Stephen, naturally. But there are two other faces in this family portrait. One belongs to William, the third brother. Do you concur, Lestrade?'

'Yes,' Lestrade said. 'If this is the straight of the matter, William also had to be in on it. He said he was halfway down the stairs when he saw the two of them go in together, Jory a little ahead.'

'How interesting!' Holmes said, eyes gleaming. 'Stephen breaks in the door - as the younger and stronger of course he must - and so one would expect simple forward momentum would have carried him into the room first. Yet William, halfway down the stairs, saw Jory enter first. Why was that, Watson?'

I could only shake my head numbly.

'Ask yourself whose testimony, and whose testimony alone, we can trust here. The answer is the only witness who is not part of the family: Lord Hull's man, Oliver Stanley. He approached the gallery railing in time to see Stephen enter the room, and that is just as it should have been, since Stephen was alone when he broke it in. It was William, with a better angle from his place on the stairs, who said he saw Jory precede Stephen into the study. William said so because he had seen Stanley and knew what he must say. It boils down to this, Watson: we know Jory was inside this room. Since both of his brothers testify he was outside, there was, at the very least, collusion. But as you say, the smooth way they all pulled together suggests something far more serious.'

'Conspiracy,' I said.

'Yes. Do you recall my asking you, Watson, if you believed all four of them simply walked wordlessly out of that parlor in four different directions after they heard the study door locked?'

'Yes. Now I do.'

'The four of them.' He looked briefly at Lestrade, who nodded, and then back at me. 'We know Jory had to have been up and off and about his business the moment the old man left the parlor in order to reach the study ahead of him, yet all four of the surviving family - including Lady Hull - say they were in the parlor when Lord Hull locked his study door. The murder of Lord Hull was very much a family affair, Watson.'

I was too staggered to say anything. I looked at Lestrade and saw an expression on his face I had never seen there before nor ever did again; a kind of tired sickened gravity.

'What may they expect?' Holmes said, almost genially.

'Jory will certainly swing,' Lestrade said. 'Stephen will go to jail for life. William Hull may get life, but will more likely get twenty years in Wormwood Scrubs, a kind of living death.'

Holmes bent and stroked the canvas stretched between the legs of the coffee-table. It made that odd hoa.r.s.e purring noise. 'Lady Hull,'' Lestrade went on, 'may expect to spend the next five years of her life in Beechwood Manor, more commonly known to the inmates as Poxy Palace . . . although, having met the lady, I rather suspect she will find another way out. Her husband's laudanum would be my guess.'

'All because Jory Hull missed a clean strike,' Holmes remarked, and sighed. 'If the old man had had the common decency to die silently, all would have been well. Jory would, as Watson says, have left by the window, taking his canvas with him, of course . . . not to mention his trumpery shadows. Instead, he raised the house. All the servants were in, exclaiming over the dead master. The family was in confusion. How shabby their luck was, Lestrade! How close was the constable when Stanley summoned him?'

'Closer than you would believe,' Lestrade said. 'Hurrying up the drive to the door, as a matter of fact. He was pa.s.sing on his regular rounds, and heard a scream from the house. Their luck was shabby.'

'Holmes,' I said, feeling much more comfortable in my old role, 'how did you know a constable was so nearby?'

'Simplicity itself, Watson. If not, the family would have shooed the servants out long enough to hide the canvas and 'shadows.' '

'Also to unlatch at least one window, I should think,' Lestrade added in a voice uncustomarily quiet.

'They could have taken the canvas and the shadows,' I said suddenly.

Holmes turned toward me. 'Yes.'

Lestrade raised his eyebrows.

'It came down to a choice,' I said to him. 'There was time enough to burn the new will or get rid of the hugger-mugger . . . this would have been just Stephen and Jory, of course, in the moments after Stephen burst in the door. They - or, if you've got the temperature of the characters right, and I suppose you do, Stephen - decided to burn the will and hope for the best. I suppose there was just enough time to chuck it into the stove.'

