Rafferty's Last Case Read online

  Rafferty’s Last Case

  Also by Larry Millett

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon

  Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders

  Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery

  Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Alliance

  The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes

  Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma

  The Magic Bullet

  Strongwood

  Rafferty’s Last Case

  A Minnesota Mystery Featuring Sherlock Holmes

  Larry Millett

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis

  London

  Jacket design by Percolator Graphic Design

  Copyright 2022 by Larry Millett

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  ISBN 978-1-4529-6698-4 (ebook)

  Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061578

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  Contents

  Prologue: A Knife to the Back

  BOOK I. A Body, a Funeral, a Promise

  1. “Are You Here?”

  2. “It Is the Darkest of Days”

  3. “I Give You My Promise”

  BOOK II. Rafferty Investigates

  4. “Was That a Gunshot?”

  5. “We Are Entering Deep and Dangerous Waters”

  6. “I Took Him up to the Sixth Floor”

  7. “There Is Still Much We Must Learn”

  BOOK III. Suspects and Clues

  8. The Blackmailer

  9. “I Must Warn You to Be Careful”

  10. “We Must Dig and Dig”

  11. The Policeman

  12. “You Are Sniffing at the Clouds”

  13. “The Mystery Deepens”

  14. The Poet

  15. “You Are Being Insolent”

  BOOK IV. More Suspects, More Questions

  16. “She Is a Woman Who Makes Arrangements”

  17. “How Old Do You Suppose He Is?”

  18. The Priest

  19. “I Fear for Your Soul”

  20. “We Are Tangled Up in a Web of Lies”

  21. The Politicians

  22. “We’re Always Just a Step Behind”

  23. “We Are on the Cusp”

  24. “I Pose No Threat to You”

  25. “We May Have No Other Choice”

  26. “The Game Is Afoot!”

  BOOK V. Endgame at the Ryan

  27. Convergence

  28. “You Are a Monster”

  29. “How I Wish He Were Still Here!”

  30. “May He Rest in Peace”

  Epilogue: There Were Reports of His Death

  About the Author

  Prologue

  A Knife to the Back

  When the darkness of forever beckons, there is no time to waste. Using nearly his last reserves of energy, Shadwell Rafferty rolled over, pain tearing at his body like a sharp-clawed beast, so that he could face the end with his eyes looking toward the heavens. He took a deep breath, aware there would be very few more, and listened to the old grandfather clock across the room as it ticked away his final moments. He wondered if God would appear, the Great Invisibility made manifest at last, but he saw no immediate sign of a divine presence. Perhaps it was just as well, he thought. Life was a mystery and death should be, too.

  Truth was, Rafferty had been ready for his day of departure for a long time, only not in the way it was happening. He’d hoped to go peacefully, a few friends at his bedside, a few choice closing words, and then a quiet slip into the unknown. Instead, he was alone, in agony, blood gushing from a deep knife wound to his upper back as death began to press down on him like a heavy stone.

  The attack had come just as Rafferty, returning from a meeting with a murderer, stepped into the study of his apartment at the Ryan Hotel in downtown St. Paul. It happened so suddenly and with such force that Rafferty crashed to the floor without ever seeing his assailant’s face. As he fell, he heard loud knocking at his door and a voice calling his name. He cried out for help but received no response.

  Rafferty was all but certain who had attacked him. A bloodied knife, which Rafferty recognized as one given to him years ago as a gift, lay on the floor beside him as if to confirm his impending demise. Rafferty knew why the vicious, desperate attack had occurred. He’d just made a startling discovery, one so shocking it had entirely changed his thinking about the murder case that had obsessed him for more than a month.

  He’d been investigating the murder of twenty-five-year-old Daniel St. Aubin, and the case had led Rafferty down a twisting path into the bleak presence of pure evil. From the start, he’d known there were five prime suspects. The five Ps, Rafferty called them, for the suspects were a policeman, a poet, a priest, and two politicians. Rafferty had interviewed each of them, looking for clues that might point him to the killer. But the truth had eluded Rafferty until just before the man with the knife came to silence him forever.

