The Plague of Thieves Affair (5 page)

Malloy obeyed. The heavy, dank odors of mold and earth mingled with the acrid scent of gunpowder tickled Quincannon's nostrils as the door creaked inward. Only one electric bulb burned here. Gloom lay thick beyond the threshold, enfolding the shapes of well pump, coiled hoses, hand trucks, and other equipment. Quincannon produced a lucifer from his pocket, scraped it alight on the rough brick wall.

“Lord save us!” Malloy said.

Caleb Lansing lay sprawled on the dirt floor in front of the well pump. Blood glistened blackly on his shirt. Beside one outflung hand was an old LeMat revolver, the type that used pinfire cartridges. Loosely clenched in the other hand was the same type of brass key Malloy had used.

Quincannon knelt to press fingers against the artery in Lansing's neck. Not even the flicker of a pulse. No blackened powder burns rimmed the bloody wound under the left armpit.

“What are you men doing here? What's going on?”

The new voice belonged to Elias Corby, the long-nosed little bookkeeper. He pushed his way forward, sucked in his breath audibly when he saw what lay at his feet.

“Mr. Lansing's killed himself,” Malloy said.

“Killed himself? Here?”

“Crazy place for it, by all that's holy.”

“But why? Why would he do such a thing?”

“God only knows.”

“Suicide,” Corby said in awed tones. “Lansing, of all people.”

Quincannon paid no attention to them. While they were gabbing, he finished his examination of the dead man and then picked up the LeMat revolver, hefted it, put it down again in the same place next to Lansing's hand.

Suicide?

Bah!

Murder, plain enough. Cold-blooded murder.

 

5

QUINCANNON

Quincannon kept his suspicions to himself. He was tolerably certain that a hand other than Caleb Lansing's had taken the man's life, for four good reasons, but he needed more time to determine the who, how, and why of the deed. Proclaiming here and now that Lansing had not died alone behind not one but two locked doors, the outer one under Quincannon's own surveillance, would have brought him scorn. Not to mention stirred the already boiling pot even more by adding unnecessary complications, and even more importantly, perhaps warned the scoundrel responsible for the crime.

He ordered Jack Malloy to relock the storeroom doors and stand guard, sent Elias Corby to summon the law, and rode the freight elevator back upstairs in the hope that James Willard had returned from his meeting. A few minutes with his client before the police arrived, to explain Lansing's involvement with the murder of Otto Ackermann to his client, would have prepared him for the interrogation to come. But Willard hadn't yet returned. Until he did, Quincannon would have to bear the brunt of the questioning.

He took himself downstairs to the brick-walled corridor leading to the cellars. A gaggle of workers had clustered there, drawn by fast-spread word of the shooting; he pushed his way through them to join the grim-faced Malloy. The two of them waited together in silence, the only sounds in the dank passage the muttering voices of the gathered men.

The wait lasted no more than ten minutes, a fast response for a change by an “ace detective” from the Hall of Justice. Quincannon's hope was that the officer in charge would be one he didn't know or knew only slightly, but he had no such luck. In fact, the man leading the half-dozen coppers who arrived on the scene was the one he least wanted to see—the beefy, red-faced Prussian named Kleinhoffer with whom he'd had run-ins in the past. Kleinhoffer was an incompetent political toady with dubious morals and a strong dislike of private detectives. His opinion of Quincannon was on a par with Quincannon's opinion of him.

When the dick spied him, his color darkened and his beady eyes and thin mouth pinched into a glower. “You, Quincannon. What the devil are you doing here?”

“Plying my trade, same as you.”

“He's been here the past few days,” Malloy said.

“Has he now. Doing what, exactly?”

“Inspecting the premises. He's a safety inspector for the Department of Public Works … isn't he?”

“No, he isn't. He's a flycop who keeps sticking his nose in places where it doesn't belong. What are you really doing here, Quincannon?”

“I'm not at liberty to say without permission of my client.”

“And who would that be?”

“James Willard, the brewery's owner.”

“Yes? Is he here now?”

“No. Away at a meeting. But he should be back soon.”

