Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  It illuminated something else below as he climbed atop the third dune — the dark figure of a man sprawled facedown in the sand.

  Panting sounds reached his ears; a few moments later, Barnaby Meeker hove into view and staggered toward him. Quincannon didn’t wait. He half-slid down the sand hill to the motionless figure at the bottom, anchored the lantern so that the beam shone full on the dark-clothed man, and turned him over. The staring eyes conveyed that he was beyond help. The gaping wound on his chest stated that he’d been shot.

  Meeker came sliding down the hill, pulled up, and emitted a cry of anguish. “Jared! Oh my God, it’s Jared!”

  Quincannon cast his gaze back along the dunes. The line of irregular footprints led straight to where Jared Meeker lay. There were no others in the vicinity except for those made by Quincannon and Barnaby Meeker.

  At dawn Quincannon helped his distraught employer hitch up his wagon. There were no telephones in Carville; Meeker would have to drive to the nearest one to summon the city police and coroner. Young Jared’s body had been carried to his bedroom car, and Mrs. Meeker had held a vigil there most of the night. Despite her disparaging comments about her son, she had been inconsolable when she learned of his death. And she’d made no bones about blaming Quincannon for what had happened, screaming at him, “What kind of detective are you, allowing my poor boy to be murdered right before your eyes?”

  For his part, Quincannon was in a dark humor. As unjust as Mrs. Meeker’s tirade had been, Jared Meeker had been murdered more or less before his eyes. He couldn’t have foreseen what would happen, of course, but the shooting was a potential blow to his reputation. If he failed to find out who was responsible, and why, the confounded newspapers would have a field day at his expense.

  One thing was certain, and the apparent evidence to the contrary be damned: Jared Meeker had not been mortally wounded by a malevolent spirit from the Other Side. Spooks do not carry guns, nor can ectoplasm aim and fire one with deadly accuracy in foggy darkness.

  When Meeker had gone on his way, Quincannon embarked on his first order of business — a talk with Artemus Crabb. Crabb had failed to put in an appearance at any time during last night’s bizarre happenings, which might or might not have an innocent explanation. The fog was still present this morning, but the wind had died down and visibility was good. The dunes lay like a desert wasteland all around him as he trudged down the left fork to Crabb’s car.

  Knuckles on the rough-hewn door produced no response; neither did a brace of shouts. Not home at this hour? Quincannon used his fist on the door, and raised his call of Crabb’s name to a tolerable bellow. This produced results. Crabb was home, and had apparently been asleep. He jerked the door open, wearing a pair of loose-fitting long johns, and glared at Quincannon out of sleep-puffed eyes.

  “You,” he said. “What the devil’s the idea, waking me up this early?”

  Quincannon said bluntly, “One of your neighbors was murdered last night.”

  “What? What’s that? Who was murdered?”

  “Jared Meeker. From all appearances, he was done in by the Carville ghost.”

  Crabb recoiled a step, his eyes popping wide. “The hell you say. The... ghost? Last night?”

  “On the prowl again, the same as before. You didn’t see it?”

  “Not me. Once was enough. I don’t want nothing to do with spooks. I bolted my door, shuttered all the windows, and went to bed with a weapon close to hand.”

  “Heard nothing, either, I take it?”

  “Just the wind. Where’d it happen?”

  “On the dunes beyond the abandoned cars.”

  “I don’t get it,” Crabb said. “How can a damned ghost shoot a man?”

  “A ghost can’t. A man did.”

  “What man? Who’d want to kill the Meeker kid?”

  Quincannon smiled wolfishly. “Who indeed?”

  He left Crabb in the doorway and made his way past the jumble of abandoned cars, around behind the line of dunes where he’d last seen the white radiance. A careful search of the wind-smoothed sand along their backsides turned up nothing. Opposite where he had found Jared Meeker was another high-topped dune; he climbed it and inspected the sparse vegetation that grew along the crest.

  Ah, just as he’d suspected. Some of the grass stalks had broken ends, and a patch of gorse was gouged and mashed flat. This was where the assassin had lain to fire the fatal shot — and a marksman he was, to have been so accurate on a night like the last.

