The Dangerous Ladies Affair

by Marcia Muller

  He moved on. A narrow, ink-black passage separated R. Sonderberg’s cigar store from the house on the far side—a low, two-story structure with a gabled roof and ancient shingles curled by the weather. The parlor window on the lower floor was a curtainless, palely lamplit rectangle; framed in it was the just discernible shape of a white-haired, shawl-draped woman in a high-backed rocking chair, either asleep or keeping a lonely watch on the street. Crowded close along the rear of store and house, paralleling Gunpowder Alley from the Jessie Street corner to its end, stood the long back wall of a warehouse, its dark windows steel shuttered. There was nothing else to see. And still nothing to hear except the wind.

  A short distance beyond the house Quincannon paused to close his umbrella, the drizzle having temporarily ceased. He shook water from the fabric, then turned back the way he’d come. The elderly woman in the rocking chair hadn’t moved—asleep, he decided. Lamp glow now outlined a window in the squat building that faced into the side passage; the front part of the shop was once again dark. R. Sonderberg, if that was who Hook-nose was, had evidently entered a room or rooms at the rear—living quarters, like as not.

  Quincannon stopped again to listen and again detected only silence from within. He sidestepped to the door and tried the latch. Bolted. His intention then was to enter the side passage, to determine if access could be gained at the rear. What stopped him was the realization that he was no longer the only pedestrian abroad in Gunpowder Alley.

  Heavy footsteps echoed hollowly from the direction of Jessie Street. Even as dark and wet as it was, he recognized almost immediately the brass-buttoned coat, helmet, and handheld dark lantern of a police patrolman. Damn and damnation! Of all times for a blasted bluecoat to happen along on his rounds.

  Little annoyed Quincannon more than having to abort an assignment in mid-skulk, but he had no other choice here. He turned from the door, moved at an even pace toward the approaching copper. They met just beyond the joining of the saloon’s back wall and the cigar store’s far-side wall.

  Unlike many of his brethren, the bluecoat, an Irishman of some forty years, was a gregarious sort. He stopped, forcing Quincannon to do likewise, and briefly opened the lantern’s shutter so that the beam flicked over his face before saying in conversational tones, “Evening, sir. Nasty weather after a pleasant spring day, eh?”

  “More coming, I expect.”

  “Aye. A bit of heavy rain before morning. Like as not I’ll have a thorough soaking before my patrol ends.”

  Quincannon itched to touch his hat and move on. But the bluecoat was not done with him yet. “Don’t believe I’ve seen you before, sir. Live in Gunpowder Alley, do you?”

  “No. Visiting.”

  “Which resident, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “R. Sonderberg, at the cigar store. Do you know him?”

  “Only by sight. We’ve yet to meet. I’ve only been on this beat two weeks now, y’see. Maguire’s my name, at your service.”

  Before Quincannon could frame a lie that would extricate him from Officer Maguire’s company there came in rapid succession a brace of muffled reports. As quiet as the night was, there was no mistaking the fact that they were pistol shots and that the weapon had been fired inside the squat building.

  Quincannon’s reflexes were superior to the patrolman’s; he was already on the run by the time the bluecoat reacted. Behind him Maguire shouted something, but he paid no heed. Another sound, a loudish thump, reached his ears as he charged past the shop’s entrance. Seconds later he veered into the side passage. The narrow confines appeared deserted and there were no sounds of movement at its far end. He skidded to a halt in front of the lit window.

  Vertical bars set close together prevented both access and egress. The glass inside was dirty and rain spotted, but he could make out the figure of a man sprawled supine on the floor of a cluttered room. There was no sign of anyone else in there.

  The spaces between the bars were just wide enough to reach a hand through; he did that, pushing fingers against the pane. It failed to yield to the pressure.

  Officer Maguire pounded up beside him, the beam from his lantern cutting jigsaw pieces out of the darkness. The bobbing light illuminated enough of the passage ahead so that Quincannon could see to where it ended at the warehouse wall. He hurried back there while Maguire had his look through the window.

