The Bughouse Affair (5 page)

“Did he, now? Mr. Truesdale, the banker?”

“That’s right. Your neighbor across the carriageway.”

“A mistaken assumption. This is not my home, and I have only just this evening met Mr. Truesdale.”

“Then who are you?”

“All in good time. This is hardly the proper place for introductions.”

“Introductions be damned,” Quincannon growled. “While we stand here confabbing, the thief is getting away.”

“Has already gotten away, I should think. If you’re what you say you are and not a thief yourself.” The hard object prodded his backbone. “Move along to the house and we’ll have the straight of things in no time.”

“Bah,” Quincannon said, but he moved along.

There was a flagstone terrace across the rear of the house, and when they reached it he could see people in evening clothes moving around inside a well-lighted parlor. His captor took him to a pair of French doors, ordered him to step inside. Activity in the room halted when they entered. Six pairs of eyes, three male and three female, stared at Quincannon and the man behind him. One of the couples, both plump and middle-aged, was Samuel Truesdale and his wife. The others were strangers.

The parlor was large, handsomely furnished, dominated by a massive grand piano. On the piano bench lay a well-used violin and bow—the source of the passages from Mendelssohn that had been played earlier, no doubt. A wood fire blazed on the hearth. The combination of the fire and steam heat made the room too warm, stuffy. Quincannon’s benumbed cheeks began to tingle almost immediately.

The first to break the frozen tableau was a small, round-faced gent with Lincolnesque whiskers and ears that resembled the handles on a pickle jar. He stepped forward and to one side so that he faced the Englishman. If the fellow was an Englishman. Quincannon was not at all sure the cultured accent was genuine.

“Where did this man come from?” the large-eared gent demanded. “Who is he?”

“On my stroll in the garden I spied him climbing over the fence. He claims to be a detective on the trail of a pannyman. Housebreaker, that is.”

“I don’t claim to be a detective,” Quincannon said sourly. “I
am
a detective. Quincannon’s the name, John Quincannon.”

“Doctor Caleb Axminster,” the large-eared fellow said. “What’s this about a housebreaker?”

The exchange drew the others closer in a tight little group. It also brought the owner of the English voice out to where Quincannon could see him for the first time. He wasn’t such-a-much. Tall, excessively lean, with a thin, hawklike nose and a prominent chin. In one hand he carried a blackthorn walking stick, held midway along the shaft. Quincannon scowled. It must have been the stick, not a pistol, that had poked his spine and allowed the scruff to escape.

“I’ll ask you again,” Dr. Axminster said. “What’s all this about a housebreaker?”

“I chased him here from a neighbor’s property.” Quincannon shifted his gaze to the plump banker. He was not a man to mince words, even at the best of times. “Yours, Mr. Truesdale.”

Mrs. Truesdale gasped. Her husband’s face lost its healthy color. “Mine? Good Lord, man, do you mean to say we’ve been robbed?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Of what, do you know? What was stolen?”

“A question only you can answer.”

“Little enough, I pray. My wife’s jewelry and several stock certificates are kept in the safe in my office, but the thief couldn’t have gotten into it. It’s burglarproof.”

No safe, in Quincannon’s experience, was burglarproof. But he allowed the statement to pass without comment, asking instead, “Do you also keep cash on hand?”

“In my desk … a hundred dollars or so in greenbacks…” Truesdale shook his head; he seemed dazed. “You were on my property?”

“I was, with every good intention. Waiting outside.”

“Waiting? I don’t understand.”

“To catch the burglar in the act.”

“But how did you know…?”

“Detective work, sir. Detective work.”

The fifth man in the room had been silent to this point, one hand plucking at his middle as if he were suffering the effects of too much rich food. He was somewhat younger than the others, forty or so, dark-eyed, clean-shaven, with a nervous tic on one cheek; his most prominent feature was a misshapen knob of red-veined flesh, like a partially collapsed balloon, that seemed to hang unattractively between his eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He aimed a brandy snifter at Quincannon, and said in aggrieved tones, “Thieves roaming everywhere in the city these days, like a plague, and you had the opportunity to put one out of commission and failed. If you’re such a good detective, why didn’t you catch the burglar? What happened?”

