The Bags of Tricks Affair--A Carpenter and Quincannon Mystery

by Bill Pronzini

  How had Gaunt found it? He hadn’t been in San Francisco long enough to go scouting in unfamiliar territory. Or was it unfamiliar to him? Had he been here before in his travels? Unlikely, given the information the Pinkertons had provided on his past activities; Sacramento and Grass Valley must be the farthest west he’d ventured until this past week.

  He must know someone in San Francisco, then, someone who had told him of this derelict shop and supplied him with keys. Sabina couldn’t imagine who, but it didn’t really matter now. Any more than it mattered where Gaunt had gone after depositing her here, whether or not he was still somewhere in the city. Unless he came to check on her, make sure she hadn’t escaped. If he did, she thought with a fresh surge of fury, he would find a pipe-wielding hellcat waiting for him.

  But he wouldn’t. As far as he was concerned, this prison was escapeproof. And so far he was right.

  If there were any other buildings nearby, they were untenanted. She had yelled herself hoarse, beat on the walls and corrugated iron doors with the length of pipe and other implements. There was no sense in trying again today—it would be a hopeless waste of time, energy, breath. Gaunt would not have confined her within shouting, noise-making distance of anyone who might hear and come to her rescue.

  No one would come to her rescue. Not John, who must know by now that she was missing and that Gaunt was responsible. He would be frantic, trust in the hope that she was still alive, do everything in his power to find her—but how could he, when she herself didn’t know exactly where she was?

  No, her only chance of survival lay in escape. Two days now, and she’d been over every inch of space half a dozen times without finding a way out or anything she could use to create one. But hope remained strong in her. There had to be some means of escape.

  The cot was in what must have been the repair business’s office, walled off by plywood at the inner end of the building. There was nothing else in it except for a rickety desk, a broken chair, and a scattering of debris. The entrance to it was doorless.

  Two sets of double doors, both of rusty corrugated iron, gave access to the building, one set next to the makeshift office, the other at the bayside end that Sabina judged would open onto some sort of pier. Both were tightly secured with padlocks. She knew that because the padlock on the bayside doors was on the inside, heavy and thick-stapled, and because no matter how long and hard she rattled and banged and pried at the other set, she failed to part them so much as an inch.

  The hole in the roof was up near the peak; there was no possible way for her to climb up to it. The walls and floor were in warped condition, but the chinks that admitted daylight were too small to admit any tool larger than a screwdriver. If any such tools had been abandoned here, Gaunt had anticipated their use and disposed of them. The piece of pipe was the only object she’d found of any possible use, which thus far had been limited to frightening off the rats. The palms of both her hands were lacerated from vain attempts to batter loose wall boards and floorboards.

  Another series of mournful wails from the foghorns, followed a few seconds later by the blast of a ship’s horn, goaded her into motion. She groped her way out of the office, into the center of the slightly down-slanted warehouse where she stood peering around, reorienting herself.

  There was little enough to see in the gloom. Overhead, lengths of oxidized chain hung from a winchlike contraption strung across the beams, too high up for her to reach. The floor was strewn with various pieces of board lumber, a broken sheet of plywood, a coil of heavy rope so decayed the hemp fibers had crumbled when she tried to pick it up, the skeleton of a rowboat laid askew on a pair of sawhorses. She had examined the skeleton and the sawhorses, one of which had a fractured leg, with the thought of making some use of their bones, but she hadn’t sufficient strength, even with the pipe as a lever, to rip the loose, splintered ones free. Even if she’d succeeded, she knew now that the chunks would have been as useless to her as the rest of the scattered lumber.

  A rusted metal drainage trough some eight inches wide extended down along the side wall. Shallow, empty except for rat droppings and dead insects and dust, it led to an opening in the bayside wall next to one of the corrugated door halves. The opening had been clogged with debris that she’d cleared out. Prying and chipping at the hole with the pipe had splintered off enough decayed wood to enlarge it slightly, but the vertical boards on both sides were thick and firmly nailed in place.

