American Sherlocks

by Nick Rennison

  Our conversation turned to my personal affairs. Rather I should say that Masters directed it thus. Perceiving that he did not care to discuss the case further at the time, I related the work I had accomplished in his absence. After a time I saw an impersonal stare creeping into his eyes, the old symptom of concentration. Since I knew that he was not listening, I picked up a newspaper.

  We did not stop in the town of Weekapang, but took the station bus directly to the country club. ‘I thought you said Jaques Corners,’ I mentioned, as we were jogging along over the macadam road.

  ‘Yes. There’s no station there for passengers, though. See!’ And Masters pointed to the north, where I discerned a cloud of smoke over the tree-tops. ‘That’s Jaques Corners,’ he said.

  ****

  The Weekapang Country Club proved to be a frame building set in a small grove of oaks. Toward the ocean the land rolled away as clipped fair green, artistically bunkered and pitted.

  While Masters introduced himself to the secretary, I captured a pair of caddies and practiced with my driver. The moment Masters appeared, however, he dismissed the boys, flipping them a quarter each. ‘We may play this course too irregularly to suit caddies,’ he said when we were well toward the first hole. ‘The secretary tells me that our friend, Mr Mesnil Phillips, is out alone. He is wearing a white felt hat and white flannel trousers, and has no caddie.’

  ‘Because this is Thursday we probably won’t have any difficulty locating him.’ I said. ‘Not many matches play during the week.’

  Masters scanned the broad expanse of grass. ‘No one in sight just now,’ he commented. Removing a small field-glass from the pocket of his coat he swept the circle. At a point southwest from where we stood the binoculars rested.

  ‘Think I see him,’ he remarked. ‘He’s up beyond, probably playing the second nine.’

  ‘What will we do, cut in behind him?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not yet. We’ll play the second. That doubles parallel to the way he’s shooting. All I want to do is to keep him in sight all of the time. When I am playing, you keep your eyes on him.’ At the moment all I could distinguish was a white speck, far off in the direction Masters indicated, but as we went on, the two courses converged, nearing the ocean. Fifteen minutes later we could follow the man’s actions without glasses.

  ****

  As he played along, I saw him stop two or three times and study the landscape before him, as if in doubt as to which club to play. Always he dubbed his shots, however, for as he approached the fifteenth green, I saw him use his mashie three times, yet the man did not look like a beginner. He was lean and bronzed from the sun, and he possessed an easy, certain swing that spoke of long practice.

  He acted sincerely disgusted after his last mashie shot. Throwing down his club he unbuckled the strap of the pocket on his bag and drew out another ball. Dropping this in the approximate position of his last shot he again faced the green.

  He was still angry, apparently, for when he addressed the ball he swung on it with entirely unnecessary strength. The gutta-percha sphere mounted in a perfect arch, soaring high above the flag. It floated far over the rough beyond toward a little clump of oaks, beside which an employee was raking up leaves.

  ‘Fore!’ I heard Phillips call sharply. The man in overalls started as the ball narrowly missed his head, impinging among the tree-trunks beyond. Masters got so excited at this that he holed out a putt he never could have made in a conscious moment. As the two of us picked up our balls and scored, we saw the employee gaze about him, and then recover the ball that had so nearly hit him. He did not throw it back as we expected, but dropped it into his pocket. Phillips paid no attention to this, but calmly sought his first ball, and played up to the green.

  Though we watched him feverishly as we teed off on the third hole, he never made any sign that he had seen the theft. He holed out and then teed off on the sixteenth, playing directly away from us.

  ‘Didn’t care much about eighty-five cents!’ I commented, knowing that the incident had some bearing on the case, but willing to let Masters give me the correct version, when it pleased him.

  ‘That ball was worth quite a bit more than that,’ said my friend, hurrying on. ‘Yes, I imagine Phillips would have spent a long time looking if he had really lost it.’ His tone was excitedly triumphant, and I eyed him inquiringly.

