“If you have some crazy idea of solving the murder, forget it. That’s police business.”

“Tell that to Mrs. Parsons.”

“Let’s leave, Jeff. Please.”

“You can go.”

“I don’t want to be alone.” She pulled a stick of gum out of her purse.

“Don’t leave the wrapper here,” I warned her. “When did you start chewing gum, anyway?”

“When I gave up smoking,” she said. “I eat too much candy, too, and pretty soon I’m going to get fat. Quit giving orders. And make this fast, will you?”

This was no time to tell her that she’d probably be okay on the weight because of the running. I got down on my knees in front of the bed closest to the door and flipped up the bedspread. “It would go faster if you’d help,” I said.

“Then I’ll help.”

Good girl, I thought but did not say.

A minute went by while I crawled as far under the bed as I could.

“Nothing under here,” Lynda reported from beneath the other bed. “Not even dust bunnies.”

“Same here,” I said.

Standing up, I stepped around the hideous corpse and looked at the night stand. Bingo. Right next to the hotel phone was a notepad with the fancy Winfield Hotel logo on top. The number 525 was neatly written on it in blue ink. I copied the number into the reporter’s notebook I carry in my back pocket.

“What’s that?” Lynda asked from the other side of the bed.

“Probably a hotel room number that Matheson called. Maybe even the person he hoped to meet this afternoon. That could be important.”

“Well, there’s your clue,” she said. “Now we can leave.”

“Not yet.” I reached over the bed to look inside the brass posts, then checked under the bedspread. Lynda observed and did likewise. No secrets there.

While Lynda went into the closet area just inside the door, I attacked the dresser, a reproduction Queen Somebody that was clearly a few cuts above the usual Formica-topped furniture in the motels where I stay during my infrequent road trips for the college. The only thing in the top drawer was a Book, courtesy of the Gideon Society. I paged through to see if maybe it had been hollowed out and something slipped inside. Clever idea, if I do say so myself, but unfruitful.

“It would help a lot if we knew what we were looking for,” Lynda said from the depths of the closet.

“I’m hoping we’ll know it when we see it.” Max Cutter always does.

The next drawer held underwear and socks neatly folded and stacked by the dead man. There was something pathetic about that, something that touched me more than actually seeing Matheson’s bloodied body.

“Here it is!” Lynda called. “Get over here.”

In seconds I was at her side. Inside the closet area she had the spare blanket from the overhead rack spread out on the floor, kneeling over it.

“I just unfolded it and found these tucked inside,” she said, holding up a faded red book and a fat sheaf of handwritten manuscript pages.

I took the manuscript first, instinctively holding it with respect. At the top of the first page was a chapter heading, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” and then the beginning of the story:

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings...”

What I had in my hands was the opening pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles set down as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote them in his own hand. All of the millions of copies of the book that had been printed in all the languages of the world had started with this. As a writer myself, I was moved by that.

I set the pages down and picked up the red volume. It, too, was the Hound and I knew what it had to be. Sure enough, there on the title page was an inscription in the same cramped handwriting of the manuscript:

To my dear Robinson - with thanks for the ripping good idea that put Holmes back in action.

A.C.D.

“This seals it,” I said. “Matheson was the thief, all right.”

“But who killed him?” Lynda said.

I intended to find out.

Chapter Seventeen - Going Home Again

We put the books back where we found them. We were halfway out the door in some haste before I remembered what Max Cutter never would have forgotten - fingerprints. I stepped back in and spent a fast two minutes applying my handkerchief to every surface we had touched.

Downstairs we unchained my bike from the NO PARKING sign in front of the hotel and tied it on top of the Mustang.

In the car, I tried to come to grips with the idea of Hugh Matheson as a thief - and such a small-scale thief by the standards of his huge net worth. Valuable as it was, it was a pittance for a guy who owned three homes in different cities and four antique Duesenberg roadsters.

“It made sense all along in one way, because he was the only big-time Holmes collector on the scene,” I mused aloud. “But he was so rich and successful. Why would he risk all that to steal something that was worth less than his take on just one good lawsuit?”

“Ego and lust, I guess,” Lynda said. “I was around enough to see both of those.”

I studied Lynda’s pretty profile. “You really didn’t like him, did you?”

“No. He was too full of himself. For that I actually felt kind of sorry for him, though. Still do.”

By this time we were sitting in front of the last pay phone in downtown Erin, which looks like the TARDIS in Doctor Who. I got out of the car and called 911 to report a disturbance at the Winfield. “It was a noise, almost like a shot,” I told the dispatcher who answered, talking in a squeaky voice unlike my own. “It seemed to come out of room 943.”

“Did you call the hotel desk?”

“Just check it out.”

“Where are you calling from, sir?”

From the TARDIS, lady. Fortunately, I saw a trap in the question. Wouldn’t 911 have industrial strength Caller ID? I hung up.

Back on the road, mentally going over all that had happened, I was struck by a glaring omission.

“The third book,” I told Lynda. “What was it? Oh, yeah, that Christmas annual with the first Sherlock Holmes story. Why wasn’t it with the other books?”

“That’s easy,” Lynda said without taking her eyes off the road. “The killer took it.”

“But why just that one book?”

“Maybe he’d only gotten that far when he heard me starting to come in the door.”

“Okay, then how did he-”

“Or she,” Lynda added.

“-get out of the room. Unless...”

Lynda darted a glance at me. “Yeah. Unless she or he never left. We didn’t get around to checking out the bathroom.”

“So for all we know the killer could have been just a few feet away the whole time we were in the hotel room. There’s a creepy thought for you.”

Right away I had another thought as well: If that scenario had actually happened, then the killer would be as late for the banquet as we were. I wanted to drive straight there and check out the crowd, but Lynda insisted on continuing to her apartment first.

“I’ve got to change my clothes and redo my hair,” she said. “I’m as eager to get back to Muckerheide as you are, Jeff, but I described my whole outfit for the evening to Kate. If I don’t show up dressed that way, she’ll wonder why. Besides, I need a shower. After what we’ve been through, it’s the only way I’ll feel, I don’t know, clean again.”

I argued the point all the way to her place, but she was the one driving and I didn’t want to leave her any more than she wanted to leave me.

Lynda’s apartment is on the second story of a two-family home in a comfortable Erin neighborhood of wide lanes and big trees. I mean comfortable the way your favorite piece of old clothing is comfortable - nothing fancy, it just feels right. The house is brick and stucco, with three gables and a small octagon-shaped room on the first floor. Its owners have lived there since 1974, and they bought it from the wife’s parents.

While Lynda cleaned up, I sat on her wicker couch and looked around, feeling as if I’d come home again after a long absence. Not that I was even on first base again with Lynda, but at least I was no longer in the dugout. The room hadn’t changed much in the few weeks of my exile from her life: tall bookcase, overflowing with books; a couple of wicker chairs on either side of the bricked-up fireplace; flat-screen TV above the mantle; brass spittoon with sunflowers poking out of it; wicker and glass coffee table. But the picture of Lynda and me on the mantle was gone, along with the stuffed frog holding a red heart that I’d given her for Valentine’s Day one year.