  Another short walkway, shrouded in gloom, stretched at right angles to the side passage like the crossbar of the letter T. Quincannon thumbed a lucifer alight as he stepped around behind the cigar store, shielding the flame with his other hand. That section was likewise empty except for a pair of refuse bins. There was no exit in that direction; the walkway ended in a board fence that joined the shop and warehouse walls, built so high that only a monkey could have climbed it. The match’s flicker showed Quincannon the outlines of a rear door to R. Sonderberg’s quarters. He tried the handle, but the heavy door was secure in its frame.

  Maguire appeared, his lantern creating more dancing patterns of light and shadow. “See anyone back here?” he demanded.

  “No one.”

  “Would that rear door be unlatched?”

  “No. Bolted on the inside.”

  The bluecoat grunted and pushed past him to try the handle himself. While he was doing that, Quincannon struck another match in order to examine the other half of the walkway. It served the adjacent house, ending in a similarly high and unscalable board fence. The house’s rear door, he soon determined, was also bolted from within.

  The lantern beam again picked him out. “Come away from there, laddie. Out front with me, step lively now.”

  Quincannon complied. As they hurried along the passage, Maguire said, “Is it your friend Sonderberg lying shot in there?”

  No friend of mine or society’s, Quincannon thought. But he said only, “I couldn’t be sure.”

  “Didn’t seem to be anybody else in the room.”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’ll soon find out for sure.”

  When they emerged from the passage, Quincannon saw that the elderly woman had left her rocking chair and was now standing stooped at the edge of her front window, peering out. One other individual had so far been alerted; a man wearing a cape and high hat and carrying a walking stick had appeared from somewhere and stood staring nearby. A gaggle of other onlookers would no doubt materialize before long.

  No one had exited the cigar store through the Gunpowder Alley entrance; the recessed door was still locked on the inside. Maguire grunted again. “We’ll be having to break it down,” he said. “Sonderberg, or whoever ’tis, may still be alive.”

  It took the combined weight of both of them to force the door, the bolt finally splintering free with an echoing crack. Once they were inside, Maguire flashed his lantern’s beam over displays of cigars and pipe tobacco, partly filled shelves of cheap sundries, then aimed it down behind the low service counter. The shop was cramped and free of hiding places—and completely unoccupied.

  The closed door to the rear quarters stood behind a pair of dusty drapes. “By the Saints!” Maguire exclaimed when he caught hold of the latch. “This one’s bolted, too.”

  It proved no more difficult to break open than the outer door had. The furnished room behind it covered the entire rear two-thirds of the building. The man sprawled on the floor was short, sallow complexioned, and hook-nosed—Quincannon’s quarry, right enough, though he no longer wore the bulky overcoat, muffler, and slouch hat that had covered him in the Hotel Grant. Blood from a pair of wounds spotted the front of his linsey-woolsey shirt; his open eyes glistened in the light from a table lamp.

  Maguire went to one knee beside him, felt for a pulse. “Dead,” he said unnecessarily.

  Quincannon’s attention was now on the otherwise empty room. It contained a handful of secondhand furniture, a blanket-covered cot, a potbellied stove that radiated heat, and a table topped with a bottle of whiskey and two empty glasses. The whole was none too tidy a
nd none too clean.

  Another pair of curtains partially concealed an alcove in the wall opposite the window. Quincannon satisfied himself that the alcove contained nothing more than a wooden icebox and larder cabinet. The only item of furniture large enough to provide a hiding place was a rickety wardrobe, but all he found when he opened it was a few articles of inexpensive clothing.

  Maguire was on his feet again. He said, “I wonder what made him do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Shoot himself, of course.” The patrolman made the sign of the cross on the breast of his tunic. “Suicide’s a cardinal sin.”

  “Is that what you think happened, Officer?”

  “Aye, and what else could it be, with all the doors and windows locked tight and no one else on the premises?”

