The Case of the Raspberry Halves

0:00 A Wet February and a Chess Problem

0:04 Watson: It was the wet February of nineteen fifty-two, and London sulked under cold rain. On Saturday the twenty-third, Holmes and I walked home from a recital at the Wigmore Hall. Festival of Britain posters were peeling from every hoarding. All week I had nursed a chess problem over my ration-book egg, and Holmes solved it at a glance in the interval. Mrs Hudson had left the hall lamp burning.

0:30 Watson: A whole week of breakfasts I squandered on that knight, Holmes. Holmes: Wrong piece. The bishop was the key.

0:37 Watson: You might have let me lose to it in private. Holmes: During the slow movement? The pianist was losing to it already.

0:45 Watson: That's unkind to the poor fellow. And to me. Mrs Hudson: Mind that loose stair-rod, Doctor!

0:51 Watson: Thank you, Mrs Hudson. Goodnight! Holmes: Dark. Yet I left the lamp lit, and someone is smoking my shag.

1:00 Ortega: Come in, gentlemen. Make yourselves at home. Watson: Good Lord. In your chair, Holmes, with the Persian slipper on her knee.

1:08 Holmes: And ash enough to say she's waited the better part of an hour. Ortega: Nearer the whole of it. My name is Ortega. I practise law in Manhattan.

1:18 Holmes: A long way to come for my tobacco. Ortega: My client goes before a New York jury within weeks, Mr. Holmes, and I've left him to fly the Atlantic myself because I need you there before— Holmes: Before it's sworn, yes. A case already in the courts is counsel's business, Miss Ortega. I've no standing in yours, no friend in your police, and an ocean between me and every fact.

1:39 Watson: Think a moment. When does counsel leave her client with a trial so close? Holmes: When counsel fancies a holiday.

1:47 Watson: In February? She crossed the Atlantic in winter rather than send a cable. Holmes: Your point?

1:54 Watson: Counsel only does that when she's desperate for a fact. A cable won't fetch her one. Holmes: You found the right piece, this time.

2:03 Ortega: Then you'll come? I've a car below for London Airport. Watson: And my chess problem?

2:09 Holmes: Bring the board. The Atlantic is wide. Your hat.

2:12 Watson: We were above the clouds before the London rain had finished with us.

2:21 Glass on the Tenement Stoop at Eight in the Morning

2:26 Watson: Ortega's hired car set us down in Stanton Street, on the Lower East Side, at eight in the morning, beside a tenement where a man was sweeping glass from the stoop. Ortega: Kessel! Here they are. Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson, the men I flew for.

2:41 Kessel: Mind your feet, gents. More glass than stoop this morning. Holmes: A milk bottle, dropped from well above. It burst on the top step and sprayed outward.

2:51 Kessel: Fourth floor, front. Every morning since the papers ran my picture. Watson: Your own tenants? But you keep the roof over their—

3:00 Kessel: I keep their boilers lit, doc. On Stanton Street that buys you nothing. Go on, throw another! I'll sweep that too!

3:10 Watson: Steady, man. Ortega: The court let him out on bail. They've been at him every morning since.

3:16 Holmes: And your wife, Mr. Kessel? Kessel: Upstairs, crying. Tolliver's her kid brother. She raised him when their mother died. Now her brother sits in the Tombs swearing her husband's a— a spy. You tell me how a woman lives with that.

3:34 Watson: Is she sleeping? I'm a doctor. I could look in on her.

3:38 Kessel: That's good of you, doc. She won't see nobody... Holmes: Ortega tells me you were an engineer.

3:44 Kessel: Was. Now I'm a super with a broom. Holmes: Ah.

3:50 Watson: Good Lord. Someone's chalked it right across the door. Spy.

3:56 Kessel: Kid's chalk. But they pressed hard. It won't come off...

4:02 A Door on Its Chain, Five Flights Up

4:06 Watson: Tolliver's wife, Nadine, lived five flights up, under the roof, and her door gave us the width of a chain before Holmes had finished knocking. I say, we've not come to alarm you. Nadine: Nobody on Stanton Street says "I say." You're the English pair. The lawyer's.

4:24 Watson: Well. Yes. Holmes: And you're Nadine. You heard us on the stair below and had the chain on before we reached your door.

