The Bughouse Affair: A Carpenter and Quincannon Mystery (24 page)

She opened the bottom file drawer. Inside was a stack of very old case files—and bound together by a rubber band at the back, a dozen small pocket notebooks the size of a billfold. She paged through one, then a second and a third. Each was filled with writing in Andrew Costain’s somewhat crabbed hand. The man had not only been an alcoholic and a packrat, he’d been a compulsive recorder of bits and pieces of his life. The books contained a hodgepodge of jottings—calendar dates, brief chronicles of activities both social and professional, notes concerning clients and points of law, accounts of trips taken and trips planned, comments on sporting and social events, lists of figures in what appeared to be some kind of personal code, doodlings, even fragments of poorly conceived poetry.

John said, “What’s that you have there?” He had finished with the desk and come over to stand behind her.

She showed him the most recent book, which spanned the period from January through August of the current year. He flipped through it until he reached the coded list of figures. Those pages he studied carefully, a small smile lifting the corners of his mouth.

“The figures mean something to you?” she asked.

“A list of gambling wagers, unless I miss my guess, at such establishments as the House of Chance. With far more losses noted than winnings.”

“One of the reasons Costain was in financial straits, then.”

“Yes. The final piece of the puzzle, by Godfrey.”

“Well?”

But he just smiled his well-fed wolf’s smile and refused to elaborate. Instead he ushered her out of the offices, relocking the door behind him. They left the building without incident, and soon parted company at a nearby hack stand.

Her partner’s cryptic behavior would have irritated her more than it did if not for the fact that the search had also provided her with the final pieces of the Clara Wilds puzzle. If John chose to keep his conclusions secret until he deemed it suitable to announce them, then she would do the same with hers.

*   *   *

Sabina let herself into her furnished Russian Hill flat and for a moment leaned wearily against the closed door. A long day, and a productive one, but she was glad to be back in this comfortable nest she’d created for herself. Adam twined around her ankles, making soft burbling sounds that she knew were a plea for food.

“Yes, I know you’re hungry. I am, too.”

She removed her cloak and hung it on the oak hall tree. In the small parlor with its Morris chair and rather ugly Beauchamp settee, she lighted the gas heater to relieve the evening chill, then went into the tiny kitchen. She took chopped chicken livers from the icebox under the sink and served them to the kitten on one of the few remaining pieces of her grandmother’s Sevres china, a delicate floral pattern that had not stood up well to her several moves.

Her larder was not well stocked; she had been too busy to do marketing this week. But the piece of smoked salmon and the bay shrimp she’d purchased from Tony the Fish Monger would be more than enough for her dinner. To go with them she heated a cup of clam broth on the cumbersome black-iron stove, set out crackers to go with the seafood.

Solitary meals did not displease her. She and Stephen had often had differing schedules and frequently ate alone. What she missed was the notes they’d left for each other: little lovers’ missives, often jokingly worded in a fashion calculated to produce smiles and chuckles. Stephen had left one for her the night before he died, its exact wording forever etched in her memory.

My dearest helpmeet,

There is dust on my bureau. If you persist in ignoring your housewifely duties, I will divorce you and marry a fat Cuban lady.

The case I am on being neither a difficult, protracted, nor dangerous one, I look forward to seeing you and my well-dusted bureau tomorrow evening.

Your exasperated but loving husband,
Stephen

She had laughed heartily, with not an inkling that it would be the last laughter to come from her for many months. For when she read the note, her loving husband was already lying dead in a Denver alleyway.

Sighing, she cleared the table and washed the dishes. Usually she spent her post-prandial hours in the parlor writing personal letters or reading
Harper’s Bazaar, The Cosmopolitan,
and a magazine that most proper ladies of the day avoided as shocking fare, the
National Police Gazette
. This evening she sat with pad and paper and carefully set down all the information she’d gleaned during her investigation and the conclusions she drew from them. She often did this when a case was nearing its closure. Hers was an orderly mind, unlike her partner’s; creating a careful written outline of facts, observations, and suppositions satisfied her that she hadn’t overlooked anything important and had events detailed in their proper sequence.

