Quincannon jq-1

by Bill Pronzini

  “I might ask you the same thing.”

  She made no reply. She was peering out to one side of him, at where the object that had been in her hand lay on the ground. He followed the direction of her gaze, saw that the object was a fold of heavy parchment paper; he moved at the same time she did, so that he blocked her way with his body and reached the paper first.

  Sabina Carpenter said angrily, “Give me that,” and tried to pull it from his grasp. Quincannon held her away, unfolding the paper with his free hand so he could determine what it was. A stock certificate — two hundred and fifty shares in Oliver Truax’s Paymaster Mining Company. It had been made out in the name of Helen Truax, but on the reverse side, Quincannon saw just before Sabina Carpenter kicked him and then wrenched the certificate away, was Helen Truax’s endorsement and Jason Elder’s name as the new owner of the stock.

  Her breath coming rapidly now, the Carpenter woman had backed off a few paces clutching the certificate. There was a wary tenseness in her, but no apparent fear. If he moved toward her, Quincannon thought, she wouldn’t turn and flee, as most women would in such a situation; she would stand her ground and fight him.

  He said mildly, “Thievery, Miss Carpenter?”

  “Of course not.”

  “That certificate has two names on it, neither of them yours.”

  “It was lying on the floor inside,” she said. “Mr. Elder isn’t home and I thought… well, it seems valuable. I intend to take it to the marshal for safekeeping.”

  “Why not return it to Mrs. Truax?”

  She hesitated before she said, “It belongs to Mr. Elder now. Besides, I hardly know the woman.”

  “Elder must know her quite well, to be the recipient of such a large amount of stock.”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “And you must know Elder quite well yourself, to be inside his house alone.”

  “Your innuendoes are offensive, Mr. Lyons,” she said stiffly. “I know Mr. Elder no better than I know Mrs. Truax. I came to see him about a hat he ordered. The door was open, so I simply walked inside.”

  She was lying, Quincannon thought, making up her answers out of whole cloth. He said, “Then you aren’t aware that Elder has been missing for four days.”

  “Missing? How do you know that?”

  “Will Coffin told me.”

  “I see. And why are you here, then?”

  “Whistling Dixon. You’ve heard about his murder, haven’t you?”

  “Murder?” Her surprise, at least, seemed genuine. “No, I hadn’t heard.”

  “Yes. And I’ve learned that Dixon and Elder were acquainted. Were you aware of that?”

  She shook her head. “I told you, I hardly know Jason Elder. And I did not know Whistling Dixon at all.”

  He studied her for a time, and received the same sort of scrutiny in return. He felt stirred by her again, by her resemblance to Katherine Bennett and by her odd actions and by some intangible quality that he could not quite define. Uneasiness formed in him, made him yearn for a drink of whiskey.

  At length she said, “I’ll be on my way now, Mr. Lyons. If you believe me guilty of wrongdoing, perhaps you would like to accompany me to the marshal’s office.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said, and saw relief flicker in her eyes. She had no intention of taking the stock certificate to Marshal McClew, he thought. But why? What did she want with it?

  Blackmail or extortion — was either of those her game?

  She turned away from him and went along the path, around under the crabapple trees. Quincannon moved to the corner and watched her reach Owyhee Street, hurry down it toward Jordan. When she was out of sight he returned to the porch and entered the shack.

  It was a single room, not clean and sparsely furnished. From the look of it, Jason Elder either lived in a state of upheaval — the “pigsty” Will Coffin had referred to — or the shack had been searched thoroughly and rather recklessly. Quincannon was inclined toward the latter theory, with Sabina Carpenter as the most obvious culprit.

  A cot had been upended in one corner; a pair of filthy blankets were wadded nearby, along with a torn or slashed pillow leaking feathers onto the packed-earth floor. A flat-topped trunk, old and disreputable, stood with its lid up, some of its contents still inside and the rest spilled out around it. A chair lay on its side next to a small table. Pots, pans, two broken dishes, a tin basin, and a straight razor were also scattered about; and against one wall, a canister of flour and another of sugar lay upended, their contents mingled like a sifting of snow and acrawl with insects. The only items in the room that seemed to still be in their proper place were an ancient sheet-iron stove, its door hinged open, and an empty woodbox.

