Quincannon

by Bill Pronzini

  1. Each man must recognize that his service belongs to the government through 24 hours of every day.

  2. All must agree to assignment to the locations chosen by the Chief, and respond to whatever mobility of movement the work might require.

  3. All must exercise such careful saving of money spent for travel, subsistence, and payments for information as can be self-evidently justified.

  4. Continuing employment in the Service will depend upon demonstrated fitness, ability as investigators, and honesty and fidelity in all transactions.

  5. The title of regular employees will be Operative, Secret Service. Temporary employees will be Assistant Operatives or Informants.

  6. All employment will be at a daily pay rate; accounts submitted monthly. Each operative will be expected to keep on hand enough personal reserve funds to carry on Service business between paydays.

  Article 3 had been a constant bone of contention during the ten years Quincannon had worked in the San Francisco office. What he considered justified expenditures seldom coincided with Boggs’ opinion; their arguments had been mostly amiable, like an ongoing chess match each of them looked forward to — Quincannon for the challenge of finding a winning gambit, Boggs because he almost always won. That had been the case, at least, until the incident in Nevada the previous year. Now it was Article 4 that Boggs most often quoted — the continuing fitness and ability of Quincannon as an investigator. But he raised the issue gently, knowing as he did the full story of Katherine Bennett’s death and understanding what it had done to Quincannon. Boggs was not a man who generally yielded to personal feelings — the Service came first and foremost in his life — but he made allowances in this instance, out of a combination of loyalty, friendship, and pity. Quincannon did not really care one way or the other. He walled out Boggs and Boggs’ attitude as he walled out everything and everyone else: using pain for bricks and alcohol for mortar.

  In the bottom drawer of his desk were a number of maps of the Western states and territories. He found the one for Idaho and spread it open. Silver City was in the southwestern corner of the state, in the Owyhee Mountains where the barren, unsettled corners of Oregon and Idaho met the equally barren Nevada desert — a silver-mining town that had been the center of a boom in the 1870s and was still a major producer of that precious metal. The closest rail service was at Nampa, just north of Boise, forty miles away; from there an overland trip via stage or horseback was required. Police jurisdiction in the area, Quincannon thought, would be thin and divided, thereby making it a favorite haunt of outlaws from four different states.

  He took down the government survey pamphlet on Idaho and read what it contained about Silver City and the Owyhee region. Then, from his wallet, he removed the slip of paper he had found last night in Bonniwell’s hand and studied that again. He was still studying it when Boggs came in.

  Boggs was in his mid-fifties, a round, graying man with a bulbous nose; one of his friends had once likened him to a keg of whiskey with the nose as its bung. He favored butternut suits, fashionable square-crown hats, and gold-headed walking sticks in a variety of designs. The stick he carried this morning bore the head of a lion.

  His surprise at seeing Quincannon at his desk so early was evident. He said, “Well, this establishes a happy precedent,” and immediately went to the open window and banged it shut. Then he lit one of his Havana panatellas. He liked the office warm, even stuffy, and redolent of cigar smoke.

  Quincannon said, “Bonniwell was murdered last night. Bludgeoned to death in his rooming house and the body dropped into the alley below to make it seem an accident.”

  Boggs gave him a narrow, glowering look. “How do you know it was murder?”

  “I saw the man responsible. He pushed the body through the window just as I was approaching.”

  “And?”

  “He escaped. I almost caught him.”

  “Almost,” Boggs said heavily. “Were you drunk?”

  “No. The rain and the muddy ground were to blame, not liquor.”

  “Did you have a good look at him?”

  “Red-thatched, big, face mindful of a slab of marble. I’ve never seen him before. But I’ll know him if I see him again.”

  “Was there anything in Bonniwell’s room?”

  “Nothing. The redhead saw to that. But I did find something in Bonniwell’s hand.”

  “And that was?”

  Quincannon stood and brought the piece of butcher’s paper to Boggs, who squinted at it through the smoke from his cigar.

  “Whistling Dixon,” Boggs said. “Someone’s name?”

  “No doubt. It means nothing to me.”

  “Nor to me.”

  Boggs went to his desk, sat down, and lifted out the file on the present case from the bottom drawer. Quincannon stood watching him shuffle through reports from a variety of sources both here in the West and in Washington; samples of the silver eagles and half eagles that had first begun to appear in Oregon, Washington state, and northern California close to a year ago; samples of the ten- and twenty-dollar notes that were now flooding the entire coast, as well as Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Utah, and had been for better than three months; lists of known counterfeiters, coney brokers, and boodle carriers. But it was a slim file, for all of that. Scattered bits of positive information, a welter of speculation and possibilities.

  Neither the coins nor the greenbacks bore the style of any known counterfeiter. The ink and the silk-fiber paper that were being used to make the notes were of good quality and therefore would not have come cheap, but their source or sources remained a mystery. None of the counterfeit seemed to have been transported or distributed in a traceable fashion, through known carriers or brokers. The only definite link between the coins and greenbacks had come from a field operative in Seattle, who had managed to trace a man who had shoved $10,000 worth of queer on a local brokerage house. When the operative and the local authorities broke into the man’s rented flat they found a small cache of both eagles and bills. The man himself had not turned up until two days later — floating in Puget Sound with his face shot away. All efforts to identify him had failed. Samuel Greenspan was still working on that angle, still chasing down what his latest telegram referred to as “dead-end leads” in the Seattle area.

