The Flimflam Affair

17 Quincannon

It was after midnight before the bumbling constabulary (he considered all but a handful of city policemen to be bumbling) finished with their questions, took Annabelle and the remains of A. Vargas away, and permitted the others to depart.

Fortunately the homicide detective in charge was a man Quincannon knew only slightly and who had no ax to grind with him. If the dick in charge had been the beefy, red-faced, and doubtless corrupt Prussian, Kleinhoffer, the interrogation would not have gone half as smoothly. Each rubbed the other the wrong way, a mutual antipathy that had led to clashes in the past.

After helping his wife into their phaeton, Winthrop Buckley drew Quincannon and Sabina aside. He said to her, “You and your partner are competent detectives, Mrs. Carpenter, I’ll grant you that even though I don’t entirely approve of your methods.”

“I only wish your wife had been spared the horror of Vargas’s murder.”

“As do I. But I have a feeling that once she recovers, she will abandon her faith in mediums and her quest for an audience with our daughter’s spirit.”

“I hope so, Mr. Buckley.”

Quincannon said, “If you should find yourself in need of our services again, sir...”

“I trust I won’t. One question before we part. As I told Mrs. Carpenter at our first meeting, the first séance we attended here was concluded by Vargas’s claim that Angkar had untied him. We heard the rope flung through the air, and when the gas was turned up we saw it lying unknotted on the floor. He couldn’t have untied all those knots himself, with only one hand. How was that trick done?”

“Annabelle assisted in it, too. The unknotted rope, which he himself hurled across the room, was not the same one with which he was tied. In the darkness she slipped up behind him and cut the knotted rope into pieces with her dagger, then hid the pieces in the cabinet. The second rope was concealed there with the other props and given to Vargas after she’d severed the first.”

“His planned finale for tonight’s séance as well, I expect.”

“No doubt.”

Buckley shook Sabina’s hand, then Quincannon’s. “We’ll be leaving now. I would offer you both a ride, but there is hardly enough room for two more passengers. And Margaret is in no condition for any more company.”

“We wouldn’t trouble you in any event,” Sabina said. “Dr. Cobb has offered to take us to the nearest cab stand.”

The short ride in the Cobbs’ roomy landau to Market and Van Ness, where the nearest stand was located, was conducted in silence. Grace Cobb sat hunched in the passenger side corner, arms folded across her breast, her blond head bowed; she had hardly spoken since the explanations in the spirit room, had in fact remained mostly silent from the time Vargas’s body was discovered. In light of Annabelle’s revelation that Vargas had been a fornicator, Quincannon suspected that she and the fake medium had been more than just business acquaintances. Whether Dr. Cobb’s reticence was the result of a similar suspicion, or merely a delayed reaction to the evening’s events, was none of his business.

Sabina, too, had nothing to say in the Cobbs’ presence or in the hansom on the way to her Russian Hill flat. Nor did she sit any closer to Quincannon than Grace Cobb had to her husband in the landau. She seemed peeved at him for some reason he couldn’t fathom. Finally, halfway through the ride, he broached the question to her.

“You know the answer, John,” she said. “Don’t be obtuse.”

“Obtuse? What have I done?”

“The Buckley investigation was mine to begin with, the explanations to the spiritualist trickery largely the result of my conference with Madame Louella, and the solution to Vargas’s untimely demise as much mine as it was yours.”

“I don’t dispute that, my dear—”

“But you saw fit as usual to claim all the credit.”

“I did no such thing—”

“Yes you did. You and your dratted flair for the dramatic. If I hadn’t kept interrupting, you would have rattled on through the entire set of explanations without letting me put a word in edgewise.”

Quincannon was honestly surprised. “But I had no intention of shutting you out. If I spoke too quickly and too often, it was purely unintentional—”

“Oh, bosh. You’re worse than a ward politician when it comes to self-serving oratory.”

“Self-serving? That’s not true.”

“It is true. You fancy yourself a master detective without equal and you seize every opportunity to prove it to the world. Well, you’re not without equal, John Quincannon, whether you believe it or not.”

“But you know how much I respect your ability—”

“Respect it but consider it inferior to yours. Well, it’s not. I am just as adept as you at solving difficult cases, and that includes your specialty of seemingly impossible crimes. And you know it whether you admit it or not.”

“I do admit it. Haven’t I said so to you more than once?”

“Saying and believing are two different things.”

“I do not consider you inferior,” he said. “Truly, honestly.”

“Well, you certainly acted like it tonight.”

Quincannon was somewhat cowed. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive, didn’t realize I was deprecating you in any way. I apologize. Nothing like it will ever happen again.”

“So you say now.”

“A solemn promise, my dear.”

“You had better mean it.”

“I do, I swear it.” He reached over, tentatively closed his fingers around her hand. For a moment he thought she would pull hers away, but she didn’t. “Am I forgiven?”

“You’re forgiven. Provisionally.”

They sat once more in silence, companionably now, the stillness broken only by the jangle of the horse’s bit chains, the clatter of the cab’s iron wheels on the cobblestones. Yes, Quincannon thought, he had learned Sabina’s lesson well. He would no longer indulge his passion for the limelight, the approbation of others at his prowess.

Not while she was involved and present, ever again.

Sunday was a quiet day.

Quincannon would have liked to spend it with Sabina, but she had a date to go riding in the park with her friend Amity Wellman and other members of the Golden Gate Ladies Bicycle Club. Dinner with her was not possible, either. After the day’s bicycling, there was a meeting at the Wellman home of Voting Rights for Women, of which Amity was head and Sabina an ardent member, in preparation for the California State Woman Suffrage Convention next month.

He slept late, catching up on the past week’s lost sleep, then rode a trolley car to the Cobweb Palace, Abe Warner’s eccentric eatery on Meigg’s Wharf, for a leisurely meal of abalone steak and rhubarb pie. One of two slumming young women at a nearby table kept casting glances in his direction and smiling when she caught his eye. Interested and flirtatious — a sort he knew well from past experience. It would have been easy enough to have made her acquaintance, and eventually if not immediately been permitted to sample her favors.

But now, feeling as he did about Sabina, he was not even slightly tempted. There was something a bit sad in that, in the transformation... no, the demise... of a practiced ladies’ man. Not that he regretted it. A woman as attractive, as exciting, as exceptional as Sabina made all others seem deficient in both charm and sex appeal.

After lunch he went for a stroll through the Sunday bazaar in the open field opposite the Palace Hotel, with its salmagundi of patent medicine and physical therapy pitchmen, phrenologists, palm readers, temperance speakers, organ grinders, food sellers, Salvation Army musicians. He viewed all of this with his usual jaundiced eye, stopping at none of the booths and buying nothing, but it helped pass the afternoon.

A light evening meal and games of pool and snooker, both of which he played expertly, at Hoolihan’s Saloon, and then home to his lonely flat to read from his collection of volumes of poetry until it was time for bed. All in all a pleasant enough Sunday.

But it would have been so much better had he shared it with Sabina.