No Police Like Holmes (3 page)

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.

The guiding dream of Ralph's life seems to be a campus where nothing out of the mainstream is ever taught, nothing controversial ever happens, and the bottom line is always written in black ink. I bet his favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla. No surprise, then, that
The Write Stuff
, Mac's blog nitpicking the grammatical foibles in faculty and staff writing on our campus - including Ralph's administrative memos - sent Ralph's blood pressure off the charts. Mac's other eccentricities, such as his penchant for bagpipes and his success in writing mystery novels, only rubbed salt in the wound.

Ralph Pendergast, let me make clear, does not like Sebastian McCabe. He also does not like me because of my inability to keep Mac's escapades out of the local press. And he absolutely hates surprises, which is why I was calling him with the bad news at this hour instead of letting him find out in the morning from the stories I was almost certain would appear in our local media.

He picked up the phone on the fifth ring, his voice groggy. Early to bed, early to rise.

“Sorry to wake you, Ralph,” I said. “This is Jeff Cody.”

“Cody? Oh, no.”

“Yes, sir. We've had a little incident you should know about.” I quickly outlined the situation.

“This is a disaster,” Ralph announced. “Simply a disaster.” I could imagine him pressing together his thin lips, running a hand through his slicked-back hair, maybe fumbling at his bedside for his wire-rimmed glasses. “I personally secured the corporate sponsors for this Chalmers Collection. Do you have any idea what this theft will do to our reputation in the business community?”

It wasn't really a question.

I looked across the way. Mac was standing outside the exhibit room, next to the NO SMOKING sign, smoking a cigar.

“I should have known better than to let myself become involved in any McCabe project,” Ralph continued. “Sherlock Holmes, indeed!”

“You can hardly blame Mac this time,” I pointed out, grudgingly, out of my irrepressible sense of fairness. “As academic vice president, you're in charge of the damned library. If your curator of special collections had taken some precautions-”

Why was I throwing Gene under the bus like that?

“Don't let them play it cute,” Ralph interrupted.

“What?”

“The media. Don't let them say it's another case for Sherlock Holmes or something like that. They'll put that on the front page. Get them to play it straight.”

“The media aren't the enemy here, Ralph.”
You are.
“The best way to handle a public relations crisis is to be as open and accurate and responsive with the media as you can. If you've made a mistake, admit it and apologize. Have a bad day, if necessary, and get it behind you, move on.”

“We didn't make a mistake. Don't make this about the college. How the media choose to cover this is the issue.”

I took a deep breath. “Get real, Ralph. There's no way I can tell the media how to play a story.”

“Then what good are you? And I was certainly under the impression that you had... connections, shall we say, at the
Observer
.”

“Don't get personal, Ralph. Besides, that's all over.”

“Emphasize the law enforcement angle,” Ralph went on, ignoring me as usual. “Campus Security is on the case, near a solution, that sort of thing.”

I barely heard him. On the other side of the escalator a stocky man in his mid-fifties, dressed in a dapper twill suit, was sidling up to my brother-in-law.

“Okay, Ralph,” I blurted into the phone, “I'll take care of it. If you get any media calls, send them to me. But I have to go now. The press is already on the scene.”

Chapter Five -
“Someone I Know”

Even at eleven o'clock at night, Bernard J. Silverstein was impeccably attired in a crisp white shirt and freshly pressed three-piece suit. He looked, as always, more like a professor than a news hawk. He also looked more like a professor than the professors.

“Hello, Jeff,” he said. “Interesting caper somebody pulled here.”

“I prefer to think of it as an incident, Ben. You pick it up on the police scanner?” Ben writes about police, courts, aviation and restaurants for the
Erin Observer & News Ledger
. In the summer he also writes a gardening column.

“Uh-huh.” Ben pulled a gnarled black pipe out of his coat pocket and stuck it between his thick lips without lighting it. “So what happened?”

Mac took the cigar out of his mouth, as if to speak.

“That's what Campus Security is trying to determine now,” I interjected before my brother-in-law could talk.

“Don't hand me that line of bovine excrement,” Jeff,” Ben said. He blinked his owlish eyes. “You know I need some information and I need it fast for the website. That's the tail that wags the dog now.”

