The Barker Street Regulars (17 page)

So that was when the third incident really occurred. Studying the snapshots of the new residents, I realized that I’d learned of one death at the Gateway, Nancy’s. In fact, people had been dying there all the time. I’d simply pretended otherwise. Althea was older than I wanted to acknowledge. The Holmes nonsense was make-believe. Fact: Jonathan Hubbell had been brutally murdered. Fact: Although we are all dying all the time, Althea was going to die sooner than most other people,
sooner even than most other people at the Gateway. The complaining woman in the elevator had definitely been wrong about one thing. The Gateway had never, ever been
just
like a hotel. Here, almost no one had ever checked out alive.

A
S I WAS CRATING ROWDY
in the back of the car, Hugh and Robert suddenly appeared in the Gateway parking lot, hustled across, and abruptly demanded a sample of dog hair.

“Hugh intends to perform a few experiments,” Robert explained. Half to Hugh and half to me, he added in the sort of voice people use when they’re quoting,
“I gather we have your good wishes, Miss Winter.”

Lacking the correct Sherlockian reply, I just said, “Indeed you do, Mr. MacPherson. And if Rowdy were shedding, you could have enough hair to spin and weave into a deerstalker hat. But he isn’t.”

Producing a pair of manicure scissors, Hugh started to speak. I cut him off. No pun intended. “Rowdy is entered tomorrow,” I said, shifting into what is literally my mother tongue—she bred and showed golden retrievers. “In a dog show,” I explained. “I want someone chopping off a patch of his coat about the way you want someone hacking off the first paragraph of ‘A Study in Scarlet.’”

“In eighteen seventy-eight …”
Hugh began.

Robert cut in. “
In
the year
eighteen seventy-eight
…”

“The American Kennel Club had not yet been established,” I said, “and it wouldn’t have made any difference, but it does now. Besides, those scissors have sharp points.” Softening, I conceded that Kimi was beginning to shed. “I’ll send you some of her hair if you want.” That’s me: all generosity.

Like the proverbial bloodhounds on the trail, Robert and Hugh, however, insisted on following me home. As I drove there, I kept checking the rearview mirror in the hope that I’d lost them. But Hugh, at the wheel, stuck to me like the infernal paint that the villainous Stapleton applied to the unfortunate hound of the Baskervilles. With Rowdy entered the next day, I had grooming to do, and having spent the morning doing housework and then visiting the Gateway, I hadn’t written so much as an indefinite
a
or
an
or the definite
the,
never mind the kind of article I could sell. Like every other freelance writer, I live in terror of having to get a real job. It was noon. Would Hugh and Robert hang around? Would they expect lunch?

Something about those two simple questions made me realize how little I knew about Hugh and Robert. They shared, it seemed to me, Holmes’s fondness for disguise, but instead of adopting the Master’s guises, they cloaked themselves in the identity he’d hidden beneath the persona of a drunken-looking groom or an old woman. What exactly was the quality of their devotion to Althea? Did they love her as a woman, a person? Or as
the
woman, the representative of Irene Adler? As to their relationship, was it a peculiar reenactment of what Holmes-lovers called “The Friendship”—the curious tie between Holmes and Watson? I thought of the tongue-in-cheek essay Althea had given me: “Watson
Was a Woman.” Hugh and Robert were definitely men, brothers-in-law, men who had married sisters, yet who made no secret of having lived their lives in thrall to a third woman, Althea. They’d presumably been visiting the Gateway since Althea first moved there. Had the complainer in the elevator voiced her dissatisfaction to them? Had the Gateway’s standards really declined? Had the cost increased? Jonathan had been Althea’s heir. He’d had her power of attorney. He must have paid the Gateway’s bills. Could he have planned to move Althea to a cheaper place? Could Hugh and Robert have taken decisive action to prevent the move?

As I pulled into my driveway, two crazy ideas arrived with me. The first was about Hugh’s demonstrated capacity for violence. As quite a young man, Althea had told me, Hugh had disrupted a Sherlockian convention by taking his fist to the jaw of an opponent in the Oxford-Cambridge debate. The ardor of youth, I’d assumed, had overcome Hugh’s judgment. But from Althea’s perspective, Ceci was, and I quote, “a young woman.” Ceci was eighty. Hugh’s episode of supposedly youthful violence might have taken place only a few years ago. Hearing about it, I’d facetiously reflected that Hugh’s mistake, in the eyes of Sherlockians, had been to use his fist instead of the Master’s favorite weapon, a loaded hunting crop. The weapon used to murder Jonathan Hubbell was only presumed to be the missing shovel that Ceci had abandoned by Simon’s grave. Could it, in fact, have been a weighted hunting crop? The second crazy idea was about the cocaine on Jonathan’s body. The Republican philatelist victim seemed as wildly improbable a source of the white powder as did his great-aunt, Ceci. Was it possible that in their Holmesian zeal, Hugh and Robert indulged in a seven-percent solution?