  ****

  He wasted no time in explanations, however. As soon as we had a bunker between us and the man in overalls, Masters stopped. ‘You stay right here!’ he commanded. ‘Take a good rest and watch that employee. If he does anything with that ball, you follow the ball. Don’t let them know you’re watching, either, or it will all be spoiled!’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Going in to interrogate the secretary again,’ he answered shortly, and swung away into his long, graceless stride.

  I watched him depart with mixed feelings. I was going to miss luncheon and anticipated a dull, hot time out in the sand-pit, watching our quarry; still, if Masters really was only going to see the club secretary, I was nearer to the action than he would be. I poked my head out beside the bunker, and looked for the man in overalls.

  I was just in time. He was making his way down toward the beach, having deserted his rake. In a moment the bank would have shut him off from my view. I seized the ball I had been playing with and hurled it with all my strength toward the clump of trees. It bounced into the rough, and I hurried after it, seizing the first club that came to hand.

  Using this as an excuse, I approached the edge of the bank. The man in overalls was looking straight out over the bay, seemingly interested in the white stone lighthouse two miles out to sea. As bad luck would have it I tiptoed that instant upon a dry stick. At the snap which resulted the man in overalls whirled about. I did my best to register absorption in the business of finding my ball, but out of the tail of my eye I saw him glowering at me. A second later he strode up the hill.

  ‘Are you a member of this club?’ he demanded, approaching me.

  ‘No, a guest,’ I replied, assuming as innocent an expression as I could summon.

  ‘Who introduced you?’ His tone was curt and aggressive, and his words left me at a total loss. Jigger had not mentioned the member through whom we had obtained the right to play.

  ‘Mr – er – Smith,’ I rejoined hesitatingly. ‘Did you see a ball come over here?’ I stamped about in the long grass, hoping to divert his attention.

  His expression grew blacker, and I saw him glance hastily over his shoulder. ‘Mr Smith died last month!’ he growled, and a shiver danced down my spine. Could there be only one Smith in the club?

  ‘Harry Smith is the one I mean,’ I explained.

  ‘There ain’t any Harry Smith!’ he retorted. ‘Now you get out, and get out quick!’ He extended a muscled arm in the direction of the gateway, and came toward me.

  ‘Now see here, my man,’ I began in an attempt to be dictatorial. It did not work, however. He dived for a hold on my collar and made me duck to avoid him. Seeing there was to be no other way out of it I brought my mashie niblick down upon the crown of his head. It was not a hard blow, as I had no intention whatever of killing him, but he sank to the ground without a word. I examined him hastily, but could not tell for certain whether or not I had fractured his skull.

  ****

  The far-away throbbing of a marine engine caused me to look up. Midway between the distant lighthouse and the shore a white chip of a motorboat was dancing on the rollers. It was headed in my direction, and as I gazed, the idea flashed through my mind that a connection might exist between my victim and the little craft. I thought immediately of the golf ball, and feverishly explored the pockets of his overalls for this.

  The moment I had it in hand, however, I knew that there was something peculiar about it. The sphere was less than one third the normal weight of
a ball! I turned it over, examining the surface. Sure enough, a curved line was distinguishable where a flap had been fastened down with rubber adhesive. My penknife soon sliced through this, exposing the hollow core. The interior of the ball was literally stuffed with paper!

  I pulled this out and put it in my pocket, and then glanced again at the motorboat. It was approaching steadily, and I knew that in a very few minutes the occupants would be looking for the man in overalls. On impulse I turned again to him. Stripping him of the blue suit I pulled it over my golfing attire, and pulled his battered felt hat over my eyes. Then I went down to the protection of the last clump of bushes near the water’s edge, and waited. I had some hope of being shielded sufficiently from the observation of those who would land to allow me to get the drop on them with my revolvers.

  As they drew near, however, it became apparent that they did not intend to land at all. Keeping just outside the line of breakers they hummed along parallel to the shore. I got the idea. The golf ball would float! The next second the sphere was flying outward in a long parabola, to fall a few yards in front of the bow of the motorboat. The lone occupant dipped it out of the water deftly, waved his hand and passed on.

