The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 28 Thinking

January 10, 2010, cont.

It was time for Harold to do some deep thinking.

That’s how Sherlock Holmes had done it. He’d sit in his armchair, wearing his dressing gown, puffing away at his pipe, while he kept his eyes closed to all distraction. And he’d methodically, step by step, go through the problem at hand. He would break it down logically and figure out what had to have happened. After a few hours, he’d burst up suddenly, without any warning, and he’d have his answer.

That was Holmes’s greatest gift, Harold realized. Not his uncanny powers of observation, not his encyclopedic knowledge of footprints and poisons, not his facility with disguises or scent-sniffing dogs. The real trick was concentration. It was his ability to think through a mystery. Reason was his weapon against the unknown.

If Harold was going to become Holmes, or at least a worthy heir, then he’d have to do the same thing. The only trouble was that it was proving harder than he’d hoped.

Harold sat in the red armchair, his elbows resting against the curved armrests. The cushioned seat below him was comfortable, though it pressed his wallet, which was in his right rear jeans pocket, awkwardly into his buttocks.

He should get up and remove it. Then he’d be more comfortable.

Harold was back in the hotel room in which he and Sarah had spent the previous night. She lay on the bed eating a Greek salad while she flipped through the pages of Alex Cale’s Conan Doyle biography. Harold could hear the crunching of the romaine lettuce in her mouth and the dull sound of her plastic fork scraping her plastic salad bowl. The noise made it difficult to concentrate.

The wallet in his pocket was really starting to bother him. It tilted the weight of his pelvis so that there wasn’t any truly comfortable way to sit. He should get up and take out his wallet so he could get back to thinking. But he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t stand up until he had a solution. He would stick to his plan. He would remain seated.

Sarah was chewing again. God, he should have told her to take a walk or something. Since she had nowhere else to go, she had decided to finish Cale’s work and have some lunch. She’d asked if he’d mind her hanging around while he did his thinking, and he’d said that he didn’t. Harold was very polite, and he liked having Sarah around, a lot. But she was making it very hard to sustain a logical train of thought.

Here was the problem at hand: In October, Alex Cale had announced that he’d found the lost diary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He’d called his sister to tell her the good news, and he’d declined her offer to celebrate. He’d spent the next months reading and studying the diary, preparing to integrate the information gleaned from it into his biography. Though, as of December 14, the manuscript of the biography hadn’t been rewritten to include any of it. On January 5, Cale had arrived at the Algonquin Hotel in New York to present the diary to his fellow Sherlockians. He reported being followed, and he seemed afraid. In the middle of the night, his door was opened to visitors three times. There was no clue whatsoever as to who those visitors might have been, and no one had yet claimed to be among them. Between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., he was strangled to death with his own shoelace.

His own shoelace. That was pretty odd, wasn’t it? There weren’t any instances of shoelace stranglings in the Canon…

The killer had written the word “elementary” on the wall, in the darkest corner of the darkened hotel room. He’d written it using Cale’s blood, which he’d gotten from puncturing the inside of Cale’s nose. The room had then been ransacked. The diary was found and removed.

Or, thought Harold, wait. What if the diary hadn’t actually been removed from the hotel room in New York? What if Alex had left it in his writing office in London? That’s why the killer had to break in to that office, to search for the diary there as well! No. Damn. That didn’t work. Harold knew who’d ransacked the London office: It was the Goateed Man, and his friend with the gun. But the Goateed Man didn’t have the diary, because if he did, he wouldn’t have asked Harold for it. So the diary hadn’t been in the London office. It had to have been in the hotel. Did that mean two different sets of people were searching for it? The killer, who’d taken it from the hotel, and the Goateed Man, who’d failed to find it in London? But if that were true, then what did the Goateed Man know about the true killer? Did he, like Ron Rosenberg, think that Harold was the killer? Is that why he’d asked him for the diary? If he-

Sarah crunched loudly into a chunk of crisp lettuce. Harold heard every gnash of her teeth while she chewed. He heard the plastic fork rummage around again in the bowl, and then he heard her bite into something else. It sounded duller… Maybe a cucumber? Or a fetacovered olive?

Harold completely lost track of his thoughts. His concentration had been shot. And now his wallet was bothering him again.

