Free The Spook Lights Affair by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller

Holmes.
    “Good afternoon, my good man. A pleasure to see you again, despite the present circumstances. It has been much too long since our last meeting.”
    “Not long enough.” Quincannon glowered at him. “I thought you’d gone back to England or wherever you came from.”
    “I intended to return from the dead, as it were, yes, to resume my private inquiry practice in London and to put the good Dr. Watson’s mind at ease. He believes me to have fallen victim to my arch enemy, Professor Moriarity, at Reichenbach Falls, if you recall, and I feel badly for having deceived the poor fellow. However, for personal reasons I have decided to remain ‘deceased’ and in your stimulating bailiwick awhile longer.”
    Stimulating bailiwick. Bah. “I suppose you’re still sponging off Dr. Axminster.”
    “Sponging? Upon my soul, sir, you wound me grievously. I have never sponged, as you so quaintly put it, off anyone. I was a guest in Dr. Axminster’s home for only a few weeks. In the interim since our last meeting, I have taken lodgings in several different places, under several different names, most recently in the Old Union Hotel.”
    Quincannon snorted. The Old Union was a less-than-genteel hostelry on the fringe of the Barbary Coast that catered to performers, traveling salesmen, and—evidently—candidates for mental hospitals.
    “I have not sought to renew our acquaintance until now,” Holmes went on, “inasmuch as I have been engaged on a mission of the utmost secrecy and importance. The mission has been successfully accomplished for the most part, but of course I am still not at liberty to discuss it.”
    Bah and double bah. “Well? Why are you bothering me now?”
    “Why, for purposes of commiseration, my dear chap. And to offer my services again, should you desire them.”
    “I don’t desire them. Not today or ever again.”
    “Tut, tut,” Holmes said, but his tone was one of tolerant comradeship. “It may well require my analytical powers as well as yours and the charming Mrs. Carpenter’s to unravel last night’s curious mystery at Mayor Sutro’s estate. That is, par foi , if you and she have not yet deduced the correct answer.”
    “I haven’t had time to deduce anything,” Quincannon growled. “We haven’t spoken yet today.”
    “Ah. So your knowledge of the young woman’s strange disappearance comes from the same source as mine, the afternoon newspaper. All the more reason for us to join forces, wouldn’t you say? Two preeminent detectives once again working in consort, now that a new game is afoot.”
    Quincannon studied the Englishman’s neck, his fingers curled and his palms itching. Holmes or whatever his name had been a major irritant in a robbery, fraud, and murder investigation the previous year—what Quincannon referred to as the bughouse affair. Admittedly the addlepate had played a small role in the solution of the complicated case, purely through blind luck despite his claim of having used “observation, in particular observation of trifles, and deductive reasoning.” The fact was, without Holmes’s constant interference, the investigation would have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion much sooner. Sabina didn’t agree, preferring to give the devil his due; she maintained that mad or not, the imposter had been surprisingly adept at employing the methods of his namesake. Poppycock! Not even the genuine Sherlock Holmes, if he were still alive and practicing, would have been able to outsleuth John Quincannon.
    To still the strangler’s urge in his hands, he proceeded to load tobacco into his stubby briar. Holmes took this as a tacit invitation to occupy the client’s chair and charge his curved clay pipe. They regarded each other through clouds of mingled aromatic and putrid smoke, the Englishman still