The Baker Street Letters Read online

  He went on to the next room, where a balding, sixtyish man announced personal surgical details of which Reggie would just as soon have remained ignorant.

  He moved on to the next room.

  And there was Nigel.

  He was lying flat out in the bed, unconscious. A nurse was tending to him.

  “What’s his condition?” Reggie asked.

  “A concussion.”

  “When will he come out of it?”

  “You should ask the doctor that. But I’ve seen worse.”

  “He’s had one before,” said Reggie.

  “Sure, honey,” she said helpfully. “Who hasn’t?”

  “Was there a woman visitor here earlier?” asked Reggie.

  “Yes, he seems to be a popular guy.”

  “Tallish redhead, highly freckled?”

  “The first one. The second was medium, Hispanic, also very pretty. She said she had to go see her father. In the burn wing.”

  The nurse exited.

  Reggie sat on the plastic hospital guest chair. He stared at Nigel and tried to push back a memory of thirty years ago—when he’d waited outside a surgery while his distraught mother and a doctor peered into Nigel’s eyes, assessing the results of a concussion that Reggie had caused.

  In relating that incident years later, their mother, unable to deal with the knowledge of one son hurting the other that way, had transferred that guilt onto one of Nigel’s chums, and in family legend, that’s where it had remained.

  Making it all the more awkward for Reggie, hearing the story again and again at family events.

  This one isn’t my fault, he reminded himself. Nigel came out here against his instructions.

  But perhaps because of his lawyer’s training—or perhaps in spite of it—Reggie looked back one step in the trail of proximate cause.

  He had given Nigel the menial position that, as it turned out, included the job of answering the letters.

  Yes, but there was no way he could have known Nigel would do such an extraordinary thing with them. So Reggie was not the cause.

  He looked yet another step back—Nigel had taken the job because of his troubles with the Law Society.

  But those troubles were of Nigel’s own making, so Reggie was not the cause there, either, and it was time, he knew, to be done with that.

  But then Reggie looked back one more step, to what had preceded Nigel’s gloriously successful—and then completely disastrous—first trial.

  And what had preceded that was Laura’s breakup with Nigel.

  And the lover she had dumped him for was Reggie.

  That was not proximate cause, either; no court on either continent would say so, there were too many intervening events and too much exercise—and often foolish exercise—of Nigel’s free will in between.

  But Reggie’s mind was not a court of law, and as he sat by his brother’s bedside, there was no jury to provide exoneration.

  Mercifully, now his mobile rang.

  It was Ms. Brinks.

  “I have your list,” she said.

  “Which list is that?” said Reggie.

  “Clients of O’Malley and Associates,” she said. “Remember, you asked for—”

  “Yes, I remember,” said Reggie. “What did you find?”

  Ms. Brinks began to rattle off a long list of people and corporations known to be clients of that law firm.

  Reggie dismissed each in turn; he could see no possible connection for any of them.

  “Perhaps it would help,” said Ms. Brinks, “if I knew what sort of connection you are looking for.”

  “Someone, or some thing, with some likelihood of communication, however indirect, with me, Nigel, or Laura.”

  “Oh,” said Ms. Brinks. Then, after just a short pause, “Well, there is one more thing, then.”

  “Yes?”

  “I . . . just don’t know whether I should say.”

  “If you’ve got something, Ms. Brinks, you’d better spit it out.”

  “You asked me to look into Lord Buxton. So I did. And you were right, there’s a connection. I mean, indirectly.”

  “Say that again?”

  “He owns one of the companies represented by O’Malley and Associates. And . . . I just don’t think it’s my place to say—”

  “Ms. Brinks—”

  “Well, in the Star a few days ago, there was an item about him in the company of Miss Rankin. In New York City, some premiere or another. Now, I don’t want to be presumptuous, sir, but the indirect connection I’m referring to is—”

  “Thank you, Ms. Brinks. I will connect the dots.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  Reggie hung up the phone.

  Buxton.

  Could it really be? Could Buxton be behind any of it at all?

  That would be perfect. Laura would drop the man like a stone.

  Reggie sat alone in the room for several moments more, contemplating the possibilities. And then the door opened, and he looked up with a start.

  It was Laura.

  She entered the small hospital room, her dark red hair spilling down over her neck and exposed shoulders, making her seem unusually vulnerable. She looked across first at Nigel, unconscious in the bed, and then she appraised Reggie.

  “Where does it hurt most?” she asked.

  “My head and neck and arms and knees,” said Reggie. “Nothing more. What about you?”

  “Not a scratch,” she said. “Nigel saved the Saint Bernard, you know. It seems the blast put it airborne, and Nigel cushioned its fall, so to speak. Heaths are apparently excellent buffers.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Reggie.

  “And then it cushioned mine. I’ll be sneezing now for a month, but fair trade.”

  For a moment they both sat in silence, looking at Nigel. Reggie thought he caught Laura glancing surreptitiously over at Reggie watching Nigel, but she looked away again and said nothing.

  Reggie spoke first.