Did Sherlock Holmes have these difficulties concentrating? Did Arthur Conan Doyle? Harold thought of Conan Doyle’s attempts at consulting with Scotland Yard. No one seemed to regard them as having been particularly successful. What an ego Conan Doyle must have had, to think that just because he wrote mystery stories, he could solve real-life mysteries.

Harold closed his eyes tighter and focused his thoughts. “We must look for consistency,” Sherlock Holmes had said. “When there is a want of it we must suspect deception.” So what was inconsistent here? What didn’t make sense?

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

For the love of God, thought Harold. If she doesn’t stop chewing that salad like she’s operating a trash compactor, there’s going to be another murder. Harold heard her chewing stop, as if she’d read his thoughts. He heard her walk into the bathroom and shut the door. Then he heard the rush of running water. Harold felt he would have only a minute of uninterrupted concentration before Sarah left the bathroom and her chewing started up again.

Even though his wallet was now digging sharply into his backside, he would ignore it. He would give this one last minute of pure mental energy. He was committed to his task, and nothing would keep him from it. So then: What doesn’t make sense?

That’s when he figured it out.

His eyes burst open. He squinted, adjusting his eyes to the daylight. They had been closed for a while. He stood up from his armchair and heard a creak in his knees. He must have been sitting there for hours. He called to Sarah in the bathroom.

“Sarah!” he yelled.

“Yeah?” she called back over the sound of running water.

“Alex Cale never found the lost diary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!”

Harold heard the water stop. A second later Sarah emerged from the bathroom, a very strange look on her face.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Alex Cale never found the lost diary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He lied.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s one piece of evidence that doesn’t make sense. There’s one thing that doesn’t belong. Once I figured out what that was, the whole story unraveled.”

“And that thing was…?”

“The manuscript! What’s the story, as we know it now? Cale spent twenty years working on that thing. It was supposed to be the culmination of a life’s work. And then, at long last, he finds what he’s been looking for. The diary. After all these years, he can finally complete his manuscript… But he doesn’t? He’s too busy in the three months after he found the diary to include its contents in his masterpiece? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“But wait, all we have is one backup copy of one draft of his manuscript. Maybe that chapter was in a different file. Maybe it was in a different draft. We have no way of knowing.”

“True,” said Harold. “But think about this. What did Alex’s sister say about his mood after he found the diary?”

Sarah raised her eyes, trying to remember. “She said he didn’t want to celebrate,” Sarah finally replied. “She said he wouldn’t talk about what was in the diary. He didn’t tell her anything. She said for those last months, whatever he found in the diary made him nothing but miserable.”

“Does that make any sense? Or was it that not finding the diary, and deciding to lie to the public, made him nothing but miserable? In the time since Cale supposedly found the diary, did he ever divulge, to anyone, even the slightest hint about its contents? Or anything about where he’d found it?”

“No.”

“Is there any hard evidence, besides Alex’s word, that he actually found that diary?”

“No.”

“So which is more probable: that Alex Cale solved the greatest mystery in the history of Sherlockian studies, but refused to tell anyone how he’d solved it or what the answer was, and then neglected to write about it in his almost-completed book; or that he lied about finding the diary in the first place?”

Sarah nodded, admitting that Harold had a point.

“Okay then,” she said. “If he never found the diary, then who killed him?”

At this, Harold had to smile. The explanations really were the most fun part of being a detective.

“No one,” Harold said. “Alex Cale killed himself.”

If Sarah had been surprised before, now she was dumbfounded.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“ ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

“I’m going to assume Sherlock Holmes said that?”

“Yes. And he’s right. I know it’s improbable, but it’s the only way to explain everything.”

“Okay then,” said Sarah as she plopped herself down on the bed. “Explain everything.” She sat looking up at Harold like an eager audience member at the opening curtain of a play. She’d never looked at him like this before. The sensation was exhilarating.

“The first thing that needs explaining is, why would Cale lie about finding the diary and then attend the convention? What the hell was his plan? He was just going to show up at the lecture the next morning empty handed and say he was sorry? The suicide explains it. He never intended to make it to the lecture. His plan, from day one, was to announce that he’d found the diary and then kill himself under suspicious circumstances, making it look like the diary had been stolen. He ransacked his own room. He opened and closed the door to his room three times in the night, to simulate having received potentially murderous visitors. And remember, no one claims to have visited Cale at any point in the night. Sure, the killer wouldn’t, but would two innocent Sherlockians really lie about it to the cops out of paranoia?”

