Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years

by Michael Kurland

  “There is a loose button and loose thread on your vest, and your shirt collar is slightly frayed—telltale indications of our shared state of bachelorhood. When I stood close behind you in the garden, I detected the scent of your tobacco; and once in here, I noted a small spot of ash on the sleeve of your coat which confirmed the mixture and the fact that it was smoked in a well-aged briar. It happens, you see, that I once wrote a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different types of cigar, pipe, and cigarette tobacco ash and am considered an authority on the subject. Your beard has been recently and neatly trimmed, as has your hair, which retains a faint scent of bay rum—hence your visit to the tonsorial parlor. Under the nail of your left thumb is dust from the type of chalk commonly used on the tips of pool cues, and while billiards is often played in America, straight pool has a larger following and strikes me as more to your taste. On the handkerchief you used a moment ago to mop your forehead is a small, fresh stain the color and texture of which identifies it to the trained eye as having come from a dish of chicken croquettes. Another scent that clings faintly to your coat is that of Syringa persica, or Persian lilac, indicating that you have recently spent time in close proximity to such a flowering shrub; and inasmuch as there are no lilac bushes in Dr. Axminster’s garden, Mr. Truesdale’s property is the obvious deduction. I perceive that you are well-read from the slim volume of poetry tucked into the pocket of your frock coat, and that you are both sensitive and sentimental from the identity of the volume’s author. Emily Dickinson’s poems, I am given to understand, are famous for those very qualities.”

  There was a moment of silence. Quincannon, for once in his life, was at a loss for words.

  Axminister clapped his hands and exclaimed delightedly, “Amazing!”

  “Elementary,” Holmes said.

  Penelope Costain yawned. “Mr. Holmes has been regaling us with his powers of observation and deduction all evening. Frankly, I found his prowess with the violin of greater amusement.”

  Her husband was likewise unimpressed. He had refilled his glass from a sideboard nearby and now emptied it again in a swallow; his face was flushed, his eyes slightly glazed. “Mental gymnastics are all well and good,” he said with some asperity, “but we’ve strayed well away from the issue here. Which is that my name, Penelope’s and mine, are on Quincannon’s list of potential robbery victims.”

  “I wouldn’t be concerned, Andrew,” Axminster said. “After tonight’s escapade, that fellow wouldn’t dare attempt another burglary.”

  Quincannon said, “True enough. Particularly if he suspects that I know his identity.”

  “You recognized him?”

  “After a fashion.”

  “Then why don’t you go find him and have him arrested?” Costain demanded.

  “All in good time. I guarantee he won’t do any more breaking and entering this night.”

  Mrs. Costain asked, “Did you also guarantee catching him red-handed at the Truesdales’ home?”

  Quincannon had had enough of this company; much more of it and he might well say something even he would regret. He made a small show of consulting his stemwinder. “If you’ll all excuse me,” he said then, “I’ll be on my way.”

  “To request police assistance?”

  “To determine the extent of the Truesdales’ loss.”

  Dr. Axminster showed him to the front door. The Costains remained in the parlor, but Sherlock Holmes tagged along. At the front door the Englishman said, “I must say, Quincannon, I regret my intervention in the garden, well-intentioned though it was, but I must say I found the interlude stimulating. It isn’t often I have the pleasure of meeting a distinguished colleague while a game’s afoot.”

  Quincannon reluctantly accepted the Englishman’s proffered hand, clasped the doctor’s just as briefly, and took his leave. Nurturing as he went the dark thought of a game involving his foot that he’d admire to play with Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  3

  Sabina was already at her desk when Quincannon arrived at the Market Street offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, the following morning. Poring over their financial ledger and bank records—a task he gladly left to her, since he had no head for figures. Other than hers, that was.

  She was not a beautiful woman, but at thirty-one she possessed a healthy and mature comeliness that melted his hard Scot’s heart. There was strength in her high-cheekboned face, intelligence in eyes the color of dark blue velvet. Her seal black hair, layered high and fastened with a jeweled comb, glistened with bluish highlights in the pale sunlight slanting in through the windows at her back. And her figure … ah, her figure. Fine, slim, delicately rounded and curved in a lacy white shirtwaist and a Balmoral skirt. Many men found her attractive, to be sure, and as a young widow, fair game. If any had been allowed inside her Russian Hill flat, he wasn’t aware of it; she was a strict guardian of her private life. He knew she was fond of him, yet she continually spurned his advances. This not only frustrated him but left him in a state of constant apprehension. The very thought that she might accept a proposal of either dalliance or marriage from anyone but John Quincannon was maddening.

