The Spook Lights Affair

10

Quincannon’s wily brain often worked on knotty problems while he was asleep, so that when he awoke he had an answer or a method of obtaining one. Such was the case on Monday morning. Not the Virginia St. Ives conundrum; his glimmering of explanation was still just that. No, what his subconscious had produced was a possible means of locating Bob Cantwell, if none of his network of information sellers had already done the job for him.…

None had. No messages had been slipped through the mail slot in his front door during the night. When he stopped off at Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, he found a business card wedged between the door and jamb and pounced on it, only to discover it had nothing to do with Cantwell or the Wells, Fargo holdup. It had been left by a prospective client, a man whose name and professional association he didn’t recognize. Barnaby L. Meeker, Western Investment Corporation, with an address on Sansome Street. Written on the back of the card in a small, crabbed hand were the words:

Bizarre matter, eh? The phrase piqued Quincannon’s interest, as did the well-placed address of Western Investment Corporation. If he had not been on the trail of Bob Cantwell and the Wells, Fargo reward, he would have immediately contacted Mr. Barnaby Meeker. As it was, he entered the office and placed the card, message side up, on Sabina’s desk blotter, along with a note asking her to contact Meeker and arrange an appointment if she felt the man’s troubles warranted their attention.

From the agency, Quincannon proceeded directly to Battery Street and the offices of Hammond Realtors. Hallelujah. Open for business today.

Bob Cantwell’s desk, of course, sat unoccupied. But the head of the firm, Jacob Hammond, a bewhiskered gent in his fifties, was a bulky presence behind his. At first Hammond was unwilling to provide what he called “confidential business information,” but Quincannon’s glib tongue and a promise to steer potential buyers and renters to Hammond Realtors finally persuaded him.

“Mr. Cantwell was only a junior salesman, you understand,” he said. The past tense indicated that the lad’s unexplained absence had cost him his job, not that this mattered in the slightest to Quincannon or would to Cantwell if he knew. “He had been entrusted with only a few, ah, minor accounts.”

“My interest is in those properties that are presently unoccupied. That information is contained in your records, I expect?”

“Yes. There shouldn’t be more than half a dozen.”

There were five, to be exact, including the house in Drifter’s Alley. Of the remaining four, two were private homes, one near the Southern Pacific Railroad yards, the other on the eastern fringe of Chinatown. The others were business establishments: a small brewery on Brannan Street that had ceased operation the previous year, and a building on Tenth Street near Natoma that had belonged to a recently deceased printer and photographer.

Armed with addresses provided by Jacob Hammond, Quincannon quickly took his leave. If he was right that Bob Cantwell was still in the city, there were precious few places where he could be hiding. He had no relatives, according to his employer, and if his manner of living was a proper indication, few friends; and he was not the sort to hole up anywhere outdoors. What better place, then, than one of the vacant properties that had been under his charge at Hammond Realtors? It would mean he had broken into whichever one he might have chosen, for he’d had no access since Friday night to any of the keys in the realty office, but he wasn’t above that any more than he was above blackmail.

One of the private homes seemed the most likely prospect, so Quincannon went first to the closest of these — the one on the fringe of Chinatown. It turned out to be a modest, weather-beaten structure tucked between a Chinese laundry and a two-story lodging house. It also turned out to be deserted. The lock on the front door hadn’t been breached, nor had any of the shuttered windows, and there was no rear entrance. This was no surprise, considering the amount of pedestrian and carriage traffic in the neighborhood. The location was much too public for a frightened lad like Cantwell.

The ramshackle house near the Southern Pacific yards stood by itself, flanked by a vacant lot on one side and a railroad storage-and-repair facility on the other. Perfect for Cantwell’s needs as far as the location went, but vandals had been at the place; all but one of its windows were broken, as was the lock on the front door which stood an inch ajar. The only living things inside were rats, whose scurrying under the floorboards and inside the walls Quincannon could hear when he briefly ventured inside. No other human had set foot in those dusty, barren rooms in months.

The abandoned brewery, a pocked brick structure with a small loading dock on one side, stood inside a fenced, weed-grown yard. The gate in the fence was padlocked, but there was no barbed wire strung across its top to discourage trespassers. Nimbly Quincannon climbed the gate and went to check the front entrance and the double doors that opened onto the loading dock. Secure. As were the boards that had been nailed across windows on two sides.

One more address to be investigated. If that one proved to be as unbreached as the first three …

Ah, but it didn’t.

