The Art of Detection (21 page)

Lee took a sip of her twig tea and glanced at Kate’s sheaf of papers. “What’s that?”

“I am,” Kate told her, “‘working the weird.’”

“Sorry?”

“Oh, nothing, just something Jules told Al. You know that case of the dead Sherlockian?”

“It is a great title.”

“I’ll save it for my memoirs. Anyway, the guy had recently got his hands on what may or may not have been a valuable manuscript, that may or may not be a lost Sherlock Holmes story, which I am told may or may not hold some similarities to how the body was actually found. So I need to look it over.”

“One thing I love about your job, you deal with so much hard reality.”

“What may or may not be hard reality,” Kate said.

While she waited for the machine to find its niche in the household wireless system—another, recent, concession to comfort, freeing her from the upstairs desktop—Lee glanced over at the crisp white paper in Kate’s hands. “That paper’s not from the Twenties,” she stated.

“This is a photocopy of a photocopy. The original’s in a bank vault, along with a ton of other ridiculously valuable junk. Collectors,” she said with a shrug.

Lee stared absently into the screen. “A lost Sherlock Holmes story.”

“That’s what I’m told,” Kate agreed. She kicked off her shoes and put her stockinged feet up on the table.

“I heard something about that, not too long ago. Where was it?”

But Kate could only shake her head. In a minute, Lee turned to the keyboard, and Kate settled to her reading, but before she had reached the end of the first page, Lee interrupted. “Got it. It was a little piece in the
Chron,
Leah Garchik’s column about three weeks ago.”

“Leah Garchik. The gossip columnist?”

“She’s a friend of Roz’s, often sticks things in there about her or Maj.”

“And she had something about this story?”

“Well, about
a
story. Look.”

She passed Kate the laptop. The screen showed an archived column of the
San Francisco Chronicle
from, as Lee had said, the middle of the previous month. The third paragraph read:

Fans of Sherlock Holmes are abuzz (sorry!) over a rumor that a previously unknown story about the detective has surfaced right here in San Francisco. I’m told that Arthur Conan Doyle spent a few days in the City back in the Twenties, but came away unimpressed. Seems he preferred LA, where his “message” of Spiritualism was more enthusiastically embraced. Isn’t it good to know things haven’t changed much? No one I could find knows anything about the rumor, but while I’m on holiday, I’ll keep my magnifying glass and deerstalker cap out, just in case.

Kate handed the machine back to Lee. “Thanks, I’ll look into it,” she said, took a swallow of tea, and opened the manuscript.

SEVEN

The mind is a machine ill suited to desuetude. The occasional holiday is all very well, but without the oil of challenge and the heat generated by effort, the mind rusts and seizes and is unavailable when needed.

     I found myself in San Francisco one spring evening, my travelling companion temporarily about other business and my mind at a loss for a load to carry. Recent days had seen the successful conclusion of a case not without interest, but after forty-eight hours of solitary leisure, a dangerous restlessness had begun to set in, so I cast about for other forms of stimulation to see me through the days ahead.

     In the brief time I had been in this brash city on the Pacific, I had come to appreciate its idiosyncrasies and, despite its youth, its powerful sense of personality. A remarkably diverse metropolis, with nearly three-quarters of its residents born elsewhere, it seemed less a part of these United States than a country unto itself. It claimed, only half-humorously, its own emperor, a poor madman who had wandered the streets during the previous century; it had faced the worst fire any modern city had ever known and had built anew within a decade; its port linked the disparate parts of the world more than any other I had seen; it even chose which federal mandates it should apply to itself, so that the Volstead Act that was currently shredding the social orders of the rest of the nation went all but unacknowledged in San Francisco, where the prohibition of alcohol was given merely token recognition in restaurants and public houses alike: I had myself seen the chief of police with a glass of wine in his hand. The main effect of Prohibition that I had found was in the reduction of quality, not quantity.

     I decided that, in keeping with my long-held belief that matriculation in the university of life ends only with the great final lesson, my education might benefit by an exploration of this remarkable city of the future. Not, however, the sort of exploration available to me by light of day--I had already spent more time than I cared playing the tourist. Thus, as evening fell I took up my overcoat against the night’s mists and my stick against any possible assailant, and walked out of the doors of my hotel.

     The city had come far from its days of being little more than a polite adjunct to the roaring Barbary Coast. The humorously named Maiden Lane, once the centre of bawdy entertainments, was now a staid enclave of the fashion industry, and these days, few men woke after a night out on the town to find themselves on a ship bound for Shanghai.

     Still, though the Barbary Coast might have been shut down and the Chinese district cleansed of its more noxious corners, this remained, I had been assured, a ‘wide open town’.

     In the interest of research, then, I went to investigate its self-professed openness.

     In San Francisco, those wishing the less salubrious quarters keep away from the hills and make for the low-lying ground. I had been in the city long enough to know the general direction, and made my way out of the commercial centre towards Market Street, and beyond. Within ten minutes I had found what I was looking for, paid a twenty-five-cent ‘membership fee’, ordered an overpriced glass of a beverage that in better times would have been swilled around the floor with a string-mop, and soon had found my evening’s guide.

     My guide introduced himself by a surreptitious insinuation of his fingers into my pocket. When I had his wrist firmly locked between my own fingers, I said without turning around, ‘I see that the New World pickpockets have yet to attain the skill of their London brothers. Or perhaps I have simply come across an incompetent.’

