Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years

by Michael Kurland

  Glowering, Quincannon left the study to search the premises. Not long afterward, Holmes did the same. The results were rather astonishing. They found no sign of Dodger Brown, and yet every window, upstairs and down, was firmly latched. Furthermore, the wedge Quincannon had kicked under the back door was still in place, as was the heavy chair Holmes had dragged over to block the front door. They were the only two doors that provided an exit from the house.

  “How the deuce could he have gotten out?” Quincannon said. “Even the cellar door in the kitchen is locked tight. And I doubt there was enough time for him to slip away before we entered.”

  “Dear me, no. You or I would have seen him.”

  “Well, he managed it somehow.”

  “So it would seem. A miraculous double escape, in fact.”

  “Double escape?”

  “From a locked room, then from a sealed house.” Holmes smiled one of his enigmatic smiles. “According to Dr. Axminister, you are adept at solving seemingly impossible crimes. How then did Dodger Brown manage either a single or double escape trick? Why was Andrew Costain shot as well as stabbed? Why was the pistol left in the locked study and the bloody stiletto taken away? And why was the study door locked in the first place? A pretty puzzle, eh, Quincannon? One to challenge the deductive mind.”

  Quincannon muttered five short, colorful words, none of them remotely of a deductive nature.

  8

  As much as Quincannon disliked and mistrusted the city police, the circumstances were such that notifying them was unavoidable. He telephoned the Hall of Justice on the instrument in Costain’s study. After that he paced and cogitated, to no reasonable conclusion. Holmes examined the corpse again, the carpet in both the study and the hallway (crawling on his hands and knees), and any number of other things through his glass. Now and then he muttered aloud to himself: “More data! I can’t make bricks without clay” and “Hallo! That’s more like it!” and “Ah, plain as a pikestaff!” Neither had anything more to say to the other. If was as if a gantlet had been thrown down, a tacit challenge issued—which in fact was the case. They were two bloodhounds on the scent, no longer working in consort, but as competitors in an undeclared contest of wills.

  The police arrived in less than half an hour, what for them was quick dispatch. They were half a dozen in number, along with a handful of reporters representing the Daily Alta, the Call, and San Francisco’s other newspapers, who were made to wait outside—half as many of both breeds as there would have been if the murder of a prominent attorney had happened on Nob Hill or Russian Hill. The inspector in charge was a beefy, red-faced Prussian named Kleinhoffer, whom Quincannon knew slightly and condoned not in the slightest. Kleinhoffer was both stupid and corrupt, a lethal combination, and a political toady besides. His opinion of flycops was on a par with Quincannon’s opinion of him.

  His first comment was, “Involved in another killing, eh, Quincannon? What’s your excuse this time?”

  Quincannon explained, briefly, the reason he was there. He omitted mention of Dodger Brown by name, using the term “unknown burglar” instead and catching Sherlock Holmes’s eye as he spoke so the Englishman would say nothing to contradict him. He was not about to chance losing a fee—small chance though it was, the police being a generally inept bunch—by providing information that might allow them to stumble across the Dodger ahead of him.

  Kleinhoffer sneered, “Some fancy flycop. You’re sure he’s not still somewhere in the house?”

  “Sure enough.”

  “We’ll see about that.” He gestured to a uniformed sergeant, who stepped forward. “Mahoney, you and your men search the premises, top to bottom.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Kleinhoffer’s beady gaze settled on Holmes, ran over both his face and his “disguise.” He demanded, “Who’re you?”

  “S. Holmes, of London, England. A temporary associate of the Carpenter and Quincannon agency.”

  “A limey, eh?” Kleinhoffer turned to Quincannon. “Picking your operatives off the docks these days, are you?”

  “If I am, it’s none of your concern.”

  “None of your guff. Where’s the stiff?”

  “In the study.”

  Kleinhoffer gave Andrew Costain’s remains a cursory examination. “Shot and stabbed both,” he said. “You didn’t tell me that. What the hell happened here tonight?”

