The Bughouse Affair

assailant appeared to vanish from the premises after the crime was committed.”

“How clever of you. Explain, please.”

“You’ll pardon me, but not just yet. I prefer to make my discoveries known in the presence of the various concerned parties, including you and Mr. Quincannon, and I require time to properly prepare. I confess to a propensity, you see, for the dramatic presentation. If I had not chosen to become a detective, I might well have sought a career on the stage.”

Nonsense, Sabina thought. The man was a daft fraud, after all; the real, and now deceased, Sherlock Holmes would have been all too eager to trumpet his triumphs. Or would he? John was usually eager to trumpet his triumphs, but he, too, had been known to keep his deductions to himself until he was ready to unveil them in front of an audience.

She said, “When and where do you intend to make this presentation of yours?”

“Soon. As early as tomorrow morning, if arrangements can be made.”

Lord, he was infuriating! No wonder John disliked him so intensely, though it was John’s fault the fellow was involved. “Surely you understand that you have no right to withhold information in a robbery and homicide case.”

“From you and your partner? As you took pains to point out, I am no longer even marginally in your employ.”

“I meant from all concerned individuals. A man’s life has been cruelly snuffed out and his widow left grieving. Violent death is not a matter to be taken lightly.”

“I do not take it lightly,” he said. “On the other hand, I do not regard death in quite as serious a light as you Americans. We British prefer to face its inevitability in a matter-of-fact fashion, without undue emotion, and I might say less euphemism and pretense as well.”

Sabina said with temper, “There is no such thing as a national approach to either death or bereavement.”

“If that is your belief, I shan’t argue. However, there are many differences between our nations. We British…”

And he was off again on another monologue. Solidarity of British society despite problems with the Cornish, the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots, and the rebellious nature of the Empire’s colonies; traditions passed down over multiple generations; the lessons taught and learned through the long and glorious history of the British Isles.

Sabina thought she might shriek if he didn’t shut up. She forestalled the necessity by deliberately rattling her cup and saucer loudly enough to turn the head of the shop’s elderly proprietress.

Holmes blinked at her.

“You seem to have invited me here in order to pontificate and gloat,” she said. “I have better things to do with my time than to be subjected to either.”

“You misunderstand me, dear lady. My one and only purpose was to inform you that I have solved the case, thus saving you and your estimable partner the need to continue your investigations.”

“I’ll believe that when you’ve proven it to me.”

“And so I will-tomorrow.”

“When and where tomorrow?”

“The time and place have yet to be determined.”

Sabina had had enough of his sly, arrogant manner. She pushed her chair back and stood. “Thank you for the tea-and good-bye.”

The Englishman also stood. “The pleasure was all mine,” he said, and offered up another of his bows. “I shall let you know as soon as the necessary arrangements have been made. I guarantee neither you nor Mr. Quincannon will be disappointed.”

Sabina knew what John would have said to that, but she was too much a lady to ever use “Bah!” as an exit line. She took her leave in dignified, if bristling, silence.

23

QUINCANNON

The district known as the Uptown Tenderloin was a pocket of sin more genteel and circumspect than the Barbary Coast, catering to the more playful among the city’s respectable citizenry. It was located on the streets- Turk, Eddy, Ellis, O’Farrell-that slanted diagonally off Market. Some of San Francisco’s better restaurants, saloons, variety-show theaters, and the Tivoli Opera House flourished here at the western end of the Cocktail Route that nightly drew the silk-hatted gentry.

Smartly dressed young women paraded along Market during the evening hours, not a few of them wearing violets pinned to their jackets and bright-colored feather boas around their necks that announced them to those in the know as uptown sporting ladies. Men of all ages lounged in front of cigar stores and saloons, engaged in the pastime that Quincannon himself had followed on occasion, known as “stacking the mash”: ogling and flirting with parading ladies of both easy and well-guarded virtue.

Parlor houses also flourished here, so openly that the city’s reform element had begun to mount a serious cleanup campaign. The most notorious of these houses was the one operated by Miss Bessie Hall, the “Queen of O’Farrell Street,” all of whose girls were said to be blond and possessed of rare talents in the practice of their trade. Lettie Carew and her Fiddle Dee Dee were among the second-rank of Bessie’s rivals, specializing in nymphets of different cultures and hues.

The evening parade had yet to begin when Quincannon alighted from the Market Street trolley at O’Farrell Street, his pockets empty now of the stolen loot; he had stopped off at the agency to lock it away in the office safe. Above him, as he strolled along the wooden sidewalk, sundry flounced undergarments clung to telephone wires, another form of advertisement tossed out by the inhabitants of the shuttered houses lining the route. This, too, had scandalized and provoked the blue-nose reformers.

Midway in the third block, he paused before a plain shuttered building that bore the numerals 244 on its front door. A small, discreet sign on the vestibule wall said FIDDLE DEE DEE in gilt letters.

A smiling colored maid opened the door in answer to his ring and escorted him into an ornately furnished parlor, where he declined the offer of refreshment and requested an audience with Miss Lettie Carew. When he was alone he perched on a red plush chair, closed his nostrils to the mingled scent of incense and patchouli, and glanced around the room with professional interest.

Patterned lace curtains and red velvet drapes at the blinded windows. Several red plush chairs and settees, rococo tables, ruby-shaded lamps, gilt-framed mirrors, oil paintings of exotically voluptuous nudes. There was also a handful of framed mottoes, one of which Quincannon could read from where he sat: If every man was as true to his country as he is to his wife … God help the U.S.A. In all, the parlor was similar to Bessie Hall’s, doubtless by design, although it was neither as lavish nor as stylish. None could match “the woman who licked John L. Sullivan” when it came to extravagance.

At the end of five minutes, Lettie Carew swept into the room. Quincannon blinked and managed not to let his jaw unhinge. Miss Lettie had been described to him on more than one occasion, but this was his first glimpse of her in the flesh. And a great deal of flesh there was. She resembled nothing so much as a giant blond-haired cherub, pink and puffed and painted, dressed in pinkish white silk and trailing rose-colored feather boas and a cloud of sweet perfume that threatened to finish off what oxygen had been left undamaged by the patchouli and incense.

Even before she reached him she launched her into a practiced spiel: “Welcome, sir, welcome to the Fiddle Dee Dee, home of an array of bountiful beauties from exotic lands. I am the proprietress, Miss Lettie Carew.”

Quincannon blinked again. The madam’s voice was small and shrill, not much louder than a mouse squeak. The fact that it emanated from such a mountainous woman made it all the more startling.

“What can I do for you, sir? Don’t be shy … ask and ye shall receive. Every gentleman’s pleasure is my command.”

“How many Chinese girls are employed here?”

“Ah, you have a taste for the mysterious East. Only one at present, Ming Toy, from far-off Shanghai. And