  Rafferty had kept meticulous notes as he puzzled through the case. Hours earlier, sitting at the big mahogany desk that formed the centerpiece of his study, he’d typed up his latest thoughts about St. Aubin’s killer. Rafferty had made many such notes during his investigation, all deposited in a manila folder atop his desk next to his trusty Underwood typewriter. The killer undoubtedly had found the notes and would, of course, destroy them. But Rafferty had taken precautions, and the killer was mistaken if he thought he would get away with his crimes.

  Rafferty had another reason to believe his death would not go unavenged. Two extraordinary men had arrived recently in Chicago, amid much publicity, and they would be shocked to learn of Rafferty’s fate. He was sure they would come to St. Paul, if they could, to investigate his murder.

  Light now began turning to darkness, thought and life itself at their last extremities. Wondering for the final time at the majesty and misery of the world, Rafferty searched once again for a glimpse of light that might guide him into a new, perhaps better place. He had for years given up on God, or perhaps it was the other way around, and he blamed the hard, cold Jesuits of Boston for his apostasy. With their measureless disgust for sinful mankind, they had driven faith from his heart at a young age, and he’d long doubted it would ever return. But in the past few years he’d begun to see strange glimmers, lamps flickering in the darkness, and faith had reemerged like a tiny flower growing out of stony ground.

  Rafferty began to see a faint glow of possibility in the air around him. Was it a promise from the heavens or a mere mirage? Rafferty didn’t know, but as he prepared to cross over, he reached into his shirt pocket for a scrap of paper with a telephone number on it. The number would be a vital clue if—

  Suddenly, a flood of memories and images began roaring through his head, like a movie shown at ultrahigh speed. The rush ended as abruptly as it had begun, followed by a flash of light, and then ineffable calm. He felt at peace as the scrap of paper fell from his hand. So it was that on the twenty-first day of January 1928, at just past six in the evening, Shadwell Rafferty took his final breath.

  Book 1

  A Body, a Funeral, a Promise

  1

  “Are You Here?”

  George Washington
Thomas, Rafferty’s longtime business partner and closest friend, found the body and paid a price for his discovery. He and Rafferty had planned to meet at six for dinner at the hotel café. A man of large appetite, Rafferty was rarely late for a meal, and when he hadn’t shown up by quarter past six, Thomas grew concerned. He went up to Rafferty’s second-floor apartment and knocked on the door three times while calling out Rafferty’s name. There was no answer. Worried that Rafferty had fallen or even suffered a heart attack, Thomas fished out his key to the apartment and opened the door.

  When he awoke ten minutes later, feeling as though he’d been struck by a highballing express train, Thomas staggered to his feet and tried to collect his senses. A bloody knot on the back of his head told him what had happened. He’d been sapped from behind as soon as he stepped into the apartment. He had no idea who had ambushed him or why. But as his mind cleared, his thoughts turned to Rafferty. Had he been attacked as well?

  “Are you here, Shad?” Thomas called out. Silence. A dark wave of dread flowed over Thomas. Something felt terribly wrong. He checked Rafferty’s bedroom. No one there. Then Thomas went into the study and experienced the most terrible shock of his life.

  Rafferty lay prone on the carpet in front of his desk, blood pooling around his right shoulder. His eyes were fixed and wide open. Two objects—a folded piece of paper and a blood-smeared knife—lay next to his body. His jacket and pants pockets were turned inside out, as though someone had searched through them.

  Tears streaming down his cheeks, Thomas tried to revive Rafferty but it was useless. He had known for some time that Rafferty was failing and that death could not be far away. But bloody murder? No, that was not how Shad deserved to meet his end. Thomas felt not only the depths of grief but also seething anger. He intended to find the man who had taken Shad’s life, before the police did if possible, and send him straight to hell.