Lestrade turned, looked at it, then looked back. 'Only a man as black as Hull would have found strength enough to scream at the end,' he said.

'Only a man as black as Hull would have required a son to kill him,' Holmes rejoined.

He and Lestrade looked at each other, and again something pa.s.sed between them, some perfectly silent communication from which I myself was excluded.

'Have you ever done it?' Holmes asked, as if picking up on an old conversation.

Lestrade shook his head. 'Once came d.a.m.ned close,' he said. 'There was a girl involved, not her fault, not really. I came close. Yet . . . that was only one.'

'And here there are four,' Holmes returned, understanding him perfectly. 'Four people ill-used by a villain who should have died within six months anyway.'

At last I understood what they were discussing.

Holmes turned his gray eyes on me. 'What say you, Lestrade? Watson has solved this one, although he did not see all the ramifications. Shall we let Watson decide?'

'All right,' Lestrade said gruffly. 'Just be quick. I want to get out of this d.a.m.ned room.'

Instead of answering, I bent down, picked up the felt shadows, rolled them into a ball, and put them in my coat pocket. I felt quite odd doing it: much as I had felt when in the grip of the fever which almost took my life in India.

'Capital fellow, Watson!' Holmes cried. 'You've solved your first case, become an accessory to murder, and it's not even tea-time! And here's a souvenir for myself - an original Jory Hull. I doubt it's signed, but one must be grateful for whatever the G.o.ds send us on rainy days.' He used his pen-knife to loosen the artist's glue holding the canvas to the legs of the coffee-table. He made quick work of it; less than a minute later he was slipping a narrow canvas tube into the inner pocket of his voluminous greatcoat.

'This is a dirty piece of work,' Lestrade said, but he crossed to one of the windows and, after a moment's hesitation, released the locks which held it and opened it half an inch or so.

'Say it's dirty work undone,' Holmes said in a tone of almost hectic gaiety. 'Shall we go, gentlemen?'

We crossed to the door. Lestrade opened it. One of the constables asked him if there was any progress.

On another occasion Lestrade might have shown the man the rough side of his tongue. This time he said shortly, 'Looks like attempted robbery gone to something worse. I saw it at once, of course; Holmes a moment later.'

'Too bad!' the other constable ventured.

'Yes,' Lestrade said, 'but at least the old man's scream sent the thief packing before he could steal anything. Carry on.'

We left. The parlor door was open, but I kept my head down as we pa.s.sed it. Holmes looked, of course; there was no way he could not have done. It was just the way he was made. As for me, I never saw any of the family. I never wanted to.

Holmes was sneezing again. His friend was twining around his legs and miaowing blissfully. 'Let me out of here,' he said, and bolted.

An hour later we were back at 221B Baker Street, in much the same positions we had occupied when Lestrade came driving up: Holmes in the window-seat, myself on the sofa.

'Well, Watson,' Holmes said presently, 'how do you think you'll sleep tonight?'

'Like a top,' I said. 'And you?'

'Likewise, I'm sure,' he said. 'T'm glad to be away from those d.a.m.ned cats, I can tell you that.'

'How will Lestrade sleep, d'you think?'

Holmes looked at me and smiled. 'Poorly tonight. Poorly for a week, perhaps. But then he'll be all right. Among his other talents, Lestrade has a great one for creative forgetting.'

That made me laugh.

'Look, Watson!' Holmes said. 'Here's a sight!' I got up and went to the window, somehow sure I would see Lestrade riding up in the wagon once more. Instead I saw the sun breaking through the clouds, bathing London in a glorious late-afternoon light.

'It came out after all,' Holmes said. 'Marvelous, Watson! Makes one happy to be alive!' He picked up his violin and began to play, the sun strong on his face.

I looked at his barometer and saw it was falling. That made me laugh so hard I had to sit down. When Holmes asked - in tones of mild irritation - what the matter was, I could only shake my head. I am not, in truth, sure he would have understood, anyway. It was not the way his mind worked.

