Unwin put on his tie, slipped into his jacket and buttoned it. He considered hailing a taxicab—not to take him to the Gilbert Hotel but to take him home. No cars moved on the block, however, and now he saw Emily, coming toward him from across the street. Her black raincoat was cinched around her waist, and she walked with one hand in her pocket. She did not look like a detective’s assistant. She looked like a detective.
Without a word she handed him his umbrella, took the keys from her pocket, and opened the trunk. Together they lifted the bicycle out, and Unwin set it against the lamppost.
“Everything’s set,” Emily said. “There’s a little restaurant in the back, but Miss Greenwood isn’t in there. You’ll have to go straight to her room. I’ve already spoken to the desk clerk. No one will stop you from going up.”
Unwin looked across the street and noticed the sign over the door from which she had come. The cursive script was lit by an overhanging lamp:
The Gilbert.
“You’ve done great work, Emily. I think you should take some time off now. Lie low, as they say.”
Emily stood with him under his umbrella. She moved in very close and reached a hand up to his chest. He felt as he had that morning, in the office on the twenty-ninth floor—that the two were shut in together, without enough space between them. He could smell her lavender perfume. She was unbuttoning his jacket.
Unwin stepped away, but Emily held to his jacket. Then he saw why. He had put the buttons in the wrong holes, and she was fixing his mistake. She undid the rest of the buttons, then straightened the sides and refastened them.
When she was finished, she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, lifting her face toward his. “Those closest to you,” she said, “those to whom you trust your innermost thoughts and musings, are also the most dangerous. If you fail to treat them as enemies, they are certain to become the worst you have. Lie if you have to, withhold what you can, and brook no intimacy which fails to advance the cause of your case.”
Unwin swallowed. “That sounds familiar.”
“It ought to,” she said. She opened her eyes and patted his briefcase. “Don’t worry, I put your book back where I found it. And I only took a peek. I think that page is especially interesting. Don’t you?”
Emily closed the trunk and went around the car. He followed her with the umbrella, holding it over her head until she was inside. She rolled down her window and said, “There’s something I’ve been wondering about, Detective Unwin. Say we do find Sivart. What will happen to you?”
“I’m not sure. This may be my only case.”
“What about me, then?”
Unwin looked at his feet. He could think of nothing to say.
“That’s what I thought,” Emily said. She rolled up the window, and Unwin stepped aside as she pulled away from the curb. He watched the car veer down a street into the park and vanish among the trees, heard its gears shifting. When it was gone, he walked his bicycle across the street to the hotel, found an alleyway beside it, and left it chained to a fire escape.
Not until he had entered the hotel lobby and exchanged nods with the desk clerk did he realize that Emily had admitted to knowing his reason for coming here, even though he had never mentioned Miss Greenwood’s name.
THE WOMAN WHO HAD introduced herself as Vera Truesdale answered her door on the second knock. She wore the same old-fashioned dress, black with lace collar and cuffs, but it was wrinkled now. Her hair was down, wavy and tousled. There were streaks of white in it that Unwin had failed to notice that morning. In the room beyond, the little lace cap lay folded on the pillow, and a black telephone was sunk in the folds of the untidy bed.
Her red-rimmed eyes were wide open. “Mr. Lamech,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to come in person.”
“All part of the job,” Unwin said.
She took his coat and hat, then closed the door behind him and went into the kitchenette. “I have some scotch, I think, and some soda water.”
What had he read in the
Manual,
about poisons and their antidotes? Not enough to take any chances. “Nothing for me, thanks.”
Unwin glanced around the room. An unfastened suitcase lay on a chair, and her purse was on the table beside it. In Lamech’s office she had said she arrived in the city about three weeks ago—that much may have been true. But in a corner of the room, on a table of its own, was an electric phonograph. Had she brought this with her, too, or purchased it after she arrived? A number of records were stacked beside it.
