The Seventh Bullet (5 page)

Mrs. Frevert, too, stood up, fixing her eyes on my friend. “Mr. Holmes,” she said, “do you take me for a fool? I didn’t travel all the way from New York to tell you about intuition. What’s more, I’d thank you to at least extend the courtesy of hearing me out.”

Holmes’s humble smile and nodding head, an attitude he seldom displayed—especially to a woman—righted the moment. “Pray be seated,” he said softly, and they both resumed their chairs.

“There is also the question of the bullets,” she announced triumphantly.

“Bullets?” I repeated.

“The number, I mean.”

“He was shot six times,” Holmes reminded us.

“Precisely!” Mrs. Frevert exclaimed. “All the reports agree. Six times! And then the assassin pointed the gun at his head, firing once.”

“I see,” Holmes said slowly. He appeared to possess some sense of the direction in which her argument was going. For my part, I must admit to having been a bit startled to hear a woman of Mrs. Frevert’s refined nature speaking so intimately about firearms.

“Don’t you understand, Mr. Holmes? That’s seven shots! Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, my brother’s alleged lone assassin, carried a single revolver that held only six bullets.”

One needn’t have been Sherlock Holmes to see the anomaly once the facts were made known; but allowing himself a restrained smile, my friend got up, walked into his library, and returned a
moment later with a small box full of as-yet unfiled newspaper cuttings. He rummaged through them for a moment until he found what he was looking for. “Allow me to read the following, Mrs. Frevert, from your own
New York Times
dated January 24, 1911:

“David Graham Phillips, the novelist, was shot six times yesterday afternoon by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough. ... After sending six bullets into Mr. Phillips’s chest, abdomen and limbs with a .32 calibre automatic revolver, Goldsborough put the weapon up to his own right temple and fired one of the four remaining bullets in the magazine, killing himself instantly.”

“A ten-chamber, automatic revolver quite satisfactorily accounts for the six wounds to your brother and the assassin’s suicide, I should expect.”

“It would, Mr. Holmes, except for Algeron Lee, the witness who said Goldsborough had been firing a six-shooter.”
^*

For a brief moment Holmes was speechless. Only the cries of the birds above seemed a commentary on Mrs. Frevert’s assertion. “Even so, Mrs. Frevert,” he said finally, “the number of bullets could have been miscounted. Perhaps the doctors weren’t sure.”

“They tracked the paths of all six bullets, Mr. Holmes. They were
quite
sure. And nearby witnesses confirmed there were six shots. As did the most authoritative witness of them all—my brother! Remember, he said that he could have beaten four bullets but that six were too many.”

“An interesting theory, but merely hearsay,” Holmes said.

“There is also the matter of Goldsborough’s diary, Mr. Holmes.
The evidence that the police used to identify Goldsborough’s motive came from his journal, a notebook that was found by some person on the street.”

“Yes,” Holmes said, “careless detective work. The journal presented the singular notion that Phillips was some kind of literary vampire sucking out Mr. Goldsborough’s identity. Phillips was becoming Goldsborough or Goldsborough, Phillips. I forget which. Hence the peculiar telegram your brother received. A belief based on the melodramatic novel
The House of the Vampire
by one George Sylvestre Viereck, I think.”

“You’re absolutely correct, Mr. Holmes. And that diary, which was so conveniently found at the scene of the crime and in which all of this nonsense was discovered, was then handed over to an assistant district attorney who kept it the entire day of the murder. He held it so long that even the coroner was furious. What’s more, Mr. Holmes, the diary was written in a crooked and shaky handwriting sprinkled with blots of ink. Those jottings could have been made by anyone.”

This latest charge certainly seemed a possibility to me. It also seemed to have piqued the curiosity of Sherlock Holmes. Instead of replying immediately as he had been doing, he sat rapt in thought.

