The Paradise Affair Read online

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  For Marcia

  1

  QUINCANNON

  The one thing above all others that Quincannon could not abide was failure.

  Failure was an affront to his pride and his skills as a detective, a threat to his mental health if not his very career. It infuriated and frustrated him. It plunged him into a morass of gloom, nagging and rankling after the fashion of an infected tooth.

  A long time had passed since he’d last tasted the bitterness of defeat. He hadn’t expected he would ever taste it again. Now, faced with the evident fact that his infuriatingly elusive quarry had permanently escaped his clutches, it was as if his mouth had been stuffed with ashes. Two weeks of intense investigative work, all for nothing!

  He glowered at the Matson Navigation Company clerk, a look of such ferocity that the man paled; the business card Quincannon had given him dropped to the counter as if it had suddenly burned his fingers. “You’re certain those two men embarked for the Hawaiian Islands on Saturday?”

  “Yes, sir. Their names are on the Roderick Dhu’s passenger list. James A. Varner and Simon Reno.”

  Those were aliases, not their true names, but that was none of the clerk’s business. “Did they actually depart?” Quincannon demanded. “You know that for a fact?”

  “They must have, sir, or their names would not be on the list. They each booked a first-class cabin.”

  “To Honolulu, not to Australia or someplace in the Far East? You’re sure of that, too?”

  “Yes, sir. Honolulu is their final destination.”

  “One-way or round-trip tickets?”

  “Round-trip.”

  “Date of return passage also booked?”

  “No, sir. Round-trip tickets are valid for three months, so passengers often delay booking their return voyage.”

  Hell, damn, and blast! “Did you personally sell them the tickets?”

  “Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “Friday afternoon, the day before the Roderick Dhu sailed. I remember them because they each paid the one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee in gold specie.”

  “Describe them.”

  The clerk did so. One tall, dark, slender, well dressed, the possessor of a mane of silvery hair; the other short, stout, red-haired, also well dressed, and sporting an imperial beard. Unquestionably the two birds Quincannon had been chasing. Incredible as it seemed, they had not only managed to fly away, they had flown the blasted country.

  “May I ask why you’re looking for these men, sir?”

  Quincannon said, “No, you may not,” turned on his heel, and stomped out into the cold, wet, early-May morning. Another dreary day in a string of dreary days, a perfect match for his mood.

  * * *

  Hoolihan’s Saloon was marginally closer to the Matson Navigation Company’s office than to the Market Street base of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. He went there first because it was a familiar place of refuge, and because he was not yet ready to face Sabina with the news of his failure.

  The Second Street resort had been his favorite in his drinking days. It was there that he had sought for two long years to drown his guilty conscience after the incident in Virginia City, Nevada, when a young woman named Katherine Bennett, eight months pregnant, had perished with a bullet from his pistol in her breast. The shooting, a tragic accident, had happened during a gun battle that erupted when he and a team of local law enforcement officers attempted to arrest a pair of brothers who were counterfeiting U.S. government currency. In the skirmish one of the brothers wounded a deputy and then fled through the backyards of a row of nearby houses. Quincannon had shot the man, to avoid being shot himself; but one of his bullets had ricocheted wildly and found Katherine Bennett, who had been outside hanging up her washing.

  That had been the darkest day of his life by far. The burden of responsibility for the loss of two innocent lives had been unbearable; guilt and remorse had eaten away at him, led him to take so heavily to drink that he’d been in danger of losing his position as a Secret Service operative. Two things saved him: the first was another counterfeiting case that led him to the Owyhee Mountains of Idaho; the second was meeting Sabina, then a “Pink Rose” attached to the Pinkerton Agency’s Denver office, who was there on an undercover assignment of her own. Their investigations had combined, and the successful resolutions to both had led him to make peace with himself and to the eventual creation of their detective partnership. Not a drop of alcohol had passed his lips since then, nor ever would again.

  Nevertheless, he continued to frequent Hoolihan’s on a sporadic basis, or had until he and Sabina tied the marital knot six months ago. His visit there today was only his second in that half year’s time. He had always felt comfortable among its clientele of small merchants, office workers, tradesmen, drummers, and less rowdy waterfront habitués. It was dark and bare in comparison to the uptown, Cocktail Route saloons, illuminated as it was by old-style gaslights. Sawdust was spread thick on the floor, and there were back-room pool and billiard tables on which Quincannon had often honed his considerable skills with a cue.

  The other lure for him in the old days had been Hoolihan’s free lunch, the best free lunch in the city in his estimation—corned beef, strong cheese, rye bread, bowls of hard-boiled eggs and tubs of briny pickles. But he had no appetite for any of the fare today. Nor any desire to trade the usual good-natured and mildly profane insults with Ben Joyce, the head barman. He ordered his usual tipple, a mug of steaming clam juice, and sat at a corner table letting it warm his hands and his insides while he reflected gloomily on what he’d been told by the Matson Company clerk.

