The Bughouse Affair: A Carpenter and Quincannon Mystery (2 page)

“What do you find so amusing in … which paper is that?”

“The
Examiner.
Mr. Bierce’s ‘Prattle’ column.”

As he might have known. Sabina was an admirer of San Francisco’s resident pundit and merciless, often vicious critic of all that others held dear: Ambrose Bierce—Bitter Bierce, as he was more widely known. Quincannon found the man’s scribblings insufferably arrogant, as evidenced by his definition of an egoist as “a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.” Sabina had once voiced the opinion, tongue in cheek, that Quincannon’s aversion to the man stemmed from the fact that he was something of a curmudgeon himself and chafed at the competition. Patent nonsense, of course. True, he was not one to suffer fools and knaves, and often grumbled at the foibles of others, but the milk of human kindness had yet to sour in him as it had in Bitter Bierce.

Sabina said, “I know how you feel about Mr. Bierce, but I think you’ll find this entry amusing.”

“Will I? I doubt it.”

“‘In a city in which anomalous occurences abound,’” she read, “‘none would seem more peculiar than the presence among us of an ambulatory dead man. No less a personage than the world’s most-celebrated detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, reportedly done in by a plunge from atop a waterfall in Switzerland three years ago, is alleged to have achieved a miraculous resurrection and found his way across thousands of miles of land and sea to our fair city, where he is spending a leisurely period of recuperation, or perhaps reanimation, at the home of a prominent family. If these rumors should prove factual and the secret of the Great Man’s revivification is widely disseminated, cemeteries everywhere will soon empty and the general population swell to riotous proportions.

“‘There is, however, a less preternatural explanation for this phenomenon. It may well be that the person answering to the name of the London sleuth is in fact that rival aspirant to public honors, an impostor—a latter-day claimant in deerstalker hat and gray cape to the throne left vacant by the passing of His Imperial Majesty, Joshua Abraham Norton. More crackbrains walk among us than dead men, as may be seen on any evening’s stroll along the Cocktail Route.’”

Joshua Abraham Norton. A gent known locally as Emperor Norton, the self-proclaimed “Emperor of these United States and Protector of Mexico,” whose antics had captured the imagination of San Francisco’s citizens some thirty years earlier, long before Quincannon’s arrival in the city. Among Norton’s numerous proclamations were an “order” that the United States Congress be dissolved by force, and ridiculously impossible “decrees” that a bridge be built across and a tunnel under San Francisco Bay. A crackbrain, to be sure.

“For once, Bierce and I agree,” Quincannon said. “There is no disputing his last statement.”

“No. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if Sherlock Holmes were still alive and visting in San Francisco?”

“Wonderful? Bah.”

“Why do you say that?”

“World’s most-celebrated detective. In whose opinion besides Bitter Bierce’s?”

“You’ve read of Holmes’s exploits, surely. His companion and biographer, Dr. John Watson, has written numerous accounts that have been all the rage here as well as in England.”

“I’ve better things to do with my time,” Quincannon said. He was not about to admit that he had, in fact, read some of Dr. Watson’s hyperbolic writings. “Sherlock Holmes … faugh! The man may have achieved a small measure of fame, but fame is fickle and fleeting. In a few years, his exploits will be forgotten.”

“Whereas the detections of John Quincannon are bound to be writ large in the annals of crime.”

Quincannon, who did not have a humble bone in his body and who considered himself the finest detective west of the Mississippi, if not in the entire United States, failed to notice the note of gentle sarcasm in her voice. He said in all seriousness, “I should hope so. Meaning no disrespect to your detective skills, my dear.”

“Oh, of course not. You know, you should cultivate a biographer such as Dr. Watson. Perhaps Mr. Ambrose Bierce would agree to the task.”

“Bierce? Why Bierce?”

“Well,” Sabina said, “prattle
is
his stock-in-trade.”

2

SABINA

After John had left the office for parts unknown, Sabina put on her straw picture hat and skewered it to her upswept dark hair with a Charles Horner hatpin of silver and coral. The pin, a gift from her cousin Callie on her last birthday, was one of two she owned by the famed British designer. The other, a butterfly with an onyx body and diamond-chip wings, had been a gift from her late husband and was much too ornate—to say nothing of valuable—to wear during business hours.

