A Study in Sherlock

“That was wonderful, Julia.” Judge Watts appeared beside us, smiling broadly, and handed her a glass of white wine. “Better than any concert we ever get around here.”

Watts was a tall, wiry man with wide shoulders, a full head of curly gray hair, and a profile like Basil Rathbone’s. He looked as if he’d been a basketball player—small forward, perhaps—and he was astonishingly smart. When he’d come onto the trial bench a year or so earlier nobody expected him to stay at that level for long. He had an almost magical intuition for law that enabled him to resolve legal issues as quickly as lawyers could state them. Other judges sought him out for help with difficult cases, and he came to be known as the Sherlock Holmes of the judiciary for more than his silhouette. It was said that if the entire Maine Supreme Court bench of seven justices died in a plane crash the governor could replace them all with Gibson Watts.

“Thanks, Judge.” She pointed to the nine-foot Steinway grand. “I rarely find an instrument this superb in a private home. I had to try it.”

“Glad you did!” Taciturn, even dour, around the courthouse—thinking too deeply to be bothered with civility—he was the opposite here, an enthusiastic and warm host.

“Do you play?” she asked him.

He chuckled. “Dumb fingers. I keep the piano tuned because it’s too beautiful to ignore.” He lifted his glass toward me. “Alas, Mr. Morey, I’d have brought you some wine too, but the King of Reversible Error is looking for you and prefers you not slur your words.”

“Thanks, Judge,” I replied. “A pleasure, Ms. Austrian.”

“Thanks, Artie.”

I crossed the hall and found King Boothby in the dining room at the salmon.

I approached semireverently. “Judge Watts delivered your summons.”

He looked up as he was shoving the last of his salmon sandwich into his mouth. Holding his index finger in the air, he chewed for a moment and then gulped it down. “Emmy Holcrofts arrived a few minutes ago. She’s agitated about her niece and wants to talk right away. I asked her to wait in the library. Would you like to join us?”

I followed Boothby to a small, book-lined room. A wood fire in the modest fieldstone fireplace made it cozy—an atmosphere to calm the nerves.

Emmy started to stand, but Boothby waved her back into her seat. “What’s the matter, Emmy?”

He and I took chairs.

“I’ve been going through Ina’s steno tapes to find her notes of the Doak case—the one you asked me to transcribe?” When he nodded, she continued. “I found them and was preparing a transcript when I got a visit from a federal drug enforcement investigator. She asked if I had information about Ina’s relationship with Harold Doak—the same man. Doak had named Ina as a customer.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Ina was the court reporter who took notes of a plea bargain, for her very own supplier?”

“And the Feds wanted to keep the plea bargain secret,” Boothby added, “so neither Doak’s suppliers nor his customers would know. Christ. Ina had to realize DEA agents would be on her doorstep soon. Maybe that explains her suicide.”

“No, I think you’re wrong,” said Emmy. “I read her diary again. That’s where she put her emotional entries—happy, sad, angry, all kinds of feelings. What the police are calling her ‘suicide note’ was on the tape in her steno machine. Why there and not in her diary? I spent the last two days reviewing all the tapes of all the hearings she attended for the last year. The only personal entry is that single note the police found.”

“So that was unusual for her—but so is suicide,” Boothby said. “She must have been distraught.”

“I brought the police report.” She reached into her large handbag, pulled out a document. “Here’s her note. It says, ‘I can’t face my family anymore. They believed in me, and I betrayed them.’ Ina wouldn’t have said that. I was the only person she considered family, the only family member she’d mentioned in her journal for the past year. I’m one person, not ‘them.’ The only time she referred to family plural was this single entry on the steno tape—where she would never have put it.”

“What about the brothers?” I asked.

“She wasn’t close to them. They were lucky: the law designates them her heirs.”

Boothby’s eyebrows descended in a frown. “So you think someone else wrote the suicide note.”

I scroonched forward on the couch. “Maybe it was written after Ina died, to make it look like a suicide?”

Eyebrows up, then down again, thinking.

“Someone who knew steno machines,” I continued, “and felt safer typing the note than faking Ina’s handwriting.”

Boothby picked up the thread: “Assuming Ina’d been selling the stuff she got from Doak and told a customer about Doak’s plea agreement, that customer wouldn’t want Ina doing to him—or her—what Doak would likely do to Ina. Killing Ina prevents her from revealing anyone to the cops.”

All this theorizing ignited my suspicion: “What else about Ina’s death, Emmy, suggests murder?”