The Plague of Thieves Affair (24 page)

“Something in it, yes.”

Slick Fingers shook his head, as if the proposition had rattled his senses. “Geez,” he said, “I never figured you for a thief.”

Quincannon winced, recalling his righteous thought in Caleb Lansing's rooms that he was many things but a thief wasn't one of them. “Extenuating circumstances demand it,” he said, as much in self-defense as explanation to Rigsby. A man was not a thief, after all, if he had no intention of realizing illegal profits from the commission of an unlawful act.

“What is it you want swiped?”

“One or two pieces of paper.” Assuming the formula was still in Cyrus Drinkwater's office safe, but the odds were good that it was. The old reprobate had no real cause yet to have moved it elsewhere, nor to have had it copied. Though he might well do one or both when he got wind of Elias Corby's arrest. Immediate action, therefore, was imperative.

“No money or other valuables?”

“Just the paper or papers, nothing more.”

“You mind if I ask why?”

“I told you. To right a wrong.”

“No, I mean why you picked me for the job?”

“Because you're the best box man in California. And a closemouthed fellow when a job's done and a proper price paid for it.”

The same sort of avarice that had been in his wife's eyes sparked the cracksman's. “How much?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Quincannon said. He could afford to be generous; James Willard would be the one to foot the bill.

The figure made Slick Fingers suck in his breath. “That's a lot of lettuce. You must want them papers pretty bad.”

“I do, in order to close a case. Well? Is the fee enough to put you back in the game?”

“I dunno, I got to think about it. What kind of box is it?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? Well, Jesus, Mr. Quincannon…”

“Does it matter? You've been known to brag that there's not a safe made you can't crack.”

“Yeah, sure, that's true,” Slick Fingers said. “But I got to have some idea what I'm dealing with. If it's one of these so-called burglarproof boxes they're manufacturing nowadays, likely you got to blow the door to open it up. That takes a lot of work. And I don't work with soup, you know that.”

“I wouldn't want it blown open no matter what kind it is. Given the location, this job has to be done with as little noise as possible. And without damage to the safe.”

“What's the location?”

“An office in a building near Civic Center.”

“Whoa.” Slick Fingers held up both hands, palms outward. “Office building, Civic Center … public places like that are too hard to get into.”

“Not for me.”

“You mean you got a key?”

“I don't need a key. I'll have no trouble getting us in.”

“Us? You'd be there, too?”

“The entire time,” Quincannon said. “Inside the building, inside the office. All you have to do is open the safe.”

“If I can.” Rigsby scratched his long fingers through the remaining few strands of hair clinging to his scalp. Then he said musingly, half to himself, “Downtown office … so it won't be an old box, the kind you can crack with a hammer. A hammer's out anyway … no noise, no damage. Won't need to take my kit, just a dark lantern and a stethoscope, and hope it's a box with a rotary combination dial.”

A cracksman's kit, Quincannon knew, was a small valise packed with a carpenter's hand brace, the drill bits known as “dan” and “stems,” a ball-peen hammer, and a pinch bar, among other items. He said, “Most safes have rotary combination dials, don't they?”

“Most.”

“Then chances are this one will, too. And opening one of that type by ear and touch is your specialty. Slick Fingers Sam Rigsby, the best lock manipulator in the state.”

“Hell, in the entire West.”

“Are you in, then?”

“When's the job to be?”

“Tonight. Late.”

“Tonight! Does it have to be so soon?”

“Yes. There's no time to waste.”

Slick Fingers ruminated in silence for a clutch of seconds. Then he said, “Suppose the box is one I can't crack by taking the high road.” Meaning his specialty method of lock manipulation; the use of tools and brute strength was considered the “low road” in safecracking. “Do I still get the two-fifty?”

“You do.”

“Guaranteed? Word of honor?”

“Guaranteed. Word of honor.”

The promise made up the cracksman's mind for him. “All right, Mr. Quincannon,” he said. “You talked me into it. I just hope I ain't gonna live to regret it.”

