The Dangerous Ladies Affair

by Marcia Muller

  “Did you hear anyone moving about in the side or rear passages, before or after the pistol shots?”

  “Only you and the other policemen.” She sighed again, sadly this time. “Poor Mr. Sonderberg.”

  Poor Mr. Sonderberg, my eye, Quincannon thought. Poor Titus Wrixton, who was now bereft of ten thousand dollars as well as the rest of his ill-advised and no doubt self-incriminating letters. And poor Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, who were out a substantial fee if the mystery of Sonderberg’s death remained unsolved and the money and blackmail evidence could not be recovered.

  The old woman said in her quavering voice, “Is there anything more, young man? It’s quite chilly standing here, you know.”

  “Nothing more.”

  “Then I shall bid you good night,” she said, and retreated inside.

  He returned to the boardwalk. R. Sonderberg’s remains were in the process of being loaded into the morgue wagon. None of the policemen so much as glanced in Quincannon’s direction as he crossed the alley and made his way to Jessie Street, his thoughts as dark and gloomy as the night around him.

  * * *

  Home was where he went, by trolley car from Market Street to his bachelor’s flat on Leavenworth. He had neither reason nor inclination to remain downtown. Titus Wrixton would have long since left the Hotel Grant for his residence on Rincon Hill; a report to him could and would wait until tomorrow. Perhaps by then Quincannon would have divined at least a partial explanation for the night’s strange events and some definite idea of what to do next.

  His flat, once both a sanctuary and, from time to time, a place to bring willing wenches for a night or two of sport, lately seemed to have taken on a lonesome aspect. He knew the reason well enough: his consuming desire for Sabina. She was on his mind constantly when he wasn’t occupied with business matters, intensely so in night’s solitude. Other women no longer had any appeal for him. The carefree, randy fellow he had once been would have scoffed at such feelings, but that fellow had become little more than a memory. If ever he brought a woman here again, it would be Sabina. But he knew what her answer would be if he suggested it. No matter how she felt about him, or he about her, she was not the sort to indulge in a casual dalliance. She would agree to share his or any man’s bed only if she loved him and was sure he loved her, and that meant marriage or the definite promise thereof.

  Marriage. Was he ready and willing to take such a step, to share his personal as well as his professional life with a woman after so many years on his own? And if he determined that he was, was she ready and willing to end her long widowhood with him? The chances of her saying yes to a proposal seemed depressingly slim. Yet he couldn’t go on indefinitely sparking her in the present platonic fashion; it was too blasted frustrating. A crisis point would inevitably be reached, one that could have no favorable outcome. Yet the situation had to be resolved one way or another. His bed, by Godfrey, was already too cold and lonely as it was.

  He took Emily Dickinson into it tonight, not that she provided any comfort. Her poetry not only failed to move him as it usually did, it also failed to help take his mind off Sabina. Or the problem of how R. Sonderberg had been murdered and by whom, the solution to which continued to elude him—a lack of success that doubled his frustration because he prided himself on having an uncanny and unerring knack for unraveling even the knottiest of seemingly impossible conundrums.

  7

  SABINA

  She was at her desk, once again rereading the two threatening messages Amity Wellman had entrusted to her care, when John arrived on Tuesday morning. The messages bothered her. Why would a person bent on shooting an enemy, real or imagined, write a series of warning notes in advance of the act? A misguided attempt to frighten the intended victim? Because the tormentor hadn’t made up his or her mind yet to cross the line into violence? Or was there some other explanation?

  John greeted her pleasantly enough, but as he folded his umbrella and shed his overcoat his smile turned upside down and became a semi-ferocious scowl. Which meant that he was in one of his dark moods, at least in part because he had spent a restless and mostly sleepless night. Smudges under his expressive brown eyes testified to that.

  She waited until he was seated behind his desk before she asked, “Difficulties, John?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “The way you’re scowling. You have the look of a pirate on his way to the gibbet.”

  “Bah.”

