The Flimflam Affair

10 Sabina

It was just past four-thirty when John walked into the agency toting his traveling valise. He looked rumpled, weary, and a trifle nonplussed. In answer to her greeting he said cheerfully enough, “Ah, it’s good to be back, my dear,” and crossed to her desk to bestow a light kiss on her cheek. She responded with a smile.

“Uncomfortable trip?” she asked.

“No more so than the one to Jamestown. But at least the train from Stockton arrived on schedule for a change.” A frown ridged his broad brow. “In time for me to make a brief stop before I came here, not that it did me any benefit.”

“Mr. Boggs’s office at the Mint?”

“Yes. I expected he’d be there, but he wasn’t. He wired me, as I’m sure you know, and I sent him a return wire with my travel plans.”

“Called away on another matter, probably.”

“So he wrote in a message he left for me. He’ll be available again in the morning. You had a conversation with him, I take it?”

“He telephoned for you on Wednesday.”

“Did he tell you why he wants to see me?”

“Only that it concerns a counterfeiter named Long Nick Darrow.”

“A counterfeiter perhaps come back to life after ten years in a watery grave.”

“And perhaps active again at his old trade,” Sabina said. “Mystifying, if so.”

“To say the least.”

“Why do you suppose Mr. Boggs would want to involve you in the government’s investigation?”

“He gave no hint in his wire. Something to do, I suppose, with the fact that I was the operative who tracked Darrow down and the last known person to see him alive.”

“You knew his handiwork well?”

“Yes, but so did Boggs.”

“Did Darrow ever operate in the Bay Area?”

“Not to my knowledge,” John said. “Always in the Pacific Northwest, specifically Seattle. Yet another puzzle, if he is back in the business of manufacturing and shoving queer.”

“Will you assist Mr. Boggs if he requests it?”

“Naturally. I owe him any number of favors.”

Sabina couldn’t resist asking, “At a request for our usual fee?”

John looked at her askance, though not without a certain wistfulness, and made no reply. He went to sit at his desk, where he produced his pipe and began to load the bowl with black tobacco from his waterproof pouch. Try as she might, she could not convince him to change his dreadful brand to one less odorous.

To make up for her jab at his acquisitive nature, she said, “Tell me about your investigation for Sierra Railway, John. It was successful, I trust?”

That perked him up, as she had known it would. There was nothing her partner liked better than regaling an appreciative audience with his accomplishments. Her, in particular.

“Naturally,” he said.

“What did it entail?”

“A hunt for one of the railroad’s so-called burglarproof safes and the shipment of gold it contained.”

“The safe was also stolen?”

“It was, from an express office in Tuttletown.”

“You recovered the gold, of course.”

“Every ounce.” He was so busy puffing out billows of smoke that he seemed not to notice Sabina turning in her chair to open the window behind her. “And arranged the arrest of the thieves, a pair of brothers named Schneider who owned the local icehouse.”

“Ah. Was that where the gold was hidden?”

“And where I found it, yes.”

“Did you have any trouble with the Schneiders?”

“A bit with one of them, not worth mentioning.”

From his offhand tone and the quick fluff of his beard, Sabina had the impression that the trouble had been greater than he was letting on. It was not like him to gloss over any details of his triumphs, even those that involved personal peril. To spare her concern, perhaps — a measure of the depth of his feelings for her?

He said with a smug little smile, “You’ll never guess how the Schneiders managed to open the safe.”

Well, that wasn’t quite true. That the brothers owned an icehouse and had hidden the loot inside it gave her a clue, but she refrained from puncturing John’s conceit by offering an educated guess. She asked, “How?” and expressed proper admiration when he explained the clever method in considerable detail. When he was finished, she stroked his ego by saying, “Your usual excellent work, John.”

“Cromarty and the others thought so, too. Worthy of a bonus, in my estimation, though one probably won’t be forthcoming. Railroad accountants are notoriously tightfisted.”

“A satisfactory fee for your time and effort, nonetheless.”

“True.” He polluted the room’s atmosphere with more streams of noxious gray-white smoke. “And what have you been up to while I was gone?” he asked then. “Any new cases?”

“One.”

“Lucrative?”

Naturally that would be his first question. “Lucrative enough. The client is a well-to-do securities broker, Winthrop Buckley.”

“A case involving financial shenanigans?”

“No. His problem is personal, concerning his wife.”

“The eternal triangle, eh?”

“Nothing like that.” Sabina paused. “John, if you’re free tomorrow night, I’d like you to attend a séance with me.”

“... Did you say séance?”

“At the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses.”

His thick eyebrows lifted even higher. “Are you serious?”

“Never more.”

“What the devil is the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses?”

“The guise for a spiritualism racket operated by a transplanted New Yorker named Vargas. Professor A. for Abraham Vargas, medium, spirit counselor, and womanizer.”

“Womanizer?”

“By reputation and confirmed by observation and experience.”

John scowled. “You mean he made advances to you?”

“Not overtly. He’s too clever for that.”

“How then?”

Sabina summarized her three experiences in the Turk Street house, word of the hand-holding and finger-stroking and Vargas’s subtly sly innuendoes causing John’s scowl to become fiercer. She also related what she had learned about the charlatan’s past in New York.

“Damn the man,” John said witheringly. “Communication with the dead and the rest of his stage-managed claptrap is nothing but a pile of horse... ah... horsefeathers.”

“In Vargas’s case, yes, I’m sure it is. But quite a lot of people believe in the existence of a spirit afterlife.”

“Don’t tell me you give a whit of credence to such folly?”

“I have an open mind.”

“So do I, on most matters.”

“But not the paranormal.”

“Not a bit of it.”

“Well, your skepticism is more than justified in this case,” Sabina said. “Mr. Buckley’s wife is an avid believer, however, bent on an audience with her long-departed daughter, and Vargas has convinced her that he will be able to arrange it through his self-styled Egyptian spirit guide, Angkar.”

“At this séance tomorrow night?”

“Quite likely, in view of the fact that Mrs. Buckley has promised a substantial donation to his ‘college’ if he succeeds to her satisfaction. Five thousand dollars, to be exact.”

John whistled softly. “And Buckley wants to forestall the financial loss by exposing Vargas for a fraud.”

“That, and to convince his wife of the futility of her quest. Mrs. Buckley must be shown the truth in person before she’ll accept it.”

“And you propose to accomplish this by exposing his spirit-world manifestations for the tricks they are.”

“Just so. It shouldn’t be too difficult, thanks to Madame Louella’s tutoring — I spent half an hour with her earlier today. I expect I could manage it alone, but the two of us working in concert would ensure success.”

“Your safety and that of the Buckleys, as well. There is no telling what scoundrels like this Vargas are capable of when unmasked, even in front of witnesses.”

“You’ll come with me, then? I paved the way this morning by asking Vargas if he minded my bringing my cousin with me. Of course he had no objection to another twenty-five-dollar donation.”

“Unless Mr. Boggs has urgent need of me, yes, I will. Attending a séance will be a new experience for both of us.” John’s glower modulated into one of his basilisk smiles. “The prospect of putting a philandering flimflammer who preys on vulnerable women out of commission warms my cockles.”

Sabina gazed fondly at him. His ready agreement was gratifying; she had expected him to balk some at the suggestion, to have to cajole him into accepting. Another measure of his feelings toward her and their budding intimacy? It pleased her to believe so.