The Plague of Thieves Affair (19 page)

She found her way through the teeming streets to the Tam O'Shanter. Like most of the saloons in Tar Flat, it had a nondescript façade with a half-shaded window next to the entrance to prevent passers-by from peering inside—a typical workingman's watering hole. The sounds of male voices raised in song came from within. She hesitated at the door. She had never been in a saloon such as this, but she knew what to expect from the patrons when she entered. Respectable ladies shunned such resorts; the few members of her sex who didn't were either slovenly alcoholics or women of easy virtue whose favors were available to one and all.

The song that was being lustily sung by a small group of men at the far end of a plain plank bar, something about a Tipperary Bull, continued when Sabina entered, but several other pairs of eyes turned in her direction and remained fixed on her. She stood aloof and expressionless, scanning the bare room with its thick pall of tobacco smoke and strong odors of Irish whiskey and beer. There were some two-score customers seated at a scattering of puncheon tables or spread along the bar. All were men except for a pair of middle-aged slatterns hunched together at a corner table.

The dim, smoky gaslight made it difficult to see faces clearly. Charles the Third didn't seem to be among them—

“And who might you be, darlin'?”

A young man with a shaggy thatch of red hair had come up beside her, a foaming mug in one hand. He'd drained several before this one, from the look of him and his gold-toothed leer. She ignored him after a quick glance, once more searching the room with her eyes.

“How's for company and a glass of lager? Or a wee drop of the crayture?”

Yes, Charles was here! When the Tipperary Bull song ended, from behind the bunched group a spritely and somewhat squawky fiddling commenced—an Irish jig that spurred three of the men into a foot-stomping dance. Charles the Third in his velvet-collared coat was then visible at the far wall, wielding bow and fiddle in an enthusiastic fashion.

Sabina started in his direction. The brash young man said something else and petted her arm; she shook him off, threaded her way across the room past the ogling eyes. Charles was intent on his fiddling; he didn't see her until she was within a few paces of him. His eyes rounded in surprise and he scraped a single false note before recovering and continuing to play until the jig was finished. One of the revelers said something to him, perhaps urging another tune, but Charles shook his head and sidled away along the wall to a table occupied by a ferret-faced individual in a linen cap. An empty chair, the blackthorn stick and empty fiddle case propped against it, and a headless mug of beer indicated this was where he'd been sitting.

He remained upright behind the chair as Sabina approached. His expression was guarded; it was plain that he was not happy to see her, but she detected neither guilt nor guile in his piercing gaze. The group at the bar began another song, this one with ribald lyrics—the singing loud enough so that she had to raise her voice when she spoke.

“So here you are, Uncle Seamus,” she said, stressing the word “uncle.”

The ferret-faced man glanced up at her, but in a uninterested, bleary-eyed fashion before returning his attention to a large glass of whiskey. He and Charles the Third were evidently nothing more than random tablemates in the crowded room.

“This is no place for you, my lass,” Charles said sternly. His affected Irish brogue was almost as thick as that of the clerk at the Dubliner Hotel. “Why have you come?”

“It's urgent that we speak privately, Uncle. Will you please come outside with me?”

He glanced toward the group of singers, his reluctance apparent. But he didn't argue. “As you wish,” he said, and proceeded to case his fiddle and bow, tuck the case under his arm. The rounded knob on the blackthorn stick, Sabina noted when he caught it up, bore no telltale signs of blood or damage.

Once outside on the crowded boardwalk, Charles steered her into the doorway of a closed barbershop. “Explain yourself, Mrs. Carpenter,” he said in peevish, now British-accented tones. “Your presence at the pub not only interrupted my observations but placed my mission in Tar Flat in jeopardy. What is of such urgency?”

“Roland Fairchild. The Baldwin Hotel.”

His only reaction was one of annoyance. “Yes, yes, I went to see the fellow this morning, as I promised you I would.”

“What happened?”

“I made it quite clear to him that my name is Holmes, not Fairchild, that I am in no way related to him, that I have never been in the city of Chicago, and that I have no intention of going there with him or anyone else.”