Murmurs of surprise had rippled through the listening workmen. One of them piped up, “I saw this man chasing Mr. Lansing through the fermenting room a while ago.”

“Is that so. Who's Lansing?”

“The assistant brewmaster,” Malloy said. “The man who shot himself.”

“Shot himself, eh? You're sure this flycop didn't do it?” His tone implied that he'd like nothing better.

Quincannon said, “I had no reason to, nor could have done it if I had. I have no key to these doors—both of which were locked by Lansing when I got here. And still are, as you'll soon see.”

“Then why were you chasing Lansing?”

“I can't say without permission of Mr. Willard.”

Elias Corby stepped forward. “It couldn't have anything to do with Otto Ackermann's death, could it? That was a tragic accident.”

“What's that?” Kleinhoffer said. “There's been another death here recently?”

“Last week. Poor Otto, our brewmaster, slipped off a catwalk and drowned in a vat of fermenting beer. A terrible way to die, terrible. But it was an accident, as I said. The precinct officers who came to investigate ruled it as such.”

“First the brewmaster, then the assistant brewmaster—an accident and an apparent suicide. Sounds fishy to me. Well, Quincannon? Is there some sort of connection or isn't there?”

“I can't say without—”

Kleinhoffer snapped,
“Scheisse,”
glared daggers at him, and then turned to Malloy. “You have the key? All right, open the doors and let's have a look at the stiff.”

Malloy hastened to do his bidding. Kleinhoffer and his usual shadow, a burly sergeant named Mahoney, shouldered their way inside, taking the foreman with them. Quincannon made no attempt to join them; it was unnecessary—he'd already seen all there was to see in the utility room—and Kleinhoffer wouldn't have allowed it anyway. The other coppers, four bluecoats, held him and the rest of the onlookers at a distance.

The Prussian and his shadow blundered around inside for ten minutes, making a good deal of noise in the process. The workmen all gave Quincannon a wide berth, as if he'd been revealed as a none-too-savory and possibly dangerous spy. When the two plainclothesmen reappeared, Kleinhoffer attempted to question Quincannon again, using thinly veiled threats this time. This tactic got him nowhere, the threats being nothing but empty bluster. Grumbling, he and Mahoney proceeded to interrogate Jack Malloy and several other employees, none of whom had anything pertinent to tell.

Two nearly simultaneous arrivals put a halt to the questioning. First came the morgue wagon and a pair of attendants with a stretcher, followed less than a minute later—and not a moment too soon, by Quincannon's reckoning—by Mr. James Willard.

*   *   *

“Caleb Lansing, a murderer and a thief,” Willard said in mournful tones. “My God, I can hardly believe it.”

“There's no doubt he was guilty of both crimes,” Quincannon said.

Kleinhoffer said sourly, “So you say. How do you know he killed the brewmaster for the steam beer formula? According to the bookkeeper, the official verdict is that Ackermann drowned accidentally.”

“The official ruling was wrong.”

“Smart flycop. Think you know everything.”

“Murder when murder's been done for profit, yes.”

The three men were in Willard's office, where they'd gone for the sake of privacy. The news of Lansing's betrayal and apparent suicide—a second death by violence in the Golden State in a week's time—had shocked Willard into a lather; his florid features were mottled, veins bulged and pulsed in both temples as if he might be in danger of a seizure. After a brief consultation out of Kleinhoffer's hearing, he had agreed to permit an explanation of why he'd hired a detective to investigate Otto Ackermann's demise. Which Quincannon had then given as succinctly and in as little detail as possible. It was not yet time to hand over the burned note fragment he'd found, or to reveal the presence of the two thousand dollars in the strongbox hidden in Lansing's rooms—the latter in particular, given Kleinhoffer's less than stellar reputation for honesty.

“All right, then,” Kleinhoffer said when he'd finished. “How'd you get onto Lansing?”

“Astute detective work, naturally.” Quincannon resisted adding that such was something the beefy dick knew little about.

“That doesn't answer my question.”

“Under the circumstances the exact nature of my investigation is my and my client's concern, not the police's.”

“The stolen formula is police business.”

“Only if my client chooses to make it so.”

“Well? Do you, Mr. Willard?”

