The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters (54 page)

“To the end of your search,” the man answered, as if that was supposed to mean anything.

I decided to remain silent and wait it out, knowing that the car eventually had to stop and the door be opened, at which time I could make a run for it. After all, being kidnapped by a party of one was not exactly overpowering. On the other hand, my capacity to fight back had been considerably diminished by my capacity for alcohol.

Before long we came to street I knew only too well, and pulled up at the curb in front of a building I had been in many times. “Why have you brought me here?” I asked, staring through the window at the offices of Graham Wicking.

I heard the car doors unlock, and quickly opened mine and rolled out. I made my way for the front door of the building, which was being held open by Wicking himself.

“Graham, is this some bloody joke?” I demanded.

“I wish it were a joke, Len,” he said, ushering me into the dark building.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s not safe for you, that’s all I can say.”

“What?”

“Come this way, Len, please.”

He led through the darkened lobby to the elevator. My head was spinning.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” I asked.

As we waited for the lift door to open, he said: “At first I thought you were crazy, or maybe just drunk. But this thing with Stinson…” A bell announced the lift. “Get in.”

We took the lift to the basement, and when it opened again, Wicking led me down another hallway to a door that, save for a tracing of light around it, might have looked like the entrance to a bunker. “What is this?” I asked.

“Please, Len, just go in,” he said, nervously.

I did as I was told and entered the room, and he closed the door behind me. It was a storeroom, filled with boxes of books. There were probably a few crates of mine somewhere in here. In the midst of the crates, seated on folding chairs, were about a dozen elderly men and women, each of whom sported a tweed fore-and-aft hunting cap and carried a peacock feather.

My utter confusion must have been telegraphed on my face, for the one of the group, a very old man, rose and uttered: “We are the Peacock Street Peculiars.”

I looked around at the assortment in astonishment. “Good God,” was all I could think to say.

“You are Leonard Dobie?”

I nodded.

“The same Leonard Dobie, I presume, who fostered lies about Lord Stinson?”

“What?” I said, stupidly. “You mean my introduction? My good man, I did not lie. Perhaps I did not have all the facts, but it was not a conscious attempt at prevarication. You said ‘Lord Stinson.’ I did not know he had been made a peer. I’d be happy to put that in.”

The old man’s face darkened. “That is a blasphemous jest,” he scolded.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You have taken the name of the Lord Stinson in vain!”

“The Lord Stinson?” I muttered. As I looked from face to face, I noticed that they all could have been wearing the same mask. It was not their features that were similar, it was their identical expressions of wide-eyed adoration, the kinds of glassy stares that one encounters amongst the desperately religious. To my horror, I realized then that they did not represent simply a gathering of fans, but a cult!

“Good lord, you mean to tell me that you people have based a religion on William Radford Stinson?”

“We honour our God,” one of the women said.

“But of all people,
why him
?” I cried. “He was nothing but a crap writer!”

A gasp went up in the room, and some people fell to their knees while others clasped their hands in prayer. No doubt about it, it was time to leave. “Well, I am glad to have had the honour of meeting you all,” I said quickly, “and I am truly sorry if I have broken a commandment, or…whatever. I shall try to be more careful in the future. Now I must go.” I rushed to the door, only to find that it was locked. Where in hell was Wicking?

“You must answer for your heresy,” the old man, clearly the leader of the group, proclaimed. “Let the charges be read.”

Charges?
Bloody hell!

Another member rose and read aloud my introduction, the one in which I savaged the man, the one Wicking claimed never to have received! Good god, don’t tell me
Jim Redgrave
had leaked it out to these lunatics! When he was finished, the rest of the group began to moan in a low, eerie way.

Then the leader asked: “What does the accused have to say?”

“What do you mean ‘the accused’?” I cried indignantly, instantly realizing that was the wrong approach. These people were clearly unbalanced, and I had to treat them with more gentleness. Forcing myself to calm down and think, I had a sudden flash of inspiration.

“You are forgetting the other introduction I wrote, the real introduction. I realized I had made a grievous mistake. I had been too harsh, too cruel. Perhaps the devil forced me to write it, I don’t know, but I wrote another one to make amends for it. Read that one before you judge me.”

The same man who had aired my “charges” now pulled out another piece of paper and, much to my relief, read the favourable review. When he was done, the old man asked: “And you say that is your true belief?”

“I swear,” I declared.

