Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 2. Whole No. 822, February 2010

Burglarproof by Bill Pronzini

Devising an impossible crime is among the seemingly endless number of things MWA Grand Master Bill Pronzini can do better than most others in our genre. His skill in this area is starting to remind us of another MWA Grand Master: the late, great Edward D. Hoch. We doubt you’ll be ahead of him in solving the impossible theft in this new tale, and if you want even more dazzling deduction be sure not to miss Mr. Pronzini’s latest “Nameless” detective novel, Schemers (Forge).

The four-car Sierra Railway train chuffed and wheezed into Jamestown just past noon, more than an hour behind schedule. Quincannon was in a grumpy mood when he alighted from the forward passenger coach, carpetbag in hand, and stood vibrating slightly from the constant jouncing and swaying. The overnight trip from San Francisco, by way of Stockton and Oakdale on the AT&SF, had been fraught with delays, the car had been overheated to ward off the early spring chill in the Mother Lode foothills, his head ached from all the soot and smoke he’d inhaled, and this was not yet his final destination. Another train ride, short and doubtless just as blasted uncomfortable, awaited him before the day was done.

The town’s long, crooked main street stretched out beyond the depot. Two- and three-storied wood and stone buildings lined both sides — businesses and professional offices on one, rows of saloons and Chinese washhouses on the other — and the street was packed with rough-garbed men and a variety of conveyances. Behind the saloons, hidden by tall cottonwoods, lay the notorious red-light district known as “Back-of-Town.” Quincannon happened to know this by hearsay, not personal experience; this was his first visit to the Queen of the Mines. If he were fortunate, he thought irritably, it would also be his last.

Jimtown’s reputation as the “rip-snortin’est, most altogether roughest town in the mines” was evidently justified. A mad cacophony of noises bludgeoned his eardrums — whistles, cowbells, raucous shouts, tinny piano music, crowing roosters, braying mules, snorting horses, clanks and rattles and steam hisses in the rail yards, distant dynamite blasts and the constant pound of stamps at the big Ophir and Crystalline mines on the southern outskirts. Those mines, and hundreds more within a ten-mile radius, had produced more than two million dollars of gold the previous year of 1897. Little wonder that the town was wide open and clamorous.

A reception committee of two awaited Quincannon in front of the depot. The middle-aged gent sporting brown muttonchop whiskers introduced himself as Adam Newell, Sierra Railway’s chief engineer. The long and lanky one with fierce gray eyes and a moustache to match was James B. Halloran, Jimtown’s marshal. The pair ushered Quincannon into a private office inside the depot, where a third man waited — heavy-set, clean-shaven, dressed in a black broadcloth suit spotted with cigar ash and overlain with a gold watch chain as large and ornate as any Quincannon had ever seen. This was C.W. Cromarty, the railroad’s division superintendent.

Cromarty’s desk was stacked with profiles, cross-sections, and specification sheets for bridges, rails, switches, and other material; arranged behind it was a series of drafting boards containing location and contour maps of the area. All of this, Quincannon later learned, was for the continuation of the road’s branch line to Angels Camp. The branch had been completed as far as Tuttletown, where the trouble that had brought him here had taken place three nights ago.

Cromarty said, after they’d shaken hands, “We’ll make this conference brief, Mr. Quincannon. A freight is due in from Tuttletown any minute. As soon as it arrives, we’ll leave in my private car.”

Quincannon produced his stubby briar and pouch of Navy Plug and began thumbing tobacco into the bowl. “Has any new information come to light on the robbery?”

“None so far.”

The engineer, Newell, said, “Tuttletown’s constable, George Teague, would have sent word if he’d learned anything. He’s a good man, Teague, but out of his element in a matter such as this. We’ll be relying on you, Mr. Quincannon.”

“A well-placed reliance, I assure you.”

“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?” Halloran said around the stub of a slender cheroot. His voice and his expression both held a faint sneer.

“With just cause.”

“That remains to be seen. You may have a fancy-pants reputation as a detective in San Francisco, you and that woman of yours, but you don’t cut no ice up here.”

Quincannon bristled at this — literally. When his ire was aroused, the hairs in his dark freebooter’s beard stiffened and quivered like a porcupine’s quills. He fixed Halloran with an eye more fierce than the marshal’s own as he said, “Sabina Carpenter is my partner, not ‘my woman’ — a Pinkerton-trained detective the equal of any man.”

