Locked rooms

firmly on the little side-table.

“Mr Hammett, you may at one time have been a Pinkerton operative, but you are no longer. For whom are you working?”

The man's brown eyes flew open in surprise, and he held them open as a show of innocence. “Why do you say that?”

“Young man, you bring me here yet expect me to believe you an active operative? Do not take me for a fool. You receive an Army disability pension because of your lungs, and you have no doubt supplemented that from time to time with work for the agency, but you are a man who at times is so debilitated you cannot make it from one end of the apartment to the next without stopping to rest. At the moment you are attempting to support your wife and small daughter by writing for popular journals.”

The bone-thin fingers slowly resumed their movements, automatically taking a precise pinch of tobacco and arranging it along the centre of the paper without his looking. “You want to tell me how you know all that?”

“Eyes, man: have them, use them. The doll, a woman's magazine on the side-table, two envelopes from the United States Army in a pigeon-hole, the Underwood on the kitchen table, and a pile of manuscript pages and copies of such literary works as Black Mask. Mr Hammett, I of all people should recognise the signs of a struggling writer.”

“The Smart Set on the side-table is mine, not my wife's,” Hammett asserted, but weakly. “I write for them. But how could you know of my occasional . . . debility?”

“A series of chair-backs have worn marks into the wall-paper where they are occasionally arranged to allow you to walk the thirty feet from chair to bath without falling to the floor,” Holmes told him dismissively. “Satisfied?”

Hammett's eyes fell at last to the cigarette his fingers had made. He ran a tongue along the edge, pressed it, and as he lit a match his eyes came back to Holmes'. “You're that Holmes, aren't you? The detective.”

“I am, yes.”

“I always thought . . .”

“That I was a fictional character?”

“That maybe there'd been some . . . exaggerations.”

Holmes laughed aloud. “One of the inadvertent side-effects of Watson's florid writing style coupled with Conan Doyle's name is that Sherlock Holmes tends to be either wildly overestimated, or the other extreme, dismissed entirely as something of a joke. It used to infuriate me—Doyle's a dangerously gullible lunatic—but apart from the blow to my ego, it's actually remarkably convenient.”

“You don't say,” Hammett responded, clearly taken aback at the idea of the flesh-and-blood man seated in his living-room being considered a piece of fiction. And no doubt wondering how he would feel, were someone to do the same to him.

It was all a bit dizzying.

Fortunately, Holmes had his eye on the ball. “Now, will you tell me who hired you to follow me?”

“Okay. You're right. But it was through the Pinkertons. I used to work for them, and like I said, I still do little jobs for them from time to time, when I feel up to it. I had a bad spell recently, but the rent's due, so when one of my old partners there called and said they needed a couple nights' work I said sure. But after I'd got the job, I began to wonder if he hadn't thought the job stunk and decided to palm it off on me. Here, let me show you.”

He went to the table and opened the top drawer, pulling out a thick brown file folder, which he laid on the small table and flipped open, sliding the top piece of paper over to Holmes. On it was printed:

I wish to know all possible details concerning the whereabouts and interests of Mr. S. Holmes and Miss M. Russell, staying at the St Francis Hotel. She owns a house in Pacific Heights. I shall phone you at 8:00 on the morning of Tuesday, 6 May for news.

“That's what I got, that and a 'phone call. Now, it's not unusual to get a case over the 'phone, but I like to meet my clients face-to-face, and the lady didn't seem all that eager to meet with me. Refused, in fact. And paid cash in an envelope delivered by messenger—not a service either, just a kid, a shabby one. The whole set-up made me feel pretty uncomfortable.”

“Thinking that perhaps you were being brought into something less than legal?”

“That there was something shady here, and I don't like being played for a chump.”

“‘Played for a chump',” Holmes repeated to himself as he bent over the note with his pocket magnifying- glass. “A flavourful sample of the vernacular. Hmm. What can you tell me about your telephone caller?”

“Woman, like I said.”

“Woman, or lady?”

“I guess I'd call her a lady, if we set aside the question of whatever it is she's up to. Anyway, she talked like someone who'd been educated. In the South—deep South, that is.”

Holmes' head snapped up from the handwritten note. “A Southern woman?” he said sharply. “From what part of the South?”

“That I couldn't say. Not Texas, deeper than that—Alabama, Georgia, maybe the Carolinas, that sort of thing. Slow like molasses, you know?”

But Holmes was not so easily satisfied. “Did she use any words that struck you as slightly unusual?” he pressed. “What about her vowels—what did her a's sound like? Did she employ any hidden diphthongs?”

Hammett, however, could be no clearer than he had been; Holmes shook his head and returned to the note, leaving the younger man to feel that he had let down the Pinkerton side rather badly.

“You getting anything out of that?” he asked, sounding a trifle short.

“Very little,” Holmes admitted, but before Hammett could make a pointed display of his own impatience, Holmes continued. “Criminals print because it conceals everything about them up to and including their sex. I see very little here, other than the obvious, of course: that she is right-handed, middle-aged, in good health, and educated; that she is probably American—hence the profligate scattering of full-stops—but has spent long enough in Europe that ‘six May' rather than ‘May six' comes to her pen; that said pen is expensive and probably gold-nibbed but the ink is not her own, as it shows an unfortunate tendency to clump and dry unevenly. The paper itself might reward enquiries from the city's stationers, although the watermark appears neither remarkable nor exclusive. And I should say that, behind its careful formation of the letters, the lady's hand betrays a tendency toward self- centredness such as one sees in the hand of most career criminals.”

“The lady's a crook? Well, that sure narrows things down in a town this size.”

“I shouldn't hold my breath,” Holmes agreed, folding his magnifying-glass into its pocket and handing back the brief note. “Businessmen and even mere social climbers often display the same traits.”

“You don't say?” Hammett mused, holding the note up into the light as if to follow the track of the older man's deductions.

“Graphology is far from an exact science, but it does reward study.” Holmes sat back in the chair, took out his pipe and got it going, then fixed his host with a sharp grey eye. “So, Mr Hammett, am I to understand that you wish to terminate your employment with the lady from the South?”

“Not sure how I can do that; I took her money.”

“Have you spent it?”

In answer, Hammett opened the file again and took out the envelope that gave it its thickness, handing it to Holmes. “I opened it to see how much there was, and since then it's sat there, untouched.”

Holmes opened the flap and ran his thumb slowly up the side of the bills within, taking note of their number and their denomination. His eyebrow arched and he looked at Hammett, who nodded as if in agreement.

“Yeah, way too much money for a couple days' trailing.”

“But as, what is the term? ‘Hush money'?”

“You can see why I got nervous.”

Holmes dropped the envelope back in the file; Hammett flipped the cover shut as if to put the money out of sight. “What I can see,” said Holmes, “is that I'm dealing with a man who prefers to choose his employer.”

“Mr Holmes, I've got a family. I'm not a whole lot of good to them, the state I'm in, but I'd be a lot less good in prison.”

Despite Hammett's explanation, Holmes thought that the threat of gaol was less of a deterrent than the