Билл Пронзини - The Bags of Tricks Affair

“I hate like the devil to say this, John, my lad,” Bluefield said, “but if this bastard Gaunt is in the city, he has made no contact with gamblers, sure-thing men, or others of their ilk.”

“You’re certain such a meeting couldn’t have been kept secret?”

“You know as well as I do there are no secrets in the Coast or the Tenderloin. Any can be bought for as little as the price of a beer.” For emphasis Bluefield raised his mug of lager, his favorite tipple; he consumed prodigious quantities day and night. “Lady One-Eye’s name is known to several after the shooting of her husband in Grass Valley, but none ever sat at table with her or with Jack O’Diamonds. And none even knew Gaunt’s name.”

“He must know someone here,” Quincannon insisted.

Bluefield drank from his mug, licked foam off his coal-black handlebar mustache. Its waxed, sharp-pointed ends quivered when he said, “Ah, lad, why must he? A man bent on mayhem seldom asks for aid.”

“He doesn’t if he intends to strike from ambush, shoot down his victim in cold blood, but there is no indication that is what happened to Sabina. If he had something else in mind, he might well seek assistance.”

“Something such as what? A kidnapping?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“What would he stand to gain by such an act?”

“I don’t know. What I do know, what I feel in my bones, is that she is still alive.”

Bluefield said nothing. But his thinking was plain: Gaunt may in fact have murdered Sabina in cold blood and disposed of her body in such a fashion that it had yet to be found or might never be found.

Fighting exhaustion — Quincannon had gone home for just a short time, slept hardly at all — he drove to the Western Union office on Market Street. The last two collect wires answering his queries about Gaunt and Lady One-Eye were waiting, but neither contained any useful information.

Onward, then, to Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. The morsel of hope that he might find Sabina there at her desk, safe and with a rational explanation for her absence, died when he found the door locked and the morning’s mail on the floor inside. He sifted quickly through the envelopes. No messages and nothing worth opening in the batch.

He tossed the lot onto his desk. The wires from Sheriff Hezekiah Thorpe and the Pinkerton office in New Orleans caught his eye where he’d left them on Sabina’s blotter. He sat in her chair, smudged a hand over his face and knuckled his tired eyes, then reread the wires — doing that because he had nothing else to do at the moment.

D. S. Nickerson.

He passed over the name in the Pinkerton wire, then paused and looked at it again. D. S. Nickerson, Gaunt’s coconspirator in a land-speculation fraud in New Orleans five years ago. Neither man had been prosecuted. Gaunt had been declared persona non grata by the local constabulary as a result of his suspected involvement in the gambler’s murder, at a time when he was already under police scrutiny for the land swindle. Had his partner, Nickerson, also been sent packing from the gulf city? And if so, was it possible he’d come to the Far West to establish a new life?

Quincannon rummaged up the agency’s copy of Langley’s City Directory . He found no listing under the heading of “Real Estate,” but when he turned to “Land Agents”—

Donald S. Nickerson, Fifth and Townsend

His first rush of excitement lasted only a few seconds. Don’t go jumping to conclusions, he warned himself. Nickerson was not a common name, though neither was it an obscure one; the similarity in both name and initials could be coincidental. As could Donald S. Nickerson’s profession. San Francisco was a long way from New Orleans, five years a long time for two former partners to remain in contact.

Still, it was the best and only lead he had. And how could you possibly find a needle in a haystack without grabbing at straws?

The two-story building on the corner of Fifth and Townsend had seen better days. It was not exactly ramshackle, but various parts of its façade were in need of repair and the whole of a fresh coat of whitewash. According to the directory in the vestibule, it housed an attorney, a manufacturer’s agent, a publisher of maps, a purveyor of unidentified novelties, and Donald S. Nickerson, Land Agent, office on the second floor.

Quincannon climbed a creaky staircase, went along a gloomy hallway to the door marked with Nickerson’s name and profession. Without knocking, he opened it and stepped inside. The office was composed of two rooms, the one he was in and a slightly smaller one visible through an open doorway at the far end. An unoccupied desk and a smattering of other nondescript and inexpensive furniture half filled this one. Photographs of properties, most of which looked to be industrial, were pinned to the walls.

A chair scraped the floor in the other room and a man appeared in the doorway. Fiftyish, stocky, with a moon face topped by strands of ginger-colored hair combed in a checkerboard pattern over an otherwise bald scalp. The smile he wore was hearty and welcoming, and as artificial as the rows of tobacco-stained teeth it revealed. His brown suit was a touch threadbare, his waistcoat and cravat likewise. Not a particularly successful land agent, whether an honest one or not.

“Ah, good afternoon, sir, good afternoon,” he said as he came forward. He had no discernible Southern accent. “Donald S. Nickerson, at your service. How may I help you?”

“By answering a few questions.”

“Certainly, sir, certainly. Anything and everything you’d care to know. I have several excellent properties for sale, with and without structures, many at bargain prices—”

“I’m not interested in buying property.”

“You’re not?” Disappointment dimmed Nickerson’s toothy smile. “Well. Selling land, then?”

“Not that, either.”

The piggish little eyes turned wary. “You wouldn’t be here about the, mmm, bank matter, would you?”

“I’m not a collection agent, no.”

“No, of course you aren’t,” Nickerson said, relieved. “A minor matter, that business, of no consequence. May I ask your name, sir?”

“Quincannon. John Quincannon.”

That erased the smile completely. “The, mmm, the detective?”

“You’ve heard of me then.”

“Oh, yes. You’ve often been prominent in the news. Yes, quite prominent. Splendid reputation. What, mmm, what brings you to see me?”

“Jeffrey Gaunt.”

Nickerson’s only visible reaction was a twitch at a corner of his mouth. “I don’t believe I know the name. Gaunt, did you say? No, I know no one named Gaunt.”

“New Orleans, Mr. Nickerson.”

“Mmm? What’s that? I don’t understand.”

“You’ve never done business there?”

“No, sir. No. Never done business there, never been there. Why do you ask?”

“I’m looking for Gaunt. Looking hard for him.”

“Are you? Has he, mmm, done something illegal?”

“Committed a crime that will send him to prison for a long time, if not to the hangman.” Quincannon added pointedly, fixing the land agent with a basilisk eye, “And anyone who worked in consort with him, too.”

The muscle jumped again in Nickerson’s cheek. He cleared his throat phlegmily before he said, “But I don’t understand, sir. Why have you come to me about this person?”

“He once worked a land swindle in New Orleans with a man named D. S. Nickerson.”

“Oh, mmm, I see. The remarkable similarity of name and profession brought you here. A coincidence, I assure you, a remarkably bizarre coincidence.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. Certainly. I am an honest man, honest as the day is long. And as I told you I have never been to New Orleans. Never traveled farther east than the state capital, as a matter of fact. No, never.”