“So you say. Me, I never put much stock in a man that’d partner up with a female, trained or not.”

“And I put no stock at all in one who blathers about matters he knows nothing about.”

Cromarty said, “Here, that’ll be enough of that. Marshal, this is a railroad matter, as you well know. The decision to hire Mr. Quincannon has been made and will be abided by.”

“I still say I can do a better job than some citified puff-belly.”

Quincannon bit back a triple-jointed retort. A fee to fatten the bank account of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, had been requested in his reply to Cromarty’s first wire, and agreed upon in his second. It wouldn’t do to get into a sparring match with a small-town peacekeeper who had no say in the matter and no jurisdiction outside his own bailiwick.

He made a point of ignoring Halloran while he fired his pipe with a lucifer. When it was drawing to his satisfaction, he said to Cromarty, “Now then, Superintendent — suppose you provide the details of the robbery left out of your wire. What was the contents of the safe that was stolen?”

“Ten thousand dollars in gold dust and bullion from two of the mines near Tuttletown, awaiting shipment here and on to Stockton.”

“A considerable sum. Why was it being kept in the express office overnight?”

“The shipment didn’t arrive in time for the last train that afternoon. The Tuttletown agent felt no cause for concern.”

“Damn fool,” Halloran muttered.

“No, I don’t blame Booker. We all believed the gold was secure where it was. What we overlooked was the audacity of thieves who would carry off a four-hundred-pound burglarproof safe in the middle of the night.”

Quincannon said, “Burglarproof?”

“A brand-new model, guaranteed as such by the manufacturer.”

“I’ve heard such guarantees before.”

“This one has been proven to our satisfaction,” Cromarty said. “Sierra Railway Express now uses them exclusively.”

“What type of safe is it?”

“Cannon Breech, with a circular door made of reinforced steel. The dial and spindle can be removed once the combination is set, and when that has been done, the safe is virtually impenetrable and indestructible. Not even the most accomplished cracksman has been able to breach it.”

“And the dial and spindle were removed in this case?”

“Yes. Booker did that before he locked up and took them home with him. He still has them and swears they were never out of his sight.”

“Virtually impenetrable and indestructible, you said? Even with explosives? Dynamite or nitroglycerin inserted in the dial hole in the door?”

“Can’t be done, according to the safe company,” Newell said. “You couldn’t open a dialless one with a pile driver.”

Quincannon remained dubious. Ingenuity could be a two-edged sword, as he well knew; if a burglarproof safe could be built, a way to breach it could likewise be found. “Is this fact common knowledge locally?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say common knowledge, but we’ve made no secret of the fact.”

Then why had the thieves — thieves, plural, for it would have taken at least two strong men to carry 400 pounds of gold-filled steel — broken into the express office and made off with the safe? Halfwits who refused to believe the burglarproof claim? Professional yeggs?

A large, heavy wagon would have been required to transport the safe from the Tuttletown depot, but there was no potential clue in that fact; ore and freight wagons plied the area in large numbers. Nor was there any way to tell in which direction the plunder had been taken, or how far. Two main roads crossed at Tuttletown, one running northward to Angels Camp and the other southward toward Stockton, and there were also a number of intermediate roads connecting with other Mother Lode communities. The town had been the hub of mining activity since placer days, surrounded by a cluster of settlements so close that pioneers from Jackass Hill, Mormon Gulch, and half a dozen others on the west side of Table Mountain could walk into Tuttletown to shop.

These facts had made the town a prime target for thieves before. In the 1880s, the notorious poetry-spouting bandit Black Bart had filched three Wells Fargo stage shipments of bullion and dust amounting to five thousand dollars from the nearby Patterson Mine. Quincannon had been with the Secret Service on the east coast at that time — it wasn’t until 1891 that he’d been transferred west to the Service’s San Francisco office — so he’d had no opportunity to pit his detective skills against Black Bart’s criminal wiles. If he had, he’d once confided to Sabina, there was little doubt that he would have been the one to put an end to the bandit’s criminal career.

Outside, a distant train whistle sounded. One long, mournful blast, followed closely by a second.

“That’s the Tuttletown freight, Mr. Quincannon,” Cromarty said. “We’ll take our departure as soon as the main tracks are clear.”

