Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [40]
“Certainly, unless you have to be back to your shop.”
“My assistant will have closed up, but I don't know that I . . .” His voice drifted off.
“We can find you another coat,” Holmes said.
“Holmes, I don't think that's the problem,” I said. “The St Francis may have certain . . . exclusionary policies.”
“Ah. Well, if they do, we'll take him to our rooms and have our supper brought up. Come, we can do nothing more here at the moment.”
Three sets of eyes and ears scanned the streets for gun-wielding lurkers, but we walked two streets down and caught a cab on Van Ness without mishap. At the hotel, we avoided the question of the dining room's policies by simply whisking our guest past the desk and onto the lift; the operator did glance sideways at Mr Long, but his interest seemed to be more upon the small man's bloody sleeve than on the shade of his skin.
“Russell, would you like to order up a dinner while I remove a quantity of grime from my finger-nails? I won't be a moment,” Holmes said, and stepped into the suite's bath-room. I consulted with Mr Long and then picked up the telephone and placed an order. When Holmes emerged, scrubbed and damp, he made for the collection of bottles which, in a shallow bow to the Volstead Act, the hotel had placed behind the doors of a side-board.
“What flavour of analgesic may I offer you, Mr Long? Despite the strictures of your Eighteenth Amendment, we appear to have brandy, gin, whiskey, the inimitable American bourbon—”
“The brandy would be fine,” our guest said, settling back a fraction into his chair. He took a healthy swallow, then took off his spectacles and cleaned them with a pristine white handkerchief. When they were back on his face, he seemed to relax, as if the cleaning exercise had clarified a decision as well.
“I hope you understand,” he said to me, “why I hesitated to respond to your questions this afternoon in the shop.”
“You wanted to think about it first.”
“Indeed. And also to see you, as it were, in situ rather than in my place of business. However, when I saw a man with a gun aimed at you, it decided me that you were on the side of the angels. May I ask, though: When I ran at you—for which I apologise; I hope it is understood that I did not intend to injure you?”
“You need not apologise for saving my life, Mr Long.”
“You are kind. However, when you turned to face me, it appeared as if you were assuming a position of the martial arts.”
“Yes, I have some training.”
“Interesting. And you, sir?”
“A discipline called baritsu. It's Japanese, a style of—”
“I am familiar with it, although I would have thought that few Westerners were. Thank you, it was merely a point of curiosity.”
“Sir,” Holmes said, with an air of drawing the meeting to order. “You have no doubt spent considerable time on the question of your foster parents' murder.”
“Oh yes, I have. And cast out a hundred lines of enquiry, with no result.”
“Yet you have never formulated a theory as to their deaths?” Holmes put it more as an accusation than a statement, and eyed him over the top of his glass.
The bookseller smiled. “I did not say that.”
“Aha!”
“Yes. However, until this good lady appeared in my store this afternoon, there seemed little I could do about it.”
“Wait, are you saying that I know anything about their deaths?” God, not another gap in my mind! Or was he saying—no, surely he couldn't think that I, a fifteen-year-old girl, would have come to Chinatown with a gun to do away with the family servants. To say nothing of the fact that in February of 1915, I'd been in England, on the verge of meeting Sherlock Holmes.
“No, of course not. But I have come to wonder if the actions of your parents might not have, unwittingly and posthumously, contributed to the deaths of my own.”
Before I could summon speech from my dropped jaw, a rap at the door indicated the arrival of our meal. The distribution of linen and plates suspended conversation for a time, and the momentum of the actions and the odours from beneath the silver lids took us halfway