THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOSTON DROMIO
Matthew Pearl is the author of the historical novels The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens. His nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and Legal Affairs. He has taught literature and creative writing at Harvard University and Emerson College.
“‘More morphine!’ ‘More chloral!’” he cried, his eyes small and restless. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe, Watson, how American patients order you about as if you were the stable boy.”
This commentary I heard over breakfast with Dr. Joseph Lavey, the surgeon who had ministered to my injuries in Afghanistan, during my restorative tour through America. Lavey, formerly of London and now of Commercial Street, Boston, had remained in disconsolate and solitary spirits in the years since his wife had died of pneumonia. He was highly distracted and complained of matters large and small, whether the dwindled profits in his medical practice, or the incompetence in recent weeks of his housemaid.
“She has brought me plates of food never requested,” he said about this. “She has spent daytime hours locked in her little room instead of at her duties!”
I could not know then what startling events the moody statements of my old friend Dr. Lavey portended.
Lavey’s misery was so robust, I was relieved at the end of our breakfast to be left in peace with some free time and my guidebook to Boston. Two days later, Lavey returned to my lodgings at dinner. He was out of breath and had fear painted across his face.
“Why, Lavey, you are not well,” I said. “Let us have something to eat.” I wanted to get a closer look at him, thinking I had recognized in him some telltale signs of an opium eater.
He cried out in a muttering voice, his hands clapped to his brow, “Dead!”
“What?”
“She is dead, Watson! And the detectives’ eyes are hot with suspicion. My dear Watson, I know you have experience in the line of queer criminal happenings. You are the only friend remaining to me in the wide world. You must help!”
During the night, Lavey said, he had been awakened to a loud thumping. Dressing hastily and taking a rifle from the wall, he nearly tumbled down the stairs before finding his housemaid, Mary Ann Pinton, lying dead on his kitchen floor. That was all he could remember. When next conscious, he was lying on top of her body with his rifle and the police were shaking him. It occurred to me that the whole fantastic tale had been some mental production of his opiates.
“Lavey, remain here with me in my lodgings,” I implored him.
“No. She is gone; I must take care of her!” he said cryptically, and hurried away from the premises deaf to my pleas.
Opening the next morning’s paper, I found news of the most alarming type: Dr. Joseph Lavey, the man to whom I owed my life, arrested for the murder of Mary Ann Pinton!
I cabled my friend and traveling companion, Sherlock Holmes, at once requesting that he depart on the earliest train for Boston. He had remained at our hotel in Portland, Maine, on business of a personal nature while I had continued our tour of New England.
During these same days, my name and Holmes’s could be found in the Boston news columns. It was said that I had decided to hide Sherlock Holmes from the public of Boston. That when we had crossed through New Hampshire, I kept my coat draped over his face. That I had refused to make him available in any public appearances. Various editors called for Holmes to banish me back to England and replace me with an improved companion, preferably a Yankee. Meanwhile, I received piles of notes from portrait artists and photographers proposing Holmes the honor of sitting for them, and others from admirers offering up to twenty dollars for locks of his hair!
All this interrupted my attempts on poor Lavey’s behalf. As I sat at my small desk writing letters to lawyers one afternoon, I was surprised in turning around for my water carafe to find that the armchair by the open window was now occupied.
“Holmes!” I cried.
“Boston is a city of overgrown college men,” Sherlock Holmes said abstractedly.
I was overjoyed to have my friend back by my side.
Holmes had been suffering from the variety of mild ailments to the skin, nails, and lungs that many English visitors to United States cities experienced from the stale air and the lack of ventilation inside buildings and trains. Yet, as though his spirits compensated for his physical depression, Holmes had more than usual pluck and smartness in his slender, swift frame. I explained in detail what I knew about Lavey’s case.
“You say your reunion with this man at this lodging house was less than pleasant?” Holmes asked, steepling his long fingers together.
“Lavey is by disposition a temperamental man. Still, he had been a well-meaning citizen at the side of his American wife, Amelia, a good and strong woman I counted as my friend. Since her death by pneumonia, I believe he has reverted to his former state, and turned to drugs for comfort.”
“You had not seen him for many years, then.”
“No. Yet I am fully inclined to give the old fellow assistance when requested—his dutiful services when an army surgeon having saved my life in the base hospital at Peshawar.”
“That is an old grudge,” Holmes observed.
“I should call it gratitude, not at all a grudge,” I protested earnestly, “toward a man who kept me from death.”
