The Plague of Thieves Affair (17 page)

It was the calendar that hung on the parlor wall, noticed but not closely examined on his first visit, that had brought him here. The name of the Los Alegres firm that it advertised was Pioneer Hatchery, purveyors of “grade-A single-comb leghorn chicken eggs and other fine poultry products.” The illustration, done in photographic style, was of a giant egg labeled Pioneer; a smiling man stood possessively beside it, and several chickens, presumably single-comb leghorns, pecked in the foreground.

The facing page was of the present month, February, and the present year. Nothing had been written on it. Quincannon took it down and turned it over. Nothing on the back, either. He riffled through the pages. January was also blank; so were March and April. Ah, but May wasn't. One date, the seventeenth, bore a notation in ink in Corby's neat bookkeeper's hand.

Ella's birthday.

Ella. The widowed owner of a farm in Los Alegres or vicinity? The calendar sent by her to Corby, or obtained by him on a visit to her?

Quincannon flipped through the rest of the pages. All of them were blank. Pioneer Hatchery's address was on the calendar; he copied it down in his notebook.

On his way out he reviewed what he knew of Los Alegres. It was most definitely an upcountry town, located some forty miles north of the city. Founded in the 1830s by General Mariano Vallejo, then commandant of the San Francisco Presidio, as a summer home on his sprawling Mexican land grant. In the years since, it had evolved into a thriving community of some twenty-five hundred souls, known for poultry processing and grain milling. Eggs were its primary industry; more than half the eggs shipped to San Francisco came from Los Alegres.

The town itself had been built along the banks of a wide saltwater estuary, a riverlike waterway that wound through tule marshes to San Pablo Bay. That body of water was directly connected to San Francisco Bay, thus making it easy and profitable for large amounts of eggs, poultry, dairy products, hay, hides, produce, and other goods to be shipped to the city from Sonoma County, in exchange for grain and feed, lumber, hardware, and equipage.

Quincannon had been there only once, having made the trip for business purposes on one of the paddlewheel passenger steamers that plied the estuary along with flat-bottom barges and dredgers that kept its shallow, muddy bottom free of buildups of silt. This was the most direct route to Los Alegres, but also the slowest. The faster option was by way of ferry to Sausalito, then by train on the San Francisco and North Pacific line.

It was no short trip either way, and the evidence that the widow's farm was where Corby had gone to ground was flimsy at best. Still, he had no other leads; no message had been forthcoming from any of his informants. And if the name Ella did belong to the widow, he ought to be able to locate the farm with relative ease once he arrived in Los Alegres.

*   *   *

As usual on Sundays the Ferry House at the foot of Market Street was teeming with departing and arriving passengers, luggage carts, porters, and a variety of vendors hawking their wares. The old wooden building had already begun to undergo renovation into the city landmark it was intended to become—a new Ferry Building, as it was to be called, with a sandstone façade, an ornamental 245-foot-tall clock tower modeled after one in Seville, Spain, a 660-foot skylit, two-story concourse on the second floor which would provide access to the ferries, marble walls and decorative mosaic marble floor, crossed lattice windows, and other architectural wonders. Quincannon was all in favor of the refurbishment; the present structure was much too small and cramped to properly accommodate the ever-increasing number of travelers.

As he made his way through the throng inside, on a zigzag course to the information booth, he heard his name called. He stopped in mild surprise, turned to see a round, graying man of some sixty years striding toward him. A smile of pleasure parted his freebooter's beard when he recognized the gent's bulbous nose (which someone had once likened to a keg of whiskey with a swollen bung), the habitual Havana cigar jutting from a corner of his mouth, and the equally habitual butternut suit and square-crowned hat.

“Well—Mr. Boggs! A sight for sore eyes.”

“I'll say the same for you, my boy.”

They shook hands warmly. Boggs was head of the San Franciso field office of the Secret Service, housed in the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets; had in fact been one of thirty detectives who had been brought together to form the Service in 1865, and was a personal friend of William P. Wood, its first chief, who had handpicked him for his position here. He was also Quincannon's former boss, mentor, and friend of long standing.

