“Probably not. It was just a thought.”
I left Popcorn to her book, planning to join the breakfast crowd in the President’s Dining Room. Before I got very far in that direction, though, I saw the bald-headed bookseller go in the second door of the Hearth Room with a box under his arm. Reuben Pinkwater, Mac had said his name was, and he was on Mac’s list of people to interview.
I sidled up to him casually as he pulled books out of the box and stacked them on the long table. He was wearing gabardine pants, a small brown bow tie and white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. When he heard me coming he looked up and gave a cheery “Good morning.”
The smile, showing off his gold tooth, put wrinkles in his face to match the soft indentions at the back of his head. It occurred to me then that all bald men over the age of thirty-five look alike, from Daddy Warbucks to Lex Luthor to Kojak.
But a deerstalker would hide a bald dome nicely.
“Morning,” I agreed. “I haven’t seen you around Erin.” This was content-free chatter to get the ball rolling.
“Probably not. My shop’s in Licking Falls. The Scene of the Crime. Here.”
He handed me a business card with the name of the store and the unmistakable silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, the man in the deerstalker.
With the card in my hand I gestured to the small stack of deerstalker caps on one end of the table. “Do you sell many of those?”
He looked where I pointed. “A few a year. I thought I’d get rid of them all this weekend, but no such luck.”
Pinkwater fussed with the books in jerky movements, squaring off volumes that already looked perfectly aligned to me. There were paperbacks and hardbacks of every size, some hot off the press and some barely held together with rubber bands. About ninety percent had either “Sherlock Holmes” or some obvious Sherlockian reference like “Baker Street” in the title.
“Isn’t this kind of a narrow specialty?” I asked.
“Oh, I just brought the best of the Holmes stuff for this symposium or whatever it’s called,” he said. “We sell all kinds of mysteries. In fact, Al Kane’s doing a book signing for us tomorrow night. See anything you like?”
Resisting the impulse to calculate the odds on that one, I said, “You have some old books here. There must be a few gems for collectors among them.”
Pinkwater smiled. “Nothing that would excite a Woollcott Chalmers, that’s for sure. I shy away from real rarities. You have to know what you’re doing there or you can get burned. That happened to me once on a copy of The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Ellery Queen and very rare because it was suppressed by the Conan Doyle Estate. It turned out to be a modern bootleg reprint.” He shook his head. “There’s not much margin for that kind of error in this business.”
What was that volume Pinkwater had showed me yesterday about a rare book that turned out to be fake? There it was, still on the table - The Adventure of the Unique ‘Hamlet.’ There was the beginning of an idea there, if only I could put my finger on it.
“I never again bought a so-called rarity and I never will,” Pinkwater concluded. “That’s not the business I’m in.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“But what if you did happen to acquire a book like that?” I pressed. “Say it just fell into your lap, something unique and worth thousands of dollars. Would you know where to resell it?”
“Sure.” That smile again.
Now I was getting somewhere.
“Well, where?”
“Woollcott Chalmers. He’d buy it.”
With a frustration bordering on despair, I thanked Mr. Clean and headed for the President’s Dining Room in hopes of at least getting breakfast out of this deal. On the way I pulled out my notebook and struck a line through the names of Reuben Pinkwater and, now that I thought about it, Renata Chalmers.
For all of Mac’s baloney about not having time to interview the people on his list, several shared his breakfast table - Judge Crocker, Dr. Queensbury, and Woollcott Chalmers. Kate and Renata were there, too, along with Al Kane, Bob Nakamora, and Lynda. So there she was.
As I joined them they were in the midst of an animated discussion that could only have concerned the late Hugh Matheson.
“He was a slickster, a trickster, and a damned womanizer,” Chalmers said with a fire in his blue eyes, as if daring anyone to disagree.
Judge Crocker, seated immediately to Chalmers’s left, concentrated on applying strawberry jam to a biscuit.
“Worst of all,” Chalmers added, “he was a poseur. Most of what he knew about Sherlock Holmes he must have picked up from some old Basil Rathbone films. And the fact that he’s dead doesn’t change any of that.”
“I fear that Hugh, rather like the victim in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, had a more-than-ample share of detractors,” Mac rumbled.
“Somebody must have liked him,” Lynda said, “or he couldn’t have been a womanizer.”
She wore a short-sleeved yellow and blue dress with a bright floral design that was giving me spring fever. I tried not to give her too much eyeball time.
Mac paused from attacking his extremely unhealthful hash browns long enough to praise Lynda for clarity of reasoning “bordering on the Sherlockian.” If she objected to his cheap flattery she didn’t say so, but then she’s always had a soft spot for Mac, regarding him for some mysterious reason as an adorable screwball.
“So who do you think killed Matheson?” Al Kane asked, directing the question at Chalmers.
“Perhaps some narrow-minded husband,” the old collector said acidly.
“One who just happened to be wearing a deerstalker?” Mac said. “Come now, Woollcott, you ask us to believe too much.”
“The way you talk about Matheson,” Kane said to Chalmers, “are you sure you didn’t do it yourself?”
Renata Chalmers sucked in her breath.
“Nonsense,” her husband snapped. “Why would I do a horrible thing like that?”
It was hard to read the look behind Kane’s rimless spectacles. He was either having a great time putting the old man on, or he was back to playing amateur sleuth and assigning Chalmers the role of villain.
“How about revenge?” Kane suggested. “That was a favorite motive of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if I recall correctly.”
“Watson,” Queensbury corrected under his breath.
Chalmers snorted. “Revenge for what? Revenge is for losers, not winners. If Matheson and I went after the same thing, I’m the one who inevitably walked off with it. Everyone knew that. I built a collection that Matheson would have paid a fortune to get his hands on, then I gave it away.”
“Stop it - stop it, all of you!” Molly Crocker’s voice was strained. Looking weary, she shoved strands of graying hair out of her eyes. “You’re all playing fun and games with the death of a man most of us knew. As a jurist and a human being, I find that distasteful and unconscionable.”
“I didn’t know the victim,” Bob Nakamora said, “but I think the lady’s right.”
“Indubitably,” Mac concurred. “In letting our passion for sleuthing get the best of us, we have been insensitive louts.” Speak for yourself Mac; I wasn’t in this for fun and games.
“Maybe so,” Queensbury said, “but the question remains: Whodunit? We all have a stake in the answer. You heard what Mac said earlier: A witness saw Hugh open his door to somebody wearing a deerstalker. Doesn’t that make it look like one of us?”
In the awkward silence that followed, I wanted to point to the cap lying on the floor between his chair and Molly Crocker’s and say, “You should know, Dr. Queensbury.” But, of course, I politely restrained myself.
Then Bob Nakamora pointed out, “We still haven’t solved the mystery of the stolen books. Maybe whoever took those books was also stealing something from Matheson, and Matheson caught him. Couldn’t a clever burglar have noticed a lot of deerstalkers around the hotel and put one on so he’d fit in? They’re not hard to buy.”