The Plague of Thieves Affair Read online

“That is satisfactory. What are your fees?”

  She named a retainer figure, an amount somewhat less than John surely would have asked.

  “Also satisfactory. Shall I write you a check now?”

  “If you like.” But she wouldn’t deposit it in the agency account until she checked to make absolutely sure Roland W. Fairchild was who and what he claimed to be.

  While he was writing the check with a gold fountain pen of his own, Sabina asked, “Where can you be reached, Mr. Fairchild?”

  “We have a suite at the Baldwin Hotel.”

  “We?”

  “My wife Octavia and I. Like me, she has always longed to visit the ‘Paris of America’ and all its charming attractions.”

  Fairchild’s smile turned wistful as he spoke, as if he secretly wished he’d come alone to the “Paris of America”—a city as famous for its sinful attractions as for its charming ones. A roving-eyed gay blade like Roland Fairchild, if he were here untethered and unsupervised, would have had himself a grand time in the flesh palaces and gambling halls of the Barbary Coast and Uptown Tenderloin. His wife must be a forceful woman, and a perceptive one, to have convinced him to bring her with him.

  Sabina said, keeping her voice free of irony, “I hope you’ll both enjoy the many available pleasures during your stay.”

  “I’m sure we will.” Fairchild stood. “And I hope I shall hear from you soon with positive news.”

  “Soon in any case, Mr. Fairchild. Good day.”

  A reply in kind, followed by another small raffish smile, and he was gone. The strong scent of his bay rum remained, however; Sabina opened the window facing on Market Street to let in breaths of cold fresh air.

  Had she been a little too hasty in accepting his proposition and his check? Not because of her dislike of the dandified Mr. Roland Fairchild, and not because she doubted her ability to locate his delusional cousin if such were possible; the undertaking was worthwhile if only to give Charles Percival Fairchild III the option of returning to Chicago to attempt to claim his inheritance. No, the concern lay in the prospect of dealing with him again in his vainglorious and vaguely sinister Sherlock Holmes role.

  Their last meeting had been an amicable one, but his secretive involvement with Carson Montgomery’s past and present troubles had left her with further doubts about his sanity. There was no question that he was shrewd and his deductive powers considerable—he had proved that on more than one occasion—but last October he’d given her reason to suspect that his methods were not quite as cerebral and nonviolent as those of the genuine Mr. Holmes. She wasn’t afraid of him, but her uncertainty as to the exact nature of his instability was unsettling.

  John had similar feelings, though for different reasons. Sabina hadn’t told him about the unpleasant business with Carson; it would have served no good purpose. His aversion to “Holmes” was motivated by enmity and jealousy, the poseur having dealt a blow to John’s self-esteem during their investigation of the Bughouse Affair. As far as he knew, the thorn in his side had been plucked out for good the previous summer, after the close of the Spook Lights Affair. Should she tell him of the crackbrain’s true identity and what the present assignment entailed? He was entitled to know, of course, but it would probably make him furious. No, not probably—definitely. The best course, then, was to proceed privately with the search for Charles Percival Fairchild III; and however it turned out, to give John an ex post facto explanation. His feathers wouldn’t be quite so ruffled then, especially if her investigation resulted in Charles the Third’s departure for a city two thousand miles from San Francisco.

  Having settled this in her mind, Sabina turned her thoughts to the task itself. How would she go about tracking down a man who never remained long in one place, who was prone to adopting outlandish disguises, and who seemed to thrive on shadowy associations with thieves, blackmailers, and other crooks?

  Three starting points occurred to her, one direct, two indirect. The latter pair were the most likely to succeed, but both required an unknown amount of passive waiting. The direct one first, then. But not until she had verification of Roland W. Fairchild’s bona fides.

  She pinned on her new straw boater with its stylish trim of ostrich tips and crushed ribbons (inelegantly referred to as a “settin’ hen” by some), donned her fur-collared long coat, locked the office, and set off on her rounds.

