More Tales of the Black Widowers (30 page)

“Well, look,” said Drake. “I have an idea. You've mentioned your cousin, the one in Brazil. He was your uncle's son, and he was disinherited. Isn't it possible that he wasn't entirely disinherited; that your uncle mailed him the stamp, told him its value, and let that be his inheritance? He could then leave the house and its contents to his sister with a clear conscience, along with whatever else he had in his estate.”

Leominster thought for a while. He said, “That never occurred to me. I don't think it's likely, though. After all, his son was in no way in financial trouble and I was always given to understand he was very well to do. And there was hard feelings between father and son, too; very hard. It's a family scandal of which I do not have the details. I don't think Uncle Bryce would have mailed him the stamp.”

Gonzalo said eagerly, “Could your cousin have come back to the United States and—”

“And stolen the stamp? How could he have known where it was? Besides, I'm sure my cousin has not been out of Brazil in years. No, heaven only knows where the stamp is, or whether it exists at all. I wish I could get a phone call, as Mr. Halsted did, that would tell me it's been located under the bed, but there's no chance of that.”

Leominster's eye fell to his still unopened Chinese fortune cookie and he added whimsically, “Unless this can help me.” He cracked it open, withdrew the slip of paper, looked at it, and laughed.

“What does it say?” asked Drake.

“It says, ‘You will come into money,'“ said Leominster. “It doesn't say how.”

Gonzalo sat back in his chair and said, “Well then, Henry will tell you how.”

Leominster smiled like one going along with a joke. “If you could bring me the stamp on your tray, Henry, I'd appreciate it.”

'I’m not joking,” said Gonzalo. 'Tell him, Henry.”

Henry, who had been listening quietly from his place at the sideboard, said, “I am flattered by your confidence, Mr. Gonzalo, but of course I cannot locate the stamp for Mr. Leominster. I might ask a few questions, however, if Mr. Leominster doesn't mind.”

Leominster raised his eyebrows and said, “Not at all, if you think it will help.”

“I cannot say as to that, sir,” said Henry, “but you said your uncle was no reader. Does that mean he did not read the books in his library?”

“He didn't read much of anything, Henry, and certainly not the books in his library. They weren't meant to be read, only collected. Dry, impossible stuff.”

“Did your uncle do anything to them—rebind them, or in any way modify them? Did he paste pages together, for instance?”

“To hide the stamp? Bite your tongue, Henry. If you do anything to any of those books, you reduce their value. No, no, your collector always leaves his collection exactly as he receives it.”

Henry thought a moment, then said, “You told us your aunt affected an elegant vocabulary.”

“Yes, she did.”

“And that if you said 'ask,' for instance, she would change it to 'inquire.' “

“Yes.”

“Would she have been aware of having made the change? —I mean, if she had been asked under oath to repeat your exact words, would she have said 'inquire' and honestly have thought you had said it?”

Leominster laughed. “I wouldn't be surprised if she would. She took her false elegance with enormous seriousness.”

“And you only know of your uncle's hiding place by your aunt's report. He never told you, personally, of his hiding place, did he?”

“He never told me, but I'm bound to say that I don't for a minute believe Aunt Hester would lie. If she said he told her, then he did.”

“She said that your uncle said he had hidden it in one of his unabridged volumes. That was exactly what she said?”

“Yes. Exactly. In one of his unabridged volumes.”

Henry said, “But might not your aunt have translated his actual statement into her own notion of elegance, a short word into a long one? Isn't that possible?”

Leominster hesitated. “I suppose so, but what short word?”. “I cannot say with absolute certainty,” said Henry, “but is not an abridged volume one that has been cut, and is not an unabridged volume therefore one that is uncut. If your .— uncle had said 'in one of my uncut volumes,' might not that have been translated in your aunt's mind to 'in one of my unabridged volumes'?” “And if so, Henry?”

“Then we must remember that 'uncut' has a secondary meaning with respect to books that 'unabridged' does not. An uncut volume may be one with its pages uncut, rather than its contents. If your uncle collected books which he did not read, and with which he did not tamper, some of them may have been bought with their pages uncut and would have kept their pages still uncut to this day. Does he, in fact, have uncut books in his library?”

Leominster frowned and said hesitantly, “I think I remember one definitely, and there may have been others.”

Henry said, “Every pair of adjacent pages in such a book would be connected at the margin, and perhaps at the top, but would be open at the bottom, so that they would form little bags. And if that is so, sir, then the young girls who went through the books would have turned the pages without paying any attention to the fact that some of them might be uncut, and inside the little bag—one of them—a stamp in its transparent envelope may easily have been affixed with a bit of transparent tape. The pages would have bellied slightly as they were turned and would have given no signs of the contents. Nor would the girls think to look inside if their specific instructions were merely to turn the pages.”

Leominster rose and looked at his watch. “It sounds good to me. I'll go to Connecticut tomorrow.” He almost stuttered as he spoke. “Gentlemen, this is very exciting and I hope that once I am settled you will all come and have dinner with me to celebrate. —You especially, Henry. The reasoning was so simple that I'm amazed none of the rest of us saw it.”

“Reasoning is always simple,” said Henry, “and also always incomplete. Let us see if you really find your stamp. Without that, of what use is reason?”

11
  
Afterword

I sometimes feel faintly embarrassed over the slightness of the points on which the solution to a Black Widowers story rests, but that's silly. These are, frankly, puzzle stories, and the size of the puzzle doesn't matter as long as it's a sufficient challenge to the mind.

And as for myself, I have the double pleasure of thinking of the puzzle point first, and then of hiding it under layers of plot without being unfair to the reader.

The Unabridged” I didn't submit anywhere, but saved it for this collection.

