The Art of Detection (35 page)

     Yes, I would admit it freely: San Francisco had proved a most educational place, in the end.

FOURTEEN

L
ater that morning, at her desk in the homicide room, Kate let the manuscript fall shut against its clip, her eyes running across the opening line.
The mind is a machine ill suited to long periods of desuetude.
What a peculiar voice, the haughty yet humane narrator of this bittersweet story, a story based on a legal conundrum that eight decades later had yet to be solved.
Everyone in California is from somewhere else, which means everyone in the state has had to re-invent themselves.
What would young Lieutenant Raynor make of San Francisco today, where Jon, Sione, and Lalu made for an accepted definition of family? The motivation for Raynor’s murder had been dark and twisted, like anything that grew in hidden places. That his brother officer—a gay man like Raynor himself—should have exterminated him just as he was on the verge of finding happiness was the most poisonous betrayal of all. She found herself hoping that Jack Raynor hadn’t known who it was that moonlit night on the cliffs, assaulting him with the bat.

Then Kate shook herself: Don’t be ridiculous, this wasn’t real, it was a fable, it was fiction. She hadn’t intended to read it in any depth, just skim for content, but read it she had, every word, and for those hours, it had been real. As she drew back from what she’d once heard described as the fictional dream, she had to admit that it was, in the end, just a story: Sherlock Holmes in San Francisco. And maybe not even that: Philip Gilbert may have adopted the tale with open arms, but so far as she could see, the only references to her victim’s favorite detective were jokes, and as a piece of writing, it sure didn’t have the old-fashioned feel of those stories as she remembered them, all fog and gaslights and horse-drawn cabs and the incident of the dog in the nighttime. This story was as outrageous and colorful as…well, as a revue of drag queens.

She picked up the phone. When the English voice came on the line, she said, “All right, Mr. Nicholson, I’ve finished the thing.”

“Glorious, isn’t it?”

“Er…”

“I spent this morning rereading it myself, and all the while I could just hear old Sir Arthur in the background, sputtering his protests as the spirit of San Francisco took over his character.”

“So you’d say that Arthur Conan Doyle actually wrote it?”

“Couldn’t say, certainly not without seeing the original. But this will put a fox in the henhouse, that’s for sure. The Holmesian world will be up in arms over this.”

Irate Sherlockians were not Kate Martinelli’s primary concern, not unless one of them had become so infuriated he’d bashed Gilbert over the head. “Aside from the coincidence of Mr. Gilbert’s body also being found in a Point Bonita gun emplacement, why have I spent all these hours on it?”

“But…I should think it would be obvious.”

“Not to me. It’s amusing, and not badly written, but hardly a work so earthshaking someone would kill for it.”

“Of course you’re right. I tend to forget that most of the world looks at this stuff with a rather jaundiced eye. And the key questions here are, one, was this story originally written in the early 1920s, and thus is not a modern forgery, and, two, if it is from the Twenties, was it actually written by Arthur Conan Doyle?

“The thing is, we Sherlockians will start with those questions, but we’ll rapidly shoot off in a thousand related tangents. In no time at all the question will move on from the prosaic, Did Conan Doyle write it? to the much more interesting, If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took the time out from his hectic Spiritualism tour of America to create this story, only to abandon it unpublished, why? It would open an enormous window of speculation as to his experiences here. He liked San Francisco well enough when he got here, but by the time he left, he said that he found San Francisco unsympathetic and unspiritual compared to Los Angeles. It is generally assumed that the reporters here proved less gullible and awestruck than their Southern California brothers, but it could as easily be that this story seized him here, and colored his entire feeling about the city.”

There was a pause and a rustle on the line, as if Nicholson had shifted in his chair and the phone had changed from one hand to the other. Settling in to his argument.

“You have to remember, this was a man who believed passionately in such things as channeling and spirit possession: He dedicated his life and his fortune to the cause. He would have allowed the story to come to light, despite the elements he would certainly have found extremely distasteful, even shocking,
if
he believed that the spirits were behind it. However, I don’t know that he would then have felt obligated to put his name on the thing and submit it for publication. He could as easily have abandoned it unacknowledged. Sitting wherever it’s been for eighty years.”