“An unforeseen occurrence over which I had no control.” Quincannon glared sideways at his gaunt captor. “I would have chased him down if this man hadn’t accosted me.”

“Accosted?” The Englishman arched an eyebrow. “Dear me, hardly that. I had no way of knowing you weren’t a prowler.”

Mrs. Truesdale was tugging at her husband’s arm. “Samuel, shouldn’t we return home and find out what was stolen?”

“Yes, yes, right away.”

“Margaret,” Axminster said to one of the other women, a slender graying brunette with patrician features, “find James and have him drive the Truesdales.”

The woman nodded and left the parlor with the banker and his wife in tow.

The doctor said then, “This is most distressing,” but he didn’t sound distressed. He sounded eager, as if he found the situation stimulating. He produced a paper sack from his pocket, popped a horehound drop into his mouth. “But right up your alley, eh, Mr. Holmes?”

The Englishman bowed.

“And yours, Andrew. Eh? The law and all that.”

“Hardly,” the man with the drinker’s nose said. “You know I handle civil, not criminal, cases. Why don’t you introduce us, Caleb? Unless Mr. Quincannon already knows who I am.”

Quincannon decided he didn’t particularly like the fellow. Or Axminster, for that matter. Or the gaunt Englishman. In fact, he did not like anybody tonight, not even himself very much.

“Certainly,” the doctor said. “This is Andrew Costain, Mr. Quincannon, and his wife, Penelope. And this most distinguished gentleman from far-off England…”

“Costain?” Quincannon interrupted. “Offices on Geary Street, residence near South Park?”

“By God,” Costain said, “he
does
know me. But if we’ve met, sir, I don’t remember the time or place. In court, was it?”

“We haven’t met anywhere. Your name happens to be on the list.”

“List?” Penelope Costain said. She was a slender, gray-eyed, brown-curled woman some years younger than her husband—handsome enough, although she appeared too aloof and wore too much rouge and powder for Quincannon’s taste. “What list?”

“Of actual and potential burglary victims, all of whom own valuables insured by the Great Western Insurance Company.”

This information seemed to make her husband even more dyspeptic. He rubbed nervously at his middle again as he asked, “Where did such a list come from?”

“That remains to be determined. Likely from someone affiliated or formerly affiliated with Great Western Insurance.”

“And Truesdale’s name is also on the list, I suppose. That’s what brought you to his home tonight.”

“Among other things,” Quincannon said.

Axminster sucked the horehound drop, his brow screwed up in thought. “Quincannon, John Quincannon … why, of course! I knew I’d heard the name before. Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. Yes, and your partner is a woman.”

“A woman,” the man called Holmes said. “How curious.”

Quincannon skewered him with a sharp eye. “What’s curious about it? Both Mrs. Carpenter and her late husband were valued operatives of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.”

“Upon my soul. In England, you know, it would be extraordinary for a woman to assume the profession of consulting detective, the more so to be taken in as a partner in a private inquiry agency.”

“She wasn’t ‘taken in,’ as you put it. Our partnership was by mutual arrangement.”

“Ah.”

Quincannon demanded, “What do you know of private detectives, in England or anywhere?”

“He knows a great deal, as a matter of fact,” Axminster said with relish. He asked the Englishman, “You have no objection if I reveal your identity to a colleague?”

“None, inasmuch as you have already revealed it to your other guests.”

The doctor beamed. He said as if presenting a member of British royalty, “My honored houseguest, courtesy of a mutual acquaintance in the south of France, is none other than Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221 B Baker Street, London, England.”

Sherlock Holmes, my eye, Quincannon thought. This must be the fellow Bitter Bierce had written about in his column in this morning’s
Examiner
—the crackbrain posing as the legendary detective.

He said, “Holmes, eh? Not according to Mr. Ambrose Bierce.”

Axminster made sputtering noises. “Bierce is a poisonous fool. You can’t believe a word the man writes.”

“I assure you, Mr. Quincannon, that I am indeed Sherlock Holmes.” The Englishman bowed. “At your service, sir.”

“I’ve already had a sampling of your ‘service,’” Quincannon said irascibly. “I prefer my own.”

“Nous verrons.”

King’s English, and now French. Bah.

“Sherlock Holmes died in Switzerland three years ago. Resurrected, were you, as Bierce inferred?”

