The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Quincannon’s reflexes were superior to the patrolman’s; he was already on the run by the time the bluecoat reacted. Behind him Maguire shouted something, but he paid no heed. Another sound, a loudish thump, reached his ears as he charged past the shop’s entrance, dropping his umbrella so he could grasp the Navy Colt in its holster. Seconds later he veered into the side passage. The narrow confines appeared deserted, and there were no sounds of movement at its far end. He skidded to a halt in front of the lighted window.

  Vertical bars set close together prevented both access and egress. The glass inside was dirty and rain-spotted, but he could make out the figure of a man sprawled supine on the floor of a cluttered room. There was no sign of anyone else.

  The spaces between the bars were just wide enough to reach a hand through; he did that, pushing fingers against the pane. It didn’t yield to the pressure.

  Officer Maguire pounded up beside him, the beam from his lantern cutting jigsaw pieces out of the darkness. The bobbing light illuminated enough of the passage ahead so that Quincannon could see to where it ended at the warehouse wall. He hurried back there while Maguire had his look through the window.

  Another short walkway, shrouded in gloom, stretched at right angles to the side passage like the crossbar of the letter T. Quincannon thumbed a lucifer alight as he stepped around behind the cigar store, shielding it with his hand. That section was likewise empty, except for a pair of refuse bins. There was no exit in that direction; the walkway ended in a board fence that joined shop and warehouse walls, built so high that only a monkey could have climbed it. The match’s flicker showed him the outlines of a rear door to R. Sonderberg’s quarters. He tried the latch, but the heavy door was secure in its frame.

  Maguire appeared, his lantern creating more dancing patterns of light and shadow. “See anyone back here?” he demanded.

  “No one.”

  “Would that rear door be open?”

  “No. Bolted on the inside.”

  The bluecoat grunted and pushed past him to try the latch himself. While he was doing that, Quincannon struck another match in order to examine the other half of the walkway. It served the adjacent house, ending in a similarly high and unscalable board fence. The house’s rear door, he soon determined, was also bolted within.

  The lantern beam again picked him out. “Come away from there, laddie. Out front with me, step lively now.”

  Quincannon complied. As they hurried along the passage, Maguire said, “Is it your friend Sonderberg lying shot in there?”

  No friend of mine or society’s, Quincannon thought. But he said only, “I couldn’t be sure.”

  “Didn’t seem to be anybody else in the room.”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’ll soon find out.”

  When they emerged from the passage, Quincannon saw that the elderly woman had left her rocking chair and was now standing stooped at the edge of her front window, peering out. One other individual had so far been alerted; a man wearing a light overcoat and high hat and carrying a walking stick had appeared from somewhere and stood staring nearby. Quincannon knew from rueful experience that a full gaggle of onlookers would soon follow.

  No one had exited the cigar store through the Gunpowder Alley entrance; the door was still locked from within. Maguire grunted again. “We’ll be having to break it down,” he said. “Sonderberg, or whoever ’tis, may still be alive.”

  It took the combined weight of both of them to force the door, the bolt finally splintering free with an echoing crack. Once they were inside, Maguire flashed his lantern’s beam over displays of cigars and pipe tobacco, partly filled shelves of cheap sundries, then aimed it down behind the low service counter. The shop was cramped and free of hiding places—and completely empty.

  The closed door to the rear quarters stood behind a pair of dusty drapes. “By the saints!” Maguire exclaimed when he caught hold of the latch. “This one’s bolted, too.”

  It proved no more difficult to break open than the outer door had. The furnished room beyond covered the entire rear two thirds of the building. The man sprawled on the floor was middle-aged, medium-sized, and hook-nosed—Quincannon’s quarry, right enough, though he no longer wore the overcoat, muffler, and slouch hat that had partially disguised him in the Hotel Grant. Blood from a pair of wounds spotted the front of his linsey-woolsey shirt; his open eyes glistened in the light from a table lamp.

