The Plague of Thieves Affair

by Marcia Muller

  “What happened?”

  “I made it quite clear to him that my name is Holmes, not Fairchild, that I am in no way related to him, that I have never been in the city of Chicago, and that I have no intention of going there with him or anyone else.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I left him and his rather shrewish wife and returned to the Dubliner Hotel.”

  “Mr. Fairchild was all right when you left?”

  “Of course he was. Annoyingly insistent and in something of a temper, but then so was I. I do not take kindly to being insulted.”

  “Did you strike him? With your hands or your stick?”

  “Strike him? My dear Mrs. Carpenter, what gave you such a notion?”

  “Roland Fairchild is dead,” Sabina said. “Brutally bludgeoned to death. Mrs. Fairchild claims you struck the fatal blows with your stick in a sudden frenzy.”

  He stared at her with his mouth slightly agape. “A foul lie! I have never committed a frenzied act in my life. Nor even a rash one. I am always in perfect control of myself, no matter what the circumstances. As you well know, I am sworn to uphold the law, not to break it.”

  His shock, indignation, and moral outrage all seemed genuine; she would have sworn he wasn’t lying, at least not deliberately. Was it possible the act had been so damaging to his already unbalanced mind that he’d blocked it out completely? Possible, yes, but—

  “How did you learn of this outrage, pray tell?”

  Sabina told him of her police summons and the words that had been exchanged in the Fairchilds’ hotel room.

  “I am most grateful to you for not revealing my present whereabouts to the police detectives. You must believe, then, that I am innocent of these monstrous charges.”

  “I do now, yes.”

  “Mrs. Fairchild, therefore, is either delusional or she herself is a murderess of the most vicious, calculating, and brazen variety.”

  Sabina had had the same thought. Octavia Fairchild possessed both the temperament and the physical strength to have battered her husband to death in cold blood—likely with his own walking stick, which had then been hidden before the police arrived. Her motive: a combination of hatred and greed. With Roland Fairchild dead and Charles the Third incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane, she stood to inherit the entire Fairchild estate as Roland’s next of kin.

  “It would seem to be the latter.”

  “Indubitably.” Charles’s eyes, turned toward Sabina, glowed as if they had been set afire. “So the black widow has ensnared Sherlock Holmes in her web of deceit and made a hunted man of him, has she? The web must therefore be quickly broken, our positions reversed, and the truth will out.”

  “How?”

  “That is yet to be determined. Come, let us walk while I cogitate.”

  They had gone half a block when Charles muttered, “I dislike playing the fiddle, though I must say I am rather adept at it. I much prefer the violin. Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs Without Words,’ the ‘Barcarolle’ from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. Do you know that I have a genuine Stradivarius in my London flat? I acquired it from a broker in Tottenham Court Road for a mere fifty-five shillings.”

  The skewed way in which Charles the Third’s mind worked was a constant source of amazement to Sabina. “What does any of that have to do with—”

  “Cogitation takes many forms, ofttimes requiring digression in order to bring fruition.” Which sounded like gibberish to Sabina, but she made no comment. They proceeded to the end of the block in silence. Then Charles halted abruptly and demanded, “Were you permitted to view Mr. Fairchild’s corpse?”

  “No. It was just being taken away when I arrived at the hotel.”

  “Did the police reveal to you the number of times the victim was coshed?”

  “They did. His skull was crushed in four places. Mrs. Fairchild claims she was also struck a glancing blow when she began screaming.”

  “Did she, now. Were there any marks upon her person to corroborate her claim?”

  “Only a small gash on her cheek.”

  “How small?”

  “Two inches or so, below the left cheekbone.”

  “Was her clothing torn or bloodstained?”

  “The dressing gown she wore was unblemished. She must have changed and then hidden her bloodstained clothing along with the weapon she used. The police had little enough reason to search the rooms, given her testimony.”

  Charles the Third ruminated in silence for another quarter of a block. Then, his eyes burning even brighter, he gave a sharp nod, tapped his blackthorn smartly on the boardwalk, and said, “The strategy is now clear. You and I must once more work together in consort, daringly this time.”

