Bill Pronzini - The Bughouse Affair

At one time the Scarlet Lady had been a crimping joint, where seamen were fed drinks laced with laudanum and chloral hydrate and then carted off by shanghaiers and sold to venal shipmasters in need of crews. The Sailor’s Union of the Pacific had ended the practice and forced the saloon’s closure, but only until Bluefield had promised to give up his association with the shanghaiers and backed up the promise with generous bribes to city officials. The Scarlet Lady was now an “honest” deadfall in which percentage girls, bunco ploys, and rigged games of chance were used to separate seamen and other foolhardy patrons from their money.

As usual, Bluefield was in his office at the rear. He was an ex-miner who had had his fill of the rough-and-tumble life in various Western goldfields and vowed to end his own rowdy ways when he moved to San Francisco and opened the Scarlet Lady. He had taken no active part in the crimping activities, and was known to remain behind his locked office door when brawls broke out, as they often did; the team of bouncers he employed were charged with stifling trouble and keeping what passed for peace. It was his stated intention to one day own a better class of saloon in a better neighborhood, and as a result he cultivated the company and goodwill of respectable citizens. Quincannon was one of them, largely because he had once prevented a rival saloon owner from puncturing Bluefield’s hide with a bullet.

Bluefield was drinking beer and counting profits, two of his favorite activities. The profits must have been considerable, for he was in a jovial mood and seemed not to mind being visited again so soon.

“I’ve nothing for you yet, John, my lad,” he said. “You know I’ll send word when I do.”

“I’m the one with news today,” Quincannon said. “The housebreaker I’m after is Dodger Brown.”

“The Dodger, is it? Well, I’m not surprised. How did you tumble?”

“I came within a hair of nabbing him in the act last night. He escaped through no fault of mine.”

“So he knows you’re onto him?”

“I don’t believe he does, as dark as it was.”

“He’ll still be in the city then, you’re thinking.”

“Or somewhere in the Bay Area.”

Bluefield raised his mug of lager with one thick finger, drank, licked foam off his mustached upper lip. The mustache was an impressive coal-black handlebar, its ends waxed to rapier points, of which he was inordinately proud. “And mayhap old Ezra can find out where he’s hanging his hat, eh?”

“If anyone can, it’s you.”

“You flatter me, Quincannon. Not that I mind.”

“Then you’ll put out word on Dodger Brown?”

“I will. For a favor in return.”

“Name it.”

“There is a saloon and restaurant just up for sale in the Uptown Tenderloin. The Redemption, on Ellis Street.”

“I know it. A respected establishment.”

“I’m looking to buy it,” Bluefield said. “It’s past time I put this hellhole up for sale and leave the Barbary Coast for good. There’ll never be a place better suited or better named for the likes of me to own so that I can die a respectable citizen. I have the money, I’ve made overtures, but the owners aren’t convinced my intentions are honorable. They’re afraid I have plans to turn the Redemption into a fancy uptown copy of the Scarlet Lady.”

“And you’ve no such plans.”

“None, lad, I swear it.”

“Is it a letter of reference you’re after?”

“It is. Your name carries weight in certain quarters in this city.”

“No greater weight than yours in other quarters.”

“The letter in exchange for my help, then?”

“You’ll have it tomorrow, by messenger.”

Bluefield lumbered to his feet and thumped Quincannon’s back with a meaty paw. “You won’t regret it, lad. You and Mrs. Carpenter will always have free meals at Ezra Bluefield’s Redemption.”

Quincannon had never once turned down the offer of anything for free-anything reasonably legitimate, that was-nor would his thrifty Scot’s blood ever permit him to do so. But it wouldn’t do to press his luck with a man of Bluefield’s mercurial temperament.

“I’ll settle for the whereabouts of Dodger Brown,” he lied glibly.

“Within forty-eight hours,” Bluefield said, “and that’s a bloody promise. Even if it means hiring a gang of men to comb through every rattrap from here to China Basin.”

SABINA

Sabina spent the rest of the morning in pursuit of information from the pickpocket’s victims and their families, following a route she had mapped out after studying the list Lester Sweeney had given her.

Her first destination was the residence of Mr. William Buchanan on Green Street near Van Ness Avenue. Mr. Buchanan was not at home, the maid who answered the door told her. He and Mrs. Buchanan had gone to their country house on the Peninsula for two weeks.

The driver of the hansom she’d hired and left waiting took her next to Webster Street in the Western Addition, where she had somewhat better luck. The house there was large and well kept, and its owner, John Greenway, the man who had been robbed of a wallet containing nearly forty dollars, chanced to be home. He greeted Sabina cordially, and when she presented her card and stated her purpose in calling, he showed her into the front parlor where he introduced her to his wife, who was quite obviously expecting a child.

“Of course we’ll help in any way we can,” he said then, “but I’m afraid there isn’t much we can tell you. I didn’t see the woman who robbed me. Mrs. Greenway did, but only a fleeting glimpse.”

Mrs. Greenway nodded. “She was rather tall and wore a white hat with a sun veil that covered part of her face. That’s all I remember about her.”

“What were the circumstances of the theft?” Sabina asked.

“We had ridden the water slide and stopped at the refeshment stand for a glass of lemonade,” Greenway said. “The ride was ill-advised-it made Mrs. Greenway feel unwell. There was a large crowd watching a juggler near the gates, and while we were passing through it the woman bumped into me and I felt a sudden sharp pain in my side. It caused me to stumble and fall to one knee. My wife and a young fellow in the crowd helped me up, and that was when I discovered the theft.”

“What caused the sharp pain you felt?”

“I don’t know. I thought at the time that it was a gastric attack, a result of the food we’d eaten combined with the ride, but upon reflection it seemed more a jabbing or pricking sensation.”

A jabbing or pricking sensation. Sabina had overheard the frock-coated victim on the Cocktail Route last evening make a similar complaint, which he attributed to having eaten too many oysters on the half-shell at the Bank Exchange. Coincidence? Or a clever pickpocket using some sharp object to distract her mark-an object such as a hatpin?

* * *

No one came to the door at either of the next two victims’ residences, but at a small Eastlake-style Victorian near Washington Square, Sabina was greeted by the plump young daughter of Mr. George Anderson. Her father was at his place of business, the Orpheum, a vaudeville house on O’Farrell Street, she said, and her mother was out shopping. Did she know anything about the robbery of her father at the Chutes? Oh, yes, she had witnessed it.

In the small front parlor, Ellen Anderson rang for the housekeeper and ordered tea. It came quickly, accompanied by a plate of ginger cookies. Sabina took one as Miss Anderson poured and prattled on about how exciting it was to make the aquaintance of a lady detective.

Sabina directed her back to the business at hand by asking, “Were you alone with your father when his purse was stolen?”