Sensing his vulnerability, Mrs. Frevert was quick to exploit her advantage. “Say you’ll help me, Mr. Holmes. Graham was too courageous a man to allow his murder to be dismissed so casually. In point of fact, he ruined the careers of many a fraud and changed the course of American history. Oh, that Goldsborough shot my brother I have no doubt. But that he acted alone I cannot believe. At the very least I want to know who put him up to it. Who hired him? And that seventh bullet raises an obvious
question: If Goldsborough shot himself with one of the six, and Graham was struck six times, who fired the seventh? Who was the other assassin? The authorities are no longer interested. Trust me, I’ve asked. The police have gotten their killer. Why should they reopen an investigation that I believe might implicate some prominent people after they’ve already closed the case? I’ve come to you, Mr. Holmes, with the hope of appealing to your regard for my brother to help clear up the mystery surrounding his death.”

At last she was finished, and I knew my friend well enough to know that her importuning had reached him. Holmes leaned forward and took one of Mrs. Frevert’s hands.

“My dear lady,” he said, “I appreciate your intentions. And I sympathise with your desires. But, as I am sure my former colleague and ever-faithful friend Dr. Watson has told you, I am retired. Even if I wanted to help you, what could I do? For the past eight years I’ve done very little detecting—save for the most singular death of a neighbour. I’m too old. My most constant endeavours lately have been to solve whatever puzzles surround the tending of my apiary. Composing a monograph on the segregation of the queen bee has been consuming all of my time, certainly not the study of the criminal mind, and especially not the criminal mind in America. No, I must protest. I grant you the grounds for your concern, but I am not your man.”

Holmes had voiced his reservations with an earnestness befitting the situation, but there was something about his manner—perhaps the way he continued to lean forward at the edge of his seat— not the position of one who was backing away—that suggested otherwise. Mrs. Frevert must have sensed his ambivalence as well. I do believe that had she accepted his words as he spoke them,
Holmes might have escaped his involvement in the case; but she did not and, therefore, I knew he could not refuse her.

“Mr. Holmes,” she said, “I live quite comfortably, and in addition to your usual fees I will be more than happy to pay for your voyage to New York and for hotel accommodations while you are there.”

“It is not the money, Mrs. Frevert,” he replied. “In truth, I have always wanted to see New York. And yet—” Despite his trailing voice, I began to detect that keen energy in his spirit that always shone in his eyes when he was on the hunt. Mrs. Frevert must have seen it as well.

“For my brother,” she pleaded.

“And the principles for which he stood,” Holmes affirmed softly. “Very well, Mrs. Frevert,” he said at last, “if you’re satisfied with an old veteran like myself on unfamiliar terrain, I will accept your offer.”

“Thank you! Thank you, Mr. Holmes!” She beamed. “When will you begin?”

Her electric enthusiasm contrasted with my own sense of melancholic exclusion. After all, I had brought her here, and I, too, wanted to see New York. In our younger years, I reminisced, Holmes would have—

“I’ll need some time to get my things in order,” he was saying, “but I shall remain in touch with Watson and—” A glance at my downcast face caused him to stop. “Why, Watson,” he laughed, “you certainly don’t expect me to work on my own!”

I was dumbfounded. I was not prepared to go to America however much I might desire it. To be sure, my practice on Queen Anne Street had been dwindling since I myself had begun
considering retirement. I had in fact already sent a number of my patients round the corner to Dr. Larraby of Harley Street, a most reliable colleague, but I still had a few remaining to whom I owed some loyalty—and, of course, I was also married.

“You’re right, Watson. I have no right to ask. Just as Mrs. Frevert should not have asked me. But this is no ordinary case. I share Mrs. Frevert’s concern that some very important people may be involved, and thus I could use your tactful guidance, old fellow—that is, if Mrs. Watson could spare you for some weeks.”

It was true that my wife had spoken to me of wanting to visit an elderly aunt who lived in Lincolnshire. Perhaps my absence would provide her with the perfect opportunity for such a trip; at the very least, I would encourage her to go. Holmes needed me, after all, and the invitation to America, which Mrs. Frevert had likewise extended to me, seemed very alluring indeed. I therefore offered Holmes tentative affirmation of my decision to join him.

