Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  “I remember you made use of them yourself on the Chessman woman, last summer, for just that purpose.”

  Russell’s head dropped back against the padded head-board, and for a moment her face went quiet. “Good Lord, only last summer? What a long time ago it seems, since that afternoon poor Miss Ruskin came to tea and gave us her inlaid box. And then we had your friend Baring-Gould, then Ali and—” As if she had become aware of the unshed tears trembling in her eyes, her head snapped forward, her eyes dried instantly, and she was away again. “You’re right, although I’m terribly clumsy at hypnosis compared to Dr Ginzberg. She was so gentle and convincing, she’d have you recalling what you had for dinner on your sixth birthday. But in any case, Jerry or Terry remembered that she was something of a celebrity in town, so that when she was . . . when she died, people talked about it for weeks, and it was in all the papers.”

  Holmes looked at his wife’s hands, wringing each other with enough force that he could hear the sound from across the room; she was completely oblivious to both sound and gesture. “So I was thinking, Holmes, if it made such a stink at the time, surely the police would still have the file open. I mean unless they’ve decided she fell and hit herself on the head with the statue. Which going by what I heard tonight would only be likely if they were paid to decide that, did you know, Holmes—”

  He walked into the bath-room and shook tooth-powder onto his brush, but even with the noise of the running tap and the brush, he could hear the words spilling out of the next room. Drugged, drunk, hysterical, or simply infected by the mood of a flock of partying flappers, he couldn’t know, but it was tiresome and it was worrying and it was not Russell, not at all.

  At last, near dawn, she slept. Holmes, who had spent most of his life in complete disregard of the hours of light and dark, wondered if age was beginning to slip up on him, for the long hours they’d kept the past few days had left him feeling light-headed with exhaustion. So he, too, slept, so deeply he did not hear her rise, dress, and go out.

  It was past ten o’clock when the door opened again. This time, he came awake swiftly.

  “Russell?”

  “Good heavens,” she said. “Are you still asleep? Sorry, I felt sure you’d gone out and I missed seeing you.”

  “How long have you been up?” A faint heaviness at the edges of his voice gave away his sleep-clogged state, and he cleared his throat to rid himself of it.

  “Oh, two or three hours,” she answered cheerfully: If that was true, she had slept for less than three hours, in spite of which she showed no signs of hang-over. She was probably still intoxicated. “It’s a lovely morning, a bit of fog earlier but it looks to be warm today. I’ll just fetch what I came for and leave you.”

  “That is not necessary, I was on the edge of waking. Have you had your breakfast?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Six cups of black coffee.”

  “Two, and toast,” she protested.

  “Then you’ll be ready for a proper breakfast. I shall meet you in the restaurant after I have shaved. Unless your current task cannot wait.”

  “Oh no, that’s fine. I was just coming for the key, I thought I’d go up to the house this morning, but it can wait. I’ll order coffee.” And so saying she left. Holmes rubbed his face, grimacing at the stubble, and swung his long legs to the floor.

  The restaurant was nearly deserted at that hour, and Russell was at a window table, the bright sunlight turning her into the silhouette of a young woman bent over her morning paper. She looked sleek and alien in her bobbed haircut and new clothes, and the arm that stretched across the paper had something of the modern fashion for bone without muscle: In another few days, her thinness would become alarming.

  She looked up when he came to the table, and permitted the waiter to fill her cup along with Holmes’.

  “Have you ordered?” he asked.

  “I’ll just have a piece of toast. I had an omelette at Flo’s house.”

  “Seven hours ago. You will have a breakfast,” he said flatly, and turned to the waiter to order two large meals. She raised an eyebrow at his tone and his action, and when the waiter had left, Holmes addressed himself to her again. “Occasional periods of self-starvation benefit the mental processes; over the long term, it can be destructive. The body is a machine, and needs fuel. Think of your porridge and eggs as petrol.”

  “They will have about as much savour.”

  “The body cares not what the palate thinks. What is in the news today?”