She came back with a drink in her hand and pointed to one of the two windows. Both offered dismal views of the building beside the hotel, an alley’s width away. “That’s the one that’s always open in the morning,” she said, “even though I lock it at night.”
The window gave out onto the fire escape. Unwin examined the latch and found it sturdy. He wondered how long he could get away with this impersonation. Miss Greenwood might already have found him out and was only playing along. He would have to take risks while he still could.
“Do you mind if I put something on the phonograph?”
“I suppose not,” she said, nearly making it a question.
Unwin took the record from his briefcase and slid it out of its cover. He set the pearly disk on the turntable, switched on the machine, and lowered the needle. At first there was only static, followed by a rhythmic shushing. Then a deeper sound, a burbling that was almost a man’s voice. The recording was distorted, though, and Unwin could not make out a word.
“This is horrid,” she said. “Please shut it off.”
Unwin leaned closer to the amplifier bell. The speechlike sound continued, stopped, started again. And then he heard it. It was the same thing he had heard on the telephone at the museum café, when he snatched the receiver from the man with the blond beard.
A rustling sound, and the warbling of pigeons.
Miss Greenwood set down her drink and came forward, nearly catching her foot on the rug. She lifted the needle from the record and gave Unwin an angry, questioning look. “I don’t see what this has to do with my case,” she said.
He put the record back in its sleeve and returned it to his briefcase. “That sleepiness routine disguised your limp this morning,” he said.
She flinched at the mention of her injury. “I read the late edition,” she said. “Edward Lamech is dead. You’re no watcher.”
“And you’re no Vera Truesdale.”
Something in her face changed then. The circles under her eyes were as dark as ever, but she did not look tired at all. She picked up her drink and sipped it. “I’ll call hotel security.”
“Okay,” Unwin said, surprised at his own boldness. “But first I want to know why you came to Lamech’s office this morning. It wasn’t to hire Sivart. He went looking for you days ago.”
That made her set her drink down. “Who are you?”
“Detective Charles Unwin,” he said. “Edward Lamech was my watcher.” He showed her his badge.
“You’re a detective without a watcher,” she said. “That’s a unique position to be in. I want to hire you.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Detectives are assigned cases.”
“Yes, by their watchers. And you don’t have one. So I wonder what you’re working on, exactly.”
“I’m trying to find Detective Sivart. He went to the Municipal Museum, but you know that. Because it was you, wasn’t it, who showed that museum attendant the Oldest Murdered Man’s gold tooth?”
She considered this with obvious interest but did not reply. “What time is it?” she said.
He checked his watch. “Nine thirty.”
“I want to show you something, Detective.” She led him back to the doorway but did not open it. She pointed to the peephole and said, “Look there.”
Unwin leaned in to look, then thought better of turning his back on Cleopatra Greenwood. She took a few steps away and opened her hands, as though to show that she was unarmed. “I trusted you enough to let you in, didn’t I?”
He hesitated.
“Hurry,” she said, almost whispering. “You’ll miss it.”
Unwin looked through the peephole. At first he had only a fish-eyed view of the door across the hall. Then a red-coated bellhop appeared with a covered tray in his hand. He set it on the floor in front of the opposite door, knocked twice, and went away. No one came for the food.
“Keep watching,” Miss Greenwood said.
The door opened slowly, and an old man wearing a tattered frock coat peered into the hall. He had an antique service revolver in his hand and was polishing it with a square of blue cloth. He looked each way, and when he was satisfied that the hall was empty, he slid the revolver into his pocket. Then he picked up the tray and went back inside.
Miss Greenwood was grinning. “Do you know who that was?” she said.
“No,” Unwin said, though the man did seem vaguely familiar. This game, whatever it was, was making him nervous.
“Colonel Baker.”
“Now you’re deliberately trying to rattle me,” Unwin said.
“I’m trying to do good by you, Detective Unwin. You ought to realize by now that things are rather more complicated than you may have believed. Everyone knows that Colonel Baker is dead. Everyone knows that Sivart walked away victorious, case closed. Nonetheless, Colonel Baker is living across the hall from me. He orders room service every night. He likes a late dinner.”
