2 The Spook Lights Affair

by Marcia Muller

“Meaning he lost more than he won. Lost heavily on occasion, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Until recently, you said. When did he stop coming in?”

  “A few weeks back. Short of funds, I imagine.”

  Or had his access to ready cash cut off by his father. “What was his gaming preference? Or did he sample all your wares?”

  “Dice,” Riley said. “Craps, mostly.”

  “The same as Bob Cantwell, only on a larger scale.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Did he come in alone, or in the company of others?”

  Riley gave some thought to the question before he answered. “As I recall, he was often in the company of others.”

  “How many others?”

  “Not many. Half a dozen at most.”

  “Was Bob Cantwell one of them?”

  “He might have been. I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “Do you know the names of any of the others?”

  “One of the Crocker heirs, the youngest, Jeremy. The rest … no.”

  “Less socially prominent types? Hangers-on?”

  “If you mean riffraff, no. I don’t allow that sort in my place.”

  “Not riffraff—presentable young men of lesser means.”

  “A fair assessment, I suppose.”

  “Was St. Ives free with his money? By that I mean, did he finance the play of these hangers-on?”

  “He may have. A free spender in any event, yes. Must say I was sorry when he and the others stopped coming in.”

  “Was this man among those others?” Quincannon asked, and described Jack Travers.

  Riley shrugged. “If so, I’ve no memory of him.”

  “Or this man.” Lucas Whiffing, from Sabina’s description of the lad.

  “That one sounds vaguely familiar. But I can’t be sure.”

  “Does the name Whiffing, Lucas Whiffing, mean anything to you?”

  “I can’t say it does,” Riley said, “because it doesn’t.” He shifted position in his chair, causing the mastiff to become instantly alert, and consulted a gold turnip watch. “Now if that’s all, Quincannon, it’s time for my noonday meal. Rollo’s, too. He gets grumpy if he’s not fed regular.”

  Quincannon had no more questions to ask and no desire to remain in the presence of a grumpy carnivore the size of a small bear. He wasted no time taking his leave.

  * * *

  A visit to the Purple Palace on Turk Street yielded nothing in the way of confirmation or new information. He had never had any dealings with the proprietor, a man named Kineen, and the employees he questioned were all day workers who had never seen or heard of David St. Ives and his nighttime entourage.

  He had better luck at Madame Fifi’s Maison of Parisian Delights, which was neither a mansion (just an ordinary two-story, red-lighted house) nor a purveyor of French delights. Madame Fifi’s accent was as phony as the name of her sporting house, and judging from the three samples lounging in her parlor, her girls were no more French than she was, or likely to be particularly delightful in the practice of their trade. She quickly shooed them out when she discovered Quincannon was not there for the usual reason.

  It was fortunate that David St. Ives and his pals were of a differing opinion and so had selected Madame Fifi’s as their favorite from among the dozen or so Tenderloin joy houses. If they had chosen one of the others instead, Quincannon might not have had such an easy time soliciting information. Most of the madams, such as Miss Bessie Hall, “the Queen of O’Farrell Street,” were closed-mouthed about their customers. And had Lettie Carew’s Fiddle Dee Dee been their choice, Quincannon would not have gotten past the front door—and likely been shot had he tried. After the commotion he’d caused at the Fiddle Dee Dee during the bughouse affair last fall, in the pursuit and capture of one of Lettie’s customers, she had sworn to relieve him of a certain portion of his anatomy if ever again he darkened her door.

  As it was, it cost him a ten-dollar gold piece to pry open Madam Fifi’s sealed lips. She bit the coin with one of two gold incisors, tucked it between a pair of enormous breasts all but spilling out of the bodice of her too-tight silk dress, and settled back on a quilted couch chair the same flaming orange color as her hair. Above her on the wall were two framed mottoes that expressed the sentiments of her house. One said: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED OR MONEY REFUNDED. The other: IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, TRY, TRY AGAIN.

  “Mais oui, I know young M’sieu St. Ives,” she said then. “A fine young gentleman. Always so pleasant, even when he has had a tiny bit too much to drink. Never a complaint.”