When a stray bullet from Quincannon's pistol fired during a running gun battle with a gang of Arizona counterfeiters had accidentally struck and killed a pregnant woman and her unborn child, he had sought to drown his lingering guilt in liquor. It was Boggs who had ignored the Service's rules by allowing him to remain on the government payroll, thus saving him from a descent into drunken debasement that would likely have ended his life. No one had been happier when Quincannon finally made peace with his conscience, largely through his connection with Sabina, and taken the pledge upon quitting the Service to begin his new career as the city's foremost private investigator.

“Where have you been keeping yourself?” Boggs asked. “It has been quite a while since I've seen you.”

“Busy, as always. But no busier than you, I'll hazard.”

“And so I'll be as long as I'm alive and counterfeiters continue to ply their misbegotten trade.”

“You'll be at your desk at age one hundred, then.”

“Hah. Little enough chance of that. Where are you bound today?”

“Sonoma County, if I can arrange passage. On the trail of a thief and murderer.”

“The Golden State brewery business? I saw your name mentioned in the newspapers in connection with it.”

“None other.”

“Where in Sonoma County do you think your man is?”

“Los Alegres or vicinity.”

“Ah. If you have need of official assistance, Lincoln Evans, the town constable, will provide it. I had occasion to work with him on a government case a while back. Knows his onions and honest as they come. His office is in the city jail on Fourth Street.”

“I'll remember that, thanks.”

“You'll get your man in any event, I'm sure.”

“I always do, sooner or later. You taught me well, Mr. Boggs.”

“I take no credit,” Boggs said gruffly. Praise always embarrassed him. “You were born with the right stuff, John. Polished off the rough edges yourself, as any good man should. Well, I'd best be on my way. My ferry's due to depart shortly.”

“Where are you off to?”

“Oakland. Sunday dinner with my daughter and her family. Damn nuisance, these fatherly duties.”

Bosh. Boggs doted on his daughter and his grandson.

“My regards to Eleanor.”

“And mine to your partner. A fine figure of a woman, Mrs. Carpenter. Anything of a romantic nature in your relationship yet?”

“Not yet. But I'll succeed in that quest sooner or later, too. I always bag my woman as well as my man.”

Boggs chuckled. “Good luck, my boy. Drop around to my office one day soon. We'll have lunch and tell each other lies about our professional escapades.”

“I will,” Quincannon said, and meant it. “But the stories won't be lies.”

Another handshake, and Boggs hurried off to catch his ferry.

Quincannon continued to the information booth, where he was told that the last of the two Sunday steamers to Los Alegres had left forty minutes before. The next one for Sausalito was scheduled to leave in half an hour. If he took passage on it, he would arrive in time to make a connection with the day's final northbound SF&NP passenger train. But this meant he would have to travel without luggage, in nothing more than the clothes on his back. And since the train wouldn't arrive in Los Alegres until six o'clock, it would be too late to begin his inquiries.

He was a fastidious man, and the prospect of spending a night and at least one day in an upcountry farm town without such necessities as changes of clothing and underwear, brushes, comb, and his beard-trimming scissors, held no appeal whatsoever. Far better that he should take the fastest route north first thing in the morning. He booked early passage on the Sausalito ferry and the SF&NP train, which if they were both on schedule would put him in Los Alegres shortly past noon.

The delay was meaningless, really. If Elias Corby was holed up at the farm of a widow named Ella, he would still be there twenty-four hours hence. Quincannon's father had served with Allan Pinkerton during the Civil War, and in addition to learning from him many investigative techniques that he'd utilized himself and passed on to his son, he'd taken to quoting some of his favorite axioms. One of which was that a manhunter functions at his keenest after a good night's sleep in his own bed.

With that in mind, Quincannon hied himself first to Hoolihan's, where he filled the hollow in his stomach, and then rode a cable car home to follow Allan Pinkerton's sage advice.

 

18

SABINA

The last person she expected to come knocking on her door on a Sunday morning was a uniformed policeman she'd never seen before.