  The gurgling of the bay water around the pilings beneath was a painful reminder of her thirst. Biting her lip, she commanded herself once again to ignore physical discomfort, focus on the task at hand. In slow shuffling steps she began to prowl through the gloom, feeling along the walls for any loose board she might have missed previously. There were none. Again she made a futile effort to create separation between the bayside doors. Again she scuffed over the length and width of the enclosure, avoiding the shadowy obstacles … no loose boards there, either, no overlooked tool or other useful object.

  At the front set of doors she lost her composure for a moment, beat on them furiously with the pipe until the palm of her hand was slick with blood. A scream born of frustration welled in the back of her throat; it took an effort of will to keep it from bursting forth. If she were to give in to such an impulse, she might not be able to stop.

  Slowly again she made her way back along the side wall where the drainage trough was. When she stepped up close to it, the toe of her shoe stubbed on an uptilted edge, causing her to stumble off balance, to drop the blood-slick pipe when she threw her hands out to brace herself against the wall. The pipe clattered into the trough, setting up ringing echoes that disturbed the nesting birds and sent one of them flying out through the roof hole. A gull loosed a raucous cry somewhere nearby.

  She bent to fumble for the pipe, found it, and when she straightened, her toe again struck the protruding edge. In a kind of furious retaliation she kicked at it. The metal shivered, rattled at the impact.

  She started to move ahead. And then stopped and stood still.

  The trough, she thought.

  The trough?

  21

  QUINCANNON

  After leaving Russian Hill Sunday evening, he had driven to the Hall of Justice. Not to report Sabina missing—his distrust of the police and their methods was too deeply ingrained; there was nothing they could do that he couldn’t. And not to consult again with Lieutenant William Price. It was probable that Price would not be on duty, and if he’d received any new and important information on Jeffrey Gaunt, he would have sent word.

  Quincannon went to the Hall of Justice because that was where the city morgue was located.

  Before doing anything else, he had to cement his conviction that Sabina was alive. He said a silent prayer when he stepped into the morgue’s dank confines. Had any young women, as yet unidentified, been found and brought in since Friday night? Only one, the morgue attendant told him, the victim of a stabbing on Pacific Avenue. A soiled dove, according to the police report. Quincannon viewed the corpse anyway, just to be sure. And said another silent prayer, this one thankful, when he walked out.

  The rest of Sunday night and all of Monday morning he spent checking the guest lists at a dozen hotels large and small—Gaunt was not registered at any of them, nor was any man answering his description—and roaming the Uptown Tenderloin, the Barbary Coast and its fringes, Tar Flat, the waterfront area. He questioned the “gypsy” fortune-teller who called herself Madame Louella, the bunco steerer who went by the moniker of Breezy Ned, the hoodlum named Luther James, the “blind” newsy Slewfoot, and other informants and information sellers with whom he and Sabina had had past dealings. He spoke to Charles Riley, owner of the high-toned House of Chance on Post Street, and the proprietors of other gambling halls from the semi-respectable to the meanest of the Coast’s deadfalls. He even paid brief visits to Madame Fifi’s Maison of Parisian Delights and Bessie Hall, the “Queen of O’Farrell Street,” on the off chance that Gaunt had b
een one of their customers.

  He learned nothing.

  No one had seen Gaunt. No one had seen Sabina.

  The grim futility of his search had been pointed up in advance by Ezra Bluefield when Quincannon called on him at the Redemption Saloon, his first stop after leaving the Hall of Justice Sunday night. What the ex-miner, ex-Coast denizen had told him, after commiserating over Sabina’s disappearance and lamenting his inability to help find her or Gaunt, had not deterred Quincannon at the time. But by noon on Monday there was no gainsaying its bitter truth.

  “I hate like the devil to say this, John, my lad,” Bluefield said, “but if this bastard Gaunt is in the city, he has made no contact with gamblers, sure-thing men, or others of their ilk.”

  “You’re certain such a meeting couldn’t have been kept secret?”

