She looked skeptical. “Do air guns shoot .32 bullets?”

“You know I don’t know anything about guns, except what I research for my mystery writing. But even if they don’t, Chalmers could have had it specially built - that’s what Chalmers said Colonel Sebastian Moran did in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’”

“That’s a little far-fetched, isn’t it?”

“Not with the kind of people we’re dealing with here, Lynda - people who have little drawings of Sherlock Holmes on their checks and 221B on their license plates. And Chalmers put a Stradivarius in his Holmes collection - a violin worth as much as the stolen books or more, for crap’s sake. The man has the money to feed his obsession.”

“But we didn’t find anything like an air gun in Mac’s guest suite,” Lynda protested.

“We weren’t looking for it.” I turned off the DVD player/recorder and the TV. “And as soon as we found the Beeton’s Christmas Annual we stopped searching. It’ll be different this time.”

Lynda touched my arm as we neared the door to the suite at Mac’s house. “I still don’t like this.”

“I guess not,” I said, “considering what happened the last time you were here. How’s your head?”

“Huge. Let’s get this over with.”

We started with the sitting room, figuring that Lynda had had little time to explore it earlier before she’d been lured away by a noise. It was a small, sparsely furnished room which, like the bedroom, featured a picture window with a glorious view of the Ohio River below us. The window was framed by bookcases full of old detective novels. We moved the bookcases and checked behind them, but no dice. A closet-cum-dressing area ran the length of the wall opposite, and we gave that close attention with the same result. The love seat was rattan, so there was no place to hide anything under it. Feeling the pillows revealed no suspicious lumps.

“Bedroom next,” I said with more hope than faith.

We spent five minutes revisiting the familiar territory of the dressers and bed. I was standing on a captain’s chair peering into the box at the top of the red and black curtains when Lynda called, “Over here.”

She stood between the bed and a clothes tree draped with what I took to be Chalmers’s jacket, a deerstalker cap and a pair of Renata’s slacks. I focused on the cap, partially hidden by the jacket so that neither of us had noticed it earlier. But that wasn’t what Lynda wanted me to see. She held up Chalmers’s cane.

“It was leaning there, in the umbrella stand at the bottom of the clothes tree where you could hardly see it,” she said. “Why would Chalmers leave it behind and go limping around the way he has since yesterday evening?”

I got down from the captain’s chair and took the cane to look it over. “This damned thing is heavier than my car. I bet it’s what he brained you with.”

It looked like solid wood, except for an inch-wide band of silver running around the neck just below the handle. The band was inscribed: “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.H.H. 1884.” The words were out of Sherlock Holmes, I was pretty sure. So I ignored them and looked over the length of the cane for evidence that it had been hollowed out and filled with lead or something equally suitable for skull-bashing.

“Take the tip off,” Lynda suggested, pointing to a bit of dirty beige rubber at the bottom of the cane. When I did, I found myself looking down the barrel of something wicked.

“We can quit looking for the air gun,” I said. “This answers your question of why Chalmers quit carrying the cane: Some of his Sherlockian friends must know about this little beauty. He was afraid that, seeing him with it, they’d put two and two together.”

Lynda might have said something then but for the horrible sound that erupted, like a volcano, coming down Half Moon Street. It was Mac’s Chevy. The awful racket reached a peak and then cut out altogether as Mac killed the engine in his driveway. I held on to the cane with one hand and Lynda with the other and we went to the front of the house.

Kate came through the front door first and immediately saw us in the hallway. But her face had barely registered surprise before her husband and the Chalmerses appeared behind her.

“Well, well,” Mac said mildly, waving an unlit cigar. “What’s this, a welcoming committee in my own home?”

Chalmers, holding Renata’s arm for support, focused his clear blue eyes on the cane in my hand. “What are you doing with that?” he snapped.

“Holding it for the police,” I said. “They’re generally interested in murder weapons.”

Renata sucked in her breath.

“Jeff!” my sister exclaimed.

Chalmers looked appropriately murderous. “This is intolerable! Outrageous! And possibly actionable! Didn’t you learn anything from your earlier embarrassment, young man? Maybe I should withdraw my gift to your college.”

Only Mac remained unruffled through all this. My brother-in-law’s face, as much as I could see through the beard, showed only a weary sadness.

“Just in case there’s anybody here who doesn’t know it,” Lynda said, “let me point out that there’s an air gun concealed in that cane, and I’m pretty sure Mr. Chalmers used it to kill Hugh Matheson.”

Mac sighed. “He most certainly did not. Tell them, Renata.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t. If you want me to be the loyal wife, to say that Woollcott couldn’t have committed the murder, I can’t do that.”

“What I want,” Mac said, “is for you to tell the truth. That you yourself killed Hugh.”

Chapter Thirty-Four - End of the Game

In the deep silence that followed, Renata looked around as if trying to read our faces. The hallway grew smaller.

“You can’t be serious,” she told Mac in a choked voice.

“How fervently I wish that I were not!” Mac said. “We had better sit down, all of us. This will not come easy or quick.”

Chalmers and Renata exchanged looks that nobody but them would understand, then followed Kate into the McCabes’ long living room. Lynda and I came next, with Mac hanging back as if uneager.

Once in the room, my brother-in-law enthroned himself in his favorite fireside chair. Kate flanked him on the other side of the bar in a matching wingback, while Lynda and I sat in two other chairs and the Chalmerses shared the couch.

“It was all perfectly obvious from the first,” Mac said, looking longingly at his cigar. “Obvious, that is, that Woollcott was supposed to be guilty of killing Hugh. He apparently had not just one motive for revenge but two - books and Renata. You all know the sordid details of the latter, as did I and several others.

“What I did not know, but soon began to suspect, was that Woollcott’s cane is actually a specially machined air gun, probably powered by a CO2 cartridge.”

Mac motioned with the cigar at the cane/gun, which I held loosely between the legs in front of me.

“It was designed, of course, to emulate the one made for Colonel Sebastian Moran,” Mac said. “Cane guns were quite popular in those days. We know from ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ that Moran’s air gun fired soft revolver bullets, although the caliber was unspecified. Woollcott’s weapon here fires standard .32 bullets, not the customary air rifle pellets. It was very custom-made indeed.”

“Not a very powerful weapon, however,” Chalmers said. “Or so I was warned.”

“That’s why the bullet didn’t go all the way through, not because it was fired from a distance,” Mac said. “The gun was fired at close range into Hugh Matheson’s carotid artery. High power wasn’t needed. Of far more importance was that the gun was virtually silent, which is helpful if you plan to shoot someone in a hotel room.”

I let go of the cane for a moment and rubbed my sweating hands on my pants leg.

“Yet another strong indication that Woollcott had murdered Hugh was the missing Beeton’s Christmas Annual which Lynda and Jefferson found in his room here. Obviously, Woollcott retrieved the book after killing the one who had stolen it from Muckerheide Center.