  ****

  Just as the ball left my hand, I heard a gasp behind me. ‘My heavens, Bert!’ protested the voice of Masters. ‘You didn’t give them that ball after all, did you?’ He was looking up at me in genuine consternation, and I noticed that the course employee lay beside him in a crumpled position different from that in which I had left him.

  Masters said nothing more for an instant; I saw that he was truly disgusted. ‘Here,’ I answered at last, unable to keep the secret longer, ‘are the papers that were inside the ball!’ I held out the crumpled roll.

  Masters pounced upon this and examined it hastily. ‘Bravo, Bert!’ he exclaimed. ‘I had thought you stupid for the moment.’ A peculiar expression crept into his blue eyes. ‘Guess I won’t have to explain much of this case to you,’ he commented. ‘You must have got to the bottom of it pretty well in the ten minutes I was away.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can explain to me what you did when you got back here.’ And I pointed to the prostrate figure beside us.

  ‘Killed him,’ rejoined Masters. ‘I came up just in time to see him creeping up on you with a golf club. I reached him first; that’s all.

  ‘You have the chain pretty well in hand now,’ he went on, changing his tone. ‘That golf ball goes out to Steffen Shoals lighthouse. What becomes of the message then?’

  ‘I – I suppose they send it to Germany by wireless,’ I returned doubtfully.

  ‘No. That wouldn’t work long. How would you like to see the dénouement and the answer to it all at the same time?’

  ‘Lead on!’

  ‘Well, no hurry,’ he answered, smiling. ‘There’s nothing doing till evening. I thought, as soon as I saw the way the golf ball was being passed around, that I had come to the last snarl of the chain. We’ll go down now and get a boat for Block Island.’

  ‘Won’t he – the chap in the boat, I mean – find out that the message has been extracted from the ball and come back for it?’ I asked as we gained the clubhouse.

  Masters nodded sharply. ‘Correct, Bert!’ he said. ‘I’ll get a posse to wait down there for him.’

  ****

  At seven that evening we boarded a United States torpedo-boat destroyer at Block Island. The speedy vessel moved quietly out into the ocean and was joined by two more of the rakish gray craft. Though dusk was settling on the water, the destroyers showed no lights. At a speed which could not have been more than seven or eight knots an hour the three silent defenders crept toward Steffen Shoals. As they approached, their speed slackened still more, until it seemed that they were scarcely moving. As the tower of the lighthouse became dimly perceptible in the distance. Masters clutched my arm. ‘We may have to wait awhile,’ he said in a low tone, ‘but the show is due to start at any minute!’

  Fifteen minutes later it did start. On the side of the lighthouse tower a steady light flashed out. This burned for perhaps ten minutes. Then it began certain gyrations that were both unaccountable and unintelligible to me, whirling about in a semicircle to the right, going back to the horizontal, going to the left twice and then continuing the dizzy whirl until I lost count entirely.

  ‘Semaphore signals!’ whispered Masters. The second he spoke three immense searchlights flared from the decks of the destroyers, throwing the ocean at the foot of the lighthouse into a light far brighter than day. Motionless, perhaps six hundred yards in front of us, I saw a grayish shape lying on the water, like an immense elongated whale come to the surface.

  ‘A U-boat!’ I cried, as Masters pushed his hand over my mouth. As it proved, there was no necessity for silence. Fifteen three-inch semi-automatic cannon, trained on the marauder, spoke almost in unison. Every second thereafter one or more of the pieces sent a shell into the splendid target.

  It lasted only a minute or so, but during that time the gray back of the U-boat was kept well illuminated by the fires of bursting shells as well as by the searchlights. Huge fragments were knocked off before the commander could even think of submerging, and as I watched, deafened but thrilled to the depth of my soul, the sea monster turned on one side and sank.

  Masters left me at that moment, and while the vessels were patrolling the circle he was in conference with the captain. The two joined me a half-hour later, and Masters’s face was glowing. ‘It’s really a big success, Bert!’ he exclaimed. ‘We got one U-boat, and the captain thinks that more will call around here each day or so. They will trap every one of them!’

