Short Story #67: The Adventure of the Dying Detective

Will Sherlock Holmes week continue into the weekend? Stay tuned.

Prompt: Write a short story that could have the title: "The Adventure of the Dying Detective." (Word count: 258)

* * * * * Jack Baines didn’t have to pull his hand away from his gut to know he was bleeding. Didn’t have to see to know his blood flowed almost as freely as the champagne at the Governor’s Ball. He’d be dead soon, had to incriminate his killer while he could.

The Governor’s Ball, an annual event to which Baines was annually not invited. Not that he minded; he wasn’t political. Nevertheless, when Abner Fretwell III asked him to shadow his wife at the shindig, he gladly broke out his tuxedo and infiltrated the waitstaff.

Everything had gone well until some old bird with a shellfish allergy sampled the lobster pâté. As the codger’s face inflated like a swollen hot-water bottle, Dolores Rosemund-Fretwell took advantage of the distraction to step out onto the veranda. A moment later Gordon Bessemer, the governor’s press secretary, followed.

Baines waited ten minutes to let their delicto get well in flagrante, then headed out himself. He found them going at it like weasels near the rose garden, started shooting photographs with his cufflink camera, heard Mrs. Fretwell gasp, “That’s the detective my husband hired. My detective pointed him out to me earlier today,” then found himself stumbling away, gutshot.

The party was too far away. He couldn’t write Bessemer shot me in his blood on the lawn. Writing a note on paper was possible, but risky: Bessemer could easily search him, destroy the message.

In the end, he swallowed his cufflinks. He didn’t know if an autopsy’d be performed, but it was worth a try.

–30–