The Plague of Thieves Affair

by Marcia Muller

  His office was also handsomely appointed, with a row of windows overlooking the busy thoroughfare below. Dr. Axminster stood before a rosewood desk waxed to a high gloss, a short, round-faced man with a Lincolnesque beard and ears that John had described to her as resembling the handles on a pickle jar.

  “My dear Mrs. Carpenter,” he said, smiling and taking her hand, “this is an unexpected pleasure. It has been some time since we last met. More than a year, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, in the offices of Great Western Insurance. I hope you’ll forgive me for breaking into your busy schedule this way, Doctor, but I really won’t keep you more than five minutes.”

  “Not at all, my dear lady, not at all.” Axminster was addicted to horehound drops, a paper sack of which sat on the desktop; he popped one into his mouth. “What may I do for you? You haven’t a medical complaint, I hope?”

  “No, nothing like that. It concerns Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I’m trying to locate him for a rather important reason.”

  “Ah, I see. Quite a character, Mr. Holmes. That iconoclast Ambrose Bierce called him an imposter in one of his Argonaut columns, likened him to the infamous Emperor Norton if memory serves—a spurious claim if ever there was one. He’s not only the genuine Holmes but every bit the brilliant detective he is reputed to be. Not,” Axminster added hastily, “that you and Mr. Quincannon aren’t his equal.”

  “Thank you. Have you had any contact with him recently?”

  “No, I’m sorry to say. Not since he left my home shortly after the events last year. Left rather abruptly, as a matter of fact, without so much as a by-your-leave. Ah, well, that’s genius for you, eh?”

  Lunacy, too. Not that the two are so far apart.

  “Do you have any idea where I might find him?”

  “I’m afraid not. My wife and I were of the opinion that he’d left the city and returned to England.”

  “He was still here in October,” Sabina said. “He popped up briefly during a case I was investigating at the time.”

  “Indeed? Well, well. I wish I’d known—I would have invited him to partake of our hospitality again. I really did enjoy having a gentleman of his obvious breeding under my roof. Amusing fellow, possesses all sorts of esoteric knowledge. Quite an accomplished violinist, as well.”

  Sabina remembered the strange, not very harmonious melody the man had been playing when she and John had visited him at the Axminster home. Accomplished violinist? As John would say, “Bah!”

  Axminster sucked with obvious pleasure on his horehound drop. “You have reason to believe Mr. Holmes is still somewhere in the city, Mrs. Carpenter?”

  “No. Merely the hope that he is.”

  “Need his assistance on another case, eh?”

  “Let’s just say it’s a professional matter.”

  “Oh, of course, not at liberty to discuss it. I understand perfectly. Well, I do hope Mr. Holmes is still among is. If so, and you locate him, give him my regards and ask him to come calling again.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sabina lied. She thanked the doctor for his time and took her leave.

  * * *

  An answering wire from Leland Hazelton in Chicago was waiting upon her return to the telegraph office. Roland W. Fairchild was indeed authorized to act on the firm’s behalf in the search for Charles Percival Fairchild III. Time was of the essence—kindly proceed with all dispatch.

  Yes. She would do just that.

  * * *

  Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, made use of several reliable informants. The two Sabina depended on most often were the “blind” newspaper vendor known as Slewfoot, and Madame Louella, a fortune-teller who claimed to be a native of a Transylvanian tribe of Gypsies but who had in fact made her way west from Ashtabula, Ohio. Both had developed strings of contacts in the Barbary Coast, the Uptown Tenderloin, the waterfront areas, and the various working-class neighborhoods.

  Madame Louella had been of considerable help during the Body Snatchers Affair the previous fall, so Sabina went first to her Kearney Street parlor. The woman sat alone in her “fortune room” like a spider waiting to ensnare a fly, her large body draped as usual in a flowing gold robe emblazoned with black and crimson cabalistic signs, her head covered by a somewhat moth-eaten gold turban. She had heard of the bogus Sherlock, though not in recent memory. Her vow to have him found in short order, followed by a wheedling request for a few dollars in advance—“I’m in arrears on my rent, dearie, and living hand to mouth”—were as familiar as her outfit. Madame Louella was a competent snitch, but no miracle worker, and a chronic poormouth. Sabina left her with nothing more than the promise of a successful finder’s fee of twenty dollars.