“No.”

Kleinhoffer ground his yellowed teeth. “What did Lansing do with the formula?” he demanded of the brewery owner. “Who hired
him
?”

Willard glanced at Quincannon, who imperceptibly shook his head. “I don't know.”

“Meaning you're gonna be as closemouthed as the flycop here.”

“Meaning I don't know. Neither does Mr. Quincannon, or he would have said so.”

“Lansing may not have been hired by anyone,” Quincannon said glibly. “He may have acted with the idea of selling the formula to the highest bidder. I'll find out, in any case, if Mr. Willard should want me to continue in his employ.”

“I do,” Willard said.

Kleinhoffer said,
“Scheisse.”

Quincannon suppressed a grin. “Are you satisfied that Lansing's death was a suicide?” he asked.

“Couldn't be anything else,” the Prussian admitted grudgingly. “You trapped him down there in that utility room and he took the coward's way out.”

“So he must have been guilty as I've charged.”

“Or just plain off his trolley.”

“In any event, as far as the law is concerned the case is closed. There's no need for you to concern yourself with the stolen formula, Lansing's motives, or anything else to do with the matter.”

Kleinhoffer repeated his favorite word. But he had no choice then except to remove himself, which he proceeded to do after jabbing a rigid forefinger in Quincannon's direction and saying ominously, “Our paths are bound to cross again, flycop. And when they do, you might well find yourself on the blunt end of my nightstick.”

Empty threats bothered Quincannon not a whit. “I wouldn't count on it,” he said.

When the dick had slammed out, Willard released a heavy sigh and sank into the creaking swivel chair at his desk. Through the window behind him, fog lay over China Basin and the bay beyond; tall ships' masts were faintly visible through its drift, like the fingers of skeletal apparitions. Quincannon remained standing, packed and lit his pipe, and puffed furiously to create an equivalent fog of tobacco smoke. The good rich aroma of navy plug helped mask some of Golden State's insidious pungency.

The brewery owner said at length, gloomily, “I don't suppose there's any chance Lansing hadn't yet turned the recipe over to West Star?”

“Little, I'm afraid. Assuming, that is, Ackermann relinquished his master copy before he died.”

Willard brightened a bit. “You think he might not have?”

“It's possible.”

“But the safe in his office where he kept it was empty…”

“He may have transferred the formula elsewhere for some reason.”

“Yes, but … would Lansing have pitched him into the fermenting vat if he hadn't gotten the recipe?”

“The act could have been unintentional, the result of a struggle on the catwalk. Lansing wasn't the sort to have jumped into the vat himself to save Ackermann from drowning, no matter what the impetus.”

“What are the chances it did happen that way? Be honest now. Do you believe it's likely?”

The answer to that was no, and it would not have been proper to continue giving Willard what amounted to false hopes. Ackermann's office safe had been unlocked as well as empty, and his rooms on Clay Street, which Quincannon had examined, had not been searched. The probable scenario was that the brewmaster had been forced to open the safe and then, once the formula had been pilfered, taken to the catwalk and cast into the vat. The charred note and the two thousand dollars in Lansing's flat also testified to the likelihood that West Star was now in possession of the recipe.

Quincannon believed in being straightforward with a client—up to a point. He said, “No, sir, I don't,” and proceeded to explain his reasons. All, that is, except for his conviction that Caleb Lansing had been murdered; he was still not ready to confide his suspicions in that regard. He also showed Willard the burned paper with its
X.J.
signature.

“By God, this proves Lansing was in cahoots with West Star.”

“To our satisfaction, yes. But not from a legal standpoint.”

“You can testify as to where you found it.”

“Yes, but as you can see, Lansing's name appears nowhere on what's left of the note, nor is the remainder of its contents legally incriminating.”

“But the two thousand dollars…”

“He could have gotten it any number of ways. Gambling, for one. There is no clear-cut connection between the money and Xavier Jones or Cyrus Drinkwater.”

Willard made a faint sound in his throat that might have been a moan. He put his face in his hands and said through splayed fingers, “So there's nothing I can do. If West Star does have the recipe, there are no grounds for an injunction to prevent them from implementing it.”