The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

Gunpowder Alley by Bill Pronzini

FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

FROM WHERE HE SAT propped behind a copy of the San Francisco Argonaut, Quincannon had an unobstructed view of both the entrance to the Hotel Grant’s bar parlor and the booth in which his client, Titus Willard, waited nervously. The Seth Thomas clock above the back bar gave the time as one minute past nine, which made the man Willard was waiting for late for their appointment. This was no surprise to Quincannon. Blackmailers seldom missed an opportunity to heap additional pressure on their victims.

Willard fidgeted, looked at the clock for perhaps the twentieth time, and once more pooched out his cheeks-a habitual trick that, combined with his puffy muttonchop whiskers, gave him the look of a large rodent. As per arrangement, he managed to ignore the table where Quincannon sat with his newspaper. The satchel containing the $5,000 cash payoff was on the seat next to him, one corner of it just visible to Quincannon’s sharp eye.

The Argonaut, like all of the city’s papers these days, was full of news of the imminent war with Spain. The Atlantic fleet had been dispatched to Cuban waters, Admiral Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron was on its way to the Philippines, and President McKinley had issued a call for volunteer soldiers to join Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Quincannon, who disdained war as much as he disdained felons of every stripe, paid the inflammatory yellow journalism no mind while pretending to be engrossed in it, and wondered again what his client had done to warrant blackmail demands that now amounted to $10,000.

He had asked Willard, of course, but the banker had refused to divulge the information. Given the fact that the man was in his midfifties, with a prim socialite wife and a grown daughter, and the guilty flush that had stained his features when the question was put to him, his transgressions likely involved one or more young and none-too-respectable members of the opposite sex. In any case, Willard had shown poor judgment in paying the first $5,000 demand, and good judgment in hiring Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, to put an end to the bloodletting after the second demand was made. The man may have been worried, frightened, and guilt-ridden, but he was only half a fool. Pay twice, and he knew he’d be paying for the rest of his life.

Quincannon took a sip of clam juice, his favorite tipple now that he was a confirmed teetotaler, and turned a page of the Argonaut. Willard glanced again at the clock, which now read ten past nine, then drained what was left of a double whiskey. And that was when the blackmailer-if it was the blackmailer and not a hireling-finally appeared.

The fellow’s entrance into the bar parlor was slow and cautious. This was one thing that alerted Quincannon. The other was the way he was dressed. Threadbare overcoat, slouch hat drawn low on his forehead, wool muffler wound up high inside the coat collar so that it concealed the lower part of his face. This attire might have been somewhat conspicuous at another time of year, but on this damp, chilly November night, he drew only a few casual glances from the patrons, none of which lingered.

He paused just inside the doorway to peer around before his gaze locked in on his prey. Out of the corner of one eye Quincannon watched him approach the booth. What little of the man’s face was visible corroborated Willard’s description of him from their first meeting: middle-aged, with a hooked nose and sallow complexion, and average to small in size, though it was difficult to tell for certain because of the coat’s bulk. Not such-a-much at all.

Titus Willard stiffened when the fellow slipped into the booth opposite. There was a low-voiced exchange of words, after which the banker passed the satchel under the table. The hook-nosed gent opened it just long enough to see that it contained stacks of greenbacks, closed it again, then produced a manila envelope from inside his coat and slid it across the table. Willard opened the envelope and furtively examined the papers it contained-letters of a highly personal nature, judging from the banker’s expression. They would not be the sum total of the blackmail evidence, however. Finding the rest was one part of Quincannon’s job, the others being to identify and then yaffle the responsible party or parties.

While the two men were making their exchange, Quincannon casually folded the newspaper and laid it on the table, gathered up his umbrella and derby hat, and strolled out into the hotel lobby. He took a position just inside the corridor that led to the elevators, where he had an oblique view of the bar entrance. His quarry would have to come out that way because there was no other exit from the bar parlor.

The wait this time was less than two minutes. When Hook-nose appeared, he went straight to the swing door that led out to New Montgomery Street. Quincannon followed twenty paces behind. A drizzle of rain had begun and the salt-tinged bay wind had the sting of a whip. It being a poor night for travel by shanks’ mare, Quincannon expected his man to take one of the hansom cabs at the stand in front of the Palace Hotel opposite. But this didn’t happen. With the satchel clutched inside his overcoat, the fellow angled across Montgomery and turned the far corner into Jessie Street.

Quincannon reached the corner a few seconds later. He paused to peer around it before unfurling his umbrella and turning into Jessie himself, to make sure he wasn’t observed. Hook-nose apparently had no fear of pursuit; he was hurrying ahead through the misty rain without a backward glance.

Jessie was a dark, narrow thoroughfare, and something of an anomaly as the new century approached-a mostly residential street that ran for several blocks through the heart of the business district, midway between Market and Mission. Small, old houses and an occasional small business establishment flanked it, fronted by tiny yards and backed by barns and sheds. The electric light glow from Third Street and the now steady drizzle made it a chasm of shadows. The darkness and the thrumming wind allowed Quincannon to quicken his pace without fear of being seen or heard.