The superintendent’s private car waited on a siding at the near end of the rail yards, coupled to a Baldwin 4-4-0 locomotive. Cromarty, Newell, and Quincannon were the only passengers; Halloran left them at the depot to return to his duties as Jimtown’s marshal, with a parting remark about cocksure flycops that Quincannon pretended not to hear. When he resolved this stolen safe business, he vowed to himself, he would not leave Jamestown until he looked up James B. Halloran and claimed the last word.

The car appeared ordinary enough on the outside, but the interior was well appointed with comfortable seats and dining and sleeping compartments. It also contained a pair of ceiling fans and a potbelly stove. The comfort, plus a late lunch once they were underway, improved Quincannon’s mood considerably.

The Angels extension branched off Sierra’s main line in front of the Nevills Hotel, bridged a creek at the north end of town, then climbed a steep grade to a cut high on Table Mountain. Over on the mountain’s west side, the tracks swept down another steep grade and curved around a wide valley and several working mines before swinging northward into Tuttletown. The place was a smaller but no less busy and noise-laden version of Jamestown, its narrow streets, stores, and brace of saloons clogged with off-shift miners and railroad workers from the crews engaged in laying new track and constructing what Cromarty described as a “fifty-foot-high, seventeen-bent wooden trestle” across the Stanislaus River to the north.

A one-man reception committee awaited them here. As soon as the Baldwin hissed to a stop, Quincannon, looking through the window, saw a thin, balding man come out from under the platform roof and hurry over to the car. He was waiting when the three men stepped down, mopping his face with a bandana. Despite the fact that the day was cool and overcast, he was sweating profusely.

Cromarty said, “Hello, Booker,” which marked him as the Tuttletown express agent, Howard Booker. “This is John Quincannon, the detective I sent for. Where’s Marshal Teague?”

Booker said excitedly, “I got news, Mr. Cromarty. Big news. The safe’s been found.”

“Found, you say? When? Where?”

“About an hour ago. In a field on Icehouse Road. Teague’s out there now with the rancher who found it.”

“Bully! Abandoned by the thieves, eh?”

“Abandoned, all right, but the news ain’t bully.”

“What do you mean?”

“Turns out that burglarproof safe’s no such thing,” Booker said. “She’s been opened somehow and she’s empty. The gold’s gone.”

Icehouse Road, obviously named after the stone building with ICE painted on its front wall that squatted alongside a wide creek, serpentined away from town into the hilly countryside. The buggy that Booker had had waiting for them bounced through chuckholes and over thick-grassed hummocks. A grim-visaged C.W. Cromarty sat up front with the express agent, Quincannon on the backseat with Newell. All four kept their own counsel on the quarter-mile ride.

Around a bend, a broad meadow opened up near where the road forked ahead. Oak and manzanita, and outcroppings of rock, spotted the high grass. A buckboard and a saddled chestnut partially blocked the road, and under one of the large oaks twenty rods away, a group of three men stood waiting. One of the men, a leaned-down gent with a handlebar moustache, detached himself from the others and hurried out to meet the rig. The star pinned to his vest identified him as the local constable, George Teague.

He said to Cromarty, “Damnedest thing you ever saw, Mr. Cromarty. Just the damnedest thing. I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes.”

“Who found the safe?”

“Sam Higgins. He’s a dairy rancher lives farther out this way.”

Quincannon asked, “Have you discovered anything else here?”

“Just a line of trampled grass. Looks like the safe was carried in from the road.” Teague paused. “You the detective from San Francisco?”

Cromarty answered the question and introduced them. Then he said in pained tones, “Very well. Let’s have a look at it.”

The safe lay tilted on its side in the oak’s shade, one corner dug deep into the grassy earth. The black circular door, bearing the words Sierra Railway Express in gold leaf, was open and partially detached, hanging by a single bolt from a bent hinge. Cromarty and Newell stood staring down at it, mouths pinched tight. Quincannon stepped past them, lowered himself to one knee for a closer study.

“She wasn’t blowed open,” Teague said behind him. “You can see that plain enough.”

Quincannon could. There were no powder marks on the door or other evidence that explosives had been used, nor did the center hole for the dial and spindle show any damage. Yet the door had clearly been forced somehow; the bolts were badly twisted. There were marks along the bottom edges of the door, the sort a wedge or chisel struck by sledgehammers would make, but a safe of this construction could not have been ripped open in that fashion, by brute force.

A whitish residue adhered to the steel along where the wedge marks were located. Quincannon scraped it with a thumbnail. Hard and flaky — dried putty, from the look and feel of it.