  On one wall shelf was a black-lacquered Chinese tray; Quincannon crossed to look at it. It contained the instruments of Jason Elder’s opium addiction: the toy, a small bone box that held the opium; the yen hok needle on which the pill was cooked; a little oil lamp; the sponge known as the souey pow; an enamel cup to hold the yenshee; the slender ivory tube, not quite two feet long, that was the stem of the pipe; and the round, crusted black bowl, the size of a doorknob, with its tiny center hole. He picked up the toy, looked inside, and found that it contained a small amount of raw opium. And when he examined the yenshee cup he saw that at least a quarter of an ounce of the black scrapings lay within.

  Everything was here, all the keys that would unlock the gateway to celestial dreams — keys that no opium addict would willingly leave behind. Wherever Elder had gone, circumstances must have forced him to leave in a great hurry, from some location other than this shack. Either that, or someone else had been responsible for his disappearance.

  Quincannon examined the contents of the flat-topped trunk. Shirts, a pair of trousers, galluses, stockings, underdrawers, a pair of crumbling books on the printing trade in general and various type faces in particular, and an empty carpetbag — most if not all of Elder’s personal possessions. None of it contained any clues to his present whereabouts, to his connection with Whistling Dixon or Helen Truax or Sabina Carpenter. Nor was there anything that even hinted that Elder might be involved with the koniakers.

  The remainder of the room likewise revealed nothing of interest. If any other unusual item aside from the stock certificate had once been kept here, Sabina Carpenter — or another party; Will Coffin, for one, had also been to the shack — had made off with it.

  Quincannon went outside, back to Owyhee Street and then down Jordan. The first saloon he came to drew him inside and held him for ten minutes, the time it took to drink two whiskeys to ease his mind and eat a sandwich and two pickled eggs to ease the hunger pangs in his stomach. Then, following directions he had obtained from the bartender, he found his way to the house where the Truaxes lived, east across Jordan Creek on a hummock that overlooked most of the town and descending valley beyond.

  The house differed considerably in style from most of the buildings in Silver City — a bastardized Italianate with a single jutting cupola and an ornate front veranda bordered by lilac bushes. No doubt the fanciest home in Silver, Quincannon judged; he would have been surprised, having met both Oliver Truax and his wife, if it had been otherwise. He climbed to the veranda, pulled the ring for the bell.

  No one responded to the summons. Helen Truax was out somewhere, perhaps shopping; he would have to wait until later to talk to her.

  From the Truax house he went to the Wells Fargo office, where he wrote out another Western Union telegram to be sent to Boggs in care of the “Caldwell Associates” mail-drop in San Francisco. This one read:

  PRINCIPLE ACCOUNT BANKRUPT NO EXPLANATION YET STOP HAVE SEVERAL OTHER POSSIBILITIES TO INDICATE THIS IS FRUITFUL TERRITORY STOP WILL COFFIN FROM KANSAS CITY OWNER LOCAL NEWSPAPER HAS BEEN MOST HELPFUL SO HAVE OLIVER TRUAX OWNER PAYMASTER MINE AND WIFE HELEN STOP REMEMBER SABINA CARPENTER FROM DENVER QMK SHE IS HERE AND VERY ACTIVE

  All of which would tell Boggs that Whistling Dixon had been killed, that his
death might be connected with the counterfeiting operation, and that Quincannon required information on Will Coffin, the Truaxes, and especially Sabina Carpenter.

  He remained at the Western Union counter until the brass pounder had sent the message. Leaving then, he located Cad-mon’s Livery near the stage barn. The hostler turned out to be the bespectacled man named Henry who had found Whistling Dixon’s corpse; Quincannon mentioned the murder and then asked, with apparent casual curiosity, if Marshal McClew had found anything in Slaughterhouse Gulch that might identify the killers.

  Henry said that he hadn’t. “And he likely never will, either,” he added. “Outlaws done it. Damned few of those sons of bitches ever get caught. They don’t hang around Silver long enough for that, once they rob or kill somebody.”