“You misunderstand, my dear Watson,” said Holmes. “I mean the grudge to be on his part against you. There is nothing quite as trying as saving another man’s life. He punishes you to this day. Yet, since you maintain a personal attachment, the case shall be ours. As you know, I cannot promise it will turn out as you want it to. But I should not mind terribly satisfying a long curiosity I’ve had by making a firsthand study of the methods of Boston detectives—the oldest department of detection in the United States, Watson. In my knowledge of Boston crooks, their crimes are by no means as clever as Chicago nor as desperate as New York, but they are singular to the degree their misdeeds are performed out of public view. One thing, Watson, have you seen Dr. Lavey since his arrest?”
“Yes. I visited the jail this morning and found he hadn’t even a lawyer! He can hardly be of help to himself, I am afraid, Holmes. He mumbled pitiably how he could not be guilty of any crime if he could remember nothing of it.”
“To be found lying on top of a murder victim is most unfortunate for the public perception. I should be interested in what he has to say about the girl. Miss Pinton, you say?”
I nodded. “He knows very little. Miss Pinton is twenty-three or twenty-four, from somewhere out west. Though quite attractive, she never married, has no family to speak of, never had a single visitor to the house.”
“You are right that Dr. Lavey knows very little, but to our advantage. I am certain you have already considered that a housemaid may meet all kinds of ruffians on her errands for her master.”
“Yes, Holmes, I did think just that. I asked Lavey to tell me the location of every household mission he had sent her on in the last weeks. I have recorded them on the map of Boston in McNally’s guidebook, with a mark in red for his house.” I showed this to Holmes, who seemed extremely pleased by it.
“Excellent, Watson! This shall be critical in time in understanding the crime.”
“There was one other thing, Holmes. I thought it might be promising, but it turned out rather useless. When Lavey left here the other day in quite a state, I had urged him to remain but he said, ‘She is gone; I must take care of her.’ I thought it a queer phrase considering.”
“Yes, I see why.”
“This morning, I asked my friend in his cell, whom he had gone to take care of, whether it was perhaps a patient of his. It was my suspicion, as a matter of fact, that it was a mistress he was concerned about.”
“A fine line of questioning, Watson. And did he tell you about the little animal?”
“Why, Holmes, you astound me still! Exactly!” I cried. “Lavey looked at me with a blank stare, then said, ‘Oh, no. I meant only I had to take care of Mollie, the wretched kitten Mary had brought into the house the other day.’ But Holmes, how did you know his strange words had referred to a pet?”
Holmes waved this away and smiled. “A trivial deduction little worthy of talk, Watson. If Lavey and his maid were united in the care of another being in their quiet household, by which Mary’s sudden absence burdened her master, it was most likely to be a domestic animal and no doubt, with his recent mood, any pet too large or unseemly would have already met with expulsion. I shall say no more on the subject for now, so that we may begin to gather one or two important particulars you have failed to consider.”
I visited the police headquarters. Detective Dugan, upon hearing the name Sherlock Holmes, immediately arranged for us to visit the scene. The modest three-story house was located in a dingy residential district near the waterfront of the city. Lavey had lived there for three years, having moved from a desirable street in Back Bay following his wife’s death.
“We sealed the doors upon discovery of the crime, Mr. Holmes,” Dugan said with a tone of professional pride. “The body was in the kitchen—over there. Dr. Lavey had fainted right on top of her, holding a rifle. I saw from the jump how it happened.”
“She jumped, Detective Dugan?” I asked, looking around the kitchen.
“No, Watson,” Holmes interjected. “‘The jump,’ if I am not mistaken, is like the start, the beginning. I have made a study of Americanisms since our passage, and consider doing a small monograph on the subject for publication upon our return to England. Please continue, Detective.”
“I could see that she had been smothered and suffocated, Mr. Holmes, from the moment I saw her body,” he said, with a sneering eyebrow at me. “The skin around her mouth was discolored and her nose was flattened and bruised as though it had been pushed down. He did not want anyone to hear him finishing her. There were no other marks or bruises on her head or body, and the rifle had not been discharged.”
“Excellent! I would have asked you about the latter point, if you had not anticipated it,” Holmes said.
Dugan was moved to a boyish smile by my friend’s praise. “I also thought to check the doors, but none had been forced open.”
“Was there anyone else seen near the house?” I asked the officer.
“The nearest neighbors did not look out until Dr. Lavey’s shouts for help were heard before he fainted dead away. I am sorry to say the evidence is strong against your friend, Dr. Watson,” said Dugan. “Firstly, they were the only two people in the house. Secondly, Lavey discovered the girl’s body but says he cannot remember the circumstances.”