Momentarily she recalled Stephen’s face: thin, with prominent cheekbones and chin. Brilliant blue eyes below wavy, dark brown hair. A face that could radiate tenderness—and danger. Like herself, a Pinkerton International Detective Agency operative in Denver, he had been working on a land-fraud case when he was shot during a raid and succumbed to his wounds. It troubled Sabina that over the past few years his features had become less distinct in her memory, as had those of her deceased parents, but she assumed that was human nature. One’s memories blur; one goes on.

At times, however, the memories had a stronger pull than at others. This morning she could not dismiss recollections of the year when she had been a girl Friday (a term she loathed) in the Pinkerton Agency’s offices in Chicago. Her father had also been a Pinkerton operative and had died at the age of forty-nine, not in the line of duty but rather ignobly of gout; Sabina had secured her position through her father’s partner when the need to work to support her sickly mother became apparent. And it was there that her talent for detective work had engaged the interest of branch manager Stephen Carpenter, who began courting as well as mentoring her. By the onset of the new year, Sabina was on her way to becoming a full-fledged “Pink Rose,” as the women operatives proudly called themselves.

The Pink Roses were few in number, yet respected as excellent detectives. Forty years earlier, the first of them, a widow named Kate Warne, had entered the Chicago offices of the agency and requested of Allan Pinkerton that he give her a position—not as a member of the clerical staff, but as an operative. Mrs. Warne overcame Pinkerton’s objections, was given the position on a trial basis, and acquitted herself outstandingly from the first. She had been instrumental in uncovering a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln as he rode the train from Illinois to Washington, D.C., to take the oath of office after his election, and had herself accompanied him all the way to the nation’s capital.

It was rumored that Mrs. Warne had engaged in a long-standing love affair with Allan Pinkerton, but if the rumors were true, the affair had been well shielded and never publicly corroborated. John seemed not to know about this, or at least had never spoken of it to her, and of course she had been careful not to mention it herself. She had enough difficulty fending off his advances without a possible precedent to spur him on.

Within a year of their marriage, she and Stephen had been transferred together to the agency’s Denver headquarters, where occasionally they worked as a team, but most often on separate cases that utilized their individual talents. Until the unthinkable happened, and Sabina found herself a widow.

In her grief she had taken a leave of absence from the agency and for a time withdrawn from society, even from herself. She spent long days and nights in the too-quiet flat she and Stephen had occupied in a large brick house in the city, doing little, feeling nothing. Neglecting her appearance, burrowing in bed for entire days, not eating until hunger drove her to gorge herself and then regurgitate.

Then, at her lowest point, Frieda Gosling became her savior.

Frieda, the wife of another Pinkerton operative and a friend of both hers and Stephen’s, entered the flat against Sabina’s protests, sat her down, and in stern but compassionate tones delivered both a lecture and a message from the Pinkerton office. Did Sabina expect to wallow in grief and misery for the rest of her life? A fine monument to Stephen’s memory that would be. Wouldn’t he want her to start embracing life again, and return to her duties in the profession for which she was best suited? If she chose the latter, Frieda said, the agency had urgent need of a Pink Rose to work an undercover assignment in Silver City, Idaho, on a case involving a mining stock swindle.

Sabina had taken her friend’s words to heart and never regretted it. For not only had her return to Pink Rose status given her renewed purpose, it had been in Silver City that she’d met John Quincannon, then with the United States Secret Service, and eventually embarked on her new and rewarding life in San Francisco. She and Frieda had remained close, exchanging frequent letters and small gifts at Christmastime.

Now she scrutinized her reflection in her hand mirror and concluded that she looked more like a respectable young matron than a detective setting out to snaffle a pickpocket. Satisfied, she left the office to keep her luncheon date with Callie at the Sun Dial, a popular spot with the ladies.