  Maguire went to one knee beside him, felt for a pulse. “Dead,” he said unnecessarily.

  Quincannon’s attention was now on the otherwise empty room. It contained a handful of secondhand furniture, a blanket-covered cot, a potbellied stove that radiated heat, and a table topped with a bottle of whiskey and two empty glasses. The whole was none too tidy and none too clean.

  Another pair of curtains partially covered an alcove in the wall opposite the window. Quincannon satisfied himself that the alcove contained nothing more than an icebox and larder cabinet. The only item of furniture large enough to conceal a person was a rickety wardrobe, but all he found when he opened it was a few articles of inexpensive clothing.

  Maguire was on his feet again. He said, “I wonder what made him do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Shoot himself, of course. Suicide’s a cardinal sin.”

  “Is that what you think happened, Officer?”

  “Aye, and what else could it be, with all the doors and windows locked and no one else on the premises?”

  Suicide? Faugh! Murder was what else it could be, and murder was what it was, despite the circumstances. Three things told Quincannon this beyond any doubt. Sonderberg had been shot twice in the chest, a location handgun suicides seldom chose because it necessitated holding the weapon at an awkward angle, and one of the wounds was high on the left side in a nonlethal spot. The pistol that had fired the two rounds lay some distance away from the dead man, too far for it to have been dropped if he had fired the fatal shot. And the most damning evidence: the satchel containing the $5,000 blackmail payoff was nowhere to be seen here or in the front part of the shop.

  But Quincannon shrugged and said nothing. Let the bluecoat believe what he liked. The dispatching of R. Sonderberg was part and parcel to the blackmail game, and that made it John Quincannon’s meat.

  “I’ll be needing to report in to headquarters,” Maguire said. “The nearest callbox is on Jessie, two blocks distant. You’ll stay here, will you, and keep out any curious citizens until I return, Mr.—?”

  “Quinn. That I will, Officer.”

  “Quinn, is it? You’ll be Irish yourself, then?”

  “Scotch-Irish,” Quincannon said.

  Maguire hurried out. As soon as he was alone, Quincannon commenced a search of the premises. The dead man’s coat and trouser pockets yielded nothing of value or interest other than an expired insurance card that confirmed his identity as Raymond Sonderberg. The pistol that had done for him was a small-caliber Colt, its chambers fully loaded except for the two fired rounds; it bore no identifying marks of any kind. The $5,000 was not in the room, nor was whatever blackmail evidence had been withheld from Titus Willard tonight.

  The bolt on the rear door was tightly drawn, the door itself sturdy in its frame; and for good measure a wooden bar set into brackets spanned its width. Sonderberg had been nothing if not security-conscious, for all the good it had done him. The single window was hinged upward, the swivel latch at the bottom of the sash loosely in place around its stud fastener. Quincannon flipped the hook aside and raised the glass to peer again at the vertical bars. They were set tightly top and bottom; he couldn’t budge any of them. And as close together as they were, there was no way in which anything as bulky as the satchel could have passed between them.

  Sonderberg had brought the satchel inside with him, there could be no mistaking that. Whoever had shot him had made off with it; that, too, was plain enough. But how the devil could the assassin have committed his crime and then escaped from not one but two sealed
rooms in the clutch of seconds that had passed between the firing of the fatal shots and Quincannon’s entry into the side passage?

  The night’s stillness was broken now by the sound of voices out front, but as yet none of the bystanders had attempted to come inside. Muttering to himself, Quincannon lowered the window and made his way out through the cigar store to stand in the broken doorway.

  The parlor of the house next door, he noted, was now dark and the white-haired occupant had come out to stand, shawl-draped and leaning on a cane, on the small front porch. The others gathered in Gunpowder Alley numbered less than a dozen, drawn from nearby houses and the Jessie Street watering hole, among them the man in the cape and high hat, who now assailed him with questions. Quincannon provided only enough information, repeating Maguire’s false theory of suicide, to dampen the bystanders’ enthusiasm; shootings were common in the city, and there was not enough spice in a self-dispatching to hold the jaded citizens’ interest. He then sought information of his own, but none of the crowd owned up to seeing Sonderberg or anyone else enter the cigar store after its six o’clock closing.