  “You know as well as I do there are no secrets in the Coast or the Tenderloin. Any can be bought for as little as the price of a beer.” For emphasis Bluefield raised his mug of lager, his favorite tipple; he consumed prodigious quantities day and night. “Lady One-Eye’s name is known to several after the shooting of her husband in Grass Valley, but none ever sat at table with her or with Jack O’Diamonds. And none even knew Gaunt’s name.”

  “He must know someone here,” Quincannon insisted.

  Bluefield drank from his mug, licked foam off his coal-black handlebar mustache. Its waxed, sharp-pointed ends quivered when he said, “Ah, lad, why must he? A man bent on mayhem seldom asks for aid.”

  “He doesn’t if he intends to strike from ambush, shoot down his victim in cold blood, but there is no indication that is what happened to Sabina. If he had something else in mind, he might well seek assistance.”

  “Something such as what? A kidnapping?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “What would he stand to gain by such an act?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know, what I feel in my bones, is that she is still alive.”

  Bluefield said nothing. But his thinking was plain: Gaunt may in fact have murdered Sabina in cold blood and disposed of her body in such a fashion that it had yet to be found or might never be found.

  Fighting exhaustion—Quincannon had gone home for just a short time, slept hardly at all—he drove to the Western Union office on Market Street. The last two collect wires answering his queries about Gaunt and Lady One-Eye were waiting, but neither contained any useful information.

  Onward, then, to Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. The morsel of hope that he might find Sabina there at her desk, safe and with a rational explanation for her absence, died when he found the door locked and the morning’s mail on the floor inside. He sifted quickly through the envelopes. No messages and nothing worth opening in the batch.

  He tossed the lot onto his desk. The wires from Sheriff Hezekiah Thorpe and the Pinkerton office in New Orleans caught his eye where he’d left them on Sabina’s blotter. He sat in her chair, smudged a hand over his face and knuckled his tired eyes, then reread the wires—doing that because he had nothing else to do at the moment.

  D. S. Nickerson.

  He passed over the name in the Pinkerton wire, then paused and looked at it again. D. S. Nickerson, Gaunt’s coconspirator in a land-speculation fraud in New Orleans five years ago. Neither man had been prosecuted. Gaunt had been declared persona non grata by the local constabulary as a result of his suspected involvement in the gambler’s murder, at a time when he was already under police scrutiny for the land swindle. Had his partner, Nickerson, also been sent packing from the gulf city? And if so, was it possible he’d come to the Far West to establish a new life?

  Quincannon rummaged up the agency’s copy of Langley’s City Directory. He found no listing under the heading of “Real Estate,” but when he turned to “Land Agents”—

  Donald S. Nickerson, Fifth and Townsend

  His first rush of excitement lasted only a few seconds. Don’t go jumping to conclusions, he warned himself. Nickerson was not a common name, though neither was it an obscure one; the similarity in both name and initials could be coincidental. As could Donald S. Nickerson’s profession. San Francisco was a long way from New Orleans, five years a long time for two former partners to remain in contact.

  Still, it was the best and only lead he had. And how could you possibly find a needle in a haystack without grabbing at straws?

  * * *

  The two-story building on the corner of Fifth and Townsend had seen better days. It was not exactly ramshackle, but various parts of its façade were in need of repair and the whole of a fresh coat of whitewash. According to the directory in the vestibule, it housed an attorney, a manufacturer’s agent, a publisher of maps, a purveyor of unidentified novelties, and Donald S. Nickerson, Land Agent, office on the second floor.

  Quincannon climbed a creaky staircase, went along a gloomy hallway to the door marked with Nickerson’s name and profession. Without knocking, he opened it and stepped inside. The office was composed of two rooms, the one he was in and a slightly smaller one visible through an open doorway at the far end. An unoccupied desk and a smattering of other nondescript and inexpensive furniture half filled this one. Photographs of properties, most of which looked to be industrial, were pinned to the walls.

