Stuart Kaminsky - He Done Her Wrong

He zipped his pants solemnly, steadied himself against the white tile wall, straightened his straw hat, and asked what group I was with.

“Engineer’s Thumbs,” I said.

“Engineers,” he said.

“Right,” I agreed, not wanting to make his world any more complicated than it already was.

By the time I got back everyone was seated and waiting for me. There were about twenty of them. Lachtman let out a small sigh when he spotted me and motioned with his hand to the empty seat on his left. I strolled over while the group watched me, and I had the sudden fear that I had forgotten to zip up in the washroom. I settled myself in next to Lachtman, who introduced me to Officer Margaritte.

Lachtman rose and in a far-from-steady voice said that the dinner was about to be served and that the speaker for tonight was Tony Pastor, a real detective who would be introduced more fully later by Lou Randisi. The caped crusader who sat opposite me at one of four round tableclothed tables let his eyes roll upward in anticipation.

Randisi, alias Alvin the Aardvark, sat on my left, hurrying down a scotch.

“Teaching high school is like walking in MacArthur Park. It’s nice to look at the animals, but while you’re doing it you always step in their crap.”

That was the extent of his conversation with me during the meal.

Lachtman kept his head down and attended to eating. Randisi kept his snout in his drink and his mind on his students. It was Friday, May 1, May Day 1942. He had the weekend to look forward to and summer vacation was coming, but it didn’t seem to cheer him up through the roast chicken, salad, and orange sherbet.

Lachtman got up to apologize for the lack of sugar for the coffee. The sale of sugar had stopped three days before and wouldn’t begin again till people picked up their sugar ration books on Monday.

“A lot of things are going to be rationed,” bellowed the man in the cape, “before this war is over.” He looked at Lachtman piercingly, as if the sugar shortage were his fault. Then he said, “Cyril Overton.”

I wasn’t sure whether that was his name, the person responsible for the shortage, a black-market sugar dealer we could all go to, or someone he was turning the floor over to.

As he sat down, Lachtman said, “‘The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.’”

Mrs. Lachtman leaned back to speak over her husband’s thin shoulders.

“It’s part of our procedure,” she explained. “One can throw a challenge from the Canon of Holmes tales and the challenged party must identify the story in which the item appears.”

She had good brown eyes and dark hair that reminded me of Anne, my former wife, who was scheduled to marry an airline executive. I smiled at her. She smiled back a bit too officially and returned to her sugarless coffee.

I said something to Aardvark, but he only grunted morosely, staring into his sherbet. He seemed to have a fondness for concentrating on melting things.

When dinner was over, Lachtman pulled some notes from his May Company shopping bag. I could also see a Holmes deerstalker cap in the bag and watched Lachtman’s right hand waver over it, almost touch it and pull away. He looked up at his wife, who gave him no sign either way.

“‘Darkness,’” she said softly.

“The title of chapter four of ‘The Valley of Fear,’” Lachtman answered, but couldn’t bring himself to whip out the hat and plunk it on his head. Throughout the rest of the next hour of the meeting I caught him reaching into that bag six times. He never did get up enough nerve to touch it, let alone put it on his head. I was tempted to do it for him, like my sister-in-law Ruth plunking a leather aviator’s cap on one of my nephews, Nat or Dave.

The preliminaries were painful and unswift. The Pierces had small photographs of London taken in 1937. They were passed around photo by photo while the Pierces alternated in telling how they thought each photo showed some location from a Holmes story.

The next order of business was the mysterious Campbell report. Lachtman gave the floor over to Richard Campbell, who turned out to be the man with the cape. He rose with a flourish, threw back his cape, stroked his thin moustache, and strode to the front table past a beagle-faced waiter, who had already started to clear off plates. Campbell gave the waiter a deadly glare, which did no good, and spoke.

“My report,” he began, the time between the two words equaling the duration of the Battle of Midway, “is not fully prepared. But it soon will be. Mark my word. It soon will be.”

With that he returned to his seat and folded his arms, waiting for someone to dare criticize him.

“Cynthia Brewer,” mumbled Aardvark.

The superior sneer left Campbell’s face. His eyes darted back and forth as if reading frantically through his memory of all the tales of Conan Doyle in a mad frenzy to recover the forgotten name.

“Challenge,” he shouted at Aardvark, who didn’t look up.

“He challenged,” I said to Randisi, whose eyes were cast forlornly on the disappearing sherbet.

“What?” said Aardvark, brushing a wisp of orange hair from his forehead.

“He challenged Cynthia Brewer,” came a voice, an old lady voice.

Aardvark’s confusion was evident.

“He challenged Cynthia Brewer?”

“He did,” I said. “Who is she?”

“She’s a sophomore in my early American history class,” he said. “How does he know her? I was just thinking …”

“And now,” said Lachtman the meek and bald, rising with a prod from Officer Margaritte before he could make another swipe at the deerstalker challenging him in his shopping bag, “Lou will introduce our speaker for the night.”

He sat down and all eyes turned to Randisi, whose head was down completely, lost in the scotch memory of Cynthia Brewer.

We waited for several moments for Randisi to stir, but the best he could do was reach up and remove his name card. We all watched in fascination as he turned it right-side up, considered putting it back on, and let it fall to the table. I introduced myself.

“What part,” asked an ancient woman with incongruously blond hair, “does deduction play in your solving cases?”

“Almost none,” I said.

“Then how do you help your clients, catch criminals, restore order?” demanded Campbell.

“I’m stubborn,” I said, looking around the room for my suspect. “I take whatever passes for a lead, and I keep after it. Sometimes I go after ten leads before I get anywhere, and sometimes I go after twenty leads and never get anywhere. My trick is to never give up.”

“Do the police ever seek your help on baffling cases?” came another female question.

The question had a sting to it. She was thinking Holmes. I was thinking that my being in this very room was the result of the only time in my life that a cop had asked me for help. I skipped that exception and gave the rule: that cops thought I was a pest, which I was, that they caught far more con men, thieves, and killers than I did and did it a lot more efficiently.

More questions came, and I kept giving answers, but not the ones they wanted to hear. The only one that seemed to please them was that I liked my work.

When I sat down Lachtman got up, thanked me, and everyone clapped politely. The meeting ended with Lachtman asking for suggestions about the next meeting. One little old lady, filled with enthusiasm, said aloud, “I’ve got it. Let’s put on a play.”

While this never failed to get a rise from Judy Garland when Mickey Rooney said it, no one in the group even gave an indication that the woman had spoken.

Campbell rapped his cane on the table and stood.

“I suggest that when next we meet, we have a Sherlockian quiz prepared by our current president and that the winner of that quiz have his dinner paid for.”