  “How do you propose we do that?

  “Elementary, dear lady. Our first and most important course of action is a visit to the one place the authorities will never expect to find me.”

  “And that is?”

  “The city morgue.”

  20

  QUINCANNON

  The eight A.M. ferry for Sausalito left on schedule, but the SF&NP train for Los Alegres was twenty minutes late. Typical railroad inefficiency, though the delay was minimal enough.

  On the train, Quincannon shared a seat with an undersized drummer of drug sundries. (“Everything from female complaint medicine to prophylactics,” the little man said confidentially, tapping his sample case.) The drummer, as gregarious as most of his breed, had spent twenty years traveling the counties north of San Francisco; when he learned that his seatmate knew relatively little about the Los Alegres area, he offered a font of local anecdotes and historical detail. Quincannon paid attention to some of it, asking questions now and then, because having a useful amount of information about an unfamiliar place was always beneficial.

  There were six hatcheries in Los Alegres, of which the Pioneer was the second largest. Dozens of small chicken farms thrived in the outlying areas; if the one belonging to a widow named Ella was one of them, the drummer had no knowledge of it. The town had better than fifty saloons—“drinking hells,” the salesman called them, adding unnecessarily that he himself was a temperance man—and the nearby hills were “riddled with bootlegging stills.” Nonetheless, he admitted, the town was “mostly a respectable place. Haven’t been but half a dozen murders and one hanging since it was incorporated.”

  A good horse could be rented at Gilford’s Livery on Main Street above Steamer Basin. And if Quincannon was interested in “letting his hair down some,” why, there was a spot out near a place called the Haystacks that was run by a right friendly woman named Belle …

  The time passed swiftly enough, the drummer’s droning voice and the rhythmic clacking of steel on steel putting Quincannon into a half doze. But he was on his feet as soon as the engineer whistled down for the Los Alegres station, interrupting one of the salesman’s monologues with a hasty word of parting. When the locomotive hissed to a stop he was the first passenger off the cars.

  The day was cold and overcast here, as it had been in the city. Green hills stretched out to the east, beyond miles of open farmland. To the west he could see the brown line of the estuary, its banks lined with feed and grain mills, and the town proper beyond.

  He boarded a horse-drawn cable car that took him across the estuary to Main Street. It was a four-block walk to the Pioneer Hatchery, a winged brick building on a corner lot. From the clerk he spoke to he learned that one of their former suppliers of eggs were the Draycotts, Samuel and Ella, whose farm was several miles east. Former? Samuel had died some three months before and the farm had fallen on hard times; that was all the clerk would say. Never having been there, he was unable to provide adequate directions.

  Quincannon considered a visit to Lincoln Evans, the town constable, and decided it was premature. Instead he found his way to Gilford’s Livery, opposite a city park. This was the right choice, for not only did the hostler have a good horse for hire—a lean and sturdy claybank—but he knew t
he Draycotts and was willing to share his knowledge without prying into Quincannon’s reasons for asking.

  “Sam and me were friends,” he said. “I used to go out to his place all the time to play euchre. Fine man, Sam. Shocked me when I heard he died. Caught the grippe and it turned into pneumonia just about overnight.”

  “How has Mrs. Draycott been bearing up?”

  “Better than you’d expect. First all the troubles they had with the farm, then Sam up and dying so sudden. Plenty of women would’ve took to their beds. But Miz Draycott, she’s a strong one.”

  “What sort of troubles?”

  “Whole string of ’em. Chicken disease wiped out more than a hundred of their laying hens. Been real dry around here for a year now, and they had a poor alfalfa crop. Then the barn caught fire and burned down. Some folks been saying the place is jinxed, probably why it hasn’t been sold by now, but I don’t hold with that kind of talk.”

  “The property is for sale, then?”

  “Ever since Sam died. More than fair price, too.”

  Quincannon said, “I’m looking for a man named Corby, Elias Corby, who may be interested in buying it. A bookkeeper for Golden State Steam Beer in San Francisco. Would you happen to know him?”

