Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006
- Автор: Пикард Нэнси, Пронзини Билл
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
When Quincannon finished his pipe he strolled briskly to Market Street, where he boarded a westbound streetcar. He rode it as far as Duboce, walked the two blocks south to Fourteenth Street — a workingman’s neighborhood of beer halls, oyster dealers, Chinese laundries, grocers, and other small merchants.
The front door of the boardinghouse where Lansing hung his hat was unlocked; he sauntered in as if he belonged there, climbed creaking stairs to the second floor. The hallway there was deserted. He paused before the door bearing a pot-metal numeral 8 and tested the latch. Locked, of course. Not that this presented much of a problem. Quincannon had developed certain skills during his years with the United States Secret Service and subsequent time as a private investigator, some of which rivaled those of the most accomplished yeggs and cracksmen. The set of burglar tools he had liberated from a scruff named Wandering Ned several years ago gave him swift access to Lansing’s two small rooms.
Both sitting room and bedroom were cluttered with personal items, as well as several bottles of rye whiskey. But no steam beer; Lansing evidently had little taste for what he helped brew. In the fireplace grate Quincannon found a partially charred note penned in a sprawling backhand. Much of its content was unburned and legible, including an injunction from the writer to Lansing to destroy it after reading. Also present and damning was the writer’s signature, X.J. Very few men in San Francisco could lay claim to those initials. The only one Quincannon knew of was Xavier Jameson, the head brewmaster at one of Golden Gate’s rivals, West Star Steam Beer.
His second discovery took longer, but was equally rewarding. In a small strongbox cleverly concealed behind a loose board in the bedroom closet he found two thousand dollars in greenbacks and a handful of gold double eagles. As much as he enjoyed the look and feel of spendable currency, he hesitated only a few seconds before returning the money to the strongbox and the strongbox to its hiding place.
Criminals — faugh! The lot of them were arrogant and careless dolts. Lansing’s failure to completely burn the note and his hiding of the payoff money here in his rooms, coupled with the testimony of the witness who had seen him entering the brewery late on the night of Ackermann’s death, Lansing’s denial of the fact, and a slip he’d made that revealed his dealings with Xavier Jameson and West Star Steam Beer, was more than sufficient evidence to hang him.
Quincannon whistled an old temperance tune, “The Brewers’ Big Horses Can’t Run Over Me,” as he left the boardinghouse. Naught was left but to confront Lansing, urge a confession out of him through one means or another, and hand him over to those inept, blue-coated denizens of the Hall of Justice who had the audacity to call themselves San Francisco’s finest. Then he could return to the relative peace and clean air of the offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, where his only temptation — one he yearned to succumb to — was the charms of his partner and unrequited love, Sabina Carpenter.
Golden Gate’s business offices were clustered at the east end of the second floor, all of them small and cramped except for James Carreaux’s. This was Quincannon’s first stop upon his return, but Caleb Lansing was not in his office. Waiting there for the assistant brewmaster was not an option; he was anything but a patient man when he was about to yaffle a miscreant. He went down the hall to the nearest occupied office, that of the company bookeeper, Adam Corby, and poked his head inside.
“Would you know where I can find Lansing, Mr. Corby?”
Corby, a bantam of a man in striped galluses and rough twill trousers, paused in his writing in an open ledger book. “Lansing? Why no, I don’t.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Just after I arrived this morning. Have you tried the brewhouse?”
“My next stop.”
The brewhouse was at the opposite end of the building. Lansing was nowhere to be found in the rooms containing the malt storage tanks and mash tun. Jacob Drew, the mash boss, a red-haired, red-bearded giant, reported that he’d seen Lansing in the fermenting room a few minutes earlier.
“What d’ye want with him, mister?” Drew asked. “Something to do with your inspection?”
“No. Another matter entirely.”
“The lad’s a weak stick, but he’s done competent work since poor Ackermann’s accident.”
“That he has,” Quincannon said. “Though not in the brewer’s art.”
He left Drew looking puzzled and followed a sinuous maze of piping to the fermenting room, a cavernous space filled with gas-fired cookers and cedar-wood fermenting tanks some nine feet in height and circumference. Two of the cookers contained bubbling wort — an oatmeal-like mixture of water, mashed barley, and soluble starch turned into fermentable sugar during the mashing process. After the wort was hopped and brewed, it would be filtered and fermented to produce “steam beer” — a term that had nothing to do with the use of actual steam. The lager was made with bottom-fermenting yeast at 60–70 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than the much lower temperatures necessary for true lager fermentation, because the city’s winters were never cold enough to reach the freezing point. Additional keg fermentation resulted in a blast of foam and the loud hiss of escaping carbon dioxide when the kegs were tapped, a sound not unlike the release of a steam boiler’s relief valve.
The heady aroma was strongest here. Once again Quincannon’s nostrils began to quiver, his mouth and throat to feel like the inside of a corroded drainpipe. He wished, ruefully, that a man could be fitted with a relief valve as easily as a boiler, to ease pressure buildup inside his head.
On the catwalk above the cookers, Caleb Lansing stood supervising the adding of dried hops to the cooking wort. Workmen with long-handled wooden paddles stirred the mixture, while others skimmed off the dark, lumpy scum called krausen, a mixture of hop resin, yeast, and impurities that rose to the surface. The slab floor, supported by heavy steel girders, was slick with globs of foam that a hose man sluiced at intervals into the drains.
Quincannon hastened to climb the stairs. From the catwalk, the cooking wort and interiors of the fermenting vats were visible. An unappetizing view, to be sure. The vat in which Ackermann had died had been cleaned and was no longer in use, but Quincannon’s imagination was sufficient to conjure up the scene that had confronted the workmen the morning after.
Lansing was a rumpled, obsequious sort in his middle years, given to smoking odiferous long-nines; cigar ash littered his loose-hanging vest and shirtfront. He had just finished consulting a turnip watch when he spied Quincannon. Sudden anxious tension pulled his vulpine features out of shape. The look of a guilty man, by grab; Quincannon had seen it often enough to know it well.
Lansing swung away from the low railing, came forward as he approached, and sought to push past him. Quincannon blocked his way. “I’ll have a word with you, Lansing.”
“Not now you won’t. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“My business with you won’t wait.”
“What business?”
“Otto Ackermann. Xavier Jameson. And the West Star Brewing Company.”
Fright shone in the assistant brewmaster’s narrow face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The game’s up, Lansing. I know the whole lay.”
Lansing said, “Damned fly cop!” under his breath and shoved past him. He would have run then if Quincannon hadn’t grabbed the trailing flap of his vest and yanked him around.
“No trouble now, or you’ll—”
The blasted scoundrel was quick as a cat, not with his hands but with his feet. The toe of his heavy work shoe thudded painfully into Quincannon’s shin, sent him staggering backward against the railing. Lansing fled to the stairs, clattered down them as Quincannon, growling an oath, regained his balance and hobbled in pursuit.