The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  “Is that what you think happened, Officer?”

  “Aye, and what else could it be, with all the doors and windows locked and no one else on the premises?”

  Suicide? Faugh! Murder was what else it could be, and murder was what it was, despite the circumstances. Three things told Quincannon this beyond any doubt. Sonderberg had been shot twice in the chest, a location handgun suicides seldom chose because it necessitated holding the weapon at an awkward angle, and one of the wounds was high on the left side in a nonlethal spot. The pistol that had fired the two rounds lay some distance away from the dead man, too far for it to have been dropped if he had fired the fatal shot. And the most damning evidence: the satchel containing the $5,000 blackmail payoff was nowhere to be seen here or in the front part of the shop.

  But Quincannon shrugged and said nothing. Let the bluecoat believe what he liked. The dispatching of R. Sonderberg was part and parcel to the blackmail game, and that made it John Quincannon’s meat.

  “I’ll be needing to report in to headquarters,” Maguire said. “The nearest callbox is on Jessie, two blocks distant. You’ll stay here, will you, and keep out any curious citizens until I return, Mr.—?”

  “Quinn. That I will, Officer.”

  “Quinn, is it? You’ll be Irish yourself, then?”

  “Scotch-Irish,” Quincannon said.

  Maguire hurried out. As soon as he was alone, Quincannon commenced a search of the premises. The dead man’s coat and trouser pockets yielded nothing of value or interest other than an expired insurance card that confirmed his identity as Raymond Sonderberg. The pistol that had done for him was a small-caliber Colt, its chambers fully loaded except for the two fired rounds; it bore no identifying marks of any kind. The $5,000 was not in the room, nor was whatever blackmail evidence had been withheld from Titus Willard tonight.

  The bolt on the rear door was tightly drawn, the door itself sturdy in its frame; and for good measure a wooden bar set into brackets spanned its width. Sonderberg had been nothing if not security-conscious, for all the good it had done him. The single window was hinged upward, the swivel latch at the bottom of the sash loosely in place around its stud fastener. Quincannon flipped the hook aside and raised the glass to peer again at the vertical bars. They were set tightly top and bottom; he couldn’t budge any of them. And as close together as they were, there was no way in which anything as bulky as the satchel could have passed between them.

  Sonderberg had brought the satchel inside with him, there could be no mistaking that. Whoever had shot him had made off with it; that, too, was plain enough. But how the devil could the assassin have committed his crime and then escaped from not one but two sealed rooms in the clutch of seconds that had passed between the firing of the fatal shots and Quincannon’s entry into the side passage?

  The night’s stillness was broken now by the sound of voices out front, but as yet none of the bystanders had attempted to come inside. Muttering to himself, Quincannon lowered the window and made his way out through the cigar store to stand in the broken doorway.

  The parlor of the house next door, he noted, was now dark and the white-haired occupant had come out to stand, shawl-draped and leaning on a cane, on the small front porch. The others gathered in Gunpowder Alley numbered less than a dozen, drawn from nearby houses and the Jessie Street watering hole, among them the man in the cape and high hat, who now assailed him with questions. Quincannon provided only enough information, repeating Maguire’s false theory of suicide, to dampen the bystanders’ enthusiasm; shootings were common in the city, and there was not enough spice in a self-dispatching to hold the jaded citizens’ interest. He then sought information of his own, but none of the crowd owned up to seeing Sonderberg or anyone else enter the cigar store after its six o’clock closing.

  Some of the men were already moving away to homes and saloon when Maguire returned. The bluecoat dispersed the rest. The elderly woman still stood on the porch; it was not until the alley was mostly deserted again that she doddered back inside the darkened house.

  Quincannon asked Maguire if he knew the woman’s name and whether or not she lived alone. “I couldn’t tell you, lad,” the patrolman said. “I’ve not seen her before—the house has always been dark when I’ve come by.”

