The Spook Lights Affair (3 page)

“Obviously she didn’t think so. Young girls take life very seriously, Mr. St. Ives. And love as well.”

“Love? She wasn’t in love with anyone.”

“Your father believed she might be.”

“That damned rascal Lucas Whiffing? Nonsense. She was upset at not being allowed to see him, but not despondent over it.”

“Isn’t it possible she simply slipped and fell?” Mayor Sutro asked Sabina.

“No, sir. She jumped from the parapet.”

“You saw this clearly? Fog has a way of distorting what one observes from a distance.”

“Clearly enough not to be mistaken.”

“I still don’t believe it.” David St. Ives was glaring at her; she could feel as well as see the intensity of his stare in the lantern light as the coach rattled at a rapid pace along the carriageway. He was an arrogant, vain young man whom Sabina had disliked on their first meeting; his attitude now was even more overbearing and offensive, despite his obvious grief. “You were hired to watch over my sister, Mrs. Carpenter,” he said angrily. “How could you let something like this happen?”

“I had no way of knowing what she was planning to do. I thought she was intent on meeting someone on the parapet. Lucas Whiffing, perhaps.”

“Did you speak to her when you saw she was alone out there? Try to save her?”

“There was no time to do either. I called her name, but either she didn’t hear me or ignored my shout—”

“I still hold you responsible. You had words with her in the salon before she ran out. Everyone heard what was said.”

“Her voice was raised, yes, but not mine. I said nothing to provoke her. Besides, she’d already made up her mind—the suicide note had already been written.”

“Damn the suicide note! You could have saved her and you didn’t—that’s the inexcusable fact. You’ll pay dearly for your dereliction, I promise you that!”

Mayor Sutro, sitting on the seat facing David St. Ives, leaned across to grip his knee. “That’s enough, young man. This is tragedy enough without you compounding it with threats.”

St. Ives muttered something under his breath, then lapsed into a brooding silence.

They were passing through the estate’s arched entrance now, onto Point Lobos Avenue. The coach driver whipped his brace of horses into a fast downhill run. The fog was so dense that the Cliff House and Sutro Baths, the mayor’s new and as yet unfinished gifts to the city, were invisible along the promontories below. And the intersection with the Great Highway materialized so abruptly that the driver was forced to brake sharply in order to make the turn.

No lights showed along the highway’s sand-strewn expanse. There was little traffic in this part of the city at night, especially when the ocean fog was this thick. The coach clattered ahead, its side lanterns illuminating the bottom edges of the bare cliff wall. Abruptly, then, the driver braked again and the rig ground to a rocking halt. Sabina thought it must be because he had seen Virginia St. Ives’ broken remains in the roadway ahead. But when she alighted along with the three men, Sutro and St. Ives carrying the lanterns, she saw that this was not the case.

What lay on the highway, in close to the cliff, was a rock the size of a small boulder that had evidently been dislodged during the fall. The girl’s body must be somewhere close by, hidden by the restless mist. But to Sabina’s surprise and consternation, this, too, turned out not to be the case.

A long, careful search of the highway revealed no sign of Virginia, alive or dead.

“It’s possible someone came along and found her,” Mayor Sutro said when the four of them stood with the driver in a bewildered group alongside the coach. “But my home is the nearest habitation and we would surely have encountered anyone entering the grounds. Nor did we pass another vehicle on the way down Point Lobos.”

“Dickey’s Road House is less than a mile from here,” Sabina said.

“Yes, that’s so. Unlikely, but … we’ll drive down there and see.”

“If she wasn’t taken to Dickey’s,” David St. Ives said, “then she
couldn’t
have gone over the cliff. She must be caught on a tree or outcropping somewhere up above. Unconscious, or we’d have heard her cry for help.”

Sabina would have liked to believe that, but she didn’t. “The strip of ground below the parapet was empty,” she said, “and marks in the ice plant are visible to the edge.”

“Then she must have fallen all the way down,” Mayor Sutro said. “The cliff face is sheer below that strip.”

Dr. Bowers spoke for the first time. “I’m afraid there’s no doubt of it, if this belongs to the girl. I found it near the dislodged rock.”