After two blocks, his quarry made another turning, this time into a cobblestone cul-de-sac called Gunpowder Alley. The name, or so Quincannon had once been told, derived from the fact that Copperhead sympathizers had stored a large quantity of explosives in one of the houses there during the War Between the States. Gunpowder Alley was even darker than Jessie Street, the frame buildings strung along its short length shabby presences in the wet gloom. The only illumination was strips and daubs of light that leaked palely around a few drawn window curtains.

Not far from the corner, Hook-nose crossed the alley to a squat, dark structure that huddled between the back end of a saloon fronting on Jessie Street and a private residence. The squat building appeared to be a store of some sort, its plate-glass window marked with lettering that couldn’t be read at a distance. The man used a key to unlock a door next to the window and disappeared inside.

As Quincannon cut across the alley, lamplight bloomed in pale fragments around the edges of a curtain that covered the store window. He ambled past, pausing in front of the glass to read the lettering: CIGARS, PIPE TOBACCO, SUNDRIES. R. SONDERBERG, PROP. The curtain was made of heavy muslin; all he could see through the center folds was a slice of narrow counter. He put his ear to the cold glass. The faint whistling voice of the wind was the only sound to be heard.

He moved on. A narrow, ink-black passage separated R. Sonderberg’s cigar store from the house on the far side-a low, two-storied structure with a gabled roof and ancient shingles curled by the weather. The parlor window on the lower floor was an uncurtained and palely lamplit rectangle; he could just make out the shape of a white-haired, shawl-draped woman in a high-backed rocking chair, either asleep or keeping a lonely watch on the street. Crowding close along the rear of store and house, paralleling Gunpowder Alley from the Jessie Street corner to its end, was the long back wall of a warehouse, its dark windows steel-shuttered. There was nothing else to see. And nothing to hear except the wind, muted here in the narrow lane.

A short distance beyond the house Quincannon paused to close his umbrella, the drizzle having temporarily ceased. He shook water from the fabric, then turned back the way he’d come. The woman in the rocking chair hadn’t moved-asleep, he decided. Lamp glow now outlined a window in the squat building that faced into the side passage; the front part of the shop was once again dark. R. Sonderberg, if that was who the hook-nosed gent was, had evidently entered a room or rooms at the rear-living quarters, like as not.

Quincannon stopped again to listen, and again heard only silence from within. He sidestepped to the door and tried the latch. Bolted. His intention then was to enter the side passage, to determine if access could be gained at the rear. What stopped him was the fact that he was no longer the only pedestrian abroad in Gunpowder Alley.

Heavy footsteps echoed hollowly from the direction of Jessie Street. Even as dark and wet as it was, he recognized almost immediately the brass-buttoned coat, helmet, and handheld dark lantern of a police patrolman. Hell and damn! Of all times for a blasted bluecoat to happen along on his rounds.

Little annoyed Quincannon more than having to abort an investigation in midskulk, but he had no other choice. He turned from the door and moved at an even pace toward the approaching policeman. They met just beyond the joining of the saloon’s back wall and the cigar store’s far side wall.

Unlike many of his brethren, the bluecoat, an Irishman in his middle years, was a gregarious sort. He stopped, forcing Quincannon to do likewise, and briefly opened the lantern’s shutter so that the beam flicked over his face before saying in a conversational tone, “Evening, sir. Nasty weather, eh?”

“Worse coming, I expect.”

“Aye. Heavy rain before morning. Like as not I’ll be getting a thorough soaking before my patrol ends.”

Quincannon itched to touch his hat and move on. But the bluecoat wasn’t done with him yet. “Don’t believe I’ve seen you before, sir. Live in Gunpowder Alley, do you?”

“No. Visiting.”

“Which resident, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“R. Sonderberg, at the cigar store.”

“Ah. I’ve seen the lad a time or two, but we’ve yet to meet. I’ve only been on this beat two weeks now, y’see. Maguire’s my name, at your service.”

Before Quincannon could frame a lie that would extricate him from Officer Maguire’s company, there came in rapid succession a brace of muffled reports. As quiet as the night was, there was no mistaking the fact that they were pistol shots and that the weapon had been fired inside the squat building.

Quincannon’s reflexes were superior to the patrolman’s; he was already on the run by the time the bluecoat reacted. Behind him Maguire shouted something, but he paid no heed. Another sound, a loudish thump, reached his ears as he charged past the shop’s entrance, dropping his umbrella so he could grasp the Navy Colt in its holster. Seconds later he veered into the side passage. The narrow confines appeared deserted, and there were no sounds of movement at its far end. He skidded to a halt in front of the lighted window.

Vertical bars set close together prevented both access and egress. The glass inside was dirty and rain-spotted, but he could make out the figure of a man sprawled supine on the floor of a cluttered room. There was no sign of anyone else.

The spaces between the bars were just wide enough to reach a hand through; he did that, pushing fingers against the pane. It didn’t yield to the pressure.

Officer Maguire pounded up beside him, the beam from his lantern cutting jigsaw pieces out of the darkness. The bobbing light illuminated enough of the passage ahead so that Quincannon could see to where it ended at the warehouse wall. He hurried back there while Maguire had his look through the window.