  James A. Varner and Simon Reno. Two of the many fictitious names utilized by the slick and slippery grifters he had pursued the past two weeks, and who had escaped his clutches by inexplicably sailing away to what had formerly been known as the Sandwich Islands. Their true names: Jackson “Lonesome Jack” Vereen—the “Lonesome Jack” an ironical moniker, for he was a libertine of gargantuan appetites—and E. B. Nagle, better known as Nevada Ned, whose primary vice was the opium derivative morphine.

  During their lengthy careers, the pair had first engaged in bait-and-switch and gold-brick trickery, then graduated to confidence games involving phony stock swindles that netted greater profits. They had been arrested half a dozen times in three states and tried once for their crimes (case dismissed for insufficient evidence), and had yet to serve a single day in prison. Their latest mark had been R. W. Anderson, a nouveau riche Oakland resident who owned several East Bay dry goods establishments and who had recently begun investing in the stock market. Vereen and Nagle had made his acquaintance and insinuated themselv
es into his confidence by posing as Eastern investors with inside knowledge of the commodities market.

  Mr. Anderson had allowed himself to be talked into the purchase of two thousand dollars’ worth of bogus shares in a nonexistent Nevada silver mine. This error in judgment had been exacerbated by the commission of a mistake even more egregious: Anderson, a trusting soul, had permitted the two swindlers to examine his slim but valuable portfolio of stock certificates and bearer bonds, then foolishly left them alone in his private office while he went to answer a call of nature. The two miscreants, naturally, had seized the opportunity to make off with the portfolio.

  Embarrassment, distrust of the police, fear that word would get out and damage his standing in the community had kept him from reporting the theft. It had taken all his courage to seek the aid of a private agency, he admitted to Quincannon—that, plus a healthy dose of anger, a burning desire to see the thieves punished, and the slim hope that the stock certificates and bearer bonds could be recovered. He had chosen Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, because of the agency’s reputation for discretion as well as success.

  Anderson was willing to pay handsomely for their services, but this was not the only factor in the decision to undertake a full-time investigation on his behalf. Quincannon didn’t often feel sorry for his clients, but he felt sorry for this one—a pleasant, well-meaning, harmless gent who had been badly used and who was suffering miserably as a result.

  His mouth quirked sardonically. He felt even sorrier for Mr. Anderson now. Yes, and not a little for himself.

  He had been confident—overconfident, as much as he hated to admit it—that nabbing Vereen and Nagle would prove to be neither a difficult nor a lengthy undertaking. For one thing, he had had no trouble identifying them from Anderson’s descriptions and the agency’s file of dossiers of known confidence men. And for another they were known habitués of the more sordid fleshpots when financially solvent.

  He had tracked them through known and newly uncovered associates, both female and male, from the East Bay to San Francisco, then south to San Jose, where the pair had succeeded in cashing one of the bearer bonds, then back again to San Francisco. Twice he had come near to closing in on them, only to be foiled by cussed misfortune. He had been sure he was close to nabbing them when he learned that they had been seen in Charles Riley’s high-toned Polk Street gamblers’ mecca, House of Chance, and that one of the waiters there overheard them planning to make the rounds of the Uptown Tenderloin parlor houses. That usually meant not one but several nights of debauchery, which made it likely that they could still be found in the district.

  But this turned out not to be the case. The pair had sampled the exotic wares in three establishments—Miss Bessie Hall’s notorious O’Farrell Street establishment, Lettie Carew’s Fiddle Dee Dee, and Madame Lucy’s Ye Olde Whore Shoppe. But Madame Lucy’s had been their last stop. And it was there that the trail ended. A painted and powdered, red-haired nymphet informed Quincannon, upon receipt of a gold sovereign, that after having been serviced by her, Lonesome Jack had drunkenly boasted that he and his partner were soon to embark on a voyage to the “Crossroads of the Pacific.”

  Quincannon hadn’t believed it. A false boast, surely, one of Vereen’s habitual fabrications. The pair’s bases of operations ranged from Seattle to Los Angeles and points inland; never once had they traveled so far as Mexico, much less to a far-flung island in the Pacific Ocean. Yet he had no other leads, so this morning he had begun canvassing the shipping companies that offered passenger service to various ports in the South Pacific. And now, after his interview with the Matson clerk, there could be no doubt that the pair were in fact bound for Honolulu, Hawaii.

  Why, blast it? A lark? Unlikely, given their past history. It must be that they had stumbled onto a new mark and were plotting a swindle as profitable as, if not more so than, the one they had perpetrated on R. W. Anderson. The red-haired bawd had had no knowledge of who or what the new game might involve, nor had Quincannon picked up so much as a whisper or a hint at any time during his search.