  “Corby, Corby. No, the name don’t ring any bells.”

  Quincannon described him, but the description rang no bells for Gilford, either. But then he said, “San Francisco, you say? Ella Draycott’s brother lives down there, now I think of it. Teamster, makes his living driving a beer wagon. Mebbe that’s how this Corby fella heard about the Draycott farm being for sale.”

  Likely it was. “Is Mrs. Draycott still living at the farm?”

  “Sure is. Wouldn’t hear of moving into town. Said she didn’t want to put nobody out.”

  “Alone, or is there a hired hand to help her with the chores?

  “No, sir, just her now. Sam had to let their last hired man go two months before he died.”

  “Well, I believe I’ll pay a call on the widow. How do I get to her farm, Mr. Gilford?”

  “It’s about four mile out Oak Creek Road,” the hostler said. “Easy enough to find.” He went on to give directions to Oak Creek Road, and described a landmark that would identify the wagon trail leading in to the Draycott property.

  Quincannon paid in advance for the claybank, left his grip in the hostler’s care, and rode out of town to the northeast, following Gilford’s directions. The claybank was spirited and wanted to run; Quincannon held him down for a while, because it had been some time since he’d sat a saddle and the one Gilford had rented him was old, worn, and of an unfamiliar design. But he was used to it by the time he reached the cutoff for Oak Creek Road and he gave the horse his head, letting him canter for a mile or so before hauling him down again.

  The road wound through rich farmland, much too fallow and dry-looking for this time of year. The creek paralleling the road was little more than half full. San Francisco had had only a small share of rain this winter, likewise this region—not nearly enough to put an end to the long dry spell.

  A sharp wind made the ride a cold one, even bundled as he was in his chesterfield, his hands gloved, a scarf tied chin-high around his neck. A farm wagon drawn by two horses and piled high with crates of eggs clattered by; otherwise the road was deserted. The only people he saw aside from the wagon driver were men working here and there in the fields. He passed two poultry ranches, identifiable as such by rows of long, low, shedlike henhouses. The wind carried the faintly audible clucking of innumerable chickens.

  The landmark the hostler had told him about—a lightning-struck live oak—appeared ahead. Quincannon slowed the claybank. The rutted wagon trail was visible beyond the tree, angling away across a short meadow; but a low, grassy hill hid the farm from the road. That suited him. He wanted a look at the place from a safe distance before he went near it, and that hill might do. There was cover along its brow; more live oaks, manzanita, and some bare rocks jutting up through the green and brown grass.

  He turned onto the trail, but left it after a short distance and walked the horse across the meadow and up along the backbone of the hill. Near the crown he dismounted, ground-reined the animal, then moved up among the rocks to where he could see what lay on the far side.

  The farm was there, tucked into a little hollow, flanked on two sides by alfalfa fields. From where he stood, the farm buildings were better than three hundred yards away. He could see a flock of brown and white hens pecking the ground behind chicken-wire fencing alongside one of four henhouses, a couple of horses inside a pole corral with a lean-to shelter at the near end. There was no sign of human habitation, but a buckboard was visible under the lean-to, and someone was inside the farmhouse. A thin column of chimney smoke spiraled up into the gray sky.

  The property did in fact have a gone-to-seed look. The small farmhouse and chicken coops were in need of whitewash; the remains of the burned-out barn sat off to one side, all but a single wall collapsed into rubble and that one leaning like a collection of fire-blackened bones; the small windmill had lost two of its blades; the unplowed fields showed their neglect. Only a vegetable garden alongside the house appeared, at least from a distance, to have been tended to by the widow Draycott.

  A place that was dying, that would be as dead as Samuel Draycott in less than a year if someone didn’t take it in hand. There was something sad and lonesome about it—a blighted, tragic place. The only sounds that reached Quincannon’s ears were the squawking of the chickens and the irregular, rhythmic scree of the windmill’s remaining blades turning in the wind. Like the beat of a bad heart. Like the beginnings of a death rattle.

