EQMM, February 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And Marge, who was a relaxed Catholic, telling about her latest “confession” to the local priest. Grace wanted to hear the end of Marge's story. She'd send Marge home with a pie for Jean. And Clyde still hollering.

  "Don't go, Marge. I'll be back."

  She found Clyde in the clawfoot tub, still complaining, water up to his chin. The gold-topped cane in with him—he'd have tried to get out himself. “Help me out o’ here, woman. Now, I said. Send that Popish female home. Y'hear me? I said now. Now!" He held up his massive arms.

  "Grace, I'll be on my way,” Marge called up. “I'll show myself out."

  Grace fished out the cane and looked down at him: the big Wallace nose, the pale naked body with hardly any hair at all, the shriveled-up privates. The second (or third) glass of whiskey on the tub rim. The pale watery blue eyes that never really saw her, had no idea who she was.

  "Marge,” she called back. “A pie for Jean—it's in the freezer. No, wait! I'll come down."

  "Bitch!” He picked up the glass—heaved it at her—it struck the sink and shattered, bits of glass ricocheting back. “Do as I say, goddamn you!"

  She didn't answer, couldn't—no words for it. Just shoved him back, down, into the water—glass splinter in her eye, she was seeing red. Ran crazy-legged, half blind, down the steps to give Marge the pie. But Marge already gone.

  Had to call Marge back an hour later when she'd stopped shaking, when she'd drunk a second glass of wine (even then thinking, what would the boys say to that?). “Help me, Marge, help me get Clyde out of the tub...."

  She told Marge he must've fallen asleep. But Marge knew—the way her eyebrow shot up at the word “asleep.” Marge, her friend—who could never keep a secret for long.

  "Blackberries!” The girl began grabbing handfuls. “We'll follow the tracks. I know the way from Elmira. It's just south of here. Dad'll be glad to see you, honest he will. You won't need money. He's dying for company, said so. You know how to milk?"

  "I guess,” Grace said, looking at her hands. They were coarse-looking, purplish veins. But strong. Strong enough to hold down a two-hundred-fifty-pound man. Underwater. Seemed like a dream now—nightmare. Like something she'd read that someone else did—never her.

  But it was.

  "Well, there's some cows over there, in that field. I'm thirsty as heck. A good squirt, that's all I need. I never learned. Poor Mom. I guess she had to do it all."

  "Now?” At least Grace had on sturdy shoes, shoes a farmer ought to wear. It was warm enough, she'd throw out the stockings—they wouldn't take another mending. But the shoes. Good for tramping fields.

  Already she felt her chest and throat full, the way it got with Jimmy's stories—the time he took the funeral wreath off a neighbor's door and presented it to his ma for her birthday. The time he was chased by a swarm of bees and dove into a pond and came up mud—she'd laughed till she doubled over. The time Jimmy took her to see the five kittens the barn tabby birthed in the hay—his and her shoulders touching as they stood close, watching, listening to the sucking, hardly breathing.

  "Look!” It was Claire this time, grinning, pointing up at the sky.

  Canada geese. Grace heard them before she saw them: the thrilling double-syllabled ha-ronk. Over two dozen, in that deep-throated V, flying low over the cornfield....

  Ian will meet the train, she thought. He'll find the coffin, the gold cane he covets. He'll spend the two hundred dollars on a memorial for his father. He won't miss his stepmother.

  Later she would contact her daughter, and tell her what really happened. Jessie would know what to do.

  For now it was like herself up there, flying along with the geese as they hollered south on their wide-spread wings.

  Copyright © 2010 Nancy Means Wright

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  Fiction: BURGLARPROOF by Bill Pronzini

  Devising an impossible crime is among the seemingly endless number of things MWA Grand Master Bill Pronzini can do better than most others in our genre. His skill in this area is starting to remind us of another MWA Grand Master: the late, great Edward D. Hoch. We doubt you'll be ahead of him in solving the impossible theft in this new tale, and if you want even more dazzling deduction be sure not to miss Mr. Pronzini's latest “Nameless” detective novel, Schemers (Forge).

