The Dangerous Ladies Affair Page 8

  “A series of anonymous threatening notes, for one thing.”

  “Threatening notes? I don’t understand.…”

  “Accusing Mrs. Wellman of being a false prophet and warning her to change her ways or suffer dire consequences. The implied meaning of ‘change her ways’ being her vocal leadership of Voting Rights for Women.”

  Dobbs harrumphed, then drew himself up and said in defensive tones, “Surely you don’t think I would write such notes?”

  “Your strenuous opposition to woman’s suffrage is well known, Mr. Dobbs.”

  “Yes, but my opposition is a matter of principle and, ah, political expediency. I hold no personal animosity toward Mrs. Wellman. Absolutely none.”

  “Night before last,” Sabina said, “an attempt was made to shoot her at her home.”

  Dobbs opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, much like a freshly caught fish. “Good heavens!”

  “Fortunately, whoever fired the shot had poor aim.”

  “But I’ve heard nothing of this until now. There was no such mention in the newspapers.…”

  “Mrs. Wellman chose not to report the incident. If you had nothing to do with the attempt on her life—”

  “I did not. Certainly not.”

  “—then I trust you’ll make no public comment about that or the written threats.”

  “I assure you I won’t. I abhor such vulgarities. The Solidarity Party is a non-violent organization. We are—”

  “Yes, I know. The Antis. Anti-progress, anti-reform, anti–women’s rights.”

  “That is not true,” Dobbs protested. “The pejorative term ‘Anti’ is inaccurate. We are not against progress or reform unless it threatens the long and honorably established status quo by violating the laws of the land and the word of God as set down in the Good Book. Nor are we against the rights of women per se, only their unreasonable demands—”

  “Our demands, Mr. Dobbs, and they’re not unreasonable. I’m a suffragist, too.”

  “Ah, yes, well,” he said, paused, and then resumed, “It is the Solidarity Party’s firm belief that a woman’s place is in the home, as God intended, and not in jury boxes or executive offices or involved in the making of public policy.”

  “In other words, to be nothing more than submissive housewives and child bearers.”

  “I repeat, as God intended.” Another harrumph, after which he quoted oratorically and not at all aptly, “‘Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, and is himself the savior of his body. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.’ Ephesians, chapter five, verses twenty-two through twenty-four.”

  Sabina said cynically, “Timothy, chapter two, verses eleven and twelve.”

  “Eh?”

  “‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’”

  “Oh, ah, yes. In silence. Yes.” Dobbs picked up the quill pen, dipped the nib into an open jar of India ink, found a piece of paper, and began to write on it. “Another appropriate quote, that, one I’d, ah, forgotten. I must include it in my repertoire. Timothy, chapter two, verses eleven and twelve, you said?”

  Sabina got to her feet and went to the door. “I won’t remain in silence, Mr. Dobbs, nor will my sisters—not now and not in the future. You and your Antis can count on that.”

  She went out without waiting for a response and just barely managed to restrain herself from slamming the door behind her.

  10

  QUINCANNON

  Gunpowder Alley was no more appealing by daylight than it had been under the cloak of darkness. Heavy rain during the early-morning hours had slackened into another dreary drizzle, and the buildings encompassing the alley’s short length all had a huddled appearance, bleak and sodden under the wet gray sky.

  The cul-de-sac was deserted when Quincannon, dry beneath a newly purchased umbrella, turned into it from Jessie Street. Boards had been nailed across the front entrance to the cigar store and a police seal applied to forestall potential looters. At the house next door, tattered curtains now covered the parlor window.

  He stood looking at the window for a few seconds, his mind jostled by memory fragments—words spoken to him by Patrolman Maguire, others by Letitia Carver. Quickly, then, he climbed to the porch and rapped on the front door. Neither that series of knocks, nor two more, brought a response.

