Locked Rooms (24 page)

Ten minutes later, the young man in the driver’s seat shifted and the hillside scene leapt and danced through the lens.

Holmes said coldly, “Mr Tyson, you may feel free to get out and watch the sea-birds.”

After a minute, the door opened and the abashed lad got out, shutting it with care. Holmes settled again to the eyepiece.

Taking into account his poor physical condition, Hammett was making a remarkably thorough job of his investigation of the cliffside. With an intervening decade of high waves and Pacific rain, there could be little evidence left among the rocks, but twice now Holmes had seen the man pick his way cautiously towards some invisible object. The first time, hanging like a three-legged spider, he had worked some object loose with his fingers, examined it (to all appearances completely unconscious of the precariousness of his stance) and tossed it away. The second time he had pulled something from his back trouser pocket and gouged at a crack in the rocks, retrieving some long, narrow object; that, too, he held close to examine, only this time he kept it, lifting his coat to secure it through the back of his belt.

His greying hair and coat-tails tossed wildly in the wind as he continued to scan the rocks, and Holmes found himself muttering under his breath: “Hammett, it must be damned cold out on that exposed rock; this won’t be doing your lungs a bit of good. The tide’s on its way in and in another ten minutes you’ll get wet. Look, man, I’m not your father; you’ve nothing to prove to me.”

It took another twenty-five agonising minutes, during which time Hammett had found one other item of interest, nearly fallen down the cliff twice, and shifted upwards on the cliff three times to keep free of the wave splashes, before he finally threw back his head to study the return route.

From where he stood, the cliff must have appeared nearly vertical, because he then pulled back to survey the terrain to his right. He appeared to stare straight into Holmes’ lens for a moment before it became clear that he was merely estimating the possibilities of the beach route. The horizontal must have appeared preferable, because in a minute he waved widely at the bow-legged man who had been pacing to and fro on the cliff-top road all this time, and pointed towards the sand.

Immediately, the other man waved his response and turned away to the bread van—only to leap back at the unexpected approach of another motor.

A sleek blue motorcar driven by a fair-headed boy, with two young women passengers. He’d been right: Russell had insisted on coming by this route. He’d also been right that she wouldn’t succeed in getting that car-proud young man to relinquish the wheel.

Holmes raised his face from the instrument and lifted the curtains to one side so as to see unimpaired. The gaunt man was beginning to work his way along the cliff above the line of wetness, his entire being concentrating on the effort. Above him on the roadway, the bow-legged man gave him a glance before turning to face the three young people emerging from the motorcar. The slick-haired driver tumbled over the side with the practiced agility of a monkey, trotting around to open the passenger door for the black-haired girl; the other young woman, the one with the absurdly short blonde hair, was standing up so as to follow. Holmes put his head back to the eyepiece.

Russell moved stiffly, as if she were in pain, or fear, climbing out of the car and onto the surface. She wrapped her heavy coat around her against the wind. Flo Greenfield said something, then reached out as if to take her arm, but Russell had stepped away from her in the direction of the precipitous edge. Holmes risked a quick glance down at the man near the water, but Hammett was still intent on his spider-act along the rocks.

Russell stood at the very lip of the cliff, leaning over the inadequate railing as she’d leant over the ship’s rail the week before. Flo Greenfield picked her way near, but the shoes she wore were inadequate for the terrain, and she wobbled dangerously until her beau’s arm flashed out to steady her. The two young people stood on secure ground, apparently pleading with their English companion, but Russell did not respond. She seemed hypnotised by the breaking waves, but Holmes could see the moment when her attention was caught by the figure far below: Her mouth came open in surprise and her hand came out, but to Holmes’ immense relief, the bow-legged man stepped forward and took her arm, urging her back from the cliff. Holmes began to breathe again.

The driver of the delivery van seemed to be explaining Hammett’s presence, and Holmes would have paid a great deal to be able to hear what he had to say. Whatever the explanation was, it did not immediately strike Russell as impossible; she looked at the man doubtfully, but her head did not go back into that intensely familiar posture of disbelief that allowed her to look down her nose at the offender. She just listened to the man, craned forward to see how far the grey-haired climber had got, then said something over her shoulder.

The three young people got into their motorcar and the bow-legged man into his, driving in procession down the long curve to where the cliff gave way to the beach. Holmes lifted his face from the eyepiece for a moment to rub the tension out of his muscles. When he pulled his hands away, Greg Tyson was walking quickly towards the car, brushing the sand from his trouser-legs. He jumped in behind the wheel and slammed the door.

