Quincannon complied. As they hurried along the passage, Maguire said, “Is it your friend Sonderberg lying shot in there?”
No friend of mine or society’s, Quincannon thought. But he said only, “I couldn’t be sure.”
“Didn’t seem to be anybody else in the room.”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll soon find out for sure.”
When they emerged from the passage, Quincannon saw that the elderly woman had left her rocking chair and was now standing stooped at the edge of her front window, peering out. One other individual had so far been alerted; a man wearing a cape and high hat and carrying a walking stick had appeared from somewhere and stood staring nearby. A gaggle of other onlookers would no doubt materialize before long.
No one had exited the cigar store through the Gunpowder Alley entrance; the recessed door was still locked on the inside. Maguire grunted again. “We’ll be having to break it down,” he said. “Sonderberg, or whoever ’tis, may still be alive.”
It took the combined weight of both of them to force the door, the bolt finally splintering free with an echoing crack. Once they were inside, Maguire flashed his lantern’s beam over displays of cigars and pipe tobacco, partly filled shelves of cheap sundries, then aimed it down behind the low service counter. The shop was cramped and free of hiding places — and completely unoccupied.
The closed door to the rear quarters stood behind a pair of dusty drapes. “By the Saints!” Maguire exclaimed when he caught hold of the latch. “This one’s bolted, too.”
It proved no more difficult to break open than the outer door had. The furnished room behind it covered the entire rear two-thirds of the building. The man sprawled on the floor was short, sallow complexioned, and hook-nosed — Quincannon’s quarry, right enough, though he no longer wore the bulky overcoat, muffler, and slouch hat that had covered him in the Hotel Grant. Blood from a pair of wounds spotted the front of his linsey-woolsey shirt; his open eyes glistened in the light from a table lamp.
Maguire went to one knee beside him, felt for a pulse. “Dead,” he said unnecessarily.
Quincannon’s attention was now on the otherwise empty room. It contained a handful of secondhand furniture, a blanket-covered cot, a potbellied stove that radiated heat, and a table topped with a bottle of whiskey and two empty glasses. The whole was none too tidy and none too clean.
Another pair of curtains partially concealed an alcove in the wall opposite the window. Quincannon satisfied himself that the alcove contained nothing more than a wooden icebox and larder cabinet. The only item of furniture large enough to provide a hiding place was a rickety wardrobe, but all he found when he opened it was a few articles of inexpensive clothing.
Maguire was on his feet again. He said, “I wonder what made him do it.”
“Do what?”
“Shoot himself, of course.” The patrolman made the sign of the cross on the breast of his tunic. “Suicide’s a cardinal sin.”
“Is that what you think happened, Officer?”
“Aye, and what else could it be, with all the doors and windows locked tight and no one else on the premises?”
Suicide? Faugh! Murder was what else it could be, and murder was what it was despite the apparent circumstances.
Four things told Quincannon this beyond any doubt. Sonderberg had been shot twice in the chest, a location handgun suicides seldom chose because it necessitated holding the weapon at an awkward angle. The entry wounds were close together, indicating that both bullets had entered the heart; Sonderberg would have had neither time nor cause nor ability to pull the trigger more than once. The pistol that had fired the two rounds lay some distance away from the dead man, too far for it to have been dropped if he had died by his own hand. And the most damning evidence of alclass="underline" the satchel containing the five-thousand-dollar blackmail payoff was nowhere to be seen here, nor had it been in the front part of the shop.
But Quincannon only shrugged and said nothing. Let the bluecoat believe what he liked. The dispatching of R. Sonderberg was part and parcel of the blackmail game, and that made it John Quincannon’s meat.
“I’ll be needing to report in straightaway,” Maguire said. “The nearest call box is on Jessie two blocks distant. You’ll stay here, will you, and keep out any curious citizens until I return, Mr...?”
“Quinn. That I will, Officer. On my word.”
“Quinn, is it? You’ll be Irish yourself, then?”
“Indeed,” Quincannon lied glibly, “though of a generation once removed from the Auld Sod.”
Maguire hurried out. As soon as he was alone Quincannon commenced a search of the premises. The dead man’s coat and trouser pockets yielded nothing of value or interest other than an expired insurance card that confirmed his identity as Raymond Sonderberg. The pistol that had done for him was a small-caliber Colt, its chambers loaded except for the two fired rounds; it bore no identifying marks of any kind. There was no place where the payoff money might have been hidden, nor was there any sign of the remaining letters belonging to Titus Wrixton.
The bolt on the rear door was tightly drawn, the door itself sturdy in its frame; and for good measure a wooden bar set into brackets spanned its width. Sonderberg had been nothing if not security conscious, for all the good it had done him. The single window was hinged upward, the swivel latch at the bottom of the sash loosely in place around its stud fastener. Quincannon flipped the hook aside and raised the glass to peer again at the vertical bars. They were set firmly top and bottom; he was unable to budge any of them. And as close together as they were, there was no way by which anything as bulky as the satchel could have passed between them.
Sonderberg had brought the satchel inside with him; there could be no mistaking that. Whoever had shot him had made off with it; that, too, was plain enough. But how the devil could the assassin have committed the crime and then escaped from not one but two sealed rooms in the clutch of seconds that had passed between the triggering of the fatal shots and Quincannon’s entry into the side passage?
6
Quincannon
The night’s stillness was broken now by the sound of voices out front, but as yet none of the growing number of bystanders had attempted to come inside. Muttering to himself, Quincannon lowered the window and made his way out through the cigar store to stand in the broken front doorway.
The men gathered in Gunpowder Alley numbered seven or eight, drawn from nearby houses and the corner watering hole. The man in the cape and high hat was still among them. The parlor of the house next door, Quincannon noted, was now dark and the white-haired occupant had come out to stand, shawl draped and leaning on a cane, on the small front porch.
The first of a barrage of questions came from the man in the cape. “What’s happened here?” he demanded.
“A police matter, sir.”
“Are you a policeman? You’re not dressed like one.”
“No. Merely a passerby who happened to be in the company of Patrolman Maguire when the unfortunate incident occurred.”
“What unfortunate incident? Has something happened to Sonderberg? I saw the two of you breaking in as I was leaving my home.”
“And I heard pistol shots before that,” another man said, stepping forward.
“Two of them. Was it Sonderberg who was shot?”
Quincannon admitted that it was.
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Was it robbery? I didn’t see anyone running away.” He turned to the man in the cape. “Did you, Harold?”
Harold hadn’t. “Who shot him, then?”
“Can’t you guess?” Quincannon said.