  His resolve, sharpened now, prodded him into action. From his coat pocket he removed the set of lockpicks he had liberated from a burglar named Wandering Ned some years back, and set to work on the flimsy door lock. It yielded to his practiced ministrations in no time at all.

  In the murky entryway inside he paused to listen. No sounds reached his ears save for the scurrying of a rodent in the wall and the random creaking of old, damp timbers. He called loudly, “Hello! Anyone here?” He didn’t expect an answer, and none came. The house had the look and feel of desertion.

  He moved through an archway into the parlor. The room was cold, decidedly musty; no fire had burned in the grate last night, nor in a long while before that, he judged. The furniture was sparse and had the worn look of discards. One arm of the rocking chair near the curtain window was broken, bent outward at an angle. The lamp on the rickety table next to it was as cold as the air, and when he shook it, its fount proved to be empty.

  Glowering fiercely now, Quincannon set off on a rapid search of the premises upstairs and down. There were scattered pieces of furniture in two other rooms, including a sagging iron bedstead sans mattress in what might have been the master bedroom; the remaining rooms were empty. All the floors bore coatings of dust unmarked except by mouse droppings. A few of the wall corners were ornamentally festooned with spiderwebs.

  The last of the closets he looked into, off the front entryway, proved to be the one he should have checked first. The single object it contained elicited a blistering, quadruple-jointed oath, though by this time the object’s presence in the house was no surprise. The use to which it had been put was all too blasted obvious.

  He left the house grumbling and growling to himself and stepped into the side passage for another examination of the barred window to Raymond Sonderberg’s living quarters. From there he moved on to the cross passage at the rear, where a quick study confirmed his judgments of the night before: there was no possible exit at either end, both fences too tall and barren of handholds to be scaled.

  Out front again, he embarked on a rapid canvass of the neighborhood. He spoke to two residents of Gunpowder Alley, both of whom corroborated that the house had been untenanted for some time—four months, to be exact.

  Hell and damn! He should have suspected this sooner. Officer Maguire’s statement that in the two weeks he’d patrolled Gunpowder Alley the parlor window had always been dark was one clue that had slipped by him in the confused aftermath of Raymond Sonderberg’s murder. Another was the claim by the woman calling herself Letitia Carver that she sometimes sat in that window at night looking out.

  The burly bartender at the saloon on the Jessie Street corner provided him with one final piece of pertinent information. Sonderberg had stopped in occasionally for a glass of beer, and though he was a man who eked out a living selling tobacco and sundries and who kept mostly to himself, he had once confided a taste for Barbary Coast melodeons and variety houses.

  “He didn’t say so,” the barman said, “but I got the idea it wasn’t only entertainment he was after.”

  “Women?”

  “Not your usual brand of soiled dove. Buck-and-wing serving girls, sure as the devil. Sonderberg had nothing to offer the performing ladies, money or otherwise.”

  But mayhap he did, Quincannon thought as he left the saloon. And mayhap one of those performing ladies had had something to offer him, temporarily.

  In any event, the mystery surrounding Son
derberg’s murder was no longer a mystery. And should not have been one as long as it had; Quincannon felt like a rattlepate amateur for allowing himself to be duped and fuddled by what was, as Sabina had suggested, a crime with an essentially simple explanation. For he knew now how and why the cigar store owner had been dispatched in his locked quarters. And he was tolerably sure of who had done the deed, if not as yet the assassin’s identity—the only person, given the circumstances, it could possibly be.

  * * *

  Titus Wrixton was alone in his private office at the Woolworth National Bank when Quincannon arrived there shortly past noon. He was none too happy to have been kept waiting for word and grew even more agitated when he saw no sign of his satchel containing the five thousand dollars.

  “Didn’t you recover the money, Quincannon? Or my letters?”

  “Not yet, though perhaps soon.”

  “You weren’t able to identify the man you followed?”

  “On the contrary. His name was Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley.”

  “Was? Did you say was?”

  “He’s dead. Murdered in his quarters before I could intervene.”

