Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

Devil’s Brew by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini’s stellar reputation in the mystery field is based mainly on his fiction writing, but his name is also seen frequently as the editor of mystery anthologies. His most recent editorial project is a book of Erle Stanley Gardner stories entitled The Casebook of Sidney Zoom (Crippen & Landru/July ’06). He also had a new novel out this past summer. See The Crimes of Jordan Wise (Walker/June ’06).

There were few more undesirable places for a detective and temperance man to be plying his trade, Quincannon reflected sourly, not for the first time in the past week, than the bowels of a blasted brewery.

The fine, rich perfume of malt, hops, yeast, and brewing and fermenting beer permeated every nook and cranny of the two-story, block-square brick building that housed Golden Gate Steam Beer. Whenever he prowled its multitude of rooms and passages, he was enveloped in a pungent miasma that tightened and dried his throat, created a thirst that plain water couldn’t quite slake. In his drinking days he had been mightily fond of the type of lager, invented during the Gold Rush and unique to San Francisco, known as “steam beer.” John Wieland’s Philadelphia Brewery, the National Brewery, and others operating in the city in this year of 1896 specialized in porter and pilsner; if one of their owners had sought his services, he would not be suffering such pangs as this place instilled in him. But it had been Golden Gate’s James Carreaux who had come calling, and the fee-plus-bonus he’d offered for an investigation into the bizarre death of his head brewmaster was a sum no Scot in his right mind could afford to turn down.

In the five years since Quincannon had taken the pledge, he had seldom been even mildly tempted to return to his bibulous ways. Even on those occasions when he visited his old watering hole, Hoolihan’s Saloon, to spend an evening with cronies or clients, he hadn’t once considered imbibing anything stronger than his usual mug of clam juice. But after one full week of undercover work in the Golden Gate’s rarefied atmosphere, his craving for a tankard of San Francisco’s best lager had grown to the barely manageable level. Another week here and he might well be seduced.

Well, it was a moot point. He wouldn’t be here in the guise of a city sanitation inspector for a second week, or even for one more day. There was no longer any doubt that Otto Ackermann’s death had been a deliberate homicide, not the freak accident the authorities had ruled it to be. He knew who had manufactured what Carreaux referred to as a “devil’s brew” by coshing Ackermann and pitching him into a vat of fermenting beer to drown, and he was tolerably certain he knew the reason behind the deed. All that was needed now was additional proof.

Instead of entering the brewery with the arriving employees, as he had on previous mornings, he loitered outside the main entrance. The cold, fog-laden March wind was much preferable to the brewery perfume. He smoked his pipe, feigning interest in the big dray wagons laden with both full and empty kegs that passed by on Fremont Street.

Caleb Lansing, the assistant brewmaster, was among the last to arrive, heavily bundled in cap, bandanna, and peacoat. He barely glanced at Quincannon as he passed and entered the building. Quincannon essayed a small satisfied smile around the stem of his briar. Lansing had no idea that he was about to be yaffled for his crime; if he had, he would have taken it on the lammas by now.

When Quincannon finished his pipe he strolled briskly to Market Street, where he boarded a westbound streetcar. He rode it as far as Duboce, walked the two blocks south to Fourteenth Street — a workingman’s neighborhood of beer halls, oyster dealers, Chinese laundries, grocers, and other small merchants.

The front door of the boardinghouse where Lansing hung his hat was unlocked; he sauntered in as if he belonged there, climbed creaking stairs to the second floor. The hallway there was deserted. He paused before the door bearing a pot-metal numeral 8 and tested the latch. Locked, of course. Not that this presented much of a problem. Quincannon had developed certain skills during his years with the United States Secret Service and subsequent time as a private investigator, some of which rivaled those of the most accomplished yeggs and cracksmen. The set of burglar tools he had liberated from a scruff named Wandering Ned several years ago gave him swift access to Lansing’s two small rooms.

Both sitting room and bedroom were cluttered with personal items, as well as several bottles of rye whiskey. But no steam beer; Lansing evidently had little taste for what he helped brew. In the fireplace grate Quincannon found a partially charred note penned in a sprawling backhand. Much of its content was unburned and legible, including an injunction from the writer to Lansing to destroy it after reading. Also present and damning was the writer’s signature, X.J. Very few men in San Francisco could lay claim to those initials. The only one Quincannon knew of was Xavier Jameson, the head brewmaster at one of Golden Gate’s rivals, West Star Steam Beer.