  “A business-related problem?”

  “Yes, confound it. Involving a banker named Titus Wrixton who called for a consultation yesterday. He has troubles that seemed simple enough to handle, and in exchange for a generous fee I agreed to act on his behalf. Now I’m almost sorry that I did.”

  “What sort of troubles?”

  “Of his own making that led to blackmail. And worse, as it turned out. Infuriatingly worse.”

  “How so?”

  John didn’t answer. He sat scowling, fluffing his beard, apparently having subsided into a gloomy reverie. He could be closemouthed about his investigations at times, particularly when they weren’t going well. On those occasions he tended to resent being prodded. He would confide in her eventually, in his own good time.

  He changed the subject before Sabina could. “What’s that you’re studying? Letters?”

  “Notes. Threatening messages.”

  “Threatening to whom? Not you?”

  “No. To a friend.”

  “The new client you mentioned in your note?”

  “Yes.”

  “A wealthy one?”

  “That’s always the first question you ask. Financial gain isn’t the only reason we’re in business.”

  “No, but it’s the primary one. Who is the client?”

  “Amity Wellman.”

  “Ah. The woman in your Sunday bicycle club, the leader of the voting-rights folderol.”

  Sabina said, “Folderol, John?” sharply and warningly.

  He paused in the act of charging his pipe, correctly read the expression on her face, and said hurriedly, “I was merely teasing. You know I support the suffrage movement—”

  “It’s not a subject to be teased about, now especially. Not with me, nor with any other New Woman. I’ll thank you not to do it again.”

  “No, no, of course I won’t.” He looked genuinely abashed. “Sincere apologies, my dear. I’m just not thinking clearly this morning. Those notes … are they genuine? Is Mrs. Wellman’s life in danger?”

  “Yes. She was nearly shot to death Sunday night. Do you want to hear the details?”

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  Somewhat mollified, Sabina told him of the attempt on Amity’s life, the possible suspects, and the fact that she’d hired Elizabeth Petrie to watch over her friend. She also showed him the notes. He was properly attentive but had no fresh perspective to offer. Not that she had expected him to; the entire matter was outside his experience.

  “If there is anything I can do—”

  “There isn’t,” Sabina said. “At least not now.”

  Since he had paid heed to her, she felt she owed him the same courtesy and made another effort to draw him out. “Are you ready to discuss the Wrixton matter now?”

  He uttered a grunting sound that she took to be an affirmative. She prompted him by saying, “Infuriatingly worse than blackmail, you said. Meaning?”

  “Murder. Sudden and so far inexplicable.”

  “Who was murdered? Not the banker?”

  “No. He’ll live to pay our fee; I’ll see to that.”

  “Then who was killed?”

  He related the details of his meeting with Titus Wrixton, the probable reason behind the extortion attempt, and his surveillance of last night’s second blackmail payoff in the Hotel Grant’s bar parlor. “The blackmailer, or the blackmailer’s emissary,” he went on, “is or was Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. He led me directly ther
e from the hotel.”

  “And then?”

  “He was shot to death in his locked quarters before I could confront him and recover Wrixton’s letters and payoff money.”

  “Locked quarters?”

  “Behind double-locked doors and a tightly barred window.”

  “It couldn’t have been suicide?”

  “No, though that is evidently the official verdict.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  John’s answer to that question indicated that he was right, Raymond Sonderberg had in fact been murdered. “A puzzling series of events, to be sure,” she said when he’d finished his account. “But perhaps not as mysterious as they might seem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know from experience, John, that such mysteries generally have a relatively simple explanation.”

  He admitted the truth of this. “But I’m hanged if I can see it in this case.”

  “Well, the first question that occurs to me—was the crime planned or committed on the spur of the moment?”

  “If it was planned, it was done in order to silence Sonderberg and make off with the five thousand dollars.”

  “By an accomplice in the blackmail scheme?”

