Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [63]
The taxi pulled up, and as I climbed in, I told my faithful driver that I wished to return to the hotel.
I believe he chatted at me the whole way back; I heard not a word.
And it never occurred to me to look around for a gunman.
In front of the St Francis, I got out, and was a good way up the entranceway when I realised that he was calling me—I had forgotten to pay him. I returned, thrust some money at him, and turned away, but his voice persisted, to be joined just inside the entrance by his person as he tried to press some dollar bills into my hand. My fingers closed over them automatically—anything to be rid of the man—but I did not pause in my path to the lift.
Inside the humming enclosure, I gave the attendant my floor number and stood staring down at the change for my fare. The bills were quivering slightly. I could feel the boy, looking out of the side of his eyes at me. The upward thrust slowed, the door slid open, and I walked to the room. The key even turned the lock, an event I found mildly amazing, considering the uncertain state of the rest of the universe.
Granite pillars, in the general course of events, did not simply crumble and fall. Trollies did not leave their tracks and set off down the side streets. Lightning did not strike out of a cloudless sky.
Psychiatrists who made for the only secure hold in a time of catastrophe did not bleed to death on their office floors.
I stepped out of my shoes, ripped off hat, gloves, and coat, and burrowed deep among the bed-clothes.
Which was where Holmes found me, five hours later.
BOOK TWO
Holmes
Chapter Ten
It is a singularly disconcerting experience to discover a supremely competent individual brought to her knees; even more so when that person is one's wife.
In the course of his long career, however, Sherlock Holmes had with some regularity been faced with a client or witness in a state of shock, and long ago recognised the benefits of the traditional remedies: either a stiff brandy or large quantities of hot, sweet tea to soothe the nerves; some readily digestible food-stuff to set the blood to flowing; and at the properly judged moment, a sharp counteractive shock to restore the patient to useful coherence.
So when he came into his hotel room and found his young wife huddled inertly beneath the bed-clothes, he picked up the telephone to summon tea and biscuits, administered a quick dose of contraband brandy, and then proceeded to an alternative not generally permitted a consulting detective when faced with a distressed client: He bundled Russell into the bath, undergarments and all, and turned the taps on hot and full.
The tea came, the water rose, and he spent the next quarter of an hour bent over the steaming porcelain tub forcing liquid and sweet morsels of cream-filled cakes into the silent woman. Slowly, her eyes returned to a focus. He went into the next room to look for her spectacles, stripping off his coat and rolling up his wet shirt-sleeves as he studied the room for any indication of what had put her into that state. No out-spread newspapers on the table, no crumpled telegrams in the waste-basket, nothing but the trail of discarded possessions and garments from door to bed.
He found her hand-bag just inside the door and turned it upside-down on the bed: money purse, handkerchief, note-book, pen-knife, pistol, and investigative tool-kit—all the usual paraphernalia and nothing out of the ordinary.
He abandoned the hand-bag, eventually found the spectacles under the bed, and took them into the steam-filled room, setting them in a corner of the soap-dish for her. He then poured himself a cup of tea, refilled hers (just one sugar this time instead of two, although usually she took none) and settled onto the vanity stool to wait for her to speak.