Might, but hadn’t. The Winfield key wasn’t in there among the paper money and the plastic credit cards, either.
Oscar slammed the wallet on the table in front of Lynda and stood up, letting his chair clatter to the floor behind him. “You win this round,” he barked, “but that doesn’t mean I’m through with you two.”
Chapter Thirty-Three - The Adventure of the Empty House
Even with Oscar long gone from the game room, I lowered my voice before I asked Lynda, “Where’s the key?”
“In the mail,” she said, scooping everything back into her purse. “I sent it back to the hotel this morning when I realized how incriminating it could be.”
“Very clever. You’re not only smart, which I always knew, you have the makings of a great criminal. I just wish you’d told me that before. The information would have added years to my life.”
“Sorry. We were always talking about other things. How long do you think it’ll take for Oscar to realize he should still parade us before his star witness?”
I gulped the last of my caffeine-free Diet Coke, barely thinking about what the acid in soda can do to a nail. “Only as long as it takes him to stop being so peeved that it clouds his judgment. But maybe after we look at the DVD in my office it won’t matter.”
We walked across the campus, hand in hand once more, and we fell to talking about the Chalmerses’ marital mess.
“I believe in marriage and I believe in forever,” Lynda said. “And when I get married I want to make sure it is forever. For that, love is essential but not sufficient. It’s not nearly enough. I saw that close up. I think my parents loved each other in their own way, but that didn’t keep them married. I don’t want to screw up the way they did.”
This was not new conversational territory for us, but the circumstances were somewhat different than in the past given that - so far as I knew - we were no longer dating. We were, however, holding hands. What was she trying to tell me by bringing this up? More importantly, what was I supposed to say?
One thing for sure, this conversation was not about Lynda’s parents, who had met in the Army and had divorced years ago. I didn’t know much about them, not even their names, because the subject didn’t come up much, except in negative contexts like this one. Theirs was not a close family.
With the wisdom of age, I decided that the safest course was to ask a question and not venture any opinions.
“Well, then, theoretically,” I said, backing slowly into a delicate subject, “other than love, what would you be looking for in a husband?”
“A partner,” she said without hesitation. That word again! “And you can’t have a partnership without two strong parties. So I’d have to be able to hold up my end of the deal. I mean, I’d want to be far enough along in my own life and career to have a strong sense of my personal identity.”
“Whew,” I said, “I’m glad to hear you’re not planning on marrying for money. That means I’m still in the running.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
We shared a nervous laugh as we entered my little office on the first floor of Carey Hall, but I filed the conversation away for future reflection.
My office is crammed with books and binders, file cabinets, campus publications, newspapers, and a television with a DVD player/recorder. Every day I record the Cincinnati news programs in case they have an item on St. Benignus. Most of the stories show up on their websites, of course, but if they slander us I don’t want to count on that.
“Now are you going to tell me what this is all about?” Lynda asked as I fast-forwarded through the TV4 Action News weather and the opening segment of Mandy Petrowski’s report about the thefts and the colloquium.
“I don’t think I’ll have to tell you. Just watch.”
I pushed the remote to slow down the action just after the exterior shots of me talking outside the library gave way to video of Woollcott Chalmers pointing with his cane to a bust of Sherlock Holmes.
“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,” Chalmers was saying.
I punched the stop-action button, freezing the old collector’s image on the screen. “That’s it,” I said.
Lynda shook her head. “Sorry. Maybe my brain is out of whack from that knock on the head, but I don’t get it. What did he say that’s so important?”
“Just two words: Air gun. Look, Chalmers has a real bust of Sherlock Holmes in his collection, why not a real air gun to go with it? That’s the real reason why the coroner’s report said there was no powder burns or ‘tattooing’ on the victim’s body, and also why nobody heard the shots. No wonder Mac found this TV report ‘highly suggestive’ about the weapon.”
She looked skeptical. “Do air guns shoot .32 bullets?”
“You know I don’t know anything about guns, except what I research for my mystery writing. But even if they don’t, Chalmers could have had it specially built - that’s what Chalmers said Colonel Sebastian Moran did in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’”
“That’s a little far-fetched, isn’t it?”
“Not with the kind of people we’re dealing with here, Lynda - people who have little drawings of Sherlock Holmes on their checks and 221B on their license plates. And Chalmers put a Stradivarius in his Holmes collection - a violin worth as much as the stolen books or more, for crap’s sake. The man has the money to feed his obsession.”
“But we didn’t find anything like an air gun in Mac’s guest suite,” Lynda protested.
“We weren’t looking for it.” I turned off the DVD player/recorder and the TV. “And as soon as we found the Beeton’s Christmas Annual we stopped searching. It’ll be different this time.”
Lynda touched my arm as we neared the door to the suite at Mac’s house. “I still don’t like this.”
“I guess not,” I said, “considering what happened the last time you were here. How’s your head?”
“Huge. Let’s get this over with.”
We started with the sitting room, figuring that Lynda had had little time to explore it earlier before she’d been lured away by a noise. It was a small, sparsely furnished room which, like the bedroom, featured a picture window with a glorious view of the Ohio River below us. The window was framed by bookcases full of old detective novels. We moved the bookcases and checked behind them, but no dice. A closet-cum-dressing area ran the length of the wall opposite, and we gave that close attention with the same result. The love seat was rattan, so there was no place to hide anything under it. Feeling the pillows revealed no suspicious lumps.
“Bedroom next,” I said with more hope than faith.
We spent five minutes revisiting the familiar territory of the dressers and bed. I was standing on a captain’s chair peering into the box at the top of the red and black curtains when Lynda called, “Over here.”
She stood between the bed and a clothes tree draped with what I took to be Chalmers’s jacket, a deerstalker cap and a pair of Renata’s slacks. I focused on the cap, partially hidden by the jacket so that neither of us had noticed it earlier. But that wasn’t what Lynda wanted me to see. She held up Chalmers’s cane.
“It was leaning there, in the umbrella stand at the bottom of the clothes tree where you could hardly see it,” she said. “Why would Chalmers leave it behind and go limping around the way he has since yesterday evening?”
I got down from the captain’s chair and took the cane to look it over. “This damned thing is heavier than my car. I bet it’s what he brained you with.”
It looked like solid wood, except for an inch-wide band of silver running around the neck just below the handle. The band was inscribed: “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.H.H. 1884.” The words were out of Sherlock Holmes, I was pretty sure. So I ignored them and looked over the length of the cane for evidence that it had been hollowed out and filled with lead or something equally suitable for skull-bashing.