As I got Rowdy out of the car, I found it difficult to suppress the thoughts that had been burbling around during the drive from the Gateway, but when Hugh pulled the Volvo in behind my Bronco and the two men got out, I was oddly alarmed by the contrast between my suspicious fantasies and the Holmesians’ appearance of normality. With his impressive height, his white hair, and his well-tailored dark topcoat, Robert was the kind of handsome and distinguished-looking man you see in Harvard Square on Commencement Day when he’s just marched with a handful of other surviving members of the Class of Long Ago. I’ve never been near an M.I.T. commencement and have no idea what’s comme il faut in the way of men’s clothing, but Hugh’s khaki pants and wool-lined tan jacket were practical-looking, and with his sturdy build, his jaunty mustache, and the outdoorsy glow on his face, he could’ve been about to accept an important scientific award for having invented an ingenious contraption that enabled researchers to investigate the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, and other places with low potential for development as family vacation spots. Both men made ordinary remarks about my neighborhood. Yes, I agreed, the townhouses that Harvard had built on the opposite side of Concord Avenue were a big improvement, and it certainly was convenient to have a branch of the library right across the street. Furthermore, neither Hugh nor Robert asked whether I owned the house or rented my floor, and neither stooped to making any sort of ill-bred reference to the increase in property values that has accompanied the gentrification of the area.

As I was contemplating the happy prospect of raising my tenants’ rent, Rita came down the back steps, and I felt ashamed of myself. When I performed introductions, Robert and Hugh were gracious and charming.
They said normal things like
How do you do?
and nothing at all about Sherlock Holmes. This phenomenon was, it seemed to me, a miracle on a par with my letting sixty social seconds elapse without mentioning dogs, not that it’s ever happened, but, hey, if Robert and Hugh, why not me?

After explaining that she had to dash off to a meeting, Rita murmured to me, “You were right about that psychic after all. She got my poor patient’s hopes all built up, and now, all of a sudden, she announces the dog is dead. I am outraged. Will you be around tomorrow morning?”

“No, I’m going to a show. Tonight?”

“I’m having dinner with someone. A person of the opposite sex, actually. A man.”

“Rita, I know which is the opposite sex. You have a date,” I informed her. “Well, have a good time.”

Still without mentioning Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, fog, gaslights, gasogenes, violins, cocaine, Jezail bullets, or anything else even remotely related to their obsession, Robert and Hugh seconded my good wishes and said what a pleasure it had been to meet Rita. Following their fine example, I refrained from asking whether the date owned a dog.

Once Hugh and Robert were in my kitchen, the availability of dog hair was embarrassingly obvious. I’d given Kimi a token, useless brushing that morning and vacuumed everything, including her. During my absence, a malamute storm had blown in to whip up whitecaps on the floor in the form of wisps of fluffy undercoat. Oblivious to the clumps of hair springing from her hindquarters, Kimi dashed up to welcome our visitors. “Robert, she’ll get hair all over you!” I warned about a second too late. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least.” A true gentleman!
His dark topcoat bore a long, wide swatch of white. “Is she suffering from some sort of condition?”

“No,” I said. “This phase is the worst. The undercoat comes out first, this wooly stuff, and then the outer coat, the guard hairs. That part isn’t quite so bad. Kimi, you are a good girl. It’s not your fault, is it?”

Hugh, meanwhile, was crouched down collecting samples from the floor and transferring them to a small brown paper bag. The activity fascinated Rowdy, who has always taken a keen interest in the tools of housework, mops, brooms, vacuum cleaners, and dust cloths, all of which he apparently regards as rival dogs, and an even keener interest in people, especially people displaying peculiar behavior. Like a psychiatrist evaluating a potentially explosive patient, Rowdy quietly observed Hugh from a distance of a few feet. Then, reaching a benign diagnosis, he calmly gave Hugh a big, wet kiss. Hugh answered with a childlike grin of surprise and awkwardly thumped Rowdy’s head.

I said, “Rowdy, enough. That will do. Kimi, here, let’s get a nice clump of fresh hair from you.”