What he was holding in his hand, outstretched into the glow of the mayor’s lantern, was a wisp of white cloth caught on a torn-off cypress limb. Sabina recognized it immediately: the distinctive butterfly scarf that had fluttered from the post-deb’s neck as she’d danced in the salon.

“It’s Virginia’s,” her brother confirmed.

The round trip to Dickey’s Road House, a popular breakfast stop for some of the more hardy and adventurous habitués of the Cocktail Route, took half an hour. And proved futile. No one there knew anything about Virginia St. Ives.

On the solemn ride back to Sutro Heights, David broke a long silence by putting voice to what Sabina and the others were thinking. “If nobody came by and found her … my God, then what happened to her body?”

3

QUINCANNON

The note, just delivered by runner to Quincannon’s Leavenworth Street flat, was printed in Ezra Bluefield’s distinctive back-slanted hand and typically brief and to the point:

Bob Cantwell, 209 Spear Street #3. Information for sale Express matter. Tell him C. Riley sent you.

E.B.

A smile pleated Quincannon’s thick freebooter’s beard. Leave it to Bluefield to ferret out a lead no one else had yet discovered. Saving the life of the owner of the Scarlet Lady saloon, one of the less odious Barbary Coast deadfalls, and then cultivating the ex-miner’s friendship had been repaid many times over. Bluefield had his pudgy fingers on the pulse of the city’s criminal activities in and out of the Coast and there was little he didn’t know or couldn’t find out through his extensive contacts.

The Express matter referred to a daring robbery by a lone masked man of the Wells, Fargo Express office one week ago, in which nearly $35,000 in greenbacks—a special company shipment that had just come in from the south by railroad—had been taken. The company’s detectives and the city’s bluecoats had failed to turn up a single lead, not surprisingly in the latter case given the general incompetence of the police.

In such cases as this, when all else failed, Wells, Fargo had been known to pay a reward of ten percent to private agencies such as Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, for the return of the stolen cash and the arrest and conviction of the thief. Thirty-five hundred dollars was a considerable lure and Quincannon had undertaken his own investigation in pursuit of it. Thus far he had made as little headway as the other investigators, but if Bluefield’s tip panned out, he would lay claim to the reward and add another triumph to an already auspicious career.

Bob Cantwell, eh? Quincannon, whose memory was both photographic and encyclopedic, knew the names of most of the city’s snitches and information sellers, as well as those of scores of grifters, yeggs, confidence tricksters, and other criminals, but Cantwell’s was not among them. Yet the lad must be on the shady side if he possessed knowledge of the Wells, Fargo Express robbery. A gambler, professional or amateur? Charles Riley was the hardshell owner of the House of Chance, one of the Uptown Tenderloin sporting palaces.

Before Bluefield’s runner had brought the sealed envelope, Quincannon had resigned himself to a lonely evening in his rooms, reading from Wordsworth’s
Poems, in Two Volumes
. Usually both solitude and poetry relaxed him; on this evening, however, neither helped ease a brooding restlessness. His mind kept straying to Sabina’s presence at one of Adolph Sutro’s lavish parties. Unescorted presence, blast it, in the midst of what was sure to be a gaggle of predatory males, accompanied and unaccompanied, who considered a comely widow fair game. Why the devil had she refused to allow him to join her tonight? True, she was on a job, a rather dull one with no real need of his company, but that had nothing to do with her refusal. “I’ll be busy, John, and you know you dislike formal gatherings among the social elite.” Social elite. Bah! Hobnobbing with highbrows may have been one of his least favorite activities, but where his partner was concerned, he was willing to put up with anything in order to forestall a potential assault on her favors.

Well, he would just have to trust to Sabina’s avowed distinterest in the attentions of the male sex in general, and to his conviction that if anyone succeeded in breaking through her defenses, that someone would be John Quincannon. Now that he had a lead to the Wells, Fargo reward, he would be too busy himself for any more brooding. Money honestly earned and the thrill of the chase were even stronger motivations than his pursuit of Sabina, and $3,500 was the kind of prize that stirred his blood to a fine simmer.

He shut off the gas heater, strapped on his Navy Colt, plucked his greatcoat from the hall tree, and hurried out into the cold foggy night in search of a cab.