Nearly forty years in the journalistic backwaters had turned Ben Silverstein's curly hair an iron gray. Two heart attacks had convinced him to modify his bull-terrier approach to getting a story, but he was still a real newsman - one of the best I'd ever known.

“Let me talk to Decker and find out what he's learned,” I said.

“I'd rather talk to him myself.”

“No doubt.”

“The lieutenant ejected me rather unceremoniously from the crime scene,” Mac complained.

“Good,” I said. “Let me get back to you, Ben.”

Decker was drinking machine-brewed coffee out of a paper cup as he watched his men (one of whom was a woman) take photos and draw sketches of the scene.

“Your favorite press hound is yapping at my heels,” I told him. “What kind of bone can I throw the man?”

“It's okay to give out the titles and descriptions of the stuff that was stolen,” Decker said. “The estimated value, such as it is, is useable. And you can say means of entry is unknown. But don't make a big deal out of that. If by any chance McCabe is right, that could be an important clue and I don't want to tip off the thief that we're on to it. Oh, and the crime had to have taken place between five this afternoon and the time you folks came. I guess that's it. Thanks for handling Silverstein, Jeff.”

Out in the corridor again, I gave Ben everything I had from Decker, plus some details from my own knowledge of how the theft was discovered.

“This heinous crime will not go long unsolved,” Mac vowed.

“I suppose not,” Ben said, looking up from his notebook, “what with all these - what do you call them? - these Sherlockians around here for the next couple of days.”

Ralph's worst fear. I sighed. “I was really hoping you wouldn't get carried away with that, Ben. I mean, I'm sure that Decker's troops will find the thief in due course. This Sherlock Holmes angle is really kind of a sideshow, a distraction to the real news here.”

Ben snorted. “The Sherlock Holmes angle
is
the news, my lad. You wanted to be a reporter once, if I can remember back nearly twenty years when you were working on the campus paper. Tell me the truth: Would you soft pedal the Holmes stuff if you were writing this story?”

Instead of answering that, I said, “Well, you know I had to try.”

Ben's mouth formed a grin around his unlit pipe. “Besides, my editor wouldn't let me take a pass on the fun part. Aren't you going to ask how she is?”

Lynda Teal, news editor of the
Erin Observer & News Ledger
, had been my girlfriend for four years. Had been, that is, until about a month back when she had declared her independence from what she considered my possessiveness and nagging. Nagging, she called it - just because I frequently provided her with helpful information about the dangers of cigarette smoking. I was only telling her for her own good, wasn't I? Well, all right, maybe our relationship problems went a tad deeper than that. I still haven't figured out why she called me a tall Woody Allen.

So now her Facebook profile said “Single” instead of “In a relationship with Jeff Cody.” At least I hadn't been replaced yet. I keep checking. She hadn't de-friended me, either. There was hope in that.

“No,” I told Ben, “I don't think I'm going to ask how she is.”

“Well, she's fine. Just fine.”

“Glad to hear it.”

After the stocky reporter left, Mac said, “Bernard is quite right, you know.”

“He must be,” I said bitterly. “Everybody else says the same thing. I can't walk down Main Street without meeting somebody who wants to tell me how well Lynda's doing without me.”

“Not about that. On Ms. Teal's well-being I have no data, and thus no conclusion. I refer to his assertion that our Sherlockian friends are central to this crime.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked with a sinking feeling.

“You don't believe the stolen collectibles could be fenced through normal channels, do you? Of course not. They are too highly specialized. Whoever took them either wanted them for himself or already had a collector lined up to purchase them. In either case, the thief was knowledgeable enough to pick the most valuable items - items that had not been singled out in press accounts of the collection. Ergo, he or she is a Sherlockian. The odds are astronomical that the person in question will be at the colloquium tomorrow. Quite likely, it is even someone I know.”

INVESTIGATING

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

AND

SHERLOCK HOLMES

A Colloquium

St. Benignus College

Erin, Ohio

March 12–13, 2011

Sessions in Hearth Room, A and B

Herman J. Muckerheide Center

(except as otherwise noted)

Saturday, March 12

Session One