2 The Spook Lights Affair

by Marcia Muller

  “Well … I probably shouldn’t say anything, but…” Grace lowered her voice to a near whisper. “He likes girls, the wrong kind of girls, if you know what I mean. And he gambles. Mama says he’s lost thousands of dollars playing poker.”

  Sabina had already heard about David St. Ives’s profligate ways. At yesterday’s luncheon, Callie had referred to him as “one of these young men celebrated for doing nothing.” He had trust funds from relatives on either side of his family, she’d said, and an indifferent attitude toward business matters that until recently had been tolerated by his father. But his bad habits had become so expensive and well known that Joseph St. Ives threatened to disown him if he didn’t cease and desist.

  Her cousin was an inveterate gossip and as such an endless fount of information. Grace DeBrett had proved to be a fledgling gossip in her own right, though far less intelligent and circumspect than Callie. Which had made questioning the girl much easier than Sabina had anticipated.

  She shifted the conversation back to Virginia by saying, “Tell me about Virginia, Grace, what she was like. Would you say she was secretive?”

  “I guess she was. I was her best friend and we shared a lot, but she didn’t tell me everything like I told her. Really personal things, I mean. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, either, but her parents weren’t getting along—something to do with Mr. St. Ives’s political aspirations. Mama told me that. The things about David, too.”

  “How else would you describe Virginia?”

  Grace heaped another scone, swallowed a bite with a sip of her honey-laced tea. “Well, she was … changeable. One minute, she’d be off in one direction, next minute off in another. There’s a better word for it…”

  “Capricious?”

  “Yes, that’s it. You couldn’t always tell when she was serious about something and when she wasn’t. And she had a … a sort of devilish sense of humor.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, she loved to play clever pranks. When I first heard about what happened on Friday night, I thought she must be playing another one. But it couldn’t have been a prank, could it?”

  Sabina wondered. There would seem to be little purpose in a bizarre suicide hoax that caused a public scandal and damaged the St. Ives family’s stature, and at the moment she couldn’t see a way such a trick could have been worked. Still, given Virginia’s crafty nature and the fact that her body had not been discovered …

  “I wish it had been one of her games,” Grace was saying. “Then she’d still be alive and we could laugh about it and everything would be the way it was.…” Another tear glistened and spilled over.

  Sabina sipped her tea while the girl composed herself. At length she asked, “Did she have any other close friends she might have confided in?”

  Grace seemed mildly offended by the question. “No. I was her best and closest.” But then she paused, nibbled at her lower lip, and said, “Well, there’s Miss Kingston.”

  “Miss Kingston?”

  “Arabella Kingston. She’s one of the instructors at the academy.”

  “Why do you suppose Virginia might have confided in her?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. But she’s much older than we are, almost thirty, and very easy to talk to. Virgie liked her, and once went to visit her at her lodgings.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  Grace nodded. “But she wouldn’t say why or what they talked about.”

  “Where does Miss Kingston reside, do you know?”

  “No. Virgie didn’t say.”

  It should be easy enough, Sabina thought, to find out the woman’s address. She asked a few more questions, but there was nothing further of interest to be gotten from Grace DeBrett. She left the girl to finish feeding her sorrow with tea and sweets alone.

  At Miss Hillbrand’s Academy, she was told by a receptionist that Arabella Kingston had left for the day. “Oh, dear,” Sabina said, “and I had so hoped to see her. I’ve only just arrived in the city and my sister suggested Miss Kingston might be able to help me find employment. They went to school together, you see. Would you mind terribly letting me have her home address?”

  This ploy worked with ease. Arabella Kingston resided at 611 Larkin Street.

  F. W. Ellerby’s showroom was only a short walk from Post Street. But Sabina was denied an immediate conversation with Lucas Whiffing. He was not present in the bicycle and sporting goods emporium. The same clerk she’d spoken to on her previous visit told her she might try the company’s Third Street warehouse, though it wasn’t likely Mr. Whiffing would be there because he was supposed to be on duty in the showroom today and once again had failed to show up. “Another of his ‘illnesses,’ no doubt,” the clerk said snippily.