His second discovery took longer, but was equally rewarding. In a small strongbox cleverly concealed behind a loose board in the bedroom closet he found two thousand dollars in greenbacks and a handful of gold double eagles. As much as he enjoyed the look and feel of spendable currency, he hesitated only a few seconds before returning the money to the strongbox and the strongbox to its hiding place.

Criminals — faugh! The lot of them were arrogant and careless dolts. Lansing’s failure to completely burn the note and his hiding of the payoff money here in his rooms, coupled with the testimony of the witness who had seen him entering the brewery late on the night of Ackermann’s death, Lansing’s denial of the fact, and a slip he’d made that revealed his dealings with Xavier Jameson and West Star Steam Beer, was more than sufficient evidence to hang him.

Quincannon whistled an old temperance tune, “The Brewers’ Big Horses Can’t Run Over Me,” as he left the boardinghouse. Naught was left but to confront Lansing, urge a confession out of him through one means or another, and hand him over to those inept, blue-coated denizens of the Hall of Justice who had the audacity to call themselves San Francisco’s finest. Then he could return to the relative peace and clean air of the offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, where his only temptation — one he yearned to succumb to — was the charms of his partner and unrequited love, Sabina Carpenter.

Golden Gate’s business offices were clustered at the east end of the second floor, all of them small and cramped except for James Carreaux’s. This was Quincannon’s first stop upon his return, but Caleb Lansing was not in his office. Waiting there for the assistant brewmaster was not an option; he was anything but a patient man when he was about to yaffle a miscreant. He went down the hall to the nearest occupied office, that of the company bookeeper, Adam Corby, and poked his head inside.

“Would you know where I can find Lansing, Mr. Corby?”

Corby, a bantam of a man in striped galluses and rough twill trousers, paused in his writing in an open ledger book. “Lansing? Why no, I don’t.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Just after I arrived this morning. Have you tried the brewhouse?”

“My next stop.”

The brewhouse was at the opposite end of the building. Lansing was nowhere to be found in the rooms containing the malt storage tanks and mash tun. Jacob Drew, the mash boss, a red-haired, red-bearded giant, reported that he’d seen Lansing in the fermenting room a few minutes earlier.

“What d’ye want with him, mister?” Drew asked. “Something to do with your inspection?”

“No. Another matter entirely.”

“The lad’s a weak stick, but he’s done competent work since poor Ackermann’s accident.”

“That he has,” Quincannon said. “Though not in the brewer’s art.”

He left Drew looking puzzled and followed a sinuous maze of piping to the fermenting room, a cavernous space filled with gas-fired cookers and cedar-wood fermenting tanks some nine feet in height and circumference. Two of the cookers contained bubbling wort — an oatmeal-like mixture of water, mashed barley, and soluble starch turned into fermentable sugar during the mashing process. After the wort was hopped and brewed, it would be filtered and fermented to produce “steam beer” — a term that had nothing to do with the use of actual steam. The lager was made with bottom-fermenting yeast at 60–70 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than the much lower temperatures necessary for true lager fermentation, because the city’s winters were never cold enough to reach the freezing point. Additional keg fermentation resulted in a blast of foam and the loud hiss of escaping carbon dioxide when the kegs were tapped, a sound not unlike the release of a steam boiler’s relief valve.

The heady aroma was strongest here. Once again Quincannon’s nostrils began to quiver, his mouth and throat to feel like the inside of a corroded drainpipe. He wished, ruefully, that a man could be fitted with a relief valve as easily as a boiler, to ease pressure buildup inside his head.

On the catwalk above the cookers, Caleb Lansing stood supervising the adding of dried hops to the cooking wort. Workmen with long-handled wooden paddles stirred the mixture, while others skimmed off the dark, lumpy scum called krausen, a mixture of hop resin, yeast, and impurities that rose to the surface. The slab floor, supported by heavy steel girders, was slick with globs of foam that a hose man sluiced at intervals into the drains.

Quincannon hastened to climb the stairs. From the catwalk, the cooking wort and interiors of the fermenting vats were visible. An unappetizing view, to be sure. The vat in which Ackermann had died had been cleaned and was no longer in use, but Quincannon’s imagination was sufficient to conjure up the scene that had confronted the workmen the morning after.

Lansing was a rumpled, obsequious sort in his middle years, given to smoking odiferous long-nines; cigar ash littered his loose-hanging vest and shirtfront. He had just finished consulting a turnip watch when he spied Quincannon. Sudden anxious tension pulled his vulpine features out of shape. The look of a guilty man, by grab; Quincannon had seen it often enough to know it well.