Another short walkway, shrouded in gloom, stretched at right angles to the side passage like the crossbar of the letter T. Quincannon thumbed a lucifer alight as he stepped around behind the cigar store, shielding it with his hand. That section was likewise empty, except for a pair of refuse bins. There was no exit in that direction; the walkway ended in a board fence that joined shop and warehouse walls, built so high that only a monkey could have climbed it. The match’s flicker showed him the outlines of a rear door to R. Sonderberg’s quarters. He tried the latch, but the heavy door was secure in its frame.

Maguire appeared, his lantern creating more dancing patterns of light and shadow. “See anyone back here?” he demanded.

“No one.”

“Would that rear door be open?”

“No. Bolted on the inside.”

The bluecoat grunted and pushed past him to try the latch himself. While he was doing that, Quincannon struck another match in order to examine the other half of the walkway. It served the adjacent house, ending in a similarly high and unscalable board fence. The house’s rear door, he soon determined, was also bolted within.

The lantern beam again picked him out. “Come away from there, laddie. Out front with me, step lively now.”

Quincannon complied. As they hurried along the passage, Maguire said, “Is it your friend Sonderberg lying shot in there?”

No friend of mine or society’s, Quincannon thought. But he said only, “I couldn’t be sure.”

“Didn’t seem to be anybody else in the room.”

“No.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out.”

When they emerged from the passage, Quincannon saw that the elderly woman had left her rocking chair and was now standing stooped at the edge of her front window, peering out. One other individual had so far been alerted; a man wearing a light overcoat and high hat and carrying a walking stick had appeared from somewhere and stood staring nearby. Quincannon knew from rueful experience that a full gaggle of onlookers would soon follow.

No one had exited the cigar store through the Gunpowder Alley entrance; the door was still locked from within. Maguire grunted again. “We’ll be having to break it down,” he said. “Sonderberg, or whoever ’tis, may still be alive.”

It took the combined weight of both of them to force the door, the bolt finally splintering free with an echoing crack. Once they were inside, Maguire flashed his lantern’s beam over displays of cigars and pipe tobacco, partly filled shelves of cheap sundries, then aimed it down behind the low service counter. The shop was cramped and free of hiding places-and completely empty.

The closed door to the rear quarters stood behind a pair of dusty drapes. “By the saints!” Maguire exclaimed when he caught hold of the latch. “This one’s bolted, too.”

It proved no more difficult to break open than the outer door had. The furnished room beyond covered the entire rear two thirds of the building. The man sprawled on the floor was middle-aged, medium-sized, and hook-nosed-Quincannon’s quarry, right enough, though he no longer wore the overcoat, muffler, and slouch hat that had partially disguised him in the Hotel Grant. Blood from a pair of wounds spotted the front of his linsey-woolsey shirt; his open eyes glistened in the light from a table lamp.

Maguire went to one knee beside him, felt for a pulse. “Dead,” he said unnecessarily.

Quincannon’s attention was now on the otherwise empty room. It contained a handful of secondhand furniture, a blanket-covered cot, a potbellied stove that radiated heat, and a table topped with a bottle of whiskey and two empty glasses. The whole was none too tidy and none too clean.

Another pair of curtains partially covered an alcove in the wall opposite the window. Quincannon satisfied himself that the alcove contained nothing more than an icebox and larder cabinet. The only item of furniture large enough to conceal a person was a rickety wardrobe, but all he found when he opened it was a few articles of inexpensive clothing.

Maguire was on his feet again. He said, “I wonder what made him do it.”

“Do what?”

“Shoot himself, of course. Suicide’s a cardinal sin.”

“Is that what you think happened, Officer?”

“Aye, and what else could it be, with all the doors and windows locked and no one else on the premises?”

Suicide? Faugh! Murder was what else it could be, and murder was what it was, despite the circumstances. Three things told Quincannon this beyond any doubt. Sonderberg had been shot twice in the chest, a location handgun suicides seldom chose because it necessitated holding the weapon at an awkward angle, and one of the wounds was high on the left side in a nonlethal spot. The pistol that had fired the two rounds lay some distance away from the dead man, too far for it to have been dropped if he had fired the fatal shot. And the most damning evidence: the satchel containing the $5,000 blackmail payoff was nowhere to be seen here or in the front part of the shop.

But Quincannon shrugged and said nothing. Let the bluecoat believe what he liked. The dispatching of R. Sonderberg was part and parcel to the blackmail game, and that made it John Quincannon’s meat.

“I’ll be needing to report in to headquarters,” Maguire said. “The nearest callbox is on Jessie, two blocks distant. You’ll stay here, will you, and keep out any curious citizens until I return, Mr.-?”

“Quinn. That I will, Officer.”

“Quinn, is it? You’ll be Irish yourself, then?”

“Scotch-Irish,” Quincannon said.

Maguire hurried out. As soon as he was alone, Quincannon commenced a search of the premises. The dead man’s coat and trouser pockets yielded nothing of value or interest other than an expired insurance card that confirmed his identity as Raymond Sonderberg. The pistol that had done for him was a small-caliber Colt, its chambers fully loaded except for the two fired rounds; it bore no identifying marks of any kind. The $5,000 was not in the room, nor was whatever blackmail evidence had been withheld from Titus Willard tonight.

