Quincannon steered him to an empty corner table near the window, set the plate down in the middle of it. Owney started to sit down beside him, but Quincannon waved him to a chair opposite. The ripe body odor was not quite as palpably offensive at a distance.
“Speak your piece,” he said then.
“Well, sir, I gets around a bit and keeps me ears open. Couple of nights ago I happens to be in a Terrific Street resort and overhears a mug in his cups tell another mug how happy he was to’ve hooked up with them that was takin’ the Treasury Department for a ride. His exact words, sir. So when I hears that a pal of Mr. Bluefield’s is interested in just such dirty business as that, I comes lookin’ for you straightaway.”
“What else was said on the subject?”
“Nothing that I hears. The second mug says hard, ‘Shut up, Dinger, or the boss’ll cut your tongue out.’”
“Dinger. You’re sure that was the name?”
“That I am, sir. No mistake.”
“Was the boss’s name mentioned? Or any others?”
“Dinger was all I hears.”
“Any idea where Dinger or the other one hang their hats?”
“No, sir. Strangers to me, they was.”
“Where was it you overheard them talking?”
“The Red Rooster. You knows it, sir?”
“I know it,” Quincannon said. The Red Rooster was a dance hall and bagnio on Terrific Street, as Pacific Avenue was known to habitués, in the black heart of the Barbary Coast. “Was anyone else with the pair while they were talking?”
“Not then there wasn’t, but one of the girls joined them up just after. Joined Dinger up, that is.” Owney punctuated the last with a wink and a leer. “Wasn’t long before they goes wobblin’ off together, headed upstairs.”
“No stranger to him, then, this girl?”
“Chummy as you please, they was.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Mollie. That’s what he called her.”
“What does she look like?”
“Hefty as them that likes ’em that way. Ringlets what fits right in with the name of the place, red as a rooster’s comb.”
“And Dinger?”
“Well, now. A mite taller than me, speckled-egg bald without his hat. Nose bent funny, like it was broke once and not fixed proper. Fond of his liquor, I’d say — face as red as Mollie’s hair.”
“Age?”
“Who can tell, sir? Not so old, not so young.”
“The other man, the one who told Dinger to shut up — describe him.”
“Shaped like a wrestler, he was, with a mustache so thick it looked like he was eating a cat.”
Paddy Lasher, like as not. “Did you notice his eyes, if one was blue and the other brown?”
“Hoo. One blue, one brown? No, sir.” Owney gave an emphatic headshake. “I never looks them in the eye as I don’t know, and even if I did, the Rooster ain’t too well lit up like some resorts.”
“Anything else you can tell me about either man?”
“Not a thing, sir. If I’d knowed then what I knows now, I’d’ve waited around and followed Dinger and his pal when they left the Rooster. As ’twas, I had some business of me own to tend to.”
Scruff’s business, no doubt. Men like Owney had their fingers in the bottoms of all sorts of unsavory barrels.
Owney leaned forward, his gaze shifting eagerly between Quincannon and the plate full of free lunch. “Was me information worth this here tucker for a hungry man?”
Quincannon pushed the plate toward him.
“And a glass to wash it down with?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. And not to be askin’ too much of your charity, sir, pr’aps a gold sovereign or two for me empty purse?”
The idea of paying money to a scruff as disreputable as this one, particularly when there was no chance of an expense-account reimbursement, chafed at Quincannon’s sense of propriety, not to mention his thrifty nature. A promise, however, was a promise. He got to his feet, withdrew a handful of coins from his pocket, extracted two dimes, and placed them on the table.
“One for the promised beer,” he said, “the other for your empty purse.”
Owney looked half crestfallen, half irritated, but he knew better than to offer a remark. He pounced on the coins, made them disappear. When last seen he had a pig’s foot in one hand and a hunk of cheese in the other and was greedily devouring them in alternate bites.
19
Quincannon
He seldom ventured into the nine-square-block lair of the Barbary Coast after nightfall. But when business demanded it, he didn’t think twice about assuming the risk. The lead provided by Owney struck him as genuine, made him eager to find Dinger and his “cat-eating” friend. And even more eager to learn the identity of “the boss.” He’d like nothing better than another confrontation with Long Nick Darrow, if Darrow was in fact alive and practicing his trade again after ten long years. Should the boss be someone else, how he’d been able to utilize Darrow’s special counterfeiting skills was an equally burning question that compelled an answer.
Before he went on the hunt, Quincannon stopped at the agency. To go traipsing around the Coast dressed as he was in a moderately expensive suit would be pure folly; only fools and drunks, or a combination of both, made targets of themselves by calling attention to the fact that they were well-to-do and likely carrying a wad of greenbacks. In the back alcove he kept hand-me-down clothing for just such situations as this, among the items an old overcoat and a seamen’s cap. He stripped off his Chesterfield, frock coat, vest, and cravat, and exchanged his hand-tooled shoes for a pair of scuffed boots. With the overcoat buttoned, his trousers and shirt were mostly hidden.
The usual nighttime babel of piano hurdy-gurdy music, the cries of shills and barkers, drunken shouts and laughter, followed Quincannon as he made his way warily along Pacific Street. The Coast had been infamous for nearly half a century as the West’s seat of sin and wickedness, a “devil’s playground” equaled by none in the country and few in the world. Murders and robberies were nightly occurrences, as were every other type of crime and vice. Thieves, cutthroats, footpads, crooked gamblers, pickpockets, bunco steerers, and roaming bands of prostitutes prowled its refuse-littered streets; so did mental defectives, some dangerous, some benign such as “Dirty Tom” McAlear who would eat anything handed him along with a nickel; and so did sports, gay blades, sailors, adventurous citizens of all classes, and addicts on their way to and from the numerous opium dens, many of whom became the predators’ victims. So great was the danger that lurked on every street, down every alley, inside every building, that even policemen, armed with pistols and foot-long truncheons, ventured there only in twos and threes after nightfall.
The Red Rooster was just off Stockton, its entrance set back beneath a rococo gallery decorated with plaster images of wispily clad nymphs. More nymphs in various come-hither poses were painted on the outer walls flanking the door. A gaudily dressed barker stood in front, hawking the dubious pleasures to be found within — exotic dancers, games of chance, and “the Coast’s most comely and accommodating hostesses.” Quincannon stepped around him, then past a burly Kanaka doorman who likely doubled as a bouncer, and stepped inside.
The place was as dimly lighted as Owney had claimed, and so thick with swirling layers of tobacco smoke that the ceiling was nearly invisible. At opposite ends of a long stage at the rear, a pair of honky-tonk pianos were being raucously and tinnily played; in the middle, half a dozen scantily clad dancers were performing a borderline obscene version of the buck-and-wing to whoops of encouragement from the customers. Raised voices and bursts of drunken laughter added to the din.
All of the close-packed tables were occupied, and there was a two-deep cluster at a long bar presided over by a trio of bartenders who, like the doorman, would do double duty when the inevitable brawl broke out. What passed for a dance floor in front of the stage was occupied by men paying a price to publically fondle their female companions. Beyond an open archway, more suckers were busily losing their money in crooked games of roulette, faro, chuck-a-luck, and poker.