Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Henry Adams gritted his teeth so hard that the grinding of molars was louder than the cracklings of the fireplace. He lifted the heavy walking stick like a club, his knuckles white from the intensity of his grip.

Holmes did not stir or try to protect himself as Henry Adams leaned over the desktop toward him, the cane raised and shaking from the man’s fury. Holmes’s own stick was propped against another chair some six feet away. He made no motion toward it, but remained seated, his eyes on Adams’s face, his hands calmly folded on his lap.

Adams dropped the cane onto the Persian carpet and collapsed into his chair, slumping down and shielding his eyes with one hand. After a moment, he said, “You must know that I did not . . . kill . . . my beloved Clover.”

“Oh, I know you did not,” said Holmes, now resting his chin on his folded fingers, propping his elbows on the polished wooden arms of his chair. “But any competent police officer, much less a competent and ambitious district attorney, could have—and probably should have, since you were investigated so shallowly primarily due to your station in society and your wealth—ended with you condemned to the gallows by a jury of your peers.”

Adams’s jaw dropped again and this time he did not soon think to close his mouth. He peered through his fingers at Holmes the way a child might peep through her fingers at a possible monster in a dark closet.

“You had the time, you knew where Mrs. Adams kept her deadly arsenic, and no servants on duty that morning saw you leave for this sudden Sunday-morning appointment with your dentist. Since you never saw your dentist that morning, you could have been waiting half a block down the street along the park’s edge, waiting until you saw Rebecca Lorne come to your doorway. She was, in a sense, your alibi.”

“If you think all this,” rasped Adams, “then why do you not believe me to be guilty of this murder?”

Holmes walked over to the open secretary where the bottles were kept, replenished his Scotch whiskey, and poured a stiff drink of brandy for Adams, setting it in front of him on the desk rather than handing it to him.

“I know you are innocent not merely because of your obvious qualities,” said Holmes, “but because you did not see Rebecca Lorne waiting at the front door of your home, pondering whether to knock and go up, as you testified to the police. Rather, you saw Miss Lorne come rushing out of your home, flinging the door wide, in a state of near-hysteria. It had been she, not you, who first discovered Mrs. Adams’s body.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Adams and took a long drink of brandy.

“You yourself ran two blocks to your doctor’s home—and returned on the run with him—and Dr. Charles E. Hagner later reported to the press that the vial of potassium cyanide sat, still opened and venting its terrible fumes, on a table across the room from where Mrs. Adams’s body had fallen to the floor in front of her favorite chair, and that an empty water glass lay on the carpet beside her,” said Holmes. “Dr. Hagner also mentioned that Miss Rebecca Lorne was waiting in the room adjoining Mrs. Adams’s bedroom when the two of you arrived and that Miss Lorne was so upset that he had to administer a tranquilizing drug to her. The police report, done under the investigation of Lieutenant Hammond—who arrived with two men some twenty minutes after you and Hagner did but who remained only a few minutes before you demanded absolute isolation with your wife’s body—mentioned the position of the body and the vial of cyanide, now corked again, but made no mention of the water glass on the carpet.”

“The scene is forever branded into my brain,” said Adams, “but I remember no water glass on the floor.”

“The bottle of poison was on a table some distance from where Mrs. Adams had lain on the carpet before you carried her body to the couch,” said Holmes, tapping his lips with two steepled forefingers. “All agree on that. And yet there had been a spill of the chemical near where your wife’s body had been lying. Your housekeeper commented that the lethal liquid had discolored the edge of the carpet and a bit of the polished floor. Her people had cut the carpet’s nap and re-finished the floor-board to get rid of the stains, she said.”

Adams’s temples and cheeks grew flushed again. “My housekeeper had the temerity to talk to you about . . .”

Holmes held up both hands, palms outward. “There was not much of a police investigation, sir, but the servants did have to give statements to the police while you were in your darkest hours of mourning. I understand that you spent two days and nights alone with the body and did not later announce the time or fact of Mrs. Adams’s funeral on December nine so your surviving Three Hearts friends could attend. At any rate, this information about the stained carpet and floorboard were in Lieutenant Hammond’s notes.”

“What’s the importance of any of this?” shouted Adams.

“There was, lying near Mrs. Adams’s body, a water glass that had obviously been the vessel from which she drank the poison, still lying there when Dr. Hagner arrived with you,” said Holmes. “The stains on the carpet and floorboard must have come from the residue of the terrible liquid that remained in the glass when Mrs. Adams dropped it. Yet the glass was gone when Detective Hammond arrived about half an hour later.”

Holmes leaned forward, his gray eyes as piercing as a predator’s. “Someone removed that glass in that half-hour interim,” he said softly. “Your housekeeper, Mrs. Soames, told the police three days after the death that there were only eleven small water glasses in the cupboard off the kitchen where they were usually kept. The glass had come from a set of twelve.”

Adams finished the brandy. “Who? If not the servants, who would have removed the glass . . . the mythical glass I do not even remember seeing? The police?”

“They say they did not, sir.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t understand the significance of a water glass or . . . or the vial of cyanide,” managed Adams. “Why does it make any difference?”

“It would be easier to make someone drink from the glass than from a vial,” Holmes said.

Adams’s dark eyes seemed to recede in their sockets. “Make them drink? Someone might have forced Clover to drink that terrible, corrosive, painful, deadly poison?”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “More than that, there is the time involved. Were there usually water glasses left in her bedroom?”

“No,” said Adams, his voice totally flat. “Clover hated rings on the furniture.”

“In the adjoining bathroom?”

“No,” repeated Adams. “There are glasses in our bathrooms, but not those small water glasses. And Clover’s was . . . still there . . . when I looked in her bathroom some days later.”

“From the time you left to see your dentist to the time you turned around and came back because of the commotion Miss Lorne was making as she came out of your front door”—began Holmes and noticed when Adams did not interrupt or contradict him—“it would have been very difficult for Mrs. Adams to go downstairs through the annex to the kitchen where the water glasses were stored . . . and to avoid being noticed by Mrs. Ryan, your chief cook, who was working in the kitchen at the time . . . and then to carry it upstairs and then to walk the length of the second floor to her darkroom and the special locked cupboard where she kept her photographic developing chemicals, then to return to her bedroom to take the poison.”

Adams shook his head like a man in a bad dream. “You’re suggesting that . . . someone else had carried up the glass and poison vial and was waiting somewhere upstairs, hiding nearby, listening, waiting for her to be alone even while I was talking to Clover before I left to see my dentist?”