  Boggs sat back after a time and licked his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Not a whisper of Silver City anywhere in here,” he said, tapping the file. “Did Bonniwell mention the place to you in any context?”

  “No,” Quincannon said. “He had met someone who might be a boodle carrier for the gang and hoped to have more information for me last night — that was all.”

  “This carrier’s name was Smith, he said?”

  “Yes. A phony moniker, of course.”

  “Bonniwell didn’t know where Smith was living?”

  “Evidently not. He had met the man in a saloon.”

  “No lead there, then. Not that we’ll need to worry about that, if Whistling Dixon and Silver City prove meaningful.” Boggs frowned abruptly. “John, could that piece of paper have been planted in Bonniwell’s hand? To put us off on a false scent?”

  “There’s a chance of it, yes,” Quincannon said. “But the handwriting is Bonniwell’s — I’ve seen it before — and the paper was clenched so tight in his fingers that I had difficulty prying it loose. If the redhead put it there the grip would not have been half so tight.”

  Boggs nodded and sat silent for a time, worrying his cigar. Then he said musingly, “Silver City, eh? Not such a bad place for koniakers to set up shop. Isolated, and not much in the way of law enforcement. Plenty of silver for the coney coins, too.”

  “It also fits geographically,” Quincannon said. “Not far from there to Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco. They could make shipment by freight wagon, even by train from Boise under false bills of lading.”

  “A risky business, though. Freighting paper and ink, machinery, other supplies into those mountains, then freight
ing out the queer. Any number of things could go wrong.”

  “But nothing has. They’re a cocky bunch, and well-organized — that’s plain. And in the normal course of events, who would suspect a coney operation in such a place?” “Just as you say,” Boggs agreed.

  Quincannon said, “I can be on a train leaving Oakland this afternoon, Mr. Boggs. And in Silver City in two days.”

  “You can and you will. Use an assumed name and occupation; you’ll need to take every precaution.”

  “I had already planned on that.”

  Boggs allowed a few seconds to pass and then said, “John ... you know how important this case is. If we don’t put these queers-men out of business, and damned soon, they have the potential to undermine the West’s economic system. The entire country’s economic system, if they should step up production and distribution to the East.”

  Quincannon said nothing. He knew what was coming.

  “I would go to Silver City myself if I could, but I’m needed here. And Greenspan hasn’t enough experience. You’re the only man I can send; next to me, you’re the best operative in this part of the country.” There was no false modesty in Boggs; he knew his talents and was not chary about expressing them to others. “Or you were once,” he went on pointedly. “If this were twelve months ago I would have no qualms. None at all. But now ...”

  “Do you expect me to burrow up in Silver City with a keg of whiskey?” Quincannon asked.

  “Of course not. But a steady consumption of liquor distorts a man’s judgment, slows his reflexes, makes him prone to mistakes.”

  “I won’t make any mistakes.”

  “You might if you continue to drink as you have this past year.”

  “What is it you want, Mr. Boggs? My promise not to use whiskey while I’m in Silver City?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you have it.”

  Boggs looked surprised. “On your word of honor as a gentleman and an employee of the Service?”

  “On my word of honor.”

  This seemed to relieve Boggs and thus put a quick end to what might otherwise have been a lengthy lecture. They spent the next few minutes settling on Quincannon’s assumed name and occupation — Andrew Lyons, patent medicine drummer, an alias and a cover he had used before — and on other matters relative to his mission. Then Quincannon left to return to his rooms, pack a bag, wait for a messenger to deliver a sample case of patent medicine, and then to proceed by ferry to the Oakland railroad depot.

  But he made one stop on his way home, at a Market Street saloon not far from the Mint, where he took two whiskeys. He would have another drink in his rooms, and one on the ferry, and one at the depot, and several on the train, and more in Boise and Nampa — and as much as he needed in Silver City. He could not stop drinking there, any more than he could stop here; he had no desire to quit, because sobriety meant confronting the shrieking ghost of Katherine Bennett and that in turn meant madness. He had willfully lied to Boggs and he felt no remorse for having done so. “On my word of honor,” he had said. But there was no honor left to him; he had lost it forever. So what did it matter if he added “liar” to what he already was?

  And what he was, plain and simple, was a murderer. The murderer of Katherine Bennett, a twenty-year-old woman innocent of any crime and eight months pregnant, who had died screaming with his bullet in her stomach.

  Chapter 3

  Idaho had changed considerably since the last time Qnin-cannon had been there, nine years ago on a case involving broken-bank bills — notes drawn on a bank that had suspended operation. Back then, in 1884, Boise had been a quiet little town just beginning to grow. Rail service had just been extended all the way across southern Idaho, ending the area’s isolation: prior to that year, more than two hundred miles in any direction separated Boise from the nearest railhead or steamboat. The railroads had opened up the area to settlement, with the result that the rich soil of the Snake River Valley now burgeoned with farms and Boise itself had grown into a city of more than four thousand.

