Renata Chalmers leaned over to her. “The hair always takes longer than you think, doesn’t it?”
Lynda answered with a polite and meaningless affirmative, never mind that homicide had a lot more to do with her tardiness than did hair care. Renata herself was wearing her hair in fancy ringlets, the creation of which, she informed us, had caused her to miss the entire cocktail hour.
“Still,” she said, “dressing up was fun.”
The rest of Renata’s outfit, like Mac’s, was suitably Victorian - a dark blue-green dress with a short fitted jacket on top. The sleeves of the jacket were puffed at the shoulders and tapered at the wrists where they ended in a frilly, cream-colored cloth. The blouse was also cream, topped with a black bow around the neck.
Lynda complimented her on it, generating a lively discussion of Victorian fashion. But while most of the table was talking bustles and bowlers, Mac whispered in my ear, “Please report on your discussion with Mr. Post.”
“The hell I will,” I whispered back. “I’m not your errand boy.”
“Jefferson, I said ‘please.’”
“Oh, all right. There’s not much to tell, anyway. Post is an arrogant stuffed shirt, but I’m convinced he had nothing to do with the theft either before or after the fact. That interview was a wash-out, just like your cute idea about duplicating the key to the room where the books were stolen.”
Mac looked at me with infinite sadness in his brown eyes. “The key was only a hope; I never really believed it would prove to be the solution.”
A waitress hustled by with my roast beef, and the mood was broken. By the time she disappeared again Mac was engaged in the general conversation and I’d lost him. I picked at my dinner - I try not to eat too much red meat - and looked around the room getting a fix on familiar faces. Kate was at our table, of course, dressed in an enchanting black velvet dress with a high collar and silver buttons up to the top. I was only vaguely aware of two other couples next to her, people who were unfamiliar to me. Around the room I saw that Judge Crocker and Dr. Queensbury were in costume, but Al Kane and Bob Nakamora weren’t. And Woollcott Chalmers...
Dressed in tails, Chalmers was just now coming toward our table, limping badly without his cane.
I kicked my brother-in-law under the table. He grunted and inclined his head in my direction.
“Has Chalmers been out of the picture since this banquet business started?” I asked in an urgent whisper.
Mac guffawed, causing Lynda to visibly strain her ears our way. “By no means, Jefferson. We spent the entire cocktail hour together in a spirited discussion of chronological problems in ‘The Red-Headed League.’ He is merely returning from a short hiatus, undoubtedly provoked by the demands of personal biology. Why do you ask?”
“I’m taking a census.” Max Cutter could play mysterious sleuth as well as any amateur. For once I knew something Mac didn’t know, and I was going to play that out as long as I could. “Is there somebody else here who wasn’t here at the beginning, somebody who came in late?” The killer didn’t have to be one of the Sherlockians, but it was a good bet.
Mac pulled on his beard, as if stimulating his hair follicles would do the same for his brain cells.
“There is at least one person,” he decided. “Hugh Matheson. I haven’t encountered him for hours, not even at the bar.”
Others around the table heard the comment and nodded their agreement. Nobody had run into Matheson since just after the last session of the colloquium - except, of course, Lynda and me, and we weren’t saying.
“I am quite certain that the last time I saw Hugh was during his set-to with Noah,” Mac said just as Chalmers rejoined the table.
“He had an argument with Queensbury?” I said. “When? Where?”
“At the back of the room, right after Kate’s talk,” Chalmers chipped in.
“What were they arguing about?”
Chalmers shrugged his ignorance.
“Eavesdropping is a loathsome habit,” Mac said. “Perhaps you should inquire of Dr. Queensbury as to the nature of the contretemps.”
“In other words,” I said, “you couldn’t get close enough to hear and you’re annoyed.”
He didn’t deign to answer. I let the subject hang there, hoping somebody would pick it up and enlighten me on what had happened between the surgeon and the lawyer, but no one did. The conversation drifted off into other channels.
Somehow the topic got on to Sherlock Holmes in the movies. Names like Basil Rathbone, Arthur Wontner, Jeremy Brett, and Robert Downey, Jr., and somebody named Cumberbatch were bandied about, along with a bunch I don’t remember. I was familiar with Basil Rathbone - he looked like Queensbury - and I’d also seen a couple of the Brett TV shows and the over-the-top Robert Downey, Jr. movie. But the other names left me in the dust. It was like being on the outside of an inside joke. I was only half-listening anyway.
While it was going hot and heavy Mac leaned my way again, hand over his mouth. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” he demanded in a low voice.
“No,” I said absent-mindedly.
My mind was on the dust-up between Queensbury and Hugh Matheson, a man who stopped breathing no more than an hour or so later. Lynda and I had been assuming that greed was the emotion behind the murder, a robbery gone wrong. But suppose there was some other passion involved - whatever had caused those two men to raise their voices in a public place.
I watched for Queensbury to leave the table where he was seated next to Molly Crocker, determined to question him as soon as possible. When my bladder started crying for relief I ignored it, afraid I’d miss a chance to corner Queensbury if I left the President’s Dining Room. Finally the tall surgeon made a bee-line for the exit, apparently in a big hurry. I excused myself to Lynda and followed him.
Into the men’s room.
Now I was glad I had a legitimate reason for being there. Once I took care of that I met Queensbury at the wash basins. He greeted me as an old friend while he washed his long-fingered hands. Before I could ask a question he offered his solution to the book thefts.
“It’s that Pfannenstiel fellow,” he said, a gleam in his gray eyes. “There was no sign of a forced entry because there was no forced entry. The thief used a key. Who had a key? The very person who set up the exhibit with the Chalmerses. Elementary, really.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said, holding my hands under the hot air blower. “Not Gene.”
“As Holmes himself said, ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Something similar happened at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. A part-time library employee was charged with stealing more than a hundred rare books with a total value of almost a million and a half dollars. I clipped the story for my scrapbooks.”
I knew that Gene couldn’t be guilty because Matheson was - unless, of course, Gene had been Matheson’s inside man. But in that case why stop at three books? With Gene’s access they could have practically loaded up a truck and cleaned the place out.
I shifted gears.
“I understand you had a bit of a confrontation with Hugh Matheson this afternoon.”
With a shrug of his shoulders, the surgeon pooh-poohed that description of the incident. “I guess you’d say we had a few heated words, as usual.”
“What was it about?”
“He accused me of spoiling the colloquium for him by insisting at every turn that Sherlock Homes was a real person,” Queensbury said as he pushed open the restroom door. “Apparently the last straw was when I stood up at the end of Kate’s talk to dispute her attribution of Conan Doyle as the author of the Holmes stories.
“Really, Hugh was intolerably rude about it and totally lacking in humor. I particularly objected to his characterization of me as, quote, ‘a prissy piss-ant.’ However, I gave the fellow the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was having a bad day.”
Remembering the sight of the lawyer’s blood-drenched body, I could confirm that. But I didn’t, of course.