  Quincannon rented a horse — a blaze-faced roan with four white stockings — and then asked Henry how to get to the Paymaster mine. He rode out of town on a rutted wagon road that led up the face of War Eagle Mountain. Ore wagons rolled past him, on their way to and from the mines; the thud and boom of the stamps and powder blasts seemed to grow louder, hollower as he climbed toward the tiered buildings above. The high country wind blew cool against his face, made him feel almost chilly.

  So did the nagging mental image of Sabina Carpenter, unwanted, vexing, like a splinter that had worked its way deep into his flesh and would not come out.

  Chapter 8

  The buildings of the Paymaster mine were arranged on tiers down the mountainside, so that they resembled a single multilevel structure. Their sheet-metal roofs glistened under the afternoon sun. So did the fan of tailings below the stamp mill, spread out from the foot of the cantilevered tramway that extended down to the mill from the main tunnel above.

  Quincannon rode into the mine yard. Three men were harnessing a team of dray horses to a big, yellow-painted Studebaker freight wagon; the only other men in sight were up on the tram, pushing ore carts from the tunnel to the chute that fed the mill, back again for another load. Quincannon. dismounted, tied the roan to one of the yard stanchions, and approached the men at the Studebaker wagon to ask the location of the mine office.

  One of the men pointed to a small building upslope. “But if you’re looking for Mr. Truax,” he said, “he ain’t there.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “Down in the mill. Stairs over yonder.”

  A dynamite explosion deep inside the mine made the ground tremble as Quincannon descended a steep flight of stairs to the stamp mill. When he entered he had no trouble locating Truax; together with a burly man in miner’s garb, probably the mill foreman, he was inspecting one of the eccentrics that raised the stamps, shut down now and locked into place. Rather than interrupt them, Quincannon stayed where he was near the entrance and watched the machinery and the millhands at their work.

  He had visited a stamp mill once before, in the Comstock Lode; he knew how they worked. The smaller pieces of ore that came tumbling down the chute went through a three-inch grizzly or grating into the feed bins; anything larger was shunted into a jaw crusher. The dressed ore was fed automatically to the stamps, where it was wet-stamped with a mixture of mercury, water, and patio reagents; the mercury drew the raw silver out of the slimes. At the end of a long process that included mulling, separating, and drainage, slugs of amalgam emerged and were delivered to retort furnaces that distilled off the quicksilver. The sponge matte was then melted and cast into bars in the adjacent melting room.

  Quincannon waited ten minutes in the lanternlit enclosure, keeping out of the way of the sweating millhands, before Truax and his foreman finished their inspection and the fat mine owner turned toward the entrance. Truax recognized Quincannon with no outward show of surprise. He gestured that they go outside, where they could make themselves heard above the thunder of the iron-shod stamps.

  “Well, Mr. Lyons, what brings you here?”

  “A private matter,” Quincannon said. “I wonder if we might talk in your office?”

  “I’m a busy man, you know. If it concerns salts or whatever it is you’re selling…”

  “Not at all. It concerns buying, not selling.”

  “Ah? Buying what?”

  “Shares in the Paymaster Mining Company, perhaps, if they’re available.”

  Truax’s expression changed; an avid sort of interest shone in his eyes. “Well, then, I’m sure I can spare you a few minutes. Yes, I’m sure I can. Come along, Mr. Lyons.”

  He led the way up the stairs. The workers who had been harnessing the drays to the Studebaker wagon were gone now, but two other men had taken their place. One was dressed in standard miner’s clothing; the other, swarthy and half a head taller, wore a frock coat over gray twill trousers, and a Montana peaked hat. When the tall one spied Truax he came quickly away from the wagon.

  Truax said, “Hello, Bogardus,” without enthusiasm. The tone of his voice and the look on his face told Quincannon that the swarthy man was not someone he liked.

  Quincannon wondered if that was because of the rumors he’d heard about Jack Bogardus and Truax’s wife. He studied the owner of the Rattling Jack mine, who had acknowledged Truax’s greeting with a curt nod and was now staring at the man with thinly veiled hostility. He was about forty, clean-shaven except for thick sideburns, with a long dark face and the eyes of a hellfire preacher. Some women would find him attractive, Quincannon thought; those fiery eyes had a spellbinding quality.

