The Spook Lights Affair (12 page)

One more address to be investigated. If that one proved to be as unbreached as the first three …

Ah, but it didn’t.

The large, nondescript clapboard building on Tenth Street was flanked on its north side by a carpentry shop and on the south side by a pipe yard. Alleyways and tall board fences gave it privacy from its neighbors—an ideal place for a hideout. Quincannon’s pulses quickened as he went past the
FOR SALE
sign in the tiny front yard and up to the front door. The lock appeared not to have been tampered with, and the plate-glass window next to it, bearing the painted words
MATTHEW DRENNAN—JOB PRINTING, LITHOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHY
, was unbroken and solidly anchored in its frame. He went around to the rear, pausing on the way to examine another untouched window. There was a rear entrance, and here was where his hunch finally paid off.

The locked door had been pried open, likely with the thin steel bar that lay on the ground nearby. It wobbled inward a few inches when he eased his shoulder against it.

He drew his Navy Colt and entered by two steps. Darkness lay ahead, muddled with shadow shapes large and small, but a faint distant sheen indicated that a lamp or candle burned somewhere in the bowels of the building. He stood listening. Silence. The same kind of empty silence that had clogged the house in Drifter’s Alley? He couldn’t be sure.

The room he was in seemed to be storage space. As cluttered as it apparently was, he was bound to blunder into something if he attempted to cross it in the dark. There was nothing for it, then, but to risk lighting a lucifer. He did so, shielding the flame with his hand.

Most of the clutter, he saw as he advanced, seemed to be photographic equipment: a hooded camera mounted on a tripod, printing frames, lenses, chemicals, a box labeled
MR. EASTMAN’S INSTANTANEOUS DRY PLATES.
The light sheen, coming from beyond an inner door that stood slightly ajar, brightened perceptibly as he neared the far end. He stopped again to listen, and again heard nothing more than the faint creak of the building’s timbers.

He shook out the match, used the faint glow to guide him to the inner door. When he pushed it inward a few inches farther, he could make out another large room dominated by a great looming shape to the left and what appeared to be a glass-fronted office cubicle at its far-right corner. The light came from inside the cubicle, from what he perceived to be a hanging lamp.

There was enough illumination from the lamp so that he was able to slowly follow a clear path toward the office. The looming object was a printing press, one of the old-fashioned single-plate, hand-roller types. A long wooden bench ran along the wall opposite, laden with tools and tins of what were probably chemicals and ink. He had gone a little more than halfway before he had a clear look through the dusty glass into the office.

Desk, chairs, filing cabinet—and nothing else.

Once more Quincannon paused to listen. The same heavy silence. Faint mingled odors tickled his nostrils then and he sniffed until he identified them as stale beer and greasily cooked meat. He went ahead to where the office door stood open, sidled up to it at a shadowed angle, and poked his head inside.

The desktop was littered with the remnants of at least two meals, a tin beer pail such as taverns and brewers supplied, and a glass that held a residue of foam. He stepped inside and approached the desk. The floor around it was empty except for crumbs and something that gleamed whitish in the lamplight—white with black spots. He bent to retrieve the object, grinned his wolfish grin as he bounced it on his palm.

A single die. One of the pair Bob Cantwell had sat clicking together on Friday night, by Godfrey, accidentally dropped and overlooked before his stay here ended.

Quincannon searched the desk drawers and file cabinets, but found nothing else left by Cantwell. The papers in both had all belonged to the late Matthew Drennan, and their disarray indicated a previous and hasty search, no doubt by Cantwell in a hunt for forgotten money or other valuables. An examination of the beer glass and empty growler revealed that the foam residue in both was long dry; and rodents had already been at the remnants of fried meat sandwiches. Which told him the beer had been drunk and the meals eaten sometime the previous night. Bought by Cantwell with what little money he had left, or supplied by someone else?

He pulled the hanging lamp down and used his handkerchief to lift the hot chimney so he could check the amount of oil left in the fount. Almost none. The light may or may not have been burning for some time, depending on how much oil there’d been when the wick was lit. So there was no telling when Cantwell had left the premises. Did the lighted lantern mean he intended to return, or had he been in such a hurry to quit the place for good that he’d neglected to extinguish it?