  Suicide? Faugh! Murder was what else it could be, and murder was what it was despite the apparent circumstances.

  Four things told Quincannon this beyond any doubt. Sonderberg had been shot twice in the chest, a location handgun suicides seldom chose because it necessitated holding the weapon at an awkward angle. The entry wounds were close together, indicating that both bullets had entered the heart; Sonderberg would have had neither time nor cause nor ability to pull the trigger more than once. The pistol that had fired the two rounds lay some distance away from the dead man, too far for it to have been dropped if he had died by his own hand. And the most damning evidence of all: the satchel containing the five-thousand-dollar blackmail payoff was nowhere to be seen here, nor had it been in the front part of the shop.

  But Quincannon only shrugged and said nothing. Let the bluecoat believe what he liked. The dispatching of R. Sonderberg was part and parcel of the blackmail game, and that made it John Quincannon’s meat.

  “I’ll be needing to report in straightaway,” Maguire said. “The nearest call box is on Jessie two blocks distant. You’ll stay here, will you, and keep out any curious citizens until I return, Mr.…?”

  “Quinn. That I will, Officer. On my word.”

  “Quinn, is it? You’ll be Irish yourself, then?”

  “Indeed,” Quincannon lied glibly, “though of a generation once removed from the Auld Sod.”

  Maguire hurried out. As soon as he was alone Quincannon commenced a search of the premises. The dead man’s coat and trouser pockets yielded nothing of value or interest other than an expired insurance card that confirmed his identity as Raymond Sonderberg. The pistol that had done for him was a small-caliber Colt, its chambers loaded except for the two fired rounds; it bore no identifying marks of any kind. There was no place where the payoff money might have been hidden, nor was there any sign of the remaining letters belonging to Titus Wrixton.

  The bolt on the rear door was tightly drawn, the door itself sturdy in its frame; and for good measure a wooden bar set into brackets spanned its width. Sonderberg had been nothing if not security conscious, for all the good it had done him. The single window was hinged upward, the swivel latch at the bottom of the sash loosely in place around its stud fastener. Quincannon flipped the hook aside and raised the glass to peer again at the vertical bars. They were set firmly top and bottom; he was unable to budge any of them. And as close together as they were, there was no way by which anything as bulky as the satchel could have passed between them.

  Sonderberg had brought the satchel inside with him; there could be no mistaking that. Whoever had shot him had made off with it; that, too, was plain enough. But how the devil could the assassin have committed the crime and then escaped from not one but two sealed rooms in the clutch of seconds that had passed between the triggering of the fatal shots and Quincannon’s entry into the side passage?

  6

  QUINCANNON

  The night’s stillness was broken now by the sound of voices out front, but as yet none of the growing number of bystanders had attempted to come inside. Muttering to himself, Quincannon lowered the window and made his way out through the cigar store to stand in the broken front doorway.

  The men gathered in Gunpowder Alley numbered seven or eight, drawn from nearby houses and the corner watering hole. The man in the cape and high hat was still among them. The parlor of the house next door, Quincannon noted, was now dark and the white-haired occupant had come out to stand, shawl draped and leaning on a cane, on the small front porch.

  The first of a barrage of questions came from the man in the cape. “What’s happened here?” he demanded.

  “A police matter, sir.”

  “Are you a policeman? You’re not dressed like one.”

  “No. Merely a passerby who happened to be in the company of Patrolman Maguire when the unfortunate incident occurred.”

  “What unfortunate incident? Has something happened to Sonderberg? I saw the two of you breaking in as I was leaving my home.”

  “And I heard pistol shots before that,” another man said, stepping forward.

  “Two of them. Was it Sonderberg who was shot?”

  Quincannon admitted that it was.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it robbery? I didn’t see anyone running away.” He turned to the man in the cape. “Did you, Harold?”

  Harold hadn’t. “Who shot him, then?”

  “Can’t you guess?” Quincannon said.