Lansing swung away from the low railing, came forward as he approached, and sought to push past him. Quincannon blocked his way. “I’ll have a word with you, Lansing.”

“Not now you won’t. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“My business with you won’t wait.”

“What business?”

“Otto Ackermann. Xavier Jameson. And the West Star Brewing Company.”

Fright shone in the assistant brewmaster’s narrow face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The game’s up, Lansing. I know the whole lay.”

Lansing said, “Damned fly cop!” under his breath and shoved past him. He would have run then if Quincannon hadn’t grabbed the trailing flap of his vest and yanked him around.

“No trouble now, or you’ll—”

The blasted scoundrel was quick as a cat, not with his hands but with his feet. The toe of his heavy work shoe thudded painfully into Quincannon’s shin, sent him staggering backward against the railing. Lansing fled to the stairs, clattered down them as Quincannon, growling an oath, regained his balance and hobbled in pursuit.

“Stop him!” he shouted at the workers below. “Stop that man!”

“No, no, don’t let him catch me!” Lansing cried in return. “He’s an assassin, he’s trying to kill me!”

The workers stood in clustered confusion, looking from one to the other of the running men. Lansing threaded through them, vaulted an intestinal coiling of pipes, and disappeared behind one of the vats. Quincannon might have snagged him before he escaped from the fermenting room if a moustached workman hadn’t stepped into his path, saying, “Here, what’s the idea of—” Quincannon bowled him over, but in doing so his foot slipped on the wet floor and he went skidding headfirst into a snakelike tangle of hose. By the time he disengaged himself and regained his feet, fought off clutching hands, and went ahead in a limping rush, Lansing was nowhere to be seen.

There was only one way out of this section of the brewery. Still hobbling, Quincannon went through the boiler room, past the corner room where the vats of rejected beer stood in heavy shadow, then past the freight elevator and down the stairs to the lower floor. An electrically lit passage led into the main tunnel that divided the building in half. He hurried along the tunnel, out onto the Seventh Street loading dock. There was no sign of Lansing anywhere in the vicinity. Half a dozen burly workmen were wrestling filled kegs onto a pair of massive Studebaker wagons; Quincannon called to them. No, they hadn’t seen Lansing come out.

So his quarry was still in the building. But for how long?

Quincannon’s leg still smarted, but he could move more or less normally again; he ran back inside. Perpendicular to the tunnel was another wide corridor that led in one direction to the shipping offices and the main entrance, in the other to the cellars. There was no exit from the cellars; he hastened the other way. But then he encountered a clerk on his way to the dock with a handful of bills of lading, who told him that Lansing hadn’t gone that way, either. The clerk had been conversing with another man in the passage for the past five minutes and would have seen him if he had.

Now Quincannon was nonplussed. He retraced his path along the side corridor to the brick-walled one that led downward to the cellars. A workman pushing a hand truck laden with fifty-pound sacks of barley was just coming up. Mr. Lansing? Yes, sir, just a few moments ago. Heading into the storerooms.

“The storerooms? Are you certain, man?”

“Aye. In a great hurry he was.”

Why the devil would Lansing go there? To hide? Fool’s game, if that was his intention. The storerooms, where all the ingredients that went into the mass production of beer were kept, were a collective dead end. So were the cellar rooms that housed filled kegs and the enormous cedar vats where “green” beer was ripened and finished beer was held before being piped to the company’s bottling plant in a separate building next-door.

Quincannon was not wearing his Navy Colt; James Carreaux had an aversion to firearms and would not permit them in his brewery under any circumstances. As he made his way down the passage, he berated himself for not defying Carreaux’s edict. Unarmed, he would have to proceed with considerably more caution. Men who blundered into uncertain situations were ripe for the suffering of consequences. This was doubly true of detectives.

The temperature dropped noticeably as he descended. When he reached the artery that led into the storerooms, the air was frosty enough to require the buttoning of his coat. He passed through a large room stacked on two sides with empty kegs. At its far end, a solid oak door barred the way into the remaining storerooms.

The door, Quincannon had been told, had been installed as a deterrent to both rodents and human pilferage. Years before, a former brewery employee had returned at night and helped himself to a wagonload of sugar and barley, and Carreaux would brook no repeat of that business. The door was kept open during the day but locked at end of shift. Only a handful of men in supervisory positions had keys.