  4

  QUINCANNON

  Golden State’s business offices were clustered at the east end of the second floor, all of them small and cramped except for the two-room office inhabited by James Willard. This was Quincannon’s first stop upon his return to the brewery, but Willard was not there. His secretary said he had left to attend a meeting and hadn’t been sure when he would be back.

  Quincannon debated. Should he wait to relay his information to the brewery owner before bracing Caleb Lansing? No, he decided. He was a patient man most of the time, but not when he was about to put the arm on a lawbreaker. He didn’t need Willard’s blessings to make a citizen’s arrest, and the sooner Lansing was in his custody the better.

  He strode down the hall to the assistant brewmaster’s cubicle, found it empty, and proceeded to the nearest occupied space, that of the company bookkeeper and paymaster, Elias Corby. He poked his head inside and asked, “Would you know where I can find Caleb Lansing, Mr. Corby?”

  Corby, a pint-sized, long-nosed gent dressed in striped galluses and rough twill trousers, paused in his writing in an open ledger book. “Lansing? Why, no, I don’t.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Just after I arrived this morning. Have you tried the brewhouse?”

  “My next stop.”

  The brewhouse was at the opposite end of the building. Lansing was nowhere to be found in the rooms containing the malt storage tanks and mash tun. Jacob Drew, the mash boss, a red-haired, red-bearded giant, reported that he’d seen the assistant brewmaster in the fermenting room a few minutes earlier.

  “What d’ye want with him, mister?” Drew asked. “Something to do with your inspections?”

  “You might say that.”

  “The lad’s a weak stick, but he’s done competent enough work since poor Ackermann’s accident.”

  “Work, yes,” Quincannon said, “though not in the brewer’s art.”

  He left Drew looking puzzled and followed a sinuous maze of piping to the fermenting room, a cavernous space filled with gas-fired cookers and cedar-wood fermenting tanks some nine feet in height and circumference. Two of the cookers contained bubbling wort, an oatmeal-like mixture of water, mashed barley, and soluble starch turned into fermentable sugar during the mashing process. After the wort was hopped and brewed, it would be filtered and fermented to produce “steam beer”—a term that had nothing to do with the use of actual steam. The lager was made with bottom-fermenting yeast at sixty to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, rather than the much lower temperatures necessary for true lager fermentation, because the city’s winters were never cold enough to reach the freezing point. Additional keg fermentation resulted in a blast of foam and the loud hiss of escaping carbon dioxide when the kegs were tapped, a sound not unlike the release of a steam boiler’s valve.

  The heady aroma was strongest here. Once again Quincannon’s nostrils began to quiver, his mouth and throat to feel like the inside of a corroded drainpipe. He had the fanciful, and rueful, wish that a man could be fitted with a relief valve as easily as a boiler, to ease pressure buildup inside his head.

  On the catwalk above the cookers, Caleb Lansing stood supervising the adding of dried hops to the cooking wort. Workmen with long-handled wooden paddles stirred the mixture, while others skimmed off the dark, lumpy scum called krausen, a blend of hop, resin, yeast, and impurities that rose to the surface. The slab floor, supported by heavy steel girders, was slick with globs of foam that a hose man sluiced at intervals into the drains.

  Lansing was a rumpled, obsequious individual in his middle years, given to smoking odifero
us short-sixes; cigar ash littered his loose-hanging vest and shirtfront. He had just finished consulting a turnip watch when he spied Quincannon. He’d been on his guard every time they’d met previously, even though he had little to fear from a man he believed to be no more than a city inspector. Now, nervous tension once again pulled his vulpine features out of shape—the look of a guilty man. Quincannon had seen that look often enough to know it well.

  Lansing swung away from the low railing, came forward as he approached, and sought to push past him. Quincannon blocked his way. “I’ll have a word with you in private, Lansing.”

  “Not now you won’t. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “My business with you won’t wait.”

  “What business?”

  “Otto Ackermann. Xavier Jones. Cyrus Drinkwater and West Star Brewing.”

  Fright shone in the assistant brewmaster’s narrow face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The game’s up, Lansing. I know the whole lay.”