  A chair scraped the floor in the other room and a man appeared in the doorway. Fiftyish, stocky, with a moon face topped by strands of ginger-colored hair combed in a checkerboard pattern over an otherwise bald scalp. The smile he wore was hearty and welcoming, and as artificial as the rows of tobacco-stained teeth it revealed. His brown suit was a touch threadbare, his waistcoat and cravat likewise. Not a particularly successful land agent, whether an honest one or not.

  “Ah, good afternoon, sir, good afternoon,” he said as he came forward. He had no discernible Southern accent. “Donald S. Nickerson, at your service. How may I help you?”

  “By answering a few questions.”

  “Certainly, sir, certainly. Anything and everything you’d care to know. I have several excellent properties for sale, with and without structures, many at bargain prices—”

  “I’m not interested in buying property.”

  “You’re not?” Disappointment dimmed Nickerson’s toothy smile. “Well. Selling land, then?”

  “Not that, either.”

  The piggish little eyes turned wary. “You wouldn’t be here about the, mmm, bank matter, would you?”

  “I’m not a collection agent, no.”

  “No, of course you aren’t,” Nickerson said, relieved. “A minor matter, that business, of no consequence. May I ask your name, sir?”

  “Quincannon. John Quincannon.”

  That erased the smile completely. “The, mmm, the detective?”

  “You’ve heard of me then.”

  “Oh, yes. You’ve often been prominent in the news. Yes, quite prominent. Splendid reputation. What, mmm, what brings you to see me?”

  “Jeffrey Gaunt.”

  Nickerson’s only visible reaction was a twitch at a corner of his mouth. “I don’t believe I know the name. Gaunt, did you say? No, I know no one named Gaunt.”

  “New Orleans, Mr. Nickerson.”

  “Mmm? What’s that? I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve never done business there?”

  “No, sir. No. Never done business there, never been there. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m looking for Gaunt. Looking hard for him.”

  “Are you? Has he, mmm, done something illegal?”

  “Committed a crime that will send him to prison for a long time, if not to the hangman.” Quincannon added pointedly, fixing the land agent with a basilisk eye, “And anyone who worked in consort with him, too.”

  The muscle jumped again in Nickerson’s cheek. He cleared his throat phlegmily before he said, “But I don’t understand, sir. Why have you come to me about this person?”

  “He once worked a land swindle in New Orleans with a man named D. S. Nickerson.”<
br />
  “Oh, mmm, I see. The remarkable similarity of name and profession brought you here. A coincidence, I assure you, a remarkably bizarre coincidence.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. Certainly. I am an honest man, honest as the day is long. And as I told you I have never been to New Orleans. Never traveled farther east than the state capital, as a matter of fact. No, never.”

  That was a barefaced lie. Although Nickerson had no discernible Southern accent, neither did he possess the distinctive pronunciation and inflection of a native Californian. Quincannon continued to stare at him, even more fiercely now.

  The land agent blinked several times, finally shifted his gaze. He cleared his throat again and said, “I don’t wish to be rude, Mr. Quincannon, but I am rather busy and I would appreciate it if you, mmm, proceeded with your inquiries elsewhere.”

  “No.”

  “… I beg your pardon? I don’t—”

  “I said no. I’ll continue my inquiries right here.”

  “But there is nothing more I can tell you, sir. Not a blessed thing.”

  Quincannon had run out of patience. He’d dealt with enough nervous, frightened, culpable liars during the course of his career to recognize when he was in the company of another of the breed. D. S. Nickerson of New Orleans and Donald S. Nickerson of San Francisco were one and the same man, and no mistake.

  “The devil there isn’t,” he snapped. “You can and you will tell me all you know about Jeffrey Gaunt, past and present. You’ve seen him recently, haven’t you?”

  “No! No, I—”

  Quincannon advanced on him. Nickerson flinched and backpedaled, but he didn’t get far. Quincannon’s left hand caught the front of the land agent’s coat and shirt and yanked him to a halt. His right filled with his Navy Colt; he thumbed it to cock, and thrust the barrel along Nickerson’s upper lip and tight against his left nostril.