Locked Rooms (36 page)

“Okay. ’Bye then, Mr Holmes. See you later.”

Holmes’ eggs had just been placed before him when a bellman came to tell him there was a telephone call for him. It was Hammett, suggesting that they meet.

“I’m just taking breakfast. Would you like to join me?”

“Sure, that would be fine. I’ll be there in ten minutes or so.”

Hammett arrived, looking as well-dressed and cadaverous as ever, just in time to see the dignified Englishman half-rise from his chair, eyes popping at some article in the paper before him, and then ball it up and hurl it to the floor. The entire restaurant fell dead silent; the only people moving were the maître d’ and Dashiell Hammett.

“Sir, what is it?” begged the hotel gentleman. “Is there anything—”

Holmes raised his eyes and found Hammett standing in front of him, then looked further and noticed that every pair of eyes was avidly waiting to see what this dignified Englishman would do next. He gave a sharp little laugh, waved away the maître d’, and dropped back into his chair. Hammett scooped up the armful of newsprint and sat across from him.

“Don’t like the news?” Hammett asked laconically, straightening the pages.

The older man scowled furiously at the day’s
Chronicle.
“Hammett, if ever you find yourself bound to a literary agent, for God’s sake make sure the man isn’t utterly barking mad.”

“Literary agent?” Hammett asked.

“I cannot get away from the man. I sit peacefully over my poached eggs and toast, wishing only the gentle news of the latest poisoned-chocolates case or Babe Ruth clouting his homer, and who should stare out at me from the pages of a newspaper from a city halfway across the world from my home but Conan Doyle.”

During this monologue, Hammett had been paging through the crumpled sheets with some difficulty, interrupted by the waitress taking his order and the bus-boy cleaning up Holmes’ spilt coffee, but at last he found it:

Conan Doyle Lauds, Hits S.F.
Likes City’s Beauty; Abhors Spiritual Void

Hammett read the article with close attention, learning that the writer’s recently published account of his
Second American Adventure
included the lament that he had found San Francisco to be a far less psychic city than Los Angeles. At the article’s inside continuation, he read aloud the author’s regret over “San Francisco, with its very material atmosphere,” and ending with his judgement that the city left “much room for spiritual betterment.”

By the time Hammett reached the final resounding phrase, he was finding it difficult to control his laughter. Holmes looked storm-clouds at him, until the younger man protested, “Hey, you might have had to come to Los Angeles instead of here.”

Holmes’ glare held, then softened, and he relaxed into his ruffled feathers. “That is very true,” he admitted, adding, “I like your town more and more, Hammett. Any town whose people have the sense to laugh at Doyle’s infantile philosophy can’t be too bad.”

Hammett raised his coffee cup. “Here’s to San Francisco.”

Holmes, casting a last disgusted look at the paper Hammett had folded up onto the unoccupied chair, tore his eyes and his attention away from the outrage and asked Hammett if he’d heard anything during the night.

“Not a thing. Looks like she’s cutting her losses and I’ll end up nailing the envelope onto the front of the building like I told her. But like I said, my wife’s taken the kid off to Santa Cruz for a couple of days with friends. I’m at your service.”

“What did your police detective have to say about the Ginzberg death?”

“A fat lot of nothing. Not even any prints on the statue that bashed her. Some kind of bird carving it was, an owl maybe, from Rhodes or Crete or something in the Mediterranean. Seems she collected bird sculptures from all over.”

“If you haven’t exhausted your friends’ patience there, how would you feel about having the police lab look at a set of prints?”

“From where?”

“I found them on an otherwise pristine toilet-pull in the house. They appear to belong to a woman—ours probably has no record, but just in case.”

“Okay.”

“Then later, why don’t you come by the house? I’ve arranged something that might interest you.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” Hammett’s plate arrived and he picked up his utensils.

“Oh, I suppose you might call him a Chinese fortune-teller.” Hammett shot him a dubious glance before bending to his food. “There’s also this,” Holmes added, and slid Mycroft’s telegram across the table.

The thin man read it carefully, then asked, “What are these two stones he’s lost?”

“Stones? Ah, that’s a British weight measurement; fourteen pounds is a stone. My brother’s doctors have him on a slimming diet.”

“Got you. You think that’s your gal he’s found, that she’s followed you all the way here?”