  “You know … You’re not an inspector. Who the devil are you?”

  “I’ll give you one guess.”

  Lansing muttered, “Dirty flycop!” under his breath and succeeded this time in shoving past him. He would have run then, but Quincannon grabbed the trailing flap of his vest and yanked him around.

  “Come along and don’t give me any trouble—”

  The blasted rascal was quick as a cat, not with his hands but with his feet. The toe of his heavy work shoe thudded painfully into Quincannon’s shin, broke his hold on the vest, and sent him reeling backward against the railing. Lansing spun and fled to the stairs before Quincannon, growling an oath, could regain his balance and stumble in pursuit.

  Drawing his Navy Colt was out of the question; he couldn’t very well fire it in these crowded confines, even in warning, and brandishing it would likely cause panic among the workers below. Instead he shouted as he clambered down the stairs, “Stop him! Stop that man!”

  “No, no, don’t let him catch me!” Lansing cried in return. “He’s a madman, he’s trying to kill me!”

  The workers stood in clustered confusion, looking from one to the other of the running men. Lansing threaded through them, vaulted an intestinal coiling of pipes, and disappeared behind one of the vats. Quincannon might have snagged him before he escaped from the fermenting room if a mustached workman hadn’t stepped into his path, saying, “Here, what’s the idea of—ufff!” Quincannon bowled him over, but in doing so his foot slipped on the wet floor and he went skidding headfirst into a snakelike tangle of hose. By the time he disengaged himself and regained his feet, fought off clutching hands, and plunged ahead in a limping run, Lansing was nowhere to be seen.

  There was only one way out of this section of the brewery. Still somewhat hobbled, Quincannon went through the boiler room, past the corner room where the vats of rejected beer stood in heavy shadow, then past the freight elevator and down the stairs to the lower floor. An electrically lit passage led into the main tunnel that divided the building in half. He hurried along the tunnel, out onto the Seventh Street loading dock. There was no sign of Lansing anywhere in the vicinity. Half a dozen burly workmen were wrestling filled kegs onto a pair of massive Studebaker wagons; Quincannon called to them. No, they hadn’t seen Lansing come out.

  So his quarry was still in the building. But for how long?

  Quincannon’s shin still smarted, but he could move more or less normally again; he ran back inside. Perpendicular to the tunnel was another wide corridor that led in one direction to the shipping offices and the main entrance, in the other to the cellars. There being no exit from the cellars, he hastened the other way. But almost immediately he encountered a clerk headed to the dock with a handful of bills of lading, who told him Lansing hadn’t gone that way, either. The clerk had been conversing with another man in the passage for the past three or four minutes and would have seen him if he had.

  Now Quincannon was nonplussed. He retraced his path along the side corridor to the brick-walled one that led downward to the cellars. A workman pushing a hand truck laden with fifty-pound sacks of barley was on his way up.

  “Mr. Lansing? Yes, sir, just a few moments ago. Heading into the storerooms.”

  “The storerooms? Are you certain, man?”

  “Aye. In a great hurry he was.”

  Why the devil would Lansing go there? To hide? Fool’s game, if that was his intention. The storerooms, where all the ingredients that went into the mass production of beer were kept, were a collective dead end. So were the cellar rooms that housed filled kegs and the enormous cedar vats where “green” beer was ripened and finished beer was held before being piped to the company’s bottling plant in a separate building adjacent.

  Quincannon made his way down the passage, quickly but watchfully. The temperature dropped by several degrees as he descended. When he reached the artery that led to the storerooms, the air was frosty enough to require the buttoning of his coat—though he didn’t do so, for it would have impeded access to the Navy Colt. He passed through a large room stacked on two sides with empty kegs. At its far end, a solid oak door barred the way into the remaining storerooms.

  The door, Quincannon had been told, had been installed as a deterrent to both rodents and human pilferage. Years before, a former brewery employee had returned late at night and helped himself to a wagonload of sugar and barley, and Willard would brook no repeat of that criminal business. The door was kept open during the day but locked at the end of shift. Only a handful of men in supervisory positions had keys.