So did Quincannon.

*   *   *

Three
A.M.

Neither vehicle nor pedestrian was abroad on the block of Turk Street where Cyrus Drinkwater's office was located. A sharp night wind blew scraps of paper like will-o'-the-wisps along the empty passage. Electroliers cut pale strips of light out of the darkness, but the puddles of illumination on the cobblestones and sidewalks only deepened the shadows around them. All the windows in the two-story brick building were dark. Those in Drinkwater's office above appeared to be curtained or blinded, though Quincannon couldn't be absolutely sure from street level.

He went to work on the door latch with his lock picks, Slick Fingers beside him in the doorway keeping watch for a beat patrolman or anyone else who might happen along. No one did in the two minutes it took Quincannon to snap the last of the tumblers into place. He opened the door, led the way quickly inside the small lobby.

There was a single elevator, he recalled, in the left-hand wall and a staircase at the rear. He flicked a lucifer alight with his thumbnail, shielding the flare with his other hand, and used it to guide the way to the stairs before blowing it out. They climbed to the second floor in total blackness. Once there, he whispered, “To the right,” and turned in that direction, Slick Fingers close behind him. Drinkwater's office, one of six in the building, took up the far right-hand corner, its windows overlooking both Turk and Hyde.

A few strides clear of the stairs, Quincannon halted and fired another match, again shielding the glow with his free hand. “Light your lantern here,” he said.

Rigsby went to one knee, took the small dark lantern from under his coat, and opened the shutter. Quincannon quickly lit the wick, shook out the lucifer as Slick Fingers lowered the shutter again—not quite all the way, allowing a sliver of a beam. By its glow they went ahead to Drinkwater's door.

It took Quincannon even less time to pick the lock here. Before they entered, Rigsby completely shuttered the lantern's eye. The darkness inside the outer office was complete, which meant that the windows were fully covered. He said as much to Slick Fingers, who then reopened the lantern to a slit.

The safe was not in this room; Quincannon would have noticed it on his previous visit if it were. The door to Drinkwater's private sanctum was to the left, beyond a rail divider and his secretary's desk. It wasn't locked. Again, before entering, Slick Fingers extinguished his light—a precaution that once more proved to be unnecessary. The Hyde Street windows were also covered. Drinkwater had a fetish for the color maroon; the drapes and deep pile carpet were all of that dark red shade.

The safe was not positioned in plain view, but it took Rigsby, whose long experience had given him a sixth sense not unlike that of a hound on the scent, less than a minute to locate it—hidden behind a pair of doors beneath shelves on the wall next to a massive cherrywood desk. He opened the lantern's eye halfway in order to examine it. It had a rotary dial, Quincannon was relieved to see. Slick Fingers peered at the manufacturer's name in gold leaf on its black-painted front, then rotated the dial several times before turning his head and offering up a snaggle-toothed grin.

“Piece of cake,” he said.

Quincannon watched him take a doctor's stethoscope from the pocket of his coat, fit the earpieces into his jumbo ears, place the chestpiece against the safe door just above the dial, and then set to work. Lock manipulation was a simple enough process in principle: the lock was used against itself in order to discover the combination, by feel and by the sound of the tumblers falling into place in proper sequence as the dial was slowly rotated. But it took a highly skilled cracksman with a clear understanding of the mechanical actions of locks, plus years of practice, to do the job properly and swiftly.

It took Slick Fingers less than fifteen minutes to crack this box. In his high-road world, the job had indeed been a piece of cake.

As soon as he had the door open, Quincannon knelt beside him and began to sift through the contents. The safe contained all sorts of documents, a banded packet of greenbacks—and in an unmarked manila envelope, two pages of hen-scratch jottings that were clearly the ingredients and measurements for the manufacture of steam beer.

“That what you're after, Mr. Quincannon?”

“It is.”

Slick Fingers looked longingly at the sheaf of greenbacks. “Sure there's nothing else you want?”

