Bill Pronzini - The Bughouse Affair

Sabina’s eyes widened when she read the name of the man who owned the stolen money clip.

Andrew Costain.

QUINCANNON

In his drinking days, Quincannon’s favorite watering hole was Hoolihan’s Saloon on Second Street. It was there that he had sought for two long years to drown his conscience after the incident in Virginia City, Nevada, when a woman named Katherine Bennett, eight months pregnant, had perished with a bullet from his pistol in her breast.

The shooting had been a tragic accident. It had happened during a gunfight that erupted when he and a team of local law enforcement officers had attempted the arrest of a pair of brothers who were counterfeiting United States government currency. In the skirmish behind their print shop, one of the brothers had wounded a deputy and then attempted to flee through the backyards of a row of houses. Quincannon had shot him, to avoid being shot himself; but one of his bullets had gone wild and found Katherine Bennett, who was outside hanging up her washing.

He had not been able to bear the burden of responsibility for the loss of two innocent lives. Guilt and remorse had eaten away at him; he had taken so heavily to drink over the next two years that he’d been in danger of losing his position with the Secret Service, perhaps even ending his days as another lost and sodden patron of Jack Foyles’ wine dump. Two things had saved him: the first was another counterfeiting case, in the Owyhee Mountains of Idaho; the second was meeting Sabina there and eventually entering into his partnership with her. Not a drop of alcohol had passed his lips since his return from Silver City, and never would again. He had made peace with himself. Demon rum was no longer even a minor temptation, despite the occasional nightmares that still plagued his sleep.

Nevertheless, he continued to frequent Hoolihan’s because he felt comfortable among its clientele of small merchants, office workers, tradesmen, drummers, and a somewhat rougher element up from the waterfront. No city leaders came there on their nightly rounds, as they did to the Palace Hotel bar, Pop Sullivan’s Hoffman Cafe, and the other first-class saloons along the Cocktail Route; no judges, politicians, bankers-Samuel Truesdale had likely never set foot through its swinging doors-or gay young blades in their striped trousers, fine cravats, and brocaded waistcoats.

Hoolihan’s had no crystal chandeliers, fancy mirrors, expensive oil paintings, white-coated barmen, or elaborate free lunch. It was dark and bare by comparison, sawdust thickly scattered on the floor and a back room containing pool and billiard tables on which Quincannon often played. The only glitter and sparkle came from the shine of its old-style gaslights on the ranks of bottles along the backbar, and its hungry drinkers dined not on crab legs and oysters on the half shell but on corned beef, strong cheese, rye bread, and tubs of briny pickles.

Quincannon had first grativated there because the saloon was a short cable-car ride from his rooms and because staff and clientele both respected the solitary drinker’s desire for privacy. Even after taking the pledge, it remained his refuge-an honest place, made for those who sought neither bombast nor trouble. Far fewer lies were told in Hoolihan’s than in the rarefied atmosphere of the Palace bar, he suspected, and far fewer dark deeds were hatched.

It was a few minutes shy of seven o’clock when he arrived at Hoolihan’s and claimed a place at the bar near the entrance. Ben Joyce, the head barman, greeted him in his mildly profane fashion. “What’ll it be tonight, you bloody Scotsman? Coffee or fresh clam juice?”

“Clam juice, and leave out the arsenic this time.”

“Hah. As if I’d waste good ratsbane on the likes of you.”

Ben brought him a steaming mug of Hoolihan’s special broth. Quincannon sipped, smoked a pipeful of tobacco, and listened to the ebb and flow of conversation around him. Men came in, singly and in pairs; men drifted out. The hands on the massive Seth Thomas clock over the backboard moved forward to seven. And seven-oh-five. And seven-ten …

Annoyance nibbled at him. Where the devil was that dingbat Holmes? He’d considered himself a sly fox for his conscription of the Englishman, but Sabina might have been right in reproaching him for an error in judgment; for once he may have outsmarted himself. If the fellow was untrustworthy as well as unbalanced …

Someone moved in next to him, jostling his arm. A gruff Cockney voice said, “Yer standing in me way, mate.”

Quincannon turned to glare at the voice’s owner. Tall, thin ragamuffin dressed in patched trousers and a threadbare sailor’s pea jacket, a cap pulled down low on his forehead. He opened his mouth to make a sharp retort, then snapped it shut again and took a closer look at the man. Little surprised him anymore, but he was a bit taken aback by what he saw.

“Holmes?” he said.

“At yer service, mate.”

“What’s the purpose of that outlandish getup?”

“It seemed appropriate for the night’s mission,” the Englishman said in his normal voice. His eyes, peering up from under the brim of his cap, were as bright as oil lamps. “Disguise has served me well during my career, and the opportunity for some has not presented itself in some time. I must say I enjoy playacting. It has been said, perhaps truly, that the stage lost a consummate actor when I decided to become a detective.”

Daft as a church mouse, Quincannon thought.

Quickly he ushered Holmes outside and into a hansom waiting nearby. The crackbrain had no more to say on the subject of disguises, but as the hack rattled along the cobblestones to Mission Street and on toward Rincon Hill, he put forth a slew of questions on the night’s venture, the “pannyman” responsible for the burglaries, and the various methods employed by American burglars in general. The man was obsessed with details on every conceivable topic.

For the most part Quincannon answered in monosyllables in the hope that Holmes would wind down and be quiet. This was not to be. The Englishman kept up a running colloquy on a variety of esoteric subjects from the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson to the latest advances in chemistry and other sciences to the inner workings and possible improvements of horseless carriages. He even knew somehow that an ex-housebreaker living in Warsaw, Illinois, manufactured burglar tools, advertised them as novelties in the National Police Gazette, and sold them mail-order for ten dollars for the set-a declaration that came as no surprise to Quincannon since the lock picks he carried for emergencies had come from just such a set liberated from an East Bay scruff.

Holmes’s monologue ceased, mercifully, when they departed the hack two blocks from Andrew Costain’s home. It was another night made for the prowling of footpads and yeggs, restless streams of cloud playing peekaboo games with stars and the scythe-blade moon. The neighborhood, the first of San Francisco’s fashionable residential districts, was built around an oval-shaped park that was an exact copy of London’s Berkeley Square-a fact the Englishman naturally chose to comment on. It had begun to fall into disfavor in 1869, when Second Street was carved through the west edge of Rincon Hill to connect downtown with the southern waterfront. Now its grandeur, along with that of Rincon Hill, was fading. Most of the powerful millionaires and their families had moved to more fashionable venues such as Nob Hill. Now it was on the shabby genteel side, though far from the “new slum, a place of solitary ancient houses and butt ends of streets,” as it had been unfairly dubbed by that insolent fellow Scotsman, Robert Louis Stevenson.