The Flimflam Affair

19 Quincannon

He seldom ventured into the nine-square-block lair of the Barbary Coast after nightfall. But when business demanded it, he didn’t think twice about assuming the risk. The lead provided by Owney struck him as genuine, made him eager to find Dinger and his “cat-eating” friend. And even more eager to learn the identity of “the boss.” He’d like nothing better than another confrontation with Long Nick Darrow, if Darrow was in fact alive and practicing his trade again after ten long years. Should the boss be someone else, how he’d been able to utilize Darrow’s special counterfeiting skills was an equally burning question that compelled an answer.

Before he went on the hunt, Quincannon stopped at the agency. To go traipsing around the Coast dressed as he was in a moderately expensive suit would be pure folly; only fools and drunks, or a combination of both, made targets of themselves by calling attention to the fact that they were well-to-do and likely carrying a wad of greenbacks. In the back alcove he kept hand-me-down clothing for just such situations as this, among the items an old overcoat and a seamen’s cap. He stripped off his Chesterfield, frock coat, vest, and cravat, and exchanged his hand-tooled shoes for a pair of scuffed boots. With the overcoat buttoned, his trousers and shirt were mostly hidden.

The usual nighttime babel of piano hurdy-gurdy music, the cries of shills and barkers, drunken shouts and laughter, followed Quincannon as he made his way warily along Pacific Street. The Coast had been infamous for nearly half a century as the West’s seat of sin and wickedness, a “devil’s playground” equaled by none in the country and few in the world. Murders and robberies were nightly occurrences, as were every other type of crime and vice. Thieves, cutthroats, footpads, crooked gamblers, pickpockets, bunco steerers, and roaming bands of prostitutes prowled its refuse-littered streets; so did mental defectives, some dangerous, some benign such as “Dirty Tom” McAlear who would eat anything handed him along with a nickel; and so did sports, gay blades, sailors, adventurous citizens of all classes, and addicts on their way to and from the numerous opium dens, many of whom became the predators’ victims. So great was the danger that lurked on every street, down every alley, inside every building, that even policemen, armed with pistols and foot-long truncheons, ventured there only in twos and threes after nightfall.

The Red Rooster was just off Stockton, its entrance set back beneath a rococo gallery decorated with plaster images of wispily clad nymphs. More nymphs in various come-hither poses were painted on the outer walls flanking the door. A gaudily dressed barker stood in front, hawking the dubious pleasures to be found within — exotic dancers, games of chance, and “the Coast’s most comely and accommodating hostesses.” Quincannon stepped around him, then past a burly Kanaka doorman who likely doubled as a bouncer, and stepped inside.

The place was as dimly lighted as Owney had claimed, and so thick with swirling layers of tobacco smoke that the ceiling was nearly invisible. At opposite ends of a long stage at the rear, a pair of honky-tonk pianos were being raucously and tinnily played; in the middle, half a dozen scantily clad dancers were performing a borderline obscene version of the buck-and-wing to whoops of encouragement from the customers. Raised voices and bursts of drunken laughter added to the din.

All of the close-packed tables were occupied, and there was a two-deep cluster at a long bar presided over by a trio of bartenders who, like the doorman, would do double duty when the inevitable brawl broke out. What passed for a dance floor in front of the stage was occupied by men paying a price to publically fondle their female companions. Beyond an open archway, more suckers were busily losing their money in crooked games of roulette, faro, chuck-a-luck, and poker.

Several “hostesses” as scantily clad as the dancers circulated among the throng, some carrying drinks, others engaged in tableside and barside negotiations. None of them were what Quincannon would have described as comely but all were unquestionably accommodating. One buxom blonde had already reached an agreement with an eager customer, the two of them on their way up a rickety-looking sidewall staircase to the rooms upstairs.

Quincannon weaved his way through the main room as if he were searching for a place to sit. There was no point in looking for the men who answered Dinger’s and Paddy’s descriptions; even if they were present, the poor lighting and crush of bodies made identification impossible unless viewed at close quarters. Instead his sharp eye roamed over the serving and sitting hostesses. It took him some minutes to spy the one he sought, “hefty, with ringlets red as a rooster’s comb.”

She was seated at a table not far from the stage with three young sailors, all of whom were boiled-owl drunk. One was using his bent arm for a pillow, already passed out; the other two were bickering vigorously over which would be the first to pay for the privilege of sampling Mollie’s favors. She wore a bright green, low-cut dress so tight that she bulged in the wrong as well as the right places, and a professional smile as bored as it was pasted on.

Quincannon stepped up beside her chair. The two sailors were so involved in their argument that they failed to notice him lean down close and say, “Hello, Mollie.”

Her head lifted and she squinted up at him through the smoke haze. Evidently she liked what she saw; her smile and her voice were no longer bored when she said, “Well, hello, handsome. Don’t know you, do I?”

He jerked his head in the direction of the staircase. “You’re about to,” he said.

