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Authors: Bill Pronzini

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She was also Evan Gaunt.

He found that out five seconds later, when Sabina boldly walked up and tore the bonnet off, revealing the short-haired male head and clean-shaven face hidden beneath.

Her actions so surprised Gaunt that he had no time to do anything but swipe at her with one arm, a blow that she nimbly dodged. Then he fumbled inside the reticule he carried and drew out a small-caliber pistol; at the same time, he commenced to run.

Sabina shouted, Quincannon shouted, someone else let out a thin scream; there was a small scrambling panic on the platform. But it lasted no more than a few seconds, and without a shot being fired. Gaunt was poorly schooled on the mechanics of running while garbed in women's clothing: the traveling dress's long skirt tripped him before he reached the station office. He went down in a tangle of arms, legs, petticoats, and assorted other garments that he had padded up and tied around his torso to create the illusion of pudginess. He still clutched the pistol when Quincannon reached him, but one well-placed kick and it went flying. Quincannon then dropped down on Gaunt's chest with both knees, driving the wind out of him in a grunting hiss. Another well-placed blow, this one to the jaw with Quincannon's meaty fist, put an end to the skirmish.

Sheriff Hoover, his deputies, Mr. Bridges, and the Limited's passengers stood gawping down at the now half-disguised and unconscious fugitive. Hoover was the first to speak. He said in tones of utter amazement, "Well, I'll be damned."

Which were Quincannon's sentiments exactly.

"So that's why he assaulted Old Dan in the baggage car," Bridges said a short while later. Evan Gaunt had been carted off in steel bracelets to the Barstow jail, and Sabina, Quincannon, Hoover, and the conductor were grouped together in the station office for final words before the Desert Limited continued on its way. "He was after a change of women's clothing."

Sabina nodded. "He devised his plan as soon as he recognized John and realized his predicament. A quick thinker, our Mr. Gaunt."

"The stolen clothing was hidden inside the carpetbag he carried into the lavatory?"

"It was. He climbed out the window and over the tops of the smoker and the lounge car to the first-class Pullman, waited until the women's lavatory was empty, climbed down through that window, locked the door, washed and shaved off his mustache and sideburns, dressed in the stolen clothing, put on rouge and powder that he'd also pilfered, and then disposed of his own clothes and carpetbag through the lavatory window."

"And when he came out to take a seat in the forward day coach," Quincannon said ruefully, "I nearly knocked him down. If only I had. It would've saved us all considerable difficulty."

Hoover said, "Don't chastise yourself, Mr. Quincannon. You had no way of suspecting Gaunt had disguised himself as a woman."

"That's not quite true," Sabina said. "Actually, John did have a way of knowing—the same way I discovered the masquerade, though at first notice I considered it a coincidence. Through simple familiarity."

"Familiarity with what?" Quincannon asked.

"John, you're one of the best detectives I've known, but honestly, there are times when you're also one of the least observant. Tell me, what did I wear on the trip out to Arizona? What color and style of outfit? What type of hat?"

"I don't see what that has to do with -" Then, as the light dawned, he said in a small voice, "Oh."

"That's right," Sabina said, smiling. "Mr. Gaunt plundered the wrong woman's grip in the baggage car. The gray serge traveling dress and Langtry bonnet he was wearing are mine."

Medium Rare
 

T
he night was dark, cold; most of San Francisco was swaddled in a cloak of fog and low-hanging clouds that turned streetlights and house lights into ghostly smears. The bay, close by this residential district along lower Van Ness Avenue, was invisible and the foghorns that moaned on it had a lonely, lost-soul sound. Bitter sharp, the wind nipped at Quincannon's cheeks, fluttered his thick piratical beard as he stepped down from the hansom. A sudden gust almost tore off his derby before he could clamp it down.

A fine night for spirits, he thought wryly. The liquid kind, to be sure—except that he had been a temperance man for several years now. And the supernatural kind, in which he believed not one whit.

