Locked Rooms (19 page)

“Mr Holmes, I’ve got a family. I’m not a whole lot of good to them, the state I’m in, but I’d be a lot less good in prison.”

Despite Hammett’s explanation, Holmes thought that the threat of gaol was less of a deterrent than the young man’s distaste for villainy. As unlike Watson as a person could be physically, nonetheless the two were brothers under the skin—and he had no doubt that, like the externally sensible Watson, Hammett’s fictional maunderings would lay a thin coating of hard action over the most romantic of sensibilities.

“Very well, Mr Hammett. How would you like to work for me instead?”

“Turncoating has never had much appeal, Mr Holmes.”

“Have you spent any of the lady’s money?”

“I told you I hadn’t.”

“Has she given you a means of getting into contact with her?”

“That note was it. The boy brought it with the money, stuck it in my hand, and left. When I phoned my buddy to ask what the hell it all meant, he hadn’t a clue, didn’t know who it was, just some woman who needed a job done that he couldn’t take on right away.”

“Then you’ve done no more than keep the lady’s money safe for a few days until you might return it with your regrets. Is that not so?”

Hammett sat in thought, not caring for the situation, torn between the implied but undeclared contract represented by the money in the folder and the undeniable pull of curiosity. And another thing: “You think this has something to do with the person who took a shot at your wife?”

“Pacific Heights is an unlikely venue for a random madman with a gun,” Holmes pointed out grimly.

“Yeah, you’re right. Okay, Mr Holmes, I’ll take your job, so long as it doesn’t involve outright betrayal. If it turns out that coming to me is what opens that lady up for a fall, I’m telling you now that I’m going to stand back and take my hands off both sides of it.”

“Your rigid sense of ethics, Mr Hammett, will have done you no good in the world of the Pinkertons. But I agree.”

The two men shook hands, and Hammett reached for the bottle again to seal the agreement.

“So, where do you want me to start?”

“First, you need to know what might be called ‘the full picture,’” Holmes said, rapping his pipe out into the ash-tray and pulling out his pouch. “It would appear to have its beginnings a number of years ago, when my wife’s family died on a road south of the city.”

Hammett scrabbled through the débris on the table and came up with a note-book and a pen, which he uncapped and shook into life. His cigarette dangled unnoticed from between the fingers of his left hand as he hunched over the note-book on his knee, listening. After a few minutes, however, his occasional notes stopped, and his back slowly straightened against the chair-back, until finally he put up a hand.

“Whoa,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re laying pretty much everything out in front of me.”

“More or less,” Holmes agreed mildly.

“Her father’s job, the falling balcony in Egypt—”

“Aden,” Holmes corrected.

“Aden. Do you honestly think all that’s got anything to do with what’s going on here?”

“Do I think so? There is not sufficient evidence one way or the other. But the balcony was a recent and unexplained event, and the possibility of its being linked should not be ignored.”

“If you say so. But really, are you sure you want me to know all this?”

“If you do not know the past, how can you know what of the present is of importance?”

“I just mean—”

“You mean that, seeing as our initial meeting was adversarial, I ought not to trust you too wholeheartedly.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Mr Hammett, are you trustworthy?”

The thin man opened his mouth to answer, closed it again, and then began to chuckle. “There’s no answer I can give to that—‘yes’ would probably mean ‘no,’ and ‘no’ would mean I’m a complete boob, and ‘I don’t know’ means you’d be a damned fool to trust me with so much as a butter-knife.”

Holmes was smiling in response. “Precisely.”

“So what you’re saying is, ‘It’s my look-out, shut up and listen’?”

“Mr Hammett, you have a way with the American vernacular that bodes well for your future as a writer of popular fiction.”

“Okay, it is your look-out. So I’ll shut up and listen.”

And he did, attentively, his dark eyes alive in that gaunt face. His occasional grunt and question told Holmes all he needed to know about the man’s brains, and he told Hammett even more than he had originally intended. Very nearly everything.