It should not have been closed now. Nor should it have been locked, which it was. Quincannon muttered an imprecation. Lansing must have done the locking; he had access to a key. But why? What could he be up to in the storerooms?

Quincannon listened at the door. No sounds came to him through the heavy wood. He bent at the waist to peer through the keyhole. All he could make out was an empty section of concrete floor, lighted but shadow-ridden. He straightened again, scowling, tugging at his beard. The loading-dock foreman, Jack Malloy, would have a key; find him, then, and waste no time in doing it.

Just as he turned away, the muffled bark of a pistol came from somewhere inside the storerooms.

Hell and damn! Quincannon swung back to the door, coming up hard against it, rattling it in its frame. Reflex made him tug futilely at the handle. There was no second report, but when he pressed an ear to the wood he heard several faint sounds.

Movement, but what sort he couldn’t tell. The silence that followed crackled with tension.

He pushed away again and ran back along the passage until he came on a workman just emerging from the cellars. He sent the man after the loading-dock foreman, then took himself back to the door. He tested the latch to make sure it was still locked, even though there was no way anyone could have come out and gotten past him.

Malloy arrived on the run, two other men trailing behind him. “What’s the trouble here?” he demanded.

“Someone fired a pistol behind that locked door,” Quincannon told him, “not five minutes ago.”

“A pistol?” Malloy said, astonished. “In the storerooms?”

“There’s no mistake.”

“But... Mr. Carreaux has strict orders against firearms on the premises...”

Quincannon made an impatient growling noise. “Button your lip, lad, and unlock the blasted door.”

The foreman was used to the voice of authority; quickly he produced his ring of keys. The door opened inward and Quincannon crowded through first. Two large, chilly rooms opened off the passage, one filled with sacks of barley, the other with boxes of yeast and fifty-pound sacks of malt, hops, and sugar stacked on end. Both enclosures were empty. The sacks and boxes were so tightly packed together that no one could have hidden behind or among them without being seen at a glance.

At the far end of the passage stood another closed door. “What’s beyond there?” he asked the foreman.

“Utility room. Well-pump and equipment storage.”

Quincannon tried the door. It refused his hand on the latch. “You have a key, Malloy?”

“The lock’s the same as on the storeroom door.”

“Then open it, man, open it.”

Malloy obeyed. The heavy, dank smells of mold and earth, and 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 found a lucifer in 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 shirtfront. Beside one outflung hand was an old LeMat revolver, the type that used pinfire cartridges. Quincannon knelt to press fingers against the artery in Lansing’s neck. Not even the flicker of a pulse.

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

The new voice belonged to Adam Corby, the pint-sized bookkeeper. He pushed his way forward, sucked in his breath audibly when he saw what lay at his feet.

“Mr. Lansing’s shot himself,” Malloy said.

“Shot himself? Here?”

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

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

Quincannon paid no attention to them. While they were gabbling, he finished his examination of the dead man and picked up the LeMat revolver, slipped it into his coat pocket.

Suicide?

Bah!

Murder, plain enough.

“Murder?” James Carreaux said in disbelief. “How can Lansing’s death possibly be murder? He died alone behind not one but two locked doors!”

“No, sir,” Quincannon said. “Not alone and not by his own hand.”

“I don’t understand how you can make such a claim.”

“He had no weapon when I braced him in the fermenting room — I would have noticed a pistol the size and shape of a LeMat. If he had been armed, he’d’ve drawn down on me instead of running like a scared rabbit.”

“He could have smuggled it in earlier and stashed it somewhere, couldn’t he?”

“Plan to take his own life when he had enough money to flee the city? And do it here in the brewery, in a blasted utility room? No, Mr. Carreaux, Caleb Lansing was murdered.” Quincannon paused to light his stubby briar. “Three facts prove it beyond a doubt.”

“What facts?”

“The location of the fatal wound, for one. Lansing was shot on the left side of the chest, just above the rib cage — a decidedly awkward angle for a man to hold a handgun for a self-inflicted wound. Most gunshot suicides choose the head as their target, for the obvious reason.”

“I’ll grant you that,” Carreaux said reluctantly.

“Second fact: There were no powder burns on Lansing’s shirt or vest. He was shot from a distance of at least eighteen inches, a physical impossibility if his were the finger on the trigger.”

“And the third fact?”

“His key to the two doors. It wasn’t on his person or anywhere in the utility room. He couldn’t have locked that door without it, now could he?”