He helped Sabina alight from the coach, turned to survey the house at which they were about to call. It was a modest gingerbread affair, its slender front yard enclosed by a black-iron picket fence. Rented, not purchased, as he had discovered earlier in the day. Gaslight flickered behind its lace-curtained front windows. No surprise there. Professor Vargas would have been careful to select a house that had not been wired for electricity; the sometimes spectral trembles produced by gas flame were much more suited to his purposes.

On the gate was a discreet bronze sign whose raised letters gleamed faintly in the out-spill from a nearby street-lamp. Sabina went to peer at the sign as Quincannon paid and dismissed the hack driver. When he joined her he, too, bent for a look.

 

UNIFIED COLLEGE OF THE ATTUNED IMPULSES

Prof. A. Vargas Spirit Medium and Counselor

 

"Bah. Hogwash," Quincannon said grumpily, straightening. "How can any sane person believe in such hokum?"

"Self-deception is the most powerful kind."

He made a derisive noise in his throat, a sound Sabina had once likened to the rumbling snarl of a mastiff.

She said, "If you enter growling and wearing that ferocious glare, you'll give the game away. We're here as potential devotees, not ardent skeptics."

"Devotees of claptrap."

"John, Mr. Buckley is paying us handsomely for this evening's work. Very handsomely, if you recall."

Quincannon recalled; his scowl faded and was replaced by a smile only those who knew him well would recognize as greed-based. Money, especially in large sums, was what soothed his savage breast. In fact, it was second only in his admiration to Sabina herself.

He glanced sideways at her. She looked even more fetching than usual this evening, dressed as she was in an outfit of black silk brocade, her raven hair topped by a stylish hat trimmed in white China silk. His mouth watered. A fine figure of a woman, Sabina Carpenter. A man engaged in the time-honored profession of detective couldn't ask for a more decorous — or a more intelligent and capable — partner. He could, however, ask for more than a straightforward business arrangement and an occasional night on the town followed by a chaste handshake at her door. Not getting it, not even coming close to getting it, was his greatest defeat, his greatest frustration. Why, he had never even been inside Sabina's Russian Hill
flat .
. . .

"John."

"Mmm?"

"Will you please stop staring at me that way."

"What way, my dear?"

"Like a cat at a bowl of cream. We've no time for dallying; we're late as it is. Mr. Buckley and the others will be waiting to begin the séance."

Quincannon took her arm, chastely, and led her through the gate. As they mounted the front stairs, he had a clear vision of Cyrus Buckley's bank check and a clear auditory recollection of the financier's promise of the check's twin should they successfully debunk Professor Vargas and his Unified College of the Attuned Impulses.

Buckley was a reluctant follower of spiritualism, in deference to his wife, who believed wholeheartedly in communication with the disembodied essences of the dead and such mediumistic double-talk as "spiritual vibrations of the positive and negative forces of material and astral planes." She continually sought audiences with their daughter, Bernice, the childhood victim of diphtheria, a quest which had led them to a succession of mediums and cost her husband "a goodly sum." Professor Vargas was the latest and by far the most financially threatening of these paranormal spirit-summoners. A recent arrival in San Francisco—from Chicago, he claimed—Vargas evidently had a more clever, extensive, and convincing repertoire of "spirit wonders" than any other medium Buckley had encountered, and of course his fees were exorbitant as a result.

The Buckleys had attended one of Vargas's sittings a few days ago—a dark séance in a locked room in his rented house. The professor had ordered himself securely tied to his chair and then proceeded to invoke a dazzling array of bell-ringing, table-tipping, spirit lights, automatic writings, ectoplasmic manifestations, and other phenomena. As his finale, he announced that he was being unfettered by his friendly spirit guide and guardian, Angkar, and the rope that had bound him was heard to fly through the air just before the lights were turned up; the rope, when examined, was completely free of the more than ten knots which had been tied into it. This supernatural flimflam had so impressed Margaret Buckley that she had returned the next day without her husband's knowledge and arranged for another sitting — tonight and a series of private audiences at which Vargas promised to establish and maintain contact with the shade of the long-gone Bernice. Mrs. Buckley, in turn and in gratitude, was prepared to place unlimited funds in the medium's eager hands. "Endow the whole damned Unified College of the Attuned Impulses," was the way Buckley put it. Nothing he'd said or done could change his wife's mind. The only thing that would, he was convinced, was a public unmasking of the professor as the knave and charlatan he surely was. Hence, his visit to the Market Street offices of Carpenter & Quincannon, Professional Detective Services.

