Quincannon jq-1 Read online

  Quincannon

  ( John Quincannon - 1 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

  Quincannon

  Chapter 1

  The cable car clattered downhill on Sutter Street, toward where the lamps lining Market shone a blurred yellow through the rain-damp night. One of the lighted buildings below was the Reception Saloon; but Quincannon, riding outside in spite of the weather, paid no attention to its beckoning glow. Once he would have marked the nearness of the Reception with keen anticipation, but for almost a year now he had done his public drinking in Hoolihan’s Irish Pub, south of Market, where the liquor was cheaper and the patrons more interested in their drinks than in their drinking companions.

  When the car slowed for its Market Street terminus, Quincannon dropped off. It was a chill night, with a sharp wind that slashed in from the Bay, and he drew up the collar of his greatcoat. But he scarcely felt the cold. The whiskey he had taken in his rooms on Leavenworth still warmed him like a banked fire.

  He walked swiftly through the light rain, down Market in the direction of the Ferry Building — a big man, dark-haired under his derby hat, with a heavy gray-shot beard and an unsmiling countenance that gave him, falsely, the look of a freebooter. It was a weeknight, just before nine o’clock, and traffic was sparse: a few pedestrians hurrying from one saloon to another, a pair of lighted trolleys passing nearby, a lone hack looking for a fare, two or three carriages with their side-curtains drawn. From somewhere on the Bay, a foghorn gave its lonesome cry. A poor night for ships, a worse one for men like himself, out on business and mostly sober.

  At Second Street he turned right and soon entered Hoolihan’s. It was crowded, as always in the evenings, its clientele composed for the most part of tradesmen, small merchants, office workers, and a somewhat rougher element up from the waterfront. No city leaders came here on their nightly rounds, as they did to the Reception, the Palace Hotel bar, Pop Sullivan’s Hoffman Cafe, and the other first-class saloons along the Cocktail Route; no judges, politicians, bankers, and gay young blades in their striped trousers, fine cravats, and brocaded waistcoats. Hoolihan’s had no crystal candelabra, fancy mirrors, expensive oil paintings, white-coated barmen, or elaborate free lunch. It was dark and bare by comparison, with sawdust thick-scattered on the floor and the only glitter and sparkle coming from the shine of its gaslights on the ranks of bottles and glasses along the backbar. And its free lunch consisted of staple fare: corned beef, strong cheese, rye bread, pots of mustard, and tubs of briny pickles.

  Quincannon liked it better than any of the first-class saloons, and not only because it suited his need for privacy. It was an honest place, made for honest men and honest drinking. Far fewer lies were told in Hoolihan’s than in the rarified atmosphere of the Reception, he suspected, and far fewer dark deeds were hatched.

  He made his way through the throng to the far corner of the bar, his customary place. He had an hour before he was due to meet Bonniwell, which allowed the better part of forty-five minutes to fortify himself. The edge he had maintained from his rooms was beginning to fade and the Virginia City images were gathering again: he could see Katherine Bennett’s face at the periphery of his mind, hear her screams; and the pain this brought him, as always, was too much to endure sober.

  He ordered a double shot, drank it off, and ordered a second with a beer chaser. When the second whiskey was gone the images and the ghostly cries were at bay again. He took his pipe and a plug of tobacco from the pocket of his frock coat, busied his hands preparing a smoke.

  Time passed. Quincannon thought about helping himself to the corned beef and rye bread, but even though he hadn’t eaten since noon, he had no appetite. He called to the barman for a third whiskey; but when it came he let it sit untouched, sipping his beer instead. He would take it just before he went out into the night again — that would be soon enough. His thoughts would have to be clear when he talked to Bonniwell.

  Thinking of the little wharf rat and police informant guided his hand to his trouser pocket, to the counterfeit half eagle he carried there. Absently, he ran his thumb over its edge. Fair craftsmanship. Much better had gone into the counterfeit ten-dollar note tucked into a corner of his billfold; the engraver who had designed the plates was a man of rare talent. The most accomplished koniakers he had come up against in ten years, this bunch. And the cleverest by far. If Bonniwell -

  “Quincannon, isn’t it?” a voice said at his elbow. “John Quincannon?”