“That is just it, Detective Dugan,” said I. “It would surprise me greatly if Dr. Lavey had not turned to a habitual usage of opiates since Mrs. Lavey’s death, which could explain his confusion and his untimely swoon. It is the vice of too many medical men here and in our own country.”
“If you’d permit, Dr. Watson. Thirdly, it has become known that he has been complaining around the neighborhood in recent weeks about Miss Pinton’s qualities as a housekeeper. Fourthly, as you testify, he had been a heavy user of opium as of late, and so could be prone to violence.”
“The Boston detective force is extremely organized,” Holmes said as an aside to me, with an amused air I could not share at the moment.
“As a point of fact, Detective,” I remarked firmly, “it is my experience that those who take opium tend to be drowsy and depressed, rather than roused to violence.”
“Even if that is the case, Dr. Watson, there is fifthly.”
“Fifthly?”
“Ah, fifthly,” Dugan resumed, “is that he feared, because of the sloppiness in her work, she was on the verge of resigning and looking for a new place, which could result in her whispering secrets of his habits around town. That would cause irreparable damage to his reputation as a doctor. There, that is the case in a nutshell.”
“Do you not think,” I said insistently, “that if a man is to take the trouble to suffocate a woman silently so that nobody will hear, he would not call for the police a moment later?”
“Narcotics can make a man act irrationally,” the Boston detective replied after a pause.
Holmes looked back and forth at the kitchen. “I think we have learned all we can from this place. I wonder only where has the household pet gone?”
“Beg pardon?” Dugan nervously avoided looking at my friend.
“The kitten,” Holmes clarified, speaking the word slowly and deliberately.
“Ah, yes,” the detective replied. “Probably it has died of starvation and heat by now—gentlemen, spread out and look for that dead cat for Mr. Holmes to examine!” he ordered the two police officers that had accompanied us. When they had left the room, Dugan shifted to Holmes’s side.
“Mr. Holmes, when we had first entered,” he said in a contrite whisper, “the kitten was pawing at my shoe and mewing. I gave her a dish of milk, though I could hear the other men laugh at me. I had read in the paper of a new organization on Carver Street that condemned the practice of leaving cats in vacant houses to die. So before we left I placed the kitten in my pocket, beseeching the creature to remain quiet, and took her there straightaway.”
“I perfectly understand,” said Holmes. “You may rest assured your good deed will remain entirely quiet with us. I would not mind in the least seeing this organization.”
Stopping on the way back to our lodgings, Holmes and I alighted at a three-story brick building bearing the name of the Animal Rescue League. Before going very far, we learned that the new organization had not escaped controversy, as circulars were posted on walls nearby with the following printed copy:
Humanity is sick of philanthropic fads and dilettante charities. The heart of Boston seems stirred over the distress of stray cats and the sensitive sympathies of the multitudes are awakened for some lonesome tabby that walks a back fence without a chaperon. But what of humanity? What of worse than homeless children of our city streets? Throngs appear to protect the sparrows, while little lives are perishing, one of which is of greater worth than many sparrows.
This was signed at the bottom by a Boston minister whose name meant nothing to Holmes or myself, but whose train of honorary degrees behind his name signified local prominence.
When the name of Sherlock Holmes was announced at the door, the president of the League was immediately sent for at his home as we waited in the parlor reading the literature about the place. A female employee worked diligently at a desk. A sign on the wall read, “If every person would give at least five cents we could care for several hundred more dogs and cats every year,” and another, “Kindness uplifts the world.” The latter phrase, displayed in bold lettering before us, seemed to perplex and entrap my friend Holmes’s gaze as few things I had ever seen.
“It is an honor to have you distinguished gentlemen as my guests,” said Colonel Brenton, the president, with a deep bow and hearty handshakes. “Our little League has been open to the public but a few months.”
“I should like very much to see your headquarters, if you would be so kind,” said Holmes.
Brenton led us into the League’s parlors, where animals were gathered and being pet by visitors. Brenton explained how the League was the first and only central location in the city where homeless cats and dogs could be taken to be given new homes or put to death in a humane manner rather than to starve and suffer abuse and torture in the streets.
“We wish to spread a sympathy for dumb animals too often hardened inside our hearts. Why, sometimes even I will see a dumb animal I wish to help stuck in some ash barrel, and by the time I have reached it, I have thought about something else and forgotten all about it.” He rubbed his thin moustache thoughtfully. “Sympathy is a good deal like electricity, gentlemen. The world is full of it, but before you can press the button with any effect you must have the line connected. And after connection is established the circuit is easily broken.”