  The four-car Sierra Railway train chuffed and wheezed into Jamestown just past noon, more than an hour behind schedule. Quincannon was in a grumpy mood when he alighted from the forward passenger coach, carpetbag in hand, and stood vibrating slightly from the constant jouncing and swaying. The overnight trip from San Francisco, by way of Stockton and Oakdale on the AT&SF, had been fraught with delays, the car had been overheated to ward off the early spring chill in the Mother Lode foothills, his head ached from all the soot and smoke he'd inhaled, and this was not yet his final destination. Another train ride, short and doubtless just as blasted uncomfortable, awaited him before the day was done.

  The town's long, crooked main street stretched out beyond the depot. Two- and three-storied wood and stone buildings lined both sides—businesses and professional offices on one, rows of saloons and Chinese washhouses on the other—and the street was packed with rough-garbed men and a variety of conveyances. Behind the saloons, hidden by tall cottonwoods, lay the notorious red-light district known as “Back-of-Town.” Quincannon happened to know this by hearsay, not personal experience; this was his first visit to the Queen of the Mines. If he were fortunate, he thought irritably, it would also be his last.

  Jimtown's reputation as the “rip-snortin'est, most altogether roughest town in the mines” was evidently justified. A mad cacophony of noises bludgeoned his eardrums—whistles, cowbells, raucous shouts, tinny piano music, crowing roosters, braying mules, snorting horses, clanks and rattles and steam hisses in the rail yards, distant dynamite blasts and the constant pound of stamps at the big Ophir and Crystalline mines on the southern outskirts. Those mines, and hundreds more within a ten-mile radius, had produced more than two million dollars of gold the previous year of 1897. Little wonder that the town was wide open and clamorous.

  A reception committee of two awaited Quincannon in front of the depot. The middle-aged gent sporting brown muttonchop whiskers introduced himself as Adam Newell, Sierra Railway's chief engineer. The long and lanky one with fierce gray eyes and a moustache to match was James B. Halloran, Jimtown's marshal. The pair ushered Quincannon into a private office inside the depot, where a third man waited—heavy-set, clean-shaven, dressed in a black broadcloth suit spotted with cigar ash and overlain with a gold watch chain as large and ornate as any Quincannon had ever seen. This was C.W. Cromarty, the railroad's division superintendent.

  Cromarty's desk was stacked with profiles, cross-sections, and specification sheets for bridges, rails, switches, and other material; arranged behind it was a series of drafting boards containing location and contour maps of the area. All of this, Quincannon later learned, was for the continuation of the road's branch line to Angels Camp. The branch had been completed as far as Tuttletown, where the trouble that had brought him here had taken place three nights ago.

  Cromarty said, after they'd shaken hands, “We'll make this conference brief, Mr. Quincannon. A freight is due in from Tuttletown any minute. As soon as it arrives, we'll leave in my private car."

  Quincannon produced his stubby briar and pouch of Navy Plug and began thumbing tobacco into the bowl. “Has any new information come to light on the robbery?"

  "None so far."

  The engineer, Newell, said, “Tuttletown's constable, George Teague, would have sent word if he'd learned anything. He's a good man, Teague, but out of his element in a matter such as this. We'll be relying on you, Mr. Quincannon."

  "A well-placed reliance, I assure you."

  "Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?” Halloran said around the stub of a slender cheroot. His voice and his expression both held a faint sneer.

  "With just cause."

  "That
remains to be seen. You may have a fancy-pants reputation as a detective in San Francisco, you and that woman of yours, but you don't cut no ice up here."

  Quincannon bristled at this—literally. When his ire was aroused, the hairs in his dark freebooter's beard stiffened and quivered like a porcupine's quills. He fixed Halloran with an eye more fierce than the marshal's own as he said, “Sabina Carpenter is my partner, not ‘my woman'—a Pinkerton-trained detective the equal of any man."

  "So you say. Me, I never put much stock in a man that'd partner up with a female, trained or not."

  "And I put no stock at all in one who blathers about matters he knows nothing about."