“Do you want to scoot?” he asked.

“No, I believe the two motors will stop at the other end of the beach. No need to flee unless they continue down here—you are welcome to resume your reading material. However, be ready to move quickly.”

“Whatever you say.”

Both men in the closed car sat tensely until the two other vehicles had come to a stop far up the road, Tyson’s hand hovering near the starter button. Holmes unfolded his legs and rearranged the tripod holding the telescope, pulling the curtains together until they brushed the very edges of his field of vision. He also reached into the Gladstone bag and took out a pistol, surreptitiously laying it beside his leg: He had no reason to believe that Hammett and his bread-truck assistant were on any side but that of the angels, but he had not lived this long by depending on trust. If either man made the slightest move against Russell, he wouldn’t hesitate to make a dramatic entrance with engine roaring and gun blazing. He fervently hoped, for many reasons, that it would not come to that.

It took Hammett a quarter of an hour to sidle his way off of the rocks. He stumbled when his feet sank into the sand, then set off, hunched against the cold, staggering with the soft surface and his own exhaustion. His hair was awry and his light grey suit had suffered from the treatment, and he looked a far cry from the dapper man Holmes had met.

At the bread truck, Hammett accepted his hat and a flask from the driver, propping his back against the vehicle and ignoring the approaching newcomers. Eyes shut, he took a deep draught from the flask, then another, shuddering slightly in reaction. He handed the flask back to the bow-legged man, then peeled himself off the wall of the truck, wrenching open its cargo door to drop onto the floor where he sat, head bowed and feet resting on the ground, clearly gathering his energies. After a minute, his right arm reached surreptitiously around his back, as if scratching an itch at the belt-line, then he straightened. His hands came up to run through his hair, returning it to a semblance of order, then adjusted his neck-tie, dashed ineffectually at the stained knee of one trouser-leg, and finally shifted to his inner chest pocket to pull out his pouch of Bull Durham.

Hammett’s fingers shaped the cigarette with an exaggeration of their normal care, and eventually lifted the object to his tongue to seal it. He was fumbling for his matches when the young blond swell who’d been driving the other car stepped forward and stuck out a hand with a lighter in it.

The lighter was sleek and gold, of a piece with the coat and the car; the blond man was maybe a year or two younger than Hammett himself, but he looked like a kid—family money and no responsibilities will do that for you. But Hammett bent to accept the light and sat there, eyes half shut, for the length of three or four steadying puffs. Then he moved the cigarette to his left hand, pushed his hat-brim up with the forefinger of his right hand, and at last looked up into the face of the tall blonde girl whom his new employer had been watching from the speakeasy on Friday night.

Mary Russell, married to Sherlock Holmes, gave him a smile meant to be reassuring. “That looked a rather dangerous climb.”

“Not something I’d do for fun, no.”

“So why were you doing it? If you don’t mind my asking,” she added.

“What’s it to you?” he said bluntly, putting the cigarette back to his lips.

After a moment, she said, “I know someone who was killed on that piece of hillside. It was odd, seeing you at the same exact place.”

“Yeah, well, as I understand it, there’s a number of people that corner’s killed. But my company’s only interested in two deaths that happened last December. That the same accident as yours?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“What’s your company?”

“Mutual of Fresno,” he replied, reaching for his wallet and drawing out a business card with a salesman’s automatic habit. “Somebody phoned in a tip to say we might’ve paid death benefits on an empty car. Always a problem, you see, when there’s no body.”

“I see,” she said, looking at the card.

“Well,” he said, sucking the last draw from his cigarette and tossing it out onto the sand, “I’m afraid I didn’t. Risked my neck and a case of pneumonia for absolutely nothing. And now, if there’s nothing more I can do for you, I need a drink and a fire and a pair of dry socks.” He stood, tipped his hat, and threaded his long body into the back of the van.

Smooth, thought Holmes admiringly as he studied the scene through the lens. Not once had Hammett given away the presence of the object he had retrieved from the cliffside—even Russell had taken no notice of the man’s surreptitious motions as he slid the thing from the back of his belt to the floor of the van.