“Mr Wicking?” the old man suddenly shouted, and I heard the door unlock and saw Graham walk in. “Mr Wicking, the accused claims to have realized the error of his sacrilegious beliefs and writings and argues that he rectified them with this.” He took the second introduction from the hands of the reader and passed it to Wicking, who looked at it. “Is this true?” the old man asked.

Wicking looked up at me, and then back to the paper.

“Tell them,” I prompted. “Graham,
tell them
I got drunk and wrote the first one as a bad joke, and then sent it to you by accident, and then realized my mistake and wrote this one. Tell them.”

“The truth, Mr Wicking,” the old man said. “We will accept only the truth.”

Looking down at the floor, Wicking said: “He sent them both to me. He said I could use either one. His words were, ‘the favourable one or the honest one.’”

“Dammit, Graham!” I cried.

He faced me, looking somewhat sick. “I’m sorry, Len, but it
is
what you said.”

“Enough,” the leader intoned. “Leonard Dobie, you have been revealed as a blasphemer and a liar. We, the keepers of the flame, we who protect the truth against the falseness, must now pass judgment.”

“Truth?” I shouted, suddenly enraged. “You want the truth? All right, I will tell you the bloody truth about William Radford Stinson. He was the worst sodding writer who ever drew breath! He probably faked his own death so he would no longer have to be recognized as the purveyor of the most dogshit prose on whole of the bloody damned planet!”

I felt a hand on my harm and Wicking quickly stepped between me and the leader. “Allow me to talk to the defendant,” he said, then dragging me into a corner, he hissed in a whisper: “For god’s sake, Len, shut up! You don’t know what you’re up against!”

It was a whisper I recognized. “You,” I said, stunned. “Graham, you were the voice on my phone machine!”

“I tried to warn you, tried to get you to stop, but you wouldn’t.”

“Graham, I want the truth. What do you have to do with all this?”

He looked at me with pained eyes. “The Peacock Street Peculiars came to me with the request that Stinson be brought back into print, that’s all. Since the stuff had been allowed to fall into the public domain it was cheap enough, and vintage fiction is selling again, so I said fine. I thought it was a marketable idea. But then I made the mistake of asking you to write an intro.

“First you wrote that vindictive one, which I pretended not to receive in order to protect you. But I still had to show it to them. Then you became more interested in the man than his writings. You started investigating him, trying to discover what happened to him. You went to see that old barrister today and made dinner plans with him.”

“How could you know this?”

“Len, I’ve been following you for the last two days.”

“You’ve
what
?” Behind me, I could hear restless murmurs from the Peculiars, but I no longer cared. This was getting to be too much. “And I suppose you cancelled dinner as well?”

He nodded. “I rang Todgers and told him you couldn’t make it, and then I had my assistant call you at the Ritz. Then I arranged for the cab to bring you here.”

“For god’s sake, Graham, why?”

“I…I had to.”

“What sort of power do these ancient mooncalves have over you?” I demanded.

Wicking looked at me, miserably. He was sweating. “You don’t know how deep their mania goes, Len,” he said. “They threatened my family, my wife and my kids…my
kids
, Len!”

“Threatened them with what?”

He sighed mournfully. “Stinson did not fake his death, Len, and he did not just wander off. He was—”

“We grow impatient,” the leader interrupted, and Wicking immediately grew silent. “Congregation, you have heard the evidence,” the old man went on. “What is your verdict?”

All rose in unison and practically shouted: “Guilty!”

“And the penalty?” the old man asked.

“Death!” they crowed.

I stood there, waiting desperately for this entire episode to be exposed as a perverse joke. But no one was laughing, least of all Graham Wicking.

“A fitting punishment,” the old man intoned. “Leonard Dobie, you are the second coming of the False Prophet who appeared to us thirty two years ago in the guise of the Lord Himself, who, like you, came only to blaspheme and disgrace the Sacred Writings!”

Oh, good god, it could not be! William Radford Stinson himself spoke to the Peculiars in 1974…thirty-two years ago! What had he told them? The truth? That he was a terrible writer who finally accepted that fact and quit? That these people were total fools for being his fans?

I turned to Wicking and said: “My god, they killed Stinson, didn’t they? These insane fanatics murdered him and hid his body somewhere! That’s why he ‘disappeared!’”

Wicking merely stared at his fingernails.

I had had enough. I dashed for the door, but was prevented from going through by a half-dozen surprisingly strong arms that held me fast.

“Let me go, damn you!” I cried. “Wicking! You’re my friend, for god’s sake! Do something!”

“I can’t,” he moaned. “You don’t have a family, Len. I do. I have to protect them.”