  It should not have been closed now. Nor should it have been locked, though it was. Quincannon muttered an imprecation. Lansing must have done the locking; he had access to a key. But why? What could he be up to back there?

  Quincannon listened at the door. No sounds came to him through the heavy wood. He bent at the waist to peer through the keyhole. All he could make out was an empty section of concrete floor, weakly lighted by electric bulbs and shadow-ridden. He straightened again, scowling, tugging at his beard. The loading-dock foreman, Jack Malloy, would have a key. Find him, then, and waste no time doing so.

  Just as he turned away, a muffled report sounded from somewhere behind the locked door. One he’d heard all too often to mistake for anything but what it was—a pistol shot.

  Hell and damn! Quincannon swung back to the door, coming up hard against it, rattling it in its frame. Reflex made him tug futilely at the handle. No second report came, but when he pressed an ear to the wood he heard several faint sounds. Movement, but what sort he couldn’t tell.

  The silence that followed crackled with tension.

  He pushed away again, ran back along the passage until he came upon a workman just emerging from the cellars. He sent the man after the loading-dock foreman, then took himself back to the storeroom door. He tested the latch to determine that it was still locked, though there was no way Lansing or anyone else could have come out and gotten past him.

  Malloy arrived on the run, two other men trailing behind him. “What’s the trouble here?” he demanded.

  “Someone fired a pistol behind that locked door,” Quincannon told him, “not five minutes ago.”

  “A pistol?” Malloy said, astonished. “In the storerooms?”

  “I heard it plainly.”

  “But … why? How? Mr. Willard has strict orders against firearms on the premises…”

  Quincannon made an impatient growling noise. “Button your lip, lad, and unlock the blasted door.”

  The foreman was used to the voice of authority; quickly he produced his ring of keys. The door opened inward and Quincannon crowded through first, his hand inside his coat and resting on the Navy’s walnut handle. Two large, chilly rooms opened off the passage, one filled with sacks of barley, the other with boxes of yeast and fifty-pound sacks of malt, hops, and sugar stacked on end. Both enclosures were empty. The boxes and sacks were so tightly packed together that no one could have hidde
n behind or among them without being seen at a glance.

  At the far end of the passage stood another closed door. “What’s beyond there?” he asked the foreman.

  “Utility room. Well pump and equipment storage.”

  Quincannon tried the door. It refused his hand on the latch. “You have a key, Malloy?”

  “The lock’s the same as on the outer door.”

  “Then open it, man, open it.”

  Malloy obeyed. The heavy, dank odors of mold and earth mingled with the acrid scent of gunpowder tickled Quincannon’s nostrils as the door creaked inward. Only one electric bulb burned here. Gloom lay thick beyond the threshold, enfolding the shapes of well pump, coiled hoses, hand trucks, and other equipment. Quincannon produced a lucifer from his pocket, scraped it alight on the rough brick wall.

  “Lord save us!” Malloy said.

  Caleb Lansing lay sprawled on the dirt floor in front of the well pump. Blood glistened blackly on his shirt. Beside one outflung hand was an old LeMat revolver, the type that used pinfire cartridges. Loosely clenched in the other hand was the same type of brass key Malloy had used.

  Quincannon knelt to press fingers against the artery in Lansing’s neck. Not even the flicker of a pulse. No blackened powder burns rimmed the bloody wound under the left armpit.

  “What are you men doing here? What’s going on?”

  The new voice belonged to Elias Corby, the long-nosed little bookkeeper. He pushed his way forward, sucked in his breath audibly when he saw what lay at his feet.

  “Mr. Lansing’s killed himself,” Malloy said.

  “Killed himself? Here?”

  “Crazy place for it, by all that’s holy.”

  “But why? Why would he do such a thing?”

  “God only knows.”

  “Suicide,” Corby said in awed tones. “Lansing, of all people.”

  Quincannon paid no attention to them. While they were gabbing, he finished his examination of the dead man and then picked up the LeMat revolver, hefted it, put it down again in the same place next to Lansing’s hand.