  Cromarty said, “Here, that'll be enough of that. Marshal, this is a railroad matter, as you well know. The decision to hire Mr. Quincannon has been made and will be abided by."

  "I still say I can do a better job than some citified puff-belly."

  Quincannon bit back a triple-jointed retort. A fee to fatten the bank account of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, had been requested in his reply to Cromarty's first wire, and agreed upon in his second. It wouldn't do to get into a sparring match with a small-town peacekeeper who had no say in the matter and no jurisdiction outside his own bailiwick.

  He made a point of ignoring Halloran while he fired his pipe with a lucifer. When it was drawing to his satisfaction, he said to Cromarty, “Now then, Superintendent—suppose you provide the details of the robbery left out of your wire. What was the contents of the safe that was stolen?"

  "Ten thousand dollars in gold dust and bullion from two of the mines near Tuttletown, awaiting shipment here and on to Stockton."

  "A considerable sum. Why was it being kept in the express office overnight?"

  "The shipment didn't arrive in time for the last train that afternoon. The Tuttletown agent felt no cause for concern."

  "Damn fool,” Halloran muttered.

  "No, I don't blame Booker. We all believed the gold was secure where it was. What we overlooked was the audacity of thieves who would carry off a four-hundred-pound burglarproof safe in the middle of the night."

  Quincannon said, “Burglarproof?"

  "A brand-new model, guaranteed as such by the manufacturer."

  "I've heard such guarantees before."

  "This one has been proven to our satisfaction,” Cromarty said. “Sierra Railway Express now uses them exclusively."

  "What type of safe is it?"

  "Cannon Breech, with a circular door made of reinforced steel. The dial and spindle can be removed once the combination is set, and when that has been done, the safe is virtually impenetrable and indestructible. Not even the most accomplished cracksman has been able to breach it."

  "And the dial and spindle were removed in this case?"

  "Yes. Booker did that before he locked up and took them home with him. He still has them and swears they were never out of his sight."

  "Virtually impenetrable and indestructible, you said? Even with explosives? Dynamite or nitroglycerin inserted in the dial hole in the door?"

  "Can't be done, according to the safe company,” Newell said. “You couldn't open a dialless one with a pile driver."

  Quincannon remained dubious. Ingenuity could be a two-edged sword, as he well knew; if a burglarproof safe could be built, a way to breach it could likewise be found. “Is this fact common knowledge locally?” he asked.

  "I wouldn't say common knowledge, but we've made no secret of the fact."

  Then why had the thieves—thieves, plural, for it would have taken at least two strong men to carry 400 pounds of gold-filled steel—broken into the express office and made off with the safe? Halfwits who refused to believe the burglarproof claim? Professional yeggs?

  A large, heavy wagon would have been required to transport the safe from the Tuttletown depot, but there was no potential clue in that fact; ore and freight wagons plied the area in large numbers. Nor was there any way to tell in which direction the plunder had been taken, or how far. Two main roads crossed at Tuttletown, one running northward to Angels Camp and the other southward toward Stockton, and there were also a number of intermediate roads connecting with other Mother Lode communities. The town had been the hub of mining activity since placer days, surrounded by a cluster of settlements so close that pioneers from Jackass Hill, Mormon Gulch, and half a dozen others on the west side of Table Mountain could walk into Tuttletown to shop.

  These facts had made the town a prime target for thieves before. In the 1880s, the notorious poetry-spouting bandit Black Bart had filched three Wells Fargo stage shipments of bullion and dust amounting to five thousand dollars from the nearby Patterson Mine. Quincannon had been with the Secret Service on the east coast at that time—it wasn't until 1891 that he'd been transferred west to the Service's San Francisco office—so he'd had no opportunity to pit his detective skills against Black Bart's criminal wiles. If he had, he'd once confided to Sabina, there was little doubt that he would have been the one to put an end to the bandit's criminal career.

  Outside, a distant train whistle sounded. One long, mournful blast, followed closely by a second.

  "That's the Tuttletown freight, Mr. Quincannon,” Cromarty said. “We'll take our departure as soon as the main tracks are clear."