Quincannon cursed softly and consulted his stemwinder. It was almost one o’clock now, much of the day having been wasted in his previous searches. If he’d chosen to make this place his first rather than his last stop … But there was no purpose in that sort of thinking. What was done was done. For all he knew, he would have found the building empty if he’d come here straight from Battery Street.

A vigil was required as long as there was a chance of Cantwell’s return; he had no other way to find the man at present. The prospect of waiting here in this vermin-infested office appealed to him not at all. There was a café across Natoma Street, he recalled—a much better location to wait and watch, assuming its facing windows afforded a clear view. If Cantwell did return, he would surely enter the Drennan property at the front and make his way around to the rear, as Quincannon had done. He had no reason to believe his hiding place had been discovered, or to risk trespassing on any of the surrounding properties in order to climb one of the high board fences.

Quincannon left everything as he’d found it, even putting the single die back on the floor, then made his way by matchlight to the rear door, which he closed behind him.

The café’s front window did in fact command a view of the entire front of Cantwell’s hideout, unobstructed except for the occasional passage of a freight wagon, hansom, or other conveyance. He claimed a table and alternated watchful looks through the glass with glances at the menu. Despite the stale greasy odor and rodent nibblings on the sandwich remains, his rumbling stomach demanded food. He hadn’t eaten since a light breakfast and his appetite had always been prodigious, the more so when he was on the hunt.

He ordered a dozen oysters on the half shell, a bowl of clam chowder, and a plate of sourdough bread and butter. The oysters were a day old, the chowder watery, and the bread on the stale side, but he ate it all nonetheless. Waste not, want not. Then he filled and lighted his pipe and settled back to wait.

Time passed slowly, as time always did at times like this. He was a man of action, and forced inactivity chafed at him and soured his mood. The substandard food and the cups of bad coffee he poured on top of it soured his stomach as well. By the time the hands on his stemwinder pointed to three thirty, he was uncomfortable enough and restless and frustrated enough to snap and snarl at anyone who looked at him askance.

A newsboy with an armload of evening papers entered the café just then. Quincannon bought a copy of the
Bulletin
from him, to help pass the time and to see if Homer Keeps had had any more scurrilous, if not libelous, remarks to make about himself and Sabina. If he had, Quincannon vowed to pay Keeps a visit and make him eat his derby hat and celluloid collar.

But he hadn’t. A follow-up story on the Sutro Heights incident, in fact, bore another reporter’s byline and had been consigned to an inner page. There was nothing like a sensational sex-based murder case to crowd all other news off the front page, and just such a case had broken this day.

Boldface headlines told of the arrest by two of Police Chief Crowley’s ace detectives of “the Demon of the Belfry”—one Theo Durrant, a twenty-three-year-old student at Cooper Medical College and assistant Sunday School superintendent at the Twenty-first Street Emanuel Baptist Church. Durrant had been charged with the brutal murders of two young women, whose nude and badly mutilated bodies had been found in the church the day before, one stuffed into a cabinet and the other, of a model who had disappeared nine days earlier, laid out as if for ritual burial on a platform in the church belfry.

Grisly stuff, not at all to Quincannon’s liking. He quit reading before he finished the main story and tossed the paper aside; contemplation of this monster Durrant’s atrocities soured his stomach even more than his meal had. Bloody sex murders were the most heinous of all crimes; he had never been confronted with or called upon to investigate one and never hoped to be. He had no love for Chief Crowley or any of his “ace detectives,” but he had to admit that in this case they had done a proper and commendable job in ridding the streets of the so-called Demon of the Belfry.

Another fifteen minutes of waiting and watching for Cantwell, and Quincannon had reached the limit of his endurance. Pacing the crowded sidewalks outside was better, if potentially somewhat riskier, than sitting here on his backside. He could always resume this post after walking off some of his pent-up energy. Or return to the building and continue his vigil there, for as long as he could stand it.

