The Plague of Thieves Affair (21 page)

“What reason did he give you for coming here and asking to stay?”

“He … he said he'd come into some funds, that he wanted to use it to fix up the place … that he wanted us to be … Oh, my Lord!”

“Did he give you any money?”

“Five hundred dollars. Will I not be able to keep it?”

Quincannon flicked a glance around the rundown farmyard, then returned it to the woman who now looked as though she might burst into tears. He said, “You can keep it as far as I'm concerned, though I wouldn't mention it to Constable Evans in Los Alegres.”

“No. Oh, no, I won't.”

“Corby's wound needs tending to before I take him to jail. Sulfa powder, bandages. Laudanum, if you have it. Blankets, too.”

“No laudanum, but the rest, yes … yes…” She started away, but he called her back.

“Did Corby bring any luggage with him?”

“Only a small grip.”

“Fetch that, too.”

She nodded and hurried off with her calico skirts lifted.

Quincannon knelt beside Corby. “You're finished now, man, so you might as well make a full confession. Xavier Jones already has,” he added, stretching the truth some.

“Go to hell,” Corby said, his eyes still closed.

“You'll roast there long before me, I'll wager. But none too soon if you're cooperative. The quicker you come clean, the better your chances of cheating the hangman.”

“Go to hell.”

Quincannon stretched the truth a little farther by saying, “You and Caleb Lansing were hired to steal the steam beer recipe, on orders from Cyrus Drinkwater. Jones claims you knew Drinkwater was behind the scheme from the start.”

“He's … a goddamn liar.”

“We both know he isn't. Admit it, Corby, and you and Jones won't be the only two to face a judge and jury.”

“I … I…” The rest of what Corby had been trying to say was lost in a spasm of coughing. His face, contorted with pain, had taken on a grayish cast. When the coughing ceased, his body sagged and was still.

Just as well that he'd lapsed into unconsciousness, for Ella Draycott was returning with an armful of medical supplies and heavy wool blankets and a small black valise. Quincannon unbuttoned Corby's shirt to expose the bloody bullet wound. She didn't flinch at the sight of it; farm women were a hardy lot, used to the sight of blood and torn flesh. Without looking at Quincannon, she knelt and began a makeshift dressing of the wound with sulfa powder, gauze, and adhesive tape.

While she was doing that, he opened the grip. It contained a few items of cheap clothing that Corby must have bought before leaving San Francisco, and a purse containing a wad of greenbacks and gold eagles. Quincannon gave the bills and coins a quick count. More than five thousand dollars—Corby's share of the payoff for the stolen formula, which he'd gathered wherever it had been secreted, plus what he'd pilfered from Caleb Lansing's rooms. Leaving the money where it was, Quincannon closed the grip and carried it with him into the lean-to where he hitched up the buckboard. The horses were over their fright and gave him no trouble.

The widow had finished her ministrations by the time he brought the wagon out to where Corby lay breathing stertorously, still unconscious. That made the task of lifting the man a simple one. The widow spread out a blanket on the wagon bed, and when Quincannon laid his burden atop it, she covered Corby with a second blanket.

“It's a rough ride to town,” she said then. “I'd best go with you.”

“As you please, Mrs. Draycott. I have a rented horse picketed nearby; we'll have to collect him on the way, but it shouldn't take long.”

She had nothing to say to that. She waited until Quincannon had stepped up to the seat and picked up the reins, then climbed into the wagon bed and sat in stoic silence with her back against the sideboard and Corby's head pillowed in her lap.

*   *   *

Constable Lincoln Evans was a middle-aged gent with a competent, no-nonsense manner. He listened without interruption to Quincannon's account of what had taken place on the Draycott farm, his acceptance of it bolstered by mention of Mr. Boggs's name and Quincannon's former association with the Secret Service chief. Quincannon had no qualms about turning the large amount of cash in Corby's grip over to the lawman for safekeeping; Boggs had proclaimed him honest and there could be no higher recommendation.

