The Dangerous Ladies Affair

10 Quincannon

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 now 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 Patrolman 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 into action. From his coat pocket he removed the set of lockpicks he had liberated from a burglar named Wandering Ned some years back, and set to work on the flimsy door lock. It yielded to his practiced ministrations in no time at all.

In the murky entryway inside he paused to listen. No sounds reached his ears save for the scurrying of a rodent in the wall and the random creaking of old, damp timbers. He called loudly, “Hello! Anyone here?” He didn’t expect an answer, and none came. The house had the look and feel of desertion.

He moved through an archway into the parlor. The room was cold, decidedly musty; no fire had burned in the grate last night, nor in a long while before that, he judged. The furniture was sparse and had the worn look of discards. One arm of the rocking chair near the curtain window was broken, bent outward at an angle. The lamp on the rickety table next to it was as cold as the air, and when he shook it, its fount proved to be empty.

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. All the floors bore coatings of dust unmarked except by mouse droppings. A few of the wall corners were ornamentally festooned with spiderwebs.

The last of the closets he looked into, off the front entryway, proved to be the one he should have checked first. The single object it contained elicited a blistering, quadruple-jointed oath, though by this time the object’s presence in the house was no surprise. The use to which it had been put was all too blasted obvious.

He left the house grumbling and growling to himself and stepped into the side passage for another examination of the barred window to Raymond Sonderberg’s living quarters. From there 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 barren of handholds to be scaled.

Out front again, he embarked on a rapid canvass of the neighborhood. He spoke to two residents of Gunpowder Alley, both of whom corroborated that the house had been untenanted for some time — four months, to be exact.

Hell and damn! He should have suspected this sooner. Officer Maguire’s statement that in the two weeks he’d patrolled Gunpowder Alley the parlor window had always been dark was one clue that had slipped by him in the confused aftermath of Raymond Sonderberg’s murder. Another was the claim by the woman calling herself Letitia Carver that she sometimes sat in that window at night looking out.

The burly bartender at the saloon on the Jessie Street corner provided him with one final piece of pertinent information. Sonderberg had stopped in occasionally for a glass of beer, and though he was a man who eked out a living selling tobacco and sundries and who kept mostly to himself, he had once confided a taste for Barbary Coast melodeons and variety houses.

“He didn’t say so,” the barman said, “but I got the idea it wasn’t only entertainment he was after.”

“Women?”

“Not your usual brand of soiled dove. Buck-and-wing serving girls, sure as the devil. Sonderberg had nothing to offer the performing ladies, money or otherwise.”

But mayhap he did, Quincannon thought as he left the saloon. And mayhap one of those performing ladies had had something to offer him, temporarily.

In any event, the mystery surrounding Sonderberg’s murder was no longer a mystery. And should not have been one as long as it had; Quincannon felt like a rattlepate amateur 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 the cigar store owner had been dispatched in his locked quarters. And he was tolerably sure of who had done the deed, if not as yet the assassin’s identity — the only person, given the circumstances, it could possibly be.

Titus Wrixton was alone in his private office at the Woolworth National Bank when Quincannon arrived there shortly past noon. He was none too happy to have been kept waiting for word and grew even more agitated when he saw no sign of his satchel containing the five thousand dollars.

“Didn’t you recover the money, Quincannon? Or my letters?”

“Not yet, though perhaps soon.”

“You weren’t able to identify the man you followed?”

“On the contrary. His name was Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley.”

“Was? Did you say was?”

“He’s dead. Murdered in his quarters before I could intervene.”

“Good Lord! Murdered by whom?”

“His accomplice, the actual blackmailer, who then disappeared with the money.”

Wrixton made a low moaning sound, followed by a belch; he fumbled for his dyspepsia tablets. “The blackmailer... do you have any idea who he is?”

“A good idea, yes.”

“Then why haven’t you...?”

“I’ll answer that question after you’ve answered a few of mine. Why were you being blackmailed?”

“...I told you before, I would rather not say.”

“You’ll tell me, sir, if you want the safe return of your money and the rest of your letters.”

The banker chewed and swallowed three of the tablets, then pooched his cheeks with eyes averted.

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

“Oh, dear me...”

“Well, Mr. Wrixton?”

“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.”

Wrixton 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 suspected 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 man went to the Gaiety Theater by happenstance; intention and inclination took them there. A less than respectable “palace of art,” the Gaiety specialized in raucous musical revues and bawdy melodramas — the sort of place that catered to middle-aged men such as Titus Wrixton and Raymond Sonderberg whose tastes ran to the sordidly erotic.

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

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

“Why did she have a right to know?”

“It’s... well...”

“Because the missing letters were written to her, letters of a highly indiscreet nature.”

“...Yes.”

“And how do you suppose the blackmailer obtained possession of them?”

“They were stolen from Miss Dupree’s rooms last week, along with a small amount of jewelry. This man Sonderberg or his accomplice... a common sneak thief who saw an opportunity for richer gains.”

Stolen? By a common sneak thief? What a credulous gent his client was! “Was it Miss Dupree’s suggestion that you give in to the first demand of five thousand dollars?”

“No, it was a mutual decision. We discussed it and 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 consulted with me.”

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

“And when you did tell her, you also explained that I would be present at the Hotel Grant last evening and that I intended to follow and confront whoever claimed the payoff money?”

“Why shouldn’t I have confided in her? She—” Wrixton broke off, frowning, then once again performed his red-faced 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?”

“I am not keeping her,” the banker said huffily, but his averted gaze indicated that this was at best a half-truth. “Her rooms are on Stockton Street.”

“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 with me, then, Mr. Wrixton, and we’ll pay a call on the lady. I expect we’ll both find it a stimulating rendezvous.”