To Table of Contents

“The Baker Street Irregulars,” said Roger Halsted, “is an organization of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. If you don't know that, you don't know anything.”

He grinned over his drink at Thomas Trumbull with an air of the only kind of superiority there is—insufferable.

The level of conversation during the cocktail hour that preceded the monthly Black Widowers' banquet had remained at the level of a civilized murmur, but Trumbull, scowling, raised his voice at this point and restored matters to the more usual unseemliness that characterized such occasions.

He said, “When I was an adolescent I read Sherlock Holmes stories with a certain primitive enjoyment, but I'm not an adolescent any more. The same, I perceive, cannot be said for everyone.”

Emmanuel Rubin, staring owlishly through his thick glasses, shook his head. “There's no adolescence to it, Tom. The Sherlock Holmes stories marked the occasion on which the mystery story came to be recognized as a major branch of literature. It took what had until then been something that had been confined to adolescents and their dime novels and made of it adult entertainment.”

Geoffrey Avalon, looking down austerely from his seventy-four inches to Rubin's sixty-four, said, “Actually, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not, in my opinion, an exceedingly good mystery writer. Agatha Christie is far better.”

“That's a matter of opinion,” said Rubin, who, as a mystery writer himself, was far less opinionated and didactic in that one field than in all the other myriad branches of human endeavor in which he considered himself an authority. “Christie had the advantage of reading Doyle and learning from him. Don't forget, too, that Christie's early works were pretty awful. Then, too”—he was warming up now—”Agatha Christie never got over her conservative, xenophobic prejudices. Her Americans are ridiculous. They were all named Hiram and all spoke a variety of English unknown to mankind. She was openly anti-Semitic and through the mouths of her characters unceasingly cast her doubts on anyone who was foreign.”

Halsted said, “Yet her detective was a Belgian.”

“Don't get me wrong,” said Rubin. “I love Hercule Poirot. I think he's worth a dozen Sherlock Holmeses. I'm just pointing out that we can pick flaws in anyone. In fact, all the English mystery writers of the twenties and thirties were conservatives and upper-class-oriented. You can tell from the type of puzzles they presented—baronets stabbed in the libraries of their manor houses—landed estates—independent wealth. Even the detectives were often gentlemen—Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn, Albert Campion—”

“In that case,” said Mario Gonzalo, who had just arrived and had been listening from the stairs, “the mystery story has developed in the direction of democracy. Now we deal with ordinary cops, and drunken private eyes and pimps and floozies and all the other leading lights of modern society.” He helped himself to a drink and said, “Thanks, Henry. How did they get started on this?”

Henry said, “Sherlock Holmes was mentioned, sir.”

“In connection with you, Henry?” Gonzalo looked pleased.

“No, sir. In connection with the Baker Street Irregulars.”

Gonzalo looked blank. “What are—”

Halsted said, “Let me introduce you to my guest of the evening, Mario. He'll tell you. —Ronald Mason, Mario Gonzalo. Ronald's a member of BSI, and so am I, for that matter. Go ahead, Ron, tell him about it.”

Ronald Mason was a fat man, distinctly fat, with a glistening bald head and a bushy black mustache. He said, “The Baker Street Irregulars is a group of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. They meet once a year in January, on a Friday near the great man's birthday, and through the rest of the year engage in other Sherlockian activities.”

“Like what?”

“Well, they—”

Henry announced dinner, and Mason hesitated. “Is there some special seat I'm supposed to take?”

“No, no,” said Gonzalo. “Sit next to me and we can talk.”

“Fine.” Mason's broad face split in a wide smile. “That's exactly what I'm here for. Rog Halsted said that you guys would come up with something for me.”

“In connection with what?”

“Sherlockian activities.” Mason tore a roll in two and buttered it with strenuous strokes of his knife. “You see, the thing is that Conan Doyle wrote numerous Sherlock Holmes stories as quickly as he could because he hated them—”

“He did? In that case, why—”

“Why did he write them? Money, that's why. From the very first story, 'A Study in Scarlet,' the world caught on fire with Sherlock Holmes. He became a world-renowned figure and there is no telling how many people the world over thought he really lived. Innumerable letters were addressed to him at his address in 221b Baker Street, and thousands came to him with problems to be solved.

“Conan Doyle was surprised, as no doubt anyone would be under the circumstances. He wrote additional stories and the prices they commanded rose steadily. He was not pleased. He fancied himself as a writer of great historical romances and to have himself become world-famous as a mystery writer was displeasing—particularly when the fictional detective was. far the more famous of the two. After six years of it he wrote The Final Problem,' in which he deliberately killed Holmes. There was a world outcry at this and after several more years Doyle was forced to reason out a method for resuscitating the detective, and then went on writing further stories.

“Aside from the value of the sales as mysteries, and from the fascinating character of Sherlock Holmes himself, the stories are a diversified picture of Great Britain in the late Victorian era. To immerse oneself in the sacred writings is to live in a world where it is always 1895.”

Gonzalo said, “And what's a Sherlockian activity?”

“Oh well. I told you that Doyle didn't particularly Iike writing about Holmes. When he did write the various stories he wrote them quickly and he troubled himself very little about mutual consistency. There are many odd points, therefore, unknotted threads, small holes, and so on, and the game is never to admit that anything is just a mistake or error. In fact, to a true Sherlockian, Doyle scarcely exists— it was Dr. John H. Watson who wrote the stories.”

James Drake, who had been quietly listening from the other side of Mason, said, “I know what you mean. I once met a Holmes fan—he may even have been a Baker Street Irregular—who told me he was working on a paper that would prove that both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were fervent Catholics and I said, 'Well, wasn't Doyle himself a Catholic?* which he was, of course. My friend turned a very cold eye on me and said, 'What has that to do with it?'“