“Incredible,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor will you,” Chalmers assured me. “There is nothing like it. Perhaps that is immodest, but as Holmes once said, ‘I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.’”
He watched in silence from the doorway as the rest of us strolled through the room. Mac dawdled over some faded paperbacks, the particular kind of book toward which his own collection mania is bent. I got caught up in the bizarre design of a Firesign Theatre record album called “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.”
“Don’t waste your time with that,” Chalmers said when he saw what I was up to. He pointed with his cane to a glass case against the far wall. “There lay the real gems of my forty years of collecting Sherlockiana.”
I put the album down and joined Mac and Renata in following Chalmers across the room.
The case to which the collector had pointed was lined in red velvet, giving it the air of a reliquary. Reposing on the cloth were several letters, a calling card from Arthur Conan Doyle with a note scribbled on it, a small playbill from an early performance of the melodrama Sherlock Holmes signed by the lead actor, William Gillette, and several books whose bibliographical significance escaped me.
Chalmers said, “Until I found it, no one even suspected the existence of-”
“Woollcott!”
Renata, grabbing his arm tightly, didn’t need to say anything else. Chalmers’s blue eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, grew even wider as he instantly saw what his wife was too flustered to voice.
“I don’t-” He hesitated, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. This afternoon... everything was here when we left.”
His wife nodded. “I know.”
“What is it?” Mac asked sharply. “What’s missing?”
“The Hound of the Baskervilles manuscript,” Renata replied.
“Much more than that,” Chalmers added in an agitated voice. “There was also a first edition of the Hound inscribed by Conan Doyle to Fletcher Robinson himself. And a Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, the rarest of all Sherlockian books, made even rarer by a hand-written note on the first page from Conan Doyle to his mother.”
I whistled. “That kind of stuff must be worth a pretty penny.”
“Priceless!” Mac thundered. He tugged on his beard. “I find it hard to credit that our librarian misplaced them.”
“There’s no chance of that,” Renata said. “They were here when we left this afternoon after helping set up the display. They’ve been stolen.”
Chapter Four - “We’ve Had a Little Incident”
“And it’s only my first month on the job,” Gene Pfannenstiel moaned, shaking his shaggy head.
“I know,” I told the young librarian.
“Nothing like this ever happened anywhere else I’ve worked,” he assured me.
“You said that already,” I reminded him. “Twice.”
Gene’s broad face, usually alive with the excitement of some bookish pursuit that would have put me to sleep, was a study in earnest concern. Or as earnest as a chunky man can look in a frizzy beard and no mustache.
In pleated black slacks and a white shirt open at the collar, he was dressed more like an Amish storekeeper than the curator of special collections at the Lee J. Bennish Memorial Library. Blinking around at the rest of us, he looked about as worldly, too.
“I should have asked to have special guards posted outside,” he fretted.
“That’s obvious,” said Lieutenant Ed Decker of Campus Security.
“Not particularly helpful at this juncture, however,” Mac rumbled.
By this time he had driven Woollcott and Renata Chalmers back to the McCabe house, where they were staying the weekend. The old man had left looking about ten years older.
I wasn’t feeling so hot myself. It didn’t take a public relations genius to figure that news of the Sherlockian thefts would quickly overshadow everything else happening on campus this weekend. A major gift to the college - or parts of it, anyway - had been stolen almost as soon as the collection had arrived. That made us look like a bunch of rubes. Plus there was the Holmes connection, guaranteed to set off a media feeding frenzy. Dealing with the press would be a headache on this one, and that was the least of my worries. A certain unbearable college administrator was sure to make my life really miserable.
The facts of the theft were not in doubt: Both of the Chalmerses and Gene Pfannenstiel agreed that the missing materials had been in the glass case before Gene locked up the room that afternoon in front of the couple. With much hocus-pocus Mac had unlocked the room many hours later using the same key, borrowed from Gene. In between, something had happened.
“Grand theft,” Decker pronounced unnecessarily. “I understand the stolen goods were worth way into five figures, maybe six. Right?”
Mac shrugged his shoulders, which is akin to a mountain moving. “How does one assess the value of something that is one of a kind?”
“And Mr. Pfannenstiel here simply gave you the key, Professor? How do you rate such treatment?”
From the look on his face, the question worried Gene, but not Mac. “Rank has its privileges, Lieutenant,” he said, “and I am a full professor well known to the library staff.”
“Damned sloppy security,” Decker said with a snort. “The display case wasn’t even locked.” He glared at Gene, who withered under the attention and didn’t bother to explain that he hadn’t thought that to be necessary in a room that was itself locked.
Decker looked mean. But then, Decker always looks mean, even when he hasn’t been hauled into work late on a Friday evening. He’s built like one of those beefy football players whose jersey number, according to legend, is higher than his IQ. So you probably expect me to say he’s really a heck of a nice guy and a Rhodes scholars on top of it. Not quite. Oh, he’s cooperative enough - letting me know routinely about requests for demonstration permits, for example, so I can be prepared to respond for the media. But Decker is no genius, just a thoroughly professional police officer with skin the color of anthracite, a broad flat nose, a thin mustache, high cheek bones and arms the size of Mac’s thighs.
“I already have a list and description of what Mr. Chalmers knows was taken,” Decker said, tapping a small notebook in his hand, “but I’ll need you to do a complete inventory, Mr. Pfannenstiel, to make sure nothing else is missing.”
“Right away, Lieutenant.”
“Good. Anything else I need to know?”
“Yes!” Mac thundered. “I call your attention to what Sherlock Holmes might have called the curious incident of the broken lock.”
“But the lock wasn’t broken,” Decker protested.
“That was the curious incident. How did our burglar get in there without breaking the lock?”
“You tell us,” I snapped. “You’re the magician.”
Mac slowly shook his massive head. “I have no special insight. Houdini could get into places as well as out of them, but most often he had the help of a concealed lock pick. When you examine the lock, as I did before the lieutenant arrived, you will notice there are virtually no scratches around the lock. It is difficult, if not impossible, to use a lock pick without making scratches.”
Muttering something under his breath (I distinctly caught the phrase “frickin’ amateurs”), Decker went off to direct two newly arrived officers in dusting for fingerprints or whatever it is cops do at a crime scene.
“I can’t put if off any longer,” I told Mac. “I’ve got to call Ralph.”
“You have my deepest sympathy.”
I didn’t want to do this in front of an audience, so I walked over to the other side of the escalator before I pulled out my iPhone and selected the number in my contacts list I’d been dreading to call.
Ralph Pendergast is vice president of academic affairs and provost at St. Benignus College, which makes him both Mac’s boss and mine. That’s dicey enough. But on top of that, his strong ties to several members of the college’s board of trustees make him almost as powerful in every facet of college life as our legendary president, Father Joseph F. Pirelli, C.T.L. - “Father Joe” - himself. And yet Ralph is relatively new to campus, brought in by the board just this academic year to tighten up the ship.