Read Online Sleuths by Bill Pronzini - Free Book Online

the station office for final words before the Desert Limited continued on its way. "He was after a change of women's clothing."
    Sabina nodded. "He devised his plan as soon as he recognized John and realized his predicament. A quick thinker, our Mr. Gaunt."
    "The stolen clothing was hidden inside the carpetbag he carried into the lavatory?"
    "It was. He climbed out the window and over the tops of the smoker and the lounge car to the first-class Pullman, waited until the women's lavatory was empty, climbed down through that window, locked the door, washed and shaved off his mustache and sideburns, dressed in the stolen clothing, put on rouge and powder that he'd also pilfered, and then disposed of his own clothes and carpetbag through the lavatory window."
    "And when he came out to take a seat in the forward day coach," Quincannon said ruefully, "I nearly knocked him down. If only I had. It would've saved us all considerable difficulty."
    Hoover said, "Don't chastise yourself, Mr. Quincannon. You had no way of suspecting Gaunt had disguised himself as a woman."
    "That's not quite true," Sabina said. "Actually, John did have a way of knowing—the same way I discovered the masquerade, though at first notice I considered it a coincidence. Through simple familiarity."
    "Familiarity with what?" Quincannon asked.
    "John, you're one of the best detectives I've known, but honestly, there are times when you're also one of the least observant. Tell me, what did I wear on the trip out to Arizona? What color and style of outfit? What type of hat?"
    "I don't see what that has to do with -" Then, as the light dawned, he said in a small voice, "Oh."
    "That's right," Sabina said, smiling. "Mr. Gaunt plundered the wrong woman's grip in the baggage car. The gray serge traveling dress and Langtry bonnet he was wearing are mine."

Medium Rare
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    T he night was dark, cold; most of San Francisco was swaddled in a cloak of fog and low-hanging clouds that turned streetlights and house lights into ghostly smears. The bay, close by this residential district along lower Van Ness Avenue, was invisible and the foghorns that moaned on it had a lonely, lost-soul sound. Bitter sharp, the wind nipped at Quincannon's cheeks, fluttered his thick piratical beard as he stepped down from the hansom. A sudden gust almost tore off his derby before he could clamp it down.
    A fine night for spirits, he thought wryly. The liquid kind, to be sure—except that he had been a temperance man for several years now. And the supernatural kind, in which he believed not one whit.
    He helped Sabina alight from the coach, turned to survey the house at which they were about to call. It was a modest gingerbread affair, its slender front yard enclosed by a black-iron picket fence. Rented, not purchased, as he had discovered earlier in the day. Gaslight flickered behind its lace-curtained front windows. No surprise there. Professor Vargas would have been careful to select a house that had not been wired for electricity; the sometimes spectral trembles produced by gas flame were much more suited to his purposes.
    On the gate was a discreet bronze sign whose raised letters gleamed faintly in the out-spill from a nearby street-lamp. Sabina went to peer at the sign as Quincannon paid and dismissed the hack driver. When he joined her he, too, bent for a look.
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    UNIFIED COLLEGE OF THE ATTUNED IMPULSES
    Prof. A. Vargas Spirit Medium and Counselor
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    "Bah. Hogwash," Quincannon said grumpily, straightening. "How can any sane person believe in such hokum?"
    "Self-deception is the most powerful kind."
    He made a derisive noise in his throat, a sound Sabina had once likened to the rumbling snarl of a mastiff.
    She said, "If you enter growling and wearing that ferocious glare, you'll give the game away. We're here as potential devotees, not ardent skeptics."
    "Devotees of claptrap."
    "John, Mr. Buckley is paying us handsomely for this evening's work. Very handsomely, if you