  ‘But how about Mr Mesnil Phillips and the rest of his chain of spies?’ I asked.

  Masters frowned. ‘Nobody will ever hear of them again!’ he answered shortly.

  QUINCY ADAMS SAWYER

  Created by Charles Felton Pidgin (1844-1923)

  In the course of a varied career, Charles Felton Pidgin worked as a statistician for the state of Massachusetts, wrote musical comedies for the stage and patented a number of inventions. (His most successful was a machine for tabulating statistics; his silliest, a never-used method of displaying dialogue in silent films which involved inflated text balloons emerging from the actors’ mouths.) In his fifties, he turned to fiction and wrote more than a dozen novels, including an interesting work of ‘alternate history’ in which the politician Aaron Burr, disgraced and exiled after a fatal duel in reality, becomes President of the USA and abolishes slavery half-a-century before Lincoln. Pidgin’s most famous creation was Quincy Adams Sawyer, a young attorney and the title character in his first and bestselling novel, published in 1900. The tale was twice adapted by Hollywood in the silent era and Pidgin returned several times to Sawyer in later books. By the time of the short stories collected in The Chronicles of Quincy Adams Sawyer, Detective, the character had become a professional private investigator, clearly influenced by Sherlock Holmes. The stories, as the example below shows, are all engaging and well written.

  THE AFFAIR OF LAMSON’S COOK

  Quincy sauntered slowly along the street, enjoying the sunny warmth of an early June morning. Few cases had been presented to him of late, and the resulting inactivity had served to stock him, both mentally and physically, with unusual energy. His keen eyes, restless with inaction, flashed hither and thither over the small throng of hurrying pedestrians, as though in search of something on which to exercise his peculiar talents. But the people surrounding him seemed productive of anything other than mysteries. They comprised mainly the usual throng of hurrying clerks, stenographers and other employees, all rushing toward their individual desks or stations, and whatever secrets might be buried in their minds were for the present, at least, successfully forgotten or covered. With a deep sigh at the possibility of another day of quiet and solitude, Quincy turned slowly in the direction of his own office, but paused sharply
as the sound of a call reached his ears.

  ‘Sawyer! Oh, I say, Sawyer!’ came the half-suppressed shout, and Quincy’s eyes, flashing sharply over the street, instantly picked out the source of the call.

  Slowly bearing down on him, through the press of market wagons, trucks and other early morning vehicles, came a handsome touring car. At the wheel sat an impassive French chauffeur and in the tonneau a fat, puffy little man danced frantically about for all the world like a huge bullfrog in a net. Quincy recognized the man as Herbert Lamson, prominent clubman, first-nighter, and society leader in general, and wondered vaguely what unseemly occurrence could have brought Lamson out at that early hour of the morning. He halted and stood smiling interrogatively as the machine drew up at the curb.

  ‘Oh, I say, Sawyer!’ Lamson puffed, as soon as the car had been brought to a halt. ‘It’s lucky I found you, you know. I want you to come right out to my house without a moment’s delay. We’ve had a frightful occurrence there. Frightful!’

  ‘Which house?’ Quincy inquired, ignoring the door which Lamson held invitingly open.

  ‘My country house, Sawyer. The one at Beverly. Come right away, won’t you? It’s an awful thing and I simply must have help!’

  ‘But, what is it? What has happened?’ Quincy questioned, not relishing the idea of being dragged down to Beverly to discover who had thrown a pebble through one of Lamson’s plate glass windows, which possibility, knowing Lamson as well as he did, Quincy deemed not improbable.

  ‘It’s murder, Sawyer, murder!’ Lamson spluttered, spitting out the word as though it choked him and gazing helplessly at Quincy through his round, sheep-like eyes. ‘Somebody brutally murdered my cook last night and she could cook the best fish dinners I ever tasted.’

  Quincy barely suppressed a desire to laugh at the incongruity of the two statements, knowing well that the only method of endearing oneself to Lamson was through the medium of the latter’s digestive system. For a moment only he hesitated, then, swinging into the car beside Lamson, he settled back for the ride to Beverly.