The large, nondescript clapboard building on Tenth Street was flanked on its north side by a carpentry shop and on the south side by a pipe yard. Alleyways and tall board fences gave it privacy from its neighbors — an ideal place for a hideout. Quincannon’s pulses quickened as he went past the FOR SALE sign in the tiny front yard and up to the front door. The lock appeared not to have been tampered with, and the plate-glass window next to it, bearing the painted words MATTHEW DRENNAN — JOB PRINTING, LITHOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHY, was unbroken and solidly anchored in its frame. He went around to the rear, pausing on the way to examine another untouched window. There was a rear entrance, and here was where his hunch finally paid off.

The locked door had been pried open, likely with the thin steel bar that lay on the ground nearby. It wobbled inward a few inches when he eased his shoulder against it.

He drew his Navy Colt and entered by two steps. Darkness lay ahead, muddled with shadow shapes large and small, but a faint distant sheen indicated that a lamp or candle burned somewhere in the bowels of the building. He stood listening. Silence. The same kind of empty silence that had clogged the house in Drifter’s Alley? He couldn’t be sure.

The room he was in seemed to be storage space. As cluttered as it apparently was, he was bound to blunder into something if he attempted to cross it in the dark. There was nothing for it, then, but to risk lighting a lucifer. He did so, shielding the flame with his hand.

Most of the clutter, he saw as he advanced, seemed to be photographic equipment: a hooded camera mounted on a tripod, printing frames, lenses, chemicals, a box labeled MR. EASTMAN’S INSTANTANEOUS DRY PLATES. The light sheen, coming from beyond an inner door that stood slightly ajar, brightened perceptibly as he neared the far end. He stopped again to listen, and again heard nothing more than the faint creak of the building’s timbers.

He shook out the match, used the faint glow to guide him to the inner door. When he pushed it inward a few inches farther, he could make out another large room dominated by a great looming shape to the left and what appeared to be a glass-fronted office cubicle at its far-right corner. The light came from inside the cubicle, from what he perceived to be a hanging lamp.

There was enough illumination from the lamp so that he was able to slowly follow a clear path toward the office. The looming object was a printing press, one of the old-fashioned single-plate, hand-roller types. A long wooden bench ran along the wall opposite, laden with tools and tins of what were probably chemicals and ink. He had gone a little more than halfway before he had a clear look through the dusty glass into the office.

Desk, chairs, filing cabinet — and nothing else.

Once more Quincannon paused to listen. The same heavy silence. Faint mingled odors tickled his nostrils then and he sniffed until he identified them as stale beer and greasily cooked meat. He went ahead to where the office door stood open, sidled up to it at a shadowed angle, and poked his head inside.

The desktop was littered with the remnants of at least two meals, a tin beer pail such as taverns and brewers supplied, and a glass that held a residue of foam. He stepped inside and approached the desk. The floor around it was empty except for crumbs and something that gleamed whitish in the lamplight — white with black spots. He bent to retrieve the object, grinned his wolfish grin as he bounced it on his palm.

A single die. One of the pair Bob Cantwell had sat clicking together on Friday night, by Godfrey, accidentally dropped and overlooked before his stay here ended.

Quincannon searched the desk drawers and file cabinets, but found nothing else left by Cantwell. The papers in both had all belonged to the late Matthew Drennan, and their disarray indicated a previous and hasty search, no doubt by Cantwell in a hunt for forgotten money or other valuables. An examination of the beer glass and empty growler revealed that the foam residue in both was long dry; and rodents had already been at the remnants of fried meat sandwiches. Which told him the beer had been drunk and the meals eaten sometime the previous night. Bought by Cantwell with what little money he had left, or supplied by someone else?

He pulled the hanging lamp down and used his handkerchief to lift the hot chimney so he could check the amount of oil left in the fount. Almost none. The light may or may not have been burning for some time, depending on how much oil there’d been when the wick was lit. So there was no telling when Cantwell had left the premises. Did the lighted lantern mean he intended to return, or had he been in such a hurry to quit the place for good that he’d neglected to extinguish it?

Quincannon cursed softly and consulted his stemwinder. It was almost one o’clock now, much of the day having been wasted in his previous searches. If he’d chosen to make this place his first rather than his last stop … But there was no purpose in that sort of thinking. What was done was done. For all he knew, he would have found the building empty if he’d come here straight from Battery Street.

