The Baker Street Letters Page 11

  Mendoza paused and looked at Reggie for a reaction.

  “Enlighten me,” said Reggie.

  “Every now and then even a loser gets lucky. Really lucky. For your brother it was an actress, London stage mainly, I guess, although I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her on TV, in some shampoo commercial or something. Dark red hair; pale skin; kind of reminds you of a really nice Washington apple after you’ve taken the first bite. She took him to Cannes, which is the thing to do, I guess, and they had a hot little affair during the film festival there. But then when they came back—”

  “Who told you this?” Reggie interrupted.

  “Excuse me?”

  Reggie hesitated. “I can’t see what possible source you could have for any of this,” he said.

  “Daily Sun,” said Mendoza. “And the Globe, too.”

  “The Sun?”

  “You don’t follow the London tabloids?”

  “No,” said Reggie.

  “You should. You really should. Keep you abreast of things, I expect. I mean, for every five stories about a space alien conspiracy that killed Di, there’s always at least one celebrity story with a grain of truth. Your brother never warranted coverage, of course, but apparently the lady did. Just a few lines in a couple of those ‘who’s doing whom and where’ columns, but it was enough.”

  Reggie had nothing to say to that.

  “Anyway,” said Mendoza, “that’s not the interesting part. What’s interesting is when it ends. They come back to London after, and she dumps him within a week. Don’t know why yet. But that’s our traumatic event. He quits his job, bums around for a while, then tries to come back to work. But when he does, he ends up frightening this poor girl in Kent so much that a complaint is filed with the Law Society. Then comes Picadilly Circus, and next thing you know, he’s on extended holiday on that funny farm—or health and recreation center—call it whatever you like.”

  “Bloody rubbish,” said Reggie, more vehemently than he intended.

  “Meaning none of it’s true?” said Mendoza.

  “Meaning your facts are wrong, and even if they’re not wrong, they don’t mean what you think they mean.”

  “It isn’t true, but if it is true, it doesn’t count? Uh-huh. I guess lawyer logic is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.”

  “The thing in Kent was just my brother trying to give back his fee.”

  “Say again?”

  “He won his case, but felt justice wasn’t done. He wasn’t pursuing the girl at all; he was trying to give her family the fee he had made, to set things right.”

  Mendoza and Reynolds looked at each other, then at Reggie.

  “I take it back,” Mendoza said with an amused laugh. “Lawyers are not the same on both sides of the Atlantic. But I still say he killed our Mr. Fallon because he’s obsessed with the young woman who lives in the building.”

  “You’ve got that wrong as well.”

  “Okay,” said Mendoza. “I’m a sucker for a good laugh. If he’s not stalking her, just exactly what is he doing here?”

  Tactical error, Reggie realized. He should have said nothing, but Mendoza’s recounting of Nigel’s downfall had rattled him. Now he was stuck in it. The only question was whether it would sound more credible to let Mendoza drag it out in pieces or to spill it all at once.

  “He came here in response to a letter. When she was a child she wrote a letter to Sherlock Holmes. I lease that address, and I receive those letters. Nigel answers them. He read her letter and came here in response to it.”

  Mendoza and Reynolds looked at each other again.

  “Oh, this is way too rich,” said Reynolds.

  Mendoza looked at Reggie again, and now he was well past amused. His expression was almost merry. “You’re saying your brother thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Reggie. “I’m saying he read her letter, concluded she is in trouble, and came here to help.”

  “You mean he deduced it,” said Reynolds, with a joking wink at Mendoza. “When Sherlock Holmes does something, it’s always a deduction, right?”

  Mendoza smiled slightly and stood.

  “You can make up whatever kind of story you want to cover his ass,” he said to Reggie. “But my guess is, if you don’t already know where your brother is, you soon will. And when he contacts you, you’d do well to let us know.”

  “You’re the detectives,” said Reggie, “you find him.”

  “We’ll do that,” Mendoza said.

  “And you can deduce this,” said Mendoza’s partner. “Turns out you’ve been holding out on us—we get to charge you with accessory.” Then he put a single dollar bill on the table.

  “Hope that covers the coffee,” he said. “It does where I eat.”

  The two men started to leave, then Mendoza paused and turned. “I almost forgot,” he said to Reggie. “Inspector Wembley sends his regards.”

  Mendoza and his partner walked out.

  Reggie just sat there. He was angry, but the detectives were gone and there was no one to vent it on.

  Now he got up and, avoiding the lift, took the stairs at a furious pace up to his hotel room. Nine flights three steps at a time took some of the edge off, but not all of it.

  Reggie paced to the window, back and forth, and then on impulse checked and saw that yes, as rapidly as he had left London, he had nevertheless brought an umbrella. Nigel would have also, and probably the big golf one from his office. It was routine.

  He stopped pacing and sat down, tensely, in the deep leather chair facing the window. He stared out at long shadows being cast over Figueroa Street by billboards in front of a low sun. The shadows gradually merged and disappeared, flood lamps came on to illuminate the shapely young woman on the Jordache billboard, and Reggie still sat staring, gripping the arms of the chair, trying to make one thought go out of his head:

  That Mendoza might be right.