The brewery owner sighed and swiveled his creaking chair for a long stare out the window behind his desk. Fog lay over China Basin and the bay beyond; tall ships’ masts were visible through its drift, like the fingers of skeletal apparitions. Quincannon, puffing furiously, created an equivalently thick tobacco fog in the office. The good rich aroma of navy plug helped mask some of the Golden Gate’s insidious pungency.

At length Carreaux swiveled back to face him. He was a large man of fifty-odd years, florid, with sideburns that resembled woolly tufts of cotton, and morose gray eyes. Not a happy gent, Quincannon judged, even at the best of times. He said obliquely, “Now you know why I have such an aversion to firearms.”

Quincannon made no comment.

“Well, then. You’ve convinced me — murder has been done in my house. Who the devil is responsible?”

“Lansing’s accomplice, of course.”

“Accomplice?”

“In the theft of Otto Ackermann’s formula for steam beer.”

“For the finest steam beer on the West Coast,” Carreaux amended grimly. “Golden Gate’s exclusive formula, until now. I don’t suppose there is any chance that Lansing, or this alleged accomplice of his, has yet to turn it over to West Star?”

“None, I’m afraid,” Quincannon said. “The charred note and the two thousand dollars in Lansing’s flat testify to a consummated deal.”

Carreaux sighed again. “I’ll try to get an injunction against West Star. But that may not stop them from implementing Ackermann’s formula, even with their duplicitous brewmaster in jail.”

“You still have the copy of the formula that Ackermann gave you?”

“Yes, in a safe place, but that was years ago. It’s possible he made refinements since then. Even if he didn’t... the competition, man, the competition.”

Quincannon understood; he’d been well schooled in the subject. A master brewer’s formula, the proportions in which he mixes his ingredients, the manner in which he treats them in the processing, is the lifeblood of a successful brewery. Golden Gate’s reputation as San Francisco’s best producer of steam beer would suffer, and lead to reduced sales, if West Star were to begin brewing lager of comparable quality.

“Tell me this, Quincannon. Why would Lansing need an accomplice to steal the formula, when he had access to it himself as Ackermann’s assistant?”

“The accomplice was likely the brains of the pair. His idea and plan, mayhap. He may even have had a hold of some sort on Lansing to force him into the crime.”

“You suspected there were two of them all along, then?”

“Of course,” Quincannon lied. He should have suspected it, given Lansing’s weak-stick nature. When viewed in the proper light, the man was a poor candidate for the solo planning and execution of such a crime. Ackermann had been a burly gent; it could not have been an easy task to cosh him and then pitch him into that vat of fermenting lager. Well, even the best detectives suffered a blind spot now and then. Not that he would ever admit it to a client, or to Sabina or anyone else.

“The motive for Lansing’s murder?” Carreaux asked. “And why in such a location?”

“My suspicion is that the two arranged to meet secretly in the utility room this morning, likely not for the first time. Lansing was consulting his watch when I found him in the fermenting room, which suggests that the time of a meeting was near at hand. When he escaped from me, he fled to the storerooms to keep the rendezvous and to tell his partner that the game was up. Lansing was the sort who would spill everything in an instant, once he was caught, and the accomplice knew it. Either he felt he had no choice but to dispose of him then and there before his name was revealed, or the killing was premeditated; the latter would explain why he was armed.”

“Do you have any idea of his identity?”

“Not as yet.”

“Or how he could have committed murder behind two locked doors and escaped unseen with you and others guarding the only exit route?”

“Not as yet. But I’ll find out, never fear.”

“You’d better, Quincannon,” Carreaux said. “You advertise yourself as San Francisco’s premier detective. Well, then, prove it as a fact and not mere braggadocio — and prove it quickly. For the sake of your reputation and mine!”

The door to the storerooms had been locked again after the removal of Caleb Lansing’s body, at Quincannon’s urging and Carreaux’s order. And all the keys had been rounded up and accounted for. Quincannon took one of the keys with him when he left Carreaux’s office. He appropriated a bug-eye lantern from the shipping offices to supplement the weak electric light, and then let himself into the storerooms and locked the door again behind him.

He re-searched the utility room first, in the interest of thoroughness. It contained nothing that he might have overlooked the first time. He went next to the room housing the sacked barley. The dusty smells of grain and burlap were thick enough to clog his sinuses and produce several explosive sneezes as he shined the bug-eye over the piled sacks. They were stacked close together, at a height of some five feet and flush against the back and side walls. Nothing larger than a kitten could have hidden itself behind or among any of them.

