“You mean... he shot himself?”
“So it would seem.”
“Old Sonderberg,” someone else said amid murmurs from the others. “I wouldn’t have thought him the type to do himself in.”
“You can’t tell what goes on inside chaps like him,” Harold said.
Quincannon asked, “What sort of man was he?”
“Kept to himself, never had a chummy word for anyone.”
“No friends, no one who knew him well?”
“Not so far as I know. He won’t be missed in the neighborhood.”
The false theory of suicide had served to put an end to the men’s eagerness for information about the shooting. Violence was common in the city and there was not enough spice in a self-dispatching, particularly one by an unpopular individual such as Sonderberg seemed to have been, to sustain the interest of jaded citizens. Some of the men were already moving away when Maguire returned.
The bluecoat quickly dispersed the rest. The elderly woman still stood on the porch; it was not until Gunpowder Alley was mostly deserted again that she doddered back inside the darkened house.
Quincannon asked Maguire if he knew the woman’s name and whether or not she lived alone. “I couldn’t tell you, lad,” the patrolman said. “I’ve not seen her before that I can recall.”
“Then she doesn’t often sit in her window at night looking out.”
“Not while I’ve been by these past two weeks. The window has always been dark.”
The morgue wagon and a trio of other bluecoats arrived shortly, accompanied by a pair of plainclothes detectives from the Hall of Justice. Fortunately, Quincannon was acquainted with neither of the dicks; they exhibited no interest in him. Nor did Maguire any longer. San Francisco’s finest, a misnomer if ever there was one, found suicides and those peripherally involved to be worthy of little time or attention unless they were prominent citizens.
A misty drizzle had begun to fall again. While the minions of the law were inside with the remains of Raymond Sonderberg, Quincannon mounted a brief search for his dropped umbrella. It was nowhere to be found. One of the onlookers must have made off with it. Faugh! Thieves everywhere in this infernal city!
He drew his overcoat collar up, buttoned it at the throat, then crossed to the adjacent house. The parlor window was curtained now, no light showing around its edges. The rusty bellpull beside the door no longer worked; he rapped on the panel instead. There was no immediate response. Mayhap the old woman wanted no truck with visitors after the night’s excitement or had already retired—
Neither, as it developed. Old boards creaked and a thin, quavering voice asked, “Yes? Who’s there?”
“Police officer,” Quincannon lied glibly. “A few questions if I may, madam. I won’t keep you long.”
There was a longish pause, followed by the click of a bolt being thrown; the door squeaked open partway and the white-haired woman appeared. Stooped, still bundled in a shawl over a black dress, she carried her cane in one hand and a lit candle in the other. A cold draught set the candle flame to flickering in its ceramic holder, so that it cast a shifting motif of pale light and dark shadow over her heavily seamed face as she peered out and up at him.
“I know you,” she said. “You were here before all the commotion next door.”
“You spied me through your parlor window, eh? I thought as much, Mrs...?”
“Carver. Letitia Carver. Yes, I occasionally sit watching the street. A person my age sometimes feels lonesome at night. Sight of others passing by, even at a distance, can be a comfort.”
“I’m sure it can,” Quincannon said. “Did you happen to see anyone enter or leave the cigar store at any time tonight?”
“No, no one.”
“You’re certain?”
“Quite certain. What happened to Mr. Sonderberg?”
“Shot dead in his quarters.”
“Oh!”
“You heard the reports, did you?”
“Two, yes. I thought they were pistol shots, but I wasn’t sure. Who killed the poor man?”
“Done by his own hand, presumably. Does that surprise you?”
“At my age, young man, nothing surprises me.”
“Did you know Mr. Sonderberg well?”
“Oh, no. Hardly at all. He was a surly fellow, and I have no use for the sort of goods he sold in his shop.”
“Do you live here alone, Mrs. Carver?”
“Since my husband, Theron, passed on three years ago, bless his soul.”
“And you’ve had no visitors tonight?”
She sighed wistfully. “Very few come to visit me anymore.”
“Did you hear anyone moving about in the side or rear passages, before or after the pistol shots?”
“Only you and the other policemen.” She sighed again, sadly this time. “Poor Mr. Sonderberg.”
Poor Mr. Sonderberg, my eye, Quincannon thought. Poor Titus Wrixton, who was now bereft of ten thousand dollars as well as the rest of his ill-advised and no doubt self-incriminating letters. And poor Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, who were out a substantial fee if the mystery of Sonderberg’s death remained unsolved and the money and blackmail evidence could not be recovered.
The old woman said in her quavering voice, “Is there anything more, young man? It’s quite chilly standing here, you know.”
“Nothing more.”
“Then I shall bid you good night,” she said, and retreated inside.
He returned to the boardwalk. R. Sonderberg’s remains were in the process of being loaded into the morgue wagon. None of the policemen so much as glanced in Quincannon’s direction as he crossed the alley and made his way to Jessie Street, his thoughts as dark and gloomy as the night around him.
Home was where he went, by trolley car from Market Street to his bachelor’s flat on Leavenworth. He had neither reason nor inclination to remain downtown. Titus Wrixton would have long since left the Hotel Grant for his residence on Rincon Hill; a report to him could and would wait until tomorrow. Perhaps by then Quincannon would have divined at least a partial explanation for the night’s strange events and some definite idea of what to do next.
His flat, once both a sanctuary and, from time to time, a place to bring willing wenches for a night or two of sport, lately seemed to have taken on a lonesome aspect. He knew the reason well enough: his consuming desire for Sabina. She was on his mind constantly when he wasn’t occupied with business matters, intensely so in night’s solitude. Other women no longer had any appeal for him. The carefree, randy fellow he had once been would have scoffed at such feelings, but that fellow had become little more than a memory. If ever he brought a woman here again, it would be Sabina. But he knew what her answer would be if he suggested it. No matter how she felt about him, or he about her, she was not the sort to indulge in a casual dalliance. She would agree to share his or any man’s bed only if she loved him and was sure he loved her, and that meant marriage or the definite promise thereof.
Marriage. Was he ready and willing to take such a step, to share his personal as well as his professional life with a woman after so many years on his own? And if he determined that he was, was she ready and willing to end her long widowhood with him? The chances of her saying yes to a proposal seemed depressingly slim. Yet he couldn’t go on indefinitely sparking her in the present platonic fashion; it was too blasted frustrating. A crisis point would inevitably be reached, one that could have no favorable outcome. Yet the situation had to be resolved one way or another. His bed, by Godfrey, was already too cold and lonely as it was.
He took Emily Dickinson into it tonight, not that she provided any comfort. Her poetry not only failed to move him as it usually did, it also failed to help take his mind off Sabina. Or the problem of how R. Sonderberg had been murdered and by whom, the solution to which continued to elude him — a lack of success that doubled his frustration because he prided himself on having an uncanny and unerring knack for unraveling even the knottiest of seemingly impossible conundrums.