2 The Spook Lights Affair

by Marcia Muller

  “You ain’t a neighbor.”

  “I am temporarily. Staying with the Meekers, as I told you yesterday.”

  Crabb hesitated a few seconds later, finally backed up to allow Quincannon to enter, and shut the door behind him. The interior of the car was meagerly furnished: a cot, a scarred table, a three-legged stool, an unpainted cabinet, a soot-blackened woodstove with a pile of driftwood beside it, and a scarred saddle and bridle for the horse outside. Clothing, dishes, utensils, and glasses, all of them unwashed and giving off a fetid scent, were strewn helter-skelter throughout. The Bisley Colt in its holster lay draped across the foot of the cot. There was nothing else of interest in sight.

  Quincannon said, “Pleasant little nest you’ve made for yourself.”

  The irony was lost on Crabb. “Yeah, it’s all right.” He went to the stove where a tin coffeepot was heating, found a cup that was no doubt dirty, and splashed dark brown liquid into it. Quincannon made no move to take the cup from him, so Crabb set it down on the table.

  “Now, then,” Quincannon said. “To business.”

  “Business? What business? Thought you wanted the stove and coffee.”

  “The business of Lucas Whiffing’s murder. Among other things.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that. I told you, I spent last night locked inside this here car.”

  “No, you didn’t, not all of it. You spent an hour or two before midnight lying in wait on one of the dunes, with that cocked Bisley in your hand.”

  The hard glare was back in Crabb’s eyes. “What would I do that for?”

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

  “You don’t make no sense, mister. 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. Not the bogus kind that went on here.”

  “What the hell you trying to say? That I shot the Whiffing kid?”

  “With malice aforethought, after you figured out he was responsible for the ghost business. And why.”

  “That’s a damn lie! You think I’d kill some kid just because he was trying to scare me?”

  “That was only part of the reason,” Quincannon said. “Tell me, Crabb. What do the initials E.J. stand for?”

  Crabb blinked, blinked again. “What the hell?” he said.

  “The initials E.J. Your first name wouldn’t happen to be Ezekial, would it?”

  “… What if it is?”

  “I thought as much. Zeke for short, eh?”

  “What does my name have to do with—” Crabb broke off abruptly, goggling.

  Quincannon had had his right hand in his coat pocket the entire time, wrapped around the butt of the Navy he’d transferred there before knocking on the door. Now, in one swift motion, he had produced the weapon. Crabb continued to gawp, his gaze shifting back and forth between the pistol and Quincannon’s face.

  “Where’s the money, Zeke?”

  “Money? What money?”

  “The money Lucas Whiffing was after. The Wells, Fargo Express money you swiped from Jack Travers after you killed him.”

  “You’re crazy, man! Who the hell are you?”

  “John Quincannon, peerless detective. Now answer my question. Where’s the money?”

  For a slow-witted hulk of a man, Crabb moved with the quickness of a cat. He swept the tin cup off the table, hurled it and a swirl of hot coffee at Quincannon, and lunged sideways to where the Bisley Colt lay on the cot. Quincannon managed to dodge the cup and most of the scalding spray, but the evasive action cost him any chance of putting a disabling bullet in Crabb. There was no other choice but to rush the man.

  He slashed down with the Navy’s barrel, striking Crabb’s forearm just as the Bisley was dragged out of the holster. The blow dislodged the pistol, sent it skidding across the floor, but it also weakened his grip on his own weapon. Crabb managed to knock it into a dangle from Quincannon’s index finger, nearly breaking the digit. Quincannon let the weapon drop because Crabb’s arms were around him then, squeezing in an effort to snap his spine. He retaliated in kind, and they were soon locked in a grunting, gyrating contest of strength and will.

  As bullish as Crabb was, Quincannon had just as much brawn and the benefit of considerable experience in this sort of hand-to-hand—or rather, arms-to-arms and chest-to-chest—roughhouse. The struggle lasted less than a minute. He ended it by dint of a mean and scurrilous trick he had learned from his father, who had previously learned it while on assignment on the Baltimore docks, the use of which in self-defense both considered thoroughly justified. When he released his hold, Crabb obligingly collapsed to the floor unconscious.