  “Good Lord! Murdered by whom?”

  “His accomplice, the actual blackmailer, who then disappeared with the money.”

  Wrixton made a low moaning sound, followed by a belch; he fumbled for his dyspepsia tablets. “The blackmailer … do you have any idea who he is?”

  “A good idea, yes.”

  “Then why haven’t you…?”

  “I’ll answer that question after you’ve answered a few of mine. Why were you being blackmailed?”

  “… I told you before, I would rather not say.”

  “You’ll tell me, sir, if you want the safe return of your money and the rest of your letters.”

  The banker chewed and swallowed three of the tablets, then pooched his cheeks with eyes averted.

  “A woman, wasn’t it?” Quincannon prompted. “An illicit affair?”

  “Oh, dear me…”

  “Well, Mr. Wrixton?”

  “You’re, ah, a man of the world; surely you understand that when one reaches my age—”

  “I have no interest in reasons or rationalizations, only in the facts of the matter. The woman’s name, to begin with.”

  Wrixton hemmed and hawed and pooched some more before he finally answered in a scratchy voice, “Pauline Dupree.”

  “And her profession?”

  “Profession? I don’t see— Oh, very well. She is a stage performer and actress. Yes, and a very good one, I might add.”

  “I suspected as much. Where does she perform?”

  “At the Gaiety Theater. But she aspires to be a serious actress one day, perhaps on the New York stage.”

  “Does she, now.”

  “I, ah, happened to be at the theater one evening two months ago and we chanced to meet—”

  Quincannon waved that away. No man went to the Gaiety Theater by happenstance; intention and inclination took them there. A less than respectable “palace of art,” the Gaiety specialized in raucous musical revues and bawdy melodramas—the sort of place that catered to middle-aged men such as Titus Wrixton and Raymond Sonderberg whose tastes ran to the sordidly erotic.

  He asked, “You confided in her when you received the first blackmail demand?”

  “Of course,” Wrixton said. “She had a right to know…”

  “Why did she have a right to know?”

  “It’s … well…”

  “Because the missing letters were written to her, letters of a highly indiscreet nature.”

  “… Yes.”

  “And how do you suppose the blackmailer obtained possession of them?”

  “They were stolen from Miss Dupree’s rooms last week, along with a small amount of jewelry. This man Sonderberg or his accomplice … a common sneak thief who saw an opportunity for richer gains.”

  Stolen? By a common sneak thief? What a credulous gent his client was! “Was it Miss Dupree’s suggestion that you give in to the first demand of five thousand dollars?”

  “No, it was a mutual decision. We discussed it and it seemed the most reasonable course of action at the time.”

  “But when the second demand arrived two days ago, you didn’t tell her you’d decided to hire a detective until after you consulted with me.”

  “That’s so, yes. Engaging you was something of a spur-of-the-moment decision—”

  “And when you did tell her, you also explained that I would be present at the Hotel Grant last evening and that I intended to follow and confront whoever claimed the payoff money?”

  “Why shouldn’t I have confided in her? She—” Wrixton broke off, frowning, then once again performed his red-faced rodent imitation. “See here, Quincannon. You’re not suggesting that Miss Dupree had anything to do with the extortion scheme?”

  It was not yet time to answer that question. “I deal in facts, as I told you, not suggestions,” Quincannon hedged. “Where are you keeping her?”

  “I am not keeping her,” the banker said huffily, but his averted gaze indicated that this was at best a half-truth. “Her rooms are on Stockton Street.”

  “Is she likely to be there or at the Gaiety at this hour?”

  “I don’t know. One or the other, I suppose.”

  “Come along with me, then, Mr. Wrixton, and we’ll pay a call on the lady. I expect we’ll both find it a stimulating rendezvous.”