  “You mean … he shot himself?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Old Sonderberg,” someone else said amid murmurs from the others. “I wouldn’t have thought him the type to do himself in.”

  “You can’t tell what goes on inside chaps like him,” Harold said.

  Quincannon asked, “What sort of man was he?”

  “Kept to himself, never had a chummy word for anyone.”

  “No friends, no one who knew him well?”

  “Not so far as I know. He won’t be missed in the neighborhood.”

  The false theory of suicide had served to put an end to the men’s eagerness for information about the shooting. Violence was common in the city and there was not enough spice in a self-dispatching, particularly one by an unpopular individual such as Sonderberg seemed to have been, to sustain the interest of jaded citizens. Some of the men were already moving away when Maguire returned.

  The bluecoat quickly dispersed the rest. The elderly woman still stood on the porch; it was not until Gunpowder Alley was mostly deserted again that she doddered back inside the darkened house.

  Quincannon asked Maguire if he knew the woman’s name and whether or not she lived alone. “I couldn’t tell you, lad,” the patrolman said. “I’ve not seen her before that I can recall.”

  “Then she doesn’t often sit in her window at night looking out.”

  “Not while I’ve been by these past two weeks. The window has always been dark.”

  The morgue wagon and a trio of other bluecoats arrived shortly, accompanied by a pair of plainclothes detectives from the Hall of Justice. Fortunately, Quincannon was acquainted with neither of the dicks; they exhibited no interest in him. Nor did Maguire any longer. San Francisco’s finest, a misnomer if ever there was one, found suicides and those peripherally involved to be worthy of little time or attention unless they were prominent citizens.

  A misty drizzle had begun to fall again. While the minions of the law were inside with the remains of Raymond Sonderberg, Quincannon mounted a brief search for his dropped umbrella. It was nowhere to be found. One of the onlookers must have made off with it. Faugh! Thieves everywhere in this infernal city!

  He drew his overcoat collar up, buttoned it at the throat, then crossed to the adjacent house. The parlor window was curtained now, no light showing around its edges. The rusty bellpull beside the door no longer worked; he rapped on the panel instead. There was no immediate response. Mayhap the old woman wanted no truck with visitors after the night’s excitement or had already retired—

  Neither, as it developed. Old boards creaked and a thin, quavering voice asked, “Yes? Who’s there?”

  “Police officer
,” Quincannon lied glibly. “A few questions if I may, madam. I won’t keep you long.”

  There was a longish pause, followed by the click of a bolt being thrown; the door squeaked open partway and the white-haired woman appeared. Stooped, still bundled in a shawl over a black dress, she carried her cane in one hand and a lit candle in the other. A cold draught set the candle flame to flickering in its ceramic holder, so that it cast a shifting motif of pale light and dark shadow over her heavily seamed face as she peered out and up at him.

  “I know you,” she said. “You were here before all the commotion next door.”

  “You spied me through your parlor window, eh? I thought as much, Mrs.…?”

  “Carver. Letitia Carver. Yes, I occasionally sit watching the street. A person my age sometimes feels lonesome at night. Sight of others passing by, even at a distance, can be a comfort.”

  “I’m sure it can,” Quincannon said. “Did you happen to see anyone enter or leave the cigar store at any time tonight?”

  “No, no one.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Quite certain. What happened to Mr. Sonderberg?”

  “Shot dead in his quarters.”

  “Oh!”

  “You heard the reports, did you?”

  “Two, yes. I thought they were pistol shots, but I wasn’t sure. Who killed the poor man?”

  “Done by his own hand, presumably. Does that surprise you?”

  “At my age, young man, nothing surprises me.”

  “Did you know Mr. Sonderberg well?”

  “Oh, no. Hardly at all. He was a surly fellow, and I have no use for the sort of goods he sold in his shop.”

  “Do you live here alone, Mrs. Carver?”

  “Since my husband, Theron, passed on three years ago, bless his soul.”

  “And you’ve had no visitors tonight?”

  She sighed wistfully. “Very few come to visit me anymore.”