EQMM, December 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

"No. Another matter entirely."

  "The lad's a weak stick, but he's done competent work since poor Ackermann's accident."

  "That he has,” Quincannon said. “Though not in the brewer's art."

  He left Drew looking puzzled and followed a sinuous maze of piping to the fermenting room, a cavernous space filled with gas-fired cookers and cedar-wood fermenting tanks some nine feet in height and circumference. Two of the cookers contained bubbling wort—an oatmeal-like mixture of water, mashed barley, and soluble starch turned into fermentable sugar during the mashing process. After the wort was hopped and brewed, it would be filtered and fermented to produce “steam beer"—a term that had nothing to do with the use of actual steam. The lager was made with bottom-fermenting yeast at 60—70 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than the much lower temperatures necessary for true lager fermentation, because the city's winters were never cold enough to reach the freezing point. Additional keg fermentation resulted in a blast of foam and the loud hiss of escaping carbon dioxide when the kegs were tapped, a sound not unlike the release of a steam boiler's relief valve.

  The heady aroma was strongest here. Once again Quincannon's nostrils began to quiver, his mouth and throat to feel like the inside of a corroded drainpipe. He wished, ruefully, that a man could be fitted with a relief valve as easily as a boiler, to ease pressure buildup inside his head.

  On the catwalk above the cookers, Caleb Lansing stood supervising the adding of dried hops to the cooking wort. Workmen with long-handled wooden paddles stirred the mixture, while others skimmed off the dark, lumpy scum called krausen, a mixture of hop resin, yeast, and impurities that rose to the surface. The slab floor, supported by heavy steel girders, was slick with globs of foam that a hose man sluiced at intervals into the drains.

  Quincannon hastened to climb the stairs. From the catwalk, the cooking wort and interiors of the fermenting vats were visible. An unappetizing view, to be sure. The vat in which Ackermann had died had been cleaned and was no longer in use, but Quincannon's imagination was sufficient to conjure up the scene that had confronted the workmen the morning after.

  Lansing was a rumpled, obsequious sort in his middle years, given to smoking odiferous long-nines; cigar ash littered his loose-hanging vest and shirtfront. He had just finished consulting a turnip watch when he spied Quincannon. Sudden anxious tension pulled his vulpine features out of shape. The look of a guilty man, by grab; Quincannon had seen it often enough to know it well.

  Lansing swung away from the low railing, came forward as he approached, and sought to push past him. Quincannon blocked his way. “I'll have a word with you, Lansing."

  "Not now you won't. Can't you see I'm busy?"

  "My business with you won't wait."

  "What business?"

  "Otto Ackermann. Xavier Jameson. And the West Star Brewing Company."

  Fright shone in the assistant brewmaster's narrow face. “I don't know what you're talking about."

  "The game's up, Lansing. I know the whole lay."

  Lansing said, “Damned fly cop!” under his breath and shoved past him. He would have run then if Quincannon hadn't grabbed the trailing flap of his vest and yanked him around.

  "No trouble now, or you'll—"

  The blasted scoundrel was quick as a cat, not with his hands but with his feet. The toe of his heavy work shoe thudded painfully into Quincannon's shin, sent him staggering backward against the railing. Lansing fled to the stairs, clattered down them as Quincannon, growling an oath, regained his balance and hobbled in pursuit.

  "Stop him!” he shouted at the workers below. “Stop that man!"

  "No, no, don't let him catch me!” Lansing cried in return. “He's an assassin, he's trying to kill me!"

  The workers stood in clustered confusion, looking from one to the other of the running men. Lansing threaded through them, vaulted an intestinal coiling of pipes, and disappeared behind one of the vats. Quincannon might have snagged him before he escaped from the fermenting room if a moustached workman hadn't stepped into his path, saying, “Here, what's the idea of—” Quincannon bowled him over, but in doing so his foot slipped on the wet floor and he went skidding headfirst into a snakelike tangle of hose. By the time he disengaged himself and regained his feet, fought off clutching hands, and went ahead in a limping rush, Lansing was nowhere to be seen.

  There was only one way out of this section of the brewery. Still hobbling, Quincannon went through the boiler room, past the corner room where the vats of rejected beer stood in heavy shadow, then past the freight elevator and down the stairs to the lower floor. An electrically lit passage led into the main tunnel that divided the building in half. He hurried along the tunnel, out onto the Seventh Street loading dock. There was no sign of Lansing anywhere in the vicinity. Half a dozen burly workmen were wrestling filled kegs onto a pair of massive Studebaker wagons; Quincannon called to them. No, they hadn't seen Lansing come out.

  So his quarry was still in the building. But for how long?

  Quincannon's leg still smarted, but he could move more or less normally again; he ran back inside. Perpendicular to the tunnel was another wide corridor that led in one direction to the shipping offices and the main entrance, in the other to the cellars. There was no exit from the cellars; he hastened the other way. But then he encountered a clerk on his way to the dock with a handful of bills of lading, who told him that Lansing hadn't gone that way, either. The clerk had been conversing with another man in the passage for the past five minutes and would have seen him if he had.

  Now Quincannon was nonplussed. He retraced his path along the side corridor to the brick-walled one that led downward to the cellars. A workman pushing a hand truck laden with fifty-pound sacks of barley was just coming up. Mr. Lansing? Yes, sir, just a few moments ago. Heading into the storerooms.

  "The storerooms? Are you certain, man?"

  "Aye. In a great hurry he was."

  Why the devil would Lansing go there? To hide? Fool's game, if that was his intention. The storerooms, where all the ingredients that went into the mass production of beer were kept, were a collective dead end. So were the cellar rooms that housed filled kegs and the enormous cedar vats where “green” beer was ripened and finished beer was held before being piped to the company's bottling plant in a separate building next-door.

  Quincannon was not wearing his Navy Colt; James Carreaux had an aversion to firearms and would not permit them in his brewery under any circumstances. As he made his way down the passage, he berated himself for not defying Carreaux's edict. Unarmed, he would have to proceed with considerably more caution. Men who blundered into uncertain situations were ripe for the suffering of consequences. This was doubly true of detectives.

  The temperature dropped noticeably as he descended. When he reached the artery that led into the storerooms, the air was frosty enough to require the buttoning of his coat. He passed through a large room stacked on two sides with empty kegs. At its far end, a solid oak door barred the way into the remaining storerooms.

  The door, Quincannon had been told, had been installed as a deterrent to both rodents and human pilferage. Years before, a former brewery employee had returned at night and helped himself to a wagonload of sugar and barley, and Carreaux would brook no repeat of that business. The door was kept open during the day but locked at end of shift. Only a handful of men in supervisory positions had keys.

  It should not have been closed now. Nor should it have been locked, which it was. Quincannon muttered an imprecation. Lansing must have done the locking; he had access to a key. But why? What could he be up to in the storerooms?

  Quincannon listened at the door. No sounds came to him through the heavy wood. He bent at the waist to peer through the keyhole. All he could make out was an empty section of concrete floor, lighted but shadow-ridden. He straightened again, scowling, tugging at his beard. The loading-dock foreman, Jack Malloy, would have a key; find him, then, and waste no time in doing it.

  Just as he turned aw
ay, the muffled bark of a pistol came from somewhere inside the storerooms.

  Hell and damn! Quincannon swung back to the door, coming up hard against it, rattling it in its frame. Reflex made him tug futilely at the handle. There was no second report, but when he pressed an ear to the wood he heard several faint sounds.

  Movement, but what sort he couldn't tell. The silence that followed crackled with tension.

  He pushed away again and ran back along the passage until he came on a workman just emerging from the cellars. He sent the man after the loading-dock foreman, then took himself back to the door. He tested the latch to make sure it was still locked, even though there was no way anyone could have come out and gotten past him.

  Malloy arrived on the run, two other men trailing behind him. “What's the trouble here?” he demanded.

  "Someone fired a pistol behind that locked door,” Quincannon told him, “not five minutes ago."

  "A pistol?” Malloy said, astonished. “In the storerooms?"

  "There's no mistake."

  "But ... Mr. Carreaux has strict orders against firearms on the premises...."

  Quincannon made an impatient growling noise. “Button your lip, lad, and unlock the blasted door."