  She had a sharp eye for his moods. The first thing she said was, “Well, John, from the look of you, all failed to go as planned at the Truesdale home.”

  “A fair assessment.” Quincannon shed his chesterfield and derby, hung them on the clothes tree, and retreated to his desk. His loaded his briar with shaved cable twist from his pouch, fired the tobacco with a lucifer. As he puffed, the skin along his brow furrowed. “Unique scent,” he muttered. “Monograph on 140 different types of tobacco ash. Faugh!”

  “What’s that you’re grumbling about?”

  “Gent I encountered last night, blast the luck. Damned infuriating Englishman. Not only did he cost me the burglar’s capture, he did his level best to make a fool of me with a bagful of parlor tricks.”

  Sabina raised an eyebrow. “How did that come about? Exactly what happened last night, John?”

  He told her in some detail, most of it accurate to a fault. When he was done, she said, “So this English fellow is a detective, too. His name is Holmes, you said?”

  “Sherlock Holmes.” Quincannon puffed furiously on his briar. “Sherlock! What kind of name is that?”

  “A most respected one, I do believe.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’ve heard mention of the exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” Sabina said. “He has a sterling reputation. A fascinating man, by all accounts.”

  “Not by mine. Fascinating isn’t the word I would use to describe him.”

  “Well, you didn’t make his acquaintance under the best of circumstances.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered where I made his acquaintance. If he were handing me a bagful of gold sovereigns, I would still find him an arrogant show-off.”

  “Arrogance is the trademark of a successful detective, you know.”

  “Yes? I’ve blessed little of it in me.”

  Sabina laughed. “Come now, John. You mean to say you weren’t even a little impressed by Holmes’s powers of observation and deduction? Or his record of successes in England and Europe?”

  “Not a bit’s worth,” Quincannon lied. “He may be a competent flycop in his own bailiwick, but his genius is suspect. A mentalist in a collar-and-elbow variety show at the Bella Union could perform the same tricks. World’s greatest detective? Bah!”

  “Poor John. You did have rather a difficult evening, didn’t you?”

  “Difficult, yes, but not wholly unproductive.”

  “You’re convinced Dodger Brown is the man we’re after?”

  “Reasonably. When he slipped loose and swung around to kick me—”

  “Kick you? I thought you said you slipped on the wet grass.”

  “Yes, yes,” Quincannon lied again, “but how he got away is of no consequence. The important fact is that he was of the right size and that he reeked of cheap wine. Dodger Brown’s wea
kness is ‘foot juice.’”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  He rummaged among the papers on his desk. “Where’s that dossier on the Dodger?”

  “Your left hand is resting on it.”

  So it was. He caught up the paper, scanned through it to refresh his memory. Dodger Brown, christened Hezekiah Gabriel Brown, had been born in Stockton twenty-nine years ago. Orphaned at an early age, ran away at thirteen, fell in with a bunch of rail-riding yeggs, and been immersed in criminal activity ever since, exclusively house burglary in recent years. Arrested numerous times and “put on the small book”—held as a suspicious character—by police in San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities. Served two terms in prison, the last at Folsom for stealing a pile of green-and-greasy from a miserly East Bay politician. Known traits: close-mouthed, willing to suffer all manner of abuse rather than give up spoils or acquaintances. Known confidants: none. Known habits: frequenter of Oriental parlor houses, cheap-jack gambling halls, and Barbary Coast wine dumps, in particular Jack Foyles’s on Kearney. Current whereabouts: unknown. Damn little information, but perhaps just enough.

  When he lowered the dossier, Sabina said, “If he recognized you last night, he may have already unplanted his loot and gone on the lammas.”

  “I don’t think so. It was too dark for him to see my face any more clearly than I saw his. For all he knows, I might have been Truesdale home early, or a neighbor who spotted him skulking. A greedy lad like the Dodger isn’t likely to cut and run when he’s flush and onto a string of profitable marks.”