“There is much poetic sentiment in that, Colonel,” Holmes said agreeably. “I wonder, though, if you might now turn over the guidance of our tour to the actual person in charge of the League. A woman, if I am not mistaken.”
We both turned and stared at Holmes in awkward disbelief.
“Why, Mr. Holmes, I am the president of this organization! You may well look at the stationery for evidence of that!” he cried.
Holmes stood and waited. After a moment of shuffling and protesting, and Holmes still impassive, Brenton’s face fell in inevitable surrender. “Wait here, gentlemen. I shall call for Mrs. Huntington Smith.”
“Did you not see, Watson,” Holmes said when we were alone, noting my confusion, “that the good colonel’s steps inside were taken with a tentative, semi-familiar measure, looking ahead at all times, as one who has been inside a structure perhaps but three or four times. Nor did a single one of the animals having the liberty of the place note his presence with recognition or happiness. An animal knows its friend is present long before he is even in sight.”
“I suppose you are right, but how did you know that a woman was the true head?” I asked, baffled.
“Simply enough, my dear Watson. If he is a man, then the real authority must not be. The only reason for his appointment would have been for the public legitimacy a man brings in the role. Then there is the fact that most organizations devoted to the humane treatment of animals and children are founded by women in this country, as in England, so that I had absolute certainty as to my trifling deduction. I had no desire to cause any embarrassment to the lawyer (or such I perceive him to be by his stance and inflection), but he can give us nothing we require.”
I was about to ask what that was, as this all seemed to me a strange detour away from more pressing enquiries, but at this point there entered a small, quick-moving woman who presented herself as Anna Harris Smith, wife of Huntington Smith, editor of the Boston Beacon.
A mongrel terrier ran up and pawed at Mrs. Smith’s leg for affection.
“Ah, there is a happy dog then!” I commented.
“You see,” she said to us, “the animals are happy because this is not an institution, but a real home. We do not like to keep any animal in limited quarters. You need not explain who you are. I have read of your arrival in my husband’s newspaper.”
“I wonder if we might have the pleasure of seeing a specific animal under your care, Mrs. Smith,” Holmes said. “Would that be much trouble?”
“We keep a very accurate account of the animals, entering upon our books every day where each animal comes from, in what condition it is when received, and how it is disposed of. When the animal is given away, an agreement must be signed in which a promise is made to treat the animal kindly, and if it is not desired, to return it to the League. We must be able to see for ourselves that the home is a good one. This may seem strict, but in this enlightened age there are still men and women who regard the lower animals as less than machines, using them if convenient, treating cats as animated mouse traps, then giving them less care than they would bestow upon a bicycle or a sewing machine.”
“That is very true!” Holmes said exuberantly, as though he had worked a difficult case to its conclusion which, looking back upon the surprises of the case, it was very possible he had.
Holmes having described the circumstances of this particular kitten’s arrival, Mrs. Smith took us at once to an enclosed room like a conservatory filled with fresh light from a roof of skylights. There, cats and kittens played, stretched, slept. Mrs. Smith began sorting through the menagerie with swift but gentle hands.
“When summer approaches, the number of animals given away or homeless increases greatly. It is a rather cruel habit of people to turn out their cats, or leave them inside to suffer and starve, while they leave Boston for the summer. Horses standing out in the heat become weak with thirst and hunger because of brutal owners who can pay less for another horse than to feed their own. They collapse in the street, or are taken by horse thieves and traded to be slaughtered. That is the end for the most faithful servant that mankind has. Does it not seem time to expect more of a Christian country?”
“There surely must be some recourse in the law, Mrs. Smith,” I suggested.
“Not presently. This summer, we have kept a score of men constantly employed in the streets following the more wretched horses and listening for alarms of theft. Here. The ribbon on her neck said her name was ‘Mollie.’”
The kitten had a flowing coat of orange and white, and she looked out and blinked at us with one blue eye and one granite gray.
“A beautiful puss,” Holmes said after the briefest look. “Now that I see your labors, I am certain my colleague Dr. Watson would agree that we have taken entirely too much of your day.”
On the way to the stairs, we passed by a room that held approximately a dozen boys and girls. They were playing very gently with some snoozing fat cat on a sofa and a sprightly kitten, while each youth stood up and told of a good deed performed toward an animal.
“That is our Kindness Club,” said Mrs. Smith to us proudly. “The children come nearly every day through the summer vacation. Many of these children would spend their evenings on the streets if not for our club, boredom leading to abuse of each other and any helpless beings. If we can teach humanity to the generation growing up, there will be no cruelty to grapple with in generations to come.”