  He turned to face a tubby man wearing muttonchop whiskers and a Prince Albert, with an ivory-headed cane looped over his arm. The round, red face was somewhat familiar, but he couldn’t quite place a name to it. He had no desire for casual conversation on this night — on any night in the past year — and rudeness was the best way to avoid it. He turned back to his drinks without making a reply.

  But the tubby man wedged in alongside him and hooked a polished vici kid shoe over the brass rail. “Perhaps you don’t recall me, sir. The name is Muldauer, William Muldauer. Reporter for the San Francisco News. I interviewed you once — let me see, four years ago, I think it was. Yes. The Barlow case. Altered wildcat bank notes, if you’ll remember.”

  Quincannon remembered. He also remembered Muldauer, now, along with the fact that he hadn’t cared for the man at the time of the interview. He remained silent, reaching for his beer.

  Muldauer would not be put off. “You are still with the Secret Service, Mr. Quincannon? A man of your abilities… yes, of course you are. Are you at liberty to discuss your current work, by any chance?”

  Quincannon drank from his stein, wiped foam off his mustache. The Seth Thomas on the wall above the backbar gave the time as twenty-five of ten. He would have to leave soon if he expected to reach Bonniwell’s rooming house by ten o’clock.

  “I should be delighted to have another interview,” Muldauer said. He leaned closer and breathed the odor of shandygaff into Quincannon’s face. If there was one drink Quincannon hated it was shandygaff; diluting good beer with ginger ale was an abomination. “I can guarantee that my editor will pay ten dollars for the privilege.”

  Damn your editor, Quincannon thought, and almost gave voice to the words. Instead he said, “I’m not interested, Mr. Muldauer. I can’t and won’t speak about my present activities. Now if you don’t mind — ”

  “Secret work, eh?” Muldauer said. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with the coney greenbacks that have flooded the coast the past few months, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “Ah! Of course not.” Muldauer gave him a conspiratorial wink, and Quincannon realized that the man was more than a little drunk. Too drunk to be insulted; too drunk to be gotten rid of in an ordinary fashion. “Who’s behind the game, sir? Any speculations? Some say it’s a gang in Seattle, led by an old queersman named Schindler. What would you say, Mr. Quincannon? Off the record, naturally. A passing remark.”

  Quincannon lifted the shot glass, drained the whiskey at a swallow, and nudged the tubby reporter away from him. “Good night, Mr. Muldauer,” he said, and moved off across the crowded room without looking back.

  But when he reached the door he felt a tug at his coat sleeve and saw that Muldauer had followed him. He shrugged off the hand, stepped out into the misty darkness. Muldauer, still persistent, came after him.

  “If you won’t discuss your current work, Mr. Quincannon, perhaps a past case? Eh? Our readers are always interested in good detective work, and you’ve a reputation for it. The Stanley case in Virginia City comes to mind. Details are meager; we should all like to know more.”

  Quincannon stood rigid, but he was trembling inside. “No,” he said.

  “But why not? Is it because of the woman who was
killed? What was her name? Katherine — ”

  He moved without thinking about it; he caught hold of the lapels of Muldauer’s Prince Albert and threw him up against the saloon wall, hard enough to send the fat man’s derby hat flying. Breath came out of Muldauer’s mouth in a surprised, frightened grunt. He slapped at Quincannon’s hands with fluttery gestures, like a woman.

  “Here, here, what’s this? You can’t — ”

  “Shut up,” Quincannon said. “And leave me be from now on, Muldauer. Do your drinking somewhere else. If you bother me again I’ll give you worse than this.”

  He let go of the newspaperman and stepped back. Muldauer brushed and tugged at his Prince Albert; moved to pick up his derby hat from the puddled cobbles. In the outspill of lamplight from Hoolihan’s front window, his round face was pinched and outraged.

  “You can’t manhandle me for no reason!” he shouted. “I won’t stand for it!” He jammed the derby down on his head and pointed a shaking finger at Quincannon. “I’ll report this incident to your superior! By God, I’ll write a story about it! See if I won’t, you… you damned flycopl”

  Quincannon put his back to the man and walked away through the rain.