  Slewfoot occupied his usual stand on the corner of Market and O’Farrell. Checkered suits were his normal mode of dress; the one he wore today was an eyesore of brown and bilious yellow. He, too, knew nothing of the whereabouts of the elusive S. Holmes. Sabina made him the same offer as the one to Madame Louella, which satisfied him. He knew better than to make rash promises and to ask for cash in advance.

  The likelihood of either Slewfoot or Madame Louella producing the desired results was thin at best. If Charles the Third was still somewhere in or near the city, he would surely be using another of his assumed names and dressing in costumes other than his distinctive Sherlockian outfit. In order for one of the informants’ sources to locate him, he would have to be identified first—a difficult if not impossible task. Sabina held out little hope that this would or could be done.

  The last of her tactics was the most likely to succeed, though it, too, was problematical. The shrewd addlepate might regularly peruse the city’s newspapers, and then again he might not.

  She went to the downtown offices of the Morning Call, the Examiner, and the Evening Bulletin—the last even though it was an exploitative sheet that employed the most obnoxious of muckracking reporters, Homer Keeps, with whom she and John had had run-ins in the past. At each she placed the same advertisement in the personals section, to be run immediately and for a week’s duration.

  S. Holmes please contact colleague S.C.

  earliest convenience. Most important.

  If he saw that cryptic little message, it ought to be more than he’d be able to resist no matter what he was up to.

  7

  QUINCANNON

  Quincannon waited until late afternoon to conduct his search of the brewery storerooms. He left Golden State after his conference with James Willard, went to a nearby saloon to curb his always prodigious appetite with a mug of clam juice and its generous free lunch. Over a second mug, he reviewed the morning’s events in an effort to piece together the puzzle.

  Half an hour of this produced what he felt certain must be the why of Caleb Lansing’s sudden dispatch, and a small part of the how. The rest of the how and the who continued to elude him. More information was needed in order to complete his deductions—some of which, if the gods were with him, he would discover in the storerooms. A clue, mayhap, if not actual evidence.

  By the time he returned to Golden State, things had quieted down considerably. The loading dock was mostly deserted, some of the workmen having already left for the day. He appropriated a bug-eye lantern from the empty shipping office to supplement the weak electric light in the storerooms, then set off down the passage into the cellars. The only employee he encountered on the way paid him no heed.

  With Willard’s master key, he unlocked the storeroom door, slipped inside, and relocked it behind him. The scene of the murder first. The utility room contained nothing that Kleinhoffer and Mahoney had overlooked, or that he might have missed during his first brief inspection. None of the equipment that cluttered it had been disturbed; nor were there any other indications that a scuffle had taken place. The only signs of violence, in fact, were the marks in the bare earth where Lansing’s body had lain.

  Quincannon moved on to the room housing the sacked barley. The dusty smells of grain and burlap were thick en
ough to clog his sinuses and produce several explosive sneezes as he shined the bug-eye over the piled sacks. They were stacked close together, at a height of some five feet, and flush against the back and side walls. Nothing larger than a kitten could have hidden itself behind or among any of them.

  He crossed into the other large room. The boxes of yeast and heavy sacks of malt, sugar, and hops stood in long, tightly packed rows along the side walls. No one could have hidden behind or among them, either. The floor at the far end wall was bare; a pair of hand trucks and a pile of empty fifty-pound hop sacks stamped with the name of a company in Oregon’s Willamette Valley lay at the foot of the near end wall. Everything was as it had been when he’d looked in earlier.

  Or was it?