  The morgue wagon and a trio of other bluecoats arrived shortly. None of them was interested in Quincannon. Neither was Maguire any longer. San Francisco’s finest, a misnomer if ever there was one, found suicides and those peripherally involved to be worthy of little time or attention. While the minions of the law were inside with the remains of Raymond Sonderberg, he remembered his dropped umbrella and mounted a brief search, but it was nowhere to be found. One of the onlookers must have made off with it. Faugh! Thieves everywhere in this infernal city!

  He crossed to the adjacent house. The parlor window was curtained now, no light showing around its edges. The bell pull beside the door no longer worked; he rapped on the panel instead. There was no immediate response. Mayhap the white-haired woman wanted no truck with visitors after the night’s excitement, or had already retired—

  Neither. Old boards creaked and a thin, quavery voice asked, “Yes? Who’s there?”

  “Police officer,” Quincannon lied glibly. “A few questions if I may. I won’t keep you long.”

  There was a longish pause, followed by the click of a bolt being thrown; the door squeaked open partway and the old woman appeared. Stooped, still bundled in a shawl over a black dress, she carried her cane in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. A cold draft set the candle flame to flickering in its ceramic holder, so that it cast patterns of light and shadow over her heavily seamed face as she peered out and up at him.

  “I know you,” she said. “You were here before all the commotion next door.”

  “You spied me through your parlor window, eh? I thought as much, Mrs.—?”

  “Carver. Letitia Carver. Yes, I often sit looking out in the evenings. A person my age has little else to occupy her attention.”

  “Did you see anyone enter or leave the cigar store at any time tonight?”

  “No, no one. What happened to Mr. Sonderberg?”

  “Shot dead in his quarters.”

  “Oh!”

  “Possibly by his own hand, more likely by an intruder. You heard the shots, did you?”

  “Yes. I thought that’s what they were, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “You live here alone, Mrs. Carver?”

  “Since my husband passed on, bless his soul.”

  “And you’ve had no visitors tonight?”

  She sighed wistfully. “Few come to visit me anymore.”

  “Did you hear anyone moving about in the side or rear passages, before or after the pistol shots?”

  “Only you and the other policeman.” She sighed again, sadly this time. “Such a tragedy. Poor Mr. Sonderberg.”

  Poor Mr. Sonderberg, my hat, Quincannon thought. Poor Titus Willard, who was now bereft of $10,000. And poor Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, who were out a substantial fee if the mystery of Sonderberg’s death remained unsolved.

  The woman said in her quavery voice, “Is there anything more, young man? It’s quite chilly standing here.”

  “Nothing more.”

  She retreated inside and he returned to the boardwalk. R. Sonderberg’s body was in the process of being loaded into the morgue wagon. None of the policemen even glanced in Quincannon’s direction as he crossed the alley and made his way to Jessie Street, his thoughts as dark and gloomy as the night around him.

  Sabina was already at her desk when he walked into the Market Street offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, the next morning. She was a handsome woman, his partner and unrequited love—the possessor of a fine figure, eyes the color of the sea at dusk, and sleek black hair layered high on her head and fastened with a jeweled comb. Today she wore one of the leg-of-mutton blouses which he usually found enticing, but his
mood was such that he took only peripheral notice of her. His night had been a mostly sleepless one in which he’d wrestled unsuccessfully with the problem of how R. Sonderberg had been murdered and by whom. His lack of success was all the more frustrating because he prided himself on having an uncanny knack for unraveling even the knottiest of seemingly impossible problems.

  Sabina said, as he shed his umbrella and rain-spotted overcoat, “Titus Willard telephoned a few minutes ago. He was upset that you failed to contact him last night.”

  “Bah.”

  “Well, he asked that you get in touch with him as soon as you arrived.”

  “I’ll see him later this morning. He won’t be pleased to hear the news I have for him at any time.”

  “You weren’t able to identify the blackmailer, then?”