  “And not afraid to part with a dollar, eh?”

  “No, nevair. He pay for his friends’ pleasure as well as his own.”

  “How many friends?”

  “Oh, two, three, sometimes more.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  Madame Fifi lifted one shoulder. “M’sieu St. Ives, oui, because he is so generous. The others I do not remember. The Maison of French Delights caters to so many gentlemen.”

  “But you do remember familiar faces, eh?”

  “If they are very familiar.”

  Quincannon described Lucas Whiffing. “Was he one of St. Ives’s friends?”

  “Ah, but yes,” Madam Fifi said, nodding. “A charming young man, very joie de vivre. He comes many times with M’sieu St. Ives and another young man who is, how shall I say, more bashful with my girls. Not so eager or experienced, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Thin fair-haired fellow with a skimpy mustache?”

  “Ah, oui. He and the charming young man know each other a long time. Once I hear them say they are friends since their school days.”

  Bob Cantwell and Lucas Whiffing, school chums. Well, well. Another of Cantwell’s lies exposed: he hadn’t moved to San Francisco from the southland or anywhere else. If Whiffing was a San Francisco native, then Cantwell had been one, too.

  “It is a pity we have not had the pleasure of their company recently,” Madame Fifi was saying. “Or the company of M’sieu St. Ives’s other gentlemen friends.”

  “But he still comes in regularly, eh?”

  “Certainment. He was our guest again only last night.”

  “When did he stop bringing his friends?”

  “Two, three weeks ago. I ask him why, but he chooses not to confide in Madame Fifi.”

  Likely because St. Ives’s father had cut off his ready access to spending money. It could also be that he hadn’t willingly introduced Whiffing to his sister; that Whiffing had begun seeing her on his own initiative, St. Ives hadn’t approved when he found out, and there had been a rift between the two as a result. From what Sabina had related of St. Ives’s angry comments to her about Whiffing, that was entirely possible.

  A description of Jack Travers confirmed that he, too, had been a regular in St. Ives’s entourage, but Madame Fifi could recall nothing about him. Nor anything about one or two others who had been occasional members of the group. A big, possibly rough man named Zeke? Mais non, M’sieu St. Ives’s friends were all refined gentlemen. And names, even if given, were so quickly forgotten.

  So the bogus Sherlock had been right after all, Quincannon thought as he departed from the Maison of Parisian Delights. It galled him to have to admit it—and nettled him, too, because he couldn’t for the life of him understand how the Englishman managed to gather clandestine information in what must still be a strange city to him, facts that even a detective of Quincannon’s talents had difficulty ferreting out. Still, in a case such as this one, he was willing to give the devil his due.

  Was it David St. Ives or Lucas Whiffing who had masterminded the robbery? The fact that Whiffing and Cantwell had been school chums tilted the odds in Whiffing’s direction. In any event, once Quincannon was certain which of them was the Kid, it was only a matter of a little persuasion—verbal, or if necessary, of the knuckle-dusting variety—to determine the identity and whereabouts of the elusive Zeke and the answers to the other qu
estions about the hold-up and its aftermath. And then the stolen money and the Wells, Fargo reward would be his.

  * * *

  But finding out proved to be no easy task. David St. Ives was not at the offices of the St. Ives Land Management Company, nor was he expected today. He was also absent from the family mansion, and no one there would or could say where he might be found.

  Quincannon had somewhat better luck when he turned his attention to Lucas Whiffing. The lad was not at F. W. Ellerby’s downtown showroom, but a clerk there told him that it was Whiffing’s day for work at the emporium’s warehouse on Third Street. Whiffing wasn’t there, either, it turned out—he hadn’t reported for duty that morning—but this fact was tempered by a discovery that made it even more probable that Whiffing was the Kid he was after.

  F. W. Ellerby’s warehouse was located half a block from the Wells, Fargo Express office where the robbery had taken place.

  * * *

  It was mid-afternoon when Quincannon stopped in at Western Investment Corporation to introduce himself to Barnaby Meeker. Meeker seemed to like the look of him, which was often the case with clients meeting him for the first time; a detective of his imposing size and demeanor generally inspired confidence.