The bolt on the rear door was tightly drawn, the door itself sturdy in its frame; and for good measure a wooden bar set into brackets spanned its width. Sonderberg had been nothing if not security-conscious, for all the good it had done him. The single window was hinged upward, the swivel latch at the bottom of the sash loosely in place around its stud fastener. Quincannon flipped the hook aside and raised the glass to peer again at the vertical bars. They were set tightly top and bottom; he couldn’t budge any of them. And as close together as they were, there was no way in which anything as bulky as the satchel could have passed between them.

Sonderberg had brought the satchel inside with him, there could be no mistaking that. Whoever had shot him had made off with it; that, too, was plain enough. But how the devil could the assassin have committed his crime and then escaped from not one but two sealed rooms in the clutch of seconds that had passed between the firing of the fatal shots and Quincannon’s entry into the side passage?

The night’s stillness was broken now by the sound of voices out front, but as yet none of the bystanders had attempted to come inside. Muttering to himself, Quincannon lowered the window and made his way out through the cigar store to stand in the broken doorway.

The parlor of the house next door, he noted, was now dark and the white-haired occupant had come out to stand, shawl-draped and leaning on a cane, on the small front porch. The others gathered in Gunpowder Alley numbered less than a dozen, drawn from nearby houses and the Jessie Street watering hole, among them the man in the cape and high hat, who now assailed him with questions. Quincannon provided only enough information, repeating Maguire’s false theory of suicide, to dampen the bystanders’ enthusiasm; shootings were common in the city, and there was not enough spice in a self-dispatching to hold the jaded citizens’ interest. He then sought information of his own, but none of the crowd owned up to seeing Sonderberg or anyone else enter the cigar store after its six o’clock closing.

Some of the men were already moving away to homes and saloon when Maguire returned. The bluecoat dispersed the rest. The elderly woman still stood on the porch; it was not until the alley was mostly deserted again that she doddered back inside the darkened house.

Quincannon asked Maguire if he knew the woman’s name and whether or not she lived alone. “I couldn’t tell you, lad,” the patrolman said. “I’ve not seen her before-the house has always been dark when I’ve come by.”

The morgue wagon and a trio of other bluecoats arrived shortly. None of them was interested in Quincannon. Neither was Maguire any longer. San Francisco’s finest, a misnomer if ever there was one, found suicides and those peripherally involved to be worthy of little time or attention. While the minions of the law were inside with the remains of Raymond Sonderberg, he remembered his dropped umbrella and mounted a brief search, but it was nowhere to be found. One of the onlookers must have made off with it. Faugh! Thieves everywhere in this infernal city!

He crossed to the adjacent house. The parlor window was curtained now, no light showing around its edges. The bell pull beside the door no longer worked; he rapped on the panel instead. There was no immediate response. Mayhap the white-haired woman wanted no truck with visitors after the night’s excitement, or had already retired-

Neither. Old boards creaked and a thin, quavery voice asked, “Yes? Who’s there?”

“Police officer,” Quincannon lied glibly. “A few questions if I may. I won’t keep you long.”

There was a longish pause, followed by the click of a bolt being thrown; the door squeaked open partway and the old woman appeared. Stooped, still bundled in a shawl over a black dress, she carried her cane in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. A cold draft set the candle flame to flickering in its ceramic holder, so that it cast patterns of light and shadow over her heavily seamed face as she peered out and up at him.

“I know you,” she said. “You were here before all the commotion next door.”

“You spied me through your parlor window, eh? I thought as much, Mrs.-?”

“Carver. Letitia Carver. Yes, I often sit looking out in the evenings. A person my age has little else to occupy her attention.”

“Did you see anyone enter or leave the cigar store at any time tonight?”

“No, no one. What happened to Mr. Sonderberg?”

“Shot dead in his quarters.”

“Oh!”

“Possibly by his own hand, more likely by an intruder. You heard the shots, did you?”

“Yes. I thought that’s what they were, but I wasn’t sure.”

“You live here alone, Mrs. Carver?”

“Since my husband passed on, bless his soul.”

“And you’ve had no visitors tonight?”

She sighed wistfully. “Few come to visit me anymore.”

“Did you hear anyone moving about in the side or rear passages, before or after the pistol shots?”

“Only you and the other policeman.” She sighed again, sadly this time. “Such a tragedy. Poor Mr. Sonderberg.”

Poor Mr. Sonderberg, my hat, Quincannon thought. Poor Titus Willard, who was now bereft of $10,000. And poor Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, who were out a substantial fee if the mystery of Sonderberg’s death remained unsolved.

The woman said in her quavery voice, “Is there anything more, young man? It’s quite chilly standing here.”

“Nothing more.”

She retreated inside and he returned to the boardwalk. R. Sonderberg’s body was in the process of being loaded into the morgue wagon. None of the policemen even glanced in Quincannon’s direction as he crossed the alley and made his way to Jessie Street, his thoughts as dark and gloomy as the night around him.

Sabina was already at her desk when he walked into the Market Street offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, the next morning. She was a handsome woman, his partner and unrequited love-the possessor of a fine figure, eyes the color of the sea at dusk, and sleek black hair layered high on her head and fastened with a jeweled comb. Today she wore one of the leg-of-mutton blouses which he usually found enticing, but his mood was such that he took only peripheral notice of her. His night had been a mostly sleepless one in which he’d wrestled unsuccessfully with the problem of how R. Sonderberg had been murdered and by whom. His lack of success was all the more frustrating because he prided himself on having an uncanny knack for unraveling even the knottiest of seemingly impossible problems.

