I was often left with no occupation more pressing than to watch my companion dote on Mollie as she attacked a roll of yarn. Yet, it was my forehead she would pounce on in the still hours of the night and bat her claws into my nostrils. Mollie had grown attached to Holmes and after dinners would curl up in his lap as he read a Blue Book guide to cats he had secured inexpensively.
“My dear Holmes,” I said at one point, “how long must
“Watson, I am a little surprised at your impatience with the speechless creature. She has come very close to absolving your old friend of the grave charge of murder already.”
Later that day, I sat with Sherlock Holmes at a fine restaurant he had pointed out in our guidebook among the elegant, tree-lined rows of aristocratic Boston. This outing took me quite by surprise, given my friend’s thrifty tastes. Only once we were on our way there, did I realize he had carried Mollie with us in the green bag. I suggested that the restaurant would not permit her, and, even if we were to smuggle her inside, were she to begin meowing incessantly (as was her custom), we would be thrown out.
“I suppose you are correct, as this is not Paris, where they are permissive of animal companions,” Holmes said. He tied a long ribbon he had in his pocket from her neck to a lamppost that could be seen from the restaurant’s window. It was a rather strange sight, I suppose, to the American pedestrians. Shortly into our meal, two young women in expensive silk dresses stopped and reached down for Mollie, who backed away and looked coolly at them. After some unsuccessful inducements to prove their friendship, the women yielded. Later, as Holmes uncharacteristically ordered dessert, a more dramatic trial came for the poor creature. Two well-dressed boys began to throw rocks at her. Mollie cried out and tried to run toward the restaurant.
I rose from my chair and readied my walking stick as a weapon. To my surprise, Holmes did not stir.
“Holmes, would you allow such torment by those little devils?”
The imps now crossed to Mollie’s side of the street, as their aim had been fortunately bad. Just as I was about to step into the fray, a hail of rocks flew at the perpetrators instead of the kitten. I craned my neck out the window and recognized three boys from Mrs. Smith’s Kindness Club. Though they were smaller than Mollie’s tormentors, they outnumbered the evildoers, successfully chasing them away and likely warning them never to harm helpless animals again without fearing their little club’s vengeance.
“Do you not think it somewhat strange,” I remarked when we exited, “those Kindness boys from Mrs. Smith’s club would be in this part of the city!”
“I do not think it strange at all,” replied Holmes, untying our little pet, and taking her up with one hand, “as I directed them to come. You must know I should want nothing to happen to our little colleague, Watson.”
Leaving my companion afterwards, I visited my old friend Lavey, who was weeping with news that the prosecuting attorney brought the most severe counts against him in his indictment. He begged me to convince his jailers to allow me to administer medicine to him. By this, I knew, he meant his opium, as I watched him trembling, perspiring, and yawning uncontrollably.
Holmes, meanwhile, had spent the day in leisurely visits to scientific correspondents at the laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to the site near Harvard of the famous Parkman case. Knowing the remarkable character of Sherlock Holmes’s mind, I had eliminated any doubt as to his commitment to Lavey’s case. I was therefore not surprised upon returning to our lodging house when Holmes met me at the door and requested that I repair immediately to the police station and inform Detective Dugan that we wished to visit their prison in Charlestown in the morning. He also provided some particular requests for Dugan to fulfill for our arrival.
“Shall I tell him the purpose of all this, Holmes?” I asked.
“I see you wonder about my methods in this case, Watson. Were you to have considered the data and my actions at each step, you would cease to. Yet, your friendship with the suspected murderer has prevented that, I fancy, for you think about the welfare of the man, not about the logic of the crime, a fatal mistake that has reduced many a detective into a charitable worker. In this case the man was a simple clue, nothing more. As for Dugan, you may tell him that if he grants my peculiar wishes, I shall point out for him a brutal fugitive sought by the law across New England.”