  “On the contrary. The blackmailer’s name is, or was, Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. He was murdered in his locked quarters before I could confront him and recover the blackmail evidence and payoff money.”

  “Murdered? So that’s why you’re in such a foul humor this morning.”

  “What makes you think my humor is foul?”

  “The scowl you’re wearing, for one thing. You look like a pirate on his way to the gibbet.”

  “Bah,” Quincannon said again.

  “Exactly what happened last night, John?”

  He sat at his desk and provided her with a detailed summary. They often shared information on difficult cases in order to obtain a fresh perspective. Sabina’s years as a Pink Rose, one of the select handful of women operatives hired by the Pinkerton Agency, plus the four years of their partnership had honed her skills to a fine edge. He would never have admitted it to her or anyone else, but she was often his equal at the more challenging aspects of the sleuthing game.

  “A puzzling series of events, to be sure,” Sabina said when he finished his account. “But perhaps not as mysterious as they might seem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know from experience, John, that such mysteries generally have a relatively simple explanation.”

  He admitted the truth of this. “But I’m hanged if I can see it in this case.”

  “Well, the first question that occurs to me, was the crime planned or committed on the spur of the moment?”

  “If it was planned, it was done in order to silence Sonderberg and make off with the five thousand dollars.”

  “By an accomplice in the blackmail scheme.”

  “So it would seem. The accomplice must have been waiting for him in his quarters. The stove there was glowing hot, and there was not enough time for Sonderberg to have stoked the fire to high heat, even if he’d built it up before he left for the Hotel Grant.”

  “Then why all the mystification?” Sabina asked. “Why not simply shoot Sonderberg and slip away into the night with the loot?”

  “To make murder appear to be suicide.”

  “That could have been accomplished without resorting to such elaborate flummery. Locked rooms and mysterious disappearances smack of deliberate subterfuge.”

  “Aye, so they do. But to what purpose?”

  “The obvious answer is to fool someone in close proximity at the time.”

  “Who? Not me, surely. No one could have known ahead of time that I would follow Sonderberg from the hotel to Gunpowder Alley.”

  “The bluecoat, Maguire, then,” Sabina said. “From your description of him, he’s the sort who makes his rounds on a by-the-clock schedule. Still, it seems rather an intricate game just to confuse a simple patrolman.”

  “If the whole was planned ahead of time, and not a result of circumstance.”

  “In either case, there has to be a plausible explanation. Are you certain there was no possible means of escape from Sonderberg’s building following the shooting?”

  “Front and rear entrances bolted from the inside, the door to his living quarters likewise bolted, the only window both barred and locked. Yes, I’m certain of that much.”

  “Doesn’t it follow, then, that if escape was impossible, the murderer was never inside the building?”

  “It would,” Quincannon said, “except for three facts that indicate otherwise. The missing satchel and greenbacks; the presence of the whiskey bottle and two glasses on the table; the pistol that dispatched Sonderberg lying at a distance from the body. There can be no doubt that both killer and victim were together inside that sealed room.”

  “The thump you heard just after the shots were fired. Can you find any significance in that?”

  “None so far. It might have been a foot striking a wall—that sort of sound.”

  “But loud enough to carry out to Gunpowder Alley. Did you also hear running steps?”

  “No. No other sounds at all.” Quincannon stood and began to restlessly pace the office. “The murderer’s vanishing act is just as befuddling. Even if he managed to extricate himself from the building, how the devil was he able to disappear so quickly? Not even a cat could have climbed those fences enclosing the rear walkway. Nor the warehouse wall, not that such a scramble would have done him any good with all its windows steel-shuttered.”

  “Which leaves only one possible escape route.”

  “The rear door to Letitia Carver’s house, yes. But it was bolted when I tried it, and she claims not to have had any visitors.”

  “She could have been lying.”

  Quincannon conceded that she could have been.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that she herself could be the culprit?”

  “She’s eighty if she’s a day,” he said. “Besides, I saw her sitting in her parlor window not two minutes before the shots were fired.”

