Harold did his best to ignore the Sherlockians arguing around him. As the timbre of their voices rose, in both volume and pretension, he focused more intently on the three ice cubes in his lunchtime bourbon. He watched their sharp corners round out as they melted. He shook the glass, splashing fresh liquor up and over the cubes, before taking another long sip from his drink. It was noon somewhere.
The two men behind him stood and pointed their accusatory forefingers at one another. Elsewhere in the hotel, similar arguments formed as the fault lines of every long-standing tension within the organization began to give way. Harold was far from the only attendee to fancy himself an amateur detective on a day like this one. The bar was crowded with theorizing Sherlockians, who in the absence of any actual evidence had created grand machinations to explain the crime. Minor points of canonical disagreement became reasons for brutal murder. Some tried to piece together their theories in small groups, hoping that with enough brainpower and expertise they might arrive at a solution. Others jumped straight over the “investigation” phase and landed square at the end of the story they were creating, instantly accusing the man across the table of some vile treachery. And, moreover, actually employing phrases like “vile treachery” in doing so. Everyone was a suspect. But at the world’s largest Sherlockian gathering, everyone was a detective as well.
For his own part, Harold was brain-throttled, reduced to animal needs (food, quiet, bourbon) and animal sounds (monosyllabic assents, guttural baying). He wanted to go home.
He was terrified. The reality of the death wet Harold’s scalp with a hot sweat. He nervously popped dry pretzels from the bar top into his mouth, crunching them loudly between his teeth in an attempt to drown out the surrounding conversations. Harold had long noticed that most people lost their appetites when they were scared or preoccupied. He had wished he were the same way every anxious night he’d gorged himself on air-packed snacks amid a crisis. When he was depressed, he could restrict himself to mounds of coconut frozen yogurt. But when he was nervous, he needed salty, bite-size carb products: chips, Goldfish crackers, pretzels. Usually he refrained from drinking in such situations, but in light of his close proximity, in the recent past, to the cold, pale corpse of a man he’d briefly known, Harold gave himself a break and employed the ten-year-old single-barrel in the steadying of his nerves.
Sarah, appearing out of nowhere, slid onto the barstool next to him and rubbed a comforting hand between his shoulder blades. Harold was not particularly fond of being touched by strangers in general, although in this specific instance he found it kind of pleasurable.
“It’s eleven-thirty,” she said with a smile, nodding at his glass.
“It’s been a long morning,” Harold responded. Sarah agreed and asked the bartender for some coffee. She stayed silent until it arrived.
“Were the police rough with you? They can sometimes be a little… gruff, if you’re not used to dealing with them.”
Harold wasn’t sure whether “gruff” was the right word to describe the police who had detained him-“petrifying” might be better. When they arrived at the crime scene and found him examining the unused pillows for hair fibers, they had immediately placed him in handcuffs. Their thorough, two-man frisking did not turn up any evidence, but it did trigger Harold’s apprehension at the touch of strangers. His skin curdled as they slapped their hands against his waist and thighs. They led him, still cuffed, into an empty room down the hallway, where they interrogated him about his relationship to Alex and his discovery of the killer’s message on the wall for what seemed like the entire day. As Harold grew flustered and hungry, his answers to their questions became more convoluted, and his habit of overtalking garbled the plain fact that not only had he not killed Alex Cale but that he hadn’t the faintest idea who did. Finally, having taken all the information from his driver’s license and making clear in no uncertain terms that Harold was not to leave the city until their investigation had been concluded, they released him. He learned, very much to his surprise, that the whole interrogation hadn’t taken more than ninety minutes.
“Are you used to dealing with them?” Harold asked.
“I worked two years at the Salem News. outside of Boston, when I was younger. I was on the crime beat, but at a small paper like that, the crime beat mostly means calling up the local chief of police and asking who’d been arrested the night before. The guy was an asshole- always called me ‘honey’ in front of the other cops. But there wasn’t much I could say about it if I wanted quotes from him. Anyway, you learn to smile and make nice and let them feel like they’re in charge- and of course they are.” She sipped again from her coffee and turned on her stool to face him directly, forcing Harold by the laws of social convention to turn and look her in the eye. “Are you hanging in there okay?”
Harold was not immediately sure how to answer the question. He wasn’t quite hanging in there, and he certainly wasn’t okay.
“Do you think I’m really a suspect?” he asked.
“I seriously doubt it. I’m sure they just wanted to teach you a lesson about messing around with crime scenes. They were trying to scare you.”
“They pulled it off.”
Sarah laughed. “Seems like everyone here has a theory about who did it,” she said, gesturing around the bar at all of the arguing Sherlockians. “What do you think?”
Harold had been thinking about this a lot, in fact, over the past two hours. But nothing he’d come to in his head had seemed either promising or even pleasant to think about.
“You know, the word ‘elementary,’ written on the wall… it’s only actually used in one Holmes story.”
“Really?” said Sarah. “Isn’t it one of those famous Sherlock Holmes quotes? ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’?”
“Yes, everybody knows that phrase, but it isn’t actually from the original stories. It’s from the old movie series, and the TV version with Jeremy Brett. In all the books, Holmes says ‘elementary’ to Watson only once, in ‘The Crooked Man.’”
“Huh”
“It’s a very specific quote, from a specific story. It’s weird. And the location: In A Study in Scarlet. the very first Holmes story, he finds a word written in blood on the wall. In the darkest corner of the darkened room.”
“The blood used to write that message upstairs wasn’t from Alex,” Sarah said. “There were no puncture marks on the body, no cuts. I was able to get that much from the cops.”
“It’s the same way in the story. The blood isn’t from the victim; it’s from the killer.”
Sarah and Harold thought about this silently for a long moment.
“You’re going to figure this out, aren’t you?” she said at last. “You’re going to solve Alex Cale’s murder.” She spoke as if it were so obvious, and when Harold thought about it, he realized that it was.
Harold was the youngest Baker Street Irregular since Alex Cale himself. And he would bring Cale back by doing what Cale never could, by finishing what he had started. By providing what Cale hadn’t-the solution.
Sarah smiled. “There are a lot of detectives in the hotel this morning,” she said. “But I think you’re right. I think you’re the one who’s going to figure it out.”
Harold was touched-and emboldened.
“I need to know who would do something like this… Who would kill Alex?” he said. “And who would kill someone in such an odd, macabre way and then leave a bunch of clues behind that reference Sherlock Holmes stories?”
Sarah swept her eyes across the room at the bickering Sherlockians. Two women had drawn what appeared to be a diagram of the crime scene on a bar napkin and were gesturing at it to one another insistently, as if to prove their respective points about how the crime must have been committed.