  “After such a narrow escape, would he be bold enough to try burgling another home on the insurance company’s list?”

  “Possibly. He’s none too bright, foolish, and as arrogant in his fashion as that Holmes gent. It was a bughouse caper that landed him in Folsom prison two years ago. He’s not above another, I’ll wager.”

  “What will you do if you find him?”

  “There’s little profit in bracing him. I’ll locate the place he’s holed up, search his rooms for evidence or word of which fenceman he’s approached.”

  “You intend to avoid reporting to Jackson Pollard first, I trust?”

  Quincannon nodded grimly. Not only cash had been stolen from the Truesdale home but also a valuable necklace the banker’s wife had neglected to lock away in their safe. Last night’s urgings to the banker to wait before filing an insurance claim had fallen on deaf ears; Truesdale intended to do so immediately. Pollard would not take kindly to either the claim or word of Quincannon’s failure to apprehend the thief.

  “If Pollard should stop by here,” he said, “tell him Mr. Sherlock Holmes is responsible for the night’s fiasco, and I’m busy working to atone for his mistake.”

  “That’s hardly tactful, John.”

  “Tact be damned. A fact is a fact.”

  He was redonning his coat when a knock sounded on the entrance door and a frog-faced youth wearing a cap and baggy trousers entered. The cap sported a sewn decal proclaiming his employer to be Citywide Messenger Service. The youth confirmed it in a scratchy voice and stated that he had a message for Mr. John Quincannon, Esquire.

  “I’ll have it,” Quincannon accepted the envelope, signed for it, tore it open. The youth, looking hopeful, remained standing there. “Well? You’ve done your duty, lad. Off with you!” The command, accompanied by a fiercely menacing scowl and a step forward, sent the messenger scuttling hurriedly through the door.

  Sabina said, “You might have tipped him a nickel, John.”

  “I did him a good turn by not tipping him. He’d only have spent it on profligate pleasures.”

  He finished opening the envelope, removed a sheet of bond paper that bore the letterhead and signature of Andrew Costain, Attorney-at-Law. The curt message, written in a rather ornate hand, read:

  I should like to discuss a business matter with you. If you will call on me today at my offices, at your convenience, I am sure you will find it to your professional and financial advantage.

  He read the message aloud to Sabina. She said, “Regarding the burglaries, do you suppose?”

  “Likely. He’s the worrying type.”

  “You’ll call on him, then, of course.”

  Quincannon glanced again at the paper, at the mellifluous phrase financial advantage. “Of course,” he said.

  4

  Jack Foyles’s was a shade less disreputable than most wine dumps, if only because it was equipped with a small lunch counter where its habitués could supplement their liquid sustenance with stale bread and a bowl of stew made from discarded vegetables, meat trimmings, bones, and chunks of tallow. Otherwise, there was little to distinguish it from its brethren. Barrels of “foot juice” and “red ink” behind a long bar, rows of rickety tables in three separate rooms lined with men and a few women of all types, ages, and backgrounds, a large open-floored area to accommodate those who had drunk themselves into a stupor. Porters who were themselves winos served the cheap and deadly drink in vessels supplied by junkmen—beer glasses, steins, pewter mugs, cracked soup bowls, tin cans. There was much loud talk, but never any laughter. Foyles’s customers had long ago lost their capacity for mirth.

  No one paid Quincannon the slightest attention as he moved slowly through the crowded rooms. Slurred voices rolled surflike against his ears, identifying the speakers as lawyers, sailors, poets, draymen, road bums, scholars, factory workers, petty criminals. There were no class distinctions there, nor seldom any trouble; they were all united by failure, bitterness, disillusionment, old age, disease, and unquenchable thirst for the grape. If there was anything positive to be said of wine dumps, it was that they were havens of democracy. Most customers would be there every day, or as often as they could panhandle or steal enough money to pay for their allotment of slow death, but a few, not yet far gone, were less frequent visitors—binge drinkers and slummers who found the atmosphere and the company to their liking. Many of them were crooks of one stripe or another, Dodger Brown among them.