Sabina held a relatively unique position for a woman in San Francisco: as a widow and the co-owner of a highly respectable business, she was free of many of the strictures imposed on single and married women alike. While the ladies of the city poured tea and offered sweets during weekly “at homes,” Sabina traveled the far more interesting, if sometimes dangerous, byways and districts from the notorious Barbary Coast to luxurious Nob Hill. In the course of her investigations she met people of undisputed good standing as well as those of dubious and ill repute. To her second cousin, Callie French, with whom she’d resumed a childhood friendship when she moved West, and with whom she was in fact lunching today, these were dangerous activities inviting folly.

Callie, like Sabina, had been born in Chicago, but her family had moved to California when she was only five. For a time they’d lived in Oakland, the city across the Bay, then settled on Nob Hill when her father was promoted to the regional headquarters of the Miners Bank. Callie had been a debutante—one of the “buds” of society who were presented at the cotillions—and had married a protégé of her father’s in a lavish wedding that had reputedly cost fifty thousand dollars, an unheard of amount for the day. She was Sabina’s entrée into the workings of the upper classes and the ways of the city’s elite.

But Sabina also moved unharmed through far less genteel surroundings, as if protected by an invisible shield of armor. Perhaps it was her confident manner or perhaps it was because with Stephen’s death the worst that could happen to her had already occurred. On that matter, she didn’t care to speculate.

When she entered the Sun Dial, she spied Callie at a corner table in the bright, airy main room. Sunlight spilled down through one of the large skylights, giving Callie’s intricately braided and coiled blond hair a golden sheen. She greeted Sabina effusively as always, with a hug and a burst of chatter. “There you are, my dear! How are you? In fine fettle, I hope. Here, let me help you with your cloak. They say the chicken dish is exceptional today, but I’m thinking of the veal chop.”

While Sabina studied the menu, Callie plied her with questions about John. How was he? Had she changed her mind about seeing him outside the office? No? Why not? He was such a charming man, so polite and well mannered in spite of his ferocious beard.

Sabina smiled inwardly. Callie was a firm believer in marriage, thanks to the success of her own union, and made no bones about the fact that she thought Sabina ought to marry again. Nothing would have made her happier than a Carpenter and Quincannon matrimonial as well as business match. If Sabina ever even hinted at such a possibility, Callie would immediately order champagne and a string quartet for the wedding. Not that such a hint would ever be forthcoming, but if Sabina had spoken forcefully against the notion, it would only have hurt Callie’s feelings. Her cousin could be frivolous and at times downright silly, but she was loyal and had a good, well-meaning heart. Sabina prized their friendship.

The coq au vin didn’t appeal to her, nor did the veal chop, but a seafood pasta struck the right note. When she ordered it, Callie said, “Oh, how I envy you. If I ate starch for lunch, I’d have to let my corset out.”

“Nonsense.”

“Nonsense to you, perhaps. You’ve never needed to wear a corset.”

“Not yet, at least.”

Callie leaned forward and lowered her voice. Sabina knew what was coming, for her cousin had an enormous interest in her work—and an equally enormous penchant for gossip. “Tell me, dear. What sort of cases are you and John investigating now?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“You and your silly rules about client confidentiality. At least tell me this: is there any danger in what
you’re
doing?”

“No, none.”

“Are you sure? You know how I worry about you.”

“Yes. But needlessly.”

“I wish I could be certain of that. It’s
such
a dangerous profession you’ve chosen.…”

Sabina said quickly, to forestall any painful reminder of what had happened to Stephen, “No more dangerous than crossing a busy street. Or devouring that veal chop you ordered.”

Callie sighed. “Not to mention the chocoloate torte I’m considering for dessert.”

*   *   *

After she and Callie parted outside the restaurant, Sabina hailed a cab that carried her down Van Ness Avenue and south on Haight Street. The journey was a lengthy one, passing through sparsely settled areas of the city, and all unbidden she found herself thinking about John instead of Stephen. No doubt because of Callie’s none-too-subtle matchmaking … and yet, her thoughts seemed to turn to her partner more and more often lately, at odd moments, in spite of her vow to keep their relationship strictly professional.