4:32 Nadine: Fourth landing. The stair groans there. I've learned every groan since they took my husband.

4:39 Holmes: Expecting trouble? Nadine: Trouble don't knock, mister. Second floor spits on my step every morning.

4:47 Watson: Have you any family at all in the building? Nadine: His sister, one flight down. Kessel's wife. She passes me on the stairs and don't say a word.

4:57 Watson: Oh, dear. Nadine: Twenty years she's known me. Twenty years. Now she looks right through me like I'm... like I'm a window.

5:09 Holmes: Then no one here has heard your side. Nadine: My side? I told my side till my mouth went dry.

5:17 Watson: Then tell it once more. We might hear it— Nadine: Ask Centre Street. They wrote it all down.

5:23 Radiator Dust and Wet Overcoats at Police Headquarters

5:28 Watson: Police headquarters on Centre Street smelled of radiator dust and wet overcoats, and Inspector Burke met us at noon with a cardboard file under his arm. Burke: Burke. I'll be plain, Mr. Holmes. This is the Bureau's case, not mine.

5:43 Holmes: The F.B.I.'s. Yet its file sits on a city inspector's desk. Burke: The arrests were made in my city. I keep their prisoners in the Tombs and their paper here. The trial's federal.

5:56 Watson: And they'll let the defence's man from London read it? Burke: The defence may see the exhibits. Ten minutes. There. Two halves of a card.

6:06 Holmes: Torn by hand, zigzag, so no forger could match it. But the outer edges are straight. Cut with a blade.

6:14 Burke: Is that right, now. Holmes: Three edges cut true, the fourth a fold. The side of a carton, taken off with a knife and torn in two.

6:24 Watson: They fit like a jigsaw. That was the recognition sign? Burke: It was. The courier shows his half at the machinist's door in Albuquerque, it matches, and six hundred dollars changes hands.

6:37 Watson: That much? Holmes: There's printing on the face. Burke: A scrap of border, half a letter. The register says nothing printed names the box, nor what was in it.

6:47 Holmes: Nothing? Burke: Tolliver couldn't say. The courier got his half sealed off the Russian. We asked Tolliver's wife, too. Not one of them could tell us. We never knew what box.

6:59 Watson: Someone thought it mattered enough to choose it. Burke: A box is a box, Doctor. The Bureau has both halves and a confession.

7:07 Holmes: And a knife edge it never looked at. Burke: A blade, you say. Want the rest? Tolliver's down the street, in the Tombs.

7:16 A Room of Green Paint and One Barred Window

7:20 Watson: Burke walked us across to the Tombs, where a guard showed us into a room of green paint and one barred window, and Tolliver sat waiting at a bolted table. Burke: Tolliver. These two work for your brother-in-law's lawyer. Mind your manners.

7:35 Tolliver: Kessel's mouthpiece sent a couple of limeys? Swell. Who are you?

7:40 Watson: Charming. Holmes: Holmes. This is Dr. Watson.

7:45 Tolliver: I told the Bureau the whole— I told them, Mr. Holmes. Over and over, all summer. Holmes: So I hear. And by now you recite it. The words have worn smooth, like a sergeant's count.

8:00 Tolliver: Twelve times, I told it. Say a thing twelve times, it gets smooth. Don't make it a lie.

8:06 Watson: I knew men in the war who could only tell it that way. It was how they bore it. Holmes: Then tell me the one thing you never recited. Why confess at all?

8:16 Tolliver: Why does anybody— Burke: I'll answer that. The federal attorney gave his word, in writing. Nadine will never be charged.

8:24 Holmes: Is that so. Burke: That confession bought his wife her freedom. So long as it holds, mind. Prove it a lie and the paper's worth nothing.

8:34 Holmes: You don't deny it. Tolliver: Why would I? I'd sign it again tomorrow.

8:39 Watson: Even with your own sister's husband on the end of— Tolliver: Kessel made his bed, Doc. He can lie in it.

8:45 Holmes: You speak of the bed. Not of the sister. Tolliver: Ask me anything, Mr. Holmes. Anything. Just— just leave Nadine out of it.