The next morning, we had no sooner arrived at the Charlestown prison than it was apparent to me that Dugan had carried out Holmes’s requests with strict deference. Crowded into a small courtyard were no less than fifteen criminals guarded on all sides. Holmes, striding in, removed a lens from his pocket and examined their hands and arms as he walked. Without looking up at their faces, he stopped in front of a particular prisoner and waved for Dugan.
“Detective, what has this man been arrested for, and what does he claim as his name?” Holmes asked.
“Horse thievery, Mr. Holmes. His name is Julius McArthur, and he is serving two months.”
“If I am not mistaken,” replied Holmes, “you shall find McArthur a mere alias. His name is George Simpson, a murderer of a deputy sheriff in Brunswick, as well as a bigamist, a forger, and the true killer of Mary Painting-the housemaid you know as Mary Ann Pinton.”
“Mary dead?” the man in question exploded at Holmes. “How could it be? I didn’t mean to be rough, I only wanted her to come away with me! Mary, not my Mary!” he howled her name several more times as he fell to his knees and sobbed. Two prison guards ushered the pitiful beast away. I turned and stared at Holmes as did the detective. I could not, at that moment, remember him ever completing a case in so abrupt and unexpected a fashion as to locate the perpetrator already inside the walls of a prison!
“Why, Holmes, you have saved Lavey! But how is it you knew the girl’s killer to be in this prison?” I asked. “And how, just by looking at the hands of this assortment of rascally men?”
“My dear Watson, you ask me to reveal my methods to an audience of eager ears in gray flannel who might put them to use. I have learned by telegram that we must soon depart at once for New York to attend to a grave affair with my old friend Hargreave. If Detective Dugan will accompany us on one final errand, I will happily explain the steps that have now brought a very bad fellow to justice. Detective, would you be kind enough?”
“I would not think of doing otherwise!” Dugan declared, still awestruck at the turn of events.
At Carver Street, we were ushered back into the parlor of Anna Harris Smith at the Animal Rescue League. I sat on an armchair with a cat as black as Poe’s, the poor animal having been the victim of neglect but now recuperating nicely, while Detective Dugan shared the crimson sofa with the same lazy specimen of feline (who I now heard Mrs. Smith refer to as “Stuffy”) who had been in that spot on our last visit.
“Mr. Holmes, I cannot wait a moment longer to hear!” Detective Dugan exclaimed with such fervor that even Stuffy seemed interested. Mrs. Smith stood to the side with a curious smile.
“Very well,” said Holmes, placing down the green case. He opened the flap and our fluffy orange and white kitten, with the heterochromatic eyes, crawled out to check her surroundings.
“You know this kitten, Watson?” asked Holmes.
“Why, of course I do. It is our Mollie.”
“The same dear kitten I saved from the residence of Dr. Lavey, and gave over to Mrs. Smith with my own hands,” added Detective Dugan.
“Wrong,” Holmes said.
Suddenly, a second orange and white kitten climbed into view from inside the bag. She was identical in every way, down to boasting one blue and one gray eye, though they had now switched places so that the blue was on the right and the gray on the left.
“Heavens above, Holmes! There are two of them. They are regular Dromios!” I cried, thinking of the dual figures in Shakespeare’s
“But what does this second cat have to do with the murder?” Dugan asked.
“Everything, my dear Detective!” Holmes answered. “When you removed Mollie from the scene of the murder, Detective Dugan, you had unknowingly displaced the only revealing clue in the entire place. You shall see it for yourself. When I first heard that Mary had brought a young kitten into Dr. Lavey’s home, I presumed at once that it was a gift someone had made to her. Mother cats are protective of their young, and do not part with their offspring willingly. A mother cat could meet with accident or malice, leaving her kittens behind, but the poor creatures in that circumstance will seldom survive a night, often contracting the diseases peculiar to their race or falling victim to other animals of the streets. So, the circumstances of Mary, not owning a cat, and then coming in possession of a healthy kitten, suggested that the animal had been presented to her from somewhere else.”