  No. Something seemed different now …

  Quincannon stood for a time, scanning the room and cudgeling his memory. What the devil was it? He poked at the boxes, the hand trucks, the empty hop sacks—futile effort, all of it. Something was altered, he felt sure of it, but whatever it was continued to elude him. He curbed his frustration with a counsel of patience. The room was now firmly fixed in his mind’s eye; it would come to him eventually.

  He used his handkerchief to clean smudges of yellow powder from his fingers, unlocked the outer storeroom door, and made sure the cellar corridor was empty before stepping out and reusing the key. Five minutes later he was mercifully free again of the brewery’s enticing fragrance and on his way to catch a Market Street trolley.

  * * *

  Sabina, he was pleased to discover, was at her desk when he entered the offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. Because he cared so much for her, he had grown sensitive to her moods; he was immediately aware that hers today was something new and not a little encouraging. She seemed more pleased than usual to see him, her welcoming smile a bit brighter and with a touch of warmth normally lacking in her professional demeanor. And was that a speculative gleam in her brown-eyed gaze, as though she might at long last be measuring him as a potential suitor?

  Yes. It was neither imagination nor wishful thinking—he was certain of it. Her attitude toward him was definitely softening, as her willingness to accept his invitations to social engagements over the past few months indicated. It surely must be, then, even though she refused to say so, that she was no longer adamant that their relationship remain a business-only one.

  Quincannon’s pulses quickened at the thought. He beamed at her. “You look lovely today, my dear,” he said, which was no exaggeration. Her shirtwaist was pale blue, with a large cameo at the throat of its high collar; her skirt was of soft gray wool which covered perfectly formed ankles (he’d had all too fleeting glimpses of them now and then); and her black hair, drawn back into its usual chignon and fastened with an ivory comb, glistened silkily in the electric light. “If I may say so.”

  “You may. No woman is immune to a genuine compliment.”

  Her response was likewise encouraging. So was the faint flush of color that tinted her cheeks. He warned himself to continue to proceed with caution—and then made the mistake of disobeying the warning by saying without weighing the words in advance, “No woman is more deserving. I’ve many more to pay you, though perhaps in more intimate surroundings.”

  Abruptly the gleam in her eyes vanished. “Is the prospect of intimacy why you’re grinning like the Cheshire cat?”

  Quincannon hadn’t realized that he was. He abolished the grin and hid his perplexity by fluffing his whiskers. Just that quickly her demeanor had shifted from mildly (very mildly) flirtatious to coolly businesslike. Women and their mercurial moods! If ever a man were to devise a mathematical equation that satisfactorily explained them, he would be hailed as a genius greater than Archimedes or Sir Isaac Newton.

  He repressed a sigh and asked how her day had gone.

  “Reasonably well. Marcel Carreaux and Andrew Rayburn were here to finalize arrangements.”

  “Who? Oh … the security job for that traveling exhibit at the Rayburn Gallery. Handbags Across the Years or some such.”

  “Reticules Through the Ages.”

  “A handsome fee, as I recall, for what is bound to be a dull and uneventful undertaking. Any Barbary Coast or East Bay scruff caught snaffling handbags, even ones bristling with gems, would be the butt of jokes by his fellows for the rest of his days.”

  “Be that as it may, our clients consider the security necessary. And you needn’t worry about having to attend.”

  “For which I’m grateful. Your day was much better than mine, I must say.”

  “Oh? Things didn’t go as planned at the brewery?”

  “No. I’ve spent the day in the company of louts and knaves, one of them a corpse.”

  “Corpse? Whose?”

  “Caleb Lansing, the man responsible for the murder of the brewmaster and theft of his steam beer formula. One of the men, I should say. Lansing himself was murdered this morning under bizarre circumstances.”

  “What happened?”

  Quincannon crossed to sit at his desk, where he proceeded to clean the bowl of his briar with a penknife while he gave Sabina a somewhat encapsulated account of what had taken place at the brewery. Her eyes widened as he spoke, and when he was done she said, “I don’t see how Lansing’s death could have been murder and not suicide. He died alone behind two locked doors, one of which you say you had under surveillance.”