Another substance had dried on the safe, on one of the outer sides — brownish smears of what was certainly blood. Teague said, “One of ‘em must’ve gashed hisself when they busted into the express office. There’s blood on the door and the floor inside, too.”

Quincannon said nothing. Something else had drawn his attention — a piece of straw caught on one of the skewed bolts. He plucked it loose. Ordinary straw, clean and damp.

He leaned forward to peer inside the safe. Completely empty — not a gram of gold dust or speck of the other variety remained. He ran fingertips over the smooth walls and floor, found the metal to be cold and faintly moist.

When he straightened, Cromarty asked him, “Have you any idea how it was done?”

“Not as yet.”

“If I weren’t seeing it for myself, I wouldn’t believe it. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

Again Quincannon had no comment. Actions and events that didn’t seem possible were his meat. There was nothing he liked better than feasting on crimes that baffled and flummoxed average men and average detectives.

“Leave the safe here, Mr. Cromarty, or take it back to town?” Teague asked.

“Leave it for now. We’ll send some men out for it later. Unless you’d rather have it brought in for further examination, Quincannon?”

“Not necessary. I’ve seen enough of it.”

The rancher, Higgins, had no additional information to impart. Nor did the place where the safe had been dumped, or the section of meadow between the oak and the road, or the road itself. The ground was too hard to retain more than vague impressions.

The men rode back into Tuttletown. At the depot, Quincannon asked to have a look at the scene of the robbery both inside and out. Teague and Booker accompanied him to the rear of the building that housed the baggage and express office.

A trio of poplars grew close together near the door on that side; at night a wagon could be drawn up under them and be well hidden in their shadows. The jumbled tracks of men, wagons, and horses told him nothing. He stepped up to look at the door. Its bolt lock had been forced with a pinch bar or similar instrument.

Booker said, “There’s a wood crossbar on the door inside, but they got it free somehow. It was on the floor when I come in in the morning.”

There was no mystery in how that had been accomplished. Once the bolt had been snapped, the thieves had pried a gap between the door edge and jamb just wide enough to slip a thin length of metal through and lift the crossbar free. He tried the door, found it secure; Booker had replaced the crossbar. Quincannon asked him to go inside and remove it.

While the station agent was obliging, Quincannon studied the broken lock, the gouged wood, the crusty brown stains on the door edge. A fair amount of blood had been lost during the robbery; there were splatters on the platform as well. And more on the rough wood floor inside, he saw when Booker opened up for him.

A dusty square in one corner outlined where the safe had stood. It had been bolted to the floor, the bolts pried loose with the same instrument that had been used on the door. Still more dried blood stained the boards here.

“You know, I looked the place over pretty good myself,” Teague said. His patience seemed to be wearing thin. “Thieves didn’t leave nothing of theirselves behind, else I’d’ve found it.”

Except for the blood, Quincannon thought but didn’t say.

“If you ask me,” Booker said, “the ones that done it are long gone by now. And the gold with ‘em.”

“Possibly. And possibly not.”

“Well, they dumped the empty safe, didn’t they? What reason would they have for sticking around?”

“Strong ties to the community, mayhap.”

“You think they’re locals, then?”

“If so, the gold is still here as well.”

“That don’t put us any closer to finding out who they are.”

“Or how they got that safe open,” Teague said. “Dynamite wasn’t used and they couldn’t’ve done it with hammers and chisels.”

“Nor a pile driver,” Quincannon said wryly, echoing Newell’s words in Jamestown.

“Then how the devil did they do it?”

“The how and the who may well be linked. The answer to one question will provide the answer to the other.”

“Well now, Mr. Quincannon,” Teague said, “that sounds like double-talk to me. Ain’t no shame in admitting you’re as fuddled as the rest of us.”

No shame in it if it were true, but it wasn’t. For one thing, he prided himself that he was never fuddled and only occasionally puzzled. For another, he had already discovered a number of clues which his canny brain was busily piecing together.

Teague mistook his silence for tacit agreement. “So then how you going to go about finding the answers?”

“A detective never reveals his methods until his investigation is complete,” Quincannon told him. And sometimes, he added silently, not even then.

Cromarty had invited him to spend the night in his private car, but Quincannon preferred a solitary environment and his own company when he was in the midst of a case. He took a room at Tuttletown’s only hostelry, the Cremer House — the best room the hotel had to offer, which turned out to be cramped, spartan, and stuffy. He stayed in it just long enough to deposit his bag. Downstairs again, he asked the pudgy desk clerk if Tuttletown had a doctor.

