“Take the tip off,” Lynda suggested, pointing to a bit of dirty beige rubber at the bottom of the cane. When I did, I found myself looking down the barrel of something wicked.
“We can quit looking for the air gun,” I said. “This answers your question of why Chalmers quit carrying the cane: Some of his Sherlockian friends must know about this little beauty. He was afraid that, seeing him with it, they’d put two and two together.”
Lynda might have said something then but for the horrible sound that erupted, like a volcano, coming down Half Moon Street. It was Mac’s Chevy. The awful racket reached a peak and then cut out altogether as Mac killed the engine in his driveway. I held on to the cane with one hand and Lynda with the other and we went to the front of the house.
Kate came through the front door first and immediately saw us in the hallway. But her face had barely registered surprise before her husband and the Chalmerses appeared behind her.
“Well, well,” Mac said mildly, waving an unlit cigar. “What’s this, a welcoming committee in my own home?”
Chalmers, holding Renata’s arm for support, focused his clear blue eyes on the cane in my hand. “What are you doing with that?” he snapped.
“Holding it for the police,” I said. “They’re generally interested in murder weapons.”
Renata sucked in her breath.
“Jeff!” my sister exclaimed.
Chalmers looked appropriately murderous. “This is intolerable! Outrageous! And possibly actionable! Didn’t you learn anything from your earlier embarrassment, young man? Maybe I should withdraw my gift to your college.”
Only Mac remained unruffled through all this. My brother-in-law’s face, as much as I could see through the beard, showed only a weary sadness.
“Just in case there’s anybody here who doesn’t know it,” Lynda said, “let me point out that there’s an air gun concealed in that cane, and I’m pretty sure Mr. Chalmers used it to kill Hugh Matheson.”
Mac sighed. “He most certainly did not. Tell them, Renata.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t. If you want me to be the loyal wife, to say that Woollcott couldn’t have committed the murder, I can’t do that.”
“What I want,” Mac said, “is for you to tell the truth. That you yourself killed Hugh.”
Chapter Thirty-Four - End of the Game
In the deep silence that followed, Renata looked around as if trying to read our faces. The hallway grew smaller.
“You can’t be serious,” she told Mac in a choked voice.
“How fervently I wish that I were not!” Mac said. “We had better sit down, all of us. This will not come easy or quick.”
Chalmers and Renata exchanged looks that nobody but them would understand, then followed Kate into the McCabes’ long living room. Lynda and I came next, with Mac hanging back as if uneager.
Once in the room, my brother-in-law enthroned himself in his favorite fireside chair. Kate flanked him on the other side of the bar in a matching wingback, while Lynda and I sat in two other chairs and the Chalmerses shared the couch.
“It was all perfectly obvious from the first,” Mac said, looking longingly at his cigar. “Obvious, that is, that Woollcott was supposed to be guilty of killing Hugh. He apparently had not just one motive for revenge but two - books and Renata. You all know the sordid details of the latter, as did I and several others.
“What I did not know, but soon began to suspect, was that Woollcott’s cane is actually a specially machined air gun, probably powered by a CO2 cartridge.”
Mac motioned with the cigar at the cane/gun, which I held loosely between the legs in front of me.
“It was designed, of course, to emulate the one made for Colonel Sebastian Moran,” Mac said. “Cane guns were quite popular in those days. We know from ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ that Moran’s air gun fired soft revolver bullets, although the caliber was unspecified. Woollcott’s weapon here fires standard .32 bullets, not the customary air rifle pellets. It was very custom-made indeed.”
“Not a very powerful weapon, however,” Chalmers said. “Or so I was warned.”
“That’s why the bullet didn’t go all the way through, not because it was fired from a distance,” Mac said. “The gun was fired at close range into Hugh Matheson’s carotid artery. High power wasn’t needed. Of far more importance was that the gun was virtually silent, which is helpful if you plan to shoot someone in a hotel room.”
I let go of the cane for a moment and rubbed my sweating hands on my pants leg.
“Yet another strong indication that Woollcott had murdered Hugh was the missing Beeton’s Christmas Annual which Lynda and Jefferson found in his room here. Obviously, Woollcott retrieved the book after killing the one who had stolen it from Muckerheide Center.
“Unfortunately” - Mac allowed himself an ironic smile - “I have a penchant for rejecting the obvious. Perhaps that reflects too many years of writing mystery stories and even more years of reading them, but it has served me well. Woollcott was altogether too convenient a killer. Additionally, I knew that he had been in my sight virtually from the moment we left this house last night until Jefferson and Lynda entered the President’s Dining Room. And I knew that he had been in the audience all through my talk this morning when Lynda was struck. Jefferson and Lynda were free to suspect that I was mistaken on both counts, but I knew that I was not.”
Lynda paused in the middle of unwrapping a stick of gum. “We figured it didn’t have to be the killer who hit me. It could have been another Sherlockian who wanted the Beeton’s.”
“And left without it?” Mac’s voice was rich with skepticism. “A thief who failed to find the book himself would have waited for Lynda to find it before he knocked her out. No, the killer assaulted Lynda and the killer left that book behind because the killer wanted it found. Why? To frame Woollcott Chalmers. And who could comfortably enter this house and do that? Eliminating myself and those in this room with no conceivable motive, I was left with an unpleasant but inescapable confirmation of a conclusion I had already reached: Renata Chalmers was that killer.”
Renata flinched. She was sitting up straight on the couch, about a foot from her husband. The old man stared at her, but she gave Mac her full attention. “Go on,” she said. “Play your game.”
“Hugh’s mysterious visitor in the deerstalker must have been someone he knew, for he chose to open the door,” Mac said. “Renata certainly qualifies on that score. And the cap - Woollcott’s, of course - would make a good disguise for a woman with long hair, à la Irene Adler dressing as a man in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ You will recall that Renata was already wearing a suit with slacks yesterday.”
“Hold it, Mac,” Lynda interrupted. “You mentioned long hair. Renata may not have been with her husband at the time of the murder, but we know she was putting her hair into ringlets to go with her Victorian outfit for the evening. I saw her earlier in the day and I saw her later with her hair fixed up and I know from experience how long that work can take.”
Renata flashed her a look of gratitude. But Kate said, “Not if you just put on a wig with the ringlets already on it.” My sister sat forward in her chair. “Mac, is that why you asked me this morning whether Renata’s hair-’’
“Exactly. Now Jefferson, think back to your first visit to the guest suite this morning. Undoubtedly you looked around at the dressers before Renata stopped you. Did you see a curling iron? No? I thought not. How about a wig?”
I closed my eyes and tried to bring it all back. Yes, in my mental image there was a lump of hair sitting with the jewelry box and the makeup and the hair brush. But was it just the power of Mac’s suggestion that had put it there? Unsure, I shook my head. “Sorry, Mac, I can’t-”