“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
9:00
Registration outside Hearth Room
Coffee and Danish
“Field Bazaar” selling Sherlockiana
10:00
Orientation - Dr. Sebastian McCabe, BSI, St. Benignus College
10:15
Movietone Interview / Arthur Conan Doyle
10:30
“Sherlock Holmes and the Development of the Detective Story” - Mr. Al Kane, Sarasota, Florida
11:00
“Collecting Sherlockiana” - Mr. Woollcott Chalmers, BSI, Cincinnati, Ohio
11:45
Sherlockian Quiz
Noon
Lunch (President’s Dining Room)
Opportunity to visit selections from the Chalmers Collection (Hearth Room, C)
1:00
Presentation of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection to St. Benignus College (Hearth Room C)
Chapter Six - “A Most Valuable Institution”
When I woke up the next morning I soon wished I hadn’t. Lack of adequate sleep always gives me a headache to start the day, but not as big as the one I got from looking at the front page of the Erin Observer & News Ledger.
In the hubbub the night before, I’d forgotten to check out the online version of Ben Silverstein’s story on the paper’s website, so I was coming at it cold. It was set apart in a box at the top right of the page with a three-column headline, thirty-six-point type, bold face: A CASE FOR SHERLOCK HOLMES.
Damn. Ralph would blow whatever gaskets he had left.
“This is looking like a case for Sherlock Holmes,” Ben’s piece began, grabbing the obvious hook for the lead.
“A manuscript and two valuable books from the famed Woollcott Chalmers Collection of Holmes materials were stolen Friday from a temporary display on the St. Benignus College campus.
“College spokesman T. Jefferson Cody said the value of the collection...”
The Indiana Jones theme song blaring from my night-stand stopped me there. It was the ring tone on my iPhone. Morrie Kindle, the Associated Press stringer, was calling to confirm the details of the Observer story. I read through the rest of it in a hurry, told him it was correct, and promised to get back to him if there were anything new from Campus Security. I called Decker’s office, but he wasn’t in yet. I knew he would be eventually, Saturday or not.
This was just the beginning, I realized with a sense of doom as I left my apartment. Once Kindle’s rewrite of the story hit the AP feed, calls would be coming in from all over the map. No time to worry about that, though. I had to go show the flag at the colloquium, plus be on hand to help a TV reporter shoot a few sound bites in the late morning.
My carriage house apartment next to Mac’s house, seventeen steps above his garage, is only a ten-minute bicycle ride from campus. I picked up my Schwinn and pedaled off, all the while imagining Ralph’s reaction to Ben’s story. It didn’t take much imagination.
A registration table was set up outside of Hearth Rooms A and B. Aneliese Pokorny, my diminutive administrative assistant, was taking money and handing out name tags. Popcorn is forty-nine years old, dyes her hair blond, and would cheerfully commit grand theft auto if Mac asked her to. She was volunteering her time this morning. I greeted her while the guy in front of me handed over a designer check carrying a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes.
“Do you feel as bad as you look?” she asked.
“Worse.”
Popcorn gave me a nametag with my moniker already typed in. I pinned it on, poured myself a cup of decaf from the coffee-and-pastries spread next to her, then went to survey the scene.
Hearth Room C, the scene of last night’s excitement, was sealed off by Decker’s men with yellow plastic tape. Immediately to the left was the door to Room B, which functioned as the entrance to the back of the Hearth Room when A and B were opened up to form one hall as they were today. I went in that way, intending to stay at the back of the room for a good view of the crowd and an unobtrusive exit when necessary.
It was about ten minutes until show time and the place was filling up. Maybe fifty or sixty people were there so far out of seventy-eight registered in advance and a few walk-ins expected. I counted six deerstalker caps. Mac and the Chalmerses were in the middle of the room, fiddling with a laptop and projector setup. I also noticed Al Kane, author turned pitchman; Dr. Noah Queensbury, the bore with Basil Rathbone’s nose; and a few others from Mac’s party that I couldn’t put a name to. One was a handsome, slightly plump woman with gray-blond hair who’d been in the kitchen the night before talking about Dr. Watson.
If Mac was right - and I didn’t doubt it - whoever stole those books yesterday was probably in this room right now.
I sipped my decaf and found myself turned toward the back of the room. A series of tables running the length of the far wall were covered with Sherlockian bric-a-brac for sale from a handful of vendors. There was a ton of books, of course, but also a lot more - drinking glasses, book bags, Christmas ornaments, buttons (“HOLMES IS WHERE THE ♥ IS,” “HOLMES SWEET HOLMES”), tie tacks, posters, CDs, DVDs, computer games, board games, and T-shirts. There were even a few deerstalker caps on the end of the table where a hairless man in a bow tie was accepting money from people buying these treasures. This was the “field bazaar,” according to the colloquium program. I was just thinking that somebody had misspelled “bizarre” when I heard an all-too-familiar rumble behind me.
“Rather impressive for our first colloquium, eh, Jefferson?”
I whirled around, nearly spilling my coffee, just in time to see my brother-in-law bite into a pastry with some sort of white filling that oozed out of both sides of his mouth.
“That wasn’t really the word I had in mind,” I said.
I was spared elaboration by the arrival of Al Kane, who appeared behind Mac looking like a hung-over CPA. He must have made a few too many assaults on the liquid provisions at Mac’s house last night. His mustache was crooked, the evident result of an unsteady hand with the razor, and his breath smelled like cigarettes.
“I hear somebody made a big score yesterday,” he rasped.
“You refer, of course, to the raid on the Chalmers Collection?” Mac said. We hadn’t mentioned it last night upon sneaking back into his house because Mac didn’t want to put a damper on what remained of the party.