“Sure have. Doc Goodfellow.”

“Where would his office be?”

“Upstairs above the drugstore, one block east.”

Quincannon found the doctor in and not busy with a patient. Goodfellow was a tall, saturnine gent who bore a superficial resemblance to Honest Abe. He was evidently aware of the resemblance and proud of it; even the beard he cultivated was Lincolnesque.

Quincannon identified himself and stated his mission in Tuttletown. He asked then, “Have you treated anyone for a severe gash or cut on the hand, wrist, or forearm in the past three days?”

“I have, yes. Two men and a boy.”

“Who would the men be?”

“A miner named Jacobsen was the most badly injured,” Goodfellow said. “Consequences of a fall at the Rappahanock. Gashed his arm and broke his wrist in two places. I had a difficult time setting the bones—”

“And the other man, Doctor?”

“One of the Schneider brothers — Wilhem. Deep cut on the back of his left hand.”

“Miners also, the Schneiders?”

“No, sir. They own the icehouse.”

“Ah. Big men, are they? Brawny?”

“Yes, of course. Men who make their living cutting and hauling ice can hardly be puny.”

“Have they been in Tuttletown long?”

“Not long. They bought the business about three years ago.”

“Where did they come from?”

“I’ve heard that they owned a similar business down in Bishop,” Goodfellow said, “but I don’t know for certain. They’re a close-mouthed pair when it comes to themselves.”

“Peaceable men, law-abiding?”

“Well, the younger, Bodo, has a reputation for rowdiness when he’s had too much to drink. But so do half the men who live and work in these parts.”

“Do the Schneiders live at or near the icehouse?”

“No. In a cabin on Table Mountain.” The doctor frowned. “Do you suspect them of stealing the safe from the express office?”

“At this point,” Quincannon said, “I suspect everyone and no one.” Which wasn’t quite the truth, but it permitted him to take his leave without further questions.

He returned to his room at the hotel, where he stretched out on what passed for a bed — it felt more like an uneven pile of bricks — and tucked his nose into Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Poetry was one of his two favorite forms of reading material, the other being intemperate temperance tracts. It soothed and relaxed him and allowed for proper brain-cudgeling.

Some time later, just past nightfall, he laid the book aside and left the room and the hotel wearing what Sabina referred to as his John-is-pleased-with-John smile. A thickening layer of clouds deepened the night’s blackness, he noted with satisfaction as he stepped outside. The lamplight that shone within some of the business establishments on Main Street seemed pale by contrast; electric lights had been installed in Jamestown, but not here as yet.

He made his way through the town center, whistling one of his favorite temperance tunes, and turned down the side street that led to Icehouse Road. Here, he had the night to himself. The darkness was unbroken except for distant flickers that marked the locations of mines and cabins at the higher elevations. Under the tall cottonwoods that lined the road and nearby creek the shadows were as black as India ink.

It was a brisk five-minute walk to the icehouse. The building sat creekside a short distance off the road, connected to it by a graveled lane — a low, bulky shape silhouetted against the restless sky. Set apart from it on the near side was a shedlike structure, lamplight making a pale rectangle of its single window. One or both of the Schneider brothers working late in what was probably their office.

Quincannon strolled on past, getting the lay of the place. The wagon entrance was at the far end, barred by a set of wide doors. A livery barn and rough-fenced corral occupied a grassy section between the road and the creek. No conveyances or animals were visible. The wagon and dray horses used for delivering ice would have been put away inside the barn for the night.

When he’d seen enough, he walked at a leisurely pace back to Main Street. The stone-housed general store near the hotel, Swerer’s by name, was still open for business. Inside, as he paid for his purchases, the garrulous young fellow behind the counter took considerable pride in informing him that the writer Bret Harte had once clerked there. Quincannon was more impressed by the outlandish prices charged for one dark lantern, one small tin of lamp oil, and a plug of Navy Cut tobacco. Not that the outlay bothered him; the amounts would be added to the expense account he would present to the Sierra Railway Company along with his bill for services rendered.

Hunger prodded him into Miner’s Rest Cafe, where he ate a bowl of mulligan stew and sampled a Mother Lode country favorite, a pie made with vinegar and raisins. The dessert turned out to be more appetizing than its name, fly pie.

