“How did the thief get in?”
“That is still under investigation by Campus Security.”
“Do they have any leads?”
“The investigation is ongoing.”
After the interview we found Woollcott and Renata Chalmers already in the rare book room with our young curator, Gene Pfannenstiel. The place smelled like it had been closed up since about 1840. It was roughly the size of the Hearth Room, but felt even larger because of the thirty-foot ceiling and a balcony running around all four sides. Guards seemed to be all over the place - at least today - which eased my mind considerably about security.
Highlights from the Chalmers Collection were set up in the center of the room, many of them in glass cases - this time locked. There were foreign language editions of the Holmes canon, comic books, miniatures, artwork, statuary, dolls, and playbills.
“We had to kind of slap it together this morning,” Gene apologized.
“This is incredible!” Mandy bubbled. “How can there be so much stuff about Sherlock Holmes?”
“Oh, what you see is but a small sampling of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection,” Chalmers assured her. He seemed to enjoy saying the full name. “I’ve given forty years of my life to this.”
“It is his life,” Renata said dryly.
“Can we get on with this?” Smiling Sam said as he turned on the camera light, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip. I think he needed a nicotine break.
Chalmers launched a guided tour of the display, showing a surprising adeptness at honing in on the materials that would play on television better than some beat-up old books.
“This playbill,” he said, picking it up, “advertises the American actor William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes in the first production of his famous melodrama. It was Gillette whose preference for a curved pipe on stage fixed forever the public idea of what a Sherlock Holmes pipe looks like. That’s his inscription in the corner.
“This battered tin dispatch box is just like the one where Dr. Watson kept his accounts of the adventures for which the world was not yet prepared. And these six plaster busts of Napoleon represent the central mystery in ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.’ But this hunk of sculptured wax over here is one of my favorites.”
With his cane he pointed to a colorless wax bust that was clearly supposed to be Sherlock Holmes.
“It was made by Oscar Meunier of Grenoble for Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street,” Chalmers said, which was pure B.S. but I could see Mandy was eating it up. “Holmes used it to foil an assassination attempt by Colonel Sebastian Moran in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’ Moran had planned to shoot the detective at night from across the street, using an air gun specially manufactured by the blind mechanic Von Herder. His aim at the silhouette in the window of Holmes’s flat was, as you see, impeccable.”
Chalmers pointed to a clean hole in the forehead of the bust.
“Awesome,” Mandy said.
As Smiling Sam swept the display with his camera to give an overview of its size and scope, I noticed a particularly handsome violin in one of the display cases.
“Is that yours, Renata?” I remembered that she played the instrument professionally.
“I wouldn’t dare touch it,” she said with a sparkling laugh. “It’s a genuine Stradivarius, probably worth more than what was stolen yesterday.”
“What’s it got to do with Sherlock Holmes?” Mandy asked.
“His own violin was a Strad,” Chalmers explained. “He bought it from a pawn broker in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings. This one cost me considerably more.”
Forty years and many thousands of dollars Chalmers had spent amassing his collection. How much it must have hurt him, I thought, to see part of it stolen. After Mandy and Smiling Sam had left, I was still thinking about how this whole business had affected Chalmers. Maybe that was the idea, the Max Cutter in me suggested. Maybe the whole point of the theft wasn’t to possess the stolen books, or to sell them, but merely to hurt Woollcott Chalmers by stealing them.
“You don’t seem to get along that well with Hugh Matheson,” I told Chalmers in a careful understatement. “Do you think it’s conceivable that he had anything to do with the thefts?”
Renata liked the idea, if I read the look it her dark eyes correctly, but Chalmers shot it down.
“Hugh Matheson wouldn’t have the nerve or the imagination to do anything so bold,” he said dismissively. “The man never dirtied his hands on anything in his life. That’s why I came out the winner again and again in any competition between us to acquire some interesting piece of Sherlockiana.”
“Well, then,” I said, frustrated, “who knew about the display and exactly which books in it were most valuable?”
To my surprise, the gnomish Gene Pfannenstiel, who had been practically invisible as he busied himself about the display cases, blurted out, “Graham Bentley Post, I bet.”
The name meant nothing to me.
“Director of the Library of Popular Culture,” Gene explained. “It’s a small museum and library started about ten years ago to preserve popular literary works. Post has been trying to buy the Woollcott Chalmers Collection from us ever since the word went out on the grapevine that we were getting it.”
“But you can’t sell my collection,” Chalmers snapped. “That’s one of the conditions of the gift.”
“That’s what I keep telling him,” Gene said, “as did my predecessor before me.”
Chalmers shook his white-maned head. “The fellow just won’t give up, I’ll grant him that. He hounded me to sell for years, but I didn’t want the Woollcott Chalmers Collection to be on display up in Massachusetts with a bunch of comic books and pulp novels.”
“No matter how pushy he is,” I said, “I can’t believe he’d come to Erin for a spot of breaking and entering.”
“Maybe not,” Gene said, “but he did come to Erin. He stopped by here yesterday. He said he’d be in town two or three days.”
Gene scurried into a back room and returned with a business card on which Graham Bentley Post had written his hotel room number next to his cell phone number.
“I’ll give him a call,” I promised, pocketing the card.
Sure, it was far-fetched that a library would use crime to stock its shelves. But this was a private library, not a public one, and I didn’t know how reputable it was. Besides, Post being on the scene was too much of a coincidence to just ignore. I put him on the suspect list right along with Hugh Matheson, who was still in the running in my book.
While Mac had been stuck at the colloquium, I’d flushed out two hot prospects. Max Cutter was going to solve this case, not Sherlock Holmes.
Chapter Ten - Sleuths on the Case
On my way out the front door of the Bennish library I almost collided with the tall figure of Dr. Noah Queensbury, who was rushing in. He excused himself profusely.
“I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry,” I said. “You’re already ahead of everybody else.”
“My plan precisely. I intend to beat the others at asking a few salient questions.”
He struck a Sherlockian pose, which was not too difficult considering that he was wearing a deerstalker cap.
“Others?” I repeated weakly. I was getting a grim premonition.
“Of course! Surely I am not the only one planning to apply the techniques of the Master to this case.”
I had a sudden vision of seventy-five, eighty Sherlockians trampling across the quadrangle, peering into office windows, sneaking through the physical plant...
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t get carried away. This is police business. If you muck things up by sticking your nose in, you could get yourself into some real trouble.”