  Quincannon sleeved sweat from his brow, took a moment to catch his breath, and then gathered up both pistols. He holstered the Navy, emptied the Bisley’s chambers and dropped the cartridges into his coat pocket, and tossed the useless gun onto the cot. A coil of rope was looped around the saddle’s horn; he used it to bind Crabb’s hands and feet. Then he commenced a careful search of the car, starting with the saddlebags.

  The search proved futile. So did ones of the outside of the car, the corral, even a makeshift privy.

  This served to further whet the keen edge of Quincannon’s temper. He reentered the car. Crabb was still non compos mentis, but beginning to stir. Quincannon pulled the stool over next to him, straddled it, and delivered a series of none-too-gentle slaps to Crabb’s cheeks until the man was awake again, glaring bloody daggers and snarling imprecations.

  Quincannon drew the Navy, reached down to pull Crabb’s head close, and inserted the muzzle into an unclean ear. “Now then, Zeke. I’ll ask you again. Where’s the money?”

  Fear glistened in the big man’s eyes, but he remained defiant. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I don’t have no goddamn money.”

  “You’re the only one who could have it. You killed two men, Travers and Whiffing, to get it and keep it.”

  “I never did. You can’t pin no killings on me. You got no proof I shot anybody.”

  “Ah, but I have. That uncommon Bisley Colt of yours. Or haven’t you heard of firearms identification?”

  Obviously Crabb hadn’t. He said, “Huh?”

  “The physical matching of bullets to a particular weapon by their size and the rifling marks left on them from the weapon’s barrel.”

  “I don’t believe it. You’re full of shit.”

  “Such crude language.” Quincannon screwed the Navy’s muzzle another quarter inch into Crabb’s ear canal, which produced a wince and a grunt of protest. “Believe it or not, firearms identification is an established fact. Your Bisley will hang you, unless you cooperate with me as a representative of the law.” It would hang him anyway, but Crabb didn’t have to know that. “Well, Zeke? Are you going to cooperate?”

  After a sullen half minute of silence while his small brain struggled with the decision, and another quarter-inch turn of the Navy’s muzzle, Crabb concluded that he would. The defiance evaporated, and he said bitterly, “All right, you win. But I don’t have the goddamn money. I never had it. You think I’d still be here if I had? Travers wouldn’t tell me what he done with it.”

  “Then why did you shoot him?”

  “I didn’t have no choice. He pulled a knife on me, tried to cut my throat. I tore up the house looking for the money but it wasn’t there. Thought come to me later that maybe he buried it in the yard, so next day I went back and dug around some but it wasn’t there, neither.”

  “Did it occur to you Whiffing might have it?”

  “He never went near the house after the robbery. I got that much out of Travers. Whiffing trusted him with the loot and they was gonna split when the kid was ready.”

  “The kid. Travers’s name for him.”

  “Yeah. Damn fool kid. Travers figured to doublecross him, sure as hell. Whiffing’d be dead now anyways, saved me the trouble.”

  Quincannon s
aid, “You knew Whiffing planned the robbery before you braced Travers. How?”

  “He come to me with the idea first. Knew I needed money—I let that slip one of the times we talked up at the coffee saloon. He didn’t have the sand to hold up the Express office himself, wanted me to do it on sixty/forty split. Said he knew when a big shipment of cash come in by train on account of the place he worked, the bicycle warehouse, was right across the street and he knew some Wells, Fargo clerk that flapped his gums when he had a few beers in him.”

  Whiffing’s motives for turning crook were plain enough. When he realized he had no chance to marry the St. Ives girl and her family’s fortune, he’d talked her into running off with him and set up the robbery for enough cash to finance the start of a new life with her. Damn fool kid, indeed. Two damn fool kids.

  “Why did you turn the job down?”

  “I figured it was too risky, wouldn’t come off,” Crabb said. “Otherwise why did Whiffing need me, why didn’t he pull the robbery himself? Besides, I ain’t no stick-up artist.”