  Quincannon searched behind the dune. Here and there, in places sheltered from the wind, were footprints leading to and from the abandoned cars. Then he began to range outward in the opposite direction, zigzagging back and forth among the sand hills. Gulls wheeled overhead, shrieking, as he drew nearer to the beach. The Pacific was calmer this morning, the waves breaking more quietly over the white sand.

  For more than an hour he continued his hunt. He found nothing among the dunes. The long inner sweep of the beach was littered with all manner of flotsam cast up during storms and high winds — shells, bottles, tins, driftwood large and small, birds and sea creatures alive and dead. Last night’s wind had been blowing from the southeast; he ranged farther to the north, his sharp eyes scanning left and right.

  Some two hundred rods from where he had emerged onto the beach, he found what he was looking for. Or rather, the wreckage of what he was looking for, caught and tangled around the bare limb of a tree branch.

  He extricated it carefully, examined it, and tucked it inside his coat. After which, whistling a temperance tune off-key, he retraced his path along the beach, through the dunes, and back to the Meekers’ home.

  The car that had been Jared Meeker’s bedroom was the northernmost of the four. The curtains had been drawn over the windows; he went to the door, knocked discreetly, received no response. Mrs. Meeker, as he’d hoped, had given up her vigil and gone to one of the other cars. He tried the latch, found it unlocked, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him.

  The dead man lay on his bed, covered by a blanket provided by his mother. The rest of the room contained a stove, a few pieces of mismatched furniture, a steamer trunk, a framed Wild West-show poster depicting a cowboy riding a wildly bucking bronco, and little else. Quincannon searched the dresser drawers first, then the steamer trunk. Several items of interest were tucked inside the latter: hand tools, a ball of twine, a jar of oil-based paint, a board with four ten-penny nails driven through it, and two lead sinkers that matched in size and shape the one he’d found yesterday in the abandoned car.

  He left the items where they lay and was closing the trunk’s lid when the door opened and Mrs. Meeker entered. She emitted a startled gasp when she saw him. “Mr. Quincannon! How dare you come in here without permission!”

  “My apologies. But it was necessary.”

  “Necessary? Prowling through my dead son’s possessions?”

  “To the conclusion of my investigation.”

  “...Are you saying you know who murdered Jared?”

  Before he could respond, a hailing shout came from outside: Barnaby Meeker had returned. And not alone. With him were the city coroner in a morgue wagon, and a plainclothes homicide detective named Hiram Dooley in a police hack driven by a bluecoat.

  Dooley was middle-aged, portly, sported a thick brushy moustache, and had a complexion the exact hue of cooked beets. Stretched across his bulging middle was a gold watch chain adorned with an elk’s tooth the size of a golf ball. His first words to Quincannon were, “I’ve heard of you, laddybuck. You and that female partner of yours.”

  “Only in the most glowing terms, no doubt.”

  “Hah. Just because you’ve counted yourselves lucky on a few cases doesn’t mark you high in my book. I don’t like flycops.”

  And I don’t like pompous, empty-headed civil servants, Quincannon thought, but he only smiled and said, “Perhaps I’ll count myself lucky, as you put it, on this case as well.”

  “Yeah? We’ll s
ee about that.”

  That we will, Inspector. And sooner than you think.

  Meeker had already given Dooley an account of the previous night’s events, but the homicide dick demanded another from Quincannon. He scoffed at what he called “this spook hokum” and seemed sceptical, if not openly suspicious, of Quincannon’s role in the matter. Quincannon bore his browbeating with good-natured equanimity. He could have told Dooley then and there what he had deduced, but the man’s manner irritated him and he took a certain amount of pleasure in watching him blunder and bluster about Jared’s bedroom and the scene of the murder, overlooking clues and asking the wrong questions. While the two policemen were examining the abandoned cars, Quincannon took Barnaby Meeker aside and asked him a pair of seemingly innocuous questions. The answers he received were the ones he had expected.

  As Dooley and the bluecoat emerged, Artemus Crabb came striding over from the direction of his car. Crabb seemed more at ease this time, his face reflecting curiosity rather than hostility or concern. He barely glanced at Quincannon, his attention focused on the lawdogs.

