roared.
It was intimidating how he towered over us as he raged, but neither Boothby nor I moved. The arteries in his neck stood out, throbbing. He was breathing quickly and heavily, and trembling as he glared at Boothby, practically gasping for breath. A drop of blood slid from one nostril. His hand shot into his pocket and produced a handkerchief. More blood dripped from his nose. He wiped it and stared at the handkerchief, then at Boothby, then back at the handkerchief. A moment later his eyes seemed to get wet. He kept staring at the handkerchief. Tears slid down his cheeks, and blood flowed freely from his nostrils. He pressed the handkerchief to his nose and dropped back into his armchair, the handkerchief covering his face, shaking and weeping uncontrollably.
Boothby slowly got to his feet. He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Gibson, get a lawyer. Please.” He motioned to me and I followed him out.
The next Tuesday afternoon I was in the law library thrilling at Maine’s case law on easements by prescription when the court clerk told me Boothby wanted me to meet him in the park again. It took a while, but finally I found him by the pond. He looked grumpy, so I decided to try to lighten his mood.
“Hi, Judge.” I pointed to the three Canada geese paddling across the pond. “You know how to tell a male Canada goose from a female Canada goose?”
“I don’t know, Artie. How do you tell a male Canada goose from a female Canada goose?”
“Simple: the males are white and gray and black, whereas the females are black and gray and white.”
Boothby raised his left eyebrow and looked at me, snorted with the tiniest smile, and shook his head.
“Artie,” he said, “how the fuck did you ever pass the bar exam?”
Well, it worked, sort of. He watched the geese for a while, then pulled out his Pall Malls for his afternoon treat. His movements were unhurried, and he didn’t say anything. Nor did I.
Finally: “I just learned—don’t tell anyone—that Gibson Watts has taken leave to attend a four-week rehab program.” He put a cigarette to his mouth and lit it.
I nodded. This would end Watts’s judicial career and maybe bring him beyond the tipping point for reasonable doubt about murder.
“After dropping you off on Saturday,” he said, “I called the State Police. I told their investigator everything we’d learned. And I’ve hardly gotten any sleep since.” An inhale followed by a smoke ring. “What did you learn from this experience, Artie?”
“It’s good to be suspicious of coincidences.”
“Right. And it’s good to exercise logic. Over the past few days you and I analyzed the evidence logically, so we probably solved the crime—in fact, an especially odious one because, if I may paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, when a judge goes wrong he’s the worst of criminals. And we’re just like Holmes, aren’t we? We achieved a triumph of logic. And that’s what we lawyers are trained for. So I should feel triumphant, shouldn’t I? So why do I feel like dogshit?”
I couldn’t resist; nobody was going to out-Conan-Doyle me: “Because,” I said, “as Moriarty once told Holmes, the situation had become an impossible one. In other words, there was no satisfactory outcome.”
“That’s true.” He flicked the ash off the end of his cigarette. “But that’s not what’s bothering me.” Another inhale. “Now that we’re in Sherlock Holmes mode, do you remember ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’?”
Well, he had me there. “No,” I admitted.
“Then let me enlighten you with my favorite Holmesian quotation.” He smiled at me unenthusiastically. “ ‘Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.’ What do you think of that, Artie?”
I didn’t have a clue, so I shrugged.
“It’s as fictitious as Holmes himself.” He paused and looked toward the geese again. He was gathering himself.
“Ina was murdered, Artie. Murdered. The closest I’d ever been to murder was in the courtroom, where all I do is control the proceedings so the defendant gets a proper trial. A purely formal process, the less emotional the better. I’d never known someone who was murdered, let alone someone who did it, so I’d never experienced its horror personally. No triumph of logic, no intellectual grand slam, can tame my reaction to such hideousness. It can’t lessen my outrage over Ina’s death, or my sympathy for Emmy, or, for that matter, my anguish for Gibson, a great friend, and what he’s become.”
He turned to me. “So here’s what I learned: that’s how it
I realized something: “Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict, wasn’t he?”
He stared at me for a moment. The eyebrows went up.
“And a bachelor.”
He dropped his cigarette on the ground and smushed it slowly with his shoe. When he’d finished he looked up and poked me in the arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.”
Longtime admirers of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, John Sheldon and Gayle Lynds are also partners in crime and life. They live together in rural Maine, where “A Triumph of Logic” is set. The story’s hero, Judge Linwood Boothby, comes from John’s experience as a Maine prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge, and a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School. He’s working on his first suspense novel featuring, of course, Judge Boothby and Artie Morey. The pianist in the story, Julia Austrian, is the heroine of Gayle’s book
Readers are invited to search this story for clues to a subplot: Dr. Watson has murdered Sherlock Holmes’s love, Irene Adler, and his crime has been solved by the combined efforts of Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, and, of all people, Holmes’s archenemy Moriarty.
THE LAST OF SHEILA-LOCKE HOLMES
Years later, when people tried to tease her about the summer she turned eleven and opened her own detective agency, she always changed the subject. People thought she was embarrassed because she wore a deerstalker cap with a sweatshirt and utility belt and advertised her services under the name Sheila Locke-Holmes, which was almost her real name anyway. She was actually Sheila Locke-Weiner, but it was bad enough to be that in real life. The only case she ever solved was the one about her father’s missing
Besides, it didn’t begin with the deerstalker cap, despite what her parents think they remember. She was already open for business when she found the cap, on her mother’s side of the walk-in closet, in a box full of odd things. Because her mother was Firmly Against Clutter—a pronouncement she made often, usually to Sheila’s father, who was apparently on the side of clutter—this unmarked box was particularly interesting to Sheila. It contained the deerstalker cap, although she did not know to call it that; a very faded orange T-shirt that said GO CLIMB A ROCK; a sky blue wool cape with a red plaid lining; and a silver charm bracelet.
She took the box to her mother, who told Sheila that she really must learn to respect other people’s privacy and property. “We talked about this. Remember, Sheila? You promised to do better.”
“But I have to practice searching for things,” Sheila said. “It’s my job. May I have the T-shirt? It’s cool, like the shirts people buy at Abercrombie, only even better because it’s really old, not fake-old.”
“Don’t you want the cape, too? And the charm bracelet? I think those things are back in style as well.”
Sheila maintained a polite silence. Her mother was not the kind of mother who was actually up-to-date on what was cool. She just thought she was. “I like the cap. It’s like the one on that book that Daddy is always