Holmes would have liked to hear the conversation, but his lip-reading abilities were lamentably rusty, and in any case best suited to closer work. He had only been able to follow scraps of it—almost none of Hammett’s words, since the man’s face had been in profile much of the time, but what he had perceived of Russell’s side of the brief exchange had reassured him oddly.

With his unlikely passenger stowed away, the bow-legged driver raised his own hat a fraction off his scalp, then slammed the cargo door and trotted around to the driver’s side. The bread van started with a violent cloud of blue smoke, causing Flo and her young man to back hastily away, but Russell just stood and watched the vehicle back-and-fill into a turn before it accelerated up the steep hill north.

The three young people did not immediately climb back into their own vehicle. Instead, there was a discussion, during which Flo gestured towards the road ahead, Russell stared at the wake of the bread van, and Donny sat on his running board smoking a cigarette and watching the waves. Eventually, consensus appeared to be reached. Flo straightened and dug something from her pocket, offering it to Russell. At first Holmes thought it was a cigarette, but after Russell had shaken her head and turned away, the other young woman worked at the object for a moment, put something into her mouth, and followed Russell towards the gaudy car. Holmes risked one last glance at Russell’s face as she sat down in the back, then swept the machinery away and tugged the curtains down to a crack.

“Mr Tyson, please remain where you are. Slump back into your seat and look bored with your lot in life, and watch the blue motor go past as if it was the most interesting thing that has happened in an hour.”

The sound of a starter and an engine catching reached them, then the car was in gear and accelerating onto the road. It roared past, and away, until the beat of waves against the shore was the only sound. Holmes pulled the velvet curtains aside a fraction with one finger to peer out, not entirely certain that Russell wouldn’t have chosen to solve the disagreement by staying behind, but the road and the hillside behind it were empty of humanity.

He settled himself onto the green leather, sliding the pistol back into the Gladstone. As he began to unfasten the telescope from its tripod base, he said to the boy, “Now we return to the city.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Greg Tyson radiated a palpable sense of outrage all the way back to the hotel, clashing gears in a way the big car had never before experienced and taking corners at speeds that made its tyres squeal in protest. His potentially thrilling outing had fizzled into anticlimax like a damp firecracker.

And here he’d thought he had a real Philo Vance in his backseat.

Chapter Sixteen

S
undays were invariably a source of frustration for Holmes: Why was
the world so enamoured of its day of rest, rendering itself largely unavailable to a decent, hard-working detective?

This Sunday was no exception. Once the car returned to the hotel and Holmes had paid the disgruntled young driver, it was still only the late afternoon, and long hours stretched out before him. He took the Gladstone to the room and changed his warm tweeds for a more formal City suit, then persuaded the restaurant to serve him a hot dinner despite the hour, but when he had finished it was still daylight outside.

He read the newspapers, pored over the city maps for a while, smoked a pipe and two cigarettes, and finally set out on a circuitous walk to the telegraphist’s, on the chance that a reply had come from Watson. But the man was ill pleased at having his Sunday evening interrupted, and told him brusquely that the shop was closed and no, he hadn’t had a telegram from Europe that day.

At least it was dark by the time Holmes returned to the hotel.

What was more, the desk man had a message for him from Hammett.

He went out of the hotel and down the street until he came to a public telephone, where he rang the number given. It was picked up by a man who grunted “Yeah?” In the background he heard the sound of half a dozen male voices in conversation, and the
ting
of glass on glass: a bar.

“Is Mr Hammett there?”

“Yeah,” the voice said again, without the rising inflection, and thumped down. In a minute, the thin man’s cough could be heard approaching the earpiece.

“That you?” Hammett’s voice asked.

“I had a message from you to ring this number.”

“You’re at the hotel?”

“Down the street from it.”

“Good idea. Can you find the place we had a drink at the other day?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a chop house two blocks up, same side of the street. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

They both rang off.

In five minutes, Holmes arrived at the small restaurant on Ellis in time to see a plate of chops and grilled tomato set in front of Hammett. The thin man had gone home and changed his stained grey suit for one of a subtle brown check, and looked himself again. His eyes caught Holmes’ entrance, but he continued bantering with the pretty waitress, although it seemed to Holmes that the man was so fatigued that the flirtation was little more than habitual motion. Hammett picked up knife and fork with determination, addressing himself to the plate as if eating was just another job to be got through. Holmes waited in growing impatience while the man sawed, chewed, and swallowed, but before long Hammett allowed his utensils to come to a rest on his plate, drained the glass of orange juice he had been drinking, and searched his breast pockets, coming out with a small note-book.