“It would fit. She lives in Paris, sees mention of my name in the Saturday
Times,
scrambles desperately for a means of getting to Egypt ahead of our boat—the weather was vile, which added to her difficulties. She finds one on Monday for a considerable price and boards the ship in Port Said. While we’re sailing down the Suez Canal and Dead Sea, she keeps mostly to her cabin while finding as much about us as she can. Then we get to Aden, when she gets off—possibly having arranged with an associate to meet her there and set up a booby-trap. The bazaar isn’t that large, so that if we were going to disembark for the afternoon, there was a good chance we’d walk past her trap eventually. I have a friend there I can ask to find out, for a fee.”

“But she missed.”

“
If
it was an attempt in the first place, and not just a shaky balcony,” Holmes added, to be fair.

“As you say,” Hammett noted. “But by that time, she knew you were headed to San Francisco. So while you and your wife were in India, she came on here.”

“Where she broke into the house, found some papers and burnt them, and lay in wait for our arrival. Which, again, seems to have made it into the papers.”

“But what’s she after? Other than your dead bodies, that is?”

“That I hope to learn this afternoon at the house.”

“Well, there’s an offer I can’t pass up. Give me your finger-prints and I’ll see what I can do with them, and meet you at the house later. What time?”

“I am not sure, but perhaps four?”

“I’ll be there.”

And he was. At ten minutes before the hour, Hammett stood on the door-step listening to the bell fade and the foot-steps approach. Holmes opened the door with a magazine in one hand, an object that caused Hammett to do a double-take: It was a copy of
Smart Set
from the previous year, an issue containing Hammett’s set of brief reminiscences, “Memoirs of a Private Detective.”

Hammett looked from the magazine to Holmes. “How on earth did you find that?”

“A news-agent agreed to search for your stories. I was curious,” he said, sounding apologetic.

Hammett began to chuckle ruefully. “Have you met Waldron Honeywell yet?”

“The gentleman with the poor opinion of the specialised skills of one Sherlock Holmes? Yes.”

“Sorry about that. It’s what sells.”

“Well, Mr Honeywell is not altogether mistaken. May I offer you something to drink while we wait?” Holmes asked.

The two men settled into Charles Russell’s library, waiting for Long and his feng shui divinator, smoking, drinking coffee with just a little whiskey in it to keep out the cold, and slowly easing into the shared talk of professionals concerning tricky investigations and foolish criminals. At four-thirty in the afternoon, they heard the front door come open and Holmes stepped into the hall-way, and in an instant, into the library swept Russell, looking magnificent and furious as she pulled a gun on the greying ex-Pinkerton, shouting at Holmes to stand away from the man who worked for those who had murdered her family.

Chapter Twenty-two

A
n invalid Hammett might be, but the man had nerves of steel.
His bony hands tightened over the arms of the chair when the weapon first appeared, then they relaxed, curled loosely over the leather. He did keep a close eye on the pistol while Holmes stepped forward to explain: It was a decorative object, but big enough to mean business.

“Russell, this is Mr Hammett. He was clambering around on those cliffs at my instigation. I’ve hired him as an Irregular in your absence; hope you don’t mind?”

The silvery barrel wavered, as if it might decide to point at Holmes for a while, then sank towards the floor. “
You
hired him,” she said flatly.

“He knows the ground here better than I, and I needed an assistant.”

“When did you make this arrangement?”

“Saturday,” he admitted: an exaggeration, as it had been little more than Friday night.

“Saturday. And you didn’t think to mention it to me that night, or even Sunday morning?”

“We had a great deal to get through on Saturday as it was. And in the morning, you were busy, I was busy. I’d have told you—it hardly mattered if you did not know.”

“It would have mattered just now if I’d shot the man,” she retorted.

Hammett gave a little snort of laughter, and her eyes went to him. In a moment, the gun went back into its hand-bag and she came up to him, hand out. “Mr Hammett, pleased to meet you. I apologise for my ill manners.”

“Miss Russell. Don’t worry about it. You have remarkably steady hands on a gun.”

“For a girl, you mean?”

“For a hand. More people get shot by twitchy fingers than ever get aimed at.”

“I try to avoid manslaughter when I can. Mr Hammett, if you are working for Holmes and not our two opponents, then I take it you retrieved the brake rod of my father’s Maxwell?”

“Safe and sou—” he started to reply.

“
Two
opponents,” Holmes broke in. “You say that as if you’ve identified them.”