  11

  QUINCANNON

  They found Pauline Dupree at the Gaiety Theater, a gaudily painted structure on Jackson near Kearny on the fringe of the Barbary Coast. A large billboard next to the entrance bore a photograph of a buxom young blond woman and an announcement in large black and gold letters that Miss Pauline Dupree was currently starring in matinee and evening performances of that “thrilling, titillating stage play” The Wages of Sin.

  The guard on the stage door passed Wrixton and Quincannon without question, no doubt because the banker slipped him a coin when he confirmed the actress’s presence. She was in her dressing room preparing for her afternoon performance. More attractive in the flesh than in her photograph, she had dark gold tresses that may or may not have been a wig and bold, smoke-hued eyes wise beyond her years. She wore a long red dress for her stage role, its bodice cut so low that the swell of her ample bosom was alluringly revealed. Rouge the same hue as the dress brightened her cheeks.

  As surprised as she was to see Wrixton at this hour, it was Quincannon’s entrance that caused her high color to pale a bit. But she recovered quickly, showing no other sign of recognition. “And who is this gentleman, Titus?” she asked the banker in a voice as smoky as her eyes.

  “John Quincannon, the detective I told you about.” The smile Wrixton bestowed upon her was fatuous as well as apologetic. “I’m sorry to trouble you, my dear, but he insisted on seeing you.”

  “Did he? And for what reason?”

  “He wouldn’t say, precisely. But he seems to have a notion that you are, ah, somehow involved in the blackmail scheme.”

  There was no longer any need to hold back. Quincannon said, “Not involved in it, the originator of it.”

  Pauline Dupree’s only reaction was an arched eyebrow and a little moue of dismay. A talented actress, to be sure. But then, he’d already had ample evidence of her skills last night.

  “I?” she said. “But that’s ridiculous.”

  Quincannon’s gaze had roamed the small dressing room. Revealing costumes hung on racks and an array of paints and powders and various theatrical accessories was arranged on tables. He walked over to one of the tables, picked up and brandished a long-haired white wig.

  “Is this the wig you wore last night, Mrs. Carver?” he asked her.

  There was no slippage of her composure this time, either. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Your portrayal of Letitia Carver was quite good, I admit. The wig, the shawl and
black dress and cane, the stooped posture and elderly quavering voice … all very accomplished playacting. And of course the darkness and the candlelight concealed the fact that the old-age wrinkles were a product of cleverly applied theatrical makeup.”

  “And where was I supposed to have given this performance?” Pauline Dupree’s eyes were cold and hard now, but her voice remained even.

  “The abandoned house next to Raymond Sonderberg’s cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. Before and after you murdered Sonderberg in his quarters behind the store.”

  “What’s that?” Wrixton exclaimed in shocked tones. “See here, Quincannon! An accusation of blackmail is egregious enough, but to suggest that Miss Dupree is a murderess is—”

  The actress said, “Outrageous nonsense, of course. I have no idea where Gunpowder Alley is, nor do I know anyone named Raymond Sonderberg.”

  “Ah, but you do,” Quincannon said. “Or rather did. Like Mr. Wrixton, Sonderberg was drawn to variety houses such as this one. My guess is you made his acquaintance in much the same way as you did my client, and used your no doubt considerable charms to lure him into your blackmail scheme.”

  “Preposterous!” Wrixton cried. “Utter rot!”

  “But you never intended to share the spoils with him, did you, Miss Dupree? You wanted the entire ten thousand dollars. To finance your ambition to become a serious actress, mayhap? A trip east to New York?”

  An eye flick was his only response. But it was enough to tell him that he’d guessed correctly.

  “I give you credit,” he went on. “You planned it all well enough in advance. You had time to make your arrangements after learning from Mr. Wrixton that I would be at the Hotel Grant last evening. You found out from Sonderberg about the abandoned house next to his cigar store; he may even have helped you gain access. Sometime yesterday evening you went there and made final preparations for your performance—applied makeup, arranged a rocking chair near the window, created the illusion of an old woman seated there during the time you were disposing of your accomplice.”

  “Yes? How did I do that?”