He flipped it open on the table and resumed his knife and fork, working now with a degree less intensity.

“Saw your lady this morning,” he said when he had swallowed.

“Yes? Did you have conversation?”

“Just an exchange. She saw me climbing the rocks where the accident took place, asked me if I was having fun. I said no, not really, and gave her some guff about an insurance company investigating a ‘fatal’ accident that might have been a set-up.”

“Did she believe you?”

“Seemed to.” Holmes thought this was probably the case: If Russell had been suspicious, she would have asked more questions than she had.

“Why did you wait until today to go down there?”

“I thought I’d get some answers about the car, first, and then snoop around the local garage down there, second. Couldn’t do either of those on a Sunday, but the cliff would be there anytime.”

“But why did you find it necessary to climb down the cliffs?”

The words were mild enough, but some vestige of anger in Holmes’ voice brought Hammett’s head up. After a moment, his eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. You knew I was there today. Did you have me watched?”

“I did not.”

“You were there? Where—the old Pierce-Arrow with the velvet curtains, right?”

“Correct.”

Holmes waited to see if the man became angry, saw him consider it, then lay it aside with a shrug. “Your business, I guess.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What, about why I climbed around on those cliffs? Because it needed to be done. From up at the top, it looked to me like the waves would push things in behind a couple of those rocks, and it seemed worth a look. I took a piece of wire from the truck and went to see. Or are you asking about whether I’m not too weak to be doing things like that?”

“Clearly you were not. But I mistrust derring-do even more than I mistrust cowardice. With a coward, one at least knows where one stands. With a fool, anything can happen. And most frequently does.”

“It’s not derring-do, just common sense.” Seeing Holmes’ sceptical eyebrow, the younger man sighed and picked up his fork, pushing the half-eaten chop around on the plate. “Look, this disease I have, it respects toughness. In the TB ward, it was the ones who babied themselves who died the fastest. The ones who got on with life had the best chance of shaking it. I sleep a lot, but I don’t baby myself.”

Holmes studied the young man’s features, bone-thin but unbending, and his shoulders relaxed.

“I suppose I’ve been called reckless myself, from time to time. But don’t risk your neck again for the sake of my case, you hear? In any event, what have you learnt?”

“I guess your wife’s father was something of a nut about cars,” Hammett said, his irritation fading as his attention returned to the plate. “The Maxwell dealer remembers him well, one of his first and best customers. Seems Russell bought a new car every year from 1908 until this one that killed them, which he picked up about two weeks before the war broke out in Europe—middle of July 1914. The owner seemed to think Russell might even have intended to ship this one out to Boston, where his family was going after he enlisted.”

“Not to England?”

“Said Boston, because England might not be the safest place for a while. Looking back, I’d say your father-in-law was a clever man.”

It was true: In the summer of 1914, most of the world had thought the war would be over by Christmas, and most men would not have hesitated to send an English wife home to her family.

The waitress decided that her customer had eaten as much of his dinner as he was going to, and without being asked she set two thick white mugs of coffee on the table, removing the half-eaten dinner with a shake of her head. Hammett wiped his fingers on his table napkin, took a swallow of the coffee, and picked up something from the seat of the chair beside him, laying it on the table between them.

“You know what this is?” he asked.

“This” was a pair of bent and rusted steel rods, although it did not take a very close examination to see that they had originally been two parts of a still-longer whole. The longer of these two sections, about eighteen inches from the still-attached ball joint to its broken end, was pitted from long exposure to the elements; grains of sand still nestled in the rough surface. Holmes fingered its uneven end: not merely broken, but half sawed through, then twisted hard to shattering.

The other piece was slightly shorter, just over a foot long, and although it, too, was rusted, its lack of pitting and sand indicated that it had spent its life in a slightly more protected environment. One end was a twin with that of the longer piece—half sawed, half wrenched apart. Its other end, however, was neatly, and freshly, sawed through.

Hammett gestured at the tidy end of the shorter piece. “I didn’t think we really needed to haul the whole thing around, so I just cut off the hunk we needed. Seemed to me the two ends said it all.”

Holmes laid the two pieces of rod on the table, the broken end of the rusted one resting against the broken end of the cleaner.