  “And who would you be?” Dooley demanded.

  “Crabb’s my name. I live over yonder.”

  Dooley introduced himself. “I been told you didn’t see anything of what happened out here last night.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t. Seen the spook lights the night before and once is enough for me. I spent last night locked up inside my car.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Quincannon said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You spent part of the night lying in wait on one of the dunes, with a cocked revolver in your hand.”

  “What the devil would I do that for?”

  “To lay the Carville ghost once and for all.”

  All eyes were on Quincannon now, Crabb glaring with feigned indignation, Dooley and Meeker showing their surprise. Quincannon favored them with the smile he reserved for moments such as these. It was time for him to take center stage, to reveal the deductive prowess that made him, in his estimation, the finest detective west of the Mississippi — a role he relished above all others.

  Meeker said, “What are you saying, Mr. Quincannon? That Crabb murdered my son?”

  “With malice aforethought.”

  “That’s a damn lie!” Crabb snapped. “Spook stuff scares the bejesus out of me. Ask Meeker, ask that old coot in the coffee saloon — they’ll tell you.”

  “Spook stuff that you fear might be authentic, yes. But by the time you crouched in wait last night, you knew the truth about the Carville ghost.”

  “What truth?” Dooley demanded.

  “That it was all a sham designed to separate Mr. Crabb from his cache of loot.”

  “Loot? What loot?”

  “The twenty-five thousand dollars he and his accomplice stole from Wells Fargo Express two weeks ago.”

  Dooley gawped at him. Crabb shouted, “You’re crazy! You can’t pin that on me. You can’t prove anything against me.”

  “I can prove that you murdered Jared Meeker,” Quincannon said, “by your own testimony. When I told you this morning that he’d been killed, you said, ‘How can a damned ghost shoot a man?’ But I didn’t say how he’d been killed. How did you know he’d been shot unless you pulled the trigger yourself?”

  “I just, ah, assumed it...”

  “Bosh. You had no reason to assume such a fact.” Quincannon turned his attention to Dooley. “Jared Meeker was shot with a large-bore handgun, one with a considerable range — the very type Crabb carries. A search of his premises should provide additional evidence. Though not the loot from the robbery, or else Jared would have found it. It’s hidden elsewhere, likely buried under or near one of those abandoned cars—”

  “Hold on, Quincannon,” Dooley said. “You telling us Jared Meeker knew Crabb was one of the bandits?”

  “He did — because he was the other one, Crabb’s accomplice.”

  Meeker emitted a wounded sound, puffed up, and stabbed the sand with his blackthorn stick. “That can’t be true!”

  “But I’m afraid it is,” Quincannon said. “You told me yourself just now that the only job Jared held in his young life was that of a clerk in a shoe emporium on Kearney Street downtown — the same street and the very same block on which the Wells Fargo Express office is located, and a perfect position to observe the days and times large sums of cash were delivered. He fell in somehow with Crabb, and together they planned and executed the robbery. Afterward they separated, Crabb evidently keeping the loot with him. The plan then called for Crabb to take up residence here in Carville, a place known to have been used before as a temporary hideout by criminals, until the hunt for the stolen money grew cold.

  “My guess is that Jared grew impatient for his share of the spoils and Crabb refused to give it to him or to reveal where he’d hidden it. His first action would have been to search Crabb’s car when Crabb was away on one of his infrequent outings. When he didn’t find the loot, he embarked on a more devious — and foolish — course.”

  Dooley asked, “Why didn’t he just throw down on Crabb and demand his share?”

  “The lad wasn’t made that way. He was a sly schemer and likely something of a coward, afraid of a direct confrontation with his partner in crime. I’m sorry, Mr. Meeker, but the evidence supports this conclusion.”

  Meeker said nothing. He appeared to be slowly deflating.

  Quincannon went on, “At some point during their relationship, Crabb revealed to Jared his fear of the supernatural. This was the core of the lad’s too-clever plan. He would frighten Crabb enough to force him to leave Carville after first digging up and dividing the loot. But he was careless enough to say or do something to alert Crabb to the game he was playing. That, and the probable fact that Crabb wanted the entire booty for himself, cost Jared his life.”