  Sabina bought a large soft pretzel from a street vendor, a not very nutritious or filling lunch but all she felt like eating. Usually her noontime hunger was considerable—she was blessed to be able to eat anything she chose without gaining an ounce—but recent events had severely curtailed her appetite. While she munched on the pretzel, she considered her next move.

  A cab ride to Third Street was a probable waste of time. The Montgomery Block, where the St. Ives Land Management Company’s offices were located, was not far from Powell and Market, but she was not quite ready to face Joseph St. Ives, if in fact he could be found in his place of business today; and if young David was like many habitués of the Cocktail Route and the Tenderloin, it would be noon or later before he went to work, if he went at all. As hostile as he’d been toward her on Friday night and in the newspapers, he might not even agree to see her.

  Her best chance of obtaining more information, she decided, was a talk with Arabella Kingston. She hailed a hansom and rode it to 611 Larkin Street.

  The block was a quiet, attractive one of private residences and small lodging houses set back from the cobbled street. Shade trees, neatly trimmed hedges and other shrubbery, and picket fences of wood and black iron gave each a sense of privacy. A discreet sign next to the front door of 611 proclaimed it to be a residence for single ladies only.

  But the visit proved to be another fruitless one: Miss Kingston failed to answer her bell. Sabina rang the one marked with the landlady’s card, and by using the same story as at the art academy, learned from a middle-aged, prim-faced woman that Miss Kingston ate her evening meals at neighborhood restaurants between six and seven o’clock and on weeknights invariably returned to her rooms afterward.

  The same hansom, which Sabina had asked the driver to hold in waiting, took her back downtown. To the financial district, the Montgomery Block, and the St. Ives Land Management Company.

  10

  QUINCANNON

  Quincannon’s wily brain often worked on knotty problems while he was asleep, so that when he awoke he had an answer or a method of obtaining one. Such was the case on Monday morning. Not the Virginia St. Ives conundrum; his glimmering of explanation was still just that. No, what his subconscious had produced was a possible means of locating Bob Cantwell, if none of his network of information sellers had already done the job for him.…

  None had. No messages had been slipped through the mail slot in his front door during the night. When he stopped off at Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, he found a business card wedged between the door and jamb and pounced on it, only to discover it had nothing to do with Cantwell or the Wells, Fargo holdup. It had been left by a prospective client, a man whose name and professional association he didn’t recognize. Barnaby L. Meeker, Western Investment Corporation, with an address on Sansome Street. Written on the back of the card in a small, crabbed hand were the words:

  Your services required on bizarre matter. Kindly communicate at your earliest convenience.

  BLM.

  Bizarre matter, eh? The phrase piqued Quincannon’s interest, as did the well-placed address of Western Investment Corporation. If he had not been on the trail of Bob Cantwell and the Wells, Fargo reward, he would have immediately co
ntacted Mr. Barnaby Meeker. As it was, he entered the office and placed the card, message side up, on Sabina’s desk blotter, along with a note asking her to contact Meeker and arrange an appointment if she felt the man’s troubles warranted their attention.

  From the agency, Quincannon proceeded directly to Battery Street and the offices of Hammond Realtors. Hallelujah. Open for business today.

  Bob Cantwell’s desk, of course, sat unoccupied. But the head of the firm, Jacob Hammond, a bewhiskered gent in his fifties, was a bulky presence behind his. At first Hammond was unwilling to provide what he called “confidential business information,” but Quincannon’s glib tongue and a promise to steer potential buyers and renters to Hammond Realtors finally persuaded him.

  “Mr. Cantwell was only a junior salesman, you understand,” he said. The past tense indicated that the lad’s unexplained absence had cost him his job, not that this mattered in the slightest to Quincannon or would to Cantwell if he knew. “He had been entrusted with only a few, ah, minor accounts.”