Rising, Hugh reached inside his jacket to extract a pen from the array lined up in the plastic pocket-protector in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. “I’ll need to label this,” he explained as he stepped toward my kitchen table, on which rested my one-volume Double-day edition of
The Complete Sherlock Holmes.
The book lay open to display two pages of
The Valley of Fear.
I liked the beginning, the part about Fred Porlock, the Tragedy at Birlstone, and especially the cipher message that Holmes decodes by consulting an almanac. As I refrained from admitting to Hugh and Robert, however, whenever I’d tried to finish the story, I’d found myself bogged down in all that business about Vermissa Lodge and the bodymaster, mostly because it had nothing
to do with Holmes and Watson. I’d left the book open in the hope of reminding myself to plod on.

“Ah hah!” Hugh exclaimed with great vigor and enthusiasm.

“Applying myself to the Canon,” I said, hoping to avoid a trivia question about
The Valley of Fear
that I wouldn’t be able to understand, never mind answer.

My vagueness succeeded to the extent that Hugh, after gesturing to Robert to keep his distance from the open book, spoke to his companion rather than to me. “Now, Robert, Holly presents us with an intriguing little puzzle. Open on her table is the volume you will certainly recognize.”

Robert nodded solemnly.

“Open to a certain work that makes a
singular
yet cryptic allusion to her profession,” Hugh continued, “and contains a
doubly
allusive line.”

I was so mystified that I glanced at the book to see whether it had somehow turned its own pages from
The Valley of Fear
to
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
It had not. Furthermore, far from making a cryptic allusion,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
was explicitly about a dog.

Hugh was beaming. After depositing his evidence bag on the table, he jabbed a fist of dramatic challenge at Robert and demanded, “Quote the line!”

I know the answer now, of course. What I still find eerie is that in addition to containing a double allusion to my profession, the correct solution to Hugh’s trivia challenge hints at the identity of Jonathan’s murderer in a way that Hugh could not possibly have known. So, only if you consider yourself a genuine Sherlockian, I offer the challenge to you: What was the line?

T
HREE DAYS LATER,
I presented Irene Wheeler with a close-up photograph of the cat. I’d taken the picture on Saturday after Rowdy and I returned from the show. About the show itself I will report almost nothing except that the stunning young malamute who went Winners Dog and Best of Winners had a name with eerily Holmesian connotations: Kaila The Devil’s Paw. Devil’s Paw? Devil’s Foot. Yes, indeed,
Radix pedis diaboli,
devil’s-foot root, the obscure African poison that the evil Mortimer Tregennis stole from Dr. Sterndale, the source of the toxin that left Tregennis’s sister dead and his two brothers completely demented, the same poison that Sterndale himself used on Tregennis and that almost did in Holmes and Watson when the Master’s experiment proved far more potent than he intended. Furthermore, Narly, as the dog is known, happened to be the grandson of a famous and utterly gorgeous top-winning malamute, Tracker, officially named, I swear, Ch. Kaila’s Paw Print. Yes,
Paw Print,
as what was frozen in the mud near the scene of
Jonathan’s murder. Paw Print, footprints, as in those of a gigantic hound.

What’s more, when Hugh and Robert unexpectedly turned up at the show to collect samples of white dog hair, they embarrassed me less than my father had done at a few thousand previous shows. But everyone knows Buck, whereas Hugh and Robert expected introductions and kept announcing that they were friends of mine. I dealt with them rather well, I thought. I warned them not to go around brandishing scissors and not to demand great hunks of show coat. Instead of telling my friends that the newcomers were Holmesian lunatics, I described them as researchers, a term that Hugh and Robert happily accepted. The description went over well with the dog people, too. Show types being, by definition, a competitive crew, the exhibitors, once assured that only small samples were required, seemed pleased to have their dogs selected as subjects in a scientific investigation and proceeded to inundate Hugh and Robert with information about
correct
coat and color in breed after breed. The investigators, however, were disconcerted to discover that in addition to all-white or predominantly white breeds like the kuvasz, the Great Pyrenees, the Samoyed, the West Highland white terrier, and the bichon frise, there existed white-coated individuals in dozens of other breeds as well. In some, the boxer and the German shepherd dog, for example, an all-white coat was a disqualifying fault. In others, including the Alaskan malamute, it was perfectly acceptable in the show ring and, to my eyes, beautiful. Westies and bichons and such were obviously too small to have left the gigantic paw prints found near the scene of Jonathan’s murder, but there remained many more possible breeds than Hugh and Robert had expected.