  Why was Elias Corby interested in buying it? Quincannon wondered. The bookkeeper hadn’t struck him as the type who secretly yearned to be a farmer, or would be willing to indulge in the sort of hard physical labor it would take to make this place productive again. Surely he’d seen it before, met its surviving owner … Ah, that was the answer. It wasn’t the farm he coveted so much as it was the widow Draycott. Obsessive designs on her as well as her land was the likely impetus for his transformation from reasonably honest bookkeeper into thief and murderer.

  Quincannon continued to watch the farmhouse, considering his options. If his quarry had arranged to stay there, he couldn’t very well ride in openly; Corby would have armed himself, and a man who had already killed twice wouldn’t hesitate to make an ambush try for number three in order to save himself. The safest course of action, then, was to make a covert approach and utilize the element of surprise. Safe, that was, unless Corby was not holed up here and the widow herself was armed—a likelihood for a woman living alone—and had keen eyes and no qualms about shooting a trespassing stranger.

  He studied the surrounding terrain. The hill he was on spread out to the south, sloping down gradually to a shallow gully where the creek flowed. The gully ran along two hundred yards or so to the rear of the farm buildings, through humped-up meadowland and a stand of willows. To the west, beyond the untilled alfalfa fields, the land rose again into a series of short, rolling hillocks. There was no cover in that direction, none anywhere within a fifty-yard radius of the buildings. The only reasonably safe way to make his approach was on a diagonal from the rear, from where this hill leveled out at the gully—and at that, it meant crossing those two hundred yards of open ground to either the remains of the barn or the nearest of the chicken coops.

  The cold wind gusted, causing the screech of the ungreased windmill blades to rise in volume. Quincannon’s jaw clenched; that noise, constant on windy days, would fray a man’s nerves raw. Just a few minutes of it had put an extra twist of tension between his shoulder blades.

  He backed down below the crown of the hill and went laterally along its backbone, descending toward the gully. The windmill shrieks weren’t as loud here, mercifully. When he reached the gully he followed its westward progress to where a lone willow drooped its branches down over the bank. He stopped there because he coul
d see the farm buildings again. Still no sign of anyone out and about.

  Quincannon opened his coat to allow free access to his holstered Navy Colt, then followed the gully a ways farther before cutting away from it across the rocky meadow, running with his body bent low. He kept his eyes lifted as he ran, his gaze steady on the farmhouse; a shaft of sunlight shining through a rift in the cloud cover glinted off the glass in its rear windows, so if there was movement behind them he couldn’t detect it. The back door remained closed, the farmyard empty.

  The first of the henhouses was the closest structure; he veered toward it, putting the coop between himself and the house. When he reached its back wall he eased along it and around the far side, along the chicken-wire fencing in front. Some of the hens scratching inside the yard set up a minor ruckus, but he judged it wasn’t enough to alert whoever was inside the house. He continued at an angle through the vegetable patch, still watching the house’s backside. He could see into the windows now, past faded muslin curtains. No one was there to look back at him.

  Dry cornstalks crunched under his feet; he sidestepped onto clear ground, slowing. The back stoop was straight ahead, but he bypassed it, went to the near corner and along the side wall. Toward the front was another window, its sash raised a few inches. He stopped alongside it and half squatted so that his ear was on a level with the opening.

  The murmur of voices came from inside, a man’s and a woman’s, but they were in another room and he could only make out a few of the words—not enough so that there was any sense to them, or to tell if the man’s was familiar. He eased his head up and around for a quick look through the glass. The room, a sparsely furnished front parlor, was empty. Until he was certain of the man’s identity, he was loath to take the risk of entering. He stayed where he was, listening, watching, waiting.

  Better than five minutes passed. The voices halted briefly, grew in volume when they began again. A few moments later, the woman came into the parlor through a rear doorway—tallish, spare, wearing a calico traveling dress and bonnet. Behind her was the man, and as soon as Quincannon had a clear look at him, his lips peeled back into a dragon’s grin.