  “Wembley is getting ready to drag us all back to London about Ocher,” he said, “with you first on the list. And Mendoza still wants to hang something on Nigel here if he can. We need to establish a connection between Ocher and what happened here and make everyone see it.”

  “Sorry,” said Laura. “I was wandering. Don’t know quite why. How do we do that?”

  Reggie hesitated. He had avoided this earlier. He couldn’t avoid it now.

  “We need to identify the inside source,” he said. “The person who put up Nigel’s bail.”

  “Yes, I recall you mentioned that. But who is it?”

  “You might not like this.”

  “I can’t imagine why. Tell me.”

  “Your friend Buxton,” said Reggie.

  For a brief moment, Laura just stared. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  “He has the funds to have done it.”

  “Reggie, what possible motive would he have?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Not yet.”

  “Then why are we even discussing him?”

  “Laura, he owns the majority interest in a company that is represented by the same law firm that posted Nigel’s bail.”

  Laura looked away, puzzled over that for a moment, then looked back.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “Sorry,” said Reggie. “Didn’t want to present bad news about your friend, but there it is.”

  “Reggie—if you draw lines from all of Robert’s acquisitions to all their subsidiaries, the amazing thing will be if you discover a major law firm that does not represent one of his interests somewhere. And you know this, you know it perfectly well. Why are you even bringing this up? And why do you keep saying ‘friend’ as if in quotation marks?”

  “It’s just beyond credibility,” said Reggie, “that he would fly out here just to get rid of all the thees and thous in The Taming of the Shrew.”

  “It’s not just ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ if you must know. He’s decided to go ahead with the m
ovie spinoff, and he came to set that up. There will be a quick promotional shoot at the studio in Century City before I go back to rehearsals.”

  “I see,” said Reggie, with as little inflection as he could manage.

  “Usually when you say it that way, you don’t,” said Laura. “But just tell me this—how is Robert supposed to have known that Nigel even was in jail, or about any of what we’ve been doing at all?”

  Reggie didn’t answer at first. He was digging a hole for himself, and he knew it. He was well past the clay and about to drill into bedrock, and his better sense told him to stop—but he didn’t.

  “Well, bloody hell, Laura, you’ve been spending your evenings with the man, what in blazes am I supposed to think?”

  “If you can even imagine that I would be so foolish and untrustworthy as to confide—”

  “No, I don’t, I don’t think that at all.”

  “But you thought it, you did think it, you said it just now! If I didn’t think it would break some stitches somewhere, I’d slap you so hard your teeth would rattle into the next millennium!”

  She stood and turned toward the door.

  “Laura—”

  “Reggie—for all this time you’ve waffled and I’ve waited. Now you think you see a threat come on the scene and suddenly you think it’s me that might have a shag on the side?”

  She went to the door without waiting for an answer. But then she paused and looked back.

  “You can call me,” she said, “when your brother wakes up. Or when you do.”

  And then she was gone.

  Reggie remained there beside Nigel’s hospital bed and wondered if Laura had meant it literally.

  Then something occurred to him, something so obvious that he realized that something other than rational logic must have been running him of late.

  If the inside source was not Buxton, who was it?

  He took out his mobile and rang Ms. Brinks in London.

  She asked how everything was.

  Reggie lied. He told her he now had what he needed to put an end to the whole mess—including the original survey map and the evidence to tie it to who had altered it. He would deliver both to the transit construction authority and to Mendoza. Between that and Mara’s testimony, he would see Nigel clear of the mess—on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Ms. Brinks asked if she could do anything more to help; Reggie told her nothing else remained to be done and hung up the phone.

  Then he got up and went into the corridor.

  He began looking into rooms again until he found a man who lay bandaged head to toe in light gauze, with catheters and intravenous tubes extending uncomfortably from his arms and groin. The man’s forehead and one entire side of his face was covered, and Reggie wouldn’t have been sure who it was.

  But he saw Mara sitting at his bedside.

  Her face showed a bruise on her right cheek and a deep sense of worry, but she seemed otherwise undamaged.

  Reggie found a chair and sat down next to her.

  “I suspected he had come back,” she said when she looked up. “Just a week after Lance Slaughter moved into the building, I began to notice this older man at the shelter—he’d just stand outside and stare across at my building all the time. At first it creeped me out. But he wasn’t staring in the same way that some guys will—he was just sort of . . . watching. And not so much watching me, as . . . well, watching out for me, it seemed like. Watching over my place. And once I began to suspect it was my father . . . well, I had to be real careful what I told anyone. I couldn’t even go over to the shelter to try to talk to him; I was sure that would put him at risk. I had to watch out for him as well.”

  Now Ramirez moved slightly in his bed.

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  Ramirez shifted his eyes to the side, noticing Reggie.

  “You were lucky,” he said. “A few yards made all the difference.”

  “Who was it?” said Reggie. “Who did all this?”

  “It was Rogers,” said Ramirez. “You saw.”

  “But who paid Rogers off?” said Reggie. “Who was the other man on the platform?”

  “Never saw him. Rogers knew him, I didn’t. Never saw him.” Now Ramirez became agitated and moved as if to sit up. “Anyway, I fixed it! I came back and fixed it!”