  Some of the men were already moving away to homes and saloon when Maguire returned. The bluecoat dispersed the rest. The elderly woman still stood on the porch; it was not until the alley was mostly deserted again that she doddered back inside the darkened house.

  Quincannon asked Maguire if he knew the woman’s name and whether or not she lived alone. “I couldn’t tell you, lad,” the patrolman said. “I’ve not seen her before—the house has always been dark when I’ve come by.”

  The morgue wagon and a trio of other bluecoats arrived shortly. None of them was interested in Quincannon. Neither was Maguire any longer. San Francisco’s finest, a misnomer if ever there was one, found suicides and those peripherally involved to be worthy of little time or attention. While the minions of the law were inside with the remains of Raymond Sonderberg, he remembered his dropped umbrella and mounted a brief search, but it was nowhere to be found. One of the onlookers must have made off with it. Faugh! Thieves everywhere in this infernal city!

  He crossed to the adjacent house. The parlor window was curtained now, no light showing around its edges. The bell pull beside the door no longer worked; he rapped on the panel instead. There was no immediate response. Mayhap the white-haired woman wanted no truck with visitors after the night’s excitement, or had already retired—

  Neither. Old boards creaked and a thin, quavery voice asked, “Yes? Who’s there?”

  “Police officer,” Quincannon lied glibly. “A few questions if I may. I won’t keep you long.”

  There was a longish pause, followed by the click of a bolt being thrown; the door squeaked open partway and the old woman appeared. Stooped, still bundled in a shawl over a black dress, she carried her cane in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. A cold draft set the candle flame to flickering in its ceramic holder, so that it cast patterns of light and shadow over her heavily seamed face as she peered out and up at him.

  “I know you,” she said. “You were here before all the commotion next door.”

  “You spied me through your parlor window, eh? I thought as much, Mrs.—?”

  “Carver. Letitia Carver. Yes, I often sit looking out in the evenings. A person my age has little else to occupy her attention.”

  “Did you see anyone enter or leave the cigar store at any time tonight?”

  “No, no one. What happened to Mr. Sonderberg?”

  “Shot dead in his quarters.”

  “Oh!”

  “Possibly by his own hand, more likely by an intruder. You heard the shots, did you?”

  “Yes. I thought that’s what they were, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “You live here alone, Mrs. Carver?”

  “Since my husband passed on, bless his soul.”

  “And you’ve had no visitors tonight?”

  She sighed wistfully. “Few come to visit me anymore.”

  “Did you hear anyone moving about in the side or rear passages, before or after the pistol shots?”

  “Only you and the other policeman.” She sighed again, sadly this time. “Such a tragedy. Poor Mr. Sonderberg.”

  Poor Mr. Sonderberg, my hat, Quincannon thought. Poor Titus Willard, who was now bereft of $10,000. And poor Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, who were out a substantial fee if the mystery of Sonderberg’s death remained unsolved.

  The woman said in her quavery voice, “Is there anything more, young man? It’s quite chilly standing here.”

  “Nothing more.”

  She retreated inside and he returned to the boardwalk. R. Sonderberg’s body was in the process of being loaded into the morgue wagon. None of the policemen even glanced in Quincannon’s direction as he crossed the alley and made his way to Jessie Street, his thoughts as dark and gloomy as the night around him.

