She lowered her bulk onto her pillowed chair, waited for Sabina to be seated, then said, “Now, then. What’s your proposition?”
“I assume you’re familiar with the methods used by fake mediums to perform their séance tricks — ghostly manifestations, table-tipping, slate writing, and the like. True?”
“Perhaps,” the old fraud said slyly. “You’re wanting me to spill trade secrets, eh? In order to put this fake medium Vargas out of commission, I suppose?”
“Do you object?”
“Why should I object? He’s competition, ain’t he? How much will you pay?”
“That depends on how much you reveal.”
Louella pretended to consider. “Twenty dollars is a nice round sum.”
“So is five dollars.”
“For all I know? Pshaw!”
“Ten, then.”
“That’ll buy you half.”
They haggled back and forth, finally settling on fifteen dollars. John would have considered the price exorbitant, despite the fact that the outlay would be added to Winthrop Buckley’s bill, but Sabina had expected to pay a heftier-than-usual sum to obtain the details she sought.
And obtain them she did. Even John would have to admit that the half hour she spent in the company of Madame Louella was worth the time and expense.
It was one thirty when Sabina left the fortune-teller. She had arranged a two o’clock meeting with Winthrop Buckley at his office, to give him both a written and a verbal report on her findings and to inform him of her plans for Saturday night. The distance from Kearney Street to the Montgomery Block being relatively short and the weather still balmy, she once again made passage by what John referred to as shank’s mare.
As expected, Mr. Buckley was satisfied with her conclusions about Vargas and the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses — “I knew he would turn out to be a damned... excuse me, a blasted phony” — and in agreement that it would take incontestable evidence to convince his wife. “How do you intend to go about providing it, Mrs. Carpenter?”
“By revealing to everyone present at the séance that his spirit-world manifestations are nothing more than parlor tricks.”
“You’re certain you can accomplish that? That you know how the tricks are done?”
“Most of those you described, yes.”
“Including that business with the rope and its missing knots?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Mr. Buckley asked.
“Other than maintaining the pretense of belief in what transpires at the séance, no. I intend to ask my partner, John Quincannon, to attend with me — I’ve already set the stage for his presence with Vargas. Nothing more is needed.”
Buckley sighed. “Poor Margaret. She’ll be devastated, but it has to be done. Her obsessive need to speak with our poor daughter... unhealthy and futile. Perhaps this will make her realize that the living can’t communicate with the dead.”
Sabina’s response was circumspect. “Not through frauds such as A. Vargas at any rate,” she said.
10
Sabina
It was just past four-thirty when John walked into the agency toting his traveling valise. He looked rumpled, weary, and a trifle nonplussed. In answer to her greeting he said cheerfully enough, “Ah, it’s good to be back, my dear,” and crossed to her desk to bestow a light kiss on her cheek. She responded with a smile.
“Uncomfortable trip?” she asked.
“No more so than the one to Jamestown. But at least the train from Stockton arrived on schedule for a change.” A frown ridged his broad brow. “In time for me to make a brief stop before I came here, not that it did me any benefit.”
“Mr. Boggs’s office at the Mint?”
“Yes. I expected he’d be there, but he wasn’t. He wired me, as I’m sure you know, and I sent him a return wire with my travel plans.”
“Called away on another matter, probably.”
“So he wrote in a message he left for me. He’ll be available again in the morning. You had a conversation with him, I take it?”
“He telephoned for you on Wednesday.”
“Did he tell you why he wants to see me?”
“Only that it concerns a counterfeiter named Long Nick Darrow.”
“A counterfeiter perhaps come back to life after ten years in a watery grave.”
“And perhaps active again at his old trade,” Sabina said. “Mystifying, if so.”
“To say the least.”
“Why do you suppose Mr. Boggs would want to involve you in the government’s investigation?”
“He gave no hint in his wire. Something to do, I suppose, with the fact that I was the operative who tracked Darrow down and the last known person to see him alive.”
“You knew his handiwork well?”
“Yes, but so did Boggs.”
“Did Darrow ever operate in the Bay Area?”
“Not to my knowledge,” John said. “Always in the Pacific Northwest, specifically Seattle. Yet another puzzle, if he is back in the business of manufacturing and shoving queer.”
“Will you assist Mr. Boggs if he requests it?”
“Naturally. I owe him any number of favors.”
Sabina couldn’t resist asking, “At a request for our usual fee?”
John looked at her askance, though not without a certain wistfulness, and made no reply. He went to sit at his desk, where he produced his pipe and began to load the bowl with black tobacco from his waterproof pouch. Try as she might, she could not convince him to change his dreadful brand to one less odorous.
To make up for her jab at his acquisitive nature, she said, “Tell me about your investigation for Sierra Railway, John. It was successful, I trust?”
That perked him up, as she had known it would. There was nothing her partner liked better than regaling an appreciative audience with his accomplishments. Her, in particular.
“Naturally,” he said.
“What did it entail?”
“A hunt for one of the railroad’s so-called burglarproof safes and the shipment of gold it contained.”
“The safe was also stolen?”
“It was, from an express office in Tuttletown.”
“You recovered the gold, of course.”
“Every ounce.” He was so busy puffing out billows of smoke that he seemed not to notice Sabina turning in her chair to open the window behind her. “And arranged the arrest of the thieves, a pair of brothers named Schneider who owned the local icehouse.”
“Ah. Was that where the gold was hidden?”
“And where I found it, yes.”
“Did you have any trouble with the Schneiders?”
“A bit with one of them, not worth mentioning.”
From his offhand tone and the quick fluff of his beard, Sabina had the impression that the trouble had been greater than he was letting on. It was not like him to gloss over any details of his triumphs, even those that involved personal peril. To spare her concern, perhaps — a measure of the depth of his feelings for her?
He said with a smug little smile, “You’ll never guess how the Schneiders managed to open the safe.”
Well, that wasn’t quite true. That the brothers owned an icehouse and had hidden the loot inside it gave her a clue, but she refrained from puncturing John’s conceit by offering an educated guess. She asked, “How?” and expressed proper admiration when he explained the clever method in considerable detail. When he was finished, she stroked his ego by saying, “Your usual excellent work, John.”