“I have long feared it might be something of this order. Yes, Mr Hammett, I know what this is. I spent some time as a garage mechanic in Chicago, just before the war broke out. A little case for His Majesty. That’s a brake rod, or rather the better half of a brake rod, and I agree, you were right to cut it off—as far as evidence is concerned, there’s no need to drag around a piece of steel half the length of a motorcar. Which side of the motor was it from?”

“The left.”

“So whoever did it knew they would be travelling south on that road.”

“I . . . Yes, I suppose they would have.”

“No supposition involved. Failure of the left-side brake rod under pressure would cause the motor to swerve to the right, and with that hill-top turn it didn’t even require an on-coming motor to break the rod.” Russell’s father would have braked hard at that spot in any event—without the other motor, without two squabbling children in the back. Mary Russell’s disagreeable behaviour had nothing to do with it.

“Whoever did it was clever,” Hammett agreed. “And according to my guy, if it’d been cut all the way through, your Mr Russell would never have made it as far as the top of that hill without crashing.”

“Although I’d have thought he’d had to have been a remarkably cautious man to drive all the way from San Francisco with brakes in that condition.”

Hammett’s starved-looking face relaxed into a satisfied grin. “They stopped for lunch in Serra Beach. That little town about a mile before the hill.”

“Parking the motor out of sight?”

“Actually, he left the car at the garage while they ate, to be filled up and to have a slow leak in one tyre repaired. The man took the wheel off and fixed it, and once I’d jogged his memory it all came back to him, because when he’d first heard about the accident, the day it happened, he’d been scared to death—thought maybe he’d failed to tighten the rim bolts enough. He even went out to see, and was hugely relieved to see the burnt-out shell, turned turtle, with all four wheels safely in place.”

“And this cleaner half of the brake rod was in his possession?” Holmes nudged the stub with one finger.

“Yeah. A week or so after the accident, he and his older brother, who ran the garage, took a pair of draught horses up and hauled the wreck off the rocks. Because it had landed upside-down, the fire had just erupted into open air
—poof,
hot and fast and it’s over—and his older brother thought they might be able to salvage some of the engine parts. Which, as it happened, was true. The chassis is still around the back of the garage, the bones of it, and pretty thoroughly picked over. The brother, by the way, died in a racing-car crash, the summer of 1920.”

“The man doesn’t remember anyone interfering with the machine, while it waited?”

“Nope. Wheel off, patch it up, wheel on, then fill ’er up and shift the car around to the side.”

“Was it common practice, for the Russell family to pause there on their way south?”

“I don’t know, but it would’ve made sense to stop there halfway along, let the kiddies stretch their legs.”

“A thing anyone might have anticipated.”

“Yeah.” Hammett’s eyes came down to the twisted lengths of rod, and he shook his head. “Killing a woman and a kid in that way. I’d sure like to help you solve this case.”

Until the man had come up with these two lengths of rusted steel, Holmes thought, there hadn’t been a case to solve. He owed him a great deal, already. Too, he could not see that a man working for the other side would have given him the only hard evidence the case had yet generated. This new lieutenant of his threatened to have as much independence as Russell, and he lacked the physical stamina of Russell or Watson, but Holmes found himself warming to the man. He’d trust him a little further.

“Do you have any reliable contacts among the police?”

Hammett laughed. “You haven’t been here long enough to hear about our cops. They’re the best money can buy.”

“I see. Any you can trust to take your money and not sell you as well?”

“One or two. What do you want?”

Holmes took out his bill-fold and removed a piece of paper with some writing on it, putting it in front of Hammett. “I’d like to know a little more about these three men. Charles Russell was my wife’s father, killed in that accident. That’s his home address, and I think he had an office in the Flood Building. I picked up a rumour that he was involved in some what you might call ‘shady’ activity during the fire in 1906, thought it would be good to make sure he was clean.”

“What sort of deal?”

“That’s all I know.”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“The other two, it’s just to be certain that the help they offer is not in fact a hindrance. The first, Auberon, is the manager at the St Francis; I don’t know his Christian name or his home address. The last is a Chinese bookseller who goes by the name of Tom Long; his Chinese name could be almost anything. The address is for his store, just off Grant in Chinatown.”

“Auberon and Long, got you.”

“Shall we meet here tomorrow night, at say, eight o’clock?”

“That’s fine.”

“And Hammett? Don’t try to do anything else tonight. Get some sleep.”