The highlight of Sabina’s day came as she was about to leave — a suggestion from Amity that she, too, serve as a delegate to the convention. Sabina would have been proud to wear one of the official campaign badges — a silky golden-yellow rectangle fringed at both ends, California gold being the adopted color of the suffrage campaigns in the state. The demands of her work, however, limited her free time, and she might be deeply involved in a case come November. She declined with sincere regrets.
14
Quincannon
Sabina may have been right that women of Pauline Dupree’s ilk would one day suffer a harsh reckoning, but someday was not soon enough for him. Nor was the prospect that not he but another servant of the law would have the satisfaction of bringing her to her just desserts. The woman had made a fool of him, placed a spot of tarnish on his otherwise exemplary record as a private investigator; he would not rest until the spot had been removed.
Without telling Sabina of his intentions, he had set out immediately to find ways and means. Searching the actress’s living quarters or her theater dressing room would be a futile undertaking; the ten thousand dollars she had extorted from Titus Wrixton would be well and cleverly hidden, perhaps in a safe-deposit box in a bank other than Woolworth National. Bracing her again would be just as futile. She was immune to threats. Neither tricks nor bluffs would work on her, either. What he needed in order to devise a method of ending her criminal career was more information about her and her activities.
It took him the better part of three days to compile a sketchy but useful dossier. He accomplished this by checking public records, bribing a minor official of his acquaintance in the police department’s records department, and putting the word out to Ezra Bluefield, who still knew everything that went on in the Barbary Coast even though he no longer owned the infamous Terrific Street deadfall called the Scarlet Lady, and to others in the coterie of informants he had cultivated; by dispatching Chauncey Philpotts, one of the agency’s part-time employees, to cautiously interview the other performers and staff of the Gaiety Theater; and, once Quincannon learned that his quarry had spent several months performing in Sacramento before moving to San Francisco, by sending a wire requesting information to a fellow private detective in the capital city.
Pauline Dupree’s origins were hazy, though she had apparently first seen the light of day in the Sierra foothills town of Sonora some twenty-five years ago. She had begun traveling with a motley group of small-time actors while in her mid-teens, left them to join another thespian group in Virginia City, Nevada, and moved on from there to Sacramento, where she had been arrested and fined for performing a one-woman show that was deemed lewd and lascivious. After that she had made her way to San Francisco and the Gaiety, where she had been employed for the past three years.
La Dupree had made profitable use of her time here, consorting with — and no doubt finding ways to fleece — several men of both high and low repute. Titus Wrixton was not the only prominent individual to succumb to her charms; while keeping him on her string and at the same time conspiring with Raymond Sonderberg, she had also been keeping company with a San Joaquin Delta rancher and businessman named Noah Rideout. An amazingly amoral and ruthless woman, Pauline Dupree. And one, Quincannon reflected, with a remarkable amount of physical stamina.
Rideout, it developed, was a very wealthy gent of fifty-seven years who had had two wives and at least one known mistress and who spent a considerable amount of his time in San Francisco as well as in Sacramento and Stockton. He owned much of the rich Schyler Island croplands, having forced several small farmers to sell their land to him at low prices, and earned the enmity of others by a tireless campaign to build more levee roads as a means of flood control. He had also been a leader in the legal battle against hydraulic gold mining in the Mother Lode, the dumping of billions of cubic yards of yellow slickens that had clogged rivers and sloughs and destroyed farmland. The California Debris Commission Act, passed in 1893, had made the discharge of debris into the rivers illegal and virtually put the hydraulickers known as the Little Giants out of business.
An even riper plum for the picking, Noah Rideout. Surely Dupree would have taken financial advantage of his attraction to her. Extortion of the same sort as she had perpetrated on Wrixton, using another confederate as the go-between? Either that or some equally devious means of separating Rideout from a large amount of cash.
A plainspoken interview with Rideout was indicated, once the rancher’s present whereabouts had been determined. Meanwhile Quincannon decided to have another talk with Titus Wrixton. Not an easy proposition considering that the banker remained completely under the actress’s spell and refused to see him. Refused to pay the balance of the agency’s fee as well, which Quincannon had communicated by means of a brief note delivered by messenger — a default that rankled him almost as much as the Dupree woman’s duplicity.
On Friday morning he hied himself to the Woolworth National Bank. The fact that Wrixton once again refused an audience deterred him not at all. A casual question of one of the tellers, while changing a fifty-dollar greenback, brought him the information that Wrixton took his luncheon break from twelve until one-thirty. At a quarter to twelve Quincannon took up a position outside the bank. The decision to be early was a wise one, for Wrixton emerged not more than three minutes later.
The banker was alone and, from the look of him, in a state of some distress. His shoulders were slumped, his gait burdensome, his florid features hangdog. Bracing him on the crowded street wouldn’t do; a measure of privacy was necessary for the conversation Quincannon intended to have with him. He might be on his way to meet someone. If so, then the best place for contact to be made was in the reception area of whichever restaurant he entered.
Except that where Wrixton was bound was not a restaurant. Rather, it was the Reception Saloon at Sutter and Karny, the traditional first stop on the businessman’s nightly eating and drinking revel along the Cocktail Route. Quincannon was only a few yards behind him, and when he himself entered he saw the banker head straight for an empty section at the far end of the long, polished mahogany bar and there stand, or rather hunch, with his elbows propped on the gleaming bar top. He waited until the banker had been served a large pony of brandy, then sauntered ahead and bellied up next to him.
“Drinking your lunch today, Mr. Wrixton?”
The banker lifted his nose from the brandy, blinked in recognition, and then glowered. It wasn’t much of a glower, being tempered by a despair that was even more evident at close quarters.
“I told you before, Quincannon, you’ll not get another penny from me. Not only did you grievously defame Miss Dupree, you’ve failed to find and return my letters as you promised to do. Dereliction of duty on all fronts.”
A slanderous and inaccurate comment, on which Quincannon forbore comment. “Money is not the reason I’m here. Not directly, that is.”
“Damn your eyes, this new development is all your fault.”
“What new development? Don’t tell me your paramour has broken off relations with you?”
Wrixton cast furtive glances along and behind the bar. He said sotto voce, “For God’s sake, keep your voice down. I am known in here.”