“You’re saying that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes and the drag queen because spirits told him to?” Kate tried to keep the disbelief from her voice, not entirely succeeding.

Nicholson laughed. “Personally, I wouldn’t doubt that the old man had some kind of midlife crisis during the tour, which manifested itself not in fast cars or young women, but an offensive story. Don’t forget, Doyle had already killed Holmes off once, only to be forced to resurrect him by popular demand. Here he’d have been nailing the coffin shut on the man’s reputation—it was one thing to bring in some nice exotic drug addicts and blackmailers to add color to the stories, but transvestite singers and male prostitutes? People would never have looked at Holmes the same way again. Of course, they’d never have looked at Doyle the same way again, either, which would further explain why he thought the better of publication. However, no matter what you might say was the psychological basis for this story, Doyle himself would have seen it as something else entirely. Doyle might have been irritated with the popularity of Holmes, but he did bear his creation some grudging affection; he would only have put Holmes in such a hugely embarrassing situation if he felt positively driven to do so.”

“If the spirits made him.”

“Precisely. Something along the lines of automatic writing.”

Kate pinched the bridge of her nose and sat quietly for a long time. Then she drew a deep breath, and said, “Look, let’s assume for the moment that, if nothing else, an unpublished Conan Doyle story would be worth a lot of money.”

“It would be worth a shitload of money, if you’ll pardon the vernacular.” He said the obscenity with a primness that made Kate grin in spite of herself.

“He didn’t pay a lot for it,” she told him, an understatement if ever there was one.

“All the better. If he’d paid a substantial amount, it opens the door to speculation that the manuscript was either a very expensively created hoax, or was stolen from the Conan Doyle papers—there’ve been rumors of that for years. In fact, I’ve heard that a set of Doyle papers is going up for auction in London very soon; a file from that might conceivably have been spirited away before the contents were catalogued. I haven’t seen any evidence of the provenance, but Philip wouldn’t have knowingly gotten involved in a shady deal, not if it could blow up in his face.”

“What I’ve seen of the thing’s history is pretty solid looking,” Kate admitted.

“Then as I say, a shitload of money.”

“When you say ‘shitload’—”

“Half a million, three quarters, a million? It is unprecedented, so there’s just no knowing.”

“A million dollars for a short story?” Her voice climbed to a near squeak.

“There is no knowing,” Nicholson repeated in a precise voice, which somehow indicated that a million dollars might be on the low side. Kate cleared her throat.

“Okay. Is there any evidence that Conan Doyle actually wrote it?”

“That, of course, would have been the main question behind the evaluation Philip would have had me oversee. I’m working at a strong disadvantage here, since I’ve not held the thing in my hands—when you’ve worked as long as I have in the world of rare books and manuscripts, you develop a smell for fakes, but all I have is the photocopy of a typescript. Right away, the fact of its being typed creates a problem, since most of the stories were originally written by Sir Arthur in longhand, and it is unlikely that he ever used a typewriter. However, some would tell you that he did, on occasion, employ a secretary to take dictation, and in this country, a secretary would no doubt be skilled on a typewriter as well.”

“In other words it’s all, He said, she said?”

“Oh no. The manuscript would be thoroughly examined. I actually had an entire program laid out for Philip—physical tests, of course, on paper and ink, although I can already tell you it was written on an Underwood machine dating from before the Great War, with the accents punctiliously added by hand. Those are the only corrections, by the way, which I mention as a point against its authenticity—Conan Doyle tended to go over typescripts and make the odd correction or change. I’d have to see the paper itself, to see if it looked like something that had sat in an attic for eighty years, or if it had been stored somewhere and more recently typed on. I’d have a stylographic analysis, to compare the vocabulary and grammar, the idioms used—the general style of its author—with actual Conan Doyle stories of the same era. I would have suggested which archives to search, which biographers to ask whether or not Doyle might have had some peculiar experience while he was here. One of the oddities—one of several oddities—is that when you compare the dates given to the days of the week, it isn’t actually set in the year Doyle was here. It would appear to take place a year later, in 1924. Although that could easily be explained by Doyle’s chronic lack of interest in such details—he was forever giving Holmes some piece of key evidence that, under scrutiny, was nonsensical.”