“I'm sure. Close the safe now and we'll be on our way.”

They encountered no trouble leaving the building or the neighborhood. On Market Street, before they parted to take early-morning trolleys in opposite directions, Quincannon reassured Rigsby that he would be paid his $250 on the morrow, and made the cracksman even happier by adding that he would also receive a bonus for a job well done. With Otto Ackermann's recipe safely in his possession, Quincannon could afford—or rather, James Willard could afford—to be magnanimous.

On his way home for a few hours of much-needed sleep, Quincannon's spirits were high. The irony in tonight's successful mission was a pleasure to contemplate. He might not be able to prove that Cyrus Drinkwater was behind the original theft of the recipe, but once the old scoundrel discovered it was missing from his safe, neither would he be able to prove that Quincannon was responsible. Ordinarily such a potential stalemate would have meant the job he'd been hired to do was left unfinished. Not so in this case. He had solved the murders of Otto Ackermann and Caleb Lansing, ranged far in order to yaffle the perpetrator, and recovered the stolen property which he would soon place in James Willard's hands.

No detective could have done more to satisfy his client, earn his fee, and serve the interests of justice.

 

25

SABINA

The envelope was mixed in with several others that had been pushed through the slot in the agency door. But it had not been delivered by the postman; it bore no stamp or address, only Sabina's name. The penmanship told her immediately whom it was from.

At her desk she slit open the envelope. Inside were two sheets of good-quality vellum paper, both completely filled with writing in the same familiar Spencerian hand.

My dear Mrs. Carpenter:

I must apologize for my failure to return after summoning the police yesterday, thus leaving you and Mr. Boone the task of rendering explanations. You may have considered my disappearance, as it were, to be a cowardly act, and in a sense so it was. However, I simply could not countenance a long interrogation in which my lineage would have yet again been questioned by police officials and representatives of the legal profession. The possibility that I might be forcibly shipped off to Chicago and entangled in a pointless legal rumpus over the estate of a stranger was also a factor in my decision. Protection of both my good name and my good works must take precedence over all other considerations.

For the same reason, I have concluded that I must with all dispatch finally take my leave of your fair city. The publicity I have received regarding this odious Fairchild affair, as well as that of the incident at the Rayburn Gallery, makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to continue my private inquiries here. By the time you receive this missive, I shall have pulled up stakes, as you Americans so quaintly put it, and sped upon my way.

I do not yet know my next destination. Perhaps I shall return directly to England and my Baker Street lodgings, put the good Doctor Watson's mind at rest as to my welfare, and openly resume my practice as a consulting detective. On the other hand, perhaps I shall take up temporary residence in another American city (though not, of course, Chicago), or in a European metropolis such as Paris or Vienna.

My only regret in leaving so precipitately is that I cannot inform you of my decision, gaze one last time upon your charming personage, and bid you adieu in person. Perhaps this letter, too, is an act of cowardice, but it nonetheless prevents any attempt on your part to dissuade me, as well as any recriminations and tears. We must both console ourselves with the possibility, however remote at this point in time, that I will return to San Francisco one day in future and have the distinct pleasure of once again joining forces with you and the estimable Mr. Quincannon.

Until that day, should it ever come, I wish you continued success in our shared and noble profession, good health, and safe passage wherever you may go.

With respect and admiration,

Your obedient servant,

S. Holmes, Esq.

Sabina set the letter down. Tears! As if she would shed even one over the sudden departure of a delusional individual who was neither British nor a famous detective. Or console herself with the thought that she might be subjected to his interfering ways again! The unmitigated gall of the man, making such ridiculous statements after having left her to the none-too-tender mercies of Lieutenant McGinn and stuffy Harold Stennett, who had been summoned to act on behalf of the Fairchild family's attorneys, in order to pull the addlepate's chestnuts out of the fire. She was glad he was gone, glad he would never again pop up unexpectedly at some inopportune time to make her life and her work more difficult with his foolish disguises, his insufferable ego.