Sabina said, as he shed his umbrella and rain-spotted overcoat, “Titus Willard telephoned a few minutes ago. He was upset that you failed to contact him last night.”

“Bah.”

“Well, he asked that you get in touch with him as soon as you arrived.”

“I’ll see him later this morning. He won’t be pleased to hear the news I have for him at any time.”

“You weren’t able to identify the blackmailer, then?”

“On the contrary. The blackmailer’s name is, or was, Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. He was murdered in his locked quarters before I could confront him and recover the blackmail evidence and payoff money.”

“Murdered? So that’s why you’re in such a foul humor this morning.”

“What makes you think my humor is foul?”

“The scowl you’re wearing, for one thing. You look like a pirate on his way to the gibbet.”

“Bah,” Quincannon said again.

“Exactly what happened last night, John?”

He sat at his desk and provided her with a detailed summary. They often shared information on difficult cases in order to obtain a fresh perspective. Sabina’s years as a Pink Rose, one of the select handful of women operatives hired by the Pinkerton Agency, plus the four years of their partnership had honed her skills to a fine edge. He would never have admitted it to her or anyone else, but she was often his equal at the more challenging aspects of the sleuthing game.

“A puzzling series of events, to be sure,” Sabina said when he finished his account. “But perhaps not as mysterious as they might seem.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know from experience, John, that such mysteries generally have a relatively simple explanation.”

He admitted the truth of this. “But I’m hanged if I can see it in this case.”

“Well, the first question that occurs to me, was the crime planned or committed on the spur of the moment?”

“If it was planned, it was done in order to silence Sonderberg and make off with the five thousand dollars.”

“By an accomplice in the blackmail scheme.”

“So it would seem. The accomplice must have been waiting for him in his quarters. The stove there was glowing hot, and there was not enough time for Sonderberg to have stoked the fire to high heat, even if he’d built it up before he left for the Hotel Grant.”

“Then why all the mystification?” Sabina asked. “Why not simply shoot Sonderberg and slip away into the night with the loot?”

“To make murder appear to be suicide.”

“That could have been accomplished without resorting to such elaborate flummery. Locked rooms and mysterious disappearances smack of deliberate subterfuge.”

“Aye, so they do. But to what purpose?”

“The obvious answer is to fool someone in close proximity at the time.”

“Who? Not me, surely. No one could have known ahead of time that I would follow Sonderberg from the hotel to Gunpowder Alley.”

“The bluecoat, Maguire, then,” Sabina said. “From your description of him, he’s the sort who makes his rounds on a by-the-clock schedule. Still, it seems rather an intricate game just to confuse a simple patrolman.”

“If the whole was planned ahead of time, and not a result of circumstance.”

“In either case, there has to be a plausible explanation. Are you certain there was no possible means of escape from Sonderberg’s building following the shooting?”

“Front and rear entrances bolted from the inside, the door to his living quarters likewise bolted, the only window both barred and locked. Yes, I’m certain of that much.”

“Doesn’t it follow, then, that if escape was impossible, the murderer was never inside the building?”

“It would,” Quincannon said, “except for three facts that indicate otherwise. The missing satchel and greenbacks; the presence of the whiskey bottle and two glasses on the table; the pistol that dispatched Sonderberg lying at a distance from the body. There can be no doubt that both killer and victim were together inside that sealed room.”

“The thump you heard just after the shots were fired. Can you find any significance in that?”

“None so far. It might have been a foot striking a wall-that sort of sound.”

“But loud enough to carry out to Gunpowder Alley. Did you also hear running steps?”

“No. No other sounds at all.” Quincannon stood and began to restlessly pace the office. “The murderer’s vanishing act is just as befuddling. Even if he managed to extricate himself from the building, how the devil was he able to disappear so quickly? Not even a cat could have climbed those fences enclosing the rear walkway. Nor the warehouse wall, not that such a scramble would have done him any good with all its windows steel-shuttered.”

“Which leaves only one possible escape route.”

“The rear door to Letitia Carver’s house, yes. But it was bolted when I tried it, and she claims not to have had any visitors.”

“She could have been lying.”

Quincannon conceded that she could have been.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that she herself could be the culprit?”

“She’s eighty if she’s a day,” he said. “Besides, I saw her sitting in her parlor window not two minutes before the shots were fired.”

“Lying to protect the guilty party, possibly. Perhaps a relative. In which case the murderer was hiding in the house while you spoke to her.”

“A galling possibility, if true.” Quincannon paused, glowering, to run fingers through his thick beard. “The crone seemed innocent enough, yet now that I consider it, there was something… odd about her.”

“Furtive, you mean?”

“No. Her actions, her words… I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“Why don’t you have another talk with her, John?”

“That,” Quincannon said, “is what I intend to do straightaway.”

Gunpowder Alley was no more appealing by daylight than it had been under the cloak of darkness. Heavy rain during the early morning hours had slackened into another dreary drizzle, and the buildings encompassing the alley’s short length all had a huddled appearance, bleak and sodden under the wet gray sky.