  Quincannon refrained from snorting at that little slice of irony. “When it did come off, how did you know who Whiffing had gotten for the job?”

  “I didn’t. Said to me before, if I wouldn’t do it, he’d get some other guy he gambled and whored around with who would.”

  “He didn’t mention Travers by name?”

  “No. I never knew it, never laid eyes on Travers, until the night I went up there to the house.”

  “How did you know it was Bob Cantwell who arranged the hideout?”

  Crabb’s mouth quirked derisively. “Whiffing told me. His whole damn plan, still tryin’ to convince me to go in with him.”

  “So after you decided to hijack the money for yourself, you threatened Cantwell into telling you where Travers was hiding out.”

  “Yeah. Bastard must of blabbed to Whiffing, too, even after I warned him to keep his mouth shut.”

  Cantwell had done just that, later on, when he made the mistake of trying to blackmail Whiffing. And Whiffing had assumed, as Quincannon had, that Crabb had come away with the $35,000. The kid had not possessed enough moxie to confront a man as big and intimidating as Zeke with a drawn weapon and a demand for all or part of the swag. He might well have searched this car for the money when Crabb was away, thinking it was stashed here, but was too timid to do anything of a bolder nature. Small in stature, small in courage—a coward at heart.

  Sly, half-witted tricks were his stock in trade, so he’d created the Carville ghost using the same method as in the arrangement of the St. Ives girl’s bogus death leap. The idea being to prey on Crabb’s fear of the supernatural—another piece of information Zeke must have let slip during their talks—until Crabb was spooked enough to take the money from its hiding place and flee with it. How Whiffing intended to get his hands on the swag at that point had died with him. Another foolish trick, perhaps, or pistol shots from ambush such as he’d done to dispose of Bob Cantwell.

  A harlequinade, from start to finish, Quincannon thought disgustedly. Whiffing the court jester, and the rest of the players a bunch of buffoons. The whole dodge might have been sardonically amusing if two men weren’t dead, his own head hadn’t nearly been ventilated to make number three, and all the furious activity and silly game-playing hadn’t been for nought. None of the dolts involved had ended up in possession of the $35,000. And the galling fact was, neither had Quincannon.

  He said, “You’d better not be lying to me about the money, Zeke. It’ll go twice as hard for you if I find out you know where it is.”

  “I ain’t lying. I swear to God I ain’t.”

  Quincannon sighed. Past experience had taught him the nuances necessary to distinguish between the welter of lies and sprinkling of truths that poured from the mouths of thieves, murderers, and other blackguards. No, dammit, Crabb was not lying.

  He removed the Navy from Crabb’s ear, scrubbed off a residue of earwax on the man’s shirt, and once again holstered the weapon. Then he stood, put both hands in the small of his back to stretch muscles sore from Crabb’s mauling, brushed grit from his coat, vest, and trousers, and started for the door.

  “Hey,” Crabb yelled. “You ain’t just gonna leave me here like this.”

  “I am, for the nonce. The bluecoats should arrive in another hour or three, if not after lunchtime.”

  “Loosen the ropes, will you? I can’t hardly feel my hands.”

  “No. I wouldn’t want you thrashing around, hurting yourself trying to get free. Or fleeing across the dunes like the Carville ghost.”

  Crabb furiously suggested a physical impossibility, which Quincannon chose to ignore as he went out and closed the door behind him.

  25

  SABINA

  Sabina was at her desk that Wednesday afternoon, writing a client’s report on the St. Ives case and preparing an invoice to go with it, when John finally put in an appearance.

  After she had delivered Virgina St. Ives to her angry father the night before, she had stopped by the agency before going home for her much-needed bath, food, and quiet rest. There had been no message from John then—she surmised he was still in Carville-by-the-Sea—nor any word from him since her return here this morning. Seeing him hale and hearty, if a little on the wilted side—his suit and vest needed laundering and he looked as if he had had little sleep—eased her mind.

  “Ah, good, you’re back from your trip,” he said. He seemed to be in good spirits, but she knew him well enough to detect a tempering factor to his cheerful mood. “Did your hunch pay off?”