If not for the revolver, Unwin might have gone over there to prove that what Miss Greenwood had said was a lie. The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker was one of Sivart’s most celebrated cases, and Unwin’s file was a composition of the first order—no clerk could deny it.
Colonel Sherbrooke Baker, a decorated war hero, had become famous for the secret battlefield tactic that made him seem to be in two places at once. But in his later years, he was best known for his unparalleled collection of military memorabilia. In addition to several pieces of interest to historians of the ancient world, the collection contained numerous antique rifles and sidearms, some of which had belonged to the country’s founding fathers. Others, experts agreed, were the weapons that had fired the first shots of various wars, revolutionary, civil, and otherwise. Few were allowed to study or even view these extraordinary items, however, for Colonel Baker spoke of them with pride but guarded them with something very much like jealousy.
In the colonel’s will, he left all of his possessions to his son Leopold. But there was a stipulation: the colonel’s precious collection was to remain in the family and remain whole.
A businessman who was not very good with business,
Sivart had written of Leopold Baker. When the colonel died, his son was happy to accept the considerable sum his father had left him. He was less happy to learn that he had inherited the collection as well. All too vivid in Leopold’s mind was the afternoon, as a boy of twelve, when he had interrupted his father’s polishing to ask him to play a game of catch. “This,” the colonel had told him, holding a long, thin blade before his eyes, “is the misericord. Medieval footmen slipped it between the plates of fallen knights’ armor, once the battle was over, to find out who was dead and who was only pretending. Think of that while you sleep tonight.”
The will contained no consequence for disobeying the colonel’s wishes, so he was only three days in the grave when the auction commenced. Attendance was good, the hall filled with the many historians, museum curators, and military enthusiasts the colonel had spurned through the years. Once the bidding began, however, lot after lot was won by the same strange gentleman, seated at the back of the room with a black veil over his face. It was whispered through the hall that this was a representative of Enoch Hoffmann, whose taste for antiquities was by then well known. Leopold suspected it, too, but he was not displeased, for the stranger’s pockets seemed bottomless.
At the end of the auction, the gentleman met with Leopold to settle their accounts. It was then that he pulled back his veil and revealed himself as Colonel Baker. The old man had not died, only faked his death to test his son’s loyalty. The colonel declared his will invalid—he was very much alive after all—and reclaimed all that Leopold had thought was his.
That was when Sivart became involved. His report began:
The assignment was on my desk first thing this morning. Truth is, I’d expected it. A man plays a trick like that and word gets around. Word gets around enough, someone gets into trouble. To wit, the body of the colonel was discovered on the floor of his library early in the a.m., stab wounds eight in number. The weapon was the misericord from the colonel’s own collection. The fallen pretender has been found out.
My client? Leopold Baker, primary suspect.
It was the first time Sivart had been tasked with proving someone’s innocence, and Unwin sensed that the job made him grumpy. Sivart took his time getting to the Baker estate, and his examination of the corpse was cursory.
Yes,
he wrote,
dead.
I told them to leave the body where it was and went for a walk. So many secrets in that place it gave me a headache. Through the trapdoor under the statue in the foyer, up a set of stairs behind a rack in the wine cellar, down the tunnel under the greenhouse. All this just to find a comfortable chair, probably the only one in the place.
That was in the colonel’s study, which was where I found the whiskey, and also the first interesting thing about this case.
In the desk Sivart discovered the colonel’s own writings about his military days. There the colonel revealed the secret behind the battlefield technique that had won him his glory. He seemed to appear in two places at once because he had a double, a brother named Reginald, whose identity was kept a secret from military command.
What almost got them caught was the matter of which hand to use when firing their weapons: Sherbrooke was left-handed and Reginald right-handed. A general noticed the discrepancy once, and Sherbrooke said, “In the trenches, sir, I am ambidextrous. In the mess hall, I use a fork.” That made so little sense that it worked.