“Yes,” she said, sounding rather pleased with herself. “I believe you’ll find that either your assistant here is keeping something from you, or else he got so excited about the evidence that he forgot to carry through with the interrogation of the Serra Beach mechanic.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that,” Hammett said with chagrin. “I didn’t remember until later that night that there were questions I’d forgotten to put to him, but it was too late to go back, and the garage wasn’t open Sunday. I should’ve run him to ground at his home.”

“Well, I nearly did the same,” Russell admitted generously. “And I didn’t even have a lovely piece of solid evidence to distract me.”

Hammett’s haggard face pulled into a grin that matched hers, but Holmes was impatient.

“Tell me about the two.”

“Can we sit down? I’ve had a tiring day, steering from the backseat.”

“Certainly. I had the sweep in yesterday; we can even light the fire. Would you care for whiskey, or coffee?”

“Is it the same coffee we found in the house?”

“No, I found a charming Italian gentleman up on Columbus Street who permitted me to buy some of his freshly roasted beans.”

“Such domesticity, Holmes. Coffee would be lovely.”

As she passed the small table, Russell scooped up the drooping petals of her flower arrangement and tossed them onto the bones of the fire she had laid but not lit the other day. Borrowing a match from Hammett, she set it against the dried kindling and stood back cautiously, but indeed, the chimney drew cleanly. Holmes pulled over the desk chair, and the two men settled their glasses on the table alongside her cup, then took out their tobacco pouches.

With the crackle of flames and the odours of coffee, spirits, and tobacco—Hammett’s cigarette joined by Holmes’ pipe—the library was transformed from a habitation of ghosts into a place where civilised conversation might take place.

Holmes cleared his throat. “What made you decide that your parents were murdered?”

Her eyes went sideways to the third person in the room, as if to ask how much they were to say in front of him—but then, Holmes would not have asked if he had not meant her to answer. “You mean, seeing as how I’ve been fighting the idea for days now?”

He would have said somewhat longer than that, but he merely nodded.

“Too many oddities, piling up on each other. The codicil to the will, my parents’ behaviour in the years after the fire, three related deaths immediately after theirs that were clearly murder, the shooting here. But mostly it was the dreams: The dreams were pushing me to something, all the time. I finally got there.”

“So tell me about your two villains,” Holmes suggested.

“Yes,” she said. “The two villains. A woman with a Southern accent, and the faceless man—only he is now merely a man with facial scars.” Then she paused as a thought occurred to her. “Er, Holmes, before I get into that, why are you here?”

“We are awaiting Mr Long and a friend of his, who may be able to point us towards the solution of one of our mysteries.”

“Oh yes? What time will they be here?”

“With any luck, before it is too dark outside to see the trees.”

“Will we need to see the trees?” she asked, then held up her hand. “Never mind, I’ll find out soon enough.” And without further questions, she told the two men about her days at the Lodge. She kept it to the essentials—the lack of anything resembling evidence in the hidden storage room, Mr Gordimer’s two visitors, her revealing conversation with the Serra Beach garage mechanic, the conversation with Donny and Flo that revealed the extent to which Dr Ginzberg had been known as a doctor with a speciality in helping patients retrieve memories. She did not bother telling them about her other conversations with Flo and Donny, as those were not pertinent to the matter at hand.

Holmes listened with his hands steepled and his eyes on the flames, his face showing nothing of the relief and pleasure surging through his veins. Russell was awake at last, returned to her normal clear wits and keen vision. Although he had to admit that even half asleep, she’d managed to turn up as many items of vital importance as he had working flat out. When she had reached the point in her narrative where she’d decided to come here, she sat back and said firmly to Holmes, “Now it’s your turn.”

He began by giving her the telegrams, explaining how his own had started the exchange. He told her about meeting Hammett, although he left a great deal out of the manner and precise time of their meeting, not wishing to get side-tracked into the reasons he had been following her on the Friday night. He described the cut brake rod, safely in the bank vault, and his growing conviction that her father had concealed something in the garden. He then turned the floor over to Hammett, who described how he had become involved, how he had been caught and recruited by Holmes (he, following Holmes’ lead, also avoided specific mention of time and place), and spent the next few days searching crash sites and interviewing police officers.