  “It did. I found Virginia St. Ives—alive and hiding in an empty home in Burlingame.” John’s silent nod prompted her to add, “You don’t seem surprised at the news.”

  “I’m not. I’ve known for some time she didn’t fling herself off the Heights parapet. So have you, evidently.”

  “Yes.” Sabina went on to give him an account of how she had found Virginia and the reasons the girl and Lucas Whiffing had faked her death, adding details she had omitted in her verbal report to Joseph and Margaret St. Ives. She finished by repeating Joseph’s vow to deal sternly with the pair.

  “He’ll need only to discipline the girl,” John said. “Lucas Whiffing is dead. Shot to death in Carville last night.”

  “By whom?”

  “E. J. Crabb, the Meekers’ neighbor. E for Ezekial.”

  “The mysterious Zeke?”

  “None other. Crabb and I had a minor set-to and a long chat this morning, the result of which is that he’s now in city prison on a double homicide charge.”

  “His other victim being Jack Travers, I take it.”

  “Correct.”

  “So then he did steal the Express money from Travers. Did you recover it?”

  That was the tempering factor in John’s mood; his mouth turned down at the corners. “Not yet. Crabb claims he committed his crime for naught, that he never had the money—Travers hid it somewhere and he couldn’t find it.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Crabb couldn’t find it, but I will.”

  “Why did he shoot Whiffing? Something to do with those ghostly manifestations?”

  “That, and the fact that Whiffing was the mastermind behind the Wells, Fargo holdup.”

  “I thought as much,” Sabina said. “So our two cases were intertwined after all.”

  “More tightly than either of us suspected.”

  “What exactly happened in Carville? You solved the spook riddle as well, I’m sure.”

  “I did.”

  Before continuing, John assumed his oratorical pose. Whereas Sabina imparted information in a straightforward manner without embellishments, there was nothing her partner liked better than to take center stage, even if it was only before an audience of one, and deliver what amounted to a soliloquy. Homer Keeps had referred to him in the newspaper as self-aggrandizing; at times he could be just that, if tolerably so.

  He produced his st
ubby briar and tobacco pouch and took his time in the loading and firing process—his favorite ploy to heighten drama. Sabina waited patiently for him to get the pipe drawing to his satisfaction and finally begin his explanations. Waited patiently, too, while he unfolded his story at length, in considerable detail and with numerous histrionic flourishes worthy of Edwin Booth. Or Lily Langtry, she thought with wry amusement. Much of what he told her she already knew or had surmised, but she didn’t interrupt him.

  The lengthy monologue seemed to tire him even more. When he brought his oration to a close, he sank wearily into his desk chair. But he wasn’t quite done yet. He still hadn’t explained precisely how Lucas Whiffing had perpetrated his tricks in Carville. Sabina prompted him by asking.

  “Tomfoolery, pure and simple,” he said. “The same sort he and Virginia St. Ives used to fake her death on the Heights.” He paused. “The girl didn’t tell you how that was done, did she?”

  “No.” Sabina didn’t add that she hadn’t needed to be told.

  John puffed up a huge cloud of smoke, rubbed his hands together, and said, “It was all quite simple, really. The central ingredient in both deceptions was the use of—”

  “Kites,” Sabina said.

  “Kites,” John said an instant later.

  He blinked at her, then fluffed his beard to hide a frown. “You already spotted the gaff? How, if the girl didn’t tell you?”

  “A combination of observation and ratiocination, as our friend Sherlock would say.”

  “Bah. He’s no friend of mine.”

  “Be that as it may, you’re not the only canny member of this agency, John. I’ve proven that to you more than once. I suspected for some time, as I said before, that the supposed suicide leap was a sham staged for my benefit and that Virginia was still alive and in hiding somewhere outside the city. She couldn’t have managed the trick alone and Lucas Whiffing was the obvious choice as her accomplice. But it wasn’t until I realized the contrariety in what I witnessed that had been bothering me.”

  “And that was?”

  “Virginia’s gown.”

  “What about her gown?”