Quincannon had no doubt he and Sabina could accomplish the task. They had both had dealings with phony psychics before, Sabina when she was with the Pinkertons in Denver and on two occasions since they had opened their joint agency here. But Cyrus Buckley wasn't half so sanguine. "You'll not have an easy time of it," he'd warned them. "Professor Vargas is a rare bird and rare birds are not easily plucked. A medium among mediums."

Medium rare, is he?
Quincannon thought as he twisted the doorbell handle
. Not for long. He'll not only be plucked but done to a turn before this night is over.

The door was opened by a tiny woman of indeterminate age, dressed in a flowing ebon robe. Her skin was very white, her lips a bloody crimson in contrast; sleek brown hair was pulled tight around her head and fastened with a jeweled barrette. Around her neck hung a silver amulet embossed with some sort of cabalistic design. "I am Annabelle," she said in sepulchral tones. "You are Mr. and Mrs. John Quinn?"

"We are," Quincannon said, wishing wistfully that it were true. Mr. and Mrs. John Quincannon, not Quinn. But Sabina had refused even to adopt his name for the evening's play-acting, insisting on the shortened version instead.

Annabelle took his greatcoat and Sabina's cape, hung them on a coat tree. According to Buckley, she was Professor Vargas's "psychic assistant." If she lived here with him, Quincannon mused, she was likely also his wife or mistress. Seeking communion with the afterworld did not preclude indulging in the pleasure of the earthly sphere, evidently; he had never met a medium who professed to be celibate and meant it.

"Follow me, please."

They trailed her down a murky hallway into a somewhat more brightly lighted parlor. Here they found two men dressed as Quincannon was, in broadcloth and fresh linen, and two women in long fashionable dresses; one of the men was Cyrus Buckley. But it was the room's fifth occupant who commanded immediate attention.

Even Quincannon, who was seldom impressed by physical stature, had to grudgingly admit that Professor A. Vargas was a rather imposing gent. Tall, dark-complected, with a curling black moustache and piercing, almost hypnotic eyes. Like his psychic assistant, he wore a long flowing black robe and a silver amulet. On the middle fingers of each hand were two enormous glittering rings of intricate design, both of which bore hieroglyphics similar to those which adorned the amulets.

He greeted his new guests effusively, pressing his lips to the back of Sabina's hand and then pumping Quincannon's in an iron grip. "I am Professor Vargas. Welcome, New Ones, welcome to the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses." His voice was rich, stentorian. "Mr. and Mrs. Quinn, is it not? Friends of the good Mr. Buckley? Your first sitting but I pray not your last. You are surrounded by many anxious friends in spirit-life who desire to communicate with you once you have learned more of the laws which govern their actions. Allow your impulses to attune with theirs and your spirit friends will soon identify themselves and speak with you as in earth-life . . . ."

There was more, but Quincannon shut his ears to it.

More introductions followed the medium's windy come-on. Quincannon shook hands with red-faced, mutton-chopped Cyrus Buckley and his portly, gray-haired wife, Margaret; with Oliver Cobb, a prominent Oakland physician who bore a rather startling resemblance to the "literary hangman," Ambrose Bierce; and with Grace Cobb, the doctor's much younger and attractive wife. Attractive, that is, if a man preferred an overly buxom and overly rouged blonde to a svelte brunette of Sabina's cunning dimensions. The Cobbs, like the Buckleys, had attended the professor's previous séance.

Margaret Buckley looked upon Vargas with the rapt gaze of a supplicant in the presence of a saint. Dr. Cobb was also a true believer, judging from the look of eager anticipation he wore. The blond Mrs. Cobb seemed to find the medium fascinating as well, but the glint in her eye was much more predatory than devout. Buckley appeared ill at ease, as if he wished the evening's business was already finished; he kept casting glances at Quincannon which the detective studiously ignored.

BOOK: Sleuths
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