Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [66]
“‘Possibly' this, ‘theoretically' that—you keep harping on some mysterious event of a criminal nature, Holmes. What sort of a crime are you imagining?”
“That I have yet to discover,” Holmes said calmly.
“Or even if there was one.” She rose and said coldly, “Holmes, I have things to do. I shall be out with Flo until late, so don't wait up for me. And please, I beg you, find something to keep yourself busy. This stirring about in my past is becoming a vexation.”
She walked away; he sat with his pipe, watching her retreat with hooded eyes.
Chapter Eleven
It was both a challenge and an irritation to follow an individual such as Russell without being seen. Had she been another person, Holmes would simply have trailed along in her wake, confident that a young woman in the hold of social impulse and illicit alcohol would be oblivious of a tail. Russell, however, even without her glasses, normally had eyes in the back of her head.
Not that she'd noticed him following practically on her heels all those hours on Monday afternoon. Still, Holmes kept his distance. He had his taxi park down the street from the St Francis until Russell's friend arrived, then followed behind, stopping a street down from where the gaudy, bright blue Rolls-Royce disgorged its passengers. He studied the motor's driver closely, taking note of the noise he made and the speed with which he drove—outside of a city's streets, the taxi would never have kept up with him—but noting also the way the apparently careless young man gave wide berth to a woman walking with her two children, and how he always kept both his hands on the wheel and spoke over his shoulder instead of turning his head to speak to the passengers in back.
When the blue car had been driven away by the club's valet, Holmes paid off his curious driver and took up surveillance in a more or less illicit dive across the way from the cabaret, a small and dingy space with air that looked as if the fog had moved in. He used his thumb-nail to scrape a patch of paint from the window-glass, which looked to have been applied half-heartedly at the descent of Prohibition five years before, absently cleaned the grime from underneath his nail with a pen-knife, then settled in to his surveillance with a glass of stale beer before him on the table.
An hour passed. Motorcars came and went from the sparkling gin palace, music spilt out onto the street, the uniformed doorman chatted unconcernedly with two passing policemen (confirming Holmes' suspicions that the police department in this town was not as free of graft as one might wish—a two-year-old would have known that the alcohol inside flowed like water). And slowly, he became aware that he was himself being watched.
The man was good. Holmes had taken no particular note of him when he wandered in, other than noticing how tall, thin, and tidily dressed he was. He was simply one thirsty man among a dozen others—but when the man settled into the dimmest corner, when he nursed two whiskeys over the course of the hour and seemed uninterested in the company, and particularly when he seemed to relax into his corner and displace less air than a normal man, Holmes' antennae twitched. He pondered his options: keep guard over the street and Russell, or pursue this new avenue?
After an hour and a quarter, with a full glass on the table, Holmes rose and headed towards the back of the establishment, weaving slightly. He felt the other man come to attention in the dim corner, and smiled to himself as he heard the soft clink of coins being laid on the damp table: The man was preparing to follow if Holmes did not return in a reasonable time, but not immediately—he wouldn't want to risk a face-to-face meeting in the hall-way.
The noxious facilities were out-of-doors, in the delivery yard that was closed up for the night. Holmes slipped past them to the yard's wooden gates. The lock was a joke, and he let himself