  Certainly he had part of it; he had the Law Society and the girl in Kent. The surface of it, at least.

  But it was the part about the affair with the actress setting everything off that bothered Reggie.

  Because the actress, of course, was Laura.

  And Reggie knew who was the cause of that relationship ending. He had just never before tried seriously to think of the event from Nigel’s point of view.

  He did so now.

  It was Nigel who had met her first, now that Reggie took time to remember it.

  Nigel had returned with Laura from Cannes, just as Mendoza described, and then, in a moment of reckless enthusiasm, he had rung Reggie up.

  “She will be onstage tonight at the Adelphi,” Nigel had said. “You must come see her.”

  A few moments later, thinking better of it, Nigel rang Reggie again, only an hour before the performance, to retract the invitation.

  And Reggie would have honored the request, if he had received it. But it came too late; he had already departed for the theater.

  And there, on Nigel’s initial invitation, Reggie sat in the front row with Nigel and saw Laura for the first time.

  After the performance, Nigel was to go backstage. He did not ask Reggie to accompany him, so Reggie walked instead through the lobby, thinking of this remarkable woman he had seen.

  And then, on the street in front of the theater, amid tuxedos, bouquets, and flashbulbs, there was Laura. Nigel had gone through the back to find her, but a publicity agent had pulled her out through the front. She lost her balance turning from a camera, and Reggie caught her arm, the momentum of her near fall carrying her body, just for a moment, up against his.

  She had blushed at first, laughing lightly, thanking him for breaking her fall. And then she asked Reggie if she knew him from somewhere.

  “I believe you have met my brother,” Reggie replied.

  Much later that evening, Reggie returned home and found the retraction from Nigel. But it was too late. He had already met Laura, they had all three gone out for hours after the p
lay, and from Reggie’s perspective at the time, they had all had a wonderful evening.

  But for Nigel, the damage was already done.

  Reggie had put this out of his mind long ago; but he remembered it now and realized that, even at the time, Nigel had had second thoughts and recognized the danger in inviting his older brother to meet such a woman.

  Had Nigel considered him that much of a threat?

  If he had—he would have been right, as it turned out, wouldn’t he?

  They had been in competition, he and Nigel, all their lives, now that he thought of it. In one arena and then another and at progressively more significant levels, but all their lives.

  And in each arena, in sports, which was the first in order, and in women, which they discovered next, and in their careers, there had come a moment when Reggie realized that he had won.

  At first it had surprised him. Nigel had the better serve in their youth—Reggie should never have been able to defeat him in squash. But he did, and then he had become accustomed to it. And having defeated Nigel, who was no slouch, Reggie went out thinking he could defeat anyone else. He expected the success, and it came about. The victories in this sibling competition seemed to expand into victories in the world at large.

  Had it simply become the opposite for Nigel?

  Three months after the encounter at the theater, Reggie and Laura were on holiday together, and Nigel was throwing away his legal career.

  Would any of it have happened if Reggie had not gone to that theater and snatched Laura away?

  But it wasn’t as though Nigel could have held her for long in any case, Reggie told himself now, and then wondered if he was right even about that. Perhaps he was wrong about all of it. Perhaps he was the last person in the world who could give an accurate assessment of his brother’s strengths and weaknesses.

  Could Mendoza be right about everything?

  Certainly this young woman in Los Angeles could be captivating. Given an undeniably attractive subject, and Nigel’s tendency to infer moral issues and subtle motives where other people would see nothing out of the ordinary, was it too much of a stretch to suppose that lacking other means to attain her, he would construct an imaginary danger from which he could rescue and win her?

  And no one was more likely than Nigel to be carrying around a half-eaten tube of Smarties.

  Bloody good thing I’m not the prosecutor, thought Reggie. It was simply rot, all of it, and if he weren’t so bloody tired, he wouldn’t even be considering the matter. He was allowing distinctly separate events to blend, and that made them unsolvable.

  He’d hardly slept. His thinking process was becoming a soup.

  He needed to clear his head. He had to move.

  Reggie left his room and went back down the stairs, out the lobby, and onto the street and began walking at a furious pace southward, pushing through the evening crowd of downtown pedestrians, disturbing the shoppers who clustered at the curbside clothing stores and vegetable stands below Broadway.

  He crossed Alameda. Both the vehicular and pedestrian traffic began to thin. He was entering the area of the warehouse district near Mara’s flat, a mix of decrepit buildings, avantegarde cafés and cheap American greasy spoons, and then the occasional artist’s loft, but mainly the still abandoned dark brick warehouses.

  He stopped. On the opposite corner, dim yellow light from a streetlamp revealed an old woman in too many layers of dusty clothing, dragging her belongings behind her on a flattened cardboard refrigerator box.

  Reggie had seen this homeless person earlier, when he’d first come to downtown from the airport. But at that time she had been pushing a heavily laden shopping trolley.

  Now she wasn’t, and Reggie knew why. The cart she had pushed when he had first seen her—the one with the bent orange-and-white sign—was the same one that had later contained the body under the overpass.

  Reggie crossed the street to the woman.