One chubby boy was speaking about how he gave water to an emaciated horse on the street that was in weak, uncared for condition from pulling a heavy wagon. The other children applauded with sincere appreciation. After finding myself rather moved in observing, I turned back to see Holmes was speaking quietly to our guide. The only words I heard Holmes speak were “a good bargain.” The strength in that woman’s bright eye could only remind me of my very first glimpse at Holmes himself.
As we climbed into our waiting carriage again on Carver Street, an agent from the Animal Rescue League appeared at the window holding a small green bag with perforations along the side. He handed this into the carriage to Holmes. I presumed this package was connected to Holmes’s hushed talk with Mrs. Smith. The agent said that yarn was the preferred plaything, but never to be ingested.
“I believe I saw a piece of yarn at the bottom of my wardrobe. Watson, did you notice it?” asked Holmes as we drove on our way.
“What is this about, Holmes?”
Holmes opened the top of the bag. Mollie peered over the side, then fell on her back as she tried to climb onto the carriage seat. For the next several days, Holmes hardly ever left the side of the mischievous kitten in the humble confines of our rooms.
I was often left with no occupation more pressing than to watch my companion dote on Mollie as she attacked a roll of yarn. Yet, it was my forehead she would pounce on in the still hours of the night and bat her claws into my nostrils. Mollie had grown attached to Holmes and after dinners would curl up in his lap as he read a Blue Book guide to cats he had secured inexpensively.
“My dear Holmes,” I said at one point, “how long must she stay here while we attempt to concentrate on Dr. Lavey’s case?”
“Watson, I am a little surprised at your impatience with the speechless creature. She has come very close to absolving your old friend of the grave charge of murder already.”
Later that day, I sat with Sherlock Holmes at a fine restaurant he had pointed out in our guidebook among the elegant, tree-lined rows of aristocratic Boston. This outing took me quite by surprise, given my friend’s thrifty tastes. Only once we were on our way there, did I realize he had carried Mollie with us in the green bag. I suggested that the restaurant would not permit her, and, even if we were to smuggle her inside, were she to begin meowing incessantly (as was her custom), we would be thrown out.
“I suppose you are correct, as this is not Paris, where they are permissive of animal companions,” Holmes said. He tied a long ribbon he had in his pocket from her neck to a lamppost that could be seen from the restaurant’s window. It was a rather strange sight, I suppose, to the American pedestrians. Shortly into our meal, two young women in expensive silk dresses stopped and reached down for Mollie, who backed away and looked coolly at them. After some unsuccessful inducements to prove their friendship, the women yielded. Later, as Holmes uncharacteristically ordered dessert, a more dramatic trial came for the poor creature. Two well-dressed boys began to throw rocks at her. Mollie cried out and tried to run toward the restaurant.
I rose from my chair and readied my walking stick as a weapon. To my surprise, Holmes did not stir.
“Holmes, would you allow such torment by those little devils?”
The imps now crossed to Mollie’s side of the street, as their aim had been fortunately bad. Just as I was about to step into the fray, a hail of rocks flew at the perpetrators instead of the kitten. I craned my neck out the window and recognized three boys from Mrs. Smith’s Kindness Club. Though they were smaller than Mollie’s tormentors, they outnumbered the evildoers, successfully chasing them away and likely warning them never to harm helpless animals again without fearing their little club’s vengeance.
“Do you not think it somewhat strange,” I remarked when we exited, “those Kindness boys from Mrs. Smith’s club would be in this part of the city!”
“I do not think it strange at all,” replied Holmes, untying our little pet, and taking her up with one hand, “as I directed them to come. You must know I should want nothing to happen to our little colleague, Watson.”
Leaving my companion afterwards, I visited my old friend Lavey, who was weeping with news that the prosecuting attorney brought the most severe counts against him in his indictment. He begged me to convince his jailers to allow me to administer medicine to him. By this, I knew, he meant his opium, as I watched him trembling, perspiring, and yawning uncontrollably.
Holmes, meanwhile, had spent the day in leisurely visits to scientific correspondents at the laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to the site near Harvard of the famous Parkman case. Knowing the remarkable character of Sherlock Holmes’s mind, I had eliminated any doubt as to his commitment to Lavey’s case. I was therefore not surprised upon returning to our lodging house when Holmes met me at the door and requested that I repair immediately to the police station and inform Detective Dugan that we wished to visit their prison in Charlestown in the morning. He also provided some particular requests for Dugan to fulfill for our arrival.
“Shall I tell him the purpose of all this, Holmes?” I asked.