  “Four good reasons, all of which escaped everyone’s notice except mine. First, he had no weapon when I braced him in the fermenting room. A pistol the size and shape of a LeMat would have made a conspicuous bulge in his clothing. And if he had been armed, he surely would have drawn down on me instead of running like a frightened rabbit.”

  “He could have smuggled it into the utility room earlier and stashed it somewhere, couldn’t he?”

  “Planning to take his own life when he had enough money hidden in his rooms to flee the city? And to do it there in the brewery, rather than in the privacy of his rooms? No, Caleb Lansing was murdered, and for the same reason Otto Ackermann was.”

  “The other reasons you’re so certain?”

  “Second is the location of the fatal wound. Lansing was shot on the left side of the chest, just above the rib cage—an awkward, nearly impossible angle for a self-inflicted wound. Most gunshot suicides choose the head or chest as their target, for the obvious reason.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Third, there were no powder burns on his shirt or vest. He was shot from a distance of at least two feet, an outright physical impossibility if his were the finger on the trigger. And fourth, he made no effort to leave the premises while leading me a merry chase, but headed straight down to the storerooms. That suggests a purpose that had nothing to do with hiding, for there was no safe place he could have concealed himself there.”

  “What purpose?”

  “My suspicion,” Quincannon said, “is that a rendezvous had been arranged in the utility room this morning. It’s seldom used, I was told. Lansing was consulting his watch when I found him in the fermenting room. That, too, is suggestive—that the time of the meeting was near at hand.”

  “A meeting with whom? Whoever killed him?”

  “Yes. His accomplice in the theft of the steam beer recipe and the murder of Otto Ackermann.”

  Sabina considered this for a few seconds before she asked, “Why would Lansing need an accomplice? From what you’ve told me, Ackermann was an old man. It would hardly take two to coerce the combination to his safe from him and then to pitch him into the vat.”

  “The plan required a certain amount of brain power, daring, and strong nerve, and Lansing had none of these. The accomplice may well have been the one recruited by Cyrus Drinkwater and/or Xavier Jones. He may also have had a hold of some sort on Lansing to force him into the crime.”

  “You suspected all along there were two Golden State employees in cahoots, then?”

  “Naturally,” Quincannon lied. He should h
ave suspected it from the first, given Lansing’s weak-stick nature. But he hadn’t until the discovery of the assistant brewmaster’s corpse. Well, even the best detectives suffered a blind spot now and then. Not that he would ever admit it to Sabina, or a client or any other party.

  “Was the shooting premeditated or a spur-of-the-moment crime, do you suppose?”

  “A combination of both.”

  Sabina raised an eyebrow. “That would seem to be a paradoxical statement, John.”

  “Not really. When Lansing escaped from me, he fled to the storerooms to tell his partner the game was up. He was the sort who would spill everything in an instant once he was captured, and the accomplice knew it. He had no choice but to dispose of Lansing then and there, before his name was revealed to me.”

  “Then he was the one armed with the LeMat revolver?”

  “Either that, or he planted it there himself earlier. Which means he planned to eliminate his partner for reasons of greed, self-protection, or both—his purpose in arranging the utility room meeting.”

  “And how did he manage after the shooting to escape from behind two locked doors and under your watchful eye?”

  Quincannon fluffed his whiskers. “I can’t say just yet.”

  “Meaning you have no idea?”

  “A glimmering of one, yes.” This was another prevarication. And Sabina wasn’t fooled; he could tell by the look in her eye. As was his wont when he was temporarily embarrassed, he resorted to bluster. “I’ll soon have the answer. No conundrum stumps John Frederick Quincannon for long, as you well know, my dear.”

  The corners of Sabina’s mouth quirked with wry amusement. “Oh, yes, I’m well aware of your prowess. You’re the rival of Vidocq and Sherlock Holmes when it comes to solving the seemingly insoluble.”

  “You’re referring to the genuine Holmes, I trust, not that insufferable rattlepate charlatan who kept plaguing us last year.”