  Quincannon’s account, given in deliberate detail, heightened the inspector’s apoplectic color, narrowed his eyes to slits. Any crime more complicated than a Barbary Coast mugging invariably confused him, and the evident facts in this case threatened to tie a permanent knot in his brain.

  He shook his head, as if trying to shake loose cobwebs, and snapped, “None of that makes a damn bit of sense.”

  “Sense or not, that is exactly what took place.”

  “You there, limey. He leave anything out?”

  “Tut, tut,” Holmes said. “I am an Englishman, sir, a British subject—not a limey.”

  “I don’t care if you’re the president of England. Quincannon leave anything out or didn’t he?”

  “He did not. His re-creation of events was exact in every detail.”

  “So you say. I say it couldn’t’ve happened the way you tell it.”

  “Nonetheless, it did, though what seems to have transpired is not necessarily what actually happened. What we are dealing with here is illusion and obfuscation.”

  Kleinhoffer wrapped an obscene noun in a casing of disgust. After which he stooped to pick up the Forehand & Wadsworth revolver. He sniffed the barrel and checked the chambers, as Quincannon had done, then dropped the weapon into his coat pocket. He was examining the empty valuables case when Sergeant Mahoney entered the room.

  “No sign of him in the house,” he reported.

  “Back door still wedged shut?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Then he must’ve managed to slip out tine front door while these two flycops weren’t looking.”

  “I beg to differ,” Holmes said. He mentioned the heavy chair. “It was not moved until your arrival, Inspector, by Quincannon and myself. Even if it had been, I would surely have heard the sounds. My hearing is preternaturally acute.”

  Kleinhoffer said the rude word again.

  Mahoney said, “Mrs. Costain is here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The victim’s wife. Mrs. Costain. She just come home.”

  “Why the devil didn’t you say so? Bring her in here.”

  The sergeant did as directed. Penelope Costain was stylishly dressed in a lacy blouse, flounced skirt, and fur-trimmed cloak, her brown curls tucked under a hat adorned with an ostrich plume. She took one look at her husband’s remains, and her face whitened to the shade of the feather; she shuddered violently, began to sway. Mahoney caught one arm to steady her. Quincannon took hold of the other, and they helped her to one of the chairs.

  She drew several deep breaths, fanned herself with one hand. “I … I’m all right,” she said then. Her gaze touched the body again, pulled away. “Poor Andrew. He was a brave man … he must have fought terribly for his life.”

  “We’ll get the man who did it,” Kleinhoffer promised foolishly.

  She nodded. “Can’t you … cover him with something?”

  “Mahoney. Find a cloth.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Mrs. Costain nibbled at a broken fingernail, peering up at the faces ringed above her. “Is that you, Mr. Holmes? What are you doing here, dressed that way?”

  “He was working with me,” Quincannon said.

  “With you? Two detectives in tandem failed to prevent this … this outrage?”

  “None of what happened was our fault.”

  She said bitterly, “That is the same statement you made two nights ago. Nothing, no tragedy, is ever your fault, evidently.”

  Kleinhoffer was still holding the empty valuables case. He extended it to the widow, saying, “This was on the floor, Mrs. Costain.”r />
  “Yes. My husband kept it in his desk.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Twenty-dollar gold pieces,” she answered, “a dozen or so. And the more valuable among my jewelry—a diamond brooch, a pair of diamond earrings, a pearl necklace, several other pieces.”

  “Worth how much, would you say?”

  “I don’t know … several thousand dollars.”

  She looked again at Quincannon, this time with open hostility. Kleinhoffer did the same. He said, “You and Holmes were here the whole time, and still you let that yegg kill Mr. Costain, then get away with all those valuables—right under your damn noses. What’ve you got to say for yourselves?”

  Quincannon had nothing to say. Neither did Sherlock Holmes.