8:54 A Dark Stairwell and a Paper Sack of Shopping

8:58 Watson: The stairwell was dark when we came back, and Nadine was climbing with her shopping as Ortega came down from the fourth floor. Ortega. How's Kessel's wife?

9:09 Ortega: Wretched. Someone in this family ought to sit with— Nadine: Meaning not me. Excuse me, I'm going up.

9:16 Holmes: You've come from the Tombs, Nadine. Prison carbolic. It's on your coat.

9:21 Nadine: Ten minutes through a wire grille. Is that your business too? Watson: It clings. I've smelled it on every ward I ever walked.

9:30 Holmes: One question, and I'll let you by. What did you take to Albuquerque? Nadine: A suitcase. A cardboard suitcase and a summer dress. What do you think I took?

9:40 Ortega: The F.B.I. thinks a good deal more than a summer dress. Nadine: You want it? Fine! I'll say it loud so the whole stairwell hears. I carried half that card west. In my handbag. Sealed in an envelope, with a letter for my husband.

9:58 Nadine: I never opened it! Three days on the train with it in my lap, and I never once— Ortega: Carried it. Or tore it?

10:05 Nadine: You... you got no right to— Ortega: A jury will ask. Carried it, or tore it?

10:12 Watson: Holmes. Did she tear that card herself?

10:16 Midnight at the Back Table of a Delicatessen

10:20 Watson: The delicatessen on Houston Street never closed, and at midnight Holmes and I had its back table, two coffees and a plate of pastrami we never touched. Let me set two things side by side, Holmes. Just two.

10:34 Holmes: Set them down. Mind the mustard. Watson: First, Tolliver confesses, and the price is Nadine kept out of it, signed by the federal attorney. Second, Nadine tells the whole stairwell she took half the card to Albuquerque herself.

10:51 Holmes: And straight from her husband's side. She must visit him daily; the carbolic lay on her coat like varnish. Watson: Nonsense. Ten minutes in that place and it's in your wool for a week. Once is plenty.

11:03 Holmes: Fair. Then I withdraw the daily. Once, today, and home angry.

11:09 Watson: Angry and frightened. Ortega asked her twice, and she never— Holmes: No. She climbed.

11:15 Watson: Then here's what's kept me off my supper, and you may laugh. What if Tolliver named Kessel only to shield her?

11:24 Past the Coal Heap and the Boiler

11:28 Watson: Kessel kept his workbench in the cellar, past the coal heap and the boiler, and the next evening we found him there under a green-shaded bulb, something small in pieces before him. Kessel: Mr. Holmes. Doc. Mind the coal on that last step.

11:43 Holmes: A nursery lamp, Mr. Kessel, with a rabbit on the shade. Not for the fourth floor front, surely. Kessel: Third floor. Fourth floor front ain't got kids. Just good aim.

11:55 Watson: Ha! You mend lamps for the people who chalk your door? Kessel: Kid can't sleep in the dark, doc. Kid never chalked nothing.

12:04 Holmes: Then the man who did worse than chalk. Why would Tolliver lie? Kessel: Spite. His sister picked me, see, and he figured she picked me over him. Twenty years he's chewed on that.

12:18 Kessel: Then the Bureau backs his wife into a corner and hands him a pencil. A man'll say anything to keep his wife clean. Holmes: Spite and fear in one. You've had long nights to work it out.

12:30 Kessel: Nights and boilers, Mr. Holmes. That's all I got now. Watson: There goes your screw. Here, let me—

12:37 Kessel: Leave it! Nobody touches my bench but me. Watson: I beg your pardon.

12:42 Kessel: No, I'm sorry, doc. Six years I've kept this bench, and not even my wife lays a finger on it. She says it's the one place I'm happy.

12:53 Holmes: And the one place in the house nobody has chalked. Kessel: Come on up. I'll get the hall light for you.

13:00 Back in the Green Room Before Ten

13:04 Watson: Before ten next morning Burke had us back in the green room with Tolliver, and a ledger from an Albuquerque bank lay open on the bolted table. Burke: The Bureau sent this up from New Mexico. Read it, Doctor. My eyes are no good for small figures.

13:19 Watson: Savings account. Six hundred dollars in cash, the sixteenth of July. That'll be the courier's money. And here, in a different ink: two hundred more in August, cash again.

