“What do you hear from the campus police?”

“Nothing worth repeating.”

“No theories at all?”

“Oh, there are theories galore,” I said, lowering my voice, “but not from the cops.”

“Really?” Oh, that smile. “Please tell me. I just love theories.”

I shook my head. “No way am I going to name names. I could be slandering somebody.”

And considering who one of my hot suspects was, a legal battle was the last thing I wanted.

I could have sworn Renata was about to resort to feminine wiles - something about the man-eating look in her brown eyes as she opened her mouth - but just then her husband limped by and she buttoned up.

“Hello, Cody,” he said, giving me one of the man-to-man slaps on the arm that I’ve always hated. “The program seems to be going well despite last night’s unfortunate curtain-raiser.”

He leaned on his cane and we exchanged pleasantries. I told Chalmers how much I enjoyed his morning talk. He said he was quite pleased with the way the Chalmers Collection looked in our library. I assured him that Campus Security was doing everything possible to recover the rest of the collection. After a minute or two of that, the Chalmerses left to powder their noses or whatever and I was left pondering the books for sale. Some were old and possibly rare, while others were new or even paperback. How could there be so much written about one thin guy with abominable taste in headgear?

The bald bookseller smiled, showing a gold tooth, and pointed to one slim volume with a garish cover. “There’s a new one,” he said helpfully.

I picked up the book and checked out the title: The Adventure of the Unique ‘Hamlet.’

“It’s actually an old story, of course, the famous Vincent Starrett pastiche, but a new edition with some cool illustrations,” the dealer said. “You’ve probably read it.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, it’s about a bibliophile who asks Holmes to solve the theft of his rare edition of Hamlet.”

“How timely,” I said dryly.

The bookman nodded. “In this story the client did it himself - to hide the fact that the supposedly rare volume was a fake.”

From behind me a familiar voice said: “An excellent volume you have there, Jefferson! It was one of the early pastiches, and it remains one of the finest.”

I whirled on my brother-in-law.“I set up an interview with Post. Where the hell have you been?”

“I the hell have been conversing with Lieutenant Decker, asking him the key questions that will solve this elementary case.”

“Oh, yeah? Such as?”

He shook his hairy head. “On that point I remain coy, Jefferson. Perhaps my little idea is all wrong and you would think less of me later.”

“You? Wrong?” I forced out what I hoped was an obviously faked chuckle.

“Yes, the notion is risible, is it not?” Mac gestured with the unlit cigar in his hand. “Let us say, then, that I will not answer that question because no good amateur sleuth would - not Ellery Queen, not Amelia Peabody, not Damon-”

“Oh, just stuff it, Mac. You can’t hand me that crap.”

“I just did, old boy.”

The lights in the Hearth Room flicked off, on, off, on. Somebody was trying to tell us something.

“Not another word, Jefferson,” Mac said. “We shall have to recommence this verbal ballet later. The interval is over.”

Chapter Fourteen - Master of Disguise

Barry Landers was a student of Mac’s, which put his most likely age between eighteen and twenty-one. Wearing jeans and a yellow and black Sherlock Holmes T-shirt as he stood at the lectern, he looked even younger. He was short, overweight, baby-faced.

But he talked with confidence and authority, using a vocabulary that was closer to Sebastian McCabe than something he might have picked up from watching teen-oriented television.

“Sherlock Holmes is, to use an overused phrase, a ‘master of disguise,’ ” he said. “We’re not only told this in the canon, we’re shown it. At different times Holmes appears as a common loafer, a drunken groom, the Irish-American Altamont, the rakish young plumber Escott, a French workman, an Italian priest, a Non-conformist clergyman, Captain Basil, an opium smoker, the explorer Sigerson, an elderly bookseller, and an old woman.”

Disguise, yet. And Mac sat there, back at the front of the room now, hanging on every word as if he could disguise himself as, say, a “rakish young plumber.” Was he really on to something with whatever he had asked Decker or was it just B.S.? A toss-up. With Mac you could never tell. He was, after all, a professor.

“What is interesting to note,” Barry Landers went on as I inched my way toward the door, “is that Holmes himself is more than once fooled by disguise. In A Study in Scarlet, Jefferson Hope’s friend poses as an older woman, causing Holmes to say later, ‘We were old women to be taken in.’ And in another famous sex reversal, Irene Adler dresses as a man the evening she walks by Holmes in Baker Street and says, ‘Good-night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’ ”

By this time I was in the corridor, pulling out my phone. I called Decker.

“You again?” he grumped.

“Show some gratitude. I saved your butt from a TV crew today, now I hear you’re talking about the crime to Mac.”

“He caught me by surprise.” Decker did not sound pleased.

“What did he ask you?”

“A bunch of stuff about keys to the room where the books were stolen,” Decker said. “Things like, ‘How many are there?’ and ‘Who has them?’ Pretty basic.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“Running down the keys wasn’t exactly brain surgery,” Decker said. “We did that before I went to bed this morning. Call it five keys altogether, counting the masters that open every door in Muckerheide. Nick Caruso and Bobby Deere each have masters they carry all the time.” Caruso runs the Center by day; Deere sleeps there at night. “Campus Security has another master that’s picked up by the guard at the beginning of his shift. The Muckerheide Center office has two individual keys to Hearth Room C. One was safely locked away there last night; Deere showed it to us. The other was on loan to Gene Pfannenstiel, who recklessly gave it out-”

“-to Sebastian McCabe,” I finished. “So every key is accounted for?”

“Tighter than a drum. Pfannenstiel swears up and down he never had his key out of his hands until he slipped it to McCabe around seven last night. And the one that was still in the Center office hadn’t been signed out all day.”

“And what did Mac say to that?”

“He wanted to know if it was shiny. I told him I didn’t know.”

“Shiny? What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

“Damned if I know. He’s your brother-in-law.”

“Don’t rub it in. Did he say anything else?”

“Yeah. He said I should find out, and that the key he used last night - the one I made him turn in to me - wasn’t shiny.”

Chapter Fifteen - “Women Are Never to Be Trusted”

I was supposed to meet Graham Bentley Post at five-thirty. Eager as I was to be on with it, my watch told me that was still forty-five minutes away. I returned to the Hearth Room, standing just inside the door at the front where, for a change, I could scan the faces of the crowd instead of bad haircuts.

My sister was at the lectern.

“... and Holmes himself repeatedly misstates his own posture toward the female of the species. In The Sign of Four, for example, he says that ‘love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself lest I bias my judgment.’ Holmes implies here a calculated neutrality with regard to women. This is patently false. Elsewhere in the same book Holmes tells the good Watson, ‘women are never to be trusted - not the best of them.’ That is hardly a neutral attitude.”