  At Market Street he turned east again, toward the Ferry Building. The whiskey in him no longer dulled his thoughts or kept the pain at bay; the encounter with Muldauer had seen to that. Damn the fat toad. Another enemy made — and hardly the first over the past twelve months. Likely Muldauer would make good his threats to talk to Boggs, to write an exaggerated account of the incident for the News. Well, so be it. Others had reported him to Boggs, if not to the public at large, and nothing had come of it. Warnings, yes. Admonishments to mind his temper, curtail his drinking. But Boggs would never recommend dismissal from the Service, not without major provocation. A damned flycop John Quincannon was, in more ways than one, but also a damned good flycop. As good as his father had been.

  Not that it mattered so much if he was given the sack — not any more. Quincannon’s work was all he had left of his life, and he pursued it doggedly; but if it were taken away from him he would feel little regret. A temporary inconvenience was all it would be, until he could find some other means of earning the price of his lodging and his liquor.

  He was nearing the Embarcadero now. Ahead, the massive bulk of the Ferry Building appeared through the thin drizzle; and on either side of it, the pier sheds and the masts and steam funnels of anchored ships, like a burned-out forest silhouetted against the black sky. Quincannon turned right again on Spear Street, went along its deserted length to Folsom. The buildings here, close to the docks, were a mixture of warehouses, stores operated by ship’s chandlers and outfitters, and seamen’s rooming houses. The rooming house in which Bonniwell lived lay just ahead, close to Harrison Street and the pier at its foot.

  As he walked, Quincannon kept his eye sharp for footpads. Muggings were not so common here as in the Barbary Coast, that seat of sin north of Market, but the waterfront was still a rough area at night; a man alone, particularly a man dressed in other than seaman’s garb, was fair prey — and no matter that he might be armed, as Quincannon was. But he saw no one. And heard nothing except for the foghorns on the Bay, the distant muffled throb of a piano from one of the saloons on the Embarcadero.

  Bonniwell’s rooming house took shape in the darkness — a three-story firetrap made of warping wood, never painted and badly in need of carpentry work. Smears of lamplight showed at the front entrance, in three windows in the near wall. A fenced pipeyard occupied the lot on the near side, with an alleyway separating it from the rooming house; the building on the far side was a rope-and-twine chandler’s.

  Movement at one of the lighted windows caught Quincannon’s attention, gave him pause. The window was on the third floor, and the movement appeared to be a struggle between two men… no, a heavy-set man half-carrying, half-dragging the limp form of a smaller man. The sash had been thrown up. Quincannon realized; the heavy-set man was bent on pushing the other one out through the opening.

  Quincannon broke into a run; he knew without counting windows that the room was Bonniwell’s. But he made no move to draw the Remington double-action Navy revolver from its holster under his coat. He had not drawn it against a man since that day in Virginia City and would not again, even to save his life, unless he were in close quarters with no one else close by — and even then he could not be sure he would be able to fire it at another human being. Instead, now, he shouted as he ran; shouted a second time. The heavy-set man’s head jerked up at the cries, and Quincannon had a clear impression of a square-slabbed face topped by fiery red hair. He yelled a third time, but neither his shouts nor his presence checked the redhead’s actions.

  The small man came toppling out of the window headfirst, struck the side of the building, and fell in a loose sprawl. Quincannon, at the alley mouth now, turning into it, saw the body hit the muddy ground, heard the dull breaking sound it made. He looked up again. The red-haired man was gone from the window.

  Quincannon ran past where the body lay, to the rear of the alley. The redhead would not go down and out the front way, where he would properly expect to meet the person who had just witnessed his crime. He would come down the back stairs instead. There was no doubt of that in Quincannon’s mind; he knew desperate men, knew how they thought. He had been a desperate man himself more than once.

  A six-foot board fence turned the alley into a dead-end. Without slowing he caught hold of the top boards and hoisted himself up and over. The rear door of the rooming house banged open just as he dropped down on the far side; the red-haired man emerged at a run, brandishing a pistol. The ground on this side of the fence was a quagmire: Quincannon’s feet slid out from under him and he went down hard in the mud. The fall saved his life, for the redhead fired twice and both bullets smacked into the boards directly behind him.