He called for the bill and piled coins on top of it—the exact amount. The common practice of adding a gratuity offended his thrifty Scots nature, though he did so grudgingly whenever Sabina deigned to dine with him because she believed in rewarding good food and good service. She wouldn’t have objected if she had shared this meal with him.

The temperature had dropped by several degrees during the past two and a half hours. Tattered streamers had obscured the sun and were rapidly turning the sky from pale blue to gray. Another foggy night coming up, one more in an unbroken string of more than a week’s duration.

Quincannon started up the near sidewalk, walking briskly. He hadn’t gone more than fifty yards, into the middle of the block, when he made an abrupt half turn into the doorway of a shoemaker’s shop.

His long determined surveillance had finally paid off. The lad weaving his way in and out of pedestrian traffic on the opposite side of the street was Bob Cantwell.

11

SABINA

The Montgomery Block, or Monkey Block as the locals referred to it, was the tallest building at four stories and the most prestigious business address in the city. Built in 1853, it was home to many of San Francisco’s prominent attorneys, financiers, judges, engineers, theatrical agents, and business and professional men. With masonry walls more than two feet thick, and heavy iron shutters at every salon, library, and billiard parlor window as protection against fire, it was considered the safest office building on the West Coast.

A uniformed operator in one of the Otis elevators took Sabina up to St. Ives Land Management’s suite of offices on the fourth floor. Even the elevator was richly appointed, paneled in rosewood and carpeted in thickly piled blue wool. Sabina checked her appearance in the ornately framed mirror as the cage rose. She looked somewhat pale, she decided, and pinched her cheeks to put some color into them. Not too much; it would be unseemly for a former Pink Rose to come calling on one or both of the St. Ives men looking like that same flower in bloom.

The anteroom in the St. Ives suite was presided over by a young, dark-complexioned male receptionist. On the wall behind him was a large map showing the company’s many holdings in the city and the East Bay. Two large oil paintings decorated another wall, the largest of them of Joseph St. Ives, the smaller of his son.

Both men were present, the receptionist told Sabina, but when she admitted that she didn’t have an appointment with either man, his manner grew stiff and less courteous. Neither St. Ives senior nor St. Ives junior, he said archly, saw anyone without an appointment.

She took two of her business cards from her handbag and laid them on the desk. “I guarantee they will see me,” she said in peremptory tones. “Both of them.”

Joseph St. Ives was in a meeting, which was just as well; it was David she wanted to see first. With some reluctance the receptionist took her card away into the inner sanctum.

While she waited, Sabina studied the oil painting of David St. Ives. There was no question that he was handsome, much more so than his heavyset and jowly father, but the artist had captured a hint of the cold arrogance and vanity in his blue-eyed gaze that had caused her to dislike him on their previous meeting.

The receptionist returned presently, to announce in the same stiff voice that Mr. St. Ives had consented to give her a few minutes of his time. “Follow me, please, madam,” he said, and conducted her to David’s sumptuously decorated private office.

The young man’s hostility toward her hadn’t abated; that was evident in his expression and his refusal to stand and greet her in a cordial and gentlemanly fashion when she entered. He remained tilted back in an insolent pose behind his desk, and continued his rudeness by not inviting her to be seated. He was nattily dressed in a gray coat with matching waistcoat, dark trousers, and a floppy bow tie, but the sartorial effect was spoiled by his pale, somewhat blotchy face and red-veined eyes. Suffering a hangover from the previous night’s revelries, Sabina thought.

He said without preamble, “Have you brought word of my sister?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid.”

“Then what are you doing here? You should know by now that you’re not welcome.” He leaned forward to pluck a greenish cheroot from a desktop box. “If my father has his way, the next time we meet will be in a court of law. Or hadn’t you heard that he is contemplating a civil suit?”

“I’ve heard,” Sabina said. “Be that as it may, I intend to learn exactly what happened on Sutro Heights and why before such a suit can be filed.”

“You’re still investigating? For what purpose? You must be aware of the fact that you’re no longer employed by my family.”