  The murder weapon, a bowie knife with a six-inch blade and inlaid walnut handle, looked identical to one Rafferty had owned for years. The scrap of paper next to Rafferty’s right hand was a more tantalizing clue. Thomas bent down and carefully unfolded it to reveal a telephone number—Gar 2030—written in Rafferty’s hand. Thomas recognized it as a local number from the Garfield exchange area in downtown St. Paul.

  Thomas debated what to do about the phone number. It clearly was an important piece of evidence, but could the police be trusted with it? He already suspected Rafferty’s murder might somehow be connected to the St. Aubin investigation and a possible police cover-up, in which case the clue might vanish if the coppers got their hands on it. Better safe than sorry, Thomas thought. He refolded the scrap of paper and slipped it into one of his shoes.

  Rafferty often carried a derringer for protection but Thomas didn’t find it on his body. Had the killer taken it? Or had Rafferty, believing he was safe in his apartment, been unarmed when he was attacked? Rafferty’s billfold was also missing and presumably stolen.

  Another question soon occurred to Thomas. Where were Rafferty’s notes on the St. Aubin case? They should have been in a folder he usually kept on his desk or in one of the drawers. Thomas made a quick search but didn’t find the folder. He wondered if the killer had taken it before making his escape. Perhaps it had even been his prime target all along.

  Thomas decided to look around the rest of the apartment before calling the police. His first stop was a curio cabinet in the front parlor where Rafferty displayed his bowie knife in a tooled leather sheath. One look at the empty sheath confirmed that Rafferty had been murdered with his own knife.

  It wasn’t long before Thomas came upon an oddity. Resting on a small side table in the parlor were two guns. One was an old single-shot Stevens pocket rifle Rafferty had used to good effect many years earlier during the Secret Alliance affair in Minneapolis. Thomas had hardly seen it since then. Now, here it was, loaded with a .32-caliber round. Next to it was a more modern weapon from Rafferty’s gun collection—a .45-caliber Colt automatic pistol. It too was loaded.

  Thomas knew that Rafferty never left guns lying around for fear of a mishap. Instead, he stored all of his weapons in a heavy safe in his bedroom. Thomas went into the bedroom to inspect the safe. It was locked and showed no signs of tampering. So why were there two guns out in the parlor? Had Rafferty simply forgotten about them? It didn’t seem likely.

  What seemed more likely to Thomas was that the police couldn’t be trusted with the weapons, since they were famously light-fingered when it came to guns recovered from crime scenes. Thomas had the combination to Rafferty’s gun safe, so he put the guns there. For all he knew, they could prove to be a vital clue.

  Thomas desperately wanted to spend more time hunting through the rest of the apartment but thought better of it, at least for the time being. Questions would be raised if he waited too long before notifying the police. Using the phone on the desk, he placed a call to police headquarters.

  When the law arrived, Thomas gave a full statement. His head was still aching but no one offered him medical attention. Instead, the police—led by Chief of Detectives Jackson Grimshaw, a powerful bull of a man—treated him as a suspect despite the nasty bump on his head. But after an hour of questioning, and a search of his person, Grimshaw let Thomas go for lack of any evidence against him.

  Thomas hung around the Ryan’s lobby with the intention of returning to Rafferty’s apartment once the police left. He sent a telegram to Chicago, praying it would bring powerful forces to bear on his beloved friend’s murder. Then he turned his attention to the telephone number left next to the body. He put a call through to the number, which turned out to be an answering service.

  “To whom do you wish to speak?” the woman on the other end of the line asked.

  Thomas didn’t know, so he improvised. “Maybe I have the wrong number,” he said. “Do you answer phones for several people?”

  “There are fifteen customers who use this service, sir.”

  “Could you tell me who they are?”