  He listened with half an ear as she read to him a number of political and criminological stories that concerned him not in the least—“3 FLUNG TO ROAD FROM CABLE-CAR” was one admittedly evocative headline, less so the lengthy tale of a woman who came home from filing for divorce to find her three children and the husband shot to death by his hand. When their food came, he waited until she had begun before he picked up his fork, and felt he was nearly counting the number of times her own rose and fell. After a time, the habits of her own physicality took over, and he relaxed his vigil, and paid closer attention to her words.

  By the end of the meal, he couldn’t have said precisely where his wife had been the night before or recalled the peculiar names of the dances she had assayed, but two things were clear: She had eaten enough for the moment and, although she had not expected to do so when she’d left the hotel the night before, she had in truth enjoyed the company of Flo Greenfield. Holmes commented on the latter fact.

  Russell looked mildly surprised. “Yes, I suppose so. She’s not exactly my sort, and hasn’t much of an interest in anything but fashion and decorating, but she does have a brain beneath the flutter. Sooner or later she’s going to get tired of night-clubs and hang-overs, and when she does, I have a feeling she’ll make something of herself. Are you asking for a reason?”

  Holmes was not altogether pleased to see the evidence of Russell’s quick common sense—it was good to see a flash of normality, but it meant that he’d have to proceed cautiously. He took out his cigarette case. “I don’t suppose you’ve any meetings with Norbert until Monday?”

  “I do have a brief appointment this morning, just to sign a few papers. The manager of the Sacramento property wanted to meet today, but unfortunately his mother’s been taken ill and he’s cancelled it until Tuesday or Wednesday.”

  “I see.”

  “What are you up to, Holmes?”

  “Me? Why do you imagine—”

  “You’re asking far too many innocent questions.”

  “Ah. I was simply concerned . . . well, never mind. We shall plan an outing for the week-end.”

  “Concerned that what?”

  “Russell, I don’t know that it’s good for you to be without something to employ your mind,” he replied bluntly. “You’re dwelling too much on the past. We shall hire a motor and take the Sausalito ferry to—”

  “Me? I’m not the one who’s ‘dwelling on the past,’” she snapped. “And I certainly don’t need a nurse-maid.”

  “Good, fine. You’ve no doubt made plans for parties with your friend. In town, I take it?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t . . . I would hate . . .” Holmes took a deep breath and began again. “I rather trust you won’t do something foolish such as going to see your parents’ summer house on your own.”

  “‘Foolish’?” Russell’s chin came up and her eyes flashed; with the raised colour in her face, she looked nearly herself. “Holmes, I should appreciate it if you would not try to tell me what I am and am not to do. If I choose to drive down the coast and look at the Lodge—my Lodge—then I shall do so. I need not ask your permission.”

  “Russell, I merely request—”

  But the heat of her response was only fed by placation. “You think it ‘foolish’ when I investigate a matter, and not when you do it? Thank you, Holmes, I shall let you know what I decide to do with the week-end.” And with that she rose, dropped her table napkin on the cloth, and strode from the
restaurant.

  It was as well she did not look back. She might have seen Holmes, leaning back to tap his cigarette into the ash-tray, smiling gently at the rising smoke.

  An hour later, while Russell was grappling with legal terminology in Norbert’s office, Holmes presented himself at the Greenfield mansion. He took off his hat and handed it to the man who opened the door, saying, “You must be Mr Jeeves? My wife was here the other day. I had hoped to find Miss Greenfield at home, Miss Flo Greenfield?”

  “Yes, sir, I shall see if she is at home. If you’d like to wait in here?”

  “In here” was a room whose purpose could only have been the temporary parking of callers, as the seats were too far apart to be of any use for conversation and the décor was intended to impress rather than to please or entertain. It was, in the end, more pleasing than a room more lived in, for the cool, sparse furnishings set off the modern sculpture and fireplace tile as a more cluttered room would not. It reminded Holmes somewhat of the Japanese rooms they had seen on the other side of the ocean, rich materials used in an austere fashion. Restful.