Her preliminary business completed, Mrs. Frevert joined me in bidding
adieu
to Holmes and Mrs. Hudson, and together we mounted the dog cart that had reappeared some time earlier. It would return us to Fulworth from where we would retrace our path to Eastbourne and then back to London. The afternoon had grown darker, but I sensed that the American lady’s effervescent appreciation of Holmes’s willingness to help her could brighten the gloomiest of journeys.

After depositing Mrs. Frevert in her Kensington hotel, I returned wearily to Queen Anne Street. Numerous arrangements needed to be made, not the least of which was pacifying my wife. A journey by rail to the Midlands could not compare with a voyage to New York; but as she detested sea travel, I had little doubt that I
would triumph in the end. Would that I could have been so certain about the outcome of the investigation into political assassination upon which we were about to embark—an investigation, I noted sardonically, that was beginning on the Ides of March, the anniversary of the sanguinary murder of Julius Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate.

________

*
Author’s note: For confirmation of Mrs. Frevert’s argument, see Louis Filler,
Voice of the Democracy: A Critical Biography of David Graham Phillips
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), p. 201, chap. 13. n. 4.

“When intelligence permeates the masses, then out of the action and reaction of the common and the conflicting interests of an ever-increasing multitude of intelligent men there must begin to issue a democratic self-government.”

–David Graham Phillips,
The Reign of Gilt

M
rs. Frevert began her return to New York by steamship the following day with the understanding that Holmes and I, since my wife had reluctantly but graciously consented to let me go, would join her across the Atlantic within a fortnight. Two days after Mrs. Frevert’s departure, however, I received a letter by early post announcing a meeting that was destined to alter our plans. It was from Holmes, and it requested that I join him at the Diogenes Club that afternoon at 4:45. Such an invitation could mean but one thing: a rendezvous with Holmes’s older brother Mycroft, a founding member of that institution that prided itself on
offering refuge to those unsociable or diffident gentlemen seeking a temporary haven from the vicissitudes of daily life. Such a man indeed was the reclusive Mycroft Holmes, whose involvement with the inner workings of His Majesty’s government was quite well known to me and, of course, to his brother, but to few others. Moreover, since (as I have noted in the tragic affair concerning the Greek interpreter) Mycroft only attended his club from a quarter to five till twenty to eight each evening, that his brother Sherlock and I had been summoned at the very start of his sojourn suggested a meeting of some consequence.

Unable to secure a cab at my door and with a concern for the time, I made my way on foot that rainy March afternoon to Regent Street, where I hailed a hansom to take me to Pall Mall in which the Diogenes Club was situated. The rain washing down the grey-stuccoed façade of the old building did nothing to render the cold interior any more inviting. Upon hearing my name at the great oaken door of the cavernous entry hall, the hall porter took my umbrella and mackintosh and pointed me in the direction of the Strangers’ Room, the only chamber in the entire building in which talking was permitted. Fortunately, the distance to traverse was but a few yards, for the echoing footfalls I couldn’t avoid making as I trod the black-and-white chequered tiles seemed to announce my presence to every niche of the sepulchral edifice. Only a minute late, I rapped lightly at the door and heard a familiar voice say, “Come in, Watson.” At first glance, Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft, who were both standing by a meagre fire in the grate, seemed as physically different as any two figures could be. Holmes was lean; Mycroft, quite stout. Despite his age, my friend looked wiry, agile; Mycroft, seven years his brother’s
senior, appeared lethargic, almost sluggish. It was only when one regarded the heads of the two, the erect and noble bearing, and then the keenness of the steely eyes, that one recognised the adumbrations of mental prowess that united the brothers. The analytical Sherlock himself said of his brother that, had Mycroft not been employed in God-only-knew-how-many machinations for the government, the elder Holmes could easily have outshone his brother as a mastermind in solving criminal puzzles. My friend, in fact, often consulted him on cases which Mycroft was happy to scrutinise as long as the latter was not required to leave the immediate environs of Whitehall.