  9

  It was well past midnight when Quincannon finally trudged wearily up the stairs to his rooms. After Kleinhoffer had finally finished with him, the newspapermen had descended—on him but not Holmes, who had managed to slip away. Quincannon had been pleased to assist the Englishman in avoiding publicity; in his comments to the reporters, he had referred to him as a “hired operative” and, with, relish, an “underling.”

  He donned his nightshirt and crawled into bed, but the night’s jumbled events plagued his mind and refused to let him sleep. At length he lit his bedside lamp, picked up a copy of Walt Whitman’s Sea-Drift. Reading always seemed to free his brain of clutter, to permit a settling and organizing of his thoughts. Usually Whitman or Emily Dickinson or James Lowell accomplished the task, but not tonight. He switched reading matter to Drunkards and Curs: The Truth About Demon Rum. He had once been hired by the True Christian Temperance Society to catch an embezzler, and this had led him to his second reading and collecting interest: temperance tracts. Not because he was a teetotaler himself, but because he found their highly inflammatory rhetoric both amusing and soothing.

  Drunkards and Curs did the trick. At the end of two turgid chapters his mental processes were in proper condition for cudgeling and surmising. The result of this brainwork, after another hour so, lifted his spirits and permitted him a too-short rest.

  He awoke not long past seven, permitted himself a hasty breakfast, and within an hour was at the agency offices. For once he was the first to arrive. No sooner had he unlocked the door and stepped inside than the telephone bell jangled. When he answered, a rough and unfamiliar voice said, “Duff’s Curio Shop,” repeated the name, and immediately disconnected.

  A wolf’s smile transformed Quincannon’s mouth; another worry, small though it was, had now been reduced to a trifle and the fogbound morning was considerably brighter. He replaced the earpiece, went to coax steam heat from the radiator; on mornings such as this, the offices were as damp and chill as a cave. While he was thus engaged, Sabina arrived.

  “Up bright and early this morning, John,” she said. Then, as she removed her straw boater, she took a closer look at him. “But not bushy-tailed, I see. Another sleepless night?”

  “For the most part.”

  “Not because of an eventful night at the Costain home?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Eventful as all get-out.”

  “Another attempted burglary so soon?”

  “Not attempted—successful.”

  Sabina was not easily surprised; the high lift of her eyebrows as he unfolded the tale was as much marvelment as she ever exhibited. Her only comment was, “It all seems fantastic.”

  “That sums it in a nutshell.”

  “What does Mr. Holmes think?”

  “Holmes? Why should you care what he thinks?”

  “I was only—”

  “Why don’t you ask me what I think? I’m in charge of this case, not Sherlock Holmes. This is my bailiwick, not his. Or do you actually believe the bunkum that he is the world’s greatest detective?”

  “Calm yourself, John. I wasn’t suggesting he’s a better sleuth, or more likely than you to get to the bottom of the mystery.” She fixed him with one of her analytical looks. “It sounds as though you’re threatened by the man.”

  “Threatened? By the likes of that gasbag?”

  “You’ve no reason to be.”

  “Exactly. No reason at all.”

  “I was merely wondering if you’d had a discussion with him, shared thoughts and ideas.”

  “I don’t need his thoughts and ideas to unravel this puzzle.”

  “Does that mean you have a theory?”

  “I have. A good, strong one.” In fact it was still a bit on the amorphous side, but she needn’t know that.

  “Well?”

  “I’ll need a few more facts before I’m ready to discuss it, facts that you can obtain for me. Data on Andrew Costain, for one, with emphasis on his financial status. And second, whether he purchased a handgun within the past two or three days—specifically, a .38 caliber Forehand & Wadsworth revolver. If so, it was likely in a gun-shop in the vicinity of his law offices.”

  “And what will you be doing?”

  “Hunting Dodger Brown. We’ve a lead now, courtesy of Ezra Bluefield by way of one of his henchmen.” He told her of the telephone message.

  “Ah,” she said, “our old friend Luther Duff.”

  “One of the easier eggs to crack in the city. Dodger Brown couldn’t have picked a better fenceman, for our purposes.”