The last thing John had said to her before their parting earlier was, “There will be a public unveiling of the facts tomorrow, my dear, just as that blasted Englishman wants. Only I’ll be the one to arrange it. And I’ll be the one to take the credit.”

Given his flair for the dramatic, Sabina thought, he would no doubt put on quite a performance. But he wouldn’t be alone on whatever stage he set, and for once he wouldn’t receive all the applause.

27

QUINCANNON

It took him most of the following morning to contact the principals in the Costain case and arrange for them to assemble in the offices of Great Western Insurance at one o’clock that afternoon. All were already present when he and Sabina entered the anteroom on the stroke of one. Penelope Costain, the crackbrain Sherlock in the company of Dr. Caleb Axminster, and the doltish Prussian, Kleinhoffer. He had invited Kleinhoffer not so much in his official capacity but to bask in the copper’s reaction to a demonstration of genuine detective work.

Quincannon was in fine fettle. He had slept well, as he normally did when he was about to bring a case to a successful conclusion, breakfasted well, and was eager for the proceedings to unfold. Sabina, too, seemed to have spent a restful night and was in good spirits. He had expected her to ask questions and demand answers, as she had before their sojourn to Andrew Costain’s law offices last night. But she had remained curiously silent, a small, private smile lurking at the corners of her mouth, before departing on an unrevealed errand that kept her away from the agency for more than two hours.

In a body they were shown into Jackson Pollard’s private sanctum, a large but spartan room with no permanent fixtures beyond a desk, a telephone, and a bank of filing cabinets. Chairs had been brought in to accommodate the group. Pollard wore his usual brusque expression, and behind his spectacles his bugged eyes issued a mute warning when he regarded Quincannon. The little claims adjustor had not been pleased when he’d been refused any advance knowledge of the meeting’s purpose.

Everyone sat down except Quincannon. Holmes lit his oily clay pipe and sat in a relaxed posture, his eyes bright with anticipation. Sabina sat quietly with hands clasped in her lap; patience was one of her many virtues. Penelope Costain was like a statue in her chair, her small black eyes unblinking and her head stiffly tipped, fingers toying with a tigereye and agate locket at the throat of a high-collared black dress. Dr. Axminster sucked on horehound drops, wearing the bright-eyed, expectant look of a small boy on Christmas morning. Kleinhoffer’s red face was bent into a sneer, as if he considered this business a waste of his time.

Pollard said, “Well, Quincannon? Get on with it. And what you have to say had better be worthwhile.”

“It will be,” Quincannon assured him. “First of all, Dodger Brown is in custody awaiting formal charges. I tracked him down late yesterday and handed him over to the authorities.”

Kleinhoffer stirred and said gruffly, “Not to me, you didn’t.”

“No, to Sergeant Percy at the city jail. You hadn’t come on duty yet.”

“Nobody told me about it today.”

“The sergeant’s fault, not mine.”

“You didn’t inform me, either,” Pollard said. “Not last night and not earlier today. Why not?”

“I came straight here from the Hall of Justice last evening, but you’d already gone.”

“You could have told me this morning. Why didn’t you?”

“I had my reasons.”

“Yes? Well, what about all the valuables Brown stole? I don’t suppose you recovered any of them?”

“Ah, but I did.”

Quincannon drew out the sack of valuables, which he’d removed from the office safe before coming to Great Western, and with a flourish, placed it on Pollard’s desk blotter. The little claims adjustor seemed pacified as he spread the contents out in front of him, but once he’d sifted through the lot some of his ill temper returned. “All present and accounted for from the first three burglaries,” he said. “But none of Mrs. Costain’s losses is here.”

“I haven’t recovered those items as yet.”

“Well? Do you have any idea what Brown did with them?”

“He did nothing with them. He never had them.”

“Never had them, you say?”

“Dodger Brown didn’t burgle the Costain home,” Quincannon said. “Nor is he the murderer of Andrew Costain.”

Kleinhoffer made a noise not unlike the grunt of a rooting shoat. Pollard blinked owlishly behind his spectacles. “Then who did burgle it?”

