“Just up ahead,” Fields said to his driver. Fields and Lowell stepped down and walked up the sidewalk to Wade and Son. “This is where Bachi went in before rushing to the harbor.” Fields showed Lowell.

They had found no listing of the store in any of the city directories.

“I’ll be hanged if Bachi wasn’t doing something shady here,” Lowell said.

They knocked quietly without producing a response. Then, after a while, the door swung open and a man in a long blue coat with bright buttons brushed past. He was holding an overfilled box of assorted cargo.

“Beg pardon,” Fields said. Two other policemen were approaching now, and they opened the doors to Wade and Son wider, pushing Lowell and Fields in. Inside was a lantern-jawed older man slumped on the counter, a pen still in his hand, as though he had been in mid-sentence. The walls and shelves were bare. Lowell inched closer. A telegraph wire was still wrapped around the dead man’s neck. The poet stared with fascination at how lifelike the man seemed.

Fields rushed to his side and pulled his arm toward the door. “He’s dead, Lowell!”

“Dead as one of Holmes’s carcasses at the medical college,” Lowell agreed. “No murder so mundane could be done by our Dantean, I’m afraid.”

“Lowell, come!” Fields panicked at the growing number of police busying themselves studying the room, not yet taking notice of the two intruders.

“Fields, there’s a suitcase beside him. He was getting ready to flee, just as Bachi did.” He looked again at the pen in the deceased’s hand. “He was trying to get done his unfinished business, I would rather think.”

“Lowell, please!” Fields cried.

“Very well, Fields.” But Lowell circled toward the corpse and stopped at the mail tray on the desk, slipping the top envelope into his coat pocket. “Come on then.” Lowell started to the door. Fields rushed ahead but stopped to look back when he did not feel Lowell’s presence behind him. Lowell had paused in the middle of the room with a frightening, pained expression on his face.

“What is it, Lowell?”

“My blasted ankle.”

When Fields turned back to the door, a policeman was waiting with a curious expression. “We’d just been looking for our friend, Mr. Officer, whom we last saw enter this store yesterday.”

After listening to their story, the policeman decided to write it down in his memorandum book. “That friend’s name was again, sir? The Eyetalian?”

“Bachi. B-a-c-h-i.”

When Lowell and Fields were permitted to leave, Detective Henshaw and two other men from the detective bureau had arrived with the coroner, Mr. Barnicoat, and dismissed most of the policemen. “Bury him in the paupers’ cemetery with the rest of the filth,” said Henshaw when he saw the body. “Ichabod Ross. Waste of my good time. Could still be having my breakfast.” Fields lingered until Henshaw met his eyes with a watchful glare.

The evening paper contained a small piece on the killing of Ichabod Ross, a minor merchant, during a robbery.

On the envelope that Lowell had pilfered was written VANE’S TIMEPIECES. It was a pawnshop on one of the less desirable streets of East Boston.

When Lowell and Fields entered the windowless storefront the next morning, they came upon a huge man, no less than three hundred pounds, with a face as red as the most seasonal tomato and a greenish beard filling out his chin. An enormous set of keys dangled from a rope around his neck and clanked whenever he moved. “Mr. Vane?”

“Dead to rights,” he replied, then his smile froze as he looked up and down the questioners’ clothing. “I’ve already told those New York detectives I didn’t pass those queer bills!”

“We’re not detectives,” said Lowell. “We believe this belongs to you.” He placed the envelope on the counter. “It’s from Ichabod Ross.”

An enormous smile slithered into place. “Well, ain’t that nice. Oh cow! Thought the old man would be jammed without settling with me!”

“Mr. Vane, we’re sorry for the loss of your friend. Do you know why Mr. Ross would be dealt with in such a manner?” Fields asked.

“Oh? Curiosity seekers, are you? Well, you have not brought your pigs to the wrong market. What can you pay?”

“We just brought you your payment from Mr. Ross,” Fields reminded him.

“Rightfully mine!” said Vane. “Do you deny it?”

“Must everything be done for the sake of money?” balked Lowell.

“Lowell, please,” Fields whispered.

Vane’s smile froze again as he stared ahead. His eyes doubled in size. “Lowell? Lowell the poet!”

“Why, yes…” Lowell confessed, a bit thrown off.

“ ‘And what is so rare as a day in June?’ “ the man said, then lapsed into laughter before continuing.

“The word in that fourth line is softly,” Lowell corrected him with some indignation. “You see, ‘softly her warm ear lays…’ ”

“Never tell me there is not a great American poet! Oh, the God and the Devil, I have your house, too!” Vane announced, producing from below his counter a leather-bound Homes and Haunts of Our Poets and digging through it to the chapter on Elmwood. “Oh, I even keep your autograph in my catalog. Next to Longfellow, Emerson, and Whittier, you are my top-priced seller. That rascal Oliver Holmes is right up there, too, and would be higher still if he didn’t put his name to so many things.”

The man, who had flushed a Bardolphian hue from the excitement, unlocked a drawer with one of the dangling keys and fished out a strip of paper on which was signed the name of James Russell Lowell.

“Why, that is not my signature at all!” Lowell said. “Whoever wrote this can’t put pen to paper! I demand you hand over all fraudulent autographs of all the authors in your possession at once, sir, or you shall hear from Mr. Hillard, my attorney, by the end of today!”

“Lowell!” Fields pulled him away from the counter.

“How well I shall sleep tonight knowing such a fine citizen has illustrations enough in that book to map out my home!” Lowell cried.

“We need this man’s help!”

“Yes.” Lowell straightened his sack coat. “In church with saints, in the tavern with sinners.”

“If you please, Mr. Vane.” Fields turned back to the proprietor and snapped open his wallet. “We want to know about Mr. Ross and then shall leave you be. How much will you accept to convey your knowledge?”

“I shall not part with it for one red cent!” Vane laughed heartily, his eyes seeming to go quite far back into his brain. “Must everything be done for the sake of money?”

Vane proposed forty of Lowell’s autographs as sufficient payment. Fields raised an advisory eyebrow at Lowell, who sourly agreed. As Lowell signed his name down two columns of a notepaper—”A superior piece of goods “ Vane declared with approval of Lowell’s writing—Vane told Fields that Ross was a former newspaper printer who had moved to pressing counterfeit money. Ross had made the mistake of passing the money to a gambling ring that used the queer bills to cheat the local gambling hells, and had even used some pawnshops as unwilling fences for goods purchased with the money won from that operation (the word unwilling was pronounced with the utmost twist in the gentleman’s mouth, the tongue reaching up and over his lips, almost wetting his nose). It was only a matter of time before the schemes caught up with him.

Back at the Corner, Fields and Lowell repeated all this to Longfellow and Holmes. “I suppose we can guess what was in Bachi’s satchel when he left Ross’s store,” said Fields. “A bag of queer bills as some sort of desperate arrangement. But what would he be doing mixed up in counterfeiting?”