It was late when they finished, or early. Hammett took out his package of Bull Durham again, glancing over his notes as his fingers sprinkled the tobacco and rolled the paper, every motion precise.

Eventually he nodded. “Yeah, I can see that you need another set of hands here.”

“And eyes. In the normal run of events, those would belong to Russell—to my wife. However, of late she has been . . . indisposed.”

“Too close to things to see clearly,” Hammett suggested.

“It is temporary, I have no doubt. But until she returns to herself, she is . . .” Again Holmes paused, searching for a word that might be accurate without being traitorous; he was unable to find one, and finished the sentence with a sigh and the word “unreliable.”

“So what do you want me to do first?”

“Do you know anything about motorcars?”

“They have four wheels and tip over real easy—when I’m driving, anyway. I usually ask a friend to drive me.”

“You don’t like guns and you don’t like motorcars. Are you certain you’re American?”

“I’ve hurt people with both of them, didn’t like the feeling.”

“Very well, then; ask a friend to drive you.”

Holmes reached into his inner pocket and pulled out his long leather note-case, taking from it a slip of paper with some notes in a small, difficult, but precise hand: his handwriting. “This is what I know about the motorcar crash. What we’re looking for is evidence of foul play, any evidence at all. The police report is quite clear that it was an accident, so the best we can hope for is a faint discrepancy.” He watched to see if Hammett looked puzzled, but the man was nodding.

“Something that smells off.”

“Quite. It is, after all this time, highly doubtful that there was enough of the motor to salvage, and even less of a chance the wreckage has anything to tell us, but it is just possible that no-one could decide what to do with the thing, and either left it on the cliffside or pulled it up and hauled it into a corner until its ownership was decided. The convolutions of the American legal system,” he added, “occasionally have inadvertent benefits.”

“Can’t you just ask your wife’s lawyer what happened to the car?”

“I’d rather not bring him into it.”

“I see. You’d rather pay me to go down on a fool’s task and look at a ten-year-old burned-out hulk.”

“It is an avenue of enquiry that must be pursued to its end, no matter how soon that end is reached.”

Hammett studied the piece of paper for a moment with a faint smile on his expressive mouth, then he picked it up without comment and tucked it away in his note-book. Sure, investigating the car might be a red herring designed for nothing more than getting him out of town for a couple of days, but what of it? There was trust, and there was stupidity, and despite his snooty accent, this Holmes was no jerk.

And the Limey’s money couldn’t be any dirtier than the pile of bills in the file.

As if he had followed the line of thought, Holmes addressed himself to the leather wallet again, pulling out five twenty-dollar notes and laying them onto the table. “That should be sufficient as a retainer. You see, I do not make the mistake of paying too generously.”

“No, Mr Holmes, I don’t think you make too many mistakes. Anything other than the car you want me to be getting on?”

“That is the first order of business, I think. Oh, but Hammett? You saw my wife tonight. Well enough to recognise her again?”

“Girl with glasses, her height, hair, and posture—she doesn’t exactly fade into the crowd. But if she was sitting, had a hat on? I don’t know.”

“Quite.” Holmes bent his head for a moment in thought before he slid two fingers into the note-case, this time drawing out a photograph— or rather, a square neatly snipped from a larger photograph. Reluctantly (Reluctant to show it to me? wondered Hammett. Or to show he had it at all? The Englishman seemed a person who would not reveal his affections readily.), Holmes slid it across the table for Hammett to examine.

It was of a young woman on a street, clearly unaware of the camera. Her head was up, showing a determined chin and graceful neck. The day had been bright but not sunny enough to make her spectacles throw shadows or reflections, so that behind the wire frames were revealed a pair of light-coloured eyes. Her hair was fair and gathered on top of her head in a way Hammett hadn’t seen in years—and hadn’t seen on the woman getting out of the car the night before.

“She’s cut her hair since this was taken?”

“Yes,” Holmes said, with a trace of regret that made Hammett’s mouth curve again, although he did not comment.

“And her eyes—blue or green?”

