The Misadventure of Shelrock Holmes Read Free Page B

Requiescat in Pace Funeral Directors, calls to measure the body. His activities are curious, including the discovery of Lilian's false tooth and the deduction from it that she smoked opium. He drops his magnifying glass under the bed and there finds a disguised individual whom he recognizes as Murphy. Murphy clenches his fist and rages:
    "Man, or rather devil, I know you! You are — you are — "
    "Sherlock Holmes, detective, at your service," said the other laughing. And vanished.
    Holmes next disguises himself as an opium addict, to the admiring amazement of his assistant, Harry Taxon (!), and slips out of his house to keep such a disreputable masquerade from his landlady, Mrs. Bonnet (!). He visits an opium den run by a half-caste Mrs. Ca-jana, secures opium from her, and then blackmails her for information on the threat of exposing her racket. He learns that Lilian Bell was a customer, and that Mrs. Cajana gets her drugs from a mysterious person known to her only as "The Indian Doctor." Suddenly a scream is heard from the next room. They dash in and find a beautiful damsel with her belly ripped open. Holmes spies the Ripper escaping, pursues him, but the Ripper makes good his flight by daringly jumping aboard a moving train.
    Holmes identifies the latest (and 39th) victim by her custom-built shoes as Comtesse de Malmaison. He visits her father, the Marquis, a harsh old gentleman who thinks his daughter's death served her right if she spent her time in opium dens.
    Holmes questions the Comtesse's maid. She tells him that the Comtesse used the opium den as a blind — to cover up assignations with her American riding instructor, Carlos Lake.
    Holmes grills Lake and learns that the only other person who knew of this arrangement was Dr. Roberto Fitzgerald, a prominent and respectable West End physician of Indian antecedents, who had made an appointment to meet the Comtesse at Mrs. Cajana's. The Doctor was to examine the Comtesse for a contemplated abortion.
    Holmes shadows the Doctor's wife —
    "When you wish to learn a man's secrets, you must follow his wife,"
    and witnesses a lover's tryst in Hyde Park between her and Captain Harry Thomson. He overhears Ruth Fitzgerald, the Doctor's wife, arrange to flee from her brutal, half-mad husband and take refuge with her lover's mother.
    Holmes then disguises himself as a retired soap manufacturer named Patrick O'Connor, calls on Dr. Fitzgerald, and warns him of his wife's elopement. The Doctor has a fit, literally, and denounces all the tribe of Eve as serpents that must be destroyed. He has a terrible scene with Ruth, after which he quiets himself with a shot of morphine.
    Holmes next disguises himself as Ruth Fitzgerald (!) —
    "Englishwomen are usually slender rather than full-fleshed, and their stature is at times surprisingly tall."
    He manoeuvers Ruth away from her rendezvous and saunters along "with that special gait with which public women stroll the street."
    Dr. Fitzgerald comes along and recognizes "him."
    "My wife — on the streets!"
    And the Ripper emerges full blast. He attacks Holmes but is frustrated; the detective has wisely donned a steel cuirasse.
    Meanwhile, back in Warm's office, the chief of police is listening to Murphy's report. Holmes, still looking like a loose woman (even more so), drags in Dr. Fitzgerald, and Murphy acknowledges that he has lost the bet.
    Further comment, you'll agree, is unnecessary.
    WE HAVE omitted too John Chapman's The Unmasking of Sher-loc\ Holmes, because this pastiche is devoted primarily to subtle literary criticism rather than to story. 16 In this article which appeared in "The Critic," issue of February 1905, Mr. Chapman reports an imaginary conversation between the two greatest detectives in print — C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes.
    Dupin, appearing suddenly in the rooms on Baker Street, strikes terror into the heart of Holmes, who looked "at the little Frenchman on the threshold as if M. Dupin had been a ghost."