Noah Queensbury, a couple of rows ahead of us, offered a dollar.
After some hesitation, a large woman in a print dress pushed it up to a dollar and a quarter.
“You may not have heard of this because it’s so rare,” Nakamora said, “but it was edited by the late, great Sherlockian Edgar W. Smith.”
“Five dollars,” Woollcott Chalmers said from across the room. He sat next to Renata, watching the auctioneer with eyes that betrayed an intensity of engagement. He cared what happened here.
“Six,” Queensbury counter-bid.
“Ten.” Chalmers’s voice betrayed the ragged edge of irritation.
“What the hell’s he coming on so strong for?” Lynda whispered. “He already owns every Holmes book known to humankind.”
“Not anymore,” I pointed out. “Besides, it’s how you play the game that counts for somebody like him, and he plays the game to win.”
Queensbury hung in until the bidding climbed up to twenty-five dollars, then flashed a nervous look at his spouse, the judge. Molly Crocker stirred in her seat. With obvious reluctance, Queensbury shook his head at Nakamora, silently taking himself out of the competition.
The smile on Chalmers’s craggy face was a sort of victory flag as he limped up to claim his hard-won prize. He had plenty more to smile about in the next half-hour as a dozen or so other books piled up on Renata’s lap.
“He must be trying to rebuild his whole blasted collection,” Lynda said.
“Starting with that, I suppose,” I said, nodding at the Beeton’s concealed in a paper bag in Lynda’s hand.
Just as the last item was sold (a Hound of the Baskervilles scarf that went to Barry Landers), Mac strode into the Hearth Room and up to the lectern. He removed the unlit cigar from his mouth as if to speak, but instead tossed the cigar into the air - where it turned into a yellow rose. He caught the flower and pinned it onto his boutonniere. Will the man never grow up?
“Weekends are always too short,” he commented, “and this one has been shorter than most. Though marred by tragedy, this first annual ‘Investigating Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes’ colloquium has fulfilled all my hopes for a program that would be both entertaining and enlightening. What I mean is, it worked.”
The crowd showed its agreement with applause - a little less thunderous than at other times during the weekend since maybe a third of the crowd had left early. Mac responded with a promise to reprise the program as long as they kept coming back.
“Until next time, then,” he concluded, “I bid you farewell and beg you to remember: There’s no police like Holmes!”
As he moved away from the lectern, he was mobbed by friends. Lynda and I finally cornered him a long five or ten minutes later. Being Mac, he acted like we’d been the ones missing in action.
“I need your report, Jefferson,” he harrumphed.
“Where have you been while we were doing your legwork?” Lynda demanded.
“I was involved in legwork of my own, as it turned out,” Mac said. “For one thing, I procured a verbal summary of the Sussex County coroner’s findings.”
“Oscar told me about that,” I said. “There was a .32 revolver bullet still lodged in the body, no powder burns.” Apparently shot from a distance, Oscar had said.
“Precisely, old boy! It makes the truth about the weapon transparent, does it not? Of course, the TV4 report was already highly suggestive in that matter.”
“TV4?” I repeated. “What did the-”
“We can discuss that later. What did you find out from Gene Pfannenstiel? Molly Crocker? Renata and Woollcott? Noah Queensbury? Reuben Pinkwater?” He spit out the names like shots from a Tommy gun.
For all the talk about Queensbury, we hadn’t actually talked to him, I realized now. But I unloaded everything I had, leaving out only Lynda’s misadventure in Mac’s house. Deliberately, I ended with Molly Crocker’s bombshell about Renata and Matheson as a buildup to our own suspicion of Chalmers.
“I was, of course, aware of that most unfortunate dalliance,” Mac said.
“Of course,” I snapped, peeved at his attitude. “Then maybe you’re also aware that your own house guest is the killer.”
“House guest?” If Mac had one of his big cigars in his mouth right then it would have fallen out.
“Woollcott Chalmers,” Lynda said with deliberation, twisting the knife.
“Ah, Jefferson, Lynda-” He looked from one to the other of us with sadness.
“Did somebody take my name in vain?”
All three of us looked around.
Chalmers, his face screwed into a smile, was holding tight to Renata like a metaphor of dependency.
Lynda pulled the Beeton’s Christmas Annual out of the brown bag we’d swiped from the underwear drawer in Chalmers’s room. She thrust it in front of the old man’s face. “Is this what it seems to be?”
Chalmers took it from her and sank down into a chair to page through the annual with painstaking care. “Yes,” he said finally, “it is absolutely authentic. This is wonderful! Where did you get it?”
“From your dresser in the McCabes’ guest suite,” Lynda said.
Mac pulled on his beard and Renata gasped.
“You went into my dresser? This is an outrage!” Chalmers sputtered.
“At least a lapse of etiquette,” I agreed. “But not as impolite as murder.”
Chalmers beseeched Mac. “Perhaps you can tell me what your brother-in-law is ranting about.”
Mac ignited a cigar. Apparently this was no time to obey the NO SMOKING signs, which he usually did in less stressful situations. (Friday night when he used the lit cigar to break the balloon didn’t count because that fit into the category of “just showing off.”)
“I am afraid, Woollcott, that Jefferson believes you killed Hugh,” he said between puffs to stoke up. “If I perceive the scenario correctly, your motives were primarily jealousy and secondarily to retrieve the stolen Sherlockiana which was in Hugh’s possession.”
“But I didn’t have the Beeton’s,” the old man protested. “Somebody must have put it in that drawer. You tell them, Renata.”
She seemed somehow to pull away from her husband, distancing herself from him, without physically moving at all. “I don’t go into your drawers, Woollcott. You wouldn’t like that.”
Chalmers grew older, smaller, in his chair.
“We didn’t think jealousy was the main motive at all,” Lynda said. “It was the blow to his pride when he found out that he was being cuckolded, the realization that Matheson had taken away from him something that he regarded as his.”
Renata stepped away from her husband, a look of horror mixed with fear on her face. At least, that’s how I read it. I could have sworn she believed he’d killed her lover.
Summoning up a reserve of strength, Chalmers tightened his grip on the arms of his chair and peered up at us with a fierce look. “How dare you people pry into my personal affairs? You have no damned right to invade my privacy with your amateur meddling!” He reminded me of the villain in a Sherlock Holmes story I read once, the one with the snake.
“Woollcott,” Mac said with a surprising gentleness, “the matter is scarcely a secret within the Anglo-Indian Club.”
Chalmers slumped back into the chair, as if exhausted. “Renata is a young woman and I am an old man.” His voice was distant and dry, like the sound of old newspapers rustling together. “I couldn’t blame her for having a little fling with Matheson. I knew it was merely physical.”
“I’m not... I’m not... a tramp,” his wife said, gripping the back of Chalmers’s chair. In the weird, surreal circumstances it struck me as an old-fashioned word. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply for a second. “My needs were not just physical. I could never make you understand that, Woollcott. I loved you and I wanted your companionship - I wanted to talk to you about art and music and films. But you were so absorbed in that collection... Hugh at least pretended to be interested in me. I was fool. I knew his reputation, but somehow I convinced myself it was different with me, that we had something real.”