“Blue. And to American ears, she speaks with a pure English accent.”

Hammett handed the photograph back across the table. “Okay,” he said, making it a question.

Tucking the photograph back into its hold, Holmes said, “I showed you this because I think it possible that Russell will decide to travel in the same direction you are going, sometime in the next day or two. It would be as well if she didn’t take too much notice of you.”

“I hear you.” Hammett put the money into his own wallet, dashed the last contents of his glass down his throat, and stood up to shake the hand of his new employer. “Mr Holmes, this has been an interesting evening.”

Grey eyes looked into brown, understanding each other well.

Chapter Twelve

A
t that hour, with only the occasional vehicle to impede a walker’s
straight line, Holmes’ long stride took him back to the hotel in twenty minutes—and that included doubling back twice to ensure that he had no one else on his heels. The doorman was dozing in his corner, the man on the desk jerked around, startled, at this late entrance, and the dim sea of posts and chairs that made up the lobby resembled a theatre after the curtains had fallen.

The boy on the elevator, by contrast, was bright-eyed and longing for company. He commented on the weather, mentioned a Harold Lloyd comedy showing at a nearby cinema house the following afternoon that Holmes might care to avail himself of, and admired the cut of Holmes’ hat. The lad seemed disappointed that Holmes did not seize the opportunity for conversation, and threw open the door in a subdued manner that not even a coin could assuage.

Russell was still out. He stood uncertainly inside the door, wondering if he should return to the bright cabaret where he had left her, then shook his head and closed the door firmly. It was unlikely that the young people had remained at one gin palace during the course of an evening, and he should end up haring all over town for her. She would return.

He exchanged his outer garments for a dressing-gown, then picked up the telephone to ask for a pot of coffee. When it had come, he assembled a nest of cushions and settled into it with coffee, tobacco, and his thoughts.

Two hours later, the faint rattle of the lift door was accompanied by voices raised in a manner guaranteed to wake the other guests: Russell and the elevator boy, exchanging jests. A moment later the key clattered about in the door, giving her problems before it finally slipped into place and Russell tumbled into the room.

“Good Lord, Holmes, are you still up? Had I known, I’d have rung you and had you come along. I know it’s not exactly your kind of music, but you might have found the experience interesting. There was this extraordinary singer named Belinda Birdsong,” she said, and regaled him with the details of music, dance, and conversation. As she talked she wandered in and out of the room, kicking her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe, washing her face, putting on night-clothes. She finally got into bed, but once there she sat bolt upright in the most exulted of spirits, prattling on—Russell, prattling!—about her evening with Miss Greenfield’s cronies. Spirits of the liquid variety contributed to her mood, he diagnosed, but they simply enhanced the feverish look she had worn for longer than he cared to remember.

If she went on in this manner much longer, he would have to locate some morphia and knock her out forcibly.

He scraped out the cold contents of his pipe into the ash-tray, extricated himself from the cushions, and went about the business of emptying pockets and undoing buttons, getting ready for bed. Russell looked as if she might be up for the rest of the night.

A name, or perhaps the way in which she’d said it, caught at his attention from the spate, and he paused on his way to the bath-room to listen. “—and a friend of Flo’s friend Donny, who’s a few years older than she is, was very kindly sitting out a dance with me and I mentioned what I had been doing today—or yesterday, I suppose—and he said that he remembered her.”

“Remembered whom?” asked Holmes, just to be sure.

“Are you not listening to me?”

“I was pulling my vest over my head.”

Sure sign of her state of mind was the ready way in which she accepted it, without even stopping to consider. “I was talking about Dr Ginzberg. Apparently she was rather well known in the city before . . . Anyway, this friend of Donny’s—his name was Terry, I think, or was it Jerry? I don’t know, the music was rather loud—he said he remembered that people used to say she was good at getting her patients to remember things, ‘mesmerism,’ he called it although that’s rather an old-fashioned name—even when I knew her she called it ‘hypnosis.’ You remember her techniques, Holmes.”

“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.