  The superintendent's private car waited on a siding at the near end of the rail yards, coupled to a Baldwin 4-4-0 locomotive. Cromarty, Newell, and Quincannon were the only passengers; Halloran left them at the depot to return to his duties as Jimtown's marshal, with a parting remark about cocksure flycops that Quincannon pretended not to hear. When he resolved this stolen safe business, he vowed to himself, he would not leave Jamestown until he looked up James B. Halloran and claimed the last word.

  The car appeared ordinary enough on the outside, but the interior was well appointed with comfortable seats and dining and sleeping compartments. It also contained a pair of ceiling fans and a potbelly stove. The comfort, plus a late lunch once they were underway, improved Quincannon's mood considerably.

  The Angels extension branched off Sierra's main line in front of the Nevills Hotel, bridged a creek at the north end of town, then climbed a steep grade to a cut high on Table Mountain. Over on the mountain's west side, the tracks swept down another steep grade and curved around a wide valley and several working mines before swinging northward into Tuttletown. The place was a smaller but no less busy and noise-laden version of Jamestown, its narrow streets, stores, and brace of saloons clogged with off-shift miners and railroad workers from the crews engaged in laying new track and constructing what Cromarty described as a “fifty-foot-high, seventeen-bent wooden trestle” across the Stanislaus River to the north.

  A one-man reception committee awaited them here. As soon as the Baldwin hissed to a stop, Quincannon, looking through the window, saw a thin, balding man come out from under the platform roof and hurry over to the car. He was waiting when the three men stepped down, mopping his face with a bandana. Despite the fact that the day was cool and overcast, he was sweating profusely.

  Cromarty said, “Hello, Booker,” which marked him as the Tuttletown express agent, Howard Booker. “This is John Quincannon, the detective I sent for. Where's Marshal Teague?"

  Booker said excitedly, “I got news, Mr. Cromarty. Big news. The safe's been found."

  "Found, you say? When? Where?"

  "About an hour ago. In a field on Icehouse Road. Teague's out there now with the rancher who found it."

  "Bully! Abandoned by the thieves, eh?"

  "Abandoned, all right, but the news ain't bully."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Turns out that burglarproof safe's no such thing,” Booker said. “She's been opened somehow and she's empty. The gold's gone."

  * * * *

  Icehouse Road, obviously named after the stone building with ICE painted on its front wall that squatted alongside a wide creek, serpentined away from town into the hilly countryside. The buggy that Booker had had waiti
ng for them bounced through chuckholes and over thick-grassed hummocks. A grim-visaged C.W. Cromarty sat up front with the express agent, Quincannon on the backseat with Newell. All four kept their own counsel on the quarter-mile ride.

  Around a bend, a broad meadow opened up near where the road forked ahead. Oak and manzanita, and outcroppings of rock, spotted the high grass. A buckboard and a saddled chestnut partially blocked the road, and under one of the large oaks twenty rods away, a group of three men stood waiting. One of the men, a leaned-down gent with a handlebar moustache, detached himself from the others and hurried out to meet the rig. The star pinned to his vest identified him as the local constable, George Teague.

  He said to Cromarty, “Damnedest thing you ever saw, Mr. Cromarty. Just the damnedest thing. I couldn't hardly believe my eyes."

  "Who found the safe?"

  "Sam Higgins. He's a dairy rancher lives farther out this way."

  Quincannon asked, “Have you discovered anything else here?"

  "Just a line of trampled grass. Looks like the safe was carried in from the road.” Teague paused. “You the detective from San Francisco?"

  Cromarty answered the question and introduced them. Then he said in pained tones, “Very well. Let's have a look at it."

  The safe lay tilted on its side in the oak's shade, one corner dug deep into the grassy earth. The black circular door, bearing the words Sierra Railway Express in gold leaf, was open and partially detached, hanging by a single bolt from a bent hinge. Cromarty and Newell stood staring down at it, mouths pinched tight. Quincannon stepped past them, lowered himself to one knee for a closer study.

  "She wasn't blowed open,” Teague said behind him. “You can see that plain enough."