“And,” he finished up, “just in case you’re wondering, I had a second conversation with the lady who’d tried to hire me, telling her I wasn’t working for her and asking her where I could send her money. She hasn’t gotten in touch yet, but I told her that if she didn’t fetch it by Friday, I’d be putting it out for the birds to find.

“Which reminds me,” he said, turning to Holmes, “are those children yours?”

It never even passed through Russell’s mind that the man might be referring to any biological responsibility. “More Irregulars, Holmes?”

“It seemed a good idea to keep an eye on the Hammett apartment,” he replied, then added in disappointed tones, “I expected the lads to be more invisible than that.”

“Oh, they’re good, all right—anyone who doesn’t know the area would never think twice. But it’s my own block, and I happen to know there aren’t any kids of that age right there. Especially not kids who just stand around in groups of two or three, and don’t seem to wander off much. Although I’ll admit that if I hadn’t already been thinking of getting someone to watch my door, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

Hammett reached for his pouch and papers again, glancing at Russell as he did so. “I had a couple of questions for you. Your father was going to join the Intelligence branch when he joined up?”

Russell shot a surprised glance at Holmes, who returned it evenly, as if to say,
Yes, I told him nearly everything.
She shrugged, and said to Hammett, “That’s right. He had a slightly bum leg which would have made it difficult to do a day’s march with a full pack, but he spoke both German and French, he had travelled extensively in Europe, and in addition his father had gone to school with one of the generals in charge of Intelligence, or at any rate, what eventually became the Intelligence branch.”

“But you don’t think your father could have picked up an enemy through those connexions?”

“What, German spies and assassins in San Francisco, just two months after the war started? I shouldn’t have thought so. As far as I know, he hadn’t done any work at all for them yet, and he didn’t even have any links with the Presidio. But would I have known if he did? Probably not.”

Holmes turned to Hammett. “Do you know anyone inside the Army here?”

“I might. Don’t know if he’d know, or talk if he did, but I can find out.”

“It might be worth asking. Just to eliminate the possibility.”

“I gave your toilet-pull to my police friend,” Hammett told him. “Nothing yet, but it’s not exactly a fast process, and like you said, the prints are probably not in their files.”

“There’s a project for the future,” Holmes mused, “developing a central and quickly accessible registry for finger-prints.”

“A hobby for your retirement, Holmes,” Russell commented.

But before the men could get any further in the planning stage of such a thing, the bell sounded. As Holmes went to let in Mr Long and his mystery-solving friend, Russell glanced at the window, and saw that the trees were still clearly visible.

Five hours later, when Mr Long’s feng shui expert pushed himself back from the paper-laden library desk, the trees in the garden behind him had not been visible for some time.

His name was Ming, and he was a doctor of some kind or other, although apparently not including medical. Long’s every gesture made it abundantly clear that the old scholar was one of the most important individuals in the Chinese community, and that it was an unheard-of honour for the practitioner to come to a Western house for a consultation. The three barbarians expressed their proper gratitude, which the scholar waved aside with a gracious hand. He seemed, if anything, amused at Long’s solicitous behaviour, and interested in everything around him.

Particularly in Holmes. The old man stood before the English detective with an enigmatic look on his ageless features, the lips beneath their wisps of beard twisted in what might have been distaste, or amusement. His first words did not make the attitude any clearer.

“This low-born servant is unspeakably honoured at this opportunity to meet the English High Prince of Hawkshaws,” he said. His audience looked startled, at the flowery speech as much as at this unlikely reference to low detective fiction; even Long seemed taken aback.

Hammett got the joke first, and let loose a snort of smothered laughter. Holmes, looking more closely at the visiting sage, deliberately continued extending his hand, a motion that had been interrupted by the man’s flowery words.

“The Savant of the Breath of Dragons is of course welcome to take amusement at the expense of this humble thief-taker,” he replied, and Ming nodded, the twist of his mouth finally becoming a smile.

Dr Ming was a thin, elderly gentleman with white hair that flowed from his high forehead down over the collar of his beautifully cut Western suit, a back straight and flexible as bamboo, and delicate hands that seemed to fold themselves together into the sleeves of an invisible robe. His English was fluent and precise, although accented, and he emanated a Mandarin sensibility in everything he did, from opening the cover of one of Judith Russell’s garden journals to picking up a cup of the pale green tea Long had thought to bring with him. Watching him make notes with his silver mechanical pencil was like witnessing the art of a master water-colourist, the meditation of precise and delicate strokes.