“And then?”

“And then I left him and his rather shrewish wife and returned to the Dubliner Hotel.”

“Mr. Fairchild was all right when you left?”

“Of course he was. Annoyingly insistent and in something of a temper, but then so was I. I do not take kindly to being insulted.”

“Did you strike him? With your hands or your stick?”

“Strike him? My dear Mrs. Carpenter, what gave you such a notion?”

“Roland Fairchild is dead,” Sabina said. “Brutally bludgeoned to death. Mrs. Fairchild claims you struck the fatal blows with your stick in a sudden frenzy.”

He stared at her with his mouth slightly agape. “A foul lie! I have never committed a frenzied act in my life. Nor even a rash one. I am always in perfect control of myself, no matter what the circumstances. As you well know, I am sworn to uphold the law, not to break it.”

His shock, indignation, and moral outrage all seemed genuine; she would have sworn he wasn't lying, at least not deliberately. Was it possible the act had been so damaging to his already unbalanced mind that he'd blocked it out completely? Possible, yes, but—

“How did you learn of this outrage, pray tell?”

Sabina told him of her police summons and the words that had been exchanged in the Fairchilds' hotel room.

“I am most grateful to you for not revealing my present whereabouts to the police detectives. You must believe, then, that I am innocent of these monstrous charges.”

“I do now, yes.”

“Mrs. Fairchild, therefore, is either delusional or she herself is a murderess of the most vicious, calculating, and brazen variety.”

Sabina had had the same thought. Octavia Fairchild possessed both the temperament and the physical strength to have battered her husband to death in cold blood—likely with his own walking stick, which had then been hidden before the police arrived. Her motive: a combination of hatred and greed. With Roland Fairchild dead and Charles the Third incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane, she stood to inherit the entire Fairchild estate as Roland's next of kin.

“It would seem to be the latter.”

“Indubitably.” Charles's eyes, turned toward Sabina, glowed as if they had been set afire. “So the black widow has ensnared Sherlock Holmes in her web of deceit and made a hunted man of him, has she? The web must therefore be quickly broken, our positions reversed, and the truth will out.”

“How?”

“That is yet to be determined. Come, let us walk while I cogitate.”

They had gone half a block when Charles muttered, “I dislike playing the fiddle, though I must say I am rather adept at it. I much prefer the violin. Mendelssohn's ‘Songs Without Words,' the ‘Barcarolle' from Offenbach's
Tales of Hoffman.
Do you know that I have a genuine Stradivarius in my London flat? I acquired it from a broker in Tottenham Court Road for a mere fifty-five shillings.”

The skewed way in which Charles the Third's mind worked was a constant source of amazement to Sabina. “What does any of that have to do with—”

“Cogitation takes many forms, ofttimes requiring digression in order to bring fruition.” Which sounded like gibberish to Sabina, but she made no comment. They proceeded to the end of the block in silence. Then Charles halted abruptly and demanded, “Were you permitted to view Mr. Fairchild's corpse?”

“No. It was just being taken away when I arrived at the hotel.”

“Did the police reveal to you the number of times the victim was coshed?”

“They did. His skull was crushed in four places. Mrs. Fairchild claims she was also struck a glancing blow when she began screaming.”

“Did she, now. Were there any marks upon her person to corroborate her claim?”

“Only a small gash on her cheek.”

“How small?”

“Two inches or so, below the left cheekbone.”

“Was her clothing torn or bloodstained?”

“The dressing gown she wore was unblemished. She must have changed and then hidden her bloodstained clothing along with the weapon she used. The police had little enough reason to search the rooms, given her testimony.”

Charles the Third ruminated in silence for another quarter of a block. Then, his eyes burning even brighter, he gave a sharp nod, tapped his blackthorn smartly on the boardwalk, and said, “The strategy is now clear. You and I must once more work together in consort, daringly this time.”

“How do you propose we do that?

“Elementary, dear lady. Our first and most important course of action is a visit to the one place the authorities will never expect to find me.”

“And that is?”

“The city morgue.”