Once more in his room at Cremer House, he stripped to his long johns and again made an effort to settle himself on the mound of bricks. He set his internal clock, a mechanism so unfailing that he never used one of the alarm variety. He was asleep within minutes.

At three a.m. Quincannon slipped out of the hotel’s side entrance carrying the dark lantern, its wick already lit and the shutter tightly closed. Main Street was all but deserted at this hour; even the saloons had closed. He avoided the one man he saw, a lurcher under the influence, and in less than ten minutes he was hurrying through the deep shadows on Icehouse Road.

No lamplight showed now in the shedlike office next to the icehouse. Darkness shrouded building and outbuildings alike, as well as the road in both directions. Quincannon paused under one of the trees to listen. A night bird’s cry, a faint sound from the direction of the corral that was likely the restless movement of a horse. Otherwise, silence.

He picked his way through dew-wet grass to the rear of the icehouse. As he’d expected, the pair of heavy wooden entrance doors were locked. He opened the lantern’s shutter a crack, shielding the light with his body, and quickly examined the iron hasp and padlock. Well and good. The padlock was large and looked new, but it was of inferior manufacture.

He closed the shutter, set the lantern down. The set of lock picks he carried, an unintentional gift from a burglar he’d once snaffled, were the best money could buy, and over the years he had learned how to manipulate them as dexterously as any housebreaker. The absence of light hampered his efforts here; it took him three times longer, working by feel, than it would have under normal circumstances to free the padlock’s staple. Not a sound disturbed the stillness the entire time.

He removed the lock, hung it from the hasp, and opened one door half just wide enough to ease his body through. The temperature inside was several degrees colder. When he opened the lantern, he saw that he was in a narrow space that sloped downward and was blocked on the inner side by a second set of doors. These, fortunately, were not locked.

The interior of the icehouse was colder still, as frigid as a politician’s heart. Quincannon put on the gloves he’d brought with him, then widened the lantern’s eye to its fullest and shined the light around. The stone walls, he judged, were at least two feet thick and the wooden floor set six feet or so below ground level. Large and small blocks of ice lined both walls, cut from the creek or hauled from the Stanislaus River during the winter months. Thick layers of straw covered the floor and was packed around the ice; the low ceiling would likewise be insulated with straw to keep the sun’s heat from penetrating. A trap door in the middle of the floor would doubtless give access to a stone- or brick-walled pit that would also be ice-filled, a solid mass ready to be broken by axe and chisel into smaller chunks as needed.

He played the light around more slowly, looking for a likely hiding place. None presented itself. The cold had begun to penetrate his clothing; he hurried to the far end and began his search, stamping his feet to maintain circulation.

By the time he had covered three-quarters of the space, finding nothing but ice and straw, he was chilled to the marrow. But his high good humor remained intact; so did his confidence. The stolen gold was hidden somewhere in here. Logic dictated that it couldn’t be anywhere else.

Five minutes later, his faith in himself and his deductions was rewarded.

At one wall not far from the entrance, he uncovered a cavelike space formed by ice blocks and a thick pile of straw. The bullion and sacks of dust were piled under the straw — the entire booty, from the look of it.

A satisfied smile creased his pirate’s beard. He pocketed one of the sacks, heaped straw over the rest of the gold. Quickly, then, he made his exit, making sure before he stepped outside that the night was still untenanted. He replaced the padlock without closing the staple, then hastened back into town to locate Constable Teague.

Shortly past dawn, in C.W. Cromarty’s private car, Quincannon prepared to hold court.

He and Teague, accompanied by a group of deputized citizens that included the express agent, Booker, had taken the Schneider brothers by surprise at their cabin and arrested them without incident. The two thieves were now ensconced in the Tuttletown jail. The gold had been removed from the icehouse and turned over to Booker for safekeeping. With Teague in tow, Quincannon had then come here to tell the superintendent and his chief engineer the good news.

Cromarty was effusive in his praise. “Splendid, Mr. Quincannon,” he said. “Bully! And the job done in less than twenty-four hours. You’re something of a wizard, I must say.”

“I prefer the term artiste,” Quincannon said. Humility was not one of his virtues, if in fact it was a virtue. Why shouldn’t a man at the zenith of his profession be boastful of the fact? “You might say that I am the Rembrandt of crime solvers.”

Teague said, “Who’s Rembrandt?” but no one answered him.

