And I don’t like pompous, empty-headed civil servants, Quincannon thought, but he only smiled and said: “Perhaps I’ll count myself lucky, as you put it, on this case as well.”
“Yeah? We’ll see about that.”
That we will, Inspector. And sooner than you think.
Meeker had already given Dooley an account of last night’s events, but the homicide dick demanded another from Quincannon. He scoffed at what he called “this spook hokum” and seemed skeptical, if not openly suspicious, of Quincannon’s rôle in the matter. Quincannon bore his browbeating with good-natured equanimity. He could have told Dooley then and there what he had deduced, but the man’s manner irritated him and he took a certain amount of pleasure in watching him blunder and bluster about Jared’s bedroom and the scene of the murder, overlooking clues and asking the wrong questions. While the two policemen were examining the abandoned cars, Quincannon took Barnaby Meeker aside and asked him a pair of seemingly innocuous questions. The answers he received were the ones he had expected.
As Dooley and the bluecoat emerged, Artemus Crabb came striding over from the direction of his car. Crabb seemed more at ease this time, his face reflecting curiosity rather than hostility or concern. He barely glanced at Quincannon, his attention focused on the law dogs.
“And who would you be?” Dooley demanded.
“Crabb’s my name. I live over yonder.”
Dooley introduced himself. “I been told you didn’t see anything of what happened out here last night.”
“That’s right, I didn’t. Seen the spook lights the night before and once is enough for me. I spent last night locked up inside my car.”
“No, you didn’t,” Quincannon said.
“What’s that?”
“You spent part of the night lying in wait on one of the dunes, with a cocked revolver in your hand.”
“What the devil would I do that for?”
“To lay the Carville ghost, once and for all.”
All eyes were on Quincannon now, Crabb glaring with feigned indignation, Dooley and Meeker showing their surprise. Quincannon favored them with the smile he reserved for moments such as these. It was time for him to take center stage, to reveal the deductive prowess that made him, in his estimation, the finest detective west of the Mississippi-a rôle he relished above all others.
Meeker said: “What are you saying, Mister Quincannon? That Crabb murdered my son?”
“With malice aforethought.”
“That’s a damn’ lie!” Crabb snapped. “Spook stuff scares the bejesus out of me. Ask Meeker, ask that old coot in the coffee saloon…they’ll tell you.”
“Spook stuff that you fear might be authentic, yes. But by the time you crouched in wait last night, you knew the truth about the Carville ghost.”
“What truth?” Dooley demanded.
“That it was all a sham designed to separate Mister Crabb from his cache of loot.”
“Loot? What loot?”
“The twenty-five thousand dollars he and his accomplice stole from Wells Fargo Express two weeks ago.”
Dooley gawped at him. Crabb shouted: “You’re crazy! You can’t pin that on me. You can’t prove anything against me.”
“I can prove that you murdered Jared Meeker,” Quincannon said, “by your own testimony. When I told you this morning that he’d been killed, you said…‘How can a damned ghost shoot a man?’ But I didn’t say how he’d been killed. How did you know he’d been shot unless you pulled the trigger yourself?”
“I just…ah…assumed it…”
“Bosh. You had no reason to assume such a fact.” Quincannon turned his attention to Dooley. “Jared Meeker was shot with a large-bore handgun, one with a considerable range…the very type Crabb carries. A search of his premises should provide additional evidence. Though not the loot from the robbery, or else Jared would have found it. It’s hidden elsewhere, likely buried under or near one of those abandoned cars…”
“Hold on, Quincannon,” Dooley said. “You telling us Jared Meeker knew Crabb was one of the bandits?”
“He did…because he was the other one, Crabb’s accomplice.”
Meeker emitted a wounded sound, puffed up, and stabbed the sand with his blackthorn stick. “That can’t be true!”
“But I’m afraid it is,” Quincannon said. “You told me yourself just now that the only job Jared held in his young life was that of a clerk in a shoe emporium on Kearney Street downtown…the same street and the very same block on which the Wells Fargo Express office is located, and a perfect position to observe the days and times large sums of cash were delivered. He fell in somehow with Crabb and together they planned and executed the robbery. Afterward they separated, Crabb evidently keeping the loot with him. The plan then called for Crabb to take up residence here in Carville, a place known to have been used before as a temporary hideout by criminals, until the hunt for the stolen money grew cold.
“My guess is that Jared grew impatient for his share of the spoils and Crabb refused to give it to him or to reveal where he’d hidden it. His first action would have been to search Crabb’s car when Crabb was away on one of his infrequent outings. When he didn’t find the loot, he embarked on a more devious, and foolish, course.”
Dooley asked: “Why didn’t he just throw down on Crabb and demand his share?”
“The lad wasn’t made that way. He was a sly schemer and likely something of a coward, afraid of a direct confrontation with his partner in crime. I’m sorry, Mister Meeker, but the evidence supports this conclusion.”
Meeker said nothing. He appeared to be slowly deflating.
Quincannon went on: “At some point during their relationship, Crabb revealed to Jared his fear of the supernatural. This was the core of the lad’s too-clever plan. He would frighten Crabb enough to force him to leave Carville after first digging up and dividing the loot. But he was careless enough to say or do something to alert Crabb to the game he was playing. That, and the probable fact that Crabb wanted the entire booty for himself, cost Jared his life.”
“So he was responsible for the spook business,” Dooley said.
“More than just responsible. He was the Carville ghost.”
“And just how did he manage that?”
“A remark Missus Meeker made yesterday alerted me to the method. She said that he was ‘a kiting youngster.’ At the time I took that to mean flighty, the runabout sort, but she meant it literally. His passion as a boy, as Mister Meeker confirmed to me a few minutes ago, was flying kites.”
“What does that have to do with…?”
Dooley stopped speaking abruptly. For just then Quincannon had removed from beneath his coat the wreckage he’d found earlier on the beach
“This is the Carville ghost, or what’s left of it,” he said. “A simple kite made of heavy canvas tacked onto a wooden frame, roughly fashioned in the shape of a man and coated with an oil-based paint mixed with phosphorous…all the tools for the making of which you’ll find in Jared’s steamer trunk. His game went like this. First he told Crabb that he’d seen spook lights among the abandoned cars and to watch for them himself. Then, past midnight, he slipped out, went to one of the cars, flashed the kite about to create the illusion of an otherworldly glow, used a tool made of a piece of wood and several nails…which you’ll also find in his trunk…to make clawlike scratches on the walls and floors, and then fled with the kite before Crabb or anyone else could catch him.”
Meeker asked dully: “How could he run across the tops of the dunes without leaving tracks?”
“He didn’t run across the tops, he ran along below and behind the dunes with the string played out just far enough to lift the kite above the crests. To hold it at that height, he used these”-Quincannon held out one of the lead sinkers he’d found-“to weight it down so he could control it in the wind. On dark, foggy nights, seen from a distance and manipulated by an expert kite flier, the kite gave every appearance of a ghostly figure bounding across the sandhills. And when he wanted it to disappear, he merely yanked it down out of sight, drew it in, and hid it under his coat. That was what he was about to do when Crabb shot him. When the bullet struck him, the string loosed from his hand and the kite was carried off by the wind. I saw flashes of phosphorescence, higher up, before it disappeared altogether. This morning I found the remains on the beach.”