The Spook Lights Affair

4

Only the western slopes of Telegraph Hill were habitable; the hill fell away so steeply to the east that there were no streets leading up, just foot trails and a scattered few wooden stairways. Although it was much the more difficult route, Quincannon chose the eastern ascent because it was not far from the Bucket of Beer and because a cab ride around to and up Dupont Street, the hill’s main thoroughfare, would have taken twice as long as an uphill climb on foot.

The fog had thinned somewhat along the Embarcadero and on the lower section of Broadway, but it closed in around him like cotton batting as he hiked up the long wooden stairway from Montgomery Street. It was a potentially treacherous climb at night in weather such as this, there being no streetlights above Montgomery and the steps, more than two hundred of them, being wet and slippery; he clung to the railing with his left hand, his right perched on the butt of his Navy. But he met no one on the stairs, no one on the footpaths above. He knew the area well enough, and a good thing else he might have gotten lost in the misty tangle leading up to Pioneer Park.

When he reached the hill’s summit, he was barely winded. He might have been nearing his fortieth year, but he kept himself in prime physical condition through regular wanderings around the city by shank’s mare. Nor was he much aware of the night’s chill and damp. Nothing warmed his blood like the prospect of a confrontation with lawbreakers, the more so when a substantial reward was at stake. Like his detective father before him, John Quincannon thrived on the hunt.

The fog was so thick here he could barely make out the tall signal-pole from which the city’s time ball fell each noon to tell mariners and residents that the sun was crossing the meridian. It took him a little time to find his way to the five-foot stone wall that marked the park’s perimeter, and to skirt it until he reached Filbert Street. Below him, then, he could make out faint glimmers of house lights through gaps in the wind-driven whorls of mist. The cobblestones were littered with bits and pieces of refuse, and as he hurried along, the old rhyme about Telegraph Hill flicked unbidden across his mind.

Drifter’s Alley was half a block downhill. If he hadn’t known its location, he might have missed it: there were no streetlights here, the signpost at the intersection was obscured, and the alley’s narrow mouth yawned as black as the devil’s fundament. The lane was unpaved; even though he moved slowly, he stumbled once on the uneven ground, muttered a curse under his breath when he nearly lost his balance. He might have been moving through a sinuous gray vacuum, for the only sounds were the distant fog warnings from the big bass diaphone on Alcatraz. Nor were there any lights to guide him.

Ahead the first of the two cottages took shape. Dark, dilapidated, its chimney canted at a drunken angle from a sagging roof. Untenanted, possibly abandoned. He passed it by, moving abreast of the vacant lot. The lot’s expanse was choked with weeds and debris, bordered on its far end by a high, broken black wall that materialized into a clump of pepper trees. The second cottage was invisible behind them.

Quincannon left the narrow roadway, angling into the lot toward the copse. The mist muffled the sounds of his progress; he could scarcely hear his own footsteps. The pungent pepper scent sharpened as he moved in among the trees. Through an opening between two of them, then, he could make out the second cottage.

He stood there for a time to tab up the place and get the lay. It was another ramshackle specimen as forlorn-looking as the first, with no lamplight showing and no sign of activity inside or out. Either Jack Travers was already in bed asleep, an unlikely prospect at this early hour — it couldn’t be much past nine o’clock — or else he was a night creature, like the vampires of legend, and out somewhere spending a portion of his ill-gotten gains. If the former, Quincannon would surprise him in his bed, put the grab on him, and if necessary, do a bit of skull-dragging to lay hands on the stolen Wells, Fargo money. If the latter, he would search the premises for the green-and-greasy, and whether he found it or not, await Travers’s return.

He drew the Navy, then eased out of the tree-heavy darkness. Cans, bottles, other detritus were strewn among the weeds growing in the side yard, and there were holes and mounds of dirt here and there as if someone had been digging with a spade. He managed to avoid all the obstacles until he was but a few yards from the cottage’s side wall, when the toe of his boot stubbed against something that made a rattling, clanging noise in the stillness. He froze in place, tensed, listening. The sound had been loud enough to carry a short distance, but it produced no response from inside. The silence that followed remained unbroken.

Quincannon waited several more seconds before he continued forward, bypassing more holes and piles of dirt. A window in the side wall was shuttered; the narrow front porch had the kind of tumbledown look that meant rotted boards that would squeak loudly when trod upon. Stealthily he changed direction and made his way around to the rear, past a tangle of berry bushes and a privy that looked as if it were about to topple over sideways. No porch there, just an irregular path leading from a rear door to the privy.

He crept along the path to the door, half expecting to find it barred from within. But when he tried the latch, it moved freely and the door opened an inch or two, the hinges making no sound. He paused again to listen, heard nothing from inside, and eased the door inward far enough to edge his big body through.

