A Study in Sherlock

“Between you and me and this gear shift, I did a line once when I was in the army. I felt great for an hour and instantly understood why it’s so popular. And also why I should avoid it.”

“Cocaine makes you feel like a million bucks, doesn’t it? But besides dependence, overuse produces nosebleeds. Snorting too much burns out your nose tissue, which renders the blood vessels fragile.”

“Another reason to avoid it. What’s your point?”

“Judge Watts’s law clerk told me the judge had been suffering nosebleeds. Recently one was bad enough he had to recess a jury trial for forty-five minutes.”

Boothby hit the brakes. The driver behind us blared his horn angrily and swept around us. Boothby ignored him and narrowed his eyes at me: “You’re calling Gibson Watts a cocaine addict?” Eyebrows down, he was incredulous. “More likely he’s Clark Kent and suffering exposure to kryptonite.”

“I’m not calling him anything, but please hear me out. He also has a grand piano. And some of its bass strings were recently replaced, or at least that’s what Julia Austrian thought. The investigation report said Ina was hanged on a bass piano string.”

Boothby was glowering at me, but at least he seemed to be listening.

“This is probably a coincidence,” I continued, “but coincidences always get my antennae quivering. Suppose Judge Watts had been buying cocaine from Ina, and someone told him about Doak’s plea bargain. He had to have been worried Ina would report him in exchange for a plea bargain, too.”

Boothby was silent. Then he checked the outside mirror and resumed driving. “Watts knows about the plea bargain. I mentioned it at lunch the next day.”

We drove in silence. I looked at him. Eyebrows down: trouble coming.

He stopped for a red light. “A couple of years ago I ran into one of Watts’s law school classmates at a bar meeting in Vermont. He asked how ‘Tini’ Watts was doing. In law school they called him ‘Martini,’ a play on his name, Gibson. It also reflected his love affair with gin.”

“T-i-n-i. As in T-e-e-n-i-e from the diary? Holy shit.” I thought about it. “Are you going to tell the police?”

The light turned green, and he continued driving. “Gibson Watts is a friend of mine, and he’s a wonderful judge. Report this and I’m jeopardizing his career—just try to get renominated to another judicial term after you’ve been suspected of drug use, let alone murder. Right now all we’ve got are some unconnected dots.”

“Judge, let me find out who tunes Judge Watts’s piano; perhaps the strings weren’t changed, or if they were, they can be accounted for.”

“Good idea. Meanwhile, we’d better interrupt Emmy’s cleaning. Best to preserve any DNA evidence the forensics people might find. Suspecting suicide, they might not have scoured the place as thoroughly as they would if they were thinking murder.” He made a sudden, swooping U-turn that would have earned him a ticket if any of Lewiston’s finest had seen it.

A couple of days later I was standing at the sidewalk hot dog stand in front of the courthouse when Boothby came up to me and suggested a walk in the park. I slapped some mustard on my dog and followed him across the street and onto a bricked walkway leading to a large pond in the middle.

“I got your note,” he said. “Fill me in.”

“I located the person who tuned Judge Watts’s piano. She replaced three bass strings a week before the party. She wanted to retune the piano after the strings had ‘matured’—her term—and before the party, but didn’t have a chance. She said those strings were about eight feet long. She left the old ones in Judge Watts’s metal recycling receptacle.”

I glanced at him. Eyebrows amidship: he was listening closely.

“According to the police report, one end of the wire that killed Ina had been cut,” I continued. “The investigators found several bass strings on that old upright piano had been cut off, so that’s where they thought the wire came from. By cutting the wire short you can disguise its origin.”

We walked on until we reached the pond, where several Canada geese were gliding around. We stopped to admire them.

Finally he said, “Well, shit, piss, and corruption.” A pause, followed by a sigh. “I’ve been doing some investigating too. Guess what Watts did before he went to law school.”

“Other than college?”

Boothby rubbed his hands. “I called up that law school classmate of his I’d met in Vermont, and I lied.” He shrugged, a small mea culpa. “I said I was preparing a roast for Watts and needed some dirt about his background.” Brief pause. “Watts was a court reporter in Maryland. His college GPA hadn’t been strong, but he wanted to become a lawyer so to get his nose into the legal community’s tent he chose stenography. A few years later he applied to law school. I guess his experience in the courtroom overcame his college record.”

“So Tini knew how to use a steno machine?”

“Yup.”