Umney's Last Case.

The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.

- Raymond Chandler.

The Little Sister.

I. The News from Peoria.

It was one of those spring mornings so LA-perfect you keep expecting to see that little trademark symbol - (R) - stamped on it somewhere. The exhaust of the vehicles pa.s.sing on Sunset smelled faintly of oleander, the oleander was lightly perfumed with exhaust, and the sky overhead was as clear as a hardsh.e.l.l Baptist's conscience. Peoria Smith, the blind paperboy, was standing in his accustomed place on the corner of Sunset and Laurel, and if that didn't mean G.o.d was in His heaven and all was jake with the world, I didn't know what did.

Yet since I'd swung my feet out of bed that morning at the unaccustomed hour of 7:30 A.M., things had felt a little off-kilter, somehow; a tad woozy around the edges. It was only as I was shaving - or at least showing those pesky bristles the razor in an effort to scare them into submission - that I realized part of the reason why. Although I'd been up reading until at least two, I hadn't heard the Demmicks roll in, squiffed to the earlobes and trading those snappy one-liners that apparently form the basis of their marriage.

Nor had I heard Buster, and that was maybe even odder. Buster, the Demmicks' Welsh Corgi, has a high-pitched bark that goes through your head like slivers of gla.s.s, and he uses it as much as he can. Also, he's the jealous type. He lets loose with one of his shrill barking squalls every time George and Gloria clinch, and when they aren't zinging each other like a couple of vaudeville comedians, George and Gloria usually are clinching. I've gone to sleep on more than one occasion listening to them giggle while that mutt prances around their feet going yarkyarkyark and wondering how difficult it would be to strangle a muscular, medium-sized dog with a length of piano-wire. Last night, however, the Demmicks' apartment had been as quiet as the grave. It was pa.s.sing strange, but a long way from earth-shattering; the Demmicks weren't exactly your perfect life-on-a-timetable couple at the best of times.

Peoria Smith was all right, though - chipper as a chipmunk, just as always, and he'd recognized me by my walk even though it was at least an hour before my usual time. He was wearing a baggy CalTech sweatshirt that came down to his thighs and a pair of corduroy knickers that showed off his scabby knees. His hated white cane leaned casually against the side of the card-table he did business on.

'Say, Mr. Umney! Howza kid?'

Peoria's dark gla.s.ses glinted in the morning sunlight, and as he turned toward the sound of my step with my copy of the LA Times held up in front of him, I had a momentary unsettling thought: it was as if someone had drilled two big black holes into his face. I shivered the thought off my back, thinking that maybe the time had come to cut out the before-bedtime shot of rye. Either that or double the dose.

Hitler was on the front of the Times, as he so often was these days. This time it was something about Austria. I thought, and not for the first time, how at home that pale face and limp forelock would have looked on a post-office bulletin board.

'The kid is just about okay, Peoria,' I said. 'In fact, the kid is as fine as fresh paint on an outhouse wall.'

I dropped a dime into the Corona box resting atop Peoria's stack of newspapers. The Times is a three-center, and over-priced at that, but I've been dropping that same chip into Peoria's change-box since time out of mind. He's a good kid, and making good grades in school - I took it on myself to check that last year, after he'd helped me out on the Weld case. If Peoria hadn't shown up on Harris Brunner's houseboat when he did, I'd still be trying to swim with my feet cemented into a kerosene drum, somewhere off Malibu. To say I owe him a lot is an understatement.

In the course of that particular investigation (Peoria Smith, not Harris Brunner and Mavis Weld), I even found out the kid's real name, although wild horses wouldn't have dragged it out of me. Peoria's father took a permanent coffee-break out a ninth-floor office window on Black Friday, his mother's the only white frail working in that goofy Chinese laundry down on La Punta, and the kid's blind. With all that, does the world need to know they hung Francis on him when he was too young to fight back? The defense rests.