  “Assuming Duff knows his whereabouts. The hideout must be deep, else Bluefield’s contacts would have ferreted it out as well. Time is against us now, John. If the Dodger has begun to fence the loot from his burglaries, it must mean he’s preparing to go on the lammas.”

  Quincannon said darkly, “The only place that yegg is going is to a cell in city prison.”

  “On your way then. With luck, you’ll have Dodger Brown, and I’ll have the Costain data before close of business.”

  He nodded and reached for his derby. With luck, he would also have the solution to the murder and disappearance before the end of the day. Yes, by Godfrey, and the great pleasure of using it to spit in the eye of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  10

  Luther Duff’s Curio Shop was crowded among similar establishments in the second block of McAllister Street west of Van Ness. It contained, according to its proprietor, “bric-a-brac and curios of every type and description, from every culture and every nation—the new, the old, the mild, the exotic.” In short, it was full of junk. This was Quincannon’s fourth visit to the place, all on professional business, and he had yet to see a single customer. It might have been that Duff sold some of his fare now and then, but if so, it was by accident and with little or no effort on his part. Where he had procured his inventory was a mystery; all that anyone knew for sure was that he had it and seldom if ever added new items to the dusty, moldering stock.

  Duff’s primary profession was receiver of stolen goods. Burglars, boxmen, pickpockets, and other scruffs far and wide beat a steady path to his door. Like other fencemen, he professed to offer his fellow thieves a square deal: half of what he expected to realize on the resale of any particular item. In fact, his notion of fifty-fifty was akin to putting a lead dollar on a Salvation Army tambourine and asking for fifty cents change. He took a 75 percent cut of most spoils, an even higher percentage from the more gullible and desperate among his suppliers. Stolen weapons of all types were his specialty—often enough at an 80 or 90 percent profit. A Tenderloin hockshop might offer a thief more cash, but hockshop owners put their marks on pistols, marks that had been known to lead police agencies straight to the source. Hockshop owners were thus considered hangman’s handmaidens and crooks stayed shy of them, preferring smaller but safer profits from men like Luther Duff.

  Despite being well-known in the trade, Duff had somehow managed to avoid prosecution. That fact was both a strong advertisement and his Achilles heel. He had a horror of arrest and imprisonment, and was subject to intimidation as a result. Quincannon was of the opinion that Duff would sell his mother, if he had one, and his entire line of relatives rather than spend a single night at
the mercy of a city prison guard.

  A bell above the door jingled unmusically as Quincannon stepped into the shop. On the instant, the combined smells of dust, mildew, and slow decay pinched his nostrils. He made his way slowly through the dimly lighted interior, around and through an amazing hodgepodge of furniture that included a Chinese wardrobe festooned with fire-breathing dragons, a Tyrolean pine coffer, a Spanish refectory table, a brassbound “pirate treasure” chest from Madgascar. He passed shelves of worm-ridden books, an assortment of corpses that had once been clocks, a stuffed and molting weasel, an artillery bugle, a ship’s sextant, and a broken marble tombstone with the name HORSE-SHY HALLORAN chiseled into its face.

  When he neared the long counter at the rear, a set of musty damask drapes parted and Luther Duff emerged grinning. He was short, round, balding, fiftyish, and about as appetizing as a tainted oyster. He wore slyness and venality as openly as the garters on his sleeves and the moneylender’s eyeshade across his forehead. The grin and the suddeness of his appearance made Quincannon think, as always, of a troll jumping out in front of an unwary traveler.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” the troll said. “What can I do for … awk!”

  The strangled-chicken noise was the result of his having recognized Quincannon. The grin vanished in a wash of nervous fear. He stood stiffly and darted looks everywhere but across the counter into Quincannon’s eyes.

  “How are you, Luther?” Quincannon asked pleasantly.

  “Ah … well and good, well and good.”

  “No health problems, I trust?”

  “No, no, none, fit as a fiddle.”