She was dressed in a short tan skirt and a red blouse. Black and silver earrings matched the buckle on her black belt. Her hair, naturally curly and the color of dark honey, was chin length, a little longer than I was used to seeing it. Not that I noticed. I looked away and pulled my mind back to Mac’s spiel.
“It’s no surprise that Holmes was a commanding figure in his own age, the late Victorian,” he was lecturing. “The Great Detective was above all a man of logic and science at a time when science seemed to have all the answers, not just more questions. He battled speckled bands and hounds from hell with only the faithful Watson at his side - and yes, he nearly always won. Today, however, the world faces far more frightening monsters, man-made creations of our laboratories and bomb factories. How do we explain the continued popularity of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street in these jaded and dangerous times?
“Could it be that Holmes is hero and father figure in a period that sorely needs both? Even though Holmes sometimes fails he is always a reassuring presence. When he is around we feel that everything is all right. And, of course, Holmes is always there when we need him, never farther away than a wire to summon him and a train to get him there. For these reasons and many more, we must agree with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, who so famously said, ‘Though he might be more humble, there’s no police like Holmes.’”
I groaned inwardly as the Sherlockians chuckled. So, I thought, Conan Doyle had to put up with a brother-in-law, too. I felt his pain.
Just then Lynda walked past, apparently not seeing me, and grabbed an empty seat about three rows away. I watched her strike up a conversation with the man next to her - early forties, light brown hair, tanned skin, professional smile and a Rolex watch. He looked like he’d gotten lost on his way to the cover of GQ. As they chatted, Lynda pulled out her notebook.
“Who’s the guy Lynda’s talking to?” I whispered to Kate.
“You mean the hunk?”
Muscles fairly rippled beneath his cashmere sweater.
“I don’t think he’s such a hunk,” I said. “Who the hell is he?”
“Hugh Matheson. The attorney.”
Further identification would have been superfluous. Hugh Matheson was one of the most famous litigators in the country. He hung his hat in Cincinnati, but he traveled everywhere. His shtick was a legal theory called “hedonic damages.” In English, that means he made his bread and butter - and probably a yacht or two - convincing juries to base damage awards on the “missed joy of life” rather than on some concrete fact such as lost wages. The joy of life turned out to be quite expensive for companies that had the ill fortune to face Matheson in a court room. 60 Minutes had recently estimated his personal worth at forty million dollars - even after hefty alimony payments to wives numbers one through three. There was no number four yet.
At least he was shorter than me.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked Kate.
“He’s a Sherlockian, of course, a member of the Anglo-Indian Club. And a collector. He and Woollcott don’t get along at all.”
“Unfriendly rivals, eh?” I could readily imagine Chalmers, in pursuit of bookish rarities, following a scorched earth policy not designed to win friends and influence people.
In front of us, Lynda looked around the room as if to get a handle on how many people were there. Her eye caught mine and her mouth spread in a smile of recognition. She waved. My heart skipped a beat and the blood pounded in my ears as if I were a teenager. This was ridiculous.
Instead of waving back, I turned to my sister. “Then Matheson probably isn’t too broken up about what happened to the Chalmers Collection last night.”
“I suppose not,” Kate said, “but you’d never get a collector to admit a thing like that.”
At the front of the room Mac yielded to an old video of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle talking about how he had come to create Sherlock Holmes. The gist of it was that he had intended Holmes to be different from the fictional sleuths of his day who solved their cases without showing how they had arrived at the solutions. Surprisingly, he spoke in a soft Scottish burr that reminded me of Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
The atmosphere in the Hearth Room was more casual and less reverent than I’d expected. Some Sherlockians talked quietly among themselves or fiddled with smartphones all through the video, perhaps having seen it before. Others looked through books and trinkets at the back of the room. In a wingback chair behind me a woman knitted. A guy sitting on the floor next to her crunched Ruffles potato chips. Hugh Matheson leaned over and said something to Lynda, who giggled. I swear the woman giggled.
The film ended, the lights went up, and Mac took the floor again to introduce Al Kane. I checked my watch: ten-thirty. The program was running right on schedule and I had fifteen minutes before I had to meet the reporter from Channel 4 Action News.
As he followed the massive McCabe to the lectern, peering at his audience through wire-rimmed glasses as if in apprehension, Kane looked less hard-boiled than ever. Only the obvious hangover put me in mind of his Red Maddox character.
“Of course, Edgar Allen Poe invented the detective story - and almost every significant convention of the craft still used and misused today,” he began. “It was Arthur Conan Doyle, however, who gave the form universal and timeless appeal.”
Kane described how Conan Doyle had improved on the formula developed in Poe’s three detective stories plus “The Gold-Bug” by making the endings sharper and the narrator more of a character.
I found myself mentally wandering back to Kane’s casual comment about Woollcott Chalmers himself as a suspect in yesterday’s thefts.
How would my Max Cutter figure it? Chalmers was hardly spry enough to do the deed himself, but that was no reason to rule out a man with his money and his determination. He could pay to have it done. But the risk was all out of proportion to the reward. The stolen books and manuscript pages may have been worth who-knows-what, but they were only three items out of thousands he had given away in the Woollcott Chalmers Collection. Would Chalmers have let himself in for a grand theft rap just because he couldn’t part with that particular trio of goodies? Maybe so, but the Max Cutter inside me couldn’t buy it.
“Holmes is an urban creature, although he does sometimes don the deerstalker and venture into the countryside,” Kane continued from the podium. “He is a loner, often cutting even Watson out of the loop. He has no permanent lady except the faithful Mrs. Hudson. He often operates outside the law, committing burglary in four stories and several times letting the villain flee - or die. He bucks authority, even royalty, and he can’t be bought. All are characteristics of the hard-boiled detective, from the earliest heroes of Black Mask magazine down to a fellow I know named Red Maddox.”
“Hard-boiled Holmes?” I tweeted. “So says Al Kane.”
I looked at my watch again. Damn, the TV crew was due in five minutes. “Cutting out,” I whispered to Kate. She nodded and I went out the door next to the woman who was knitting.
The corridor was empty, except for Popcorn reading a book as she sat alone at the registration table. She looked up and gave a little wave, then went back to reading Love’s Savage Desire.
I don’t know why I had entertained a fear the TV people would be early; it would be a minor miracle if they were no more than ten minutes late.
Al Kane’s talk, amplified over the wall speakers, permeated the air outside the Hearth Room like the voice of God. But soon it was cut through by another voice there in the corridor, a husky one a bit like Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep.