I found him a little after sunset, in a dim, weather-beaten saloon next to the railroad depot. He was sitting at the far end of the bar, staring straight ahead, with an empty whiskey glass in front of him. He gave a start when I put my hand on his shoulder and turned to me with a look of haggard despair. I told him Mr. Holmes was waiting for him at his boardinghouse, and he sighed and rose a little unsteadily to his feet.
Leiden was about my height, not a bad-looking man, but a little soft and beginning to run to fat. His hair, dark brown and lank, had been combed back and parted in the center but was now falling forward onto his forehead; he pushed it back now and again with an almost unconscious gesture. He had a thick, dark mustache, but no beard; his face was sallow, with heavy-lidded black eyes, a sensual mouth, and the beginnings of a double chin. On the walk back to the boardinghouse, he swayed and occasionally stumbled against me with a mumbled apology. When we came through the door, he looked at Holmes and, with a groan and a heavy shake of his head, fetched his key and led us upstairs to his room.
Leiden offered us the only two chairs and sat slumped on the bed, with his head bent over his knees. “Oh, God, I’m in trouble,” he said to no one in particular.
“Why is that?” Holmes asked, the even tone of his voice conveying no accusation.
Leiden looked up at us despairingly. “You know—that’s why you’re here. I’m the one who told about the mine payroll. I’m going to lose my job over it, maybe go to jail.”
“Why did you do it?” Holmes asked.
Leiden looked at him, alarmed. “Look, I didn’t have anything to do with the robberies,” he said. “I talked to a damned whore, that was all. It was pure stupidity, I was drunk and running my mouth. She must have had a beau. I can’t believe she’d do this to me.” He slumped forward, shook his head, and gave a long, tremulous sigh.
“Whom did you tell?” Holmes asked.
Leiden looked darkly across the room at nothing in particular for a second or two, then back at Holmes. “Her name is Russian Annie—Antonia. She’s one of the girls at Mrs. Bannerman’s house in St. Helena.” He lumbered to his feet and made his way to a small desk, where he took something from a drawer. Handing it to Holmes, he slumped down again on the bed. “That’s her picture.”
It was a pasteboard photograph of a pretty young woman with long, languid eyes. She was looking over her shoulder in a coquettish pose and wearing a dress that showed a bit more of white shoulder and trim little ankle than propriety might allow.
“When was the last time you saw her?’ Holmes asked.
“Last Saturday night.”
“Do you see her often?”
“Couple of times a month—about as much as I can afford to. I kind of liked her, and I thought she felt a little something for me. Am I in trouble with the law over this?”
“Not if you’re telling the truth,” Holmes said. “And I suppose we’ll know that when we talk to her.”
“I’m in a hell of a mess, whatever happens,” Leiden said bitterly. “Damn fool girl. I hope you find the son of a bitch that did it.” He slumped forward again, muttering curses to his shoes.
Leaving Leiden to the examination of his conscience, we found rooms at Cheeseborough’s Hotel. Before retiring, Holmes asked me if I was free to ride with him to St. Helena. I was too caught up in the chase to turn him down, so the next morning, I left a note to be sent to Fanny by the Lakeport stage, to let her know I had survived the night and would be spending the day in the valley.
In St. Helena, we found Mrs. Bannerman’s house by asking the barman at the first saloon we saw in town. “I’m afraid you gentlemen will be disappointed,” he said. “Mrs. Bannerman’s ain’t open for business this early in the day.” We declined his kind offer to direct us to a lady whose hours might better suit ours, and he wished us good hunting. “You just come back here if she don’t give you what you want.”
Mrs. Bannerman’s was a respectable-looking gabled house on a lane just outside the town. A dark-skinned maid answered the door and led us into a parlor adorned with red velvet drapes, a thick flowered carpet, and a piano whose dark wood was polished to a high shine.
I’d expected that the lady we had come to see would be middle-aged, but Mrs. Bannerman didn’t look much past thirty. Her chestnut hair was elaborately dressed, and she wore a yellow silk dress whose tight contours showed a fine figure, but her face was powdered and rouged, and behind her graceful manner and pleasant smile her gray eyes were watchful and calculating. As she held out a kid-gloved hand and said, “How may I help you gentlemen?” her eyes were sizing up what we might want and what she could get out of us. Fanny would have called her “a tough customer.”
Holmes did the talking, and I tried to do my part by looking grave and nodding at appropriate points. He suggested, without actually saying, that we were bank detectives looking for Miss Antonia to ask her some questions about one of her gentleman callers. When Mrs. Bannerman asked what it was about, he hemmed and hawed unctuously about the need for discretion and the protection of the confidences of bank customers. “Surely, Mrs. Bannerman, as a woman of business, you know how it is to be entrusted with, ah, sensitive information about one’s clients,” he intoned.
Mrs. Bannerman graciously smiled and said she was willing to help if she could. “We keep a nice establishment here, and I wouldn’t want trouble. I’m afraid I can’t introduce you to Annie, though. She left two days ago, all of a sudden. She said she was going to San Francisco. She and another girl who used to work here, Josette.”
“Did she tell you where she would be staying?” Holmes asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Mrs. Bannerman answered.
“Do you know why she was going there?”
“She didn’t say, but my guess would be to find a doctor for Josette.”
“So her friend is ill?”
“Yes.”
“She just left without giving any notice? That must be difficult for you,” Holmes said sympathetically.
“Oh, you have no idea,” Mrs. Bannerman sighed. “This whole business has been a trial. Annie can’t think of anything but Jo. She was too distracted; the men notice. She kept talking about getting Jo to some sanitarium Dr. Jenkins—he’s the doctor I send my girls to—told her about up in Colorado. She was saving money for it; she asked me once to lend her the rest, but I said no. I’m not a rich woman, and these girls are so flighty—who knows if I’d ever get it back?” She unfurled a lacy fan, fluttered it a few times, and gave Holmes a look that assumed that of course he would understand. Then her expression changed, as if she’d thought of something, and she asked Holmes, “Do you think they ran off with the man you’re looking for?”
“We don’t know at this point,” Holmes said. “Did she have a—uh—gentleman friend?”
“A fancy man, do you mean? No, not Annie. She never stepped out with anyone, so far as I know.”
“Do you know how they were traveling?” Holmes asked.
“These days, everybody takes the train. But I hear Jo is at death’s door, and if that’s so, I don’t know how they’re even going to get to San Francisco.”
We asked what Jo’s illness was, and Mrs. Bannerman said, “Consumption.” She formed her face into an expression of sympathy. “Poor girl.”
“Indeed,” Holmes said with the proper touch of gravity. “A pity.” He paused for a second of appropriate silence, and then returned, as if reluctantly, to the business at hand. “Can you tell us what they look like?”
“Well,” Mrs. Bannerman answered, “Annie is a bit taller than I am, and I’m five feet five inches. She has auburn hair, thick and straight, fair skin, gray eyes, a bit of a foreign accent—some of the men call her Russian Annie. Jo’s a Creole from New Orleans, dainty as a little doll, with wavy brown hair and big, dark eyes. Before she got so sick, she was so pretty, the men just loved her.”
“What are their full names?” Holmes asked.
Mrs. Bannerman gave an artificial laugh and looked
at us under her eyelashes. “I can tell you what they told me, but, you know, these girls almost never tell the truth about their pasts. Oh, my—let’s see—Annie goes by the name Antonia Greenwood. She told me once what her real name was—something foreign, I don’t remember what. Jo called herself Josette Duverger.”
“Do you know anything else about them?”
“Not really. They showed up here, together, oh, six months ago—Annie said they’d been working in a house in Sacramento, but came up here for Jo’s health.”
“You said Miss Duverger wasn’t working here?” Holmes asked. “Where was she staying?”
She gave him another sly look. “You gentlemen seem real interested in them. How big a deal is this? Is there a reward?”
Holmes ignored her question and asked if she’d mind if we took a look around Annie’s room. Mrs. Bannerman, obviously hoping to catch a crumb or two of information, offered to show us upstairs herself and led us up a stairway with carpeted treads and polished banisters.
A maid was in the room, cleaning it. The window was open, and the sun shining through white curtains gave the place a poignant air of innocence. In the wardrobe hung a wrapper of silk and lace and a couple of evening dresses. Some satin slippers had been left on the floor beneath them. Little else remained of the girl who had worn them, except a box of dusting powder and a worn hairbrush on the dressing table. Holmes picked up the hairbrush and examined it and looked into the drawers of the table and dresser. Mrs. Bannerman followed after him, peering over his shoulder. When he had finished, he turned to her and thanked her with a positively courtly bow. “If you should hear from Miss Greenwood, or learn anything about where she might be, please, by all means, send word to Mr. Ingram at the Bank of Calistoga.”
As we walked downstairs, Mrs. Bannerman gave Holmes directions to the boarding house where Jo lived and to Dr. Jenkins’s office. She showed us to the door herself, and as we left, said again that she would certainly help if she could. “I really don’t want trouble here. I just hope they’re all right,” she said sweetly, looking deeply into Holmes’s eyes. “You will tell me, won’t you?”
“But of course,” Holmes said, with a bow.
Dr. Jenkins’s office was on the way to the boardinghouse. He was seeing a patient in his surgery, but when he finished, he showed us into his study and offered us a glass of sherry. He was a spare, graying man, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a weary air of having seen enough sickness and death to have despaired of finding any divine plan in it. When I mentioned Miss Duverger, he shook his head. “A hopeless case,” he said. “There’s nothing left to do for her.”
Holmes told him what Mrs. Bannerman had said. “Oh, God,” he sighed, and closed his eyes. “That Annie. I tried again and again to tell her, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept that it was the end. I’ve seen mothers like that with children; they just can’t stop fighting.”
He remembered mentioning a sanitarium in the Colorado mountains. “Run by an old friend of mine, Harvey McKinnon, so I know the place is on the up and up. No one but quacks promise anything with this disease, but mountain air seems to help in some cases. Not Josette, she’s too far gone. But Annie wouldn’t listen; she had to have some hope, even a false one. So I gave her the name. Not that she could afford it; a woman in the life doesn’t make that kind of money. So I told her about a specialist I know in San Francisco, Silbermann. That was awhile ago, though. At this point, Jo probably couldn’t make the trip.”
He was surprised and saddened when Holmes told him the two women had left St. Helena. “Honestly, she was too sick to travel; I saw her just the other day. It would have been kinder to let her die in her own bed.”
After thanking the doctor, we rode to the boarding house, where the landlady, a gray sparrow of a woman, told us, with much fluttering, that Miss Duverger and her friend had left that morning. “She was too weak to walk; the porter had to carry her to the carriage.” She was puzzled when Holmes said we were trying to find the women and asked to look in Miss Duverger’s room. “I haven’t cleaned it yet,” she apologized.
“Better yet,” Holmes said.
The room was small and plain. Nothing of Miss Duverger’s was left in it except a couple of dog-eared novels, a jar of flowers and an empty medicine bottle on a table next to the bed. Holmes looked through the room and from under the bed pulled a small pasteboard trunk. In it, wrapped in an army blanket, were a pair of men’s pants, a blue shirt, a hat, and a blue bandana. “She must have forgotten that,” the landlady said. “But I can’t imagine why she’d have those clothes. No man ever came to see her except Dr. Jenkins.”
Holmes closed the trunk and asked her to keep it until he could send a man from the sheriff’s office for it. Her eyes widened in alarm. “The sheriff? What have they done? They seemed like such quiet girls.” Shaking her head, she said, “I should have listened to my sister. She told me not to let to women like that.”
As we walked from the house to the street, I asked Holmes whether those were the clothes the robber had worn. He nodded.
“So she did give someone the information about the payroll. Is he still here, do you think, or is he meeting them in San Francisco?”
“Neither, I suspect,” Holmes said, but when I asked him to explain what he meant, he shook his head. “I don’t know enough yet.”
I wasn’t surprised when Holmes told me he intended to start for San Francisco on the next day’s train. “I would go sooner, if it were possible. The trail is already getting cold,” he said. “If Miss Duverger dies, it will be that much harder to find Miss Greenwood; she’ll be free to move almost anywhere and far less conspicuous without her invalid companion.”
I gave him the address where we’d be staying in San Francisco, and of my parents’ home in Edinburgh. “Please,” I asked him, “let me know whether you find the robber. I feel like a reader forced to lay down a book just as the story becomes exciting.”
But the days that followed were so filled with breaking up our camp, moving our possessions to San Francisco, and setting up our temporary household there that I thought of the stagecoach robbery only in passing, to wonder idly whether I would ever learn the end of the tale.
We had been in San Francisco only a day or two when Sam answered a knock on the door, and I heard a familiar voice ask for me. Fanny was in the kitchen, but the damp air had played havoc with my lungs, and I was coughing the afternoon away before the fire in the sitting room. Sam, all excitement, brought Holmes into the room. When Holmes saw me, he stopped and apologized. “Mr. Stevenson—you’re ill, I see. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you.”
I stood up to greet him. “I’m not all that sick,” I said with more valor than I felt. “It’s good to see you again. Come, sit down.”
“Not now, I’m afraid,” he said, “I’ve come on urgent business.”
“Really!” I replied, welcoming a distraction from my personal ills. “What is it?”
He looked around. “Is Mrs. Stevenson here?”
A little surprised, I answered, “Yes, she’s—” A movement caught my eye and, looking toward it, I saw Fanny in the doorway, smoothing her apron. “Fanny,” I called to her, “it’s Mr. Holmes.”
Fanny hurried in. “Mr. Holmes, how good to see you,” she said warmly, and turned to me with a stern look. “Louis, you should be resting.”
“I know—it’s you Mr. Holmes has come to see,” I told her.
A little flustered, Fanny turned back to Holmes, who seemed unsure how to begin. “It’s about the stagecoach robbery,” he said.
We both stared at him, Fanny as curious as I was to find out where she fit into the case.
“We’ve tracked down the robber, and we’re at the point of making an arrest.”
“Really! That’s good news,” I said. “How did you find him?”
“I’ll tell you. But at the moment, the situation is rather difficult. You remember that one of the women was gravely ill.”
“Yes—Miss Duverge
r.”
“You have a good memory. She is still alive, though at death’s door, from what I understand. But we are about to arrest her companion, Miss Greenwood.”
Fanny’s eyes widened, and her hand went to her lips. I started to speak, to ask further about the robber, but Holmes continued before I could get a word out.
“Miss Greenwood is quite desperate on her friend’s account. I think it will go more easily if we have someone with us—a woman—who can care for Miss Duverger.” He turned to Fanny. “I remembered that Mr. Stevenson praised your skill as a nurse, though I fear there will be little even you can do for her. The purpose of having you there is to reassure Miss Greenwood that her friend will be cared for in her last hours. It’s a lot to ask, but do you think you could help?”
Fanny didn’t hesitate. “Why not? Where is she?”
“Wait,” I said, with an upwelling of husbandly protectiveness. “Is my wife going to be in danger?”
Holmes didn’t hesitate. “No. There are only the two women.”
“So where is the robber?”
“Quite safe.”
“You’ve arrested him, then?”
“Not yet, but we will shortly.”
I didn’t feel much mollified, but Fanny had already left to gather her things. I pulled my jacket and hat off the coat rack and put them on. In a moment, Fanny was back, in shawl and bonnet, and carrying a small satchel. She looked at me in alarm and frank disapproval, and I answered her before she could speak. “I’m not letting you go there by yourself.”
Had we been alone, she would have quite overpowered me, but with Mr. Holmes present she felt constrained from quarreling. “Louis, you’re crazy,” she sighed, with a dark look and a shake of her head. She turned to Holmes. “I’m ready,” she said.
A four-wheeler was waiting outside for us, and Holmes directed it to an address I didn’t recognize. On the journey there, he was his usual uncommunicative self. His silence was catching, and Fanny and I said hardly a word, though I kept her little hand wrapped tightly in mine. As the cab climbed hills and turned down one street after another, I lost track of its route, and when it finally stopped we were in a part of the city unknown to me, on a block of tall, funereal houses set close together like black cypress trees in a windbreak. The hills and the sea fog cut off any long view, and the street and houses seemed confined in a small space, like a stone castle in a fishbowl.
Sherlock Holmes: The American Years Page 29