  “By the scheme’s mastermind. I suspect Sonderberg was only a pawn. In any event, the second person was waiting for him in his quarters. The stove there was glowing hot and there was not enough time for Sonderberg to have stoked the fire to high heat, even if he’d built it up before leaving for the Hotel Grant.”

  “Then why all the mystification?” Sabina asked. “Why not simply shoot Sonderberg and slip away into the night with the loot?”

  “To make murder appear to be suicide.”

  “That could have been accomplished without resorting to elaborate flummery of whatever sort. Locked rooms and mysterious disappearances smack of deliberate subterfuge.”

  “That they do. But to what purpose?”

  “The obvious answer is to fool someone in close proximity at the time.”

  “Who? Not me, surely,” John said. “No one could have known ahead of time that I would follow Sonderberg from the hotel to Gunpowder Alley. Or that I would be near enough to the shop to hear the shots and rush into the side passage.”

  “The bluecoat, Maguire, then. From your description of him, he’s the sort who makes his rounds on a by-the-clock schedule. Still, it seems rather an intricate game just to confuse a simple patrolman.”

  “Exactly. If the whole business was planned ahead of time, and not a result of convenient or inconvenient circumstance.”

  “In either case, there has to be a plausible explanation. Are you absolutely certain there was no possible means of escape from the building after the shooting?”

  “Front and rear entrances bolted from the inside, as I told you. The door to his living quarters likewise bolted, the only window both barred and locked. Yes, I’m certain of that much.”

  “Doesn’t it follow, then, that if escape was impossible, the murderer was never inside the building?”

  “It would,” John said, “except for the missing satchel, the presence of the whiskey bottle and two glasses on the table, and the pistol that dispatched Sonderberg lying at a distance from the body. There can hardly be any doubt that both killer and victim were together inside those sealed quarters.”

  “The thump you heard just after the shots were fired. Can you find any significance in that?”

  “None so far. It might have been a foot striking a wall—that sort of sound.”

  “But loud enough to carry out to Gunpowder Alley. Did you hear running steps?”

  “No. No other sounds at all.” John stood and began to restlessly pace the office. “The murderer’s vanishing act is just as befuddling. Even if he managed to extricate himself from the building, how the devil was he able to disappear so quickly and completely? Not even a cat could have climbed those fences enclosing the rear walkway. Nor the warehouse wall, not that such a scramble would have done him any good with all its windows steel shuttered.”

  “Which leaves only one possible escape route.”

  “The rear door to Letitia Carver’s house, yes. But it was bolted when I tried it and she claimed not to have had any visitors.”

  “She could have been lying.”

  John conceded that she could have been.

  Sabina said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that she herself could be the culprit?”

  “She’s eighty if she’s a day. Besides, I saw her sitting in her parlor window not two minutes before the shots were fired. That wouldn’t have been enough time to have committed the deed and escaped back into her house with the satchel.”

  “Lying to protect the guilty party, then. A relative, perhaps. In which case the murderer was hiding in the house while you spoke to her.”

  “A galling possibility, if true. And still only a partial explanation.” John paused, glowering, to run fingers through his beard and then fluff it again. “The crone seemed innocent enough, yet now that I consider it, there was something … odd about her.”

  “Furtive, you mean?”

  “No. Her actions, her words … I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “Why don’t you have another talk with her?”

  “That,” he said, “is precisely what I intend to do.”

  8

  SABINA

  The Solidarity Party’s headquarters was located in a somewhat shabby two-story brick building on Ellis Street. Nathaniel Dobbs, however, was not in residence this morning. The lone occupant of what a sign on the door labeled a suite—a misnomer if ever there was one, given the cramped, unkempt confines of the two rooms inside—was a tubby little man seated behind a long, cluttered worktable. He wore a green eyeshade and a pair of spectacles with lenses as thick as the bottoms of milk bottles. He seemed surprised to see a woman enter the premises, and wary and not a little scornful when he squinted at her business card. Sabina knew what he was going to say before he said it; she had heard the same tiresome twaddle dozens of times before.