“Tell us how you deduced the identity of the thieves and the location of the gold,” Newell urged.

“And how they got the safe open.” The constable appealed to the two railroad men. “He wouldn’t tell me before, just said he’d explain everything when we come here.”

Quincannon took his time loading and lighting his briar, drawing out the moment. This was the time he liked best, the explanations that demonstrated the breadth and scope of his prowess. He admitted to a dramatic streak in his nature; if he hadn’t become a detective, he might have gone on the stage and become a fine dramatic actor. “Ham, you mean,” Sabina had said when he mentioned this to her once, but he’d forgiven her.

The others waited expectantly while he got the pipe drawing to his satisfaction. Then he fluffed his beard and said, “Very well, gentlemen. I’ll begin by noting clues that led me to the solution. When I examined the safe on Icehouse Road, I found two items — a hard residue of putty where the wedge marks were located on the door, and a piece of straw caught on one of the bolts. Straw, as you all know, is used to pack blocks and chunks of ice to slow the melting process. Also, the walls of the safe were cold, too cold for the night and morning air to have been responsible.”

“Pretty flimsy evidence,” Teague observed. “And what’s putty got to do with it?”

Quincannon addressed the constable’s statement, ignoring his question for the moment. “On the contrary, the evidence was not at all flimsy when combined with other factors. Such as where the damaged safe was discarded — less than a mile from the icehouse. The thieves saw no need and had no desire, as heavy and cumbersome as it is, to transport it any farther than that meadow. They were foolishly certain no one would suspect them of the crime.”

“How did you know the gold would be hidden in the icehouse?” Cromarty asked. “They might just as well have hidden it elsewhere.”

“Might have, yes, but it would have required additional risk. The weight of the gold and the necessity of finding another hiding place also argued against it having been moved elsewhere. As far as they were concerned, it was perfectly secure inside the icehouse until it could be disposed of piecemeal.”

“Are you saying that the icehouse was where the safe was opened?”

“I am. It’s the only place it could have been managed in this region at this time of year.” Quincannon shifted his gaze to Teague. “Do you recall my stating yesterday that the how and the who of the crime were linked?”

“I do.”

“And so they are. Once I determined that the Schneiders were guilty, it was a simple matter of cognitive reasoning to deduce the how.”

“Fancy talk,” Teague said. “Say it in plain English, man. How’d they break into that safe?”

“Strictly speaking, they didn’t. The safe was opened from the inside.”

“From the inside? What the devil are you talking about?”

“The application of a simple law of physics,” Quincannon said. “After the safe had been allowed to chill inside the icehouse, the Schneiders turned it on its back and hammered a wedge into the crack of the door along the bottom edge, the purpose being to widen the crack through to the inside, similar to their objective with the express-office door. Then, using a bucket and a funnel, they poured water into the safe until it was full. The final steps were to seal the crack with hard-drying putty” — he glanced meaningly at the constable as he spoke — “and then pack ice around the safe and cover the whole with straw. The object being to completely freeze the water inside.”

Newell, the engineer, clapped his hands. “Of course! Water expands as much as one-seventh of its volume when it freezes.”

“Exactly. When the water in the safe froze, the intense pressure from the ice caused the door’s hinges to give way. It was a simple matter, then, for them to chip out the ice and remove the gold. Whatever residue remained in the safe melted after they carried it away to the field.”

Quincannon stood basking in the further approbation that followed these explanations. It was only fitting, of course, for once again he had solved the seemingly insoluble. Superior detective work was a combination of intelligence, observation, deductive reasoning, and supreme self-confidence. These qualities, which he possessed in abundance, made him the most celebrated sleuth west of the Mississippi River. Any man who didn’t agree with that assessment was a dunderhead.

Marshal James B. Halloran of Jamestown, for instance.

Quincannon chuckled evilly to himself. Halloran, all unwittingly, had provided him with one other clue to the solution of this case — one he hadn’t mentioned in his summation. He was saving it to use as part of his gloat when he sought out that dunderhead marshal before leaving the Queen of the Mines.

“You may be a fancy-pants detective in San Francisco,” Halloran had said in Cromarty’s office, “but you don’t cut no ice up here.” Ah, but he had — figuratively if not literally. He’d cut more ice in Tuttletown last night, by godfrey, than the Schneiders had inside that so-called burglarproof safe!

Copyright © 2010 Bill Pronzini