  And what of the stock certificates and the rest of the bearer bonds? Had Vereen and Nagle taken those with them, or had they stashed them somewhere in the city? In either case he saw no way of finding out, no way of recovering the documents or the two thousand dollars in cash.

  The clot of unanswerable questions made the galling taste of failure that much more bitter.

  2

  QUINCANNON

  Sabina was at her desk, engaged in the writing of a report or perhaps a letter, when he entered the offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. He had spent regrettably little time with her the past two weeks; being with her now should serve to lift his spirits, relieve his dour mood, but he suspected that it wouldn’t.

  He answered her smile with a weak one of his own, then shed his rain-spotted Chesterfield and derby and hung them on the coat tree. Seated at his desk, he loaded his briar from the pouch of Navy Cut. Sabina had gifted him with a flint cigar and pipe lighter at Christmas, and while he preferred matches, he had to admit that the lighter was an improvement over sulfur-smelling lucifers. Or it was when it worked properly. Which it chose not to do this morning. He muttered, “Confounded thing!,” fished in his desk for a match, and commenced a furious puffing to get the tobacco burning evenly.

  Sabina had replaced her pen in its holder and was watching him quizzically. “What’s the matter, John? Why are you so glum?”

  He hadn’t told her what he’d learned from the Tenderloin bawd last night, believing as he had that it was probably a falsehood. And he’d left the Leavenworth Street flat alone early this morning, instead of sharing the trolley ride to Market Street with her as he usually did, in order to canvass the shipping companies that offered passenger service to the Hawaiian Islands. So she had had no foreknowledge of the calamity that had struck him.

  “Lonesome Jack Vereen and Nevada Ned Nagle.” Speaking the two names left a bitter taste like that of camphor.

  “What about them? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, curse the luck,” Quincannon said. “They’re gone. Long gone. Far gone.”

  “Far gone? You mean they’ve left California?”

  “Not only California—the United States. They’re on their merry way to Honolulu.”

  “Honolulu! Are you serious?”

  “Never more,” he said bleakly. “Departed on a Matson steamship on Saturday.”

  “Hawaii, of all places. Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Not for a vacation from crime, that’s bloody certain. Otherwise I’ve not a clue.”

  Sabina folded her hands together on the desktop. “Tell me what you do know and how you found it out.”

  He told her, puffing out great clouds of bluish smoke as he did so.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself, John,” she said when he finished. Sympathetic, but also practical as was her wont. “You had no way of knowing those rogues were planning a trip to Hawaii.”

  “No, but I should have caught up to them in time to prevent them from leaving. I had two blasted weeks.”

  “Not every investigation plays out quickly, you know that.”

  “That doesn’t make their escape or the loss of our client’s property any easier to accept.”

  “Do you suppose they took the bonds and stock certificates with them?”

  “At a guess I’d say yes. But I have no way of knowing, and it hardly matters now.”

  “Perhaps it does,” she said. “What do you intend to do?”

  “Do? What can I do?”

  “You could go after them.”

  “… All the way to Honolulu? That is hardly feasible.”

  “Why isn’t it feasible?”

  Quincannon pawed his left ear, the lobe of which had been removed by a would-be assassin’s bullet the previous year. Sabina insisted its loss had not disfigured him, but he couldn’t seem to break himself of the habit of fin
gering the scar tissue in moments of stress.

  “For more than one good reason,” he said. “Travel time to Honolulu is seven days, so I was told, and passenger vessels depart only on weekends; by the time I arrived they would have been there a full week. Trying to find them would be prohibitively difficult.”

  “Not necessarily. Most of the population is native Hawaiian and Chinese, and there are relatively few Caucasian visitors.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I read newspaper articles, among other things, that don’t engage your interest,” Sabina said. “The point is a pair of newcomers with profligate ways surely wouldn’t escape notice.”

  “Upon arrival, perhaps not,” Quincannon admitted. “But if they have a game on, their pattern has been to put a hold on public indulgence of their vices so as not to call attention to themselves. For all I know a week is enough time for them to finish their scurvy business, whatever it is, and be ready for a return voyage.”

  “It’s just as likely they will be in the midst of it. The high-profit swindles they specialize in take time to set up.”

  “Yes, but where and with whom? The game doesn’t have to be in Honolulu or even on Oahu. There are three or four other islands—”

  “Eight altogether in the Hawaiian archipelago.”

  “Eight makes the odds that much longer.”

  “Well, you could seek the aid of the police.”

  “In a backwater foreign country? They’re bound to be as inept as the bluecoats here.”

  “Hawaii is not a foreign country,” Sabina reminded him. “The Sandwich Islands Kingdom was overthrown and Queen Lili‘uokalani’s reign ended in January of ’93, five years ago. If President McKinley and his partisans have their way, the Republic of Hawaii will be annexed as a United States territory later this year.”

  “And if Japan doesn’t invade and annex it first, as they have threatened to do.”