Marcia Muller: The Plague of Thieves Affair

So his quarry was still in the building. But for how long?

Quincannon’s shin still smarted, but he could move more or less normally again; he ran back inside. Perpendicular to the tunnel was another wide corridor that led in one direction to the shipping offices and the main entrance, in the other to the cellars. There being no exit from the cellars, he hastened the other way. But almost immediately he encountered a clerk headed to the dock with a handful of bills of lading, who told him Lansing hadn’t gone that way, either. The clerk had been conversing with another man in the passage for the past three or four minutes and would have seen him if he had.

Now Quincannon was nonplussed. He retraced his path along the side corridor to the brick-walled one that led downward to the cellars. A workman pushing a hand truck laden with fifty-pound sacks of barley was on his way up.

“Mr. Lansing? Yes, sir, just a few moments ago. Heading into the storerooms.”

“The storerooms? Are you certain, man?”

“Aye. In a great hurry he was.”

Why the devil would Lansing go there? To hide? Fool’s game, if that was his intention. The storerooms, where all the ingredients that went into the mass production of beer were kept, were a collective dead end. So were the cellar rooms that housed filled kegs and the enormous cedar vats where “green” beer was ripened and finished beer was held before being piped to the company’s bottling plant in a separate building adjacent.

Quincannon made his way down the passage, quickly but watchfully. The temperature dropped by several degrees as he descended. When he reached the artery that led to the storerooms, the air was frosty enough to require the buttoning of his coat — though he didn’t do so, for it would have impeded access to the Navy Colt. He passed through a large room stacked on two sides with empty kegs. At its far end, a solid oak door barred the way into the remaining storerooms.

The door, Quincannon had been told, had been installed as a deterrent to both rodents and human pilferage. Years before, a former brewery employee had returned late at night and helped himself to a wagonload of sugar and barley, and Willard would brook no repeat of that criminal business. The door was kept open during the day but locked at the end of shift. Only a handful of men in supervisory positions had keys.

It should not have been closed now. Nor should it have been locked, though it was. Quincannon muttered an imprecation. Lansing must have done the locking; he had access to a key. But why? What could he be up to back there?

Quincannon listened at the door. No sounds came to him through the heavy wood. He bent at the waist to peer through the keyhole. All he could make out was an empty section of concrete floor, weakly lighted by electric bulbs and shadow-ridden. He straightened again, scowling, tugging at his beard. The loading-dock foreman, Jack Malloy, would have a key. Find him, then, and waste no time doing so.

Just as he turned away, a muffled report sounded from somewhere behind the locked door. One he’d heard all too often to mistake for anything but what it was — a pistol shot.

Hell and damn! Quincannon swung back to the door, coming up hard against it, rattling it in its frame. Reflex made him tug futilely at the handle. No second report came, but when he pressed an ear to the wood he heard several faint sounds. Movement, but what sort he couldn’t tell.

The silence that followed crackled with tension.

He pushed away again, ran back along the passage until he came upon a workman just emerging from the cellars. He sent the man after the loading-dock foreman, then took himself back to the storeroom door. He tested the latch to determine that it was still locked, though there was no way Lansing or anyone else could have come out and gotten past him.

Malloy arrived on the run, two other men trailing behind him. “What’s the trouble here?” he demanded.

“Someone fired a pistol behind that locked door,” Quincannon told him, “not five minutes ago.”

“A pistol?” Malloy said, astonished. “In the storerooms?”

“I heard it plainly.”

“But... why? How? Mr. Willard has strict orders against firearms on the premises...”

Quincannon made an impatient growling noise. “Button your lip, lad, and unlock the blasted door.”

The foreman was used to the voice of authority; quickly he produced his ring of keys. The door opened inward and Quincannon crowded through first, his hand inside his coat and resting on the Navy’s walnut handle. Two large, chilly rooms opened off the passage, one filled with sacks of barley, the other with boxes of yeast and fifty-pound sacks of malt, hops, and sugar stacked on end. Both enclosures were empty. The boxes and sacks were so tightly packed together that no one could have hidden behind or among them without being seen at a glance.

At the far end of the passage stood another closed door. “What’s beyond there?” he asked the foreman.

“Utility room. Well pump and equipment storage.”

Quincannon tried the door. It refused his hand on the latch. “You have a key, Malloy?”

“The lock’s the same as on the outer door.”

“Then open it, man, open it.”

Malloy obeyed. The heavy, dank odors of mold and earth mingled with the acrid scent of gunpowder tickled Quincannon’s nostrils as the door creaked inward. Only one electric bulb burned here. Gloom lay thick beyond the threshold, enfolding the shapes of well pump, coiled hoses, hand trucks, and other equipment. Quincannon produced a lucifer from his pocket, scraped it alight on the rough brick wall.

“Lord save us!” Malloy said.

Caleb Lansing lay sprawled on the dirt floor in front of the well pump. Blood glistened blackly on his shirt. Beside one outflung hand was an old LeMat revolver, the type that used pinfire cartridges. Loosely clenched in the other hand was the same type of brass key Malloy had used.

Quincannon knelt to press fingers against the artery in Lansing’s neck. Not even the flicker of a pulse. No blackened powder burns rimmed the bloody wound under the left armpit.

“What are you men doing here? What’s going on?”

The new voice belonged to Elias Corby, the long-nosed little bookkeeper. He pushed his way forward, sucked in his breath audibly when he saw what lay at his feet.

“Mr. Lansing’s killed himself,” Malloy said.

“Killed himself? Here?”

“Crazy place for it, by all that’s holy.”

“But why? Why would he do such a thing?”

“God only knows.”

“Suicide,” Corby said in awed tones. “Lansing, of all people.”

Quincannon paid no attention to them. While they were gabbing, he finished his examination of the dead man and then picked up the LeMat revolver, hefted it, put it down again in the same place next to Lansing’s hand.

Suicide?

Bah!

Murder, plain enough. Cold-blooded murder.

Quincannon kept his suspicions to himself. He was tolerably certain that a hand other than Caleb Lansing’s had taken the man’s life, for four good reasons, but he needed more time to determine the who, how, and why of the deed. Proclaiming here and now that Lansing had not died alone behind not one but two locked doors, the outer one under Quincannon’s own surveillance, would have brought him scorn. Not to mention stirred the already boiling pot even more by adding unnecessary complications, and even more importantly, perhaps warned the scoundrel responsible for the crime.

He ordered Jack Malloy to relock the storeroom doors and stand guard, sent Elias Corby to summon the law, and rode the freight elevator back upstairs in the hope that James Willard had returned from his meeting. A few minutes with his client before the police arrived, to explain Lansing’s involvement with the murder of Otto Ackermann to his client, would have prepared him for the interrogation to come. But Willard hadn’t yet returned. Until he did, Quincannon would have to bear the brunt of the questioning.