If anything really juicy happened the night before, you almost always find it on the front page of the Times, left side, just below the fold. I turned the newspaper over and saw that a bandleader of the Cuban persuasion had suffered a heart attack while dancing with his female vocalist at The Carousel in Burbank. He died an hour later at LA General. I had some sympathy for the maestro's widow, but none for the man himself. My opinion is that people who go dancing in Burbank deserve what they get.

I opened to the sports section to see how Brooklyn had done in their doubleheader with the Cards the day before. 'How about you, Peoria? Everyone holding their own in your castle? Moats and battlements all in good repair?'

'I'll say, Mr. Umney! Oh, boy!'

Something in his voice caught my attention, and I lowered the paper to take a closer look at him. When I did, I saw what a gilt-edged shamus like me should have seen right away: the kid was all but busting with happiness.

'You look like somebody just gave you six tickets to the first game of the World Series,' I said. 'What's the buzz, Peoria?'

'My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana!' he said. 'Forty thousand bucks! We're rich, brother! Rich!'

I gave him a grin he couldn't see and ruffled his hair. It popped his cowlick up, but what the h.e.l.l. 'Whoa, hold the phone. How old are you, Peoria?'

'Twelve in May. You know that, Mr. Umney, you gave me a polo-shirt. But I don't see what that has to do with - '

'Twelve's old enough to know that sometimes people get what they want to happen mixed up with what actually does happen. That's all I meant.'

'If you're talkin about daydreams, you're right - I do know all about em,' Peoria said, running his hands over the back of his head in an effort to make his cowlick lie down again, 'but this ain't no daydream, Mr. Umney. It's real! My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest'y afternoon. He brought it back in the saddlebag of his Vinnie! I smelled it! h.e.l.l, I rolled in it! It was spread all over my mom's bed! Richest feeling I ever had, let me tell you - forty-froggin-thousand smackers!'

'Twelve may be old enough to know the difference between daydreams and what's real, but it's not old enough for that kind of talk,' I said. It sounded good - I'm sure the Legion of Decency would have approved two thousand per cent - but my mouth was running on automatic pilot, and I barely heard what was coming out of it. I was too busy trying to get my brain wrapped around what he'd just told me. Of one thing I was absolutely positive: he'd made a mistake. He must have made a mistake, because if it was true, then Peoria wouldn't be standing here anymore when I came by on my way to my office in the Fulwider Building. And that just couldn't be.

I found my mind returning to the Demmicks, who for the first time in recorded history hadn't played any of their big-band records at full volume before retiring, and to Buster, who for the first time in recorded history hadn't greeted the sound of George's latchkey turning in the lock with a fusillade of barks. The thought that something was off-kilter returned, and it was stronger this time.

Meanwhile, Peoria was looking at me with an expression I'd never expected to see on his honest, open face: sulky irritation mixed with exasperated humor. It was the way a kid looks at a windbag uncle who's told all his stories, even the boring ones, three or four times.

'Ain't you picking up on this newsflash, Mr. Umney? We're rich! My mom ain't going to have to press shirts for that d.a.m.ned old Lee Ho anymore, and I ain't going to have to sell papers on the corner anymore, shiverin when it rains in the winter and havin to suck up to those nutty old bags who work down at Bilder's. I can quit actin like I died and went to heaven every time some blowhard leaves me a nickel tip.'

I started a little at that, but what the h.e.l.l - I wasn't a nickel man. I left Peoria seven cents, day in and day out. Unless I was too broke to afford it, of course, but in my business an occasional stony stretch comes with the territory.

'Maybe we ought to go up to Blondie's and have a cup of java,' I said. 'Talk this thing over.'

'Can't. It's closed.'

'Blondie's? The h.e.l.l you say!'

