Beyond the Grave

FOUR

Quincannon awoke at dawn-stiff, sore, and in a peevish frame of mind. After ten minutes, restlessness drove him out of bed. He examined himself in the mirror in the adjoining bath and found four bruises, all of them on parts of his anatomy that would be concealed by his clothing. The one on his shin was the largest and tenderest, but it hurt only when he put too much pressure on that foot; he could walk more or less normally. And except for a scratch that was all but lost in the tangle of his beard, his face had miraculously escaped being marked.

The examination buoyed his spirits somewhat, though not enough to put an end to either his cranky mood or his restlessness. Going back to bed was out of the question. Instead he washed, dressed, and went down to the dining room for coffee and hot pastry.

Traffic was sparse and desultory on State Street when he emerged from the hotel and its grounds half an hour later. The rim of the sun was just visible above the Santa Ynez Mountains to the east; the sky still wore a pink flush, like a bride on the morning after her wedding night, and the air was salty and had a crisp bite to it. lit was going to be another glorious spring day. At least, Quincannon thought grumpily, insofar as the weather was concerned.

It was too early to conduct business, but he felt that a long, brisk stroll might clear away some of his muscle stiffness and the remnants of a dull headache. He set off down State Street, found himself approaching the St. Charles Hotel, remembered that Felipe Velasquez was due to leave for his ranch at eight o'clock, and consulted his big turnip-shaped watch. Ten minutes before eight. He detoured into the alley that ran behind the St. Charles, looking for the hotel stables. The odors of fresh hay, old leather, and horse manure led him straight to them.

The first person he saw when he got there was Barnaby O'Hare.

O'Hare, dressed in riding breeches and an old-fashioned duster, was watching a stablehand saddle a ewe-necked chestnut horse. The historian's presence here surprised Quincannon-and vaguely annoyed him, for no particular reason. There was no sign of Velasquez, although a fine Appaloosa stallion stood waiting nearby, outfitted in a silver-studded bridle and a high-forked Spanish saddle with tasseled stirrup-skirts.

Quincannon was within ten strides of O'Hare before the moonfaced young man glanced up and saw him. “Ah, Mr. Quincannon,” he said with a smile. “Have you decided to join us?”

“Us?”

“Senor Velasquez and I. Didn't he tell you I am accompanying him to Rancho Rinconada de los Robles today?”

“No, he didn't.”

“Well, one of the men I shall be interviewing for my book is a neighbor of his. And there are geographical details of the old grant that I'll want to reexamine. Senor Velasquez was again kind enough to extend his hospitality for a few days.”

Quincannon thought uncharitably: After you promised him an entire chapter in your book, no doubt. He said nothing.

“Will you be joining us?” O'Hare asked.

“Not today. At the hacienda in a day or two.”

“I look forward to it. Perhaps we'll find time for a talk. I find your profession fascinating, and I should like to know more about it-your methods and such.”

“If I confided my methods to everyone who wanted to know them,” Quincannon said, “then I wouldn't be a very successful detective, would I?”

The rear door of the hotel opened just then and Felipe Velasquez emerged. He, too, wore riding clothes, and a wide-brimmed sombrero. As the rancher approached, Quincannon saw that he looked pale and hung-over this morning. It gave him a perverse pleasure to think of this pompous grandee listing a few degrees to starboard under a burden of too much wine.

“Buenos dias, Senor Velasquez.”

Instead of acknowledging the greeting, Velasquez fixed him with a sharp look. “Have you something new to report?”

“Not as yet-”

“Then why are you here? Why are you not doing what you're being paid to do?”

“May I remind you, sir,” Quincannon said, managing-just barely-to keep the testiness out of his voice, “that it is not yet eight o'clock?”

Velasquez muttered something in Spanish that Quincannon failed to catch but that O'Hare evidently understood; the smile the young man directed at Quincannon was boyishly amused. Velasquez turned his back, went to where the Appaloosa stood, and began checking the fit of its bridle. O'Hare gave his attention to the stablehand, who had finished saddling the chestnut.

Gentlemen, Quincannon thought, to hell with you both. And he stalked out to State Street without looking back.

He finished his stroll in a dark humor and returned to the Arlington, where he consumed a breakfast of five eggs, bacon, potatoes, cornbread, orange marmalade, more hot pastry, and more coffee. That improved his mood somewhat. When he considered himself sufficiently fortified, he walked to the stables, hired the same claybank he had ridden yesterday, and trotted away to the Mexican quarter.