  “Sir, that would not be possible. If you don’t know the party you wish to speak to, I can’t be of help. Good night.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE POLICE CLEARED OUT, Thomas returned to Rafferty’s apartment. The coppers had tossed the place, leaving behind a mess. Thomas began a careful search of his own. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but wondered if the police, who were no geniuses, had missed some vital bit of evidence.

  Thomas found himself in tears again as he sifted through the remains of Rafferty’s life. Fortunately, the police had left most of Rafferty’s memorabilia undisturbed. The Congressional Medal of Honor he’d won at Gettysburg with the First Minnesota Regiment still occupied a prominent place in the curio cabinet. So too did a photograph of Rafferty’s older brother, Seamus, who’d also enlisted with the Minnesota Regiment and died a few months after Gettysburg on an obscure Virginia battlefield. There were many items as well from Rafferty and Thomas’s saloon, which had operated for nearly thirty-five years on the ground floor of the Ryan. Coasters, pickle jars, beer mugs, shot glasses, a wooden tap handle, prized bottles of bourbon—it was all there, every piece a wondrous invitation to reminiscence.

  Other prizes were scattered randomly around the apartment. There was a trophy northern pike Rafferty had landed at Lake Osakis, stuffed and mounted on a wall behind his desk; a menu chalkboard signed by Teddy Roosevelt during a stop at the saloon in 1901; and an elaborate hookah won in a poker game from a man who claimed to be the son of a Turkish sultan but who was in fact a flimflam artist from Detroit.

  Rafferty kept his most cherished heirlooms on a fireplace mantle in the parlor. The greatest treasure was a picture of his wife, Mary, who’d died in childbirth just a year after their wedding, their baby boy gone too, along with a big piece of Rafferty’s heart. Another of Rafferty’s favorites was a group photograph of the First Minnesota in 1861 as they gathered at Fort Snelling before marching off to war. How young he looked then, Thomas thought, and how terrible
that regiment’s fate.

  Not all of the pictures spoke to tragedy and loss. Many memorialized happier occasions, and one in particular brought a smile to Thomas’s face. It was a poster-sized blowup of a photograph showing Rafferty, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson, James J. Hill, and Thomas in 1896 after the conclusion of the legendary ice palace case. Rafferty and Holmes had formed an enduring friendship during the case, and now murder had ended it.

  It was just before midnight by the time Thomas finally headed home on the Selby Avenue streetcar. He was heartbroken and tired, grief coursing like some horrible sickness through his blood. Even so, he had cause for hope. Help, he believed, might soon be on the way.

  * * *

  WHEN THOMAS REACHED HOME, he broke the bad news to his wife, Pats, and they cried for a while in each other’s arms. Pats finally nodded off at three in the morning, too exhausted for more tears, but Thomas couldn’t sleep. His mind racing, he went back over every detail of Rafferty’s murder. It had been staged to look like a burglary, but the theft of Rafferty’s notes from the St. Aubin case strongly suggested otherwise. No random burglar would have been interested in the notes. Nor would any self-respecting thief have left the two guns behind.

  Thomas had assisted Rafferty during much of the St. Aubin investigation and knew the case well. It had been a challenge to solve because St. Aubin turned out to be a criminal of a particularly vicious sort, which meant that any number of people might want to see him dead. But a vital clue provided by St. Aubin’s mother allowed Rafferty to narrow his search for the killer to five prime suspects. Had one of them also killed Rafferty because he was getting too close to the truth? Thomas thought it very possible. But which one?

  Jackson Grimshaw, the policeman in charge of investigating both Rafferty’s murder and that of Daniel St. Aubin, was the first suspect. Thomas knew Grimshaw all too well. He was a broad-shouldered man in his forties, with a hard, impassive face dominated by a curling mustache that lodged above his lips like a small, fur-bearing animal. He was a dangerous character—he’d shot and killed at least two men, supposedly in the line of duty—and was known for roughing up anyone who got in his way.