The Barker Street Regulars

began.
    Robert cut in. “In the year eighteen seventy-eight ...”
    “The American Kennel Club had not yet been established,” I said, “and it wouldn’t have made any difference, but it does now. Besides, those scissors have sharp points.” Softening, I conceded that Kimi was beginning to shed. “I’ll send you some of her hair if you want.” That’s me: all generosity.
    Like the proverbial bloodhounds on the trail, Robert and Hugh, however, insisted on following me home. As I drove there, I kept checking the rearview mirror in the hope that I’d lost them. But Hugh, at the wheel, stuck to me like the infernal paint that the villainous Stapleton applied to the unfortunate hound of the Baskervilles. With Rowdy entered the next day, I had grooming to do, and having spent the morning doing housework and then visiting the Gateway, I hadn’t written so much as an indefinite a or an or the definite the, never mind the kind of article I could sell. Like every other freelance writer, I live in terror of having to get a real job. It was noon. Would Hugh and Robert hang around? Would they expect lunch?
    Something about those two simple questions made me realize how little I knew about Hugh and Robert. They shared, it seemed to me, Holmes’s fondness for disguise, but instead of adopting the Master’s guises, they cloaked themselves in the identity he’d hidden beneath the persona of a drunken-looking groom or an old woman. What exactly was the quality of their devotion to Althea? Did they love her as a woman, a person? Or as the woman, the representative of Irene Adler? As to their relationship, was it a peculiar reenactment of what Holmes-lovers called “The Friendship”—the curious tie between Holmes and Watson? I thought of the tongue-in-cheek essay Althea had given me: “Watson Was a Woman.” Hugh and Robert were definitely men, brothers-in-law, men who had married sisters, yet who made no secret of having lived their lives in thrall to a third woman, Althea. They’d presumably been visiting the Gateway since Althea first moved there. Had the complainer in the elevator voiced her dissatisfaction to them? Had the Gateway’s standards really declined? Had the cost increased? Jonathan had been Althea’s heir. He’d had her power of attorney. He must have paid the Gateway’s bills. Could he have planned to move Althea to a cheaper place? Could Hugh and Robert have taken decisive action to prevent the move?
    As I pulled into my driveway, two crazy ideas arrived with me. The first was about Hugh’s demonstrated capacity for violence. As quite a young man, Althea had told me, Hugh had disrupted a Sherlockian convention by taking his fist to the jaw of an opponent in the Oxford-Cambridge debate. The ardor of youth, I’d assumed, had overcome Hugh’s judgment. But from Althea’s perspective, Ceci was, and I quote, “a young woman.” Ceci was eighty. Hugh’s episode of supposedly youthful violence might have taken place only a few years ago. Hearing about it, I’d facetiously reflected that Hugh’s mistake, in the eyes of Sherlockians, had been to use his fist instead of the Master’s favorite weapon, a loaded hunting crop. The weapon used to murder Jonathan Hubbell was only presumed to be the missing shovel that Ceci had abandoned by Simon’s grave. Could it, in fact, have been a weighted hunting crop? The second crazy idea was about the cocaine on Jonathan’s body. The Republican philatelist victim seemed as wildly improbable a source of the white powder as did his great-aunt, Ceci. Was it possible that in their Holmesian zeal, Hugh and Robert indulged in a seven-percent solution?
    As I got Rowdy out of the car, I found it difficult to suppress the thoughts that had been burbling around during the drive from the Gateway, but when Hugh pulled the Volvo in behind my Bronco and the two men got out, I was oddly alarmed by the contrast between my suspicious fantasies and the Holmesians’ appearance of normality. With his impressive height, his white hair, and his well-tailored dark topcoat, Robert was the kind of handsome and distinguished-looking man you see in Harvard Square on Commencement Day when he’s just marched with a handful of other surviving members of the Class of Long Ago. I’ve never been near an M.I.T. commencement and have no idea what’s comme il faut in the way of men’s clothing, but Hugh’s khaki pants and wool-lined tan jacket were practical-looking, and with his sturdy