“I see you wonder about my methods in this case, Watson. Were you to have considered the data and my actions at each step, you would cease to. Yet, your friendship with the suspected murderer has prevented that, I fancy, for you think about the welfare of the man, not about the logic of the crime, a fatal mistake that has reduced many a detective into a charitable worker. In this case the man was a simple clue, nothing more. As for Dugan, you may tell him that if he grants my peculiar wishes, I shall point out for him a brutal fugitive sought by the law across New England.”
The next morning, we had no sooner arrived at the Charlestown prison than it was apparent to me that Dugan had carried out Holmes’s requests with strict deference. Crowded into a small courtyard were no less than fifteen criminals guarded on all sides. Holmes, striding in, removed a lens from his pocket and examined their hands and arms as he walked. Without looking up at their faces, he stopped in front of a particular prisoner and waved for Dugan.
“Detective, what has this man been arrested for, and what does he claim as his name?” Holmes asked.
“Horse thievery, Mr. Holmes. His name is Julius McArthur, and he is serving two months.”
“If I am not mistaken,” replied Holmes, “you shall find McArthur a mere alias. His name is George Simpson, a murderer of a deputy sheriff in Brunswick, as well as a bigamist, a forger, and the true killer of Mary Painting—the housemaid you know as Mary Ann Pinton.”
“Mary dead?” the man in question exploded at Holmes. “How could it be? I didn’t mean to be rough, I only wanted her to come away with me! Mary, not my Mary!” he howled her name several more times as he fell to his knees and sobbed. Two prison guards ushered the pitiful beast away. I turned and stared at Holmes as did the detective. I could not, at that moment, remember him ever completing a case in so abrupt and unexpected a fashion as to locate the perpetrator already inside the walls of a prison!
“Why, Holmes, you have saved Lavey! But how is it you knew the girl’s killer to be in this prison?” I asked. “And how, just by looking at the hands of this assortment of rascally men?”
“My dear Watson, you ask me to reveal my methods to an audience of eager ears in gray flannel who might put them to use. I have learned by telegram that we must soon depart at once for New York to attend to a grave affair with my old friend Hargreave. If Detective Dugan will accompany us on one final errand, I will happily explain the steps that have now brought a very bad fellow to justice. Detective, would you be kind enough?”
“I would not think of doing otherwise!” Dugan declared, still awestruck at the turn of events.
At Carver Street, we were ushered back into the parlor of Anna Harris Smith at the Animal Rescue League. I sat on an armchair with a cat as black as Poe’s, the poor animal having been the victim of neglect but now recuperating nicely, while Detective Dugan shared the crimson sofa with the same lazy specimen of feline (who I now heard Mrs. Smith refer to as “Stuffy”) who had been in that spot on our last visit.
“Mr. Holmes, I cannot wait a moment longer to hear!” Detective Dugan exclaimed with such fervor that even Stuffy seemed interested. Mrs. Smith stood to the side with a curious smile.
“Very well,” said Holmes, placing down the green case. He opened the flap and our fluffy orange and white kitten, with the heterochromatic eyes, crawled out to check her surroundings.
“You know this kitten, Watson?” asked Holmes.
“Why, of course I do. It is our Mollie.”
“The same dear kitten I saved from the residence of Dr. Lavey, and gave over to Mrs. Smith with my own hands,” added Detective Dugan.
“Wrong,” Holmes said.
Suddenly, a second orange and white kitten climbed into view from inside the bag. She was identical in every way, down to boasting one blue and one gray eye, though they had now switched places so that the blue was on the right and the gray on the left.
“Heavens above, Holmes! There are two of them. They are regular Dromios!” I cried, thinking of the dual figures in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, a production of which I had recently taken in with an artistic female friend at Terry’s Theater, London.
“But what does this second cat have to do with the murder?” Dugan asked.
“Everything, my dear Detective!” Holmes answered. “When you removed Mollie from the scene of the murder, Detective Dugan, you had unknowingly displaced the only revealing clue in the entire place. You shall see it for yourself. When I first heard that Mary had brought a young kitten into Dr. Lavey’s home, I presumed at once that it was a gift someone had made to her. Mother cats are protective of their young, and do not part with their offspring willingly. A mother cat could meet with accident or malice, leaving her kittens behind, but the poor creatures in that circumstance will seldom survive a night, often contracting the diseases peculiar to their race or falling victim to other animals of the streets. So, the circumstances of Mary, not owning a cat, and then coming in possession of a healthy kitten, suggested that the animal had been presented to her from somewhere else.”
“Yes, yes. That seems quite probable,” Detective Dugan agreed.