13:33 Tolliver: That ain't mine. Watson: It's your name and your account number. Tolliver: Then the bank goofed. I never— look, I never had a dime on top of the other.

13:44 Burke: Did it, now. Holmes: Twelve tellings all summer, and never once this sum. Why leave it out?

13:50 Tolliver: It don't— it ain't mine! I'm telling you, it ain't mine! Holmes: A man who hides money from the Bureau might hide a name from it too. Watson asked me whether you named Kessel to shield your wife.

14:04 Watson: I did. I rather hoped you'd laugh at me. Holmes: I'm not laughing. Inspector, suppose the man who bought his wife her freedom paid for it with the wrong name.

14:15 Burke: Then the promise is waste paper. It holds while his story holds, and not a— Tolliver: Leave her out of it! You hear me? I told you, I told you twelve—

14:23 Burke: Guard! Get me Foley Square on the telephone, the federal attorney himself. And a car to stand by for Stanton Street.

14:30 Tolliver: You swore she'd never be charged! You swore it!

14:35 An Evening Watch in the Tenement Hallway

14:39 Watson: Burke kept watch with us in the Stanton Street hallway that evening, waiting on word from the federal attorney, when every light in the building died at once. Burke: Grand. And the super's uptown at his lawyer's office.

14:53 Holmes: Every floor together, and the street lamps still burning. Not a bulb, then. The main fuse, below.

14:59 Burke: There's an infant on three and a mother screaming the stair down. A dark house with a child in it's police business. Down we go, on my say-so.

15:08 Watson: Here's the fuse board. That fuse is black as soot. We want a spare.

15:13 Burke: Try his bench. A super keeps a dozen. Watson: Kessel would skin me for this. Hold the match closer, Inspector. There's a little tray by the vise.

15:23 Watson: It's a carton. Raspberry Gelmore, with the whole side cut clean away, and the fuses rattling about inside. Holmes: Never mind the box, Watson. The fuse.

15:34 Burke: Give it here. Fifteen amps will do. There. And God help the tenant who blew it.

15:42 Watson: Amen.

15:44 A Police Car Under the Street Lamp

15:48 Watson: The police car came at last under the street lamp, and Burke led Nadine down the stoop just as a taxi brought Ortega and Kessel back. Burke: Easy on the steps, Nadine. The matron's waiting in the car.

16:00 Nadine: The car? You people gave your— Burke: Word, I know. Foley Square gave it, and Foley Square took it back at eight tonight. I'm holding you for the Bureau.

16:10 Ortega: Inspector! What's this? Nadine: Holding me on what? Tell me on what!

16:15 Holmes: On a card torn in two by hand. Your hands tore it, Nadine, and then you took your own half to Albuquerque. Ortega: There it is. She shouted I carried half that card west for every tenant to hear, and never once denied tearing it.

16:32 Nadine: I never tore nothing! I never even looked inside that envelope! Ortega: A jury will weigh that. Kessel, you'll be a free man by spring.

16:41 Kessel: Free. Nadine, sweetheart, I never wanted— Burke: Then want it quieter. Into the car, now.

16:48 Kessel: Twenty years of family, and it all comes down to a bit of raspberry Gelmore box. Watson: Holmes, she's shaking like a leaf. Must it— must it be tonight?

17:01 Holmes: Tonight, Watson. By morning she'd have had a story ready. Nadine: Tell my husband I never... I never...

17:10 One Desk Lamp in Burke's Office Near Midnight

17:14 Watson: Near midnight one desk lamp lit Burke's office for five of us: Nadine on one hard chair, and Tolliver, brought over in handcuffs from the Tombs, on another. Tolliver: Nadine. Are they treating you—

17:27 Nadine: Don't. You promised me this could never happen. Tolliver: I know. Burke: Sit, the pair of you. Mr. Holmes, you asked for this room. Why?

17:40 Holmes: Because the courier talked first. In May, before Tolliver said a word, he gave the Bureau a statement. Burke: Pages of it. Train times, hotel rooms. It's all in the file.

17:52 Holmes: A man with no wife to shield, speaking before anyone had a reason to lie. Read me the door in Albuquerque. Burke: The door. The Bureau never thought it mattered, and no more did I.