“You know, I couldn’t even see that the thing was about Sherlock Holmes. Seems to me we should be calling it the Jack Raynor story, or the Tale of Billy Birdsong or something.” Kate realized that she was sounding irritable about the ubiquitous presence of the mythic detective, but Nicholson did not notice.

“Oh, I think it’s fairly clear that the narrator is meant to be Holmes, from the internal references—the emerald stickpin, his habits, his manner of thinking, the discussion of monographs. Speaking off the cuff, it is not too dissimilar stylistically from the pair of first-person Holmes stories Conan Doyle published in 1926. The fact that the main character calls himself Sigerson means nothing—Sigerson was an identity Holmes had used before, when he traveled to Tibet as a Norwegian explorer during the early 1890s.”

Which explained Gilbert’s use of the pseudonym as his computer password.

Kate had abruptly had enough of this airy-fairy stuff: time for some actual information. Mainly, who knew to leave Gilbert’s body in Battery DuMaurier? “Can you tell me who has seen it?”

Nicholson was silent for a moment. “Before all this, I’d have thought Philip would tell me—tell all the Diners—about it all along the way, from the moment he got it. However, he seems to have been remarkably secretive. Frankly, I have no idea who he told. He may have given it to someone some time ago, and that person let rumors leak out.”

“I know, I saw the
Chronicle
’s piece about it that Philip e-mailed all of you.”

“Leah Garchik’s column, yes. She may even have got it originally from one of the Diners. We’d first heard the rumor around Christmas, and Tom—Tom Rutland—had been back at the birthday dinner in New York, where they’d mentioned it, but there was nothing more substantial than whispers. We went around and around the topic during our own January meeting. We even hunted down the passage in Sir Arthur’s memoirs, to be sure of what he had said. It’s in the second volume of his
American Adventures,
if you’re interested.”

So that’s where the Strand Diners had gone when they all left the sitting room, before coming back to don coats and say their goodbyes. Dinner and a reference book: what a fun group.

“We went upstairs to—good heavens,” Nicholson interrupted himself. “It was on the third floor.”

“What was on the third floor?”

“Doyle’s
Adventures.
I just realized, we all missed it, entirely. You see, by Philip’s rules, anything published during Sir Arthur’s lifetime should have been on the ground floor, but Philip had it upstairs. That’s because he was researching this very story. Call me a Sherlockian,” he chided himself.

“Gilbert was trying to research it himself? But then he gave it to you for authentication.”

“Oh, he would have done his own background reading, but with something this important, he wouldn’t even have left it entirely to me. I might have coordinated the research, but I wouldn’t have done all the actual work. I don’t have access to a laboratory, for one thing. For another, he’d have wanted someone who didn’t mind flying to visit the archives.”

“That’s right, you don’t like airplanes.”

“I’d have chosen the labs and the experts, coordinated their efforts. Do you have any idea who else he consulted? Philip generally made careful note of when he gave something to me. Even if he only gave out copies, it might be in his records.”

“I only looked at the last couple of weeks. I’ll check earlier. Any idea of which Diner might have given Leah Garchik the item?”

“You know, I wondered at the time how she’d come to hear of it, but when I phoned around, no one seemed to know any more than what she’d written. The woman may even have overheard a conversation about another thing entirely, and simply put it together with the local angle. For example, there’s been a lot of talk lately about the Doyle papers, and not so long ago someone ran a piece about an unpublished story ‘discovered’ among Sir Arthur’s papers, except that it wasn’t by him at all, it was another writer who’d sent it to him, hoping for help finding a publisher. When I talked to Tom about the Garchik piece, he said he’d asked Philip, who didn’t know anything. It wasn’t until I’d read the story that I realized it was what the rumor had been about, which meant that Philip had known about it at the dinner, just kept mum.”