  Rail tracks had recently been laid into the town proper, and it was at a brand new depot that the Central Pacific train from Portland delivered Quincannon on Sunday afternoon, two days after his departure from San Francisco. He made arrangements there for passage to Nampa on the Idaho Central, found he had a wait of two hours before the next train, and used that time to find a saloon and slake his thirst with two large whiskeys and a glass of beer. He also bought a bottle of whiskey to take with him; the two he had brought from California were empty, and his pocket flask was nearly so.

  It was dusk when he arrived in Nampa, a hamlet still in its infancy that had sprung up along the Oregon Short Line railroad connecting Wyoming with Bear River and the Snake River Valley. The weather was some warmer here than in Boise — a welcome change from the dreary early-fall rains that drenched northern California. He sought out the stage depot, but it was closed for the day. A schedule in its front window told him that the coach to Silver City departed at nine in the morning.

  There was a hotel in Nampa, if it could be dignified by that term; but Quincannon cared nothing for comfort any more. He took a room for the night, drew the shade, had his customary nightcap, and took himself to bed.

  But sleep eluded him, as it sometimes did when he was traveling. After a time, restless, he lighted the lamp and tried to read the volume of poems by Emily Dickinson from his warbag. He had three-score volumes of poetry in his rooms in San Francisco, given to him by his mother, and he habitually took one with him on his trips. He had seldom opened any during the past year, but still he packed one. Old habits, good habits, died hard.

  I took my power in my hand

  And went against the world;

  ”Twas not so much as David had,

  But I was twice as bold.

  I aimed my pebble, but myself

  Was all the one that fell.

  Was it Goliath was too large,

  Or only I too small?

  He put the book aside, reached for the bottle to pour himself another drink. Poetry. Once he had loved it, just as his mother had; now there was too much meaning in most of it, too many reminders of what he had done and what he was.

  He was glad his mother had not lived to hear about Katherine Bennett. She had died much too young, of a disease that had left her withered and riddled with pain. Not that pain had been a stranger to her. A gentlewoman, Margaret Cullen Quincannon, a product of the Virginia aristocracy who had fought on the wrong side during the Civil War and had never been able to reconcile their losses. Life had been good to her before the hostilities; she had married a handsome Scot from Washington, moved to the capital, had a son, sipped cordials and broken bread with heads of state. But then the war had come, and while her loyalties were with the South, her staunchly pro-Union husband had forced her to stay in Washington, in the midst of the Northern effort to crush the Confederacy. One of her brothers had been killed at Bull Run; her father had died of apoplexy shortly before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. The laughter and joy of her youth turned to sorrow and melancholy, to the pain that had stayed with her, growing, for the rest of her days.

  She had died bewildered, had Margaret Cullen Quincannon. With nothing left to her but faded memories of a time of gentility that had become a time of blood — and her pride in her only son’s success as a detective, first with his father’s Washington agency, where he had begun work as a runner and office boy at the age of seventeen, and then with the Secret Service. If she had known about Katherine Bennett, it would have shaken that pride and caused her even more pain.

  Thomas L. Quincannon would not have understood either, if he were still alive; if an assassin’s bullet had not cut him down on the Baltimore docks eleven months after the death of his wife. A stone-hard man, his father; stubborn, unyielding. A man of principle. The rival of Pinkerton, the better of Pinkerton to hear him tell it. And a damned old fool who had believed himself invincible, who should not have been on the
Baltimore docks the night he was shot, who should have been home in bed like other stout and gout-ridden men his age.

  “You shot a pregnant woman by accident,” he would have said to his son, “in the performance of your sworn duty to the government of your country. It was unavoidable. Unfortunate, of course, but nonetheless an accident. Put it behind you, John. Forget it. There is no purpose in remorse. What is done is done and cannot be undone.” No, Thomas Quincannon would not have understood at all.

  Quincannon had taken his father’s profession, had worked with his father, had inherited his father’s ability for detective work. But inside, at the core of him, he was his mother’s son.

  He awoke at dawn with a throbbing head and a queasy stomach: it had taken two more drinks to bring him the temporary oblivion of sleep. He took another now, to still the inner trembling, and then doused his head with water from the bureau pitcher, dressed, packed his warbag. Downstairs in the dining room, he forced himself to eat a small breakfast and to wash the food down with two cups of coffee. The second cup he laced with whiskey from his flask, and when he was done with it he felt well enough for travel.

  At the stage depot he bought passage for Silver City and sat down to wait for the coach to arrive. He did nothing while he waited; simply sat with his mind blank. Two men came in after a while, both well-dressed, and he looked at them more closely when he heard them purchase tickets for Silver City. One was tall, spare, middle-aged, with a distinguished mane of hemp-colored hair; the other was roly-poly, apple-cheeked, balding, and fortyish. Judging from snippets of their conversation, Quincannon concluded the two men knew each other but were not traveling together.