 

20

QUINCANNON

The eight
A.M.
ferry for Sausalito left on schedule, but the SF&NP train for Los Alegres was twenty minutes late. Typical railroad inefficiency, though the delay was minimal enough.

On the train, Quincannon shared a seat with an undersized drummer of drug sundries. (“Everything from female complaint medicine to prophylactics,” the little man said confidentially, tapping his sample case.) The drummer, as gregarious as most of his breed, had spent twenty years traveling the counties north of San Francisco; when he learned that his seatmate knew relatively little about the Los Alegres area, he offered a font of local anecdotes and historical detail. Quincannon paid attention to some of it, asking questions now and then, because having a useful amount of information about an unfamiliar place was always beneficial.

There were six hatcheries in Los Alegres, of which the Pioneer was the second largest. Dozens of small chicken farms thrived in the outlying areas; if the one belonging to a widow named Ella was one of them, the drummer had no knowledge of it. The town had better than fifty saloons—“drinking hells,” the salesman called them, adding unnecessarily that he himself was a temperance man—and the nearby hills were “riddled with bootlegging stills.” Nonetheless, he admitted, the town was “mostly a respectable place. Haven't been but half a dozen murders and one hanging since it was incorporated.”

A good horse could be rented at Gilford's Livery on Main Street above Steamer Basin. And if Quincannon was interested in “letting his hair down some,” why, there was a spot out near a place called the Haystacks that was run by a right friendly woman named Belle …

The time passed swiftly enough, the drummer's droning voice and the rhythmic clacking of steel on steel putting Quincannon into a half doze. But he was on his feet as soon as the engineer whistled down for the Los Alegres station, interrupting one of the salesman's monologues with a hasty word of parting. When the locomotive hissed to a stop he was the first passenger off the cars.

The day was cold and overcast here, as it had been in the city. Green hills stretched out to the east, beyond miles of open farmland. To the west he could see the brown line of the estuary, its banks lined with feed and grain mills, and the town proper beyond.

He boarded a horse-drawn cable car that took him across the estuary to Main Street. It was a four-block walk to the Pioneer Hatchery, a winged brick building on a corner lot. From the clerk he spoke to he learned that one of their former suppliers of eggs were the Draycotts, Samuel and Ella, whose farm was several miles east. Former? Samuel had died some three months before and the farm had fallen on hard times; that was all the clerk would say. Never having been there, he was unable to provide adequate directions.

Quincannon considered a visit to Lincoln Evans, the town constable, and decided it was premature. Instead he found his way to Gilford's Livery, opposite a city park. This was the right choice, for not only did the hostler have a good horse for hire—a lean and sturdy claybank—but he knew the Draycotts and was willing to share his knowledge without prying into Quincannon's reasons for asking.

“Sam and me were friends,” he said. “I used to go out to his place all the time to play euchre. Fine man, Sam. Shocked me when I heard he died. Caught the grippe and it turned into pneumonia just about overnight.”

“How has Mrs. Draycott been bearing up?”

“Better than you'd expect. First all the troubles they had with the farm, then Sam up and dying so sudden. Plenty of women would've took to their beds. But Miz Draycott, she's a strong one.”

“What sort of troubles?”

“Whole string of 'em. Chicken disease wiped out more than a hundred of their laying hens. Been real dry around here for a year now, and they had a poor alfalfa crop. Then the barn caught fire and burned down. Some folks been saying the place is jinxed, probably why it hasn't been sold by now, but I don't hold with that kind of talk.”

“The property is for sale, then?”

“Ever since Sam died. More than fair price, too.”

Quincannon said, “I'm looking for a man named Corby, Elias Corby, who may be interested in buying it. A bookkeeper for Golden State Steam Beer in San Francisco. Would you happen to know him?”

“Corby, Corby. No, the name don't ring any bells.”

Quincannon described him, but the description rang no bells for Gilford, either. But then he said, “San Francisco, you say? Ella Draycott's brother lives down there, now I think of it. Teamster, makes his living driving a beer wagon. Mebbe that's how this Corby fella heard about the Draycott farm being for sale.”