Luis Cordova's dry-goods store was not yet open when he arrived; a hand-lettered sign bearing the word CERRADO hung on the front. door and was visible from the street. Quincannon turned his horse., came down the opposite side of the block, drew rein in front of the tonsorial parlor. It was open for business, and when he entered, he found a mustachioed barber and no one else-a fact that satisfied him. If anyone knew his neighbors and could be drawn into talking about them, especially when none was around to monitor the conversation, it was a barber. They were a notoriously loquacious breed, no matter what their race or color.

This barber, once he overcame his surprise at having a well-dressed Americano for a customer, and once he discovered that Quincannon spoke passable Spanish, proved to be no exception to the rule. His name, he said, was Enrico Garcia. And while he trimmed Quincannon's hair and beard he obligingly answered the questions he was asked about Luis Cordova.

Cordova had operated his dry-goods store at its present location for many years and had lived above it just as long. His widowed and aged mother had lived with him until her death two years ago; he had never married. He was a private man with no close friends in the community, and as such he seldom talked about his background. Garcia thought he had come from the Mexican state of Oaxaca but was not positive. When he spoke of Cordova as a “shrewd businessman,” Quincannon took the opportunity to ask if this meant the storekeeper was perhaps a shade dishonest. Garcia's reaction was one of shock. “Oh no, senor,” he said. “No. Luis is very religious. He would do nothing to offend God.”

He wouldn't, eh? Quincannon thought. Well, that remains to be proved.

He presented the barber with a generous tip and departed neatly trimmed and reeking of bay rum but with little more useful information about Luis Cordova than he'd taken in with him. He was of a mind to find out what other neighborhood residents thought of Cordova, but that intention changed when he again rode past the dry-goods store. It was still closed, the CERRADO sign still in place. He halted in front and checked his turnip watch. After eleven. The store should be open by this time; odd that it wasn't. Had Cordova gone somewhere on an errand? Or had he simply gone-on the fly like a thief in the night?

He dismounted, tied the claybank, and went along the boardwalk to the outside stairs that led to Cordova's rooms above. He waited until a pedestrian and wagon passed and no others were in sight, then climbed the stairs quickly. The branches of the olive tree hung in thick profusion over the landing, so that he was half-hidden among them as he rapped on the door.

There was no answer. He waited for a time and then tried the latch; the door opened under his hand. A sudden feeling of wrong-ness came to him, followed by a bunching of the muscles in his shoulders and back. He drew his Navy revolver and pushed the door all the way open, holding the pistol up close to his chest.

It looked as though a small whirlwind had been unleashed inside the adobe-walled interior, leaving havoc in its wake. Tables and chairs were overturned; a small oil painting of the Last Supper had been ripped from one wall, a wooden crucifix hung askew on another; shards of broken glass and pottery littered the floor. A kerosene lamp on the mantel above a cold fireplace burned feebly, indicating that there was little fuel remaining in the fount.

Quincannon stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. The rooms were silent except for street noises that filtered in from outside. A pair of bead-curtained archways led to other rooms, one to his left adjacent to the fireplace, the other in the wall directly ahead. He chose the far one first, crossed to it on a zigzag course to avoid stepping on the broken glass and pottery. The beads clicked like the joints of a skeleton when he passed through them.

More havoc had been wrought here, in what appeared to be Cordova's bedroom. Down pillows had been slashed with a knife, spilling feathers that clung to every surface. The mattress had been ripped open to expose its straw entrails. Even some of the bed's leather springs had been hacked through, as if in a frenzy. Bureau drawers had been pulled out and their contents dumped onto the floor. The door to an old scarred wardrobe stood open, revealing a ragbag cluster of torn and wadded clothing within.

For a moment Quincannon stood narrow-eyed, studying this room as he had studied the other; then he backed out, made his way to the second bead-curtained archway. The room beyond, at the rear, was the largest of the three, covering the entire width of the building. It was semidark in there-rattan blinds covered its plate-glass windows-but Quincannon could tell that it was used as a study. He could also tell that it had been ransacked as thoroughly as the other two.

He moved to the nearest of the windows, edged the blind aside, and looked out. A shed, an outhouse, the rear yard and rear wall of a building on the next block-and no people within the range of his vision. He used the drawstring to raise the blind and admit enough light for him to see more clearly.

The room contained a desk, two overturned chairs, an ironbound steamer trunk with its lid open and some of its contents pulled out, a battered refectory table, and a fireplace with the still-smoldering embers of a wood fire on the hearth. Papers were strewn everywhere, along with ledgers and old books and a dozen other items. All the drawers in the desk had been removed and emptied and thrown into a broken pile in one corner. Quincannon started over to the desk, walking carefully-and then stopped after half a dozen paces, when the angle at which he was moving allowed him to see more of the space behind the desk.