  “My interest is in those properties that are presently unoccupied. That information is contained in your records, I expect?”

  “Yes. There shouldn’t be more than half a dozen.”

  There were five, to be exact, including the house in Drifter’s Alley. Of the remaining four, two were private homes, one near the Southern Pacific Railroad yards, the other on the eastern fringe of Chinatown. The others were business establishments: a small brewery on Brannan Street that had ceased operation the previous year, and a building on Tenth Street near Natoma that had belonged to a recently deceased printer and photographer.

  Armed with addresses provided by Jacob Hammond, Quincannon quickly took his leave. If he was right that Bob Cantwell was still in the city, there were precious few places where he could be hiding. He had no relatives, according to his employer, and if his manner of living was a proper indication, few friends; and he was not the sort to hole up anywhere outdoors. What better place, then, than one of the vacant properties that had been under his charge at Hammond Realtors? It would mean he had broken into whichever one he might have chosen, for he’d had no access since Friday night to any of the keys in the realty office, but he wasn’t above that any more than he was above blackmail.

  One of the private homes seemed the most likely prospect, so Quincannon went first to the closest of these—the one on the fringe of Chinatown. It turned out to be a modest, weather-beaten structure tucked between a Chinese laundry and a two-story lodging house. It also turned out to be deserted. The lock on the front door hadn’t been breached, nor had any of the shuttered windows, and there was no rear entrance. This was no surprise, considering the amount of pedestrian and carriage traffic in the neighborhood. The location was much too public for a frightened lad like Cantwell.

  The ramshackle house near the Southern Pacific yards stood by itself, flanked by a vacant lot on one side and a railroad storage-and-repair facility on the other. Perfect for Cantwell’s needs as far as the location went, but vandals had been at the place; all but one of its windows were broken, as was the lock on the front door which stood an inch ajar. The only living things inside were rats, whose scurrying under the floorboards and inside the walls Quincannon could hear when he briefly ventured inside. No other human had set foot in those dusty, barren rooms in months.

  The abandoned brewery, a pocked brick structure with a small loading dock on one side, stood inside a fenced, weed-grown yard. The gate in the fence was padlocked, but there was no barbed wire strung across its top to discourage trespassers. Nimbly Quincannon climbed the gate and went to check the front entrance and the double doors that opened onto the loading dock. Secure. As were the boards that had been nailed across windows on two sides.

  One more address to be investigated. If that one proved to be as unbreached as the first three …

  Ah, but it didn’t.

  The large, nondescript clapboard building on Tenth Street was flanked on its north side by a carpentry shop and on the south side by a pipe yard. Alleyways and tall board fences gave it privacy from its neighbors—an ideal place for a hideout. Quincannon’s pulses quickened as he went past the FOR SALE sign in the tiny front yard and up to the front door. The lock appeared not to have been tampered with, and the plate-glass window next to it, bearing the painted words MATTHEW DRENNAN—JOB PRINTING, LITHOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHY, was unbroken and solidly anchored in its frame. He went around to the rear, pausing on the way to examine another untouched window. There was a rear entrance, and here was where his hunch finally paid off.

  The locked door had been pried open, likely with the thin steel bar that lay on the ground nearby. It wobbled inward a few inches when he eased his shoulder against it.

  He drew his Navy Colt and entered by two steps. Darkness lay ahead, muddled with shadow shapes large and small, but a faint distant sheen indicated that a lamp or candle burned somewhere in the bowels of the building. He stood listening. Silence. The same kind of empty silence that had clogged the house in Drifter’s Alley? He couldn’t be sure.

  The room he was in seemed to be storage space. As cluttered as it apparently was, he was bound to blunder into something if he attempted to cross it in the dark. There was nothing for it, then, but to risk lighting a lucifer. He did so, shielding the flame with his hand.