  “The wagon and team are ready for you,” Truax said, “as you’ve no doubt seen. Did you bring the cash?”

  “Would I be here if I hadn’t?”

  “Come along to the office.”

  But Bogardus didn’t move. “One of those horses is spavined,” he said.

  “Nonsense.”

  “Right hock on the big gray. Look at it yourself.”

  “I don’t need to look at it. Those horses are sound; so is the wagon. The price is five hundred, Bogardus, just as we agreed on. Not a penny less.”

  Bogardus showed his teeth in a sardonic smile. “If I didn’t need that wagon I’d tell you to go to hell.”

  “But you do need it, so you say. And no one else in Silver has one for sale. Besides, you can afford my price, now that you’ve struck your new vein.”

  “A richer vein than you ever saw,” Bogardus said.

  “Indeed? I find that difficult to believe.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you believe, Truax.”

  “My time is valuable and you’re wasting it. I have business to discuss with this gentleman.” He nodded at Quincannon. “Five hundred cash, Bogardus. Will you pay it?”

  Bogardus produced a money clip that held a thick sheaf of notes. From it he removed five one-hundred-dollar greenbacks. His fiery eyes remained fixed on Truax’s face; Quincannon might not have been there at all. “You’ll get these when I have a bill of sale,” he said.

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “No more than you trust me.”

  Truax made a laughing sound that had no mirth in it. He set out upslope; Bogardus stared after him for a moment and then followed, and Quincannon did the same. Inside the mine office Truax clumped past a man seated at a high desk piled with ledgers, went through a doorway into a private office, and sat down at a polished cherrywood desk that was much too ornate to have been made in Silver City. Neither Bogardus nor Quincannon shut the door when they entered. Bogardus slapped the five hundred-dollar notes on the desktop, kept his hand on them until Truax had written out a bill of sale and signed it and Bogardus had read it over. Truax added the greenbacks to others in a silver clip of his own; Bogardus put the bill of sale away inside his frock coat. Not a word was spoken through all of this, nor after the transaction was finished. The two men exchanged a final look, after which Bogardus turned on his heel and stalked out.

  Quincannon closed the door and occupied a chair opposite Truax. “I take it you and Mr. Bogardus aren’t friends,” he said.

  “Friends? The man is a scoundrel a
nd worse.”

  “How so, Mr. Truax?”

  “For one thing, he is a fornicator. I cannot abide a fornicator.”

  So Truax did know, or at least suspect, that his wife might be cuckolding him with Bogardus. Quincannon asked, “Is he also dishonest?”

  “He is. Dishonesty is how he obtained his Rattling Jack mine two years ago.”

  “Oh? A swindle?”

  “Not precisely. The former owner, Jack Finkle, had it up for sale because of failing health — asking a fair price, I might add. Bogardus arranged two accidents at the mine, one that crippled Finkle’s son-in-law, in order to drive the selling price down to where he could afford it. Everyone knows it was his work, but nothing was ever proved.”

  “The Rattling Jack is a well-paying mine, then?”

  “It wasn’t until Bogardus struck a new vein six months ago. The old vein was gradually pinching out.” Truax’s voice was bitter; it was plain that he begrudged Bogardus his newfound wealth. “Now his ore is assaying at one hundred dollars a ton, so he claims. Half of what the Paymaster assays at twice the tonnage per day, but still substantial.”

  “Is that why he needs a new freight wagon? To ship more of his silver?”

  “Evidently. He lost his biggest wagon last week, I’m told; one of his drivers misjudged a turn coming down the pass road, his load shifted, and the wagon went over the side.” Truax said that last with satisfaction.

  Quincannon asked, “Is Bogardus a native of Silver City?”

  “No. Came here a few months before he purchased the Rattling Jack.”

  “From where?”

  “Somewhere in Oregon.” Truax frowned. “You seem unduly interested in Bogardus, Mr. Lyons.”

  Quincannon smiled disarmingly. “Idle curiosity,” he said. “I fear I have an inquisitive nature.”