Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

“She has brought me plates of food never requested,” he said about this. “She has spent daytime hours locked in her little room instead of at her duties!”

I could not know then what startling events the moody statements of my old friend Dr. Lavey portended.

Lavey’s misery was so robust, I was relieved at the end of our breakfast to be left in peace with some free time and my guidebook to Boston. Two days later, Lavey returned to my lodgings at dinner. He was out of breath and had fear painted across his face.

“Why, Lavey, you are not well,” I said. “Let us have something to eat.” I wanted to get a closer look at him, thinking I had recognized in him some telltale signs of an opium eater.

He cried out in a muttering voice, his hands clapped to his brow, “Dead!”

“What?”

“She is dead, Watson! And the detectives’ eyes are hot with suspicion. My dear Watson, I know you have experience in the line of queer criminal happenings. You are the only friend remaining to me in the wide world. You must help!”

During the night, Lavey said, he had been awakened to a loud thumping. Dressing hastily and taking a rifle from the wall, he nearly tumbled down the stairs before finding his housemaid, Mary Ann Pinton, lying dead on his kitchen floor. That was all he could remember. When next conscious, he was lying on top of her body with his rifle and the police were shaking him. It occurred to me that the whole fantastic tale had been some mental production of his opiates.

“Lavey, remain here with me in my lodgings,” I implored him.

“No. She is gone; I must take care of her!” he said cryptically, and hurried away from the premises deaf to my pleas.

Opening the next morning’s paper, I found news of the most alarming type: Dr. Joseph Lavey, the man to whom I owed my life, arrested for the murder of Mary Ann Pinton!

I cabled my friend and traveling companion, Sherlock Holmes, at once requesting that he depart on the earliest train for Boston. He had remained at our hotel in Portland, Maine, on business of a personal nature while I had continued our tour of New England.

During these same days, my name and Holmes’s could be found in the Boston news columns. It was said that I had decided to hide Sherlock Holmes from the public of Boston. That when we had crossed through New Hampshire, I kept my coat draped over his face. That I had refused to make him available in any public appearances. Various editors called for Holmes to banish me back to England and replace me with an improved companion, preferably a Yankee. Meanwhile, I received piles of notes from portrait artists and photographers proposing Holmes the honor of sitting for them, and others from admirers offering up to twenty dollars for locks of his hair!

All this interrupted my attempts on poor Lavey’s behalf. As I sat at my small desk writing letters to lawyers one afternoon, I was surprised in turning around for my water carafe to find that the armchair by the open window was now occupied.

“Holmes!” I cried.

“Boston is a city of overgrown college men,” Sherlock Holmes said abstractedly.

I was overjoyed to have my friend back by my side.

Holmes had been suffering from the variety of mild ailments to the skin, nails, and lungs that many English visitors to United States cities experienced from the stale air and the lack of ventilation inside buildings and trains. Yet, as though his spirits compensated for his physical depression, Holmes had more than usual pluck and smartness in his slender, swift frame. I explained in detail what I knew about Lavey’s case.

“You say your reunion with this man at this lodging house was less than pleasant?” Holmes asked, steepling his long fingers together.

“Lavey is by disposition a temperamental man. Still, he had been a well-meaning citizen at the side of his American wife, Amelia, a good and strong woman I counted as my friend. Since her death by pneumonia, I believe he has reverted to his former state, and turned to drugs for comfort.”

“You had not seen him for many years, then.”

“No. Yet I am fully inclined to give the old fellow assistance when requested-his dutiful services when an army surgeon having saved my life in the base hospital at Peshawar.”

“That is an old grudge,” Holmes observed.

“I should call it gratitude, not at all a grudge ,” I protested earnestly, “toward a man who kept me from death.”

“You misunderstand, my dear Watson,” said Holmes. “I mean the grudge to be on his part against you. There is nothing quite as trying as saving another man’s life. He punishes you to this day. Yet, since you maintain a personal attachment, the case shall be ours. As you know, I cannot promise it will turn out as you want it to. But I should not mind terribly satisfying a long curiosity I’ve had by making a firsthand study of the methods of Boston detectives-the oldest department of detection in the United States, Watson. In my knowledge of Boston crooks, their crimes are by no means as clever as Chicago nor as desperate as New York, but they are singular to the degree their misdeeds are performed out of public view. One thing, Watson, have you seen Dr. Lavey since his arrest?”

“Yes. I visited the jail this morning and found he hadn’t even a lawyer! He can hardly be of help to himself, I am afraid, Holmes. He mumbled pitiably how he could not be guilty of any crime if he could remember nothing of it.”

“To be found lying on top of a murder victim is most unfortunate for the public perception. I should be interested in what he has to say about the girl. Miss Pinton, you say?”

I nodded. “He knows very little. Miss Pinton is twenty-three or twenty-four, from somewhere out west. Though quite attractive, she never married, has no family to speak of, never had a single visitor to the house.”

“You are right that Dr. Lavey knows very little, but to our advantage. I am certain you have already considered that a housemaid may meet all kinds of ruffians on her errands for her master.”

“Yes, Holmes, I did think just that. I asked Lavey to tell me the location of every household mission he had sent her on in the last weeks. I have recorded them on the map of Boston in McNally’s guidebook, with a mark in red for his house.” I showed this to Holmes, who seemed extremely pleased by it.

“Excellent, Watson! This shall be critical in time in understanding the crime.”

“There was one other thing, Holmes. I thought it might be promising, but it turned out rather useless. When Lavey left here the other day in quite a state, I had urged him to remain but he said, ‘She is gone; I must take care of her.’ I thought it a queer phrase considering.”

“Yes, I see why.”

“This morning, I asked my friend in his cell, whom he had gone to take care of, whether it was perhaps a patient of his. It was my suspicion, as a matter of fact, that it was a mistress he was concerned about.”

“A fine line of questioning, Watson. And did he tell you about the little animal?”

“Why, Holmes, you astound me still! Exactly!” I cried. “Lavey looked at me with a blank stare, then said, ‘Oh, no. I meant only I had to take care of Mollie, the wretched kitten Mary had brought into the house the other day.’ But Holmes, how did you know his strange words had referred to a pet?”

Holmes waved this away and smiled. “A trivial deduction little worthy of talk, Watson. If Lavey and his maid were united in the care of another being in their quiet household, by which Mary’s sudden absence burdened her master, it was most likely to be a domestic animal and no doubt, with his recent mood, any pet too large or unseemly would have already met with expulsion. I shall say no more on the subject for now, so that we may begin to gather one or two important particulars you have failed to consider.”