The room he was in was small and cramped; the outlines of a table, a standing cupboard, a cast-iron stove identified it as a kitchen. Again he stood with ears straining, and again heard only silence. Always sensitive to the presence of others in places of darkness, familiar and unfamiliar, he felt none of the warning signs here. The place was empty.

Nevertheless, he continued to hold the Navy at the ready while with his left hand he removed a lucifer from his vest pocket, snapped it alight with his thumbnail. The flickering glow showed him a room in disarray: the cupboard drawers pulled out and emptied, chairs overturned, the floor and tabletop littered with broken dishes, scattered sticks of firewood, food remnants a-crawl with insects. He followed the light through a doorway into another, larger front room. This one was in an even greater state of upheaval, the floor strewn with overturned and smashed furniture, a coal stove spilling ashes through its open door, a crumpled carpet shoved into a corner. Floorboards had been pried up in several different places, leaving large gaps.

Another doorway stood to his left, covered with the remnants of a bead curtain: the bedroom, the only other room in a cottage of this size. The lucifer burned down and went out before Quincannon reached the curtain; he produced and struck another. The combined odors of sulfur and the night’s chill, damp mist were sharp in the air, but as he approached the curtain, a new and far less tolerable smell came to him — one that he knew all too well. He shouldered through the curtain, causing the beads to click violently.

The match flame, held high, revealed more evidence of a frenzied search. A half-overturned cot had nothing on it but a soiled blanket. But on a second cot against the wall opposite —

The dead man was sprawled on his back, fully dressed, mouth and eyes agape. Quincannon stepped closer. The black-dried blood on the corpse’s shirtfront had become a meal for flies and ants. Shot once at close range with a large caliber weapon, judging by the size of the wound. At least three and possibly four days ago, he judged.

A third match revealed the dead man to have been in his early thirties, wiry, dark, balding, without facial hair that might have concealed a mole the size of a dime at a corner of his mouth. He was no one Quincannon had seen before. Jack Travers? Or whoever had torn the cottage apart, caught in the act and dispatched for his troubles?

The reason for the search seemed obvious: the Wells, Fargo loot. Had Travers had an accomplice, or had someone gotten wind of his and the money’s whereabouts and come to hijack it? Not Bob Cantwell, else he wouldn’t have confided the address to a stranger for a mere one hundred dollars. But possibly another party he’d told about this house for a cash settlement. One shot fired in any case, unheard because of the cottage’s relative isolation, and the shooter long gone with or without the spoils.

Hell and damn!

Quincannon holstered his weapon, breathing through his mouth. An oil lamp lay on the floor, its globe unbroken; he picked it up and lighted the wick, then went to the cot. The dead man’s clothing was disarranged, trouser and shirt pockets turned out and empty. A scatter of items that come from those pockets were on the cot and the floor beneath it. So was a wicked-looking spring blade knife, its sharp surfaces free of stains — poor defense against a pistol.

A cheap pocket watch told him nothing; the inside lid bore no inscription. Neither did the other items he found: a coin purse containing two dimes, a nickel, and four pennies; the stub of a pencil; several pieces of hard candy; a sack of Bull Durham; and two well-pawed French postcards that Quincannon studied judiciously in the lamplight before discarding.

A new-looking frock coat had been tossed into a corner. Its pockets and lining had been ripped apart, but he picked it up and examined it nonetheless. And a good thing he took nothing for granted, for the searcher had missed something that Quincannon’s deft fingers detected — a folded piece of paper that must have slipped through a pocket hole and lodged in the lining of one of the tails. Scrawled on the paper in penmanship so poor as to be barely identifiable was: The Kid, 9:15, Tuesday, usual place.

The paper hadn’t been there long; didn’t look old and wasn’t worn. Was the Kid, whoever he was, the murderer? Or did the name apply to Bob Cantwell? And had Cantwell lied or withheld information about the scope of his involvement in the robbery?

Grimly, Quincannon refolded and pocketed the paper. No matter who had committed this crime and where he might have gone, he would not get away with it or with Wells, Fargo’s $35,000 if the swag was now in his possession. Quincannon had chased down miscreants the length and breadth of California, across a dozen states and territories. He would, as he had once declaimed to Sabina, pursue a quarry to the ends of the earth, even into the bowels of the Pit if necessary. Few had escaped him, none that he would admit to publicly — and none at all when it meant the collection of a reward as substantial as $3,500.

Glowering, he blew out the lamp and made a hurried exit through the unlatched front door. On his way to track down the cowardly little weasel who had sent him to Drifter’s Alley.