  The red-haired man kept on running across the yard, into the shadow of a pepper tree. Quincannon, struggling to get his feet under him, heard thumping noises at the far boundary fence as the fugitive clambered over it. By the time he reached the fence himself, the man had vanished into the misty darkness.

  Quincannon slapped mud off his hands and clothing, then returned to the alley fence. Men clogged the rooming house’s rear doorway now, peering out, talking in excited voices; he paid no attention to them. He climbed the fence again, went to where the body lay and knelt beside it.

  The dead face that stared up at him, as he had known it would be, was Bonniwell’s.

  Other men came cautiously into the alley, one of them carrying a lighted lantern. Quincannon identified himself, showed his Service badge, and then appropriated the lantern and used its light to examine Bonniwell. The little informant’s skull had been shattered, perhaps in the fall and perhaps in his room by some sort of blunt instrument. There was nothing in his pockets that indicated what he might have found out about the koniakers — the knowledge that had doubtless led to his murder. But there was something in his clenched right hand, something he had managed to conceal there before being struck down, something the red-haired man had overlooked.

  Quincannon pried it loose with some difficulty. It was a wadded piece of butcher’s paper. Shielding it from the rain with his coat, he uncrumpled the paper and read what was written on it.

  Whistling Dixon

  Silver City, Idaho

  Chapter 2

  Early the next morning, Quincannon was the first to arrive at the Secret Service field office in the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets — one of the rare occasions that anyone had ever come in ahead of Boggs. The small, cramped room smelled of steam heat and Boggs’ Havana cigars; Quincannon opened one of the windows overlooking Mission Street to let in cold, moist air. He had taken two drinks before leaving his rooms, as was his custom every day, and he took another now from his pocket flask — a small one, to keep his thoughts sharp at the center and dull at the edges. Then he sat down at his cluttered desk.

  There were
three desks in the office, the largest belonging to Boggs; the third was assigned to young Samuel Greenspan, who was now somewhere in the Pacific Northwest following a different lead on the counterfeiting case. Boggs, Greenspan, and Quincannon composed the main staff of the San Francisco office. Boggs, in fact, had been one of the original thirty operatives brought together to form the Service in 1865, more than twenty-five years ago, and had been hand-picked to open this office, one of eleven scattered throughout the country. Before that, he had been a private detective in Washington, D.C., specializing in counterfeiting cases, and a personal friend of both Quincannon’s father and William P. Wood, the first Chief of the Service. Rumor had it that Boggs had also helped to draw up the original list of six general orders that he kept framed on the wall above his desk. He had quoted those articles for so long and so often, verbatim, that Quincannon had them memorized too.

  1. Each man must recognize that his service belongs to the government through 24 hours of every day.

  2. All must agree to assignment to the locations chosen by the Chief, and respond to whatever mobility of movement the work might require.

  3. All must exercise such careful saving of money spent for travel, subsistence, and payments for information as can be self-evidently justified.

  4. Continuing employment in the Service will depend upon demonstrated fitness, ability as investigators, and honesty and fidelity in all transactions.

  5. The title of regular employees will be Operative, Secret Service. Temporary employees will be Assistant Operatives or Informants.

  6. All employment will be at a daily pay rate; accounts submitted monthly. Each operative will be expected to keep on hand enough personal reserve funds to carry on Service business between paydays.

  Article 3 had been a constant bone of contention during the ten years Quincannon had worked in the San Francisco office. What he considered justified expenditures seldom coincided with Boggs’ opinion; their arguments had been mostly amiable, like an ongoing chess match each of them looked forward to — Quincannon for the challenge of finding a winning gambit, Boggs because he almost always won. That had been the case, at least, until the incident in Nevada the previous year. Now it was Article 4 that Boggs most often quoted — the continuing fitness and ability of Quincannon as an investigator. But he raised the issue gently, knowing as he did the full story of Katherine Bennett’s death and understanding what it had done to Quincannon. Boggs was not a man who generally yielded to personal feelings — the Service came first and foremost in his life — but he made allowances in this instance, out of a combination of loyalty, friendship, and pity. Quincannon did not really care one way or the other. He walled out Boggs and Boggs’ attitude as he walled out everything and everyone else: using pain for bricks and alcohol for mortar.