  After a quarter of an hour, he was shown into a warmer, more lived-in room. The young woman seated before the fire with a coffee service put out her hand to greet him, her dark eyes alive with interest although she showed all the signs of hasty dressing.

  “Mr Holmes? Mary’s husband? It’s fantastic to meet you. Mary said you wouldn’t like our kind of fun or I’d have had her drag you along. But I’m glad you tracked me down at home. Is she coming, too? Oh, manners, Flo!” She pulled together a mock-formal face and manner. “Sir, would you care for a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thank you, Miss Greenfield, I’ve just come from breakfast. Actually, my wife doesn’t know I am here. Tell me, have you spoken with her this morning?”

  “She woke me up about half an hour ago, ’phoning to see if I had plans for the week-end.”

  “And you’ve found yourself dragooned into a drive along the coast to her summer house in the mountains.”

  “Yes,” she said, happily unaware that this plan ought to have been a surprise to him. “Although I wouldn’t exactly say ‘dragooned.’ There’s a couple of boring parties going on but it’s the same old people, and I’m happy to tag along. She’s only here for a few days, after all.”

  “Miss Greenfield, are you aware of the circumstances, and the place, of her family’s death?”

  “Well, sure, but why—oh, I see. Oh, I promise you, we’ll drive the other way, through Redwood City. I wouldn’t want to worry her.”

  “You may find that she insists on the coastal route. She may feel it necessary to face the place where she survived, and they did not.”

  The cup dropped into its saucer with a clatter. “Oh. Golly, yes, there is that. I hadn’t thought . . .”

  “May I be frank, Miss Greenfield?”

  “Well, sure.”

  Holmes took a breath, and committed treason against his wife. “For some weeks now, my wife has not been herself. Something about this place has been preying on her mind. I should appreciate it very much if you were to keep an eye on her, in my absence.”

  “What do you mean, ‘keep an eye on her’?” She asked it warily; Holmes could see the plots of a hundred lurid novels springing up in the girl’s eyes, and hastened to turn them aside.

  “I only mean to say, she does not care for herself sufficiently. She has not been eating well, and sleeps briefly and restlessly. If you were to insist that she eat, and take exercise, and perhaps go so far as to swallow a sleeping draught . . .”

  “Ah,” she said, her eyebrows descending with mingled relief and disappointment. “I was afraid you meant, oh jeepers, suicide or something.” She gave a merry little laugh, to illustrate that she was exaggerating, but for an instant Holmes was seized by the memory of Russell teetering over the shipboard rails, a thousand miles of empty ocean waiting to swallow her. He pushed down the image, and gave the young woman his most reassuring smile.

  “Oh, she’s far too sensible for that. No, just careless of herself. She needs a friend at the moment.”

  “Sure, I can be that. It was nifty to meet Mary again—I remember her from when we were kids.” The thought startled Holmes a little, as he had never thought of his wife as any sort of a child, not even the day they’d met. But this young woman, just Russell’s age, was still young in ways Russell had never been. She did not notice his momentary distraction, but continued on. “And her family—Mary’s father was just a card, and her mother, gosh, she was amazing. Did you ever meet her?”

  “I regret I did not have the pleasure.”

  “No, that’s right, Mary met you after the . . . afterwards. Well, don’t you worry, Mr Holmes, we’ll take good care of her.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Yes, I thought Donny—he’s my boy-friend—might drive us down, if you don’t mind? He’s a very responsible boy, when he hasn’t been drinking, anyway, and he never drinks when he’s driving, honest.”

  “Quite. Yes, that should be fine.” And if this relatively sensible child and her strong young escort with the bright blue motor weren’t enough to keep Russell from harm, little would be. “And if I might ask one more favour: I believe Rus—Mary would be happiest if she did not know I’d been here. Collusion between husband and friend might prove . . . alienating.”

  “Right-o,” she said cheerfully.

  He stood up, taking her hand again, holding it for a moment so that he was bent over her almost like a courtier. Then he left, and Flo watched him go; he was, she thought, really pretty swell.

