Hobbs and I shared a look. I wrinkled my nose. Harold. No wonder he preferred Whitey.
A weak voice answered from within, but I could not discern the words. Whitey led us in, pausing at a dresser to switch on a lamp.
“I brought visitors, Grandma. Look.”
On a frilly white bed lay a woman with tufts of grey hair protruding from an old-fashioned nightcap. Thin, mottled arms extended from the sleeves of a flowered nightdress, while a thick quilt was bunched beneath her chin.
At the sight of us, her eyes brightened and twenty years seemed to fall away. Her smile was enough to warm the hardest heart.
“Oh!” she said. “How delightful. What are their names?”
Hobbs gave a short bow. “I am honored to be Mr. Skyler Hobbs, madam, and this is my good friend Dr., uh...”
“Wilder,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”
The woman continued to beam, but I noted something strange. She was not looking at our faces, but at the gnomes in our hands.
Whitey stepped back, taking the one Hobbs held. “This,” he told his grandmother, “is Percival. He’s a carpenter. You can tell by the little hammer.”
“Hello, Percival,” the woman said warmly. “You are most welcome here.”
“And these guys,” Whitey said, “are his brothers Ernest and Murgatroyd.”
“Welcome to you all,” she said. “Harold, you’ll show them where they can sleep?”
“Certainly, Grandma. Let’s check on the others, shall we?”
“Oh yes. Let’s.”
Whitey looked at us and winked. Striding around the bed, he found a cord and pulled it, causing a frilly curtain to slide away. Through panes of glass I saw moonlit trees and bushes, but could make out little detail.
All that changed as Whitey flicked a switch, and the yard was suddenly as bright as a department-store window.
Beneath the trees and bushes were flowers of every shape and color. And next to every plant stood some variety of garden gnome. There were so many it took an effort to focus on any in particular, but I soon discovered they were all different. They were fat, thin, tall, and short. They were colorful and drab, shabby and rich, male and female. Most wore peaked hats, but others had fedoras, Stetsons, even football helmets. If Hobbs noticed the one with the deerstalker and meerschaum pipe, he did not react.
Along with the usual garden tools, some gnomes had fishing poles, golf clubs, and hockey sticks. One had a lawnmower. One rode a bike. One hung by his legs from a tree limb. One had green skin and the almond eyes of a Roswell alien. One looked like Elvis and another like Marilyn. This place put the Lafarge yard to shame.
If Grandma had seemed pleased before, she was now floating on a cloud.
Hobbs was quiet on the drive to 221B.
“Not a bad night,” I said. “You solved two cases.”
“Hm,” he said. “Perhaps.”
“I wouldn’t worry. I think Whitey is through stealing garden gnomes. With the dough he’ll make working for you, he can afford to buy them. And you’ll be pleased to know I’m taking your advice about Candy. Cute as she is, it’s pointless to date a woman with the wrong initials. She and I are through.”
“That is uncommonly sensible of you, Doctor. I suspect my company has been a good influence on you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
“It will be hard on the poor girl, though, losing a fellow as loyal — and self-sacrificing — as yourself.” With this he turned and delivered a broad wink. He knew.
“Damn you, Hobbs. How did you figure it out?”
Hobbs shook his head. “If I explained all of my methods to you, Doctor, you would soon deem them commonplace.”
I pulled over to the curb. “Give, or you’re walking home.”
Hobbs sighed. “Very well. But when you submit this adventure to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, you must promise not to reveal my secrets of deduction.”
I held my left hand out of sight and crossed my fingers. “Deal.”
“It was elementary,” he said. “I eavesdropped.”
Copyright © 2012 by Evan Lewis
The Muse
by Jonathan Santlofer
Author of five crime novels, including Anatomy of Fear, which won the 2008 Nero Wolfe Award, Jonathan Santlofer has also appeared (as editor, contributor, and illustrator) in several anthologies. Recently, his work was included in New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. He’s just completed a new thriller novel, and he serves as program director of Crime Fiction Academy, the only writing program exclusively devoted to crime writing in all its forms (www.center forfiction.org/crimefiction).
Nature mort. That’s French for still life, you know, like paintings of apples and oranges and dead rabbits. Nature mort. Dead nature. Pretty cool, right? I learned that in art-history class but don’t get much opportunity to use it, like what am I going to say, Hey, I saw this awesome nature mort the other day? Right.
That’s where I met Elise, in art-history class. It took me a month to get up the nerve to speak to her; she was so beautiful. I’d see her across the auditorium, her whiter-than-white skin picking up light from the projector, incandescent, and I’m not showing off or being pretentious, like some of Elise’s friends say about me. People with artistic temperaments are always misunderstood. If you want to call me high-strung and crazy because I’m artistic, that’s your problem. If I had to describe myself in one word I’d say... sensitive. And you’ve got to be sensitive if you’re going to pick up on things like light and color and form, right? I mean, that’s what being an artist is all about.
So, Elise. I’d wait after class just to bump into her, try to touch her without her noticing, though after the third time she did.
“Excuse me,” she said, narrowing her blue eyes, like the blue in old paintings, lapis lazuli, which is a mineral they discovered in Egypt and that artists in the Middle Ages would grind up and use as pigment, a really intense blue, galvanizing you might say. For weeks after that I imagined bumping into her again and saying, “You know, your eyes are the same color as lapis lazuli,” and I finally did say it, though it turned out I was wrong. Sort of.
Some people call me a dreamer, which is fine with me — you’ve got to have your dreams, right? Mrs. Goldblatt, one of my high-school teachers, an old lady who smelled like mothballs, said I was histrionic, and I looked it up. Histrionic: deliberately affected. Like she was saying I was some sort of drama queen, which I’m definitely not. I’m quiet and shy and polite, just ask my neighbors, some of whom were quoted in the newspapers, and one who actually said exactly that — Oh, he was a nice quiet young man — which was the only true sentence in the entire article.
Art history was the only class I shared with Elise, because she was getting a degree in art education while I was getting my masters in painting, on full scholarship I might add, because I didn’t have any money, though lately I’d started making some because of Frank, my art dealer, who specializes in plundering graduate art departments and finding really talented students, like me, to show in his hipper-than-hip Chelsea gallery.
I know some people think I’m sensitive because of my leg, but it’s not really my leg. I’ve got spina bifida, which is something you’re born with, like my spinal column didn’t exactly grow right, so I limp. A little. It’s not so bad and I get to take pain meds, which is cool, because the limp throws my body out of whack and I’m like a bundle of aches and pains but I never complain because what’s the point, right? Who’s gonna listen? So I’m not a work of art, big deal. Plenty of girls like me anyway. This one girl — I can’t remember her name, but she had long brown hair and was pretty except for a mole on her cheek which she thought was sexy and made even darker with an eyebrow pencil, which was like totally insane if you ask me, highlighting an imperfection like that — she said the reason some girls liked me was because they want to mother me, but I don’t know about that, because my mother sure as hell didn’t want to mother me, but that’s her problem, right?