The Bughouse Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

left and walked over to Kearney Street at the edge of the Barbary Coast.
    There the gaslit street scene was even livelier. Saloons, shooting galleries, auction houses, discount clothiers, and painless dentists lined the block; gaudy signs proclaimed PROF. DIAMOND, COURSES IN HYPNOTISM and THE GREAT ZOCAN, ASTRAL SEER and DR. BLAKE’S INDESTRUCTIBLE TEETH. And there were sellers and pitchmen of all sorts—fakirs, snake charmers, news vendors, organ players, matrimonial agents, plug-hatted touters of Marxism and Henry George’s Single Tax. The only difference between the pitchmen and a pickpocket or footpad, Sabina thought, was that they employed quasi-legitimate means to relieve individuals of their money.
    Her quarry continued to walk at a leisurely pace, stopping once to finger a bolt of Indian fabric and then again to listen to a speaker extol the dubious virtues of phrenology. Momentarily she lost her in the crowd, then spotted her again edging up close beside a gentleman in a frock coat. Hurrying, Sabina drew near just as the man cried out and bent over at the waist, his silk hat falling to the sidewalk.
    The crowd swarmed around him as he straightened, his face frozen in a grimace of pain. Sabina, elbowing her way forward, saw him reach inside his coat, and suddenly anger replaced pain. “My gold watch,” he shouted, “it’s been stolen! Stop, thief!”
    But no one was fleeing. Voices rose from the group around him, heads swiveled in alarm and confusion, bodies formed a moving wall that prevented Sabina from reaching or pursuing her quarry.
    When she finally extricated herself, the blue hat was nowhere to be seen. The pickpocket had found an ideal mark, struck, and swiftly vanished into the crowd.

 
     
    4
     
    QUINCANNON
     
    The house at the upper westward edge of Russian Hill was a dormered and turreted pile of two stories and some dozen rooms, with a wraparound porch and a good deal of gingerbread trim. It was set well back from the street and well apart from its neighbors, given seclusion by shade trees, flowering shrubs, and marble statuary. A fine home, as befitted the likes of Samuel Truesdale, senior vice president of the San Francisco Maritime Bank. A home filled with all the treasures and playthings of the wealthy.
    A home built to be burglarized.
    Thirty feet inside the front gate, Quincannon shifted position in the deep shadow of a lilac bush. From this vantage point he had clear views of the house, the south side yard, and the street. He could see little of the rear of the property, where the bulk of a carriage barn loomed and a gated fence gave access to a carriageway that bisected the block, but this was of no consequence. The housebreaker might well come onto the property from that direction, but there was no rear entrance to the house and the night worker’s method of preferred entry was by door, not first- or second-story windows; this meant he would have to come around to the side door or the front door, both of which were within clear sight.
    No light showed anywhere on the grounds. Banker Truesdale and his wife, dressed to the nines, had left two hours earlier in a private carriage, and they had no live-in servants. The only light anywhere in the immediate vicinity came from a streetlamp some fifty yards distant, a flickery glow that did not reach into the Truesdale yard. High cirrostratus clouds made thin streaks across the sky, touching but not obscuring an early moon. The heavenly body was neither a sickle nor what the scruffs called a stool-pigeon moon, but a near half that dusted the darkness with enough pale shine to see by.
    A night made for burglars and footpads. And detectives on the scent.
    A raw wind had sprung up, thick with the salt smell of the bay, and its chill penetrated the greatcoat, cheviot, gloves, neck scarf, and cap Quincannon wore. Noiselessly he stomped his feet and flexed his fingers to maintain circulation. His mind conjured up the image of steaming mugs of coffee