*   *   *

The section of Spear Street where Bob Cantwell resided was close to the Embarcadero and the massive bulk of the Ferry Building. Flanking its dark length was a mix of warehouses, stores operated by ship’s chandlers and outfitters, cheap saloons, and lodging houses that catered to seamen, laborers, and shop workers. Whoever Cantwell was, he was none too well off to call this district home.

Quincannon stepped out of the hack on the corner of Spear and Mission streets. There was no one abroad as he started down Spear, at least no one visible to him in the swirling gray mist that blanketed the area. He walked swiftly and watchfully nonetheless, one hand inside his coat resting on the holstered Navy. Muggings were not so common here as in the Barbary Coast, north of Market, but the waterfront was still a rough place on dark nights; a man alone, particularly a man who was rather well dressed, was fair prey for footpads. Out on the Bay foghorns moaned in ceaseless rhythm. As he crossed Howard he had glimpses of pier sheds and the masts and steam funnels of anchored ships, gray-black and indistinct like disembodied ghosts.

Number 209 took shape ahead—a three-story firetrap built of warping wood, unpainted and sorely in need of carpentry work, set between another, smaller lodging house and a rope-and-twine chandler’s. Smears of electric light showed at the front entrance, illuminating a painted sign that grew readable as he neared:
DRAKE’S REST—ROOMS BY DAY, WEEK, MONTH.

Inside he found a short hallway, a set of stairs, and a small common room, all of which smelled of salt-damp and decay. In the common room, a scrawny harridan stood feeding crackers to an equally scrawny parrot in a wire cage. It was even money as to which owned the more evil eye, the woman or the bird. Her watery gaze ran Quincannon up and down in a hungry fashion, as if she would have liked nothing better than to knock him on the head and relieve him of his valuables.

The hunger, he soon discovered, was because she was the owner of the lodging house and there was a vacant room that wanted filling. Her interest in him waned when he informed her that he was there to see one of her tenants, Bob Cantwell, on a business matter.

“What business would a swell like you have with the likes of Bob Cantwell?” she asked.

“Mine and his, madam.”

“Madam,” she said. “Hah! Number three, upstairs, but he’s not in. Seldom is, nights.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“No. How would I know?” But the gleam in her eye said otherwise. She was another of the breed, Quincannon thought sourly, who gave out little or no information free of charge.

He fished in his pocket for coins. Faugh. He had only two, both silver dollars. Reluctantly he removed one, flipped it high so that it caught the light from a pair of lamps. The woman’s greedy gaze followed the coin’s path up and back down into his palm. She licked her thin lips.

“Now then,” he said. “Where does Bob spend his evenings?”

“I don’t keep track of my lodgers.”

The devil she didn’t. He flipped the coin again. “Frequents the Tenderloin, doesn’t he?”

“So I’ve heard. Among other sinful places.”

“Such as the Barbary Coast?”

“The devil’s playground,” she said, and the parrot cackled as if in agreement.

“A gambling man, is he?”

“Aye, and what man isn’t?”

“What’s his business, that he can afford such a pastime?”

“Real estate salesman, so he claims.”

“Which firm?”

“Hammond Realtors, Battery Street. But you won’t find him there this time of night. Off carousing and playing devil’s dice, or drinking in some saloon if he can’t afford worse.”

“Dice is his preferred game, is it?”

“So I hear tell. More’n once he’s lost his wages and been late with his rent. Next time he’ll be out on the street.”

That explained the connection between Cantwell and Charles Riley. Dice games, craps, and chuck-a-luck were the House of Chance’s specialties. Cantwell must have approached Riley with an offer to sell him his information in exchange for cash or gambling chits, and been turned down; Riley’s only business interest was in relieving his customers, more or less legitimately, of their hard-earned dollars.

“Where does Bob do his drinking in this area when he’s shy of funds?” Quincannon asked. “Any saloon in particular?”

The crone’s eyes were still on the silver dollar. Its shine and her greed kept her from any more pretense. “The Bucket of Beer,” she said.

“And where would that be?”

“Clay Street, near the Embarcadero.”

“Any others?”

“None as I know of.”

Quincannon tossed her the silver dollar. She caught it expertly, bit it between snaggle teeth. The parrot cackled and said, “Ho, money! Ho, money!” She glared at the bird, then cursed it as Quincannon turned for the door. She seemed genuinely concerned that the parrot might break out of its cage and take the coin away from her.