Her laugh was as counterfeit as her smile. She said, “I like a gent don’t beat around the bush,” and got to her feet, taking hold of his arm as soon as she was upright. “And a sober one’s all the better.”

As they started away, one of the sailors called out a slurred protest that Mollie paid no attention to. At the foot of the stairs she stopped, leaned against Quincannon — assaulting his nostrils with an unholy mix of sour whiskey breath and cheap perfume — and half shouted into his ear, “Two dollars, honey. In advance.”

“Two dollars?”

She gave him a lewd wink. “For a good time you’ll never forget.”

Bah. She must have thought him gullible as well as eager; the going rate in pestholes like the Red Rooster was one dollar. Quincannon had no intention of paying her two dollars, or one dollar, or even the dimes he had bestowed upon Owney. Much less of going upstairs with her.

He thrust her away at arm’s length and said in a roughened voice, “I’m not here for a good time, I’m looking for Dinger.”

The professional smile vanished. So did the whore’s coquettishness; her round face turned visibly hard and wary beneath its thick coating of powder and rouge. “Who?”

“No games, Mollie, and no lies. I know he fancies you and he was here with you Saturday night.”

“Yeah? Who told you that?”

“Never mind who. Has he been in tonight?”

“No. He only comes Saturdays. What you want with him?”

“I’ve got a job for him.”

“What kind of job?”

“That’s my business and his. Where can I find him?”

“How should I know? I ain’t his keeper.”

“You know where he hangs his hat?”

“No idea. I ain’t never seen him anywhere but here.”

“What are his other haunts?”

“No idea.”

“Dinger his real name or a moniker?”

“You oughta know; you’re lookin’ for him.”

“Dinger’s all I was told. Well?”

“You think he’d give me his right name? Hah!”

“What about his pal, Paddy?”

“Who?”

“The lad he was with Saturday night.”

“Oh, him. I don’t know him, never seen him before or since.”

Both piano players temporarily ceased their dissonant assault, lessening the clamor enough so that when Quincannon spoke again, it was in a voice a few decibels lower. “Listen,” he said through a menacing glower, “it’s important I see Dinger as soon as possible. This job I got is big and it won’t wait. He won’t like it if he misses out. You won’t like it when I tell him you’re the reason.”

The threat set Mollie to gnawing at her pendulous lower lip. “I swear to you, mister, I dunno where you can find him. But maybe... well, maybe there’s somebody that does.”

“Who would that be?”

“Funderburke.”

The name meant nothing to Quincannon and he said so.

“He’s one of them does up men’s suits,” Mollie said.

“You mean a tailor?”

“That’s it. Couple of weeks ago Dinger come in wearing a new suit. Black, no stripes, nothin’ like the cheap butternuts he favors. Bought it on account of he’s in on a sweet business deal, he says, and tips me big that night to prove it. Later on, upstairs, while he was sleepin’, I had me a look at the coat, just out of curiosity. That name, Funderburke, was sewn inside the collar.”

Simple curiosity had had nothing to do with her examination of the coat, Quincannon thought sardonically. She’d been rummaging in the pockets for Dinger’s purse and any stray coins or greenbacks she could safely filch. “Was there an address to go with the name?”

“Not that I seen. Only reason I remember Funderburke is on account of it’s such a funny name. That’s all I can tell you, mister.”

Outside the Red Rooster, Quincannon paused to rid his lungs of tobacco smoke and Mollie’s cheap perfume. Funderburke. A slim lead at best. Even if Mollie had remembered the name correctly, her idea of a new suit of quality manufacture was suspect; chances were the tailor was one of the cheapjack variety who sold off-the-rack men’s suits and wouldn’t know Dinger from hundreds of other walk-in customers. The same was true if Dinger had had enough money to patronize a more respectable tailor. Attempting to track down Funderburke would likely be a waste of time.

Still, it had to be done. His only other options were to give Dinger’s name to his contacts in the hope that one of them could turn up an address, or canvass the Coast himself with the same objective — both chancy propositions made even chancier by the possibility that word would reach Dinger of a detective on his trail. Were that to happen, it was liable to spook the coney gang, send them undercover or, worse, away from the Bay Area to set up their operation elsewhere.

Quincannon made his way cautiously out of the heart of the Coast and down to Kearney Street. A number of the cheapjack tailors did business there, a few of those staying open late to take advantage of the crowds taking part in the nightly Cocktail Route ritual. He found four open and three closed clothing shops sprinkled among the saloons, shooting galleries, painless dentists, astrologists, phrenologists, hypnotists, fortune-tellers such as Madame Louella, and other such businesses of dubious repute. None bore the name Funderburke or any other resembling it.

He debated returning to the agency to reclaim his Chesterfield and check the city business directory. But it was growing late by then, and he was tired — and hungry, having given away his supper to Owney the snitch. The Funderburke search could wait until morning. He went back to Hoolihan’s instead, exchanged a second round of insults with Ben Joyce, and partook of the free lunch before riding a cable car home to his flat.