  That, thought Holmes, took care of Sunday and Monday at the very least. Which left only the afternoon and evening to get through.

  Walking towards the lawyer’s office, Holmes noticed a news-agent’s with a small sign in the window advising OUT-OF-DATE JOURNALS LOCATED. He wrote down Hammett’s name, told the proprietor that he’d take anything the man could locate by the fellow, and was strolling up the street (for the seventh time) as Russell came out of Norbert’s office, pulling on her gloves with little jerks of irritation.

  “Holmes,” she said in surprise when she spotted him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was finished with my business, and thought I might accompany you on this fine afternoon.”

  She looked at him sideways. “Holmes, I hope you don’t mind, but I’d rather like to spend some time in the house on my own.”

  “But of course, that was merely the direction in which I was headed. You remember the Italian café we ate at the other day? The owner happened to mention that his great-grandfather was a childhood friend of Paganini and had a sheaf of the composer’s early attempts at music. I thought I might add a section on my monograph concerning childhood patterns of behaviour that extend into maturity.”

  “Yes? I didn’t know you had such a monograph in process; it sounds interesting.”

  So they walked the mile in amicable discussion of the nonexistent monograph, and after Holmes had seen her safely into the house (using the excuse of seeing if the ’phone and electrical companies had done their duties) he went off, whistling a brisk tune the Italian had composed for violin.

  At the end of the block, he paused to look back at the house that was holding his wife, in both senses of the word. The place reminded him of one of those primitive societies so beloved of archaeologists, where a people had stood up from their breakfast and walked into nothingness. The kitchen cupboard still held the packet of coffee used the morning the Russells had climbed into their new Maxwell motorcar and driven away, now so stale that, when he had tried it the other morning, it had given him little more than a brown colour and a sour taste in the cup. The half-packed trunks in all rooms but Russell’s bore mute evidence of a future that would not exist for three people. He wondered if Russell had found her mother’s night-gown inside the laundry hamper.

  He shook his head and turned his back on the house of the dead.

  Holmes had no intention of visiting
the Italian’s café (although its owner did in fact own two or three sheets of music in what he swore was Paganini’s hand). Instead, he set about a systematic interview of those inhabitants of Pacific Heights he hadn’t yet spoken with.

  Eighteen years in London is nothing—there, even eighty years after an event one might expect to find a high number of houses inhabited by the families’ descendants. In San Francisco, however, particularly given the circumstances of the past two decades, this was not the case. He had already discovered this when he had questioned the immediate neighbours on Friday and discovered that only two of the eleven houses contained the same residents as they had in 1906. Those two had, admittedly, proved useful, one of them describing how the Russells had been among the first to move back into their damaged house, the other providing the name of the postman who had worked the streets for many years. It had been the postman—or mailman—who had come up with the piquant information concerning the Russell argument, a detail of which Holmes had been very dubious and which had necessitated an interminable round of enticing similar feats of recall, until he finally was forced to admit that the postal gentleman had a perfectly extraordinary memory, prodigious in its powers of retention when it came to tit-bits of gossip.

  He’d left profoundly grateful that the man had not delivered to Baker Street, and that he seemed to have not a sinew of the blackmailer’s impulse in his makeup.

  Still, the interviews with the neighbours had taken most of Friday morning, and hunting down the mailman the bulk of the afternoon. He could only hope that today’s research proved more brisk.

  It did not. Worse, the day’s ratio of 1906 residents to newcomers was even lower than Friday’s. Of the first ten dwellings to receive his enquiries, four had no idea who had lived in their house in the year of the fire; three knew the names but not their current location (“somewhere down the Peninsula” seemed a hugely popular dwelling-place for those who had fled the city); two were new householders in new houses, having bought cracked and leaning wrecks and built anew; and one alone had lived in that house at the time of the earthquake, and even recalled a period spent under canvas in the nearby park; unfortunately, that person had been twelve years old at the time, had been visiting from his home in that mythic land “down the Peninsula,” and had been ushered back to that safe haven within days, as soon as motorcars could traverse the littered streets. The man remembered no-one named Russell.