“He strangled himself with his own shoelace?” said Sarah, swinging her feet off the edge of the bed as she spoke. “Is that even possible?”

“ The medical community is split about that one,” said Harold. “Some think it’s possible, some think it isn’t.”

“How in the world do you know that?”

“I’ve read a lot of mysteries. This isn’t exactly the first time the issue of self-strangulation has come up. Plus, he might have used a tool for help. Do you remember at the crime scene? There was an antique pen on the floor by the body. The same model that Conan Doyle used. What if Cale used the pen to tighten the shoelace around his neck? Then it fell away when he collapsed. The pen would make it easier for him to tighten it initially, before he lost muscle strength.”

“But it might not even be possible?”

“You’re being kind of glass-half-empty about this, don’t you think? It might be possible. Neither of us is a doctor. But even if we were, we couldn’t rule out the possibility, not for certain.”

Sarah smiled. She was enjoying this.

“This happened in a Holmes story, you know. Not the strangulation via shoelace. But in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge,’ a woman killed herself in such a fashion that it looked like murder. She did it in order to frame her husband’s mistress.”

“Doesn’t the word ‘elementary’ appear in a different story? You told me that.”

“Yes. It does. When Cale wrote ‘elementary’ on the wall, he wasn’t pointing us toward ‘Thor Bridge.’ He was pointing us toward A Study in Scarlet, like I always thought, which is where the killer leaves a message on the wall in his own blood. And whose blood was on the wall?”

“Alex’s!” said Sarah buoyantly.

“And then, secondly, the word ‘elementary’ is from the story ‘The Crooked Man.’ To be honest, I have no idea what that story has to do with Cale’s death. It’s another story where what looks to be murder actually isn’t. One Colonel Barclay appears to have been murdered by his wife. But Holmes deduces that the man actually died of shock, and the wife was silent about it because she was with her lover at the time. It’s sort of a weaker version of ‘Thor Bridge,’ really. I don’t know what Cale meant by that message. Yet.”

“So why’d he do it?” Sarah said. “Why did Alex lie about finding the diary and then kill himself while making it look like the diary had been stolen?”

Harold paused. He realized that he’d been pacing back and forth across the room as he’d been speaking. He planted his feet into the carpet as he continued.

“I have no idea,” he said. “That will be the next step in our investigation.” The next step. Our investigation. Harold liked the promise implicit in those phrases. “But there are a few possibilities that come to mind. What if he did it to frame somebody? Like in ‘Thor Bridge.’ ”

“Who did he frame?” Sarah swung her feet off the edge of the bed as she spoke.

“Sebastian Conan Doyle,” said Harold. “Ten to one all the cops think he did it.”

“Actually, I’ll take ten to one that all the cops think you did it, but I see your point.”

“Cale hated Sebastian. They’d been fighting for years, with increasing bitterness. They’d been racing each other to find the diary. Maybe, for his final trick, Cale decided to screw Sebastian over once and for all. By announcing he’d found the diary, he’d throw Sebastian off the scent. Then, by killing himself and making it look as if someone else stole it, he’d ensure that Sebastian would go off and spend years trying to find the murderer. He’d spend all this time and energy doing things like… well, like hiring me, but he’d be looking in the wrong place. Because no one stole the diary from Cale. Plus, all the cops would declare Sebastian their number-one suspect. Even if they never arrested him, because he didn’t actually kill anyone, he’d be tarred with suspicion for the rest of his life. Cale dies a martyred hero, and Sebastian lives a villain.”

Sarah raised her eyes to the ceiling, pondering everything Harold had just said. It was a lot to take in, but she seemed to be reasoning through it in her head, searching for flaws in his logic. Based on her grin, and the constant swinging of her legs off the edge of the bed, it didn’t look as if she’d found any.

“That was some productive thinking you did back there!” she said at last.

“I know!” said Harold. He was awfully proud of himself.

“I have two problems with all of that, though,” said Sarah. “Problem number one: Why now? Why, after all these years, would Alex Cale abandon his lifelong quest for the diary in order to kill himself and frame Sebastian?”

“I agree,” said Harold. “We know what he did, but we’re not sure why he did it. We’ll need to figure that out.”

“Problem number two-and this one is more serious.” Sarah took a deep breath. “If Alex Cale lied about finding the diary, and killed himself, and ransacked his own hotel room,” she continued, “then who the hell is chasing us?”

To that, Harold had no response.