It was nearing eleven o'clock and she was about to leave for church, after which she intended to lunch with cousin Callie and then call on Roland W. Fairchild to find out if Charles the Third had kept his promise. When she opened the door to be confronted by the bluecoat, her first thought was that his presence had something to do with the previous night's hubbub at the Rayburn Gallery. But he soon disabused her of that notion.

“Officer Dundee, Mrs. Carpenter,” he said with cap in hand but no smile on his beefy countenance. “I've been sent to fetch you. If you'll come with me, please.”

Past him she could see a police van waiting at the curb, with a second bluecoat standing beside it. “Come with you where?” she asked. “The Hall of Justice?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Where, then?”

“You'll soon see. Come along, now. Lieutenant McGinn is waiting.”

Her brow furrowed. “I don't know a Lieutenant McGinn. What does he want with me?”

“That's not for me to say. He'll tell you himself.”

Sabina had no choice but to go along. As the van clattered them downhill toward the city center, she tried again to pry information out of Officer Dundee, but he remained stoically silent. The feeling of alarm in her grew as they turned east on Market Street, and became full-fledged when she saw that their destination was the Baldwin Hotel and that two other police vehicles were on the circular carriageway at the front entrance, one parked and the other just about to leave. That one she recognized as the coroner's morgue wagon.

Oh, Lord! Not Charles the Third!

The van rattled to a stop behind the morgue wagon. A knot of onlookers were being kept at a distance by more bluecoats, Sabina saw as she alighted with Dundee at her side. Among them were a number of reporters from the city's half-dozen newspapers; one of them, she was sorry to note, was that dreadful muckraking, backbiting columnist for the
Evening Bulletin,
Homer Keeps.

Dundee escorted her inside, across the mostly empty lobby, and into one of the elevators. They ascended and stopped at the third floor, then proceeded down the hall to room 311. Dundee knocked, and when a gruff voice responded, gave his name and said he'd accomplished his mission. The door was opened by a young, grim-visaged stranger with notebook and pencil in hand, obviously a plainclothes detective, who appraised Sabina briefly before stepping aside. She steeled herself as they entered.

A large, gray-haired man of some fifty years stood in the middle of the room, his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets. He wore a rumpled suit and a tie either carelessly knotted or pulled askew; a watch chain with the largest elk's-tooth fob she'd ever seen was draped across his middle. His eyes were shrewd but on the dull side—the unimaginative plodding sort, she guessed. She had never seen him before, either, but he was even more obviously a police detective; she would immediately have identified him as such if she'd spied him in the midst of a crowd in Union Square.

Behind him, Octavia Fairchild was seated on the tufted red plush settee, her large-boned body encased in a plum-colored silk dressing gown. There was nothing haughty about her today. She sat with shoulders bowed, her hands in her lap twisting a lace handkerchief; tears stained her cheeks, and the left one bore a blood-caked gash some two inches long. The look she gave Sabina was one of grief and suppressed anger, but lacking any of the malice of their previous meeting.

There was no one else in the room. But others had been here recently, one of them the occupant of the departed morgue wagon. The overturned chair before the hearth, and the still fresh bloodstains spattered on the carpet next to it, made this all too plain.

The gray-haired detective said in his gruff voice, “You're Mrs. Sabina Carpenter? Good. Police Lieutenant McGinn.”

“Why was I brought here, Lieutenant? What happened?”

“Murder, that's what happened,” Octavia Fairchild said in a strained, tremulous voice. “Foul murder.”

“Who was killed?”

“Who do you suppose? My husband, poor Roland. Viciously slain in cold blood—”

“That'll do, Mrs. Fairchild,” McGinn said, not unkindly. Then, to Sabina, “You were summoned to help us catch the man who committed the crime. The man you were hired by the victim to locate, Charles Fairchild.”

Sabina had felt a small relief when the victim was identified as her client; rather him than Charles the Third. But now she felt only bewilderment. “Why would he murder his cousin?”

“He came to see Mr. Fairchild this morning. At your direction after that business at the Rayburn Gallery last night, according to what he told the victim. Is that right?”