The body of a man lay there, half twisted on his back, eyes open and bulging slightly so that they had the look of small boiled onions in the dim light. Luis Cordova hadn't flown anywhere in the night. He would never fly anywhere again.

Scowling now, Quincannon holstered his weapon and went around the desk, knelt alongside the dead man. There were marks on Cordova's throat, gouged half-moons where his assailant's nails had dug into the flesh; but strangulation, Quincannon judged, had not been the cause of death. There was blood in the storekeeper's hair, blood on the floor under his head: a shattered skull, like as not from a repeated pummeling against the floorboards.

The fingers of Cordova's right hand were closed into a fist, and between two of them a ragged triangle of paper was visible. Quincannon caught hold of the hand, found it limp and cold-confirming his suspicion that the man had been dead since last night, at least a dozen hours. He pulled the fingers apart, removed the tiny scrap of paper. He was about to straighten up with it when he noticed something else: a small, shiny piece of metal on the floor near one of the corpse's legs. He picked this up and then returned to the window, where the light was better, to examine both it and the paper scrap.

The piece of metal was half an inch long, slender, conical in shape, and hollow. He had no idea what it was-and yet, it seemed oddly and vaguely familiar. He studied it for several seconds, still could not identify it, and finally slipped it into his coat pocket. He gave his attention to the torn scrap.

It appeared to be the bottom edge of a letter or some other document-quite an old one, judging from the age-yellowed condition of the paper. It contained six complete words, all Spanish, written in a crabbed and perhaps hasty hand, for the letters were ink-smudged and not well-formed. On one line were four words, on the other, two-what appeared to be the last two lines of a page.

mas alia del sepulcro

donde Maria

Quincannon's scowl was now as ferocious as Chief of Police Vandermeer's. He put the scrap into the same pocket as the piece of metal and then, methodically, he set about gathering up and examining all the papers scattered on the floor. It took him more than an hour, and there was tension and frustration in him when he finished. The letter or document from which the scrap had been torn was no longer here, which meant that it was now in the possession of Luis Cordova's murderer. There was no question in Quincannon's mind that it was a vital document.

But his search had not been completely fruitless. He thought he knew now who had written the missing document, and why; and he thought he knew, too, how the statue of the Virgin Mary had come into Luis Cordova's possession. Several letters and an inscription in the Cordova family Bible had given him those answers.

Luis Cordova had not been born in Oaxaca, Mexico; he had been born on Rancho Rinconada de los Robles, in the year 1840. His father and mother had both been in the employ of Don Esteban, and the family had lived at the rancho's pueblo. Luis and his mother had fled to Santa Barbara the day before the siege by Fremont's troops, with the other women and children. His father, Tomas, had stayed behind to fight-and to die. It seemed clear now that Tomas Cordova had helped Don Esteban and Padre Urbano secrete the artifacts; it also seemed clear that he was not as trustworthy as they had considered him to be. He had managed to steal the statue of the Virgin Mary and to pass it on to his wife before she and Luis fled. And he had written down for her the location of the remaining artifacts, so that she or Luis might someday return for them. It was this document that was now in the murderer's hands.

But there were still unanswered questions. Had Tomas Cordova's wife returned for the cache of artifacts? Or had Luis, when he was old enough? And if they hadn't, for reasons of their own, were the artifacts still in their original hiding place, waiting to be carried away by the man who had killed Luis?

And who was that man? Who had the missing document?

Quincannon continued to scowl. He did not like cases involving murder. Nor was he fond of complex mysteries, as adept as he often was at solving them. Cerebral detection might be child's play for Sherlock Holmes; for John Frederick Quincannon it was damned hard work.

He tucked half a dozen personal letters into his coat pocket for future reference. Then, cautiously, he let himself out of the rooms, pausing among the olive branches to make certain there was no one on the boardwalk or street below before descending. The few people in the vicinity seemed to pay him no attention as he went to his horse, mounted, turned away from the dry-goods store.

Mas alia del sepulcro, he was thinking. Donde Maria. What was the significance of those two phrases? They were key phrases, he was sure, to the location of the original hiding place of the artifacts-perhaps so vital that without them, the person who had stolen the document would not be able to determine the exact location. Donde Maria. Where Maria. Where Maria what? Who was Maria?

As he rode back toward the center of town, the first phrase began to haunt him-to repeat itself in his mind in a kind of macabre litany.

Mas alia del sepulcro.

Beyond the grave.