Donna Andrews: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

Ah, just as he’d suspected. Some of the grass stalks had broken ends, and a patch of gorse was gouged and mashed flat. This was where the assassin had lain to fire the fatal shot — and a marksman he was, to have been so accurate on a night like the last.

Quincannon searched behind the dune. Here and there, in places sheltered from the wind, were footprints leading to and from the abandoned cars. Then he began to range outward in the opposite direction, zigzagging back and forth among the sand hills. Gulls wheeled overhead, shrieking, as he drew nearer to the beach. The Pacific was calmer this morning, the waves breaking more quietly over the white sand.

For more than an hour he continued his hunt. He found nothing among the dunes. The long inner sweep of the beach was littered with all manner of flotsam cast up during storms and high winds — shells, bottles, tins, driftwood large and small, birds and sea creatures alive and dead. Last night’s wind had been blowing from the southeast; he ranged farther to the north, his sharp eyes scanning left and right.

Some two hundred rods from where he had emerged onto the beach, he found what he was looking for. Or rather, the wreckage of what he was looking for, caught and tangled around the bare limb of a tree branch.

He extricated it carefully, examined it, and tucked it inside his coat. After which, whistling a temperance tune off-key, he retraced his path along the beach, through the dunes, and back to the Meekers’ home.

The car that had been Jared Meeker’s bedroom was the northernmost of the four. The curtains had been drawn over the windows; he went to the door, knocked discreetly, received no response. Mrs. Meeker, as he’d hoped, had given up her vigil and gone to one of the other cars. He tried the latch, found it unlocked, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him.

The dead man lay on his bed, covered by a blanket provided by his mother. The rest of the room contained a stove, a few pieces of mismatched furniture, a steamer trunk, a framed Wild West-show poster depicting a cowboy riding a wildly bucking bronco, and little else. Quincannon searched the dresser drawers first, then the steamer trunk. Several items of interest were tucked inside the latter: hand tools, a ball of twine, a jar of oil-based paint, a board with four ten-penny nails driven through it, and two lead sinkers that matched in size and shape the one he’d found yesterday in the abandoned car.

He left the items where they lay and was closing the trunk’s lid when the door opened and Mrs. Meeker entered. She emitted a startled gasp when she saw him. “Mr. Quincannon! How dare you come in here without permission!”

“My apologies. But it was necessary.”

“Necessary? Prowling through my dead son’s possessions?”

“To the conclusion of my investigation.”

“...Are you saying you know who murdered Jared?”

Before he could respond, a hailing shout came from outside: Barnaby Meeker had returned. And not alone. With him were the city coroner in a morgue wagon, and a plainclothes homicide detective named Hiram Dooley in a police hack driven by a bluecoat.

Dooley was middle-aged, portly, sported a thick brushy moustache, and had a complexion the exact hue of cooked beets. Stretched across his bulging middle was a gold watch chain adorned with an elk’s tooth the size of a golf ball. His first words to Quincannon were, “I’ve heard of you, laddybuck. You and that female partner of yours.”

“Only in the most glowing terms, no doubt.”

“Hah. Just because you’ve counted yourselves lucky on a few cases doesn’t mark you high in my book. I don’t like flycops.”

And I don’t like pompous, empty-headed civil servants, Quincannon thought, but he only smiled and said, “Perhaps I’ll count myself lucky, as you put it, on this case as well.”

“Yeah? We’ll see about that.”

That we will, Inspector. And sooner than you think.

Meeker had already given Dooley an account of the previous night’s events, but the homicide dick demanded another from Quincannon. He scoffed at what he called “this spook hokum” and seemed sceptical, if not openly suspicious, of Quincannon’s role in the matter. Quincannon bore his browbeating with good-natured equanimity. He could have told Dooley then and there what he had deduced, but the man’s manner irritated him and he took a certain amount of pleasure in watching him blunder and bluster about Jared’s bedroom and the scene of the murder, overlooking clues and asking the wrong questions. While the two policemen were examining the abandoned cars, Quincannon took Barnaby Meeker aside and asked him a pair of seemingly innocuous questions. The answers he received were the ones he had expected.

As Dooley and the bluecoat emerged, Artemus Crabb came striding over from the direction of his car. Crabb seemed more at ease this time, his face reflecting curiosity rather than hostility or concern. He barely glanced at Quincannon, his attention focused on the lawdogs.

“And who would you be?” Dooley demanded.

“Crabb’s my name. I live over yonder.”

Dooley introduced himself. “I been told you didn’t see anything of what happened out here last night.”

“That’s right, I didn’t. Seen the spook lights the night before and once is enough for me. I spent last night locked up inside my car.”

“No, you didn’t,” Quincannon said.

“What’s that?”

“You spent part of the night lying in wait on one of the dunes, with a cocked revolver in your hand.”

“What the devil would I do that for?”

“To lay the Carville ghost once and for all.”

All eyes were on Quincannon now, Crabb glaring with feigned indignation, Dooley and Meeker showing their surprise. Quincannon favored them with the smile he reserved for moments such as these. It was time for him to take center stage, to reveal the deductive prowess that made him, in his estimation, the finest detective west of the Mississippi — a role he relished above all others.

Meeker said, “What are you saying, Mr. Quincannon? That Crabb murdered my son?”

“With malice aforethought.”

“That’s a damn lie!” Crabb snapped. “Spook stuff scares the bejesus out of me. Ask Meeker, ask that old coot in the coffee saloon — they’ll tell you.”

“Spook stuff that you fear might be authentic, yes. But by the time you crouched in wait last night, you knew the truth about the Carville ghost.”

“What truth?” Dooley demanded.

“That it was all a sham designed to separate Mr. Crabb from his cache of loot.”

“Loot? What loot?”

“The twenty-five thousand dollars he and his accomplice stole from Wells Fargo Express two weeks ago.”

Dooley gawped at him. Crabb shouted, “You’re crazy! You can’t pin that on me. You can’t prove anything against me.”

“I can prove that you murdered Jared Meeker,” Quincannon said, “by your own testimony. When I told you this morning that he’d been killed, you said, ‘How can a damned ghost shoot a man?’ But I didn’t say how he’d been killed. How did you know he’d been shot unless you pulled the trigger yourself?”

“I just, ah, assumed it...”

“Bosh. You had no reason to assume such a fact.” Quincannon turned his attention to Dooley. “Jared Meeker was shot with a large-bore handgun, one with a considerable range — the very type Crabb carries. A search of his premises should provide additional evidence. Though not the loot from the robbery, or else Jared would have found it. It’s hidden elsewhere, likely buried under or near one of those abandoned cars—”

“Hold on, Quincannon,” Dooley said. “You telling us Jared Meeker knew Crabb was one of the bandits?”