18:06 Burke: Here. Sunday morning. A woman opened the door, and he showed his half of the card.

18:12 Tolliver: That was Nadine. I was shaving. Burke: Says here the woman looked at it a long while, and then... then she asked what it was.

18:25 Past One in the Morning Below Burke's Office

18:23 Holmes: Ah.

18:29 Watson: Below Burke's office, in the holding cells under Centre Street, Nadine sat behind bars past one in the morning, and Tolliver stood cuffed at the gate. Holmes: Inspector, my theory put her in there tonight. I was wrong, and I'll say so in front of her.

18:46 Burke: You were mighty sure of yourself on that stoop. Holmes: Sure, and wrong. She carried a sealed envelope three days and never opened it. A woman who tore that card would never have asked what it was.

18:59 Watson: She told you twice, Holmes. Once on the stairs, once in the street. Holmes: And I took her shouting for a bad conscience. It was only temper.

19:09 Nadine: You'd have temper too, mister, if they spat on your step. Holmes: I daresay I would. Burke: The courier spoke before anybody had a wife to save. His word clears her. She was never charged. I held her on Foley Square's word, and I'll wake the federal attorney and tell him why I let her go.

19:31 Holmes: One thing more, Tolliver, while the gate stands open. The bank. Tolliver: Not now. Not in front of—

19:37 Holmes: Now. Clear up that money, or it follows her out of here. Tolliver: Okay. Okay. The two hundred more in August was— it was dice. Crap game in the Verdane Flats barracks, three paydays running.

19:50 Burke: Dice! And you stood there denying it to my face? Tolliver: It wasn't you I was hiding it from. Her pop shot dice with the rent every Friday of her life. She swore she'd never marry a guy who gambled.

20:03 Nadine: All summer... the Bureau thinking you got paid twice... over dice? Tolliver: I was going to buy you a winter coat. A good one, with a collar.

20:14 Nadine: Dice, you fool.

20:17 An Hour Before Dawn Above the River

20:21 Watson: Holmes would not hear of bed, and an hour before dawn he had me out on the Brooklyn Bridge footway, the river black beneath the planks. Holmes: Your notebook, Watson. Read it back to me. Centre Street, the first day.

20:34 Watson: In this wind? Very well. The card. Three edges cut, one folded, a scrap of border, half a letter.

20:43 Holmes: And Burke? Watson: Nothing printed names the box. Tolliver couldn't say, the courier had his half sealed. A box is a box, says Burke.

20:53 Holmes: Stop there. Now the stoop, last night. Watson: Burke leads Nadine down. Ortega crows. Kessel sighs over twenty years of family. Then, and I wrote it as he said it: raspberry Gelmore.

21:09 Holmes: Stop. Not "a card." Not "a box." A flavour.

21:14 Watson: I'm a doctor. Half of what a wretched man says is noise. I'd not hang anyone on a sigh.

21:20 Holmes: Nor would I. I ask only that you hold the two pages side by side. Watson: Very well. On one, no one can name the box. On the other... good heavens. He names the flavour.

21:36 Holmes: Then who, Watson, told Kessel what box?

21:41 Back to the Stoop at Seven

21:45 Watson: At seven Burke drove us down to Stanton Street, where Kessel was sweeping his stoop once more and Ortega stood waiting at the street door. Kessel: Inspector. Mr. Holmes. Bottle came down whole today. Maybe they're getting tired.

22:00 Ortega: Or ashamed. Inspector, I hear you turned Nadine loose in the night. On whose word?

22:07 Burke: The courier's. His statement has her puzzling over that card at her own door. She'd never laid eyes on it. Ortega: So the shield-the-wife theory is dead, Mr. Holmes, and all that's left is a spiteful brother-in-law. Which is what I flew to tell you.

22:24 Holmes: Inspector, settle one thing. Who ever named the box that card came from? Burke: Nobody. Not my men, not the Bureau, not Tolliver, not the courier. Nadine carried it sealed, and her statement says the same. She never knew what box either.

22:40 Holmes: Yet last night, Mr. Kessel, as Nadine went into the car, you called it a bit of raspberry Gelmore box. Kessel: Did I? Well— sure. Box top, kids' stuff. What else would it be?