Suddenly I felt a sharp stabbing in my arm, and it did not take a novelist’s imagination to know it was a syringe. My strength seemed to drain out as though drawn, and I was pulled back into the room without resistance.

The last words I heard were from Graham Wicking. “All I wanted was a simple puff job and the use of your name, Len,” he was saying. “That’s all.
Why
couldn’t you have played the hack and cashed the cheque, just this once?”

* * * *

The London Times
, 21 September 2006

Police remain baffled by the disappearance of popular mystery novelist Leonard Dobie, 52, who was last seen emerging from the Ritz Hotel on the evening of 16 July. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said Tuesday that the Yard was unwilling to rule out foul play, despite scepticism regarding that judgment from some of the writer’s closest friends.

Editor James Redgrave, a longtime friend of Dobie’s, told police that the author was researching a book about a fellow mystery writer, William Radford Stinson, the creator of the Holmesian pastiche character Shadrack House, who himself had vanished in 1974. Since Stinson had disappeared, Redgrave maintains that Dobie’s seeming disappearance is somehow be connected to his research.

“Len’s a thorough type, and he could well have decided that the only way to properly research someone who vanished was by actually vanishing himself,” Redgrave said.

Graham Wicking, a publisher and a friend of the missing man, agrees. “I know I’ll see him again,” Wicking told the
Times
. “To believe that one mystery writer legitimately vanishes into thin air while researching another writer who vanished into thin air is to accept the kind of coincidence that no good writer would dare put in his books.”

With a smile, Wicking added: “Either that, or there is some great cult conspiracy going on out there to do away with mystery writers.”

SECOND FIDDLE, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WEDNESDAY, 5:36 A.M.

Holmes looked out of place as he crouched on the pavement, staring at the streak of blood. I had already put Vicks on my nose and lit a cigarette. The stench on the side of the road had nearly gagged
me
—a ten-year veteran of homicide and fifteen on the force. The area smelled as if someone had run over a herd of deer three days ago, then left them in the sun. Holmes had merely wrapped a scarf around his face before examining the blood streak as if it contained the secret of the ages.

I had already followed that blood streak. It led down an embankment to a mutilated female body lying in the drainage ditch against the chain wire fence. The killer had been daring this time, dumping the body next to one of the busiest interstates in the area, only yards away from Cabot Hill, Santa Lucia’s newest—and ugliest—housing development.

But the location didn’t seem to catch Holmes’s attention, and neither did the rusted-out 1970 Oldsmobile with blood on its fender now abandoned on the roadside. A member of the forensics unit was scraping off the blood into a plastic bag. The photographer was straddling the drainage ditch, snapping pictures of the body. Three men from the unit were scouring the car, and two other detectives were scanning the roadside looking for other clues.

I was standing beside the squad car listening as Rae Ann, the only woman on the team, hunched over the radio, requesting a few more hours at the crime scene. It would play hell with the morning commute, but Holmes had requested it. And since the department had paid over a quarter of the budget to get the only privately run time-travel company to bring the Great Detective to Santa Lucia, it had to honor his requests.

I had been watching him since they brought him into the force twenty-four hours ago. He was thin, of average height, with a hawk nose. I had expected a taller man, and perhaps by Victorian standards he had been. His suitcoat was a bit more tailored than I had expected, but he did wear a deerstalker cap, and he carried a curved pipe which he put away when he discovered that a person who owned something made of elephant ivory was subject to verbal abuse in California.

I had protested Holmes’s arrival, but the chief insisted. Our small department had had a running rivalry with the FBI for years, and since there was no actual proof that the murderer was kidnapping his victims and running them across state borders, the chief was doing all he could to prevent FBI involvement. Holmes was merely the ace-in-the-hole, a last-ditch effort to prove to the feds that the homeboys could solve one of their own.

From the moment Holmes arrived, he listened a lot, asked few questions about the crime, but asked for information on the era, on California, and on Santa Lucia in particular.

I had snorted when they told me that. He may have been the greatest detective that ever lived—although I would wager greater detectives had existed in relative anonymity—but his information was one hundred years out of date. How could a man who had made his reputation by observing the small details discover a twist none of us—good detectives all—had failed to see?

And believe me, we had looked. I had had four hours of sleep a night since the task force was formed a month ago. That’s when we realized that Santa Lucia was as much a victim as the mutilated bodies we found.