Evans sent his deputy to fetch a doctor, spoke soothingly to a taciturn Ella Draycott, and helped Quincannon carry the wounded man inside and onto a cot in one of three cells. Corby had regained consciousness on the ride in, but if he'd had anything to say, it was in an undertone to the widow. In his weakened condition, he'd posed no threat of another escape.

He was still conscious after the doctor had come and gone, having confirmed that the bullet wound was not life-threatening. Quincannon, with Constable Evans present, then made another fruitless effort to convince the prisoner to confess and implicate Cyrus Drinkwater. All his blandishments were met with stony silence. Mayhap the San Francisco police, once Corby was in their custody, would be able to coerce a confession out of him. But that would not be for some time, until he was healthy enough to be transported to the city; until then Evans agreed to keep him locked up here on a charge of attempted murder.

A confession from Corby would have made it easier to bring about Drinkwater's arrest and a conspiracy charge against him. Without it, Xavier Jones was the only man who could directly implicate his boss. Would he, if pressed hard enough? Perhaps, but his fear of the cutthroat businessman's power and of potential reprisal might be as great as Corby's.

Quincannon's most sensible option upon his return, therefore, was to take the facts he'd gathered and his suspicions to James Willard and thence to the police. With Willard's support, he ought to be able to convince Kleinhoffer and his superiors at the Hall of Justice of the guilt of Corby and Jones. Drinkwater, with his powerful political connections, might get off scot-free even if he were compromised by one or both of his hirelings—a galling thought. If that happened, the onus would be on the nabbers for failing to build a solid case against him, not on John Frederick Quincannon.

But before he went to either his client or the police, there was one more task to be accomplished—the most important of all, if he were to justify his fee and mark this case closed.

He must find a way to recover the stolen steam beer formula and return it James Willard himself, personally.

 

22

SABINA

Charles the Third had been completely serious about a visit to the city morgue. In his usual secretive fashion he kept his specific intentions to himself, saying only “that is where the evidence lies.” Even when he explained his plan to gain access to the body of Roland Fairchild, which required her assistance, Sabina didn't try to talk him out of it. Nor, after some reflection, did she refuse to take part in the scheme, despite the fact that it was bold, dangerous, and in keeping with its creator, more than a little mad. She thought she knew what he expected to find, and if he did, those findings would help prove that not he but Octavia Fairchild had slain her husband.

Stephen would have counseled her against taking part in the scheme. So would John, and so did her professional instincts. If she and Charles were caught, it would mean arrest for aiding and abetting a fugitive and irreparable harm to her reputation and that of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services; Homer Keeps, for one, would vilify her in print. Yet in spite of Charles's often infuriating habits and methods, she had grown almost fond of him. And she was convinced, now, that he was incapable of an act of wanton violence. In all good conscience, she simply could not abandon an innocent man to the life of a fugitive or the none-too-tender mercies of the law if he were caught.

His plan for gaining access to Roland Fairchild's remains was clever enough; if they were careful and luck were with them, it might well succeed. After all, as Charles had stated, the morgue, which was in a basement adjunct to the Hall of Justice, was the last place the police would expect to find him. Another of his disguises would make recognition all but impossible, and still another for Sabina, he said, would camouflage her identity as well.

“What sort of disguise do you expect me to wear?” she asked.

“One perfect for the occasion, as you'll see.”

“Washerwoman, prostitute?”

“Nothing so plebeian. Quite suitable, I assure you.”

“Tell me, Charles—”

“Kindly do not refer to me by that name,” he said, bristling. “How many times must I insist that the Fairchild family was wrong, quite wrong, in their claim of my lineage. I am a British subject,
not
an American.”

“I'm sorry.” Trying to convince him to admit that he was not S. Holmes, Esquire, was hopeless. “Tell me, Sherlock … I may call you Sherlock?”

“You may.”

“Where do you obtain so many different disguises? Do you have a storehouse of them hidden somewhere?”

“That, dear lady,” he said with one of his enigmatic smiles, “is a secret I do not wish to divulge.”