22:54 Watson: Every grocer on this street has a shelf of those, in every colour going. You chose one. Kessel: So I heard it somewhere! Tolliver, maybe. One Christmas, or...

23:04 Burke: Tolliver couldn't name it with the thing under his nose. I put it there myself. Holmes: No printing named it, and nobody they asked named it. Only the man who cut it from the carton ever knew.

23:16 Kessel: That's it? That's all you— a word I let drop on my own stoop? Ortega: Guesswork, Mr. Holmes! A sigh on a doorstep, and you'd send a man to the chair?

23:28 Holmes: Then let's see your bench.

23:31 Five of Us Under a Low Green Bulb

23:35 Watson: Five of us crowded the cellar between the vise and the boiler, and the green-shaded bulb hung low over Kessel's bench. Burke: Both halves, signed out of my file an hour ago. Handle them like eggs, Mr. Holmes.

23:49 Holmes: The tray, Watson. You found it in the dark. Watson: Here, by the vise. Shall I empty it, Kessel?

23:56 Kessel: Help yourself, doc. Nothing in it but fuses. Holmes: First half, blade edge to the bottom. Second half, torn edge to torn edge.

24:05 Watson: Good Lord. Last night, by matchlight, I told you it had the whole side cut clean away. Holmes, there's the side.

24:16 Burke: Same pink. Same border. And there's the rest of that letter, printed on the carton.

24:22 Holmes: And the knife that cut three true edges lies beside your vise, Mr. Kessel. Kessel: That's... that's just a... Ortega: Very well, it fits. But Tolliver lived in this house. He could have—

24:35 Watson: He couldn't. You told me yourself, Kessel, when I reached for your screw: "Nobody touches my bench but me." Six years, not even your wife. Burke: And those halves have sat with the Bureau since the arrests. No spiteful machinist cut a box in the Tombs to match them.

24:52 Ortega: Kessel, not one word. I'm telling you as your counsel— Kessel: You flew the ocean for me, counsellor. I won't make you lie for me too. I worked it alone. Tolliver drew those moulds because I asked him. I cut the card right here, under this lamp, and I tore it.

25:10 Watson: For what, man? The six hundred dollars went to Tolliver. Kessel: For the Russians. They bled for us at Stalingrad. Somebody had to see they got the bomb too, and I wanted that somebody to be me.

25:24 Holmes: And one half went west in Nadine's handbag. Why hers? Kessel: My wife raised that boy. If she carried it, and it ever came out, she'd go down beside me. So I sealed it up and gave it to Nadine. She never asked. Twenty years, she— she trusted me.

25:43 Burke: Foley Square will have your bail revoked by noon. Till then I'm holding you for the Bureau. Hands.

25:50 Kessel: Tolliver's wife went west so mine stayed clean.

25:55 Home to Rain on the Baker Street Windows

25:59 Watson: I find it set down in my journal that rain was streaming down the Baker Street windows when we came home, and that Holmes filled his pipe from the Persian slipper before his coat was off. One thing still nags me, Holmes. Sealed envelopes, go-betweens, a man that careful. Why on earth keep the box?

26:18 Holmes: Think what else he kept. A dropped screw he snapped at you over. A child's lamp he mended for the third floor.

26:26 Watson: A super's thrift, then. Waste nothing that might serve. Holmes: Exactly, my dear Watson. To an engineer, a stout carton with one side gone is a perfectly good tray. And for six years nobody asked him what box.

26:41 Watson: Until he told us himself on the stoop, with Burke's file swearing nobody knew. And I wrote it down as a sigh. Holmes: You also found the tray by matchlight. Between your pencil and your match, he was finished.

26:56 Watson: And the cost of it. Nadine had a night in the cells. His wife has lost her brother and her husband both.

27:05 Holmes: He stands trial for conspiracy within the month. The sketches stay in Russian hands for good, and no New York jury can fetch them back. Mrs Hudson: You both look done in. Raspberry jelly, and don't ask what it cost me in sugar.

27:20 Watson: You're an angel. Look at the colour of it, Holmes. Mrs Hudson: I've kept the box. It'll make a nice tray for my buttons.

27:28 Watson: Oh dear. Holmes: Do burn the box, Mrs Hudson.