The killer was preying on the rich and famous: two young movie stars, a former child television star, a Princeton football player who was this year’s number one draft choice, and the wife of one of the state’s most famous senators— a well-known sculptor in her own right. Each of his victims was famous enough to make the evening news across the country, and all of the bodies had been found here, in Santa Lucia, even though most of them had disappeared—alive—from somewhere else.

Holmes followed the bloodstain to the crusted grass on the embankment before putting a hand over his nose. Then I nodded. He seemed to have a diminished sense of smell, probably from snuff, or his pipe smoking.

“What the hell you think you’re doing, Ned? You too good to scour the crime scene?”

I glanced over my shoulder. Birmar was standing there, his tiny eyes running and his round face pale and greenish. He was a different kind of detective than I was. Holmes had been his idol as a boy and Birmar had been the brains behind calling the Santa Cruz Time Wizards for help in this case.

“I’m working,” I said in a tone that brooked no disagreement.

“Looks like you’re watching Holmes,” Birmar said, but he walked away, his overcoat clinging to his frame like wet sandpaper.

I had been watching Holmes, but I had already surveyed the crime scene. I had been the first member of the team to arrive. My house was a block away. That galled me. I was the spokesman on this case. If the killer was following the press coverage, he knew about me. And even though my address and phone number were unlisted, it wouldn’t take a lot of effort for a guy this smart to figure out where I lived.

“Officer Zaleski.” Holmes was looking up the embankment at me. “Would you join me for a moment, please?”

I sighed, leaned over, and stamped out the cigarette in the squad’s ash tray. Then I approached the embankment, careful to avoid the blood streak. A low irritation was building in my stomach.

Whenever this guy wanted a consult, he chose me, not Birmar. And I had better things to do than babysit someone who was wasting more of the department’s money than the chief was.

“Do we know whom this unfortunate woman is yet?” he asked. Even with the Vicks and the cigarette, the smell was nauseating. A body, decaying normally, shouldn’t smell that strong.

“No,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “This one may be exactly what we have been looking for. She does not have much in common with the others.”

I looked down, reluctantly, holding up all my training as a shield. The body was not a person; it was the king in a chess game, the reason for the fight and no more. But the killer had left her face intact, and the look of horror in her wide blue eyes would haunt me if I let it.

I made myself examine her for the clues Holmes was talking about. Her teeth were uneven and discolored—certainly not the product of million dollar attention. The remains of the dress she wore showed a store-bought label. Holmes reached down and held out a piece of fabric to me. The cuff of a sleeve. One button was missing; the other button had been sewn on rather ineptly.

“Jesus,” I said. “Copycat.” Holmes leaned on his haunches and peered up at me from beneath the brim of his cap.

“Copycat?” He clearly didn’t understand.

I pulled myself out of the embankment. “We got two of these nuts on the loose. One of them is killing for weird personal reasons and the other is reading the press coverage and imitating.”

Holmes clambered up beside me, remarkable at ease with his body although he looked as if he never exercised. “Nonsense,” he said. “Such a thing is preposterous. The odds of having two killers with the same—”

“It happens all the time,” I said. I walked to the squad car. Rae Ann’s cheeks were flushed. She was fighting with dispatch.

“They’re already rerouting because of a multi-car pile-up on 1-5,” she said.

“Let me talk to them.”

“There is no need.” Holmes was standing behind me. “As long as your photographers are finished, we may return to the station. You and I must discuss the way these copycats work.”

WEDNESDAY, 11:53 A.M.

The last thing I wanted to do was sit at my desk and talk basic criminal theory with a man who had died three decades before I was born. But he absolutely refused to work with Birmar (“I am afraid, my dear sir, that the man does not understand nuance”), and the chief told me my job was on the line if I ignored Holmes. Wonderful. It seemed that the Great Detective needed a foil, and he had chosen me as this century’s Watson.

The chief was using his office to brief a new team that would handle a double murder reported to the Gato Apartments. No privacy anywhere. So I took Holmes to my favourite dive, a bar just off Fifth that had been passed over by ferns, gold piping, and neon lights. The place hadn’t seen daylight since 1955, and the windows were painted shut. The interior smelled of cigarette smoke layered so deep that the walls were half an inch thicker. The floor was littered with popcorn and sticky with spilled beer. Someone had to be bribing the city health authorities because logically the place should have been closed in its first year.

To my surprise, Holmes said nothing as we walked in. He followed me to a booth and slid in as if we were both regulars. I ordered a light beer and he ordered an iced tea “heavy on the sugar and cream,” then smiled at me. “I have grown quite fond of that in the last few days,” he said.