The morgue—Sabina had been there once previously—was closed to visitors on Sunday evenings. Even if it hadn't been, time was needed, Charles said, to make preparations—presumably the procuring of their disguises. Therefore they decided, or rather he decided, that early Monday morning shortly after opening was the time to carry out their objective. He would arrive at her flat at eight
A.M.
, and from there they would travel together the short distance to the Hall of Justice at Portsmouth Square.

She was somewhat reluctant to let him out of her sight for such a long period of time, but she couldn't very well spend the night with him even if he were to permit it, which he wouldn't. She left him in Tar Flat and returned home. Throughout the long evening, she kept wondering if she hadn't been as daft as he was to agree to his plan, and she slept poorly. But on Monday morning, her belief in his innocence remained steadfast and she was ready if not eager to proceed with it.

*   *   *

There was a separate entrance to the morgue on a side street off Kearney, but to get to it required running a gantlet of arriving and departing uniformed officers and police vehicles. An uneventful running, as it turned out; no one paid any attention to Sabina and Charles the Third. He was dressed in sedate gentleman's clothing, carrying a furled umbrella instead of his usual blackthorn stick, sporting a bushy theatrical beard that covered most of his lean features, and walking with a slight but noticeable limp. She wore the disguise he'd brought for her, which thank heaven was more appropriate than she'd worried it would be—a plain black dress, a black veil, and a plain black hat over a wig of dark red curls. Even John or Callie would have had to look closely to recognize her.

The morgue was a dank, gloomy place rife with unpleasant odors. Plans were in the offing to build, in addition to a new Hall of Justice on the present site, a separate morgue building—one that would contain several tiled rooms including one for postmortem examinations, a cold-storage plant for the keeping of bodies and pathological specimens, and a viewing room. The coroner's office would be on the second floor, made large enough so that inquests could be held in it, and there would also be facilities for the deliberation of coroner's juries. But this expansion and restructuring was a minimum of two years off. The present outmoded facilities were cramped and inadequate, the walls of brick and decaying wooden panels.

The attendant who this morning presided over the cold room in which cadavers were kept and necropsies performed was a white-maned, pinch-faced individual nearing the age of retirement. He was ensconced in an anteroom cubicle, seated at a desk behind a low counter and reading the
Morning Call,
when Sabina and Charles the Third entered. The anteroom, she was relieved to note, was otherwise empty and no sounds came from behind the closed door to the cold room.

The attendant lowered his newspaper and peered at them with an expression of bored civility. Sabina's mourning outfit seemed not to affect him in the slightest. Too many years spent dwelling in the shadow of death, she thought.

“Yes?” he said, stifling a yawn. “Something I can do for you folks?”

“I am Mrs. Roland W. Fairchild,” Sabina said through the veil. She put a slight grieving throb into her voice; weeping would have overdone it. “I should like to view my husband's remains.”

“Fairchild. Fairchild. Gent who was … who died at the Baldwin Hotel yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“My condolences.” A by-rote remark with no feeling behind it.

“Thank you.”

“But I don't know as I should allow it. Coroner might not approve.”

“Why should he disapprove of a widow viewing her poor husband's mortal remains one last time?”

“Last time?”

“Before I arrange for shipment to his final resting place in Chicago.”

“View him there before he's buried, can't you?”

“No. He's to be cremated.”

This brought a censorious frown to the attendant's pinched face. “Don't approve of burning up the dead. Downright unchristian, if you ask me.”

“It was the deceased's wishes,” Charles the Third said, abandoning his faux British accent in favor of an American one that betrayed his Midwestern roots. “Now kindly be so good as to honor Mrs. Fairchild's request. She is under a severe strain, as you can well imagine.”

“You also a relative of the deceased?”

“No. I am John Mycroft, Mrs. Fairchild's attorney. I, too, wish to view the remains.”

“That so? Why?”

“I have just told you, my good man. I am Mrs. Fairchild's attorney, engaged by her only this morning to safeguard her interests. I have not yet had an opportunity to observe the, ah, damage that was done to my client's husband. I assume that an autopsy has yet to be performed, not that one would be necessary under the circumstances.”