Quincannon (2 page)

The red-haired man kept on running across the yard, into the shadow of a pepper tree. Quincannon, struggling to get his feet under him, heard thumping noises at the far boundary fence as the fugitive clambered over it. By the time he reached the fence himself, the man had vanished into the misty darkness.

Quincannon slapped mud off his hands and clothing, then returned to the alley fence. Men clogged the rooming house’s rear doorway now, peering out, talking in excited voices; he paid no attention to them. He climbed the fence again, went to where the body lay and knelt beside it.

The dead face that stared up at him, as he had known it would be, was Bonniwell’s.

Other men came cautiously into the alley, one of them carrying a lighted lantern. Quincannon identified himself, showed his Service badge, and then appropriated the lantern and used its light to examine Bonniwell. The little informant’s skull had been shattered, perhaps in the fall and perhaps in his room by some sort of blunt instrument. There was nothing in his pockets that indicated what he might have found out about the koniakers — the knowledge that had doubtless led to his murder. But there
was
something in his clenched right hand, something he had managed to conceal there before being struck down, something the red-haired man had overlooked.

Quincannon pried it loose with some difficulty. It was a wadded piece of butcher’s paper. Shielding it from the rain with his coat, he uncrumpled the paper and read what was written on it.

Whistling Dixon
Silver City, Idaho

Early the next morning, Quincannon was the first to arrive at the Secret Service field office in the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets — one of the rare occasions that anyone had ever come in ahead of Boggs. The small, cramped room smelled of steam heat and Boggs’ Havana cigars; Quincannon opened one of the windows overlooking Mission Street to let in cold, moist air. He had taken two drinks before leaving his rooms, as was his custom every day, and he took another now from his pocket flask — a small one, to keep his thoughts sharp at the center and dull at the edges. Then he sat down at his cluttered desk.

There were three desks in the office, the largest belonging to Boggs; the third was assigned to young Samuel Greenspan, who was now somewhere in the Pacific Northwest following a different lead on the counterfeiting case. Boggs, Greenspan, and Quincannon composed the main staff of the San Francisco office. Boggs, in fact, had been one of the original thirty operatives brought together to form the Service in 1865, more than twenty-five years ago, and had been hand-picked to open this office, one of eleven scattered throughout the country. Before that, he had been a private detective in Washington, D.C., specializing in counterfeiting cases, and a personal friend of both Quincannon’s father and William P. Wood, the first Chief of the Service. Rumor had it that Boggs had also helped to draw up the original list of six general orders that he kept framed on the wall above his desk. He had quoted those articles for so long and so often, verbatim, that Quincannon had them memorized too.

Article 3 had been a constant bone of contention during the ten years Quincannon had worked in the San Francisco office. What he considered justified expenditures seldom coincided with Boggs’ opinion; their arguments had been mostly amiable, like an ongoing chess match each of them looked forward to — Quincannon for the challenge of finding a winning gambit, Boggs because he almost always won. That had been the case, at least, until the incident in Nevada the previous year. Now it was Article 4 that Boggs most often quoted — the continuing fitness and ability of Quincannon as an investigator. But he raised the issue gently, knowing as he did the full story of Katherine Bennett’s death and understanding what it had done to Quincannon. Boggs was not a man who generally yielded to personal feelings — the Service came first and foremost in his life — but he made allowances in this instance, out of a combination of loyalty, friendship, and pity. Quincannon did not really care one way or the other. He walled out Boggs and Boggs’ attitude as he walled out everything and everyone else: using pain for bricks and alcohol for mortar.

In the bottom drawer of his desk were a number of maps of the Western states and territories. He found the one for Idaho and spread it open. Silver City was in the southwestern corner of the state, in the Owyhee Mountains where the barren, unsettled corners of Oregon and Idaho met the equally barren Nevada desert — a silver-mining town that had been the center of a boom in the 1870s and was still a major producer of that precious metal. The closest rail service was at Nampa, just north of Boise, forty miles away; from there an overland trip via stage or horseback was required. Police jurisdiction in the area, Quincannon thought, would be thin and divided, thereby making it a favorite haunt of outlaws from four different states.

He took down the government survey pamphlet on Idaho and read what it contained about Silver City and the Owyhee region. Then, from his wallet, he removed the slip of paper he had found last night in Bonniwell’s hand and studied that again. He was still studying it when Boggs came in.

Boggs was in his mid-fifties, a round, graying man with a bulbous nose; one of his friends had once likened him to a keg of whiskey with the nose as its bung. He favored butternut suits, fashionable square-crown hats, and gold-headed walking sticks in a variety of designs. The stick he carried this morning bore the head of a lion.

His surprise at seeing Quincannon at his desk so early was evident. He said, “Well, this establishes a happy precedent,” and immediately went to the open window and banged it shut. Then he lit one of his Havana panatellas. He liked the office warm, even stuffy, and redolent of cigar smoke.

Quincannon said, “Bonniwell was murdered last night. Bludgeoned to death in his rooming house and the body dropped into the alley below to make it seem an accident.”

Boggs gave him a narrow, glowering look. “How do you know it was murder?”

“I saw the man responsible. He pushed the body through the window just as I was approaching.”

“And?”

“He escaped. I almost caught him.”

“Almost,” Boggs said heavily. “Were you drunk?”

“No. The rain and the muddy ground were to blame, not liquor.”

“Did you have a good look at him?”

“Red-thatched, big, face mindful of a slab of marble. I’ve never seen him before. But I’ll know him if I see him again.”

“Was there anything in Bonniwell’s room?”

“Nothing. The redhead saw to that. But I did find something in Bonniwell’s hand.”

“And that was?”

Quincannon stood and brought the piece of butcher’s paper to Boggs, who squinted at it through the smoke from his cigar.

