I suppose there was just enough time to chuck it into the stove.’
Lestrade turned, looked at it, then looked back. ‘Only a man as black as Hull would have found strength enough to scream at the end,’ he said.
‘Only a man as black as Hull would have required a son to kill him,’ Holmes rejoined.
He and Lestrade looked at each other, and again something passed between them, some perfectly silent communication from which I myself was excluded.
‘Have you ever done it?’ Holmes asked, as if picking up on an old conversation.
Lestrade shook his head. ‘Once came damned close,’ he said. ‘There was a girl involved, not her fault, not really. I came close. Yet . . . that was only one.’
‘And here there are four,’ Holmes returned, understanding him perfectly. ‘Four people ill-used by a villain who should have died within six months anyway.’
At last I understood what they were discussing.
Holmes turned his gray eyes on me. ‘What say you, Lestrade? Watson has solved this one, although he did not see all the ramifications. Shall we let Watson decide?’
‘All right,’ Lestrade said gruffly. ‘Just be quick. I want to get out of this damned room.’
Instead of answering, I bent down, picked up the felt shadows, rolled them into a ball, and put them in my coat pocket. I felt quite odd doing it: much as I had felt when in the grip of the fever which almost took my life in India.
‘Capital fellow, Watson!’ Holmes cried. ‘You’ve solved your first case, become an accessory to murder, and it’s not even tea-time! And here’s a souvenir for myself — an original Jory Hull. I doubt it’s signed, but one must be grateful for whatever the gods send us on rainy days.’ He used his pen-knife to loosen the artist’s glue holding the canvas to the legs of the coffee-table. He made quick work of it; less than a minute later he was slipping a narrow canvas tube into the inner pocket of his voluminous greatcoat.
‘This is a dirty piece of work,’ Lestrade said, but he crossed to one of the windows and, after a moment’s hesitation, released the locks which held it and opened it half an inch or so.
‘Say it’s dirty work undone,’ Holmes said in a tone of almost hectic gaiety. ‘Shall we go, gentlemen?’
We crossed to the door. Lestrade opened it. One of the constables asked him if there was any progress.
On another occasion Lestrade might have shown the man the rough side of his tongue. This time he said shortly, ‘Looks like attempted robbery gone to something worse. I saw it at once, of course; Holmes a moment later.’
‘Too bad!’ the other constable ventured.
‘Yes,’ Lestrade said, ‘but at least the old man’s scream sent the thief packing before he could steal anything. Carry on.’
We left. The parlor door was open, but I kept my head down as we passed it. Holmes looked, of course; there was no way he could not have done. It was just the way he was made. As for me, I never saw any of the family. I never wanted to.
Holmes was sneezing again. His friend was twining around his legs and miaowing blissfully.
‘Let me out of here,’ he said, and bolted.
An hour later we were back at 221B Baker Street, in much the same positions we had occupied when Lestrade came driving up: Holmes in the window-seat, myself on the sofa.
‘Well, Watson,’ Holmes said presently, ‘how do you think you’ll sleep tonight?’
‘Like a top,’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘Likewise, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘T’m glad to be away from those damned cats, I can tell you that.’
‘How will Lestrade sleep, d’you think?’
Holmes looked at me and smiled. ‘Poorly tonight. Poorly for a week, perhaps. But then he’ll be all right. Among his other talents, Lestrade has a great one for creative forgetting.’
That made me laugh.
‘Look, Watson!’ Holmes said. ‘Here’s a sight!’ I got up and went to the window, somehow sure I would see Lestrade riding up in the wagon once more. Instead I saw the sun breaking through the clouds, bathing London in a glorious late-afternoon light.
‘It came out after all,’ Holmes said. ‘Marvelous, Watson! Makes one happy to be alive!’ He picked up his violin and began to play, the sun strong on his face.
I looked at his barometer and saw it was falling. That made me laugh so hard I had to sit down. When Holmes asked — in tones of mild irritation — what the matter was, I could only shake my head. I am not, in truth, sure he would have understood, anyway. It was not the way his mind worked.
Umney’s Last Case
The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.
— Raymond Chandler
The Little Sister
I. The News from Peoria
It was one of those spring mornings so LA-perfect you keep expecting to see that little trademark symbol — (R) — stamped on it somewhere. The exhaust of the vehicles passing on Sunset smelled faintly of oleander, the oleander was lightly perfumed with exhaust, and the sky overhead was as clear as a hardshell Baptist’s conscience. Peoria Smith, the blind paperboy, was standing in his accustomed place on the corner of Sunset and Laurel, and if that didn’t mean God was in His heaven and all was jake with the world, I didn’t know what did.
Yet since I’d swung my feet out of bed that morning at the unaccustomed hour of 7:30 A.M., things had felt a little off-kilter, somehow; a tad woozy around the edges. It was only as I was shaving — or at least showing those pesky bristles the razor in an effort to scare them into submission — that I realized part of the reason why. Although I’d been up reading until at least two, I hadn’t heard the Demmicks roll in, squiffed to the earlobes and trading those snappy one-liners that apparently form the basis of their marriage.
Nor had I heard Buster, and that was maybe even odder. Buster, the Demmicks’ Welsh Corgi, has a high-pitched bark that goes through your head like slivers of glass, and he uses it as much as he can. Also, he’s the jealous type. He lets loose with one of his shrill barking squalls every time George and Gloria clinch, and when they aren’t zinging each other like a couple of vaudeville comedians, George and Gloria usually are clinching. I’ve gone to sleep on more than one occasion listening to them giggle while that mutt prances around their feet going yarkyarkyark and wondering how difficult it would be to strangle a muscular, medium-sized dog with a length of piano-wire. Last night, however, the Demmicks’ apartment had been as quiet as the grave. It was passing strange, but a long way from earth-shattering; the Demmicks weren’t exactly your perfect life-on-a-timetable couple at the best of times.
Peoria Smith was all right, though — chipper as a chipmunk, just as always, and he’d recognized me by my walk even though it was at least an hour before my usual time. He was wearing a baggy CalTech sweatshirt that came down to his thighs and a pair of corduroy knickers that showed off his scabby knees. His hated white cane leaned casually against the side of the card-table he did business on.
‘Say, Mr. Umney! Howza kid?’
Peoria’s dark glasses glinted in the morning sunlight, and as he turned toward the sound of my step with my copy of the LA Times held up in front of him, I had a momentary unsettling thought: it was as if someone had drilled two big black holes into his face. I shivered the thought off my back, thinking that maybe the time had come to cut out the before-bedtime shot of rye.
Either that or double the dose.
Hitler was on the front of the Times, as he so often was these days. This time it was something about Austria. I thought, and not for the first time, how at home that pale face and limp forelock would have looked on a post-office bulletin board.
‘The kid is just about okay, Peoria,’ I said. ‘In fact, the kid is as fine as fresh paint on an outhouse wall.’
I dropped a dime into the Corona box resting atop Peoria’s stack of newspapers. The Times is a three-center, and over-priced at that, but I’ve been dropping that same chip into Peoria’s change-box since time out of mind. He’s a good kid, and making good grades in school — I took it on myself to check that last year, after he’d helped me out on the Weld case. If Peoria hadn’t shown up on Harris Brunner’s houseboat when he did, I’d still be trying to swim with my feet cemented into a kerosene drum, somewhere off Malibu. To say I owe him a lot is an understatement.