Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(79)
“You walked with Dr. Barrow here two days ago?” Watson asked.
“Yes,” Waller answered. “We’d been at the meeting planning the anti-apartheid teach-in and we stopped at the store to get him some groceries. I carried his bags back here and left him in good shape.” A faraway look settled his face.
“And Martin called him earlier this morning? Here in his library?” There was an adjacent back room to the study that had a cot, hot plate, and mini-refrigerator.
“Said he’d been calling off and on since last night. He’d sent somebody to his apartment and he wasn’t there. That’s why our folks started to get worried.”
Watson again examined the locks, looking for signs of tampering. “Then you get called because you were last seen with him.”
“So I came around, knowing Doctor Barrow was always up early like. I knocked and knocked but got no answer.” He gestured with his hands. “Him being up there in age, I figured it was best to get in here and see to him.”
Watson removed his Minox mini-camera from his jean jacket pocket. He was clicking away as he talked and walked around the space. “We play this like it lays out, Squelch, at least as far as the fuzz is concerned.” He paused at the desk, examining the papers and letters on the desktop. Before he’d entered the room, he’d put on his lambskin gloves. Watson sifted through the material. He snapped pictures of the various sheets of paper and letters as well.
“Did you call me using this phone?” Watson asked, pointing at the rotary sitting on a corner of the desk.
“Hell no, went around the corner and two blocks up and called you from one of the followers. Sister Mable. She’s an early riser too.” It was just edging toward six in the morning.
“She gonna get rattled in case the cops question her?”
Waller shook his massive head side to side. “Man, she been around since the Palmer raids. She’s stand-up before they invented the word.”
“Solid. I’m out of here. Call Sid and tell him what you found. Tell him everything but me being here. Then he can call the law and be here with you when they arrive so they don’t jack you around.”
“Okay.” Waller rubbed the back of his neck. “What are you gonna tell Martin?”
Watson was at the broken-in door which, according to the big man, had been locked and bolted from the inside when he got here. “What he’s going to already know. It’s going to be on him to keep a lid on things . . . if he can.”
“Yeah,” the other man drawled, “that might be a big if, soul brother.”
“You ain’t never lied.” Watson nodded curtly and left. He ascended the concrete steps to the kitchen in the rear of Francine’s Southern Cantonese Style Café. There was one person already there, a cook who was busy chopping onions, celery, and peppers and sautéing the vegetables in a wok as big around as a radar dish. As the savory aroma from the mix filled Watson’s nose, he exited by a side door onto a narrow passageway that was surprisingly trash free. At the open end of this he checked the quiet street and then walked briskly along Amsterdam Avenue away from the crime scene.
A bleary-eyed afro-Latina no more than twenty-three, dressed in a waist jacket with a dirty fake fur collar, jean shorts, torn fishnet stockings, and scuffed Chuck Taylor All-Stars, weaved on the sidewalk. A half-smoked Kool cigarette dangled from a corner of her slack mouth, miraculously not dropping to the pavement. She was heading in the opposite direction and veered into Watson’s path as he strode past. They bumped shoulders and she rocked back on her heels, giving him a crooked grin.
“Hey, Stagolee, what’s your hurry, baby? Shit,” she said, wiping her nose with the side of her hand. She looked him up and down. “Huh, for a quick twenty I’ll polish your knob till steam blows out of those big ears of yours.” She giggled, barely able to keep herself upright.
He frowned pityingly at the junkie, briefly considering giving her money but knowing she would only use it getting her next fix. He moved on. She watched him go, a bemused set to her now closed mouth. The thin cigarette smoke trailed upward past her face and unkempt hair.
By one o’clock that same day, there were more than three thousand people gathered before the Gothic and Tudor Revival designed Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street. A small stage with a podium had been placed on the sidewalk, and though a rally permit hadn’t been secured, given such short notice, the police had been advised by the mayor’s office not to interfere but to be on alert. The compact man now on the stage leafed through his notes, then contemplatively removed his fedora and placed it on the podium.
The blackout last year, happening at the same time the city’s economy went into the toilet, then the ongoing hunt for the Son of Sam, and the resulting looting, firebombings, and rioting, had pushed the city to its limits. Now more than twelve months on, with no relief in the temperature during the sweltering summer, Martin Collins, former pimp and drug dealer Newark Red, now known as Martin X, stood between order and chaos—depending on what he said today. No one had a clue what that would be from this civil rights leader, this firebrand who’d been the target of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s considerable dirty tricks counter-intelligence efforts.
Martin X paused, gazing at his audience. He again looked out on the throng of expectant faces, mostly black, some whites not including the police, and a smattering of Puerto Ricans and Chinese Americans he was pleased to see.