The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 8 The Darkened Room

January 6, 2010, cont.

In the darkest corner of a darkened room, all Sherlock Holmes stories begin. In the pregnant dim of gaslight and smoke, Holmes would sit, digesting the day’s papers, puffing on his long pipe, injecting himself with cocaine. He would pop smoke rings into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to pierce into the belly of his study and release the promise of adventure; of clues to interpret; of, at last he would plead, a puzzle he could not solve. And after each story he would return here, into the dark room, and die day by day of boredom. The darkness of his study was his cage, but also the womb of his genius. And when into that room-

Harold shuddered, and his thoughts snapped back from such fancies to Room 1117, to his sneakers on the plush carpet, to Sarah’s shoulder a hairsbreadth from his face, and to the dead body not ten feet in front of him.

Alex Cale’s corpse-and to merely glance at it was to tell it could not be anything other than a corpse-was pressed, like dough, into the carpet. He wore a black two-button suit, his wide black tie only slightly undone. He looked, to Harold, perversely like an undertaker. Except that his shoes were off and resting neatly by his side, revealing thin dress socks that almost matched the black of his suit. Was he dressing when he was killed, getting ready to lace his shoes?

Harold stepped forward, past Sarah, toward Alex. Despite the hundreds of blood-soaked stories he had read, Harold had never been in the presence of an actual dead body before. It was both more and less shocking than he might have imagined. The lifelessness of a man Harold had known-not well but at least in the flesh, so to speak-watered his eyes, and forced him to bite the inside of his lower lip. And yet the sensation of standing straight-backed and alert above the scene of the crime felt shamefully natural.

“I’m calling the police,” said the manager. He reached for the phone on the nightstand and then stopped abruptly, his hand an inch from the receiver. The blinking red message light gave his face a demonic glare. He thought better of disturbing the scene. “Please don’t touch anything,” he said with unexpected force, before slipping out of the room, off to the house phone in the hall.

“Let’s go,” said Jeffrey, his eyes glassy and wet.

Harold knew that a smart man would quietly walk out the door this instant, head bent low with the gravity of death. A normal man, even, would defer to the police and await news of their investigations in the coming morning papers. A sane man would, under no circumstances, approach the dead body of Alex Cale.

Harold stepped forward.

“Harold, no.” The strain in Jeffrey’s voice was manifest.

“What would Sherlock Holmes do?” asked Harold. He was deliriously earnest. He had to do this, he had to see if he could.

“Holmes would crawl back onto the page from which he came, because he’s made of ink and pine-tree pulp.”

“If he were real. If the stories were real. What would he do?” Harold couldn’t help his curiosity.

“Harold, this is sick. I will not be a part of this.”

“Search the floor for footprints! That’s what he does. In the very first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, the first act of detection he ever does is to examine the ground for footprints.”

“It’s carpeted,” responded Jeffrey.

Harold looked down. Indeed, the entire floor was covered in a plush, taupe carpet. There were no footprints in sight. Sherlock Holmes was not real. Harold was not a detective.

“But Holmes always finds footprints,” pleaded Harold. He couldn’t stop himself.

Sarah looked at him with a mixture of wonderment and stupefaction.

“You’re serious,” she said with a growing smile. Behind her raised eyebrows and open mouth, Harold could see her mind flying in a thousand directions at once, working out the angles.

“You can’t be serious,” said Jeffrey. “This is deranged. You’re a literary researcher, not a goddamned detective.”

As Harold’s eyes swept from Jeffrey to Sarah, desperate for support, he caught a brief glimpse of himself in the tall mirror that hung on the back of the open bathroom door. He saw his own dirty sneakers and the dead body behind them. He followed his straight spine to the deerstalker cap on his head. Harold paused for a moment, transfixed by the image.

He looked at Sarah as if he were a small child, hoping for even the slightest approval.

“What’s the second thing Holmes does?” she asked.

Harold and Jeffrey stared at each other for a long moment, Harold daring Jeffrey to say the answer out loud.

“Don’t,” Jeffrey said firmly. “Damn it, don’t you dare.”

“ ‘Sherlock Holmes approached the body, and, kneeling down, examined it intently,’ ” Harold quoted.

He leaned over, bending from the waist like a ballet dancer. Alex’s left eye was almost closed, but his right eye was opened surprisingly wide, more than Harold thought normal-though, truth be told, what exactly was normal supposed to be here? Alex’s bushy light brown hair squatted on his head like a chicken laying an egg, an impression made stronger by the near-translucent whiteness of his face. He still wore his millimeter-thin titanium glasses, unbent and unbroken. A rainbow of red-purple streaks wrapped around his neck, swirling with tiny color variations and forming an impressive impressionist bruise. Hanging loose around the purple neck was a slender black cord. It appeared soft, like cloth. Harold dropped to one knee to examine it, and only then did he finally catch the light scent of feces circulating in the air. From the body, Harold thought. As he died.

“What’s that around his neck?” asked Sarah as she knelt by Harold’s side. She both repudiated Jeffrey’s caution and encouraged Harold’s examination.

Harold peered closer and reached out to touch the cord.

It felt, on his fingertips, like cotton, and as he ran his hand along it, he found a plastic tip clasped to one end.

“It’s a shoelace,” said Harold. As Sarah reached out to feel it herself, Harold looked over at Alex’s shoes, which sat symmetrically by the side of the body. Sure enough, the left shoe was without a lace.

“It’s his shoelace,” said Harold.