  She tilted her head slightly when he approached, but she kept her eyes averted until she realized that he wasn’t going to simply walk by. Then she looked up at him suspiciously.

  “You’ve lost your shopping trolley,” offered Reggie. “Your cart, I mean.”

  “Didn’t lose it. Someone stole it. And I can’t get another, because the grocery boys see me coming and take the carts away.”

  “Where was it when it was taken?”

  She gave him a quick, hard look, then turned her back and tried to ignore him.

  “Perhaps I can help,” said Reggie.

  She said something under her breath that sounded like “liar.” But then she pointed in the direction. “By the Dumpster,” she said. “Over there in the alley.”

  The alley she pointed at was on the side of Mara’s apartment building.

  Reggie took the time to walk three blocks, steal a new shopping trolley from the grocery market’s parking lot, and wheel it back to the old woman.

  Then he crossed quickly toward Mara’s building.

  At the entrance to the alley, he slowed his pace. This alley ran along the side of Mara’s building; another alley ran behind the building. A few yards before the intersection with the second alley was the Dumpster the woman had pointed at.

  Its contents were overflowing, and it stank. But Reggie wasn’t interested in whatever might be inside it. He stared at the ground and walked slowly around the perimeter to the other side.

  On the dusty asphalt where the Dumpster abutted the wall, he found two sets of small parallel grooves, each about half an inch in width—faint but present, they were certainly marks left by the wheels of a shopping cart.

  Reggie followed them for several yards, until they stopped just beneath a fire escape. Here the marks were trampled and mashed out. And there was something else—several small, dark, dried splotches that might have been a number of things but which looked a lot like blood.

  He squatted, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Yes, it was almost certainly blood.

  No need for a taste test.

  So the body had been stuffed in the shopping cart to be moved, then wheeled to beneath the overpass. And either the killer was interrupted before he could hide it properly—or else he really didn’t care so much if it was discovered; he simply didn’t want it discovered where the killing occurred.

  The murder had been committed either here on the ground or on the fire escape above.

  It was Mara’s fire escape.

  Reggie looked across the alley. Not much going on there. Just the abandoned warehouse building, with its windows boarded up. In fact, the whole block on that side of the alley was abandoned.

  So why was there a single light from a second-floor window at the far end of the abandoned building?

  Reggie blinked. No question, there was a light, behind one of the few windows still intact.

  He stepped out of the shadows to get a better view and stood looking directly toward the lighted window.

  And immediately the light went out.

  Reggie began walking rapidly toward the street at the opposite end of the alley, counting the windows as he went. There was no doorway from the alley to the warehouse building; to get inside and find the source of that light, he would have to get in through the street entrance.

  He reached the street and then paused. A pair of headlights had appeared at the opposite end of the block. He waited until they had passed, and then he went quickly to the entrance of the old warehouse.

  There was no longer any real door over the entrance, though clearly it had once been boarded up; but the accumulated debris would be enough to keep any but the most desperate from venturing inside. There was still a sign announcing the building was condemned and suggesting all sorts of legal remedies against anyone who should trespass, but the sign’s rust, dirt, and .22-caliber bullet holes made it seem an empty threat.

  Reggie stepped over the debris and into the building and immediately gagged at the stench of rotten food, stale alcohol, and urine. There was a
narrow path through the rubbish and up a stairway. He leaned outside, took a deep breath of the marginally cleaner air, and then turned and began to walk up the stairs as quickly as he could in the near pitch darkness.

  Reggie reached the second floor without having stepped on any obvious bodies. He wasn’t quite certain that he had managed not to trod on anything of organic origin—but that seemed a bit much to ask in the circumstances.

  He tried to move quietly as he reached the second floor. Whoever had been responsible for the light would still be there, unless he had taken a back way out.

  The hallway was dark in both directions, and in both directions the doors had been either broken out completely or smashed.

  Except for a door to Reggie’s right. That door was relatively intact. And it was completely closed.

  Reggie moved silently and cautiously to the side of the door, then paused. If his guess was right, the person watching from this window was likely the person who had killed Mara’s neighbor.

  It didn’t seem wise to knock. Reggie put his hand tentatively on the doorknob.

  “Go away,” said a muffled and vaguely inebriated-sounding voice from inside.

  There was obviously no opportunity for surprise now. Reggie tried to open the door, but the latch didn’t turn.

  “I said get lost,” came the voice again, sounding even more sodden. Reggie stepped back and, not at all sure that it would work, kicked hard at the latch.

  The door broke open.

  “Bloody damn,” said the voice from the back of the darkened room, clearly recognizable now.

  Reggie just stood there for a moment. He wasn’t all that happy with this turn of events himself.

  “Nigel,” he said. “Nigel. What in hell have you—”

  That was as far as Reggie got. There was a sudden commotion from the stairs, and four police officers came charging down the hallway and through the doorway Reggie had just kicked open; one held Reggie in place against the wall, and two others held guns on Nigel as the fourth handcuffed him. It was all complete in a matter of seconds.

  “I wish,” said Nigel to Reggie, just before they were both ushered down the stairs, “you were as good at not being tracked as you are in tracking.”