“But no funny hat,” I said.
“Pardon?” The look she gave me was puzzled, but by no means unfriendly.
“Oh, sorry, just thinking out loud,” I said. Jeff Cody, Mr. Small Talk, that’s me. I didn’t even know where to take it from there, that’s how out of practice I was at schmoozing with beautiful strangers. This one was in her early thirties, just the age when women get really interesting. She was also tall and nicely built, meaning she knew how to eat but also when to stop.
She smiled at me and said, “Interesting collection of individuals we have here.” Was it just my imagination or was she including me in that collection? It wasn’t impossible. I’m six-one, reasonably presentable if you like red-headed men, and always careful to dress only slightly out of style as befits my academic environment.
“Interesting is one word for it,” I conceded. “No offense, but I’ve never really understood this whole Sherlockian thing. I mean, I guess the Holmes stories are readable enough, but I don’t get the obsession over them. I’m more into hard-boiled private eyes, myself.”
She chuckled, a pleasant sound. “Then what are you doing here?”
For a guy who was thirty-six years old and unattached by virtue of being recently thrown over by a woman I was in love with, it marginally beat being alone on a Friday night. But I didn’t get into that.
“I’m Professor McCabe’s brother-in-law,” I confessed, “and also the public relations director at St. Benignus College. This Sherlock Holmes colloquium he’s putting on tomorrow is a fairly big deal for us. And the presentation to the school of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection of Sherlockiana is a really big deal.”
She smiled at my babbling. “That I know all about.”
“Part of my job will be to promote it with social media and mass media. And then later I have to do write-ups for the alumni magazine, the annual report, the fund-raising newsletter... it’s endless. So I’m here to soak up information. Tomorrow I’ll be taking notes and tweeting.”
I patted the reporter’s notebook salted away in my left breast pocket. “Are you one of the speakers?”
Most of the guests at this soirée were, but she shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t have much in common with Sherlock Holmes except that we both play the violin.”
Better and better, I thought. “Can I get you a drink?”
“A light beer would be nice.”
That shows how wrong you can be about a person. I had pegged her for a white-wine woman.
The drinks were in the bathroom at the other end of the long hall. Sebastian McCabe, husband to my sister, Kate, has a beer tap in his study. But when he throws a party, he fills up the claw-footed first-floor bathtub with ice and lets his guests serve themselves. I fished through the icy water and pulled up... Guinness, Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, Rivertown Dunkel. Not exactly light beers. Finally I found a bottle of Samuel Adams Light for - whom? I hadn’t even asked her name. I really was rusty after four years out of general circulation. For myself, I pulled out another caffeine-free Diet Coke. I know all the studies say that moderate intake of alcohol is actually healthful, but moderation has never been my forte. Besides, I have a history of saying things I shouldn’t after just a couple of beers. So I only partake in cases of extreme need or high celebration.
With a bottle in one hand and a can in the other, I was just turning to leave the bathroom when a bright light exploded in my face. For a second all I could see were white spots in front of me. I blinked furiously and the spots made way for a smiling Japanese man with a camera in his hand. My first thought was something like, “Who invited the press to this party?” Then I remembered all the Japanese mystery enthusiasts I’d once seen at a meeting of the Mystery Writers of America in New York. This one was probably a member of the Bartitsu Society, the incredibly huge Sherlock Holmes group in Japan.
No ugly American I, I bowed in his direction and said, “Ohio,” which I believe means hello or good morning or something like that. It’s the one bit of Japanese I can always remember because it’s the state I’ve lived in since I first came to St. Benignus College from Virginia as a student a couple of decades ago.
But the man with the camera regarded me in obvious puzzlement. “What about Ohio?”
As soon as he opened his mouth, I knew my picture belonged in the dictionary next to the word “fool,” with the appropriate synonyms: numbskull, buffoon, knucklehead. The guy didn’t have a trace of an accent. He wasn’t Japanese at all - he was an American. His parents or grandparents or honorable ancestors even further back must have come from the Land of the Rising Sun, but not him.
“Uh, it’s a nice state,” I answered lamely. “Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia.”
Light dawned. “You must be Bob Nakamora.”
He acknowledged as much and I introduced myself. Nakamora was to give a talk on Sunday morning about “Holmes on the Radio.” Appropriately, I’d scheduled him for an interview with the campus radio station. I filled him in on the time and where I’d pick him up.
“We’ll have to talk about Philadelphia some time,” I said. “I write mystery novels about a private detective named Max Cutter who lives there.” I’ve actually only been to Philadelphia a couple of times, but I decided long ago that Erin, Ohio, population 29,098 (although seemingly double that on St. Patrick’s Day), was no place for a murder mystery. Too bad I was wrong.
“Oh, sure,” Nakamora replied. “I’ve read a couple of those books.”
Unfortunately, that’s not possible. None of my five Max Cutter yarns has been published. But I had the feeling that if I didn’t leave right away the polite Mr. Nakamora would start telling me how much he liked my work, which is always depressing. I held up the Samuel Adams Light in my hand. “Somebody’s waiting for this. Catch you later.”
But when I got back to where I’d been a few minutes before, the beautiful woman in black was gone.
Why was I so surprised? Max Cutter would have figured out right away that if she weren’t one of the symposium speakers herself then she must have been brought here by one of them. She could have even been married to him. I’d been so dazzled by all that silver that I hadn’t checked to see if her jewelry included a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. But I was betting it did.
I looked around for her anyway. I had her beer. So I wandered into the kitchen for a while, heard a woman in a deerstalker cap say, “Watson must have been good at something; he was married three times!” and wandered back out. In the dining room I waved at my sister, Kate, fair and red-haired like me, who was slicing a knife through a cheese ball. Before I could say a word of greeting, somebody I recognized tried to squeeze past me in the doorway. You would have recognized him, too, even though he looked bigger and tougher on television and on the dust jackets of his books.
“Al Kane,” I blurted out.
He nodded wearily, as if tired of a quarter-century in the public eye.
“I’m Jeff Cody. We talked on the phone.”
“Right. Good to meet you.”
He let his teeth show a smile through the familiar bandit’s mustache as he shook my hand. In his mid-fifties, Al Kane wasn’t the man he once was - and maybe in reality he never had been. He was only about five-seven or -eight and his rust-colored hair was tinged with gray. His wire-rimmed glasses - which he didn’t wear on TV or his book jackets - made him look like an accountant moonlighting as a shoe store clerk, not the author of a dozen blood-and-babes novels. But then, he hadn’t come out with a new Red Maddox mystery in five years or more. Too bad. Red had been one of my heroes ever since I was a kid reading with a flashlight under the covers in bed. But all of Kane’s energies these days seemed to be devoted to appearances on commercials and talk shows as the pistol-packing spokesman for the National Pistol Association.