There is an undeniable exhilaration in the moment of even the smallest discovery-the house keys unearthed from the deep pockets of yesterday’s pants; the mysterious recurring tinkle you hear as you fail to fall asleep explained, upon examination, by the dripping bathroom faucet; the digits of your mother’s old telephone number recalled, magically, from some moss-covered Precambrian mental arcadia. The human mind thrills at few things so much as making connections. Discovering. Solving. Harold quivered all over.

“What did Holmes do next?” Sarah asked.

“Don’t encourage him!” barked Jeffrey. “The police are coming. And they will have real detectives. With real tools. This is a murder scene, Harold-you can’t just go on touching things. Holmes didn’t have fingerprint analysis, but we do.”

“Good point,” said Harold thoughtfully. “But Holmes did pretty well without it, didn’t he? Nowadays we’ve got CSI teams and electrostatic print lifting. But New York City’s murder clearance rate is… what, sixty percent? I think Holmes did substantially better, don’t you?”

“This is insane,” pleaded Jeffrey. “You’re in shock. Fine. Alex is dead and you’re in shock. But don’t you dare mess up this crime scene so the real police can’t find the killer. They’ll be here any minute.”

“You’re right,” responded Harold. “They’ll be here soon. We’d better examine the room before they get here and trample over everything. In Scarlet-well, gosh, in half the stories-the police come in and make a mess of the place, obscuring all the real evidence. We don’t want to miss any clues.”

“Do you hear the words you’re saying, Harold? Do you have any idea what you sound like?” Jeffrey grunted out a deep breath. “I never wanted to tell you this, but you have always looked stupid in that hat. Take it off, and let’s go.”

Ignoring him, Harold moved to the far left corner of the room and, proceeding from the exact intersection of the two walls, began a systematic search of the room’s edges.

“Sarah, we don’t have a lot of time. Will you look around for the diary? I don’t think we’ll find it-the killer seems to have gone through the room thoroughly and presumably found what he or she was looking for.”

It’s not that Sarah didn’t need to pause to consider whether or not she should actively displace the contents of a capital crime scene-she did. It’s that her pause lasted only a subatomic fraction of a second, a quantum period of decision making. In what seemed to Harold to be an instant, Sarah was among the strewn papers, picking them up in piles and gauging their importance.

“What does the diary look like?” she asked.

Harold considered. “Leather-bound. Old. It’ll be the thing that looks like a hundred-year-old diary.”

“I thought Holmes spoke in aphorisms, not tautologies.”

“I think it’ll be pretty obvious when you see it, all right?”

The stray papers that Sarah found contained little of interest to the amateur detectives-pages 709 through 841 of Alex Cale’s unfinished Conan Doyle biography, which, by the looks of things, would have been impeccably thorough in its completion. She picked up an antique fountain pen from beside the body and held it up for Harold to see. It was a Parker Duofold “Big Red” model, probably from the 1920s- black on the blind cap, red on the barrel. It was the same model that Conan Doyle would have used to write the final Holmes stories.

She found a handful of hardbound books as well: a complete collection of the Holmes tales, dirty and frayed from overuse and almost solidly blue with marginal notes from the antique pen. Nearly every paragraph had words underlined or scrawled exclamations in the margins. She found Cale’s briefcase beneath a low chair, and when she pulled it across the carpet, Harold recognized it from the night before. It was already open. And empty.

As he searched the floor, Harold adopted a rodent’s-eye view of the area where the taupe carpet met the off-white wallpaper, below the vertical streaks of fleur-de-lis patterning that provided most of the wall’s decoration. He reached into his coat pocket and removed the magnifying glass that had previously found use only as a finger toy when he became nervous or bored.

At the sight of Harold with his glass, Jeffrey shook his head in shame.

Harold began a methodical examination of the hotel room’s walls. He could see puckers in the wallpaper through the lens, as every unevenness in the paper’s application to the drywall seemed to pop out like a series of sand dunes. What was Holmes looking for, when he searched through that fateful Lauriston Gardens house in his first case? That room had been dilapidated, dust-covered, and mildewy from years of inattention. Holmes dug through the dust and shone bright match light into the darkest corners, discovering the word “RACHE”-the German for “revenge”-written in blood at the bottom of the wall in an empty, unused portion of the room. But, thought Harold, sensational though such a clue might be, what was Holmes looking for when he found it? You couldn’t expect a real murderer to conveniently leave you a message explicating his motivations, could you? Stepping back, all Harold saw here was clean hotel wallpaper and freshly vacuumed carpet. He couldn’t possibly hope to find a clue as dramatic as Holmes’s, after all; there would be no bloody messages here. He was being responsible in his expectations. But Holmes’s method-that would work. It simply had to. So what the hell was Harold supposed to be looking for?

Harold’s search swung, inch by inch, 180 degrees across the room, to the wooden desk and chair. The top of the desk was a mess of papers and pens-whoever ransacked the room seemed to have been particularly concerned with making sure no lost diaries had been hidden in the hotel’s “Guide to Your Pay-Per-View Channels.” Harold pushed the chair away and crawled under the desk, continuing his examination. The darkness underneath made this difficult, however, so he reached up and brought the overturned lamp from the desktop to his assistance.

He flicked it on and pointed its bulb at the wall.

Then he dropped it, his body ricocheting as he gave a start. The bulb shattered, rousing both Sarah and Jeffrey from their thoughts and sending them rushing to Harold’s side. What they saw at first appeared to be a small, murky, dark stain on the bright, clean wall. Then, as they knelt beneath the desk, they began to make out red-brown letters, messily scrawled above the carpet line, as if by finger painting. No magnifying glass was needed to read the still-drying message.

“ELEMENTARY,” it read.

It was written in blood.