The Englishman ignored the last comment. “Reportedly died. Dispatched at Reichenbach Falls by my archenemy, Professor Moriarity. Officially I am still deceased. For private reasons I’ve chosen to let the misapprehension stand, until recently confiding in no one but my brother, Mycroft. Not even my good friend Dr. Watson knows I’m still alive.”

“If he’s such a good friend, why haven’t you told him?”

Holmes, for want of another name, produced an enigmatic smile and made no reply.

Axminster said, “Dr. John H. Watson is Mr. Holmes’s biographer as well as his friend, as you must know, Quincannon. The doctor has chronicled many of his cases: ‘A Study in Scarlet,’ ‘The Red-Headed League,’ ‘The Sign of Four,’ the horror at Baskerville Hall, the adventure of the six orange pips.…”

“Five,” Holmes said.

“Eh? Oh, yes, five orange pips.”

The stuffily overheated room was making Quincannon sweat. He stripped off his gloves, unbuttoned his greatcoat, and swept the tails back. At the same time he essayed a closer look at the man who claimed to be Sherlock Holmes. For an impostor, he seemed to fit the role of the Baker Street sleuth well enough as described in Dr. Watson’s so-called memoirs. Despite his gaunt, almost cadaverous appearance in evening clothes, his jaw and hawklike nose bespoke intensity and determination, and his eyes were sharp, piercing, lit with what some might consider a keen intelligence. Quincannon’s opinion was that it was the glow of madness.

The bright eyes were studying him in return. “I daresay you’ve had your own share of successes, sir.”

“More than I can count.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Quincannon and his partner are well known locally,” the doctor said. “Several of their investigations involving seemingly impossible crimes have gained notoriety. If I remember correctly, there was the rainmaker shot to death in a locked room, the strange disappearance on board the Desert Limited, the rather amazing murder of a bogus medium.…”

Holmes said, “I would be most interested to know the methods you and your partner employ.”

“Methods?”

“In solving your cases. Aside from the use of weapons, fisticuffs, and such surveillance techniques as you employed tonight.”

“What happened tonight was not my fault,” Quincannon said testily. “As to our methods … whatever the situation calls for. Guile, wit, attention to detail, and deduction, among others.”

“Capital! My methods are likewise based on observation, in particular observation of trifles, and on deductive reasoning—the construction of a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor. An exact knowledge of all facets of crime and its history is invaluable as well, as I’m sure you know.”

Bumptious, as well as a candidate for the bughouse. Quincannon managed not to sneer.

“For instance,” Holmes said, smiling, “I should say that you are unmarried, smoke a well-seasoned briar, prefer shag-cut Virginia tobacco, spent part of today in a tonsorial parlor and another part engaged in a game of straight pool, dined on chicken croquettes before proceeding to the Truesdale property, waited for your burglar in a shrub of
Syringa persica,
and … oh, yes, under your rather gruff exterior, I perceive that you are well read and of a rather sensitive and sentimental nature.”

Quincannon gaped at him. “How the devil can you know all that?”

“There is a loose button and loose thread on your vest, and your shirt collar is slightly frayed—telltale indications of our shared state of bachelorhood. When I stood close behind you in the garden, I detected the scent of your tobacco; and once in here, I noted a small spot of ash on the sleeve of your coat, which confirmed the mixture and the fact that it was smoked in a well-aged briar. It happens, you see, that I once wrote a little monograph on the ashes of one hundred forty different types of cigar, pipe, and cigarette tobacco and am considered an authority on the subject.

“Your beard has been recently and neatly trimmed, as has your hair, which retains a faint scent of bay rum, hence your visit to the tonsorial parlor. Under the nail of your left thumb is dust of the type of chalk commonly used on the tips of pool cues, and while billiards is often played in America, straight pool has a larger following and strikes me as more to your taste. On the handkerchief you used a moment ago to mop your forehead is a small, fresh stain the color and texture of which identifies it to the trained eye as having come from a dish of chicken croquettes. Another scent which clings faintly to your coat is that of
Syringa persica,
or Persian lilac, indicating that you have recently been in close proximity to such a flowering shrub; and inasmuch as there are no lilac bushes in Dr. Axminster’s garden, Mr. Truesdale’s property is the obvious deduction.