     Give the lad credit, he did not attempt to struggle against my grip, feeling no doubt the threat of broken bones in the particular arrangement of my finger-tips. Actually, I should admit that ‘incompetent’ was something of an exaggeration, a word chosen more for effect than accuracy. The boy was good enough for most purposes, just not good enough to lift the contents of my pocket. Particularly not in a place where I had half expected something of the sort.

     I twisted his arm in a manner that forced him to circle around me, and nodded at the chair behind him. ‘Do sit down,’ I suggested firmly.

     He hesitated, and I bent my restraining hand by way of encouragement. When he was seated, I let go.

     ‘May I buy you a drink?’ I asked him.

     He did not immediately bolt for the door, as nine of ten young men in his position would do. He rubbed at his wrist, then sat back in his chair, eyeing me curiously.

     Returning the favour, I saw a slim young man of perhaps nineteen or twenty, dressed in the compensatory fashion of one who has more sense of style than means of paying for it: quiet and slightly threadbare coat over flamboyant collar, waistcoat, and cravat, freshly polished shoes that had been cut for some other man’s feet, quality trousers slightly bunched at the waist, with knees on the edge of shiny and cuff-edges that had worn through and been neatly turned up. The whole was put together as if to say that if he couldn’t dress well, he would dress with panache. His blond hair (in need of a trim) was sleeked back over his head, and had not known a hat since it was last combed; his cheeks were freshly shaved, albeit by his own hand and with an inadequate looking-glass, or perhaps simply inadequate light; his nails were clean and well trimmed; his teeth had regular acquaintance with a brush and tooth-powder.

     It was his gaze that gave him away. As they wandered across my person, seeing a grey-haired man in expensive London clothes to suit the accent, his pale blue eyes took on a knowing cast. I was not surprised to see him lean back a trifle more, tucking one arm behind the back of the chair so his coat fell slightly away from the clean, innocent whiteness of his shirt, of which one button did not quite match the others. He gave me the sort of smile I had seen before, one no doubt intended to be sultry.

     I laughed aloud; his carefully composed smile wavered, his eye-brows tipped into a scowl.

     ‘My dear young man,’ I said, ‘when I offered to buy you a drink, it was merely for the purpose of conversation, nothing more. If you are looking for companionship, I would suggest you approach that male person in the unfortunate cap sitting along the back wall. His collars might not be clean, but he is clearly interested in making your acquaintance.’

     My companion hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at the unprepossessing gentleman in question, and settled again with a dismissive shake to his shoulders. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a drink.’

     He ordered a cocktail of the sort that had been invented by a bored and sadistic barkeep the week before, and while we waited I ran a small wager with myself as to its colour and the shape of glass it would come inside. I won on colour--a sickly lavender tint--but the glass was an ordinary water-glass rather than one of those broad plates better suited to olives or salted nuts than liquid. He held his drink up to me by way of toast, took a sip without wincing, then by way of thanks thrust his hand out at me and said, ‘Martin Ledbetter.’

     I gave him a name and my hand, and when we had settled the matter of identities, I sampled my local California claret-type, which to my relief did not actually scour off the membranes of my palate. I then bent to examine the small bowl of assorted oddments that had arrived with the drinks.

     ‘Are these intended to be eaten?’ I asked my companion.

     ‘If you’ve got a hard stomach and good teeth, they probably won’t kill you,’ he replied. I nudged the bowl across the table for him, and he happily scooped up a handful and began snapping off the shells of what I decided were either large pistachios or wizened peanuts, depositing them onto the floor to mix with the sawdust, shells, and assorted waste. ‘So, what brings you to our fair city, Mr Sigerson?’

     ‘My wife’s family live here,’ I replied, which statement had as much truth in it as the names we had given each other. ‘She’s off for a few days on business, so I thought I’d take a look at the other side of San Francisco.’

     ‘The seamy tour, eh?’ he said, wagging his nicely shaped eye-brows in a raffish commentary on the whims of the old and rich.

     ‘More by way of comparison. I have spent a great deal of my life in places such as this, for the most part in London. I was curious to see if this new town had any variations to play on the old themes.’

     His eyes again ran down my trousers, paused on the shoes made for me by a man in Piccadilly, went to the immaculate silk of the tie I wore, before he blurted out, ‘Why would someone like you spend time in places like this?’

     ‘And what is someone like me?’ I wondered aloud.

     His gaze went from the ebony cuff-links I had been given in Japan to the heavy gold watch-chain across my waistcoat, and he shook his head in thought. ‘You’re not beat-up enough to be a lifelong drunk or an addict, and you walked right past the girls near the door, so you’re not looking for them. Or for me. Are you some kind of do-gooder? A church reformer or something?’

     ‘I have absolutely no desire to reform any of these good people,’ I assured him.

     ‘Then why come here?’

     I held up my wine to the dim light leaking from the bar, noting the evidence of sugar added to the fermentation, then told him, ‘You might say I come here in a professional capacity.’

     I could see him pick over my statement, saw his eyes narrow for a brief instant as he considered the possibility that my profession might be within the bounds of law enforcement, then go on to more likely roles. Eventually he cocked his head at me, appraisingly, no doubt recalling the ease with which I had intercepted his intrusive fingers. ‘Con-man? Dance-hall owner? No, I’ve got it you’re a professional gambler--a cardsharp!’

     ‘I have been known to play the Great Game, but lesser forms such as baccarat and poker have never interested me. As to the other possibilities, well, shall we say merely that I try not to limit myself?’