He crossed into the other large room. The boxes of yeast and heavy sacks of malt, sugar, and hops stood in long, tightly packed rows along the side walls. No one could have hidden behind or among them, either. The floor at the far end wall was bare; a pile of empty hop sacks and a pair of hand trucks lay against the near end wall. Everything was as it had been when he’d looked in earlier.

Or was it?

No. Something seemed different now...

Quincannon stood for a few moments, cudgeling his memory. Then he made a careful examination of the room and its contents. A thin smile split his freebooter’s beard when he finished. So that was the answer! Bully!

He dusted a smudge of yellow powder off his fingers, relocked the storeroom door, and sought out Jack Malloy. The answers to the questions he asked the loading-dock foreman added weight to his conclusions.

Time now to confront his man.

Only it wasn’t, not quite.

The bookkeeper’s cubicle in the office wing was empty. A quick search revealed further damning evidence: a yellow smear on one leg of the desk chair, and two small dried flower buds on the floor under the desk. There could be no doubt now that Adam Corby was Lansing’s accomplice, or of how the murder and his “disappearance” from the locked storerooms had been managed.

He would have proceeded to comb the brewery for Corby, but one of the office staff put a crimp in that notion. “Mr. Corby left early,” he was told, “not more than half an hour ago. Said he had an important errand to run.”

Important errand? Nefarious one, more likely. Well, thirty minutes wasn’t too long a headstart; if he made haste, he might be able to prevent Corby from completing it and vanishing yet again.

There were no hansom cabs in the vicinity of the brewery. Quincannon had to cover the two blocks to Market Street on shanks’ mare before he found one. As he was settling inside, one of the newfangled horseless carriages passed by snorting and growling like a bull on the charge. Dratted machines were noisy polluters that frightened women, children, and horses, but he had to admit that they were capable of traveling at an astonishing rate of speed. Too bad he hadn’t the use of one right now; it would get him to his destination twice as fast as the hansom, and speed was of the essence.

At the promise of a fifty-cent tip, the hack driver drove his horse at a brisk pace through the crowded streets. Luck rode with Quincannon; the timing of their arrival at Caleb Lansing’s boardinghouse was almost perfect. Two minutes earlier and it would have saved him a considerable amount of temper and exertion.

As it was, Golden Gate’s diminutive bookkeeper had just emerged and was on his way through the front gate when the hansom rattled to a stop. Quincannon flung coins at the driver and hopped out. In stentorian tones he roared, “Corby! Adam Corby!”

Corby froze for an instant, his head craned and his eyes abulge. Then he emitted a cry that sounded like “Awk!” and broke into a headlong run.

One foot chase in a single day was irritation enough; two offended Quincannon’s dignity and sense of fair play, stoked his wrath. Damned cheeky felons! Growling and grumbling, he plunged after his quarry.

Corby dashed into the street, passing so close to an oncoming carriage that the horse reared. The animal’s flashing hooves narrowly missed Quincannon as it buck-jumped forward. This served to increase both his outrage and his foot speed. The little man was driven by panic, however, and there was still a distance of some twenty rods separating them when he leapt up onto the far sidewalk. He banged into a woman pedestrian, sent her and her reticule flying. Though the collision staggered him, he managed to stay on his feet; seconds later he ducked through the doorway of an oyster house.

By the time Quincannon reached the eatery and flung inside, Corby was at a counter at the far end and had swung around to face him. Something came flying from his hand, whizzed by Quincannon’s head as he advanced, and splattered him with trailing liquid. It was followed by two more of the same — large oysters, unshucked, from an iced bucket on the counter. One of them thumped stingingly against his chest before he could twist aside.

Another indignity! Damn the man’s eyes!

Corby spun, raced out a side entrance. Quincannon, unslowed by the hurled oysters, shoved his way through a clutch of startled customers and emerged into a wide cobbled alley. The scoundrel’s lead was less than twenty rods now. He threw a look over his shoulder, saw Quincannon gaining on him, and veered sideways across a short yard and through a pair of open doors into a ramshackle wooden building. A sign above the doors proclaimed: Thomas Vail and Sons, Cooperage.