  “So he was responsible for the spook business,” Dooley said.

  “More than just responsible. He was the Carville ghost.”

  “And just how did he manage that?”

  “A remark Mrs. Meeker made yesterday alerted me to the method. She said that he was ‘a kiting youngster.’ At the time I took that to mean flighty, the runabout sort, but she meant it literally. His passion as a boy, as Mr. Meeker confirmed to me a few minutes ago, was flying kites.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  Dooley abruptly stopped speaking. For just then Quincannon had removed from beneath his coat the wreckage he’d found earlier on the beach.

  “This is the Carville ghost, or what’s left of it,” he said. “A simple kite made of heavy canvas tacked onto a wooden frame, roughly fashioned in the shape of a man and coated with an oil-based paint mixed with phosphorous — all the tools for the making of which you’ll find in Jared’s steamer trunk. His game went like this: First he told Crabb that he’d seen spook lights among the abandoned cars and to watch for them himself. Then, past midnight, he slipped out, went to one of the cars, flashed the kite about to create the illusion of an otherworldly glow, used a tool made of a piece of wood and several nails — which you’ll also find in his trunk — to make clawlike scratches on the walls and floors, and then fled with the kite before Crabb or anyone else could catch him.”

  Meeker asked dully, “How could he run across the tops of the dunes without leaving tracks?”

  “He didn’t run across the tops, he ran along below and behind the dunes with the string played out just far enough to lift the kite above the crests. To hold it at that height, he used these—” Quincannon held out one of the lead sinkers he’d found — “to weight it down so he could control it in the wind. On dark, foggy nights, seen from a distance and manipulated by an expert kite flier, the kite gave every appearance of a ghostly figure bounding across the sand hills. And when he wanted it to disappear, he merely yanked it down out of sight, drew it in, and hid it under his coat. That was what he was about to do when Crabb shot him. When the bullet struck him, the string loosed from h
is hand and the kite was carried off by the wind. I saw flashes of phosphorescence, higher up, before it disappeared altogether. This morning I found the remains on the beach.”

  Dooley said grudgingly, “By godfrey, it all makes sense. You, Crabb, what do you have to say for yourself now?”

  “Just this.” And before anyone could move, Crabb’s hand snaked under his coat and came out holding the large-bore Bisley Colt. “I didn’t let that featherbrain kid get his hands on this money and I ain’t about to let you do it either. The lot of you, move on over to that car of mine.”

  Nobody moved except Crabb. He backed up a step. “I mean it,” he said. “Be locked up until I’m clear or take a bullet where you stand. One killing or several, it don’t make any difference to me.”

  He backed up another step. Unfortunately for him, the direction he took brought him just close enough for Quincannon to swat him with the wrecked kite. The blow pitched him off-balance; before he could bring his weapon to bear again, Quincannon thumped him once on the temple and once on the point of the jaw. Crabb obligingly dropped the revolver and lay down quiet in the sand.

  Quincannon massaged his bruised knuckles. “And what do you think of flycops now, laddybuck?” he asked Dooley. “Do you mark John Quincannon higher in that book of yours than before?”

  Dooley, bending down to Crabb with a pair of handcuffs, muttered something that Quincannon — perhaps fortunately — failed to catch.

  Artemus Crabb, with a certain amount of persuasion from Dooley and the bluecoat, confessed to the robbery and the murder of Jared Meeker — the details of both being for the most part as Quincannon had surmised. The Wells Fargo money turned out to be buried beneath one of the abandoned cars; the full amount was there, not a penny having been spent.

  Crabb and the loot were carted away in the police hack, and young Jared’s remains in the morgue wagon. The Meekers followed the coroner in their buggy. Neither had anything to say to Quincannon, though Mrs. Meeker fixed him with a baleful glare as they pulled out. He supposed that the one thousand dollars Barnaby Meeker had promised him would not be paid; but even if it was offered, he would be hard-pressed to accept it under the circumstances. He felt sympathy for the Meekers. The loss of a wastrel son was no less painful than the loss of a saintly one.