  But there was no sign of the Dodger. Quincannon questioned two of the porters; one knew him and reported that he hadn’t been to Foyles’s in more than a week. Did the porter know where Dodger Brown might be found? The porter did not.

  Quincannon left Foyles’s and made his way into the heart of the Barbary Coast. During the daylight hours, the “devil’s playground” seemed quiet, almost tame—a deceit if ever there was one. Less than a third as many predators and their prey prowled the ulcerous streets as could be found there after sundown; most gamblers, pickpockets, swindlers, shanghaiers, footpads, and roaming prostitutes were creatures of the night, and it was the dark hours when the preponderence of their prey succumbed to the gaudy lure of sin and wickedness. Some of the more notorious gambling dens and parlor houses were open for business, as were the scruffier cribs and deadfalls, but they were thinly populated at that early hour. And mostly absent was the nighttime babel of pianos, hurdy-gurdies, drunken laughter, the cries of shills and barkers, and the shouts and screams of victims. Quincannon was anything but a prude, having done his fair share of carousing during his drinking days, but the Coast had never attracted him. He preferred to satisfy his vices in private.

  Near Broadway there was a section of run-down hotels and lodging houses. He entered one of the latter and had words with the desk clerk, a runty chap named Galway—one of several of the Coast’s underclass who were willing to sell information for cash or favors. Galway admitted to having seen Dodger Brown “a time or two” in recent weeks, and thought he might be residing at Foghorn Annie’s, one of the seamen’s boardinghouses on the waterfront.

  Quincannon found a hack on Montgomery—he always rode in hansoms when a client was paying expenses—and was shortly delivered to the Embarcadero. The trip turned out to be wasted time. Scruffs were known to seek shelter among seafaring men now and then by pretending to be former sailors themselves or by paying extra for the protective coloration. Dodger Brown was known at Foghorn Annie’s, but no
t a current resident. Visits to two other houses in the area produced neither the Dodger nor a clue to his whereabouts.

  Hunger prodded Quincannon into a waterfront eatery, where he made short work of half a dozen oysters on the half shell and a bowl of fish stew. Another hack returned him to the Barbary Coast. He canvassed two other wine dumps, half a dozen gambling halls, and two parlor houses that specialized in “Asian specialities” without so much as a whisper of his quarry. The Dodger might have been a foolish dolt, but he was also sly enough to curtail his baser appetites and avoid his habitual haunts for the time being.

  Enough of roaming the Coast, Quincannon decided. The time had come to call on Ezra Bluefield again. He had already approached the man once that week, just two days ago, seeking information on the house burglaries and possible fencing of the loot, and Bluefield grew testy when he was asked for too many favors. But if there was one lad in the devil’s playground who could find out where Dodger Brown was holed up, it was Bluefield.

  Quincannon walked to Terrific Street, as Pacific Avenue was called, turned into an alley, and entered a scabrous building in mid-block. A sign in bloodred letters above the entrance proclaimed the establishment to be the Scarlet Lady Saloon. A smaller sign beneath it read: EZRA BLUEFIELD, PROP.

  At one time the Scarlet Lady had been an infamous crimping joint, where seamen were fed drinks laced with laudanum and chloral hydrate and then carted off by shanghaiers and sold to unscrupulous shipmasters in need of crews. The Sailor’s Union of the Pacific had ended the practice and forced the saloon’s closure, but only until Bluefield had promised to end his association with the shanghaiers and backed up the promise with generous bribes to city officials. The Scarlet Lady was now an “honest” deadfall in which percentage girls, bunco ploys, and rigged games of chance were used to separate seamen and other patrons from their money.

  As usual, Bluefield was in his office at the rear. He was an ex-miner who had had his fill of the rough-and-tumble life in various western goldfields and vowed to give up his own rowdy ways when he moved to San Francisco and opened the Scarlet Lady. He had taken no active part in the crimping activities, and was known to remain behind his locked office door when brawls broke out, as they often did; the team of bouncers he employed were charged with stifling trouble and keeping what passed for peace. It was his stated intention to one day own a better class of saloon in a better neighborhood, and as a result he cultivated the company and goodwill of respectable citizens. Quincannon was one of them, largely because he had once prevented a rival saloon owner from puncturing Bluefield’s hide with a bullet.