The cul-de-sac was deserted when Quincannon, dry beneath a newly purchased umbrella, turned into it from Jessie Street. Boards had been nailed across the front entrance to the cigar store and a police seal applied to forestall potential looters. At the house next door, tattered curtains still covered the parlor window.

He stood looking at the window for a few seconds, his mind jostled by memory fragments-words spoken to him by Maguire, others by Letitia Carver. Quickly, then, he climbed to the porch and rapped on the front door. Neither that series of knocks nor two more brought a response.

His resolve, sharpened now, prodded him to action. In his pocket he carried a set of lock picks which he’d purchased from an ex-housebreaker living in Warsaw, Illinois, who manufactured burglar tools, advertised them as novelties in the Police Gazette, and sold them for ten dollars the set. He set to work with these on the flimsy door lock and within seconds had the bolt snicked free.

In the foyer inside, he paused to listen. No sounds reached his ears save for the random creaks of old, wet timbers. He called loudly, “Hello! Anyone here?” Faint echoes of his voice were all the answer he received.

He moved through an archway into the parlor. The room was cold, decidedly musty; no fire had burned in the grate in a long while, certainly not as recently as last night. The furniture was sparse and had the worn look of discards. One arm of the rocking chair set near the curtained window was broken, bent outward at an angle. The lamp on the rickety table next to it was as cold as the air.

Glowering fiercely now, Quincannon set off on a rapid search of the premises upstairs and down. There were scattered pieces of furniture in two other rooms, including a sagging iron bedstead sans mattress in what might have been the master bedroom; the remaining rooms were empty. A closet in the foyer contained a single item that brought forth a blistering, triple-jointed oath.

He left the house, grumbling and growling, and stepped into the side passage for another examination of the barred window to Sonderberg’s quarters. Then he moved on to the cross passage at the rear, where a quick study confirmed his judgments of the night before: there was no possible exit at either end, both fences too tall and slippery to be scaled.

Out front again, he embarked on a rapid canvass of the immediate neighborhood. He spoke to two residents of Gunpowder Alley and the bartender at the saloon on the Jessie Street corner, corroborating one fact he already knew and learning another that surprised him not at all.

The first: The house next to the cigar store had been empty for four months, a possibility he should have suspected much sooner from the pair of conflicting statements he’d finally recalled-Maguire’s that in the two weeks he’d patrolled Gunpowder Alley the parlor window had always been dark, the woman calling herself Letitia Carver’s that she often sat there at night looking out.

And the second fact: Raymond Sonderberg, a man who kept mostly to himself and eked out a meager living selling cigars and sundries, was known to frequent variety houses and melodeons such as the Bella Union on Portsmouth Square.

The mystery surrounding Sonderberg’s death was no longer a mystery. And should not have been one as long as it had; Quincannon felt like a damned rattlepate for allowing himself to be duped and fuddled by what was, as Sabina had suggested, a crime with an essentially simple explanation. For he knew now how and why Sonderberg had been murdered in his locked quarters. And was tolerably sure of who had done the deed-the only person, given the circumstances, it could possibly be.

Titus Willard was alone in his private office at the Montgomery Street branch of Woolworth National Bank when Quincannon arrived there shortly before noon. And none too pleased to have been kept waiting for word as long as he had.

“Why didn’t you contact me last night, as we agreed?” he demanded. “Don’t tell me you weren’t able to follow and identify the blackmailer?”

“One of the blackmailers, yes, the man you paid. Raymond Sonderberg, proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley.”

“One of the blackmailers? I don’t understand.”

“His accomplice shot him dead in his quarters and made off with the satchel before I could intervene.”

Willard blinked his surprise and consternation. “But who…?”

“I’ll have the answer to that question, Mr. Willard, after you’ve answered a few of mine. Why were you being blackmailed?”

“… I told you before, I’d rather not say.”

“You’ll tell me if you want the safe return of your money and the remaining blackmail evidence.”

The banker assumed his habitual pooched rodent look.

“A woman, wasn’t it?” Quincannon prompted. “An illicit affair?”

“You’re, ah, a man of the world, surely you understand that when one reaches my age-”

“I have no interest in reasons or rationalizations, only in the facts of the matter. The woman’s name, to begin with.”

Willard hemmed and hawed and pooched some more before he finally answered in a scratchy voice, “Pauline Dupree.”

“And her profession?”

“Profession? I don’t see-oh, very well. She is a stage performer and actress. Yes, and a very good one, I might add.”

“I thought as much. Where does she perform?”

“At the Gaiety Theater. But she aspires to be a serious actress one day, perhaps on the New York stage.”

“Does she now.”

“I, ah, happened to be at the theater one evening two months ago and we chanced to meet-”

Quincannon waved that away. No one “happened to be” at the Gaiety Theater, which was something of a bawdy melodeon on the fringe of the Barbary Coast. The sort of place that catered to middle-aged men with a taste for the exotic, specializing as it did in prurient skits and raucous musical numbers featuring scantily clad young women.

He asked, “You confided in her when you received the first blackmail demand?”

“Of course,” Willard said. “She had a right to know…”

“Why did she have a right to know?”

“It’s… letters I wrote to her that are being held against me.”

Highly indiscreet letters, no doubt. “And how did the blackmailer get possession of them?”