  “I appreciate your willingness to investigate this matter, Mr. Quincannon. Mrs. Carpenter’s, too, of course. This ghost business is driving me to distraction. The apparition or whatever it is appeared yet again last night.”

  “Same time and place, with the same results?”

  “Exactly the same,” Meeker said. “Only the dune dancing lasted longer this time and was accompanied by the most horrific series of otherworldly moans and shrieks. My wife thinks the noises were made by the wind, but she’s prone to skepticism. My daughter Patricia was nearly prostrated with fright. These occurances have to be identified and stopped, sir, with all due haste.”

  Quincannon said he would be in Carville-by-the-Sea before six o’clock and took his leave. His primary interest was in a possible confrontation with Lucas Whiffing, not in ghosties and ghoulies and things that glowed and danced in the night. But as he made his way to the livery barn on Mission Street to rent a horse and buggy, he found himself wondering if there was not only a connection between the incident on Sutro Heights and the Carville ghost, as Sabina had suggested, but one between those events and Whiffing and the Wells, Fargo robbery as well.

  18

  SABINA

  The hansom clattered its way through a teeming traffic of other cabs, private carriages, baggage drays, and trolley cars, and finally deposited Sabina in front of the Southern Pacific depot at Third and Townsend streets. Carrying her overnight bag, she hurried inside to the ticket window and from there to the southbound platform. She needn’t have hurried, however. Her train had just arrived in the station, twenty minutes late, and would not be departing again for another twenty minutes or more.

  The delay was not surprising. There had been two daily passenger trains between San Francisco and San Jose since 1864, Sabina had been told, the year the first commuter railroad west of the Mississippi, the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad, had been completed. The Central Pacific had taken over the SF&SJ four years later, and Southern Pacific had bought CP in 1879 and doubled and then tripled the number of daily round trips down the Peninsula. One would have thought that this was more than enough time for the railroad to develop a competent level of comfort and on-time service, but that was not the case. The two previous times Sabina had made a southbound trip, she had suffered delays and a number of other annoyances. This trip was to be no different, it seemed—the third time not the charm.

  Waiting passengers had already crowded aboard and Sabina was forced to take an aisle seat next to a middle-aged matron who smelled as if she’d bathed in a mixture of lavender water and gin. The woman was not the talkative sort, fortunately. Once the train jerked into motion, she alternately dozed and looked out the window at the passing scenery. Sabina was relieved not to have to fend off idle chitchat; she bought and ate a sandwich and a chocolate bar from a vendor passing through the car, then sat quietly with her thoughts.

  She hadn’t slept well last night, her active mind going over and over last evening’s conversation with Arabella Kingston and what it might portend. The more she considered it, the stronger her hunch had become—strong enough this morning for her to pack her overnight bag and make arrangements with a neighbor to tend to Adam. If she was right in her surmises, this day away from the city would be well spent.

  The Peninsula south of San Francisco seemed remote to most people who lived in the city. Small towns strung together between the Bay and the heavily forested Coastal Range—South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae, Burlingame, San Mateo. And Palo Alto, home of the new Leland Stanford Junior University that had been founded three years previously by Leland Stanford Senior, the railroad tycoon and politician, in honor of his son who had died of typhoid fever two months before his sixteenth birthday. A coeducational and nondenominational institution of higher learning for the sons and daughters of the wealthy, such as those in Virginia St. Ives’s circle—though Sabina had heard that it had been struggling financially since the senior Stanford’s death in 1893.

  When the train arrived at the Burlingame station, Sabina was among the first to disembark. The brand-new building impressed her; it was said to be the first edifice in the new Mission Revival style, its roof covered in eighteenth-century tiles from the Mission San Antonio de Padua at Jolon and the Mission Dolores Asistencia at San Mateo. Two hansom cabs stood waiting out front. Sabina asked the driver of the first if he knew where Badger Hill was, and when he said he did, she hired him to take him to take her there.