  Most of the clutter, he saw as he advanced, seemed to be photographic equipment: a hooded camera mounted on a tripod, printing frames, lenses, chemicals, a box labeled MR. EASTMAN’S INSTANTANEOUS DRY PLATES. The light sheen, coming from beyond an inner door that stood slightly ajar, brightened perceptibly as he neared the far end. He stopped again to listen, and again heard nothing more than the faint creak of the building’s timbers.

  He shook out the match, used the faint glow to guide him to the inner door. When he pushed it inward a few inches farther, he could make out another large room dominated by a great looming shape to the left and what appeared to be a glass-fronted office cubicle at its far-right corner. The light came from inside the cubicle, from what he perceived to be a hanging lamp.

  There was enough illumination from the lamp so that he was able to slowly follow a clear path toward the office. The looming object was a printing press, one of the old-fashioned single-plate, hand-roller types. A long wooden bench ran along the wall opposite, laden with tools and tins of what were probably chemicals and ink. He had gone a little more than halfway before he had a clear look through the dusty glass into the office.

  Desk, chairs, filing cabinet—and nothing else.

  Once more Quincannon paused to listen. The same heavy silence. Faint mingled odors tickled his nostrils then and he sniffed until he identified them as stale beer and greasily cooked meat. He went ahead to where the office door stood open, sidled up to it at a shadowed angle, and poked his head inside.

  The desktop was littered with the remnants of at least two meals, a tin beer pail such as taverns and brewers supplied, and a glass that held a residue of foam. He stepped inside and approached the desk. The floor around it was empty except for crumbs and something that gleamed whitish in the lamplight—white with black spots. He bent to retrieve the object, grinned his wolfish grin as he bounced it on his palm.

  A single die. One of the pair Bob Cantwell had sat clicking together on Friday night, by Godfrey, accidentally dropped and overlooked before his stay here ended.

  Quincannon searched the desk drawers and file cabinets, but found nothing else left by Cantwell. The papers in both had all belonged to the late Matthew Drennan, and their disarray indicated a previous and hasty search, no doubt by Cantwell in a hunt for forgotten money or other valuables. An examination of the beer glass and empty growler revealed that the foam residue in both was long dry; and rodents had already been at the remnants of fried meat sandwiches. Which told him the beer had been drunk and the meals eaten sometime the previous night. Bought by Cantwell with what little money he had left, or supplied by someone else?

  He pulled the hanging lamp
down and used his handkerchief to lift the hot chimney so he could check the amount of oil left in the fount. Almost none. The light may or may not have been burning for some time, depending on how much oil there’d been when the wick was lit. So there was no telling when Cantwell had left the premises. Did the lighted lantern mean he intended to return, or had he been in such a hurry to quit the place for good that he’d neglected to extinguish it?

  Quincannon cursed softly and consulted his stemwinder. It was almost one o’clock now, much of the day having been wasted in his previous searches. If he’d chosen to make this place his first rather than his last stop … But there was no purpose in that sort of thinking. What was done was done. For all he knew, he would have found the building empty if he’d come here straight from Battery Street.

  A vigil was required as long as there was a chance of Cantwell’s return; he had no other way to find the man at present. The prospect of waiting here in this vermin-infested office appealed to him not at all. There was a café across Natoma Street, he recalled—a much better location to wait and watch, assuming its facing windows afforded a clear view. If Cantwell did return, he would surely enter the Drennan property at the front and make his way around to the rear, as Quincannon had done. He had no reason to believe his hiding place had been discovered, or to risk trespassing on any of the surrounding properties in order to climb one of the high board fences.

  Quincannon left everything as he’d found it, even putting the single die back on the floor, then made his way by matchlight to the rear door, which he closed behind him.

  The café’s front window did in fact command a view of the entire front of Cantwell’s hideout, unobstructed except for the occasional passage of a freight wagon, hansom, or other conveyance. He claimed a table and alternated watchful looks through the glass with glances at the menu. Despite the stale greasy odor and rodent nibblings on the sandwich remains, his rumbling stomach demanded food. He hadn’t eaten since a light breakfast and his appetite had always been prodigious, the more so when he was on the hunt.