  Sabina was already at her desk when he walked into the Market Street offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, the next morning. She was a handsome woman, his partner and unrequited love—the possessor of a fine figure, eyes the color of the sea at dusk, and sleek black hair layered high on her head and fastened with a jeweled comb. Today she wore one of the leg-of-mutton blouses which he usually found enticing, but his mood was such that he took only peripheral notice of her. His night had been a mostly sleepless one in which he’d wrestled unsuccessfully with the problem of how R. Sonderberg had been murdered and by whom. His lack of success was all the more frustrating because he prided himself on having an uncanny knack for unraveling even the knottiest of seemingly impossible problems.

  Sabina said, as he shed his umbrella and rain-spotted overcoat, “Titus Willard telephoned a few minutes ago. He was upset that you failed to contact him last night.”

  “Bah.”

  “Well, he asked that you get in touch with him as soon as you arrived.”

  “I’ll see him later this morning. He won’t be pleased to hear the news I have for him at any time.”

  “You weren’t able to identify the blackmailer, then?”

  “On the contrary. The blackmailer’s name is, or was, Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. He was murdered in his locked quarters before I could confront him and recover the blackmail evidence and payoff money.”

  “Murdered? So that’s why you’re in such a foul humor this morning.”

  “What makes you think my humor is foul?”

  “The scowl you’re wearing, for one thing. You look like a pirate on his way to the gibbet.”

  “Bah,” Quincannon said again.

  “Exactly what happened last night, John?”

  He sat at his desk and provided her with a detailed summary. They often shared information on difficult cases in order to obtain a fresh perspective. Sabina’s years as a Pink Rose, one of the select handful of women operatives hired by the Pinkerton Agency, plus the four years of their partnership had honed her skills to a fine edge. He would never have admitted it to her or anyone else, but she was often his equal at the more challenging aspects of the sleuthing game.

  “A puzzling series of events, to be sure,” Sabina said when he finished his account. “But perhaps not as mysterious as they might seem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know from experience, John, that such mysteries generally have a relatively simple explanation.”

  He admitted the truth of this. “But I’m hanged if I can see it in this case.”

  “Well, the first question that occurs to me, was the crime planned or committed on the spur of the moment?”

  “If it was planned, it was done in order to silence Sonderberg and make off with the five thousand dollars.”

  “By an accomplice in the blackmail scheme.”

  “So it would seem. The accomplice must have been waiting for him in his quarters. The stove there was glowing hot, and there was not enough time for Sonderberg to have stoked the fire to h
igh heat, even if he’d built it up before he left for the Hotel Grant.”

  “Then why all the mystification?” Sabina asked. “Why not simply shoot Sonderberg and slip away into the night with the loot?”

  “To make murder appear to be suicide.”

  “That could have been accomplished without resorting to such elaborate flummery. Locked rooms and mysterious disappearances smack of deliberate subterfuge.”

  “Aye, so they do. But to what purpose?”

  “The obvious answer is to fool someone in close proximity at the time.”

  “Who? Not me, surely. No one could have known ahead of time that I would follow Sonderberg from the hotel to Gunpowder Alley.”

  “The bluecoat, Maguire, then,” Sabina said. “From your description of him, he’s the sort who makes his rounds on a by-the-clock schedule. Still, it seems rather an intricate game just to confuse a simple patrolman.”

  “If the whole was planned ahead of time, and not a result of circumstance.”

  “In either case, there has to be a plausible explanation. Are you certain there was no possible means of escape from Sonderberg’s building following the shooting?”

  “Front and rear entrances bolted from the inside, the door to his living quarters likewise bolted, the only window both barred and locked. Yes, I’m certain of that much.”

  “Doesn’t it follow, then, that if escape was impossible, the murderer was never inside the building?”

  “It would,” Quincannon said, “except for three facts that indicate otherwise. The missing satchel and greenbacks; the presence of the whiskey bottle and two glasses on the table; the pistol that dispatched Sonderberg lying at a distance from the body. There can be no doubt that both killer and victim were together inside that sealed room.”

  “The thump you heard just after the shots were fired. Can you find any significance in that?”

  “None so far. It might have been a foot striking a wall—that sort of sound.”