Quincannon pounded inside in Corby’s wake. The interior was weakly lighted, inhabited by a trio of men in leather aprons working with hammer, saw, and lathe. Barrels and kegs of various types and sizes rose in stacks along one wall. The rest of the space was cluttered with tools, lumber, staves, forged metal rings. Corby was at the far end, hopping back and forth, searching desperately for a nonexistent rear exit. One of the coopers shouted something that Quincannon paid no attention to. He advanced implacably.

Another “Awk!” came out of the little man. He dodged sideways, quick but not quick enough. Quincannon clamped fingers around one arm, brought him up short. Corby struggled, managed to tear loose, but in doing so he fell backwards against a stack of barrels; the barrels toppled over on him with a great clatter, knocked him flat to the sawdusted wooden floor. Quincannon danced out of the way just in time to avoid a similar fate.

Corby wasn’t badly hurt. He moaned and tried to regain his feet. An extra-solid thump on the cranium changed the little scruff’s mind. And a second thump stretched him out cold.

Quincannon was on one knee beside his prisoner, transferring to his own pockets the greenbacks and gold double eagles Corby had taken from Lansing’s rooms, when one of the coopers came rushing up. “Here, what’s the meaning of all this?” the man demanded in irate tones. “Look what you’ve done to these barrels!”

Straightening, Quincannon pressed one of the double eagles into his palm.

“This will pay for the damage.”

The cooper gawped at the coin, then at him. “Who are you, mister?”

“John Quincannon, of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. At your service.”

“A detective?”

“The finest in San Francisco,” Quincannon said virtuously, “if not in the nation and the entire world.”

It was not often that he could persuade Sabina to dine with him, but he managed it the next day by promising her a full accounting of his prowess in the devil’s-brew case. Generally his thrifty Scot’s nature limited his restaurant meals to the less expensive establishments, but on this evening he surprised Sabina by calling for her in a rented carriage and taking her to Maison Riche — one of the city’s tonier French bistros, at Dupont and Geary streets, whose specialties included such epicurean delights as caviar sur canane and poulet de grain aux cresson. There were two dining rooms on the ground floor; he requested seating in the smaller, more intimate one with individual tables. He would have preferred one of the discreet dining cubicles on the upper floor, whose amenities included a velvet couch and a door that could be locked from the inside. But Sabina, of course, would have had none of that and he didn’t bother to suggest it.

She had dressed well for him, he was heartened to note. Beneath her lamb’s-wool coat, she wore a brocade jacket over a snowy shirtwaist and a wine-colored skirt. Pendant ruby earrings, a gift from her late husband, made a fiery complement to her sleek dark hair. Even more to his liking was the shell brooch at her breast — a gift from her doting partner, bought for her while he’d been away on a case in the Hawaiian islands the previous year.

When they were seated and their drink orders placed — French wine for Sabina, clam juice for him — Quincannon took one of her small hands in his. “You look particularly lovely tonight, my dear,” he said.

She permitted him to hold her hand while she thanked him for the compliment, and then gently withdrew it. “Now then, John,” she said. “Let’s have your explanation.”

“Explanation?”

“Of the devil’s-brew case, as you promised.”

“Business before we dine?”

“We both know you’ve been eager to glory in your latest triumph. You’ve worn your preening look all day.”

“I do not have a preening look.”

“Yes, you do. Like a peacock about to crow. Well, go ahead and spread your feathers.”

Quincannon pretended to be wounded. “You do me a grave injustice.”

“Oh, bosh,” she said. “How did you know Adam Corby was guilty of murdering his partner?”

“Lupulin,” he said.

“...I beg your pardon?”

“Yellow glands between the petals of hop flowers. A fine powdery dust clings to them, some of which is released when the flowers are picked.” He added sententiously, courtesy of Jack Malloy, that it was this dust, not the hop buds themselves, that offset the sweetness of malt and gave beer its sedative and digestive qualities.

“Amazing,” Sabina said, not without irony.

“There was a smudge of the powder on the leg of Corby’s office chair. And two dried hop flowers on the floor under his desk.”

“Dried? I thought you said the powder comes from freshly picked flowers.”

“It does.”

“John...”

“Those were the essential clues. Along with two others.”

“And what were they?”

“The fact that Corby appeared in the storerooms so soon after we discovered Lansing’s body. And the man’s stature.”

“What do you mean, his stature?”

“Just that. He was the only Golden Gate employee who could have been guilty.”

Sabina nudged him with the toe of her shoe, not lightly. “You’re being deliberately cryptic. Come now — how did these clues identify Corby as the murderer and his method of perpetrating the crime?”

