“Please sit down, Missus Carpenter,” he said. “Mister Ackerman told me you’d be coming this morning.”
“Thank you.” Sabina sat on the single wooden chair sandwiched between the desk and the wall. “What can you tell me about these pickpocketing incidents?”
“They have occurred over the past two weeks, at different times of day. Eight in all. Word is spreading, and we’re bound to lose customers.”
“You spoke with the victims?”
“Yes, and there may have been others who didn’t report the incidents.”
“Was there anything in common that was reported?”
Sweeney frowned, thinking. The frown had an alarming effect on his face, making it look like something that had softened and spread after being left out in the rain. In a moment he shook his head. “Nothing that I can recall.”
“Do you have the victims’ names and addresses?”
“Somewhere here.” He began to shuffle through the many papers on his desk.
Sabina held up a hand and stood. “I’ll return to collect the list later. In the meantime, I trust I may have full access to the park?”
“Certainly, Missus Carpenter.”
Several hours later Sabina, who was familiar with most of San Francisco’s dips and cutpurses, had ascertained that none of them was working the Chutes. Notably absent were Fanny Spigott, dubbed “Queen of the Pickpockets,” and her husband Joe, “King of the Pickpockets,” who recently had plotted-unsuccessfully-to steal the 2,000-pound statue of Venus de Milo from the Louvre Museum in Paris. Also among the absent were Lil Hamlin, “Fainting Lil,” whose ploy was to pass out in the arms of her victims; Jane O’Leary, “Weeping Jane,” who lured her marks in by enlisting them in the hunt for her missing six-year-old, then relieved them of their valuables while hugging them when the precocious and well-trained child was found; “Fingers” McCoy claimed to have the fastest reach in town, and “Lovely Lena,” true name unknown, a blonde so captivating that it was said she blinded her victims.
While searching for her pickpocket, Sabina had toured the park on the scenic railway, eaten an ice cream, ridden the merry-go-round, and taken a boatride down the Chutes-which was indeed thrilling. So thrilling that she rewarded her bravery with a German sausage on a sourdough roll. It was early afternoon and she was leaving Lester Sweeney’s office with the list of the pickpocket’s victims when she saw an unaccompanied woman intensely watching the crowd around the merry-go-round. The woman moved foward, next to a man in a straw bowler, but when he turned and nodded to her, she stepped a few paces away.
Sabina moved closer.
The woman had light brown hair, upswept under a wide-brimmed straw picture hat similar to Sabina’s. She was slender, outfitted in a white shirtwaist and cornflower blue skirt. The hat shaded her features, and the only distinctive thing about her attire was the pin that held the hat to her head. Sabina-a connoisseur of hatpins-recognized it as a Charles Horner of blue glass overlaid with a gold pattern.
The woman must have felt Sabina’s gaze. She looked around, and Sabina saw she had blue eyes and rather plain features, except for a small white scar on her chin. Her gaze slid over Sabina, focused on a man to her right, but moved away when he reached down to pick up a fretting child. After a moment the woman turned and walked slowly toward the exit.
A pickpocket, for certain; Sabina had seen how they operated many times. She followed, keeping her eyes on the distinctive hatpin.
Fortunately there was a row of hansom cabs waiting outside the gates of the park. The woman with the distinctive hatpin claimed the first of these, and Sabina took another, asking the driver to follow the other hack. He regarded her curiously, no doubt unused to gentlewomen making such requests, but the new century was rapidly approaching, and with it what the press had dubbed the New Woman. Very often these days the female sex did not think or act as it once had.
The brown-haired woman’s cab led them north on Haight and finally to Market Street, the city’s main artery. There she disembarked near the Palace Hotel-as did Sabina-and crossed Market to Montgomery. It was 5:00 p.m. and businessmen of all kinds were pouring out of their downtown offices to travel the Cocktail Route, as the Gay Nineties young blades termed it.
From the Reception Saloon on Sutter Street to Haquette’s Palace of Art on Post Street to the Palace Hotel Bar, the influential men of San Francisco trekked daily, partaking of fine liquor and lavish free banquet spreads. Women-at least respectable ones-were not admitted to these establishments, but Sabina had ample knowledge of them from John’s tales of the days when he was a drinking man. He had been an operative with the U.S. Secret Service, until the accidental death by his hand of a pregnant woman turned him into a drunkard; those were the days before he met Sabina and embarked on a new, sober life…
Once again she forced her thoughts away from John Quincannon.
The woman she had followed from the amusement park was now well into the crowd on Montgomery Street-known as The Ambrosial Path to cocktail hour revelers. Street characters and vendors, beggars and ad-carriers for the various saloons’ free lunches, temperance speakers, and the Salvation Army band-all mingled with well-dressed bankers and attorneys, politicians and physicians. Sabina made her way through the throng, keeping her eye on the woman’s hat, brushing aside the importunings of a match-peddler. The woman moved along unhurriedly and after two blocks turned left and walked over to Kearney.
There the street scene was even livelier: palm readers, shooting galleries, and auction houses had their quarters there. Ever present were the shouting vendors and pitchmen of all sorts; fakirs and touters of Marxism; snake charmers and speech makers of all persuasions. It seemed every type of individual in the world had come to Kearney Street for the start of the evening. Sabina kept her eyes on the woman as she moved at a leisurely pace, stopping to finger a bolt of Indian fabric and then to listen to a speaker extol the virtues of phrenology. She moved deeper into the crowd, and Sabina momentarily lost her; seconds later she heard a faint cry and pushed her way forward.
A gent in a frock coat was bent over, his silk hat having fallen to the sidewalk. As he straightened, his face frozen in a grimace of pain, he reached inside his coat. Sudden anger replaced pain and he shouted: “Stop, thief!”
But no one was fleeing. The crowd murmured, heads swiveling, faces curious and alarmed. The man again shouted: “My watch! I’ve been robbed!”
Sabina moved forward. “What happened?”
The man stared at her, open-mouthed.
She hurriedly removed one of her cards from her reticule and gave it to him. “I am investigating a series of thefts. Please tell me what happened.”
He examined the card. “Will you find the person who took my watch? It is very old and rare…”
“Was it you who cried out earlier?”
“Yes. I suffered a sharp pain in my side. Here.” He indicated his lower left rib cage. “I have had such discomfort before, and I’ve just come from the Bank Exchange where, I’m afraid, I consumed an overlarge quantity of oysters on the half shell. I suppose the thief took advantage of my distress.”
“Did you not notice anyone close to you? A woman, perhaps?”
The gent shook his head. “I saw no one.”
Sabina turned to the ring of people surrounding them, asked the same question of them, and received the same answer.
The woman she’d followed from the amusement park had found her mark, struck, and swiftly vanished.
It was nearly 7:00 p.m., an inconvenient time to go calling, but over the course of her years as a Pinkerton operative and a self-employed detective, Sabina had become accustomed to calling on people at incon venient times.
At her flat on Russian Hill, she changed into a heavy black skirt and shirtwaist and a long cape in deference to the foggy San Francisco eve ning. Once again she left in a hansom cab, one she’d hired to wait for her at her stops along the way. She had studied the list of names of the pickpocket’s victims that Lester Sweeney had given her, and mapped out a convenient and easy route.