“They were stolen from her rooms last week, along with a small amount of jewelry. This man Sonderberg… a common sneak thief who saw an opportunity for richer gains.”

Stolen? Sonderberg a common sneak thief? What a credulous gent his client was! “Was it Miss Dupree’s suggestion that you pay the initial five thousand dollars?”

“Yes, and I agreed. It seemed the most reasonable course of action at the time.”

“But when the second demand arrived two days ago, you didn’t tell her you’d decided to hire a detective until after you came to me.”

“That’s so, yes. Engaging you was a spur-of-the-moment decision-”

“And when you did tell her, you also explained that I’d be present at the second payoff and that I intended to follow and confront the blackmailer afterward?”

“Why shouldn’t I have confided in her? She-” Willard broke off, frowning, then once again performed his rodent imitation. “See here, Quincannon. You’re not suggesting that Miss Dupree had anything to do with the extortion scheme?”

It was not yet time to answer that question. “I deal in facts, as I told you, not suggestions,” Quincannon hedged. “Where are you keeping her?”

“Her rooms are on Stockton Street,” the banker said stiffly.

“Is she likely to be there or at the Gaiety at this hour?”

“I don’t know. One or the other, I suppose.”

“Come along, then, Mr. Willard,” Quincannon said, “and we’ll pay a call on the lady. I expect we’ll both find it a stimulating rendezvous.”

They found Pauline Dupree at the gaudily painted Gaiety Theater, primping in her backstage dressing room. She was more or less what Quincannon had expected-young and rather buxomly attractive, with dark-gold tresses and bold, smoke-hued eyes wise beyond her years. Her high color paled a bit when she saw Quincannon, but she recovered quickly.

“And who is this gentleman, Titus?” she asked Willard.

“John Quincannon, the detective I told you about.” The smile the banker bestowed on her was fatuous as well as apologetic. “I’m sorry to trouble you, my dear, but he insisted on seeing you.”

“Did he? And for what reason?”

“He wouldn’t say, precisely. But he seems to have a notion that you are somehow involved in the blackmail scheme.”

There was no need to hold back any longer. Quincannon said, “Not involved in it, the originator of it.”

Pauline Dupree’s only reaction was a raised eyebrow and a little moue of dismay. A talented actress, to be sure. But then, he’d already had ample evidence of her skills last night.

“I?” she said. “But that’s ridiculous.”

Quincannon’s gaze had roamed the small dressing room. Revealing costumes hung on racks and an array of paints and powders and various theatrical accessories were arranged on tables. He walked over to one, picked up and brandished a long-haired white wig. “Is this the wig you wore last night, Mrs. Carver?” he asked her.

There was no slippage of her composure this time, either. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Your portrayal of Letitia Carver was quite good, I admit. The wig, the shawl and black dress and cane, the stooped posture and quavery voice… all very accomplished playacting. And of course the darkness and the candlelight concealed the fact that the old-age wrinkles were a product of theatrical makeup.”

“And where was I supposed to have given this performance?” Pauline Dupree’s eyes were cold and hard now, but her voice remained even.

“The abandoned house next to Raymond Sonderberg’s cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. Before and after you murdered Sonderberg in his quarters behind the store.”

“Murder?” the banker exclaimed in shocked tones. “See here, Quincannon! An accusation of blackmail is egregious enough, but murder-”

Pauline Dupree said, “It’s nonsense, of course. I have no idea where Gunpowder Alley is, nor do I know anyone named Raymond Sonderberg.”

“Ah, but you do. Or rather, did. Like Mr. Willard, Sonderberg was drawn to melodeons such as this one. My guess is you made his acquaintance in much the same way as you did my client, and used your no doubt considerable charms to lure him into your blackmail scheme.”

“Preposterous!” Willard cried. “Outrageous!”

“But you never intended to share the spoils with him,” Quincannon said to the actress. “You wanted the entire ten thousand dollars. To finance your ambition to become a serious actress, mayhap? A trip east to New York?”

An eye-flick was his only response. But it was enough to tell him that he’d guessed correctly.

“I give you credit, Miss Dupree,” he went on. “You planned it well enough in advance. You had two days to make your arrangements, after learning from Mr. Willard that I would be at the Hotel Grant last night. You found out, likely from Sonderberg, about the abandoned house next to his building; he may even have helped you gain access. Sometime yesterday evening you went there and made final preparations for your performance-applied makeup, arranged a rocking chair near the window, created the illusion of an old woman seated there.”

“Yes? How did I do that?”

“By placing a dressmaker’s dummy in the chair, covering the head with the white wig, and draping the rest with a large shawl. This morning I found the dummy where you left it, in the foyer closet.”

Willard made disbelieving, spluttering sounds. The actress said, “And why would I have set such an elaborate stage?”

“To flummox me, of course. You knew I would follow Sonderberg from the hotel and that I would be nearby after he arrived home with the satchel. Your plan all along was to eliminate him once he had outlived his usefulness, and to do so by making cold-blooded murder appear to be suicide and staging an apparent vanishing act must have seemed the height of creative challenge.”

Willard should have been swayed by this time, but he wasn’t. His feelings for Pauline Dupree were stronger than Quincannon had realized. “My dear,” he said to his paramour, “you don’t have to listen to any more of this slanderous nonsense-”

“Let him finish, Titus. I’d like to know how he thinks I accomplished this creative challenge he speaks of.”