  The foreman was used to the voice of authority; quickly he produced his ring of keys. The door opened inward and Quincannon crowded through first. Two large, chilly rooms opened off the passage, one filled with sacks of barley, the other with boxes of yeast and fifty-pound sacks of malt, hops, and sugar stacked on end. Both enclosures were empty. The sacks and boxes were so tightly packed together that no one could have hidden behind or among them without being seen at a glance.

  At the far end of the passage stood another closed door. “What's beyond there?” he asked the foreman.

  "Utility room. Well-pump and equipment storage."

  Quincannon tried the door. It refused his hand on the latch. “You have a key, Malloy?"

  "The lock's the same as on the storeroom door."

  "Then open it, man, open it."

  Malloy obeyed. The heavy, dank smells of mold and earth, and the acrid scent of gunpowder, tickled Quincannon's nostrils as the door creaked inward. Only one electric bulb burned here. Gloom lay thick beyond the threshold, enfolding the shapes of well-pump, coiled hoses, hand trucks, and other equipment. Quincannon found a lucifer in his pocket, scraped it alight on the rough brick wall.

  "Lord save us!” Malloy said.

  Caleb Lansing lay sprawled on the dirt floor in front of the well-pump. Blood glistened blackly on his shirtfront. Beside one outflung hand was an old LeMat revolver, the type that used pinfire cartridges. Quincannon knelt to press fingers against the artery in Lansing's neck. Not even the flicker of a pulse.

  "What are you men doing here? What's going on?"

  The new voice belonged to Adam Corby, the pint-sized bookkeeper. He pushed his way forward, sucked in his breath audibly when he saw what lay at his feet.

  "Mr. Lansing's shot himself,” Malloy said.

  "Shot himself? Here?"

  "Crazy place for it, by all that's holy."

  "Suicide,” Corby said in awed tones. “Lansing, of all people."

  Quincannon paid no attention to them. While they were gabbling, he finished his examination of the dead man and picked up the LeMat revolver, slipped it into his coat pocket.

  Suicide?

  Bah!

  Murder, plain enough.

  "Murder?” James Carreaux said in disbelief. “How can Lansing's death possibly be murder? He died alone behind not one but two locked doors!"

  "No, sir,” Quincannon said. “Not alone and not by his own hand."

  "I don't understand how you can make such a claim."

  "He had no weapon when I braced him in the fermenting room—I would have noticed a pistol the size and shape of a LeMat. If he had been armed, he'd've drawn down on me instead of running like a scared rabbit."

  "He could have smuggled it in earlier and stashed it somewhere, couldn't he?"

  "Plan to take his own life when he had enough money to flee the city? And do it here in the brewery, in a blasted utility room? No, Mr. Carreaux, Caleb Lansing was murdered.” Quincannon paused to light his stubby briar. “Three facts prove it beyond a doubt."

  "What facts?"

  "The location of the fatal wound, for one. Lansing was shot on the left side of the chest, just above the rib cage—a decidedly awkward angle for a man to hold a handgun for a self-inflicted wound. Most gunshot suicides choose the head as their target, for the obvious reason."

  "I'll grant you that,” Carreaux said reluctantly.

  "Second fact: There were no powder burns on Lansing's shirt or vest. He was shot from a distance of at least eighteen inches, a physical impossibility if his were the finger on the trigger."

  "And the third fact?"

  "His key to the two doors. It wasn't on his person or anywhere in the utility room. He couldn't have locked that door without it, now could he?"

  The brewery owner sighed and swiveled his creaking chair for a long stare out the window behind his desk. Fog lay over China Basin and the bay beyond; tall ships’ masts were visible through its drift, like the fingers of skeletal apparitions. Quincannon, puffing furiously, created an equivalently thick tobacco fog in the office. The good rich aroma of navy plug helped mask some of the Golden Gate's insidious pungency.

  At length Carreaux swiveled back to face him. He was a large man of fifty-odd years, florid, with sideburns that resembled woolly tufts of cotton, and morose gray eyes. Not a happy gent, Quincannon judged, even at the best of times. He said obliquely, “Now you know why I have such an aversion to firearms."

  Quincannon made no comment.