  “Lying to protect the guilty party, possibly. Perhaps a relative. In which case the murderer was hiding in the house while you spoke to her.”

  “A galling possibility, if true.” Quincannon paused, glowering, to run fingers through his thick beard. “The crone seemed innocent enough, yet now that I consider it, there was something... odd about her.”

  “Furtive, you mean?”

  “No. Her actions, her words... I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “Why don’t you have another talk with her, John?”

  “That,” Quincannon said, “is what I intend to do straightaway.”

  Gunpowder Alley was no more appealing by daylight than it had been under the cloak of darkness. Heavy rain during the early morning hours had slackened into another dreary drizzle, and the buildings encompassing the alley’s short length all had a huddled appearance, bleak and sodden under the wet gray sky.

  The cul-de-sac was deserted when Quincannon, dry beneath a newly purchased umbrella, turned into it from Jessie Street. Boards had been nailed across the front entrance to the cigar store and a police seal applied to forestall potential looters. At the house next door, tattered curtains still covered the parlor window.

  He stood looking at the window for a few seconds, his mind jostled by memory fragments—words spoken to him by Maguire, others by Letitia Carver. Quickly, then, he climbed to the porch and rapped on the front door. Neither that series of knocks nor two more brought a response.

  His resolve, sharpened now, prodded him to action. In his pocket he carried a set of lock picks which he’d purchased from an ex-housebreaker living in Warsaw, Illinois, who manufactured burglar tools, advertised them as novelties in the Police Gazette, and sold them for ten dollars the set. He set to work with these on the flimsy door lock and within seconds had the bolt snicked free.

  In the foyer inside, he paused to listen. No sounds reached his ears save for the random creaks of old, wet timbers. He called loudly, “Hello! Anyone here?” Faint echoes of his voice were all the answer he received.

  He moved through an archway into the parlor. The room was cold, decidedly musty; no fire had burned in the grate in a long while, certainly not as recently as last night. The furniture was sparse and had the worn look of
discards. One arm of the rocking chair set near the curtained window was broken, bent outward at an angle. The lamp on the rickety table next to it was as cold as the air.

  Glowering fiercely now, Quincannon set off on a rapid search of the premises upstairs and down. There were scattered pieces of furniture in two other rooms, including a sagging iron bedstead sans mattress in what might have been the master bedroom; the remaining rooms were empty. A closet in the foyer contained a single item that brought forth a blistering, triple-jointed oath.

  He left the house, grumbling and growling, and stepped into the side passage for another examination of the barred window to Sonderberg’s quarters. Then he moved on to the cross passage at the rear, where a quick study confirmed his judgments of the night before: there was no possible exit at either end, both fences too tall and slippery to be scaled.

  Out front again, he embarked on a rapid canvass of the immediate neighborhood. He spoke to two residents of Gunpowder Alley and the bartender at the saloon on the Jessie Street corner, corroborating one fact he already knew and learning another that surprised him not at all.

  The first: The house next to the cigar store had been empty for four months, a possibility he should have suspected much sooner from the pair of conflicting statements he’d finally recalled—Maguire’s that in the two weeks he’d patrolled Gunpowder Alley the parlor window had always been dark, the woman calling herself Letitia Carver’s that she often sat there at night looking out.

  And the second fact: Raymond Sonderberg, a man who kept mostly to himself and eked out a meager living selling cigars and sundries, was known to frequent variety houses and melodeons such as the Bella Union on Portsmouth Square.

  The mystery surrounding Sonderberg’s death was no longer a mystery. And should not have been one as long as it had; Quincannon felt like a damned rattlepate for allowing himself to be duped and fuddled by what was, as Sabina had suggested, a crime with an essentially simple explanation. For he knew now how and why Sonderberg had been murdered in his locked quarters. And was tolerably sure of who had done the deed—the only person, given the circumstances, it could possibly be.