“Whistling Dixon,” Boggs said. “Someone’s name?”

“No doubt. It means nothing to me.”

“Nor to me.”

Boggs went to his desk, sat down, and lifted out the file on the present case from the bottom drawer. Quincannon stood watching him shuffle through reports from a variety of sources both here in the West and in Washington; samples of the silver eagles and half eagles that had first begun to appear in Oregon, Washington state, and northern California close to a year ago; samples of the ten- and twenty-dollar notes that were now flooding the entire coast, as well as Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Utah, and had been for better than three months; lists of known counterfeiters, coney brokers, and boodle carriers. But it was a slim file, for all of that. Scattered bits of positive information, a welter of speculation and possibilities.

Neither the coins nor the greenbacks bore the style of any known counterfeiter. The ink and the silk-fiber paper that were being used to make the notes were of good quality and therefore would not have come cheap, but their source or sources remained a mystery. None of the counterfeit seemed to have been transported or distributed in a traceable fashion, through known carriers or brokers. The only definite link between the coins and greenbacks had come from a field operative in Seattle, who had managed to trace a man who had shoved $10,000 worth of queer on a local brokerage house. When the operative and the local authorities broke into the man’s rented flat they found a small cache of both eagles and bills. The man himself had not turned up until two days later — floating in Puget Sound with his face shot away. All efforts to identify him had failed. Samuel Greenspan was still working on that angle, still chasing down what his latest telegram referred to as “dead-end leads” in the Seattle area.

Boggs sat back after a time and licked his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Not a whisper of Silver City anywhere in here,” he said, tapping the file. “Did Bonniwell mention the place to you in any context?”

“No,” Quincannon said. “He had met someone who might be a boodle carrier for the gang and hoped to have more information for me last night — that was all.”

“This carrier’s name was Smith, he said?”

“Yes. A phony moniker, of course.”

“Bonniwell didn’t know where Smith was living?”

“Evidently not. He had met the man in a saloon.”

“No lead there, then. Not that we’ll need to worry about that, if Whistling Dixon and Silver City prove meaningful.” Boggs frowned abruptly. “John, could that piece of paper have been planted in Bonniwell’s hand? To put us off on a false scent?”

“There’s a chance of it, yes,” Quincannon said. “But the handwriting is Bonniwell’s — I’ve seen it before — and the paper was clenched so tight in his fingers that I had difficulty prying it loose. If the redhead put it there the grip would not have been half so tight.”

Boggs nodded and sat silent for a time, worrying his cigar. Then he said musingly, “Silver City, eh? Not such a bad place for koniakers to set up shop. Isolated, and not much in the way of law enforcement. Plenty of silver for the coney coins, too.”

“It also fits geographically,” Quincannon said. “Not far from there to Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco. They could make shipment by freight wagon, even by train from Boise under false bills of lading.”

“A risky business, though. Freighting paper and ink, machinery, other supplies into those mountains, then freighting out the queer. Any number of things could go wrong.”

“But nothing has. They’re a cocky bunch, and well-organized — that’s plain. And in the normal course of events, who would suspect a coney operation in such a place?” “Just as you say,” Boggs agreed.

Quincannon said, “I can be on a train leaving Oakland this afternoon, Mr. Boggs. And in Silver City in two days.”

“You can and you will. Use an assumed name and occupation; you’ll need to take every precaution.”

“I had already planned on that.”

Boggs allowed a few seconds to pass and then said, “John ... you know how important this case is. If we don’t put these queers-men out of business, and damned soon, they have the potential to undermine the West’s economic system. The entire
country’s
economic system, if they should step up production and distribution to the East.”

Quincannon said nothing. He knew what was coming.

“I would go to Silver City myself if I could, but I’m needed here. And Greenspan hasn’t enough experience. You’re the only man I can send; next to me, you’re the best operative in this part of the country.” There was no false modesty in Boggs; he knew his talents and was not chary about expressing them to others. “Or you were once,” he went on pointedly. “If this were twelve months ago I would have no qualms. None at all. But now ...”

“Do you expect me to burrow up in Silver City with a keg of whiskey?” Quincannon asked.

“Of course not. But a steady consumption of liquor distorts a man’s judgment, slows his reflexes, makes him prone to mistakes.”

“I won’t make any mistakes.”

“You might if you continue to drink as you have this past year.”

“What is it you want, Mr. Boggs? My promise not to use whiskey while I’m in Silver City?”

“Yes.”

“Then you have it.”

Boggs looked surprised. “On your word of honor as a gentleman and an employee of the Service?”

“On my word of honor.”

This seemed to relieve Boggs and thus put a quick end to what might otherwise have been a lengthy lecture. They spent the next few minutes settling on Quincannon’s assumed name and occupation — Andrew Lyons, patent medicine drummer, an alias and a cover he had used before — and on other matters relative to his mission. Then Quincannon left to return to his rooms, pack a bag, wait for a messenger to deliver a sample case of patent medicine, and then to proceed by ferry to the Oakland railroad depot.

But he made one stop on his way home, at a Market Street saloon not far from the Mint, where he took two whiskeys. He would have another drink in his rooms, and one on the ferry, and one at the depot, and several on the train, and more in Boise and Nampa — and as much as he needed in Silver City. He could not stop drinking there, any more than he could stop here; he had no desire to quit, because sobriety meant confronting the shrieking ghost of Katherine Bennett and that in turn meant madness. He had willfully lied to Boggs and he felt no remorse for having done so. “On my word of honor,” he had said. But there was no honor left to him; he had lost it forever. So what did it matter if he added “liar” to what he already was?

And what he was, plain and simple, was a murderer. The murderer of Katherine Bennett, a twenty-year-old woman innocent of any crime and eight months pregnant, who had died screaming with his bullet in her stomach.