  The cab traveled a few blocks down the California Mission Trail, a six-hundred-mile arterial connecting the former Alta California’s twenty-one missions, four presidios, and several pueblos, and stretching all the way from Mission San Diego de Alcala in San Diego to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma. Flanking the packed earth roadway here were a variety of humble homes and businesses—a small hotel, three or four taverns, a dry goods and grocery, a livery stable and blacksmith shop. These soon gave way to open country, and after a quarter mile or so, the driver turned off onto a side road that curled up into low hills grown thickly with pines, redwoods, chestnuts, and bay laurel.

  It had been warm down on the flats, but a sharp wind had begun to blow as they climbed. The wind whispered and moaned in the trees, and carried the scents of pine and bay laurel; the latter, resembling tumeric, was almost overpowering. A white-tailed deer, startled by the hansom’s passage, vanished in a flash. Here and there driveways indicated habitation, as did occasional glimpses of a roof or a chimney.

  Sabina was not comfortable here. A city dweller for all her life, wild places intimidated her—none more than the vast Rocky Mountains surrounding Denver and the isolated wilderness deep in the Owyhee Mountains of Idaho where she’d met John. Strange that this should be: the cities where she’d resided had been filled with danger, and she’d been abroad both night and day on their most perilous streets. Her uneasiness with the natural world was not rational, compared to the threats presented by footpads, pickpockets, confidence tricksters, and the like, but she couldn’t seem to banish it. She felt almost relieved when the driver turned onto another road, short and evidently a dead end, and stopped at the foot of an overgrown, vine-tangled driveway.

  “Badger Hill, miss,” he said.

  Sabina looked up the drive. It was rutted and clogged with encroaching vegetation, and most of the plant shoots were new and appeared untrammeled. Six months or more must have passed since Arabella Kingston’s parents last came to The Gables. One would think people of their means would have thought to employ a gardening staff, at least on a part-time basis, but evidently not. When they dismissed servants, they must make a clean sweep.

  She stepped down and asked the driver to wait for her.

  “Don’t you want me to take you to the door, miss?”
<
br />   “No. I would rather surprise my … relatives.”

  “Relatives?” The man’s thick eyebrows met in a dark line over his beaky nose. “You sure somebody’s here? Doesn’t look like any equipage has been over this lane in some time.”

  “No, but I’m hoping somebody is.”

  He gestured at her overnight bag, which she’d left on the carriage seat. “Won’t you be staying?”

  “Possibly not. My surprise may not be a happy one.”

  “Family troubles, eh? I’ve got plenty of that myself,” he said ruefully. “But miss, I can’t afford idle time. Every fare helps me to feed my wife and little ones.”

  And to buy your daily ration of beer, Sabina thought, but not unkindly. “I’ll pay you well for your time.”

  “Ah. Well, then, in that case…”

  Sabina took two dollars from her reticule. “There’ll be two more after the return trip, as well as your regular fare.”

  “That’s generous of you, miss.” In the fading light, the driver’s eyes gleamed as he accepted the coins. “Very generous indeed.”

  “If I’m not back by”—she looked at her timepiece—“by five o’clock, drive up to the house and call for me.”

  “Five o’clock. Hour and a half, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, miss.”

  He seemed honest and trustworthy enough to do as bidden, and not to go rummaging around in her overnight bag in the interim. Not that he would find anything except her night things and toiletries if he did. Her derringer and all else of value was safely tucked inside her reticule. She gave him a nod and a brief smile, turned, drew her cape more tightly around her shoulders, and began making her way up the overgrown and wind-swept lane.

  * * *

  The Kingston summer house, on first sight, seemed impressive: three wings in French chateau style, flanked by trees and fronted by a long reflecting pool around which the carriageway looped. But as she approached, Sabina saw that everything was in poor repair. The pool’s water was low, murky, and raddled with weeds; the house’s paint was cracked and flaking; tiles were missing from the roof. Off to one side stood the carriage barn, a two-story structure whose upper floor would probably be the servants’ quarters. Both buildings had a dark, vaguely desolate appearance in the heavy tree shadows and waning afternoon light. No wonder Arabella Kingston had disliked coming here during her childhood summers.