Quincannon fluffed his well-groomed whiskers and adopted a brisk professional air. Sabina was not a woman to be trifled with when it came to business matters; she had been a Pinkerton operative in Denver before he met her, with a record every bit as exemplary, if not more so, than his own. She was not to be trifled with as a woman, either, as he had learned to his frustration and chagrin. Both qualities made her all the more desirable.

“The short and sweet of it, then,” he said, and began by relating the same facts and suppositions he had presented to James Carreaux after the murder. “Corby intended to shoot Lansing at their prearranged meeting in the utility room, had brought the pistol with him for that reason. His motives being self-protection and Lansing’s share of the West Star payoff money. Once Lansing told him that I had accosted and chased him, he wasted no time firing the fatal shot. He placed the revolver near Lansing’s hand, rifled his pocket for both the storeroom key and the key to Lansing’s rooms. In different circumstances he would have simply unlocked the storeroom door and slipped out at the first opportunity. But he’d heard the sounds I made at the door, knew the shot had been heard and the passage was blocked. He was trapped there with a dead man. What could he do?”

“What did he do?”

“He had two options,” Quincannon said. “Hold fast and bluff it out, claim that he’d tried and failed to stop Lansing from shooting himself. But he had no way of knowing how much I knew and he was afraid such a story wouldn’t be believed. His second option was to hide and hope his hiding place would be overlooked in the first rush.

“Corby was quick-witted, I’ll give him that. He had less than five minutes to formulate and implement a plan and he used every second. The first thing he did was to lock the utility-room door; the key that operates the storeroom door lock works on that one as well. The idea of that was to create more confusion and solidify the false impression of suicide. Then he entered the room containing the sacks of malt and hops and established his clever hiding place.”

“Where?” Sabina asked. “You said you looked into that room and there was no place for a man to hide.”

“No obvious place. Corby counted on the fact that the first inspection would be cursory, and that is what happened. If there’d been time for a careful inspection then, I would have found him quickly enough. But I and the others were intent on finding out what had happened to Lansing.”

“Well? Where was he?”

“When I first looked in the room, I registered a single sack of hops propped against the end wall. When I returned later, the sack was no longer there; it had been moved back into the tightly wedged row along the side wall. That fact and the pile of empty hop sacks gave me the answer.”

“Ah! Corby hid inside one of the empty sacks.”

“Just so. He dragged a full sack from the end of the row, climbed into an empty sack or pulled it down over him, and wedged himself into the space. When Malloy opened the storeroom door and we rushed in, Corby held himself in such a position that he resembled the other sacks in the row. Now you see what I meant by his stature being proof of his guilt. Only a bantam-sized man could have fit inside a fifty-pound hop sack.”

“And while you and the other men were huddled around Lansing’s body, Corby stepped out of the sack, tossed it onto the pile of empties, returned the full sack to its proper place, and pretended to have just arrived.”

Quincannon nodded. “It struck me odd at the time that he should have shown up when he did. A brewery’s bookkeeper has little business in the storerooms. Unless he’d been there all along and his business was murder.”

“The hop flowers you found in his office came from the hideout sack?”

“Yes. Caught on the twill of his trousers or inside the cuffs.”

“And the lupulin?”

“Also from the inside of the sack. Golden Gate buys its hops from a farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The flowers are picked, dried, and sacked there, and now and then dried hops are put into bags previously used by pickers. In such cases, a residue of the yellow powder clings to the inside of the burlap. Corby hadn’t changed trousers when I apprehended him; the yellow residue was still visible on both legs.”

“Well done, John, I must say. But I do have one more question.”

“Ask it, my dear.”

“I assume you turned the partially burned note over to the police as evidence against Corby. Did you also turn over the two thousand dollars he took from Lansing’s rooms?”

Quincannon assumed an injured expression. “And have it disappear into the pockets of a corrupt bluecoat five minutes after I left the Hall of Justice? That would have been irresponsible.”

“Which means you still have the money and you intend to keep it.”

“And why not?” he said defensively. “It doesn’t legally belong to our client or to anyone else. We have just as much right to it as a fat jailer or corrupt desk sergeant. More of a right, by godfrey, as an added bonus for pure and noble detective work. And I won’t listen to any argument to the contrary.”

“I won’t even try. When it comes to money, John Quincannon, you’re incorrigible.”

He gazed fondly, longingly into her dark blue eyes. Money was not the only thing about which he was incorrigible.

Copyright © 2006 by Bill Pronzini