I was in no mood for idle conversation. “So you want me to explain copycats.”

He shook his head, a slight smile on his narrow lips. “I think I grasp the concept. However, I thought I should let you know that I believe you are wrong.”

I felt a heated flush rise in my cheeks. The man knew how to get to me. I had been decorated three times by the State of California for my work, recognized as one of the best detectives in the nation by the
New York Times,
and had been portrayed in a TV movie based on one of my cases.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve investigated more homicides than I care to think about, and I’ve been on teams that have captured six different serial killers. Someone who doesn’t follow the pattern is inevitably a copycat.”

“But the pattern was followed,” Holmes said. “All the way up to and including the directions of the knife wounds, as well as the advanced odour of decay. Some of the flesh was not hers, and beneath her were the bits and pieces of another corpse. An animal, as in the other instances. In the past the killer has used this technique so that a hidden body will be discovered, and has done so this time. I do not believe you have put these details in the press, have you?”

The cocktail waitress set down my beer, sloshing some of the foam onto the scarred wooden table. Then she put down a glass of iced tea for Holmes, followed by a pitcher of milk and a bowl of sugar. With a sarcastic flourish, she produced a spoon and handed it to him, scooped my five dollar bill off the table, and left.

“No,” I said reluctantly. “We haven’t.”

“In addition, there was a small print from an—athletic shoe—and it had come from the opposite direction away from the car. I think you will find that the killer splashed the blood on the bumper as a way to lead us astray. The blood streak was a similar ploy, for it is too even and straight to have been caused by a body dragged to the edge of the embankment. The killer walked through the embankment in the pre-dawn hours, walked from one of the sidestreets, carrying the body with him. Since the incline from the road is so steep, I would doubt that anyone saw him.”

I took a sip of the beer. My hand was shaking. I had noticed those things, but had not put them together. Holmes was right. I guess some details didn’t change over the span of centuries.

“I believe,” Holmes said, “that if we discover who this woman is, we will have found our killer.”

WEDNESDAY, 2:33 P.M.

We sent the victim’s fingerprints and photograph to crime labs nationwide. Then we gave her picture to the press, who published it nationwide, then we hired a temp to monitor the phone calls.

Holmes was amazed by some things: the amount of data we had at our fingertips; the way that information could travel across country in a matter of seconds. Of course, he expressed that amazement with calm, letting us know that such changes were logical extensions of the era in which he had lived. He also told me privately that he believed such intellectual ease had made us lazy.

Birmar thought the remark funny. I didn’t. Holmes wasn’t making any points with me at all.

By this point in the investigation, we had eight different psychological profiles on the killer. The profiles assumed the killer was male and strong (which seemed obvious, given the football player), deficient in social skills and with a deep-seated hatred of famous people. Holmes disagreed with all of the experts on all of the points but two. He conceded that the killer had a hatred of the famous, and that the killer was strong.

We had returned from the bar after a lunch of burgers, heavy on the grease. I had had the one beer and Holmes had downed four cups of tea, making him jittery. When we returned, we were summoned to the chief’s office, along with Birmar, for an analysis of the case.

The office smelled of reconstituted air and old gym socks. The chief kept his workout clothes in his filing cabinet—“that way no one will snoop,” he would say slyly—and never opened his windows. His desk was littered with papers, and a computer hummed continually on the edge of a nearby table. The chief sat in an overstuffed chair behind the desk. Holmes and Birmar had taken the only remaining seats. I leaned against the closed door, arms crossed in front of my chest.

The chief had gone over the newest psychological profile—which said nothing different from the others—and then asked for our opinions.

“I would disagree with your experts,” Holmes said. “It would seem to me that our killer is quite socially adept. After all, he managed to get close to people who are continually surrounded by others and—in the case of the stars—are heavily guarded. No, this is a person who has enough resources to be able to travel great distances quickly and unseen, a person with the ability to get close to the unapproachable, and a person with ties to Santa Lucia.”

The chief and Birmar were watching Holmes as if he were god. I was beginning to resent the sound of that resonant, accented voice. I had already figured out the Santa Lucia part—that seemed obvious—and I had told the chief about my theory that the killer had a job that attached him to the famous. I had missed Holmes’s third point, and I shouldn’t have. Maybe Holmes was right: maybe my access to technology was making me intellectually lazy.

“It’s got to be a private plane,” I said. “He brought three of the victims in from the East Coast in less than two days.”

“I’ll call the airport,” Birmar said.