But Peoria couldn't be bothered with such mundane stuff as the coffee shop up the street. 'You ain't heard the best, Mr. Umney! My Uncle Fred knows a doctor up in Frisco - a specialist - who thinks he can do something about my eyes.' He turned his face up to mine. Below the cheaters and his too-thin nose, his lips were trembling. 'He says it might not be the optic nerves after all, and if it's not, there's an operation . . . I don't understand all the technical stuff, but I could see again, Mr. Umney!' He reached out for me blindly . . . well, of course he did. How else could he reach out? 'I could see again!'

He clutched at me, and I gripped his hands and squeezed them briefly before pushing them gently away. There was ink on his fingers, and I'd been feeling so good when I got up that I'd put on my new chalk worsted. Hot for summer, of course, but the whole city is air-conditioned these days, and besides, I was feeling naturally cool. I didn't feel so cool now. Peoria was looking up at me, his thin and somehow perfect newsboy's face troubled. A little breeze - scented with oleander and exhaust - ruffled his cowlick, and I realized that I could see it because he wasn't wearing his tweed cap. He looked somehow naked without it, and why not? Every newsboy should wear a tweed cap, just like every shoeshine boy should wear a beanie c.o.c.ked way back on his head.

'What's the matter, Mr. Umney? I thought you'd be happy. Jeepers, I didn't have to come out here to this lousy corner today, you know, but I did - I even got here early, because I kinda had an idea you'd get here early. I thought you'd be happy, my mom hittin the lottery and me gettin a chance at an operation, but you ain't.' Now his voice trembled with resentment. 'You ain't!'

'Yes I am,' I said, and I wanted to be happy - part of me did, anyway - but the b.i.t.c.h of it was that he was mostly right. Because it meant things would change, you see, and things weren't supposed to change. Peoria Smith was supposed to be right here, year in and year out, with that perfect cap of his tilted back on hot days and pulled down low on rainy ones, so that the raindrops dripped off the bill. He was always supposed to be smiling, was never supposed to say 'h.e.l.l' or 'frogging,' and most of all, he was supposed to be blind.

'You ain't!' he said, and then, shockingly, he pushed his card-table over. It fell into the street, papers flapping everywhere. His white cane rolled into the gutter. Peoria heard it go and bent down to get it. I could see tears coming out from beneath his dark gla.s.ses and go rolling down his pale, thin cheeks. He started groping for the cane, but it had fallen near me and he was going the wrong way. I felt a sudden strong urge to haul off and kick him in his blind newsboy's a.s.s.

Instead, I bent over, got his stick, and tapped him lightly on the hip with it.

Peoria turned, quick as a snake, and s.n.a.t.c.hed it. Out of the corner of my eye I could see pictures of Hitler and the recently deceased Cuban bandleader flapping all over Sunset Boulevard - a bus bound for Van Ness snored through a little drift of them, leaving a bitter tang of diesel fumes behind. I hated the way those newspapers looked, fluttering here and there. They looked messy. Worse, they looked wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. I fought another urge, as strong as the first one, to grab Peoria and shake him. To tell him he was going to spend the morning picking up those newspapers, and I wasn't going to let him go home until he'd gotten every last one.

It occurred to me that less than ten minutes ago, I'd been thinking that this was the perfect LA morning - so perfect it deserved a trademark symbol. And it had been, dammit. So where had things gone wrong? And how had it happened so fast?

No answers came, only an irrational but powerful voice from inside, telling me that the kid's mother couldn't have won the lottery, that the kid couldn't stop selling newspapers, and that, most of all, the kid couldn't see. Peoria Smith was supposed to be blind for the rest of his life.

Well, it's got to be something experimental, I thought. Even if the doctor up in Frisco isn't a quack, and he probably is, the operation's bound to fail.

And, bizarre as it sounds, the thought calmed me down.

'Listen,' I said, 'we got off on the wrong foot this morning, that's all. Let me make it up to you. We'll go down to Blondie's and I'll buy you breakfast. What do you say, Peoria? You can dig into a plate of bacon and eggs and tell me all ab - '