“Did you reveal that fact to Luther Duff?”
“Certainly not.”
“You made no effort to purchase the statue?”
“I might have, if I had had the two-thousand-dollar asking price. Not for myself, you understand; I know how much the statue means to Senor Velasquez. As it was, I hurried out and sent a wire informing him of the find.”
“Did you ask Duff where he'd obtained it?”
“Oh yes. He said at auction in San Jose two years ago. How it came to be there, he said, he had no inkling.” O'Hare paused for a sip of his brandy. “I expect you were able to extract a different version from him.”
“Do you?”
“Else, why would you be on your way to Santa Barbara instead of to San Jose.”
Quincannon smiled around the stem of his pipe. “Whatever I may have learned from Luther Duff is confidential information. You understand, I'm sure.”
“Oh, of course. Discretion is an admirable trait in a detective.”
“I'm glad you think so.”
There was another silence. Quincannon smoked placidly, watching the night glide by outside the windows. After a time O'Hare stirred, finished the last of his brandy, and got to his feet. In the glow of the side lamps, his eyes behind the Roosevelt glasses had the look of peeled grapes.
“If you'll excuse me,” he said, “I believe I'll retire. Perhaps we'll see each other again before our arrival.”
“If not in Santa Barbara at some point.”
“I look forward to it. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Quincannon lingered after the young historian was gone, to finish his pipe. A waiter approached him and was politely sent away. It was odd, he thought, but after six months of sobriety he no longer had any desire for alcohol. What he had told O'Hare was true: He was a drunkard. During the year prior to those six months, he had besotted himself with liquor. But there had been a reason for it, and that reason was neither a fondness for whiskey nor an inability to control its use. The reason was a woman named Katherine Bennett, a woman he had never met, never spoken to; a pregnant woman in Virginia City, Nevada, who had died-and whose unborn child had also died-with his bullet in her breast.
The shooting of Katherine Bennett had been a tragic accident. It had happened during a gunfight that had erupted when he and a team of local law enforcement officers attempted to arrest two brothers who ran a print shop, for the crime of counterfeiting United States government currency. In the skirmish behind the print shop, one of the brothers had wounded a deputy with a shotgun load of buckshot and then attempted to flee through the rear yards of a row of private houses. Quincannon had shot him, to avoid being shot himself; but one of his bullets had gone wild and found its way into the breast of Katherine Bennett, who had been hanging up wash in the neighboring yard.
A tragic accident, yes, but he had not been able to bear the burden of two innocent lives on his conscience. Guilt had eaten away at him; he had taken to drink to dull the images of that hot September afternoon, the dying screams of Katherine Bennett that echoed and reechoed inside his head. His work had suffered; he had felt incapable of ever turning his weapon against another human being, even to save his own life. Sooner or later Boggs would have been forced to dismiss him from the Service, and he would surely have become lost in a mire of alcohol and guilt if it had not been for two occurrences this past fall.
The first was a counterfeiting case involving coney greenbacks that had been flooding the Pacific Coast from an unknown location. Quincannon had uncovered evidence that indicated the source to be a remote mining town, Silver City, in the Owyhee Mountains of Idaho; and Boggs, being shorthanded, had had no choice but to send him there undercover to investigate.
The second occurrence was his meeting Sabina during the course of that investigation. At first he had been both fascinated and repelled by her, for she bore a superficial resemblance to Katherine Bennett; and she also seemed to be involved in the shady goings-on in and around Silver City. It was only later that he discovered she was neither the milliner she pretended to be nor the criminal he feared her to be, but a “Pink rose”-a female operative of the Pinkerton Agency's Denver branch-on an undercover assignment of her own.
Quincannon had continued his steady, mind-dulling consumption of alcohol while in Silver City, and as a result he had made a foolish mistake that nearly cost Sabina her life. Far-reaching changes had been wrought in him as a result. He had found the strength to stop drinking, to accept his guilt and his dependency on liquor for the senseless, crippling indulgences that they were-indulgences that had almost caused the death of a second innocent woman. And where was the purpose, the atonement, in destroying himself? There were things to be done with his special skills, perhaps even lives to save over many years of public service. And indeed, wasn't the ongoing use of those skills a proper memorial to the short and tragic life of Katherine Bennett?
After his return to San Francisco, he had given considerable thought to his future. Alcohol had no part in it-he had had his last drink in Silver City-but he'd decided that Sabina did have. He had asked her by wire if she would consider leaving the Pinkertons and joining him in a brand-new venture, a detective agency wherein they would be equal partners. She had wired back affirmatively. She was a widow-her husband, also a Pinkerton operative, had been killed in the line of duty two years before-and had no family ties in Denver; she, too, was ready for a new beginning. He had given notice to the Service, over Boggs's strenuous objections, and when Sabina arrived in San Francisco, they had pooled their savings and opened Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services.
If the agency had not yet prospered, neither was it floundering. If the past five months had had their share of frustrations, they had also had their share of smiles and satisfactions. Life felt and smelled and tasted good again. The past was behind him, trapped in an occasional nightmare, a vagrant thought or feeling like a dark cloud passing across the face of the sun. He was, he had realized not long ago, with no little surprise, a reasonably happy man once more.
Not that he was happy at the present time, however. This train was just not where he wanted to be-especially not after he returned to his compartment and settled himself into the berth the porter had made up for him. There was something about the rhythm and motion of a moving train that made sleeping alone a difficult and depressing state of affairs….
Santa Barbara was a settlement of some five thousand residents, nestled between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the sea. Its primary attraction was its sulfur and mineral springs, whose healthful and curative properties had been bombastically praised by a New York writer named Charles Nordhoff in an 1871 travel guide to California. Ever since, tourists had flocked to Santa Barbara to take the waters-the modern version, Quincannon supposed, of the eternal quest for the fountain of youth.
He had visited the town more than once as an operative of the Secret Service, the last time three years ago on a case that had taken him to the old Ortego rancho outside the neighboring village of Montecito. The hilly land there now belonged to members of a spiritualist colony called Summerland, who believed they could converse with dear-departed friends and relatives through an individual called a medium. Locally the colony was known as “Spookville,” and Quincannon had found that appellation all too appropriate. More than one strange thing had happened to him in Spookville, not the least of which was an attempt on his life outside the spiritualists' temple near the beach.
It was midmorning when the train arrived at the main depot at Victoria and Rancheria streets, on Santa Barbara's west side. Well-fed, if not well-rested, Quincannon alighted in the company of Felipe Velasquez and Barnaby O'Hare. The two men had been in the dining car when he entered it at eight o'clock, and he had joined them for breakfast. Velasquez's travel sickness no longer seemed to be plaguing him; he was in better spirits this morning and had eaten the same hearty meal as Quincannon. Their conversation had been polite and limited to neutral topics. No mention had been made of Don Esteban's lost artifacts, and Velasquez had prudently refrained from speaking James Evans's name in front of O'Hare.