A vigil was required as long as there was a chance of Cantwell’s return; he had no other way to find the man at present. The prospect of waiting here in this vermin-infested office appealed to him not at all. There was a café across Natoma Street, he recalled — a much better location to wait and watch, assuming its facing windows afforded a clear view. If Cantwell did return, he would surely enter the Drennan property at the front and make his way around to the rear, as Quincannon had done. He had no reason to believe his hiding place had been discovered, or to risk trespassing on any of the surrounding properties in order to climb one of the high board fences.

Quincannon left everything as he’d found it, even putting the single die back on the floor, then made his way by matchlight to the rear door, which he closed behind him.

The café’s front window did in fact command a view of the entire front of Cantwell’s hideout, unobstructed except for the occasional passage of a freight wagon, hansom, or other conveyance. He claimed a table and alternated watchful looks through the glass with glances at the menu. Despite the stale greasy odor and rodent nibblings on the sandwich remains, his rumbling stomach demanded food. He hadn’t eaten since a light breakfast and his appetite had always been prodigious, the more so when he was on the hunt.

He ordered a dozen oysters on the half shell, a bowl of clam chowder, and a plate of sourdough bread and butter. The oysters were a day old, the chowder watery, and the bread on the stale side, but he ate it all nonetheless. Waste not, want not. Then he filled and lighted his pipe and settled back to wait.

Time passed slowly, as time always did at times like this. He was a man of action, and forced inactivity chafed at him and soured his mood. The substandard food and the cups of bad coffee he poured on top of it soured his stomach as well. By the time the hands on his stemwinder pointed to three thirty, he was uncomfortable enough and restless and frustrated enough to snap and snarl at anyone who looked at him askance.

A newsboy with an armload of evening papers entered the café just then. Quincannon bought a copy of the Bulletin from him, to help pass the time and to see if Homer Keeps had had any more scurrilous, if not libelous, remarks to make about himself and Sabina. If he had, Quincannon vowed to pay Keeps a visit and make him eat his derby hat and celluloid collar.

But he hadn’t. A follow-up story on the Sutro Heights incident, in fact, bore another reporter’s byline and had been consigned to an inner page. There was nothing like a sensational sex-based murder case to crowd all other news off the front page, and just such a case had broken this day.

Boldface headlines told of the arrest by two of Police Chief Crowley’s ace detectives of “the Demon of the Belfry” — one Theo Durrant, a twenty-three-year-old student at Cooper Medical College and assistant Sunday School superintendent at the Twenty-first Street Emanuel Baptist Church. Durrant had been charged with the brutal murders of two young women, whose nude and badly mutilated bodies had been found in the church the day before, one stuffed into a cabinet and the other, of a model who had disappeared nine days earlier, laid out as if for ritual burial on a platform in the church belfry.

Grisly stuff, not at all to Quincannon’s liking. He quit reading before he finished the main story and tossed the paper aside; contemplation of this monster Durrant’s atrocities soured his stomach even more than his meal had. Bloody sex murders were the most heinous of all crimes; he had never been confronted with or called upon to investigate one and never hoped to be. He had no love for Chief Crowley or any of his “ace detectives,” but he had to admit that in this case they had done a proper and commendable job in ridding the streets of the so-called Demon of the Belfry.

Another fifteen minutes of waiting and watching for Cantwell, and Quincannon had reached the limit of his endurance. Pacing the crowded sidewalks outside was better, if potentially somewhat riskier, than sitting here on his backside. He could always resume this post after walking off some of his pent-up energy. Or return to the building and continue his vigil there, for as long as he could stand it.

He called for the bill and piled coins on top of it — the exact amount. The common practice of adding a gratuity offended his thrifty Scots nature, though he did so grudgingly whenever Sabina deigned to dine with him because she believed in rewarding good food and good service. She wouldn’t have objected if she had shared this meal with him.

The temperature had dropped by several degrees during the past two and a half hours. Tattered streamers had obscured the sun and were rapidly turning the sky from pale blue to gray. Another foggy night coming up, one more in an unbroken string of more than a week’s duration.

Quincannon started up the near sidewalk, walking briskly. He hadn’t gone more than fifty yards, into the middle of the block, when he made an abrupt half turn into the doorway of a shoemaker’s shop.

His long determined surveillance had finally paid off. The lad weaving his way in and out of pedestrian traffic on the opposite side of the street was Bob Cantwell.