Anderson was willing to pay handsomely for their services, but this was not the only factor in the decision to undertake a full-time investigation on his behalf. Quincannon didn’t often feel sorry for his clients, but he felt sorry for this one — a pleasant, well-meaning, harmless gent who had been badly used and who was suffering miserably as a result.
His mouth quirked sardonically. He felt even sorrier for Mr. Anderson now. Yes, and not a little for himself.
He had been confident — overconfident, as much as he hated to admit it — that nabbing Vereen and Nagle would prove to be neither a difficult nor a lengthy undertaking. For one thing, he had had no trouble identifying them from Anderson’s descriptions and the agency’s file of dossiers of known confidence men. And for another they were known habitués of the more sordid fleshpots when financially solvent.
He had tracked them through known and newly uncovered associates, both female and male, from the East Bay to San Francisco, then south to San Jose, where the pair had succeeded in cashing one of the bearer bonds, then back again to San Francisco. Twice he had come near to closing in on them, only to be foiled by cussed misfortune. He had been sure he was close to nabbing them when he learned that they had been seen in Charles Riley’s high-toned Polk Street gamblers’ mecca, House of Chance, and that one of the waiters there overheard them planning to make the rounds of the Uptown Tenderloin parlor houses. That usually meant not one but several nights of debauchery, which made it likely that they could still be found in the district.
But this turned out not to be the case. The pair had sampled the exotic wares in three establishments — Miss Bessie Hall’s notorious O’Farrell Street establishment, Lettie Carew’s Fiddle Dee Dee, and Madame Lucy’s Ye Olde Whore Shoppe. But Madame Lucy’s had been their last stop. And it was there that the trail ended. A painted and powdered, red-haired nymphet informed Quincannon, upon receipt of a gold sovereign, that after having been serviced by her, Lonesome Jack had drunkenly boasted that he and his partner were soon to embark on a voyage to the “Crossroads of the Pacific.”
Quincannon hadn’t believed it. A false boast, surely, one of Vereen’s habitual fabrications. The pair’s bases of operations ranged from Seattle to Los Angeles and points inland; never once had they traveled so far as Mexico, much less to a far-flung island in the Pacific Ocean. Yet he had no other leads, so this morning he had begun canvassing the shipping companies that offered passenger service to various ports in the South Pacific. And now, after his interview with the Matson clerk, there could be no doubt that the pair were in fact bound for Honolulu, Hawaii.
Why, blast it? A lark? Unlikely, given their past history. It must be that they had stumbled onto a new mark and were plotting a swindle as profitable as, if not more so than, the one they had perpetrated on R. W. Anderson. The red-haired bawd had had no knowledge of who or what the new game might involve, nor had Quincannon picked up so much as a whisper or a hint at any time during his search.
And what of the stock certificates and the rest of the bearer bonds? Had Vereen and Nagle taken those with them, or had they stashed them somewhere in the city? In either case he saw no way of finding out, no way of recovering the documents or the two thousand dollars in cash.
The clot of unanswerable questions made the galling taste of failure that much more bitter.
2
Quincannon
Sabina was at her desk, engaged in the writing of a report or perhaps a letter, when he entered the offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. He had spent regrettably little time with her the past two weeks; being with her now should serve to lift his spirits, relieve his dour mood, but he suspected that it wouldn’t.
He answered her smile with a weak one of his own, then shed his rain-spotted Chesterfield and derby and hung them on the coat tree. Seated at his desk, he loaded his briar from the pouch of Navy Cut. Sabina had gifted him with a flint cigar and pipe lighter at Christmas, and while he preferred matches, he had to admit that the lighter was an improvement over sulfur-smelling lucifers. Or it was when it worked properly. Which it chose not to do this morning. He muttered, “Confounded thing!” fished in his desk for a match, and commenced a furious puffing to get the tobacco burning evenly.
Sabina had replaced her pen in its holder and was watching him quizzically. “What’s the matter, John? Why are you so glum?”
He hadn’t told her what he’d learned from the Tenderloin bawd last night, believing as he had that it was probably a falsehood. And he’d left the Leavenworth Street flat alone early this morning, instead of sharing the trolley ride to Market Street with her as he usually did, in order to canvass the shipping companies that offered passenger service to the Hawaiian Islands. So she had had no foreknowledge of the calamity that had struck him.
“Lonesome Jack Vereen and Nevada Ned Nagle.” Speaking the two names left a bitter taste like that of camphor.
“What about them? What happened?”
“Nothing happened, curse the luck,” Quincannon said. “They’re gone. Long gone. Far gone.”
“Far gone? You mean they’ve left California?”
“Not only California — the United States. They’re on their merry way to Honolulu.”
“Honolulu! Are you serious?”
“Never more,” he said bleakly. “Departed on a Matson steamship on Saturday.”
“Hawaii, of all places. Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“Not for a vacation from crime, that’s bloody certain. Otherwise I’ve not a clue.”
Sabina folded her hands together on the desktop. “Tell me what you do know and how you found it out.”
He told her, puffing out great clouds of bluish smoke as he did so.
“You mustn’t blame yourself, John,” she said when he finished. Sympathetic, but also practical as was her wont. “You had no way of knowing those rogues were planning a trip to Hawaii.”
“No, but I should have caught up to them in time to prevent them from leaving. I had two blasted weeks.”
“Not every investigation plays out quickly, you know that.”
“That doesn’t make their escape or the loss of our client’s property any easier to accept.”
“Do you suppose they took the bonds and stock certificates with them?”
“At a guess I’d say yes. But I have no way of knowing, and it hardly matters now.”
“Perhaps it does,” she said. “What do you intend to do?”
“Do? What can I do?”
“You could go after them.”
“... All the way to Honolulu? That is hardly feasible.”
“Why isn’t it feasible?”
Quincannon pawed his left ear, the lobe of which had been removed by a would-be assassin’s bullet the previous year. Sabina insisted its loss had not disfigured him, but he couldn’t seem to break himself of the habit of fingering the scar tissue in moments of stress.
“For more than one good reason,” he said. “Travel time to Honolulu is seven days, so I was told, and passenger vessels depart only on weekends; by the time I arrived they would have been there a full week. Trying to find them would be prohibitively difficult.”
“Not necessarily. Most of the population is native Hawaiian and Chinese, and there are relatively few Caucasian visitors.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read newspaper articles, among other things, that don’t engage your interest,” Sabina said. “The point is a pair of newcomers with profligate ways surely wouldn’t escape notice.”