“It wasn’t difficult,” Quincannon said. “So devilishly simple, in fact, it had me buffaloed for a time-something that seldom happens.” He paused to fluff his freebooter’s beard. “Your actions from the time you set the scene in the house were these: You left the same way you’d entered, by the rear door, crossed along the walkway, and were admitted to Sonderberg’s quarters through his rear door. Thus no one could possibly have seen you from the alley. How you explained the old crone’s makeup to Sonderberg is of no real import. By then I suspect he would have believed anything you told him.

“You waited there, warm and dry, while he went to the Hotel Grant. When he returned with the satchel, he locked both the entrance to the cigar store and the inside door leading to his quarters. You made haste to convince him by one means or another to let you have the satchel. Then you left him, again through the rear door, no doubt with instructions to lock and bar it behind you.”

“Then how am I supposed to have killed him inside his locked quarters?”

“By slipping around into the side passage and tapping on the window, as if you’d forgotten something. When Sonderberg opened it, raising it high on its hinge, you reached through the bars, shot him twice, then immediately dropped the pistol to the floor. Naturally he released his grip on the window as he staggered backward, and it dropped and clattered shut-the loudish thump I heard before I ran into the passage. The force of impact flipped up the loose swivel catch at the bottom of the sash. Of its own momentum the catch then flipped back down and around the stud fastener, locking the window and adding to the illusion.

“It took you no more than a few seconds, then, to run to the rear walkway and reenter the house, locking that door behind you. While the patrolman and I were responding to the gunshots, you drew the parlor drapes, removed the dressmaker’s dummy from the rocking chair, donned the wig, and assumed the role of Letitia Carver. When I came knocking at the door a while later, you could have simply ignored the summons; but you were so confident in your acting ability that you decided instead to have sport with me, holding the candle you’d lighted in such a way that your made-up face remained shadowed the entire time.”

A few moments of silence ensued. Willard stood glaring at Quincannon, disbelief still plainly written on the lovesick dolt’s pooched features. Pauline Dupree’s expression was stoic, but in her eyes was a sparkle that might have been secret amusement.

“Utter rot,” the banker said with furious indignation. “Miss Dupree is no more capable of such nefarious trickery than I am.”

“Even if I were,” she said, “Mr. Quincannon has absolutely no proof of his claims.”

“When I find the ten thousand dollars, I’ll have all the proof necessary. Hidden here, is it, or in your rooms?”

Again her response was not the one he’d anticipated. “You’re welcome to search both,” she said. Nor did the sparkle in her eyes diminish; if anything, it brightened. Telling him, he realized, as plainly as if she’d spoken the words, that such searches would prove futile, and that he would never discover where the greenbacks were hidden, no matter how long and hard he searched.

Sharp and bitter frustration goaded Quincannon now. There was no question that his deductions were correct, and he had been sure he could wring a confession from Pauline Dupree, or at the very least convince Titus Willard of her duplicity. But he had succeeded in doing neither. They were a united front against him.

So much so that the banker had moved over to stand protectively in front of her, as if to shield her from further accusations. He said angrily, “Whatever your purpose in attempting to persecute this innocent young woman, Quincannon, I won’t stand for any more of it. Consider your services terminated. If you ever dare to bother Miss Dupree or me again, you’ll answer to the police and my attorneys.”

Behind Willard as he spoke, Pauline Dupree smiled and closed one eye in an exaggerated wink.

“Winked at me!” Quincannon ranted. “Stood there bold as brass and winked at me! The gall of the woman! The sheer mendacity! The-”

Always unflappable, Sabina said, “Calm yourself, John. Remember your blood pressure.”

“The devil with my blood pressure. She’s going to get away with murder!”

“Of a mean no-account as mendacious as she.”

“Murder nonetheless. Murder and blackmail, and with her idiot victim’s complicity.”

“Unfortunately, there’s nothing to be done about it. She was right-you have no proof of her guilt.”

There was no gainsaying that. He muttered a frustrated oath.

“John, you know as well as I do that justice isn’t always served. At least not immediately. Women like Pauline Dupree seldom go unpunished for long. Ruthlessness, greed, amorality, arrogance… all traits that sooner or later combine to bring about a harsh reckoning.”

“Not always.”

“Often enough. Have faith that it will in her case.”

Quincannon knew from experience that Sabina was right, but it mollified him not at all. “And what about our fee? We’ll never collect it now.”

“Well, we do have Willard’s retainer.”

“It’s not enough. I ought to take the balance out of his blasted hide.”

“But you won’t. You’ll consider the case closed, as I do. And take solace in the fact that once again you solved a baffling crime. Your prowess in that regard remains unblemished.”

This, too, was true. Yes, quite true. He had done his job admirably, uncovered the truth with his usual brilliant deductions; the lack of the desired resolution was not his fault.

But the satisfaction, like the retainer, was not enough. “I don’t understand the likes of Titus Willard,” he growled. “What kind of man goes blithely on making a confounded fool of himself over a woman?”

Sabina cast a look at him, the significance of which he failed to notice. “All kinds, John,” she said. “Oh, yes, all kinds.”