  "Well, then. You've convinced me—murder has been done in my house. Who the devil is responsible?"

  "Lansing's accomplice, of course."

  "Accomplice?"

  "In the theft of Otto Ackermann's formula for steam beer."

  "For the finest steam beer on the West Coast,” Carreaux amended grimly. “Golden Gate's exclusive formula, until now. I don't suppose there is any chance that Lansing, or this alleged accomplice of his, has yet to turn it over to West Star?"

  "None, I'm afraid,” Quincannon said. “The charred note and the two thousand dollars in Lansing's flat testify to a consummated deal."

  Carreaux sighed again. “I'll try to get an injunction against West Star. But that may not stop them from implementing Ackermann's formula, even with their duplicitous brewmaster in jail."

  "You still have the copy of the formula that Ackermann gave you?"

  "Yes, in a safe place, but that was years ago. It's possible he made refinements since then. Even if he didn't ... the competition, man, the competition."

  Quincannon understood; he'd been well schooled in the subject. A master brewer's formula, the proportions in which he mixes his ingredients, the manner in which he treats them in the processing, is the lifeblood of a successful brewery. Golden Gate's reputation as San Francisco's best producer of steam beer would suffer, and lead to reduced sales, if West Star were to begin brewing lager of comparable quality.

  "Tell me this, Quincannon. Why would Lansing need an accomplice to steal the formula, when he had access to it himself as Ackermann's assistant?"

  "The accomplice was likely the brains of the pair. His idea and plan, mayhap. He may even have had a hold of some sort on Lansing to force him into the crime."

  "You suspected there were two of them all along, then?"

  "Of course,” Quincannon lied. He should have suspected it, given Lansing's weak-stick nature. When viewed in the proper light, the man was a poor candidate for the solo planning and execution of such a crime. Ackermann had been a burly gent; it could not have been an easy task to cosh him and then pitch him into that vat of fermenting lager. Well, even the best detectives suffered a blind spot now and then. Not that he would ever admit it to a client, or to Sabina or anyone else.

  "The motive for
Lansing's murder?” Carreaux asked. “And why in such a location?"

  "My suspicion is that the two arranged to meet secretly in the utility room this morning, likely not for the first time. Lansing was consulting his watch when I found him in the fermenting room, which suggests that the time of a meeting was near at hand. When he escaped from me, he fled to the storerooms to keep the rendezvous and to tell his partner that the game was up. Lansing was the sort who would spill everything in an instant, once he was caught, and the accomplice knew it. Either he felt he had no choice but to dispose of him then and there before his name was revealed, or the killing was premeditated; the latter would explain why he was armed."

  "Do you have any idea of his identity?"

  "Not as yet."

  "Or how he could have committed murder behind two locked doors and escaped unseen with you and others guarding the only exit route?"

  "Not as yet. But I'll find out, never fear."

  "You'd better, Quincannon,” Carreaux said. “You advertise yourself as San Francisco's premier detective. Well, then, prove it as a fact and not mere braggadocio—and prove it quickly. For the sake of your reputation and mine!"

  * * * *

  The door to the storerooms had been locked again after the removal of Caleb Lansing's body, at Quincannon's urging and Carreaux's order. And all the keys had been rounded up and accounted for. Quincannon took one of the keys with him when he left Carreaux's office. He appropriated a bug-eye lantern from the shipping offices to supplement the weak electric light, and then let himself into the storerooms and locked the door again behind him.

  He re-searched the utility room first, in the interest of thoroughness. It contained nothing that he might have overlooked the first time. He went next to the room housing the sacked barley. The dusty smells of grain and burlap were thick enough to clog his sinuses and produce several explosive sneezes as he shined the bug-eye over the piled sacks. They were stacked close together, at a height of some five feet and flush against the back and side walls. Nothing larger than a kitten could have hidden itself behind or among any of them.

  He crossed into the other large room. The boxes of yeast and heavy sacks of malt, sugar, and hops stood in long, tightly packed rows along the side walls. No one could have hidden behind or among them, either. The floor at the far end wall was bare; a pile of empty hop sacks and a pair of hand trucks lay against the near end wall. Everything was as it had been when he'd looked in earlier.