“No one.”

“Come, come, man, speak plainly, say what you mean.”

“It was Andrew Costain who planned the theft, with the aid of an accomplice, and it was the accomplice who punctured him and made off with the contents of the valuables case.”

This announcement brought an “Ahh!” from Dr. Axminster. Sabina arched one of her fine eyebrows, but not as if she were surprised. Even Kleinhoffer and the bughouse Sherlock sat up straight in their chairs. The reactions fueled Quincannon’s ardor. He was in his element now, and enjoying himself immensely.

Penelope Costain said icily, “That is a ridiculous accusation. Why on earth would my husband conspire to rob his own home?”

“To defraud the Great Western Insurance Company. For monetary gain, so he could pay off his substantial gambling debts. You knew he was a compulsive gambler, didn’t you, Mrs. Costain? And that his finances had been severely depleted and his practice had suffered setbacks as a result of his addiction?”

“I knew of no such thing.”

“If what you say is true,” Pollard said to Quincannon, “how did
you
find it out?”

“I was suspicious of the man from the moment he asked me to stand watch on his property.” This was not quite true, but what harm in a little embellishment? “Two nights ago at Dr. Axminster’s home, Costain seemed to consider me incompetent for allowing Dodger Brown to escape from the Truesdales’. Why then would he choose me of all people to protect his property? The answer is that he wanted a detective he considered inept to bear witness to a cleverly staged break-in. Underestimating me was his first mistake.”

“Was that the only thing that made you suspicious?”

“No. Costain admitted it was unlikely that a professional housebreaker, having had a close call the previous night, would risk another crime so soon, yet he would have me believe his fear was so great, he was willing to pay dear for not one but two operatives to stand surveillance on one or two nights. An outlay of funds he could ill afford, for it was plain from his heavy drinking and the condition of his office that he had fallen on difficult times. He also made two dubious claims—that he had no time to remove valuables from his home and hide them elsewhere until the burglar was apprehended, and that he had no desire to cancel ‘important engagements’ in order to guard the premises himself.”

Dr. Axminster asked, “So you accepted the job in order to find out what he was up to?”

“Yes.” Another embellishment. He had accepted it for the money—no fool, John Quincannon. “Subsequent investigation revealed Costain’s gambling addiction and a string of debts as long as a widowed mother’s clothesline. He was a desperate man.”

“You suspected insurance fraud, then,” the crackbrain said, “when you asked me to join you in the surveillance?”

“I did,” Quincannon lied.

“Did you suspect the manner in which the fraud would be perpetrated?”

“The use of an accomplice dressed in the same type of dark clothing as worn by Dodger Brown? Costain’s arrival not more than a minute after the intruder entered the house through the rear door? These struck me as suspicious, though not until later. It was a devious plan that no detective could have anticipated in its entirety before the fact.” He added, staring meaningfully at the Englishman, “In truth, a bughouse affair from start to finish.”

“Bughouse affair?”

“Crazy scheme. Fool’s game.”

“Ah. Crook’s argot, eh? More of your delightful American idiom.”

Pollard said, “Enough of that,” and tapped the nib of a pen on his desk blotter after the fashion of a judge wielding a gavel. “So the accomplice pulled a double-cross, is that what you’re saying, Quincannon? He wanted the spoils all for himself.”

“Just so.”

“Name him.”

“Not just yet. Other explanations are in order first. Such as how Costain came to be murdered in a locked room. And why he was shot as well as stabbed.”

“Can you answer those questions?”

“I can.”

“Well, then?”

Quincannon allowed suspense to build by producing his pipe and tobacco pouch. Holmes watched him in a rapt way, his hands busy winding a pocket Petrarch, his expression neutral except for the faintest of smiles. The others, Sabina included, were on the edges of their chairs.

When he had the pipe lit and drawing well, he said, “The answer to your first question,” he said to Pollard, though his gaze was on the crackbrain, “is that Andrew Costain was
not
murdered in a locked room. Nor was he stabbed
and
shot by his accomplice.”