  “A woman detective? Of all things on God’s earth!”

  “You disapprove of women with professional credentials?”

  “I do; I most certainly do,” he said huffily. “A woman’s place—”

  “—is anywhere she chooses it to be,” Sabina said with asperity. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t say. Josiah Pitman, though I don’t see that it matters.”

  “It doesn’t matter in the slightest. Nor do you or your outmoded opinions. When do you expect your employer?”

  “Not until later today,” Pitman said through pinched lips. “He has important business elsewhere this morning.”

  “No doubt. What time do you expect him?”

  “Whenever he arrives. Why does a … a detective want to see him?”

  “To have a private conversation.”

  “Concerning?”

  “‘Private’ means ‘private.’ But you may tell him that it concerns Amity Wellman.”

  “Amity Wellman! That—”

  “Don’t say it, Mr. Pitman. My response would not be at all ladylike.”

  The look she gave him, long and smoldering, made Pitman flush and turn his head away. Satisfied, Sabina turned on her heel and left him to stew in his vinegary juices.

  Her next stop, by means of an Embarcadero trolley to China Basin, was Egan and Bradford, Tea and Spice Importers. The address turned out to be a combination office and large warehouse, with a long wharf at its backside extending out into the channel. A four-masted schooner was tied up there at present, being loaded or unloaded by a cluster of noisy stevedores.

  A large sign on the warehouse wall gave the company’s name in ornate, Oriental-style letters. A smaller sign at the entrance to the office repeated it and also served as an advertisement for Egan and Bradford’s specialties, “the finest exotic teas and spices from the Orient and the Far East.” Specific items were listed
: Darjeeling and Nepalese black tea, Chinese White Hair Silver Needle tea; Sichuan pepper, Indonesian cinnamon, Moluccan nutmeg and cloves, and two spices that Sabina had never heard of, Indian garam masala and Japanese shichimi togarashi. “Exotic” was indeed the word for the importers’ wares.

  The strong mingled scents of teas and spices tickled Sabina’s nostrils—a heady mixture that made her want to sneeze—when she entered an office presided over by two male clerks and a handsome young female receptionist with curled yellow hair and a thrusting bosom. The hair and the bosom, Sabina guessed, were the attributes that had gotten her her job; lack of mental acuity was evident in her eyes, her smile, and her somewhat nasal voice. One of Fenton Egan’s conquests, like as not.

  Sabina’s luck here was no better than it had been at the Solidarity Party’s “suite.” The yellow-haired wench informed her that she was oh, so sorry, but Mr. Egan was not expected until early afternoon; would she like to speak to Mr. Bradford instead? Sabina briefly considered the suggestion, decided it would serve no good purpose, and declined. She also considered asking for an envelope and pen and ink, writing Amity Wellman’s name on the back of one of her business cards and sealing the card into the envelope with Mr. Fenton Egan, Private written on the front. She decided against this, too. It would be best not to give Amity’s former lover any advance warning of her profession or her purpose.

  Sabina splurged on the price of a hansom cab for her visit to the Egan manse in Pacific Heights. If Prudence Egan happened not to be in residence, at least the trip would have been made in relative comfort, rather than on one of the hard seats in rattling trolleys. She wouldn’t even put the fare on the expense account; call it a donation to the cause.

  The views of the bay and the Golden Gate were splendid from the Heights, which, combed with the best weather in the city, made it another desirable neighborhood for the city’s wealthy residents. The one drawback was that, unlike the fine homes atop Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill, those here were built more closely together along the steep hillside streets. Shouldered by neighbors on both sides and perched on the edge of a sharp drop to the street below, the Egan home had almost no landscaping to relieve its stark aspect. An architect with odd, scattered tastes had evidently designed it; it was a jumbled mixture of Italianate and Colonial Revival, with Gothic windows, exposed trusses, and a great deal of ornate scrollwork. The Egans probably considered it unique. To Sabina’s eye, it was something of a monstrosity.