  “Daddy—”

  Ramirez slumped back into the bed, and his eyes closed.

  “You can’t talk to him anymore,” said Mara at his side.

  “Your father killed Lance Slaughter. Did you know that?”

  “Not for sure. I mean, not right away. But . . . well, yes. I suspected it.”

  “Mendoza will still charge Nigel with it if he doesn’t hear otherwise.”

  Reggie saw her hesitate.

  “I know,” she said. “When he comes to again, I’ll . . . I’ll ask him to tell me.”

  It was only a moment’s hesitation, between conflicting loyalties, and in Reggie’s view it meant something that she gave Nigel such weight.

  “Will that be enough?” she said. “I mean . . . to get Nigel free of this?”

  “Your father can clear Nigel,” said Reggie. “If Mendoza hears his statement. But someone behind this—the money behind all this—will escape because we don’t have the map.”

  “I want whoever made this happen to pay,” said Mara.

  She picked up her backpack from behind the chair and opened it. “I kept this safe for twenty years,” she said. “You think I would let it burn?”

  She pulled out three rolled-up sheets of singed paper. Then she just held on to them for a moment.

  “You better make good use of this,” she said to Reggie.

  “I intend to,” he said.

  She gave him the map.

  Reggie left Mara with her father and returned to Nigel’s room. He walked over to the bedside and looked.

  Nothing had changed. Nigel was still unconscious.

  Reggie turned and went back to his chair and was about to sit down. Then he heard Nigel speak.

  “Bloody hell,” said Nigel. “How long was I out?”

  Reggie returned to the side of the bed.

  “Where is she?” said Nigel.

  “She left a bit ago,” said Reggie. “Annoyed with me, I think.”

  “Oh, I see. You meant Laura. I meant, where is Mara?”

  “With her father.”

  “She’s all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Laura is all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope everyone else is dead. The bloody dog, too. God, my head is pounding.”

  “Join the club.”

  “Don’t tell Mara what I said about the dog.”

  “Why in bloody hell didn’t you contact me when you got out of jail?”

  “I’ve made you either a suspect or an accomplice in two murders on two continents. I would think that would be enough contact. So when they let me out, I just went directly to Mara’s.”

  There was something possessive in the way he said her name this time, and there was not much room for misinterpretation.

  “You mean you just showed up at her door, said, Here I am, take me in, and she said yes?”

  “Pretty much,” Nigel said in an overly self-satisfied tone. “Isn’t that how it always works for you with a beautiful woman?”

  “No,” said Reggie, looking doubtfully at Nigel. “Not exactly.”

  “Well,” said Nigel, retreating a bit, “perhaps it wasn’t exactly that way. But something changed between the time you first spoke to her and the time I got out of jail. I think because she learned that her father had returned and was in trouble. She was looking for help, and I was there.

  “We stayed at her place at first, but I had a sense the wrong people would know we were there. So I took her to the Roosevelt Arms. I know it’s not the Bonaventure, but it’s safe. Or at least I thought it was. And they accept pets.”

  “Who posted your bail?” sai
d Reggie.

  “I wondered that, too, and I still don’t know. I realized at the time that someone must be getting me out just so they could round me up and, they hoped, get the map. But just knowing that doesn’t help. And apparently the clerk at the Roosevelt will tell anybody anything for a fee. Mara and I went to the Lankershim dig, looking for her father. They followed us there. Rogers and the other wanker had both me and Mara at once; they had the gun, and I couldn’t risk doing anything.”

  “Who was he—the other wanker?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve seen his face before. I’m pretty sure his photo was hanging in the café across the street. And Mara’s attentive neighbor—keep forgetting his name . . .”

  “Lance Slaughter.”

  “He had a photo hanging there as well. Don’t know if that means a connection between the two. You should ask Laura to take a look. She can tell a producer from a director from an actor at a glance.”

  “Yes,” said Reggie. “I will when I see her.”

  Nigel sat halfway up and peered at Reggie. “Have I been missing something?” he asked. “Is there a problem between you two?”

  “There may be a problem.”

  “Well, you’ve been a fool to let her ride for so long,” said Nigel. “I mean, Buxton, for God’s sake.” He started to shake his head in amazement but immediately stopped. “Oww,” he said. “Bloody hell. I hope they have real drugs here and not some bloody holistic—”

  “Have you ever considered,” Reggie interrupted, “how things might have gone between you and Laura if you had not invited me that time to see her at the Adelphi?”

  Nigel stopped whining and stared at Reggie. “No,” he said. “Why should I?”

  “No reason,” said Reggie.

  “You remember what I was like,” said Nigel. “The state my career was in. Do you think I had the vanity to believe that a woman like Laura would marry someone with prospects like mine? I mean, yes, good looks count, but—”

  “I’m sure she would have seen possibilities,” said Reggie.

  “What? Since when do you regard my career as acceptable? And you know my work habits; I’ve been a poster child for attention deficit disorder since the day I was born.”

  “Seems to me your prospects weren’t so bad until . . . until after.”

  “Until after . . . ?”

  “You know,” said Reggie, waving his hand vaguely. “Until after . . . Laura and me.”