Holmes continued. “Dr. Lavey, who had employed Mary for the last two years, said Mary never had visitors and had no signs of any friends or relatives. It might be noted that whenever a person seems to have no friends or relatives, the fact is almost surely just the opposite: that the person has friends or relatives of very formidable and oppressive natures whom the apparently lonesome soul wishes to avoid at all costs. It was a fact at hand that Mary had been distracted and depressed in recent weeks, which I surmised was a product of fearing the return of some old element in her life from which she was surely hiding. But to return to the kitten: I suspected that the gift was from one of the housemaid’s supposedly nonexistent friends, perhaps one that Mary accidentally met while out in Boston. This feeling was confirmed when, taking possession of Mollie, I determined through a little research that she was a mix of an Angora and a Coon—two quite expensive and prized breeds of cat, often the winners, in fact, of the premium in recent years of Boston cat shows. It was sound logic that little Mollie had come, therefore, from a fashionable region of Boston, a suspicion made stronger upon examining a map drawn up by Watson of the locations of Mary’s errands in her final weeks. Choosing a place near where Mary had been on an errand in the days before receiving the kitten, Dr. Watson will now remember that we watched from a restaurant window as two young women, aristocrats to the core, stopped at Mollie filled with surprise and recognition. Their surprise was enhanced when Mollie behaved as though she did not know them and had never before seen them. You see, I counted on the fact that Mollie’s mother had given birth to more than one kitten and, hoping that at least some of the physical traits of Mollie’s brothers or sisters would be superficially similar, she would be mistaken for having escaped from her home nearby.
“I had arranged for the services of several of Mrs. Smith’s Kindness Club boys to follow any persons who exhibited unusual interest in the kitten while she remained tied on the street. This occurring, the boys sent me back a note that night that the two fashionable young Brahmins had knocked at a nearby mansion and saw to their surprise this kitten, Miss Puff, Mollie’s sister. I was fortunate, for the purposes of my scheme, that this kitten was more remarkably like Mollie than I could hope, and at a glance identical, except the colors of the eyes were switched, which a person with no scholarship in optical matters would rarely notice. Shown by a butler that Miss Puff was, in fact, sleeping soundly by a breezy window, the girls were satisfied that they had been mistaken in their recognition of the kitten at the lamppost. Now I knew who had given Mollie to Mary Ann Pinton.
“Telephoning this woman, who had retired to a house by the shore for the summer months, I inquired to whom she had given the second kitten with prismatic eyes.
“‘Why, to my poor dear friend Mary,’ she said to me.
“‘Forgive me, madam, I am a stranger here. Is it customary for a woman of society to have a friend who is a housekeeper?’
“‘No, Mr. Holmes, it is certainly not. Mary Painting was a school friend of mine when we were mere girls. We had all heard she had married and moved west. When I happened to see her on the street in the dress of a housemaid, my heart broke for her! She seemed aloof and nervous. My house girl, Betsy, said she had recognized the woman I had been speaking with from the intelligence office, and believed she kept a position with a Dr. Lavey over the last years. I thought having one of our beautiful kittens would bring her cheer.’
“‘So you left Mollie the kitten for her?’
“‘Not I, Mr. Holmes! That doctor resided in a neighborhood I do not dare enter myself without an acute loss of reputation. I had one of my domestics give her to Mary. Mollie, is that what she named her? Why, that sounds like a housemaid. Why not just name the poor thing Biddy!’
“From that point on, my path ahead to resolving Dr. Lavey’s case was quite clear thanks to what Mollie’s former owner had revealed. I consulted the city records and found that a Mary Painting had married one George Fitzbeck five years ago. The name immediately meant something to me. When I was in Maine last week, attending to personal affairs, I had read in the newspaper there about the fugitive George Smith who was wanted for murdering a deputy sheriff in Brunswick after a daring escape. Smith had been in prison there for bigamy and forgery, and had pretended to be insane so that he would be transferred to the asylum, where he easily managed an escape. The sheriff’s men had found him with a stolen horse when Smith, without warning, fired from behind some rocks and blew off the deputy’s head. The newspaper had listed several of Smith’s aliases which included Fitzbeck.
“Whether or not Mary Painting knew what kind of man her lover was when she married him in her youth, we shall leave to the imagination. She moved with him out west, as her old Boston friends had correctly heard, where his criminal history records several outstanding warrants for horse theft in his youth and, later, for bigamy. When she recognized the extent of his character, or perhaps found out about his other wives, she returned to Boston and assumed a new name—Mary Ann Pinton—in order to hide. Penniless and likely disavowed long ago by her Boston family, she concealed herself in a humble station a universe away from her Beacon Hill girlhood, as a housemaid who told her employer she had never been married and had no family. There she remained safely hidden.”
“Until Fitzbeck escaped,” I said.
“Correct, Watson. Mary read of the escape and feared for her life. We have heard from Dr. Lavey that she had become distracted and emotionally shattered in the very weeks after his escape, and often locked herself in her room. Nor, we can safely imagine, did she feel she could tell Dr. Lavey without losing her station for lying about her history. Mary feared more than anything that her husband would find her, and she was right. Through means Detective Dugan may ascertain later in questioning the murderer, the fugitive discovered her whereabouts. Entering the house by the rear door, he found Mary in the kitchen. From Detective Dugan’s accurate examinations of the injuries, I suspect Fitzbeck was attempting to convince her to leave with him, when she refused and tried to scream. He covered her face with his hand to stop her from screaming as he continued his attempt to persuade, but in her struggling against him his grip became harder, smothering her mouth and nose and suffocating her. When Dr. Lavey, in his habitual haze of opium, finally heard a noise and started down the stairs, the fugitive fled. The fugitive did not know he had just killed the girl, I might add.”
“Astounding, Mr. Holmes! But how did you know the murderer would be found in our prison?” Detective Dugan asked.
“Quite easy, Detective Dugan. I assumed it was likely the ruffian waited near the house hoping to find a time to speak again with Mary. When he heard shouting for the police, he fell into a panic. It has been my longstanding observation that the instinct of even the hardened criminal when panicked returns to his earliest form of offense—in this case, horse theft. I knew from Mrs. Smith that, in addition to the usual work of the Boston police, the Animal Rescue League had begun to place a secret service of detectives around Boston to diminish the terrible effect of horse theft on the unwilling beasts. Therefore, I did not think it unlikely that by the morning, the stolen horse, if there were one, would have been traced to its captor. Now, Fitzbeck knows enough of police to know that if he resisted and was captured, he would be investigated closely and in all probability found to be a wanted fugitive. However, if he went quietly, protesting that he mistook the horse as his own, and giving a false name, he would be handed a perfunctory sentence of a few months. I telephoned the police in Maine to retrieve George Smith’s Bertillon measurements, and then asked that Watson bring them to you with instructions to gather the prisoners that met those specifics.”
“But Mr. Holmes, you were able to identify the murderer without looking at his face! I could hardly believe it!”
“Detective Dugan, I did this not to put on a spectacle, but because I knew nothing of what George Fitzbeck, or George Smith, looked like. A forger, by rule, is quite skilled at changing his appearance through small adjustments in habits of grooming and hygiene. However, knowing that he had fooled the police in Maine into transferring him to an insane asylum, I examined his hands and arms. Criminals wishing to appear insane will usually chew off their fingernails or make cuts across their wrists that appear to be suicidal marks but in fact remain superficial and harmless. These marks could not be concealed even three or four weeks later. Our man, I found, had both of these on him, and was taken in as a horse thief. Concluding that while in prison he had not yet heard that his encounter with Mary had left her dead, I counted on further confirmation of his identity on my mention of Mary’s decease—as you saw with your own eyes.”
“There is one point I don’t understand,” I interjected, turning to our hostess. “Mrs. Smith, when we arrived here you were quite adamant that a cat could not be taken out of this building unless it is to a permanent home. Yet, you allowed Mollie to come with us to be used as an accessory in this case.”
“I am not deaf to reality, Dr. Watson,” Mrs. Smith replied forthrightly. “Our donations in these first months have been far more modest than we will need for our organization to survive more than a year. There are men and women standing high in religious and charitable enterprises who would celebrate our demise, who say that caring for animals is an affront when so much money is needed for men, women, and children. Even though when we receive a gift of one hundred dollars it is considered news, but if the new library or an institution of art receives ten thousand dollars, it is met with a shrug. But we will pass that by. Mr. Holmes assuring me that the League would be publicly credited with helping to save an innocent man from prison and capture a murderer, I agreed to his bargain. If the public can see the cause of an animal helping people, and the cause of people helping animals, we shall one day find our acceptance.”
The two kittens, Miss Puff and Mollie, were now rolling around wildly and batting each other’s heads with their paws. Mrs. Smith picked them up, one in each hand.
“I should think, Mrs. Smith, that Dr. Lavey will be quite pleased to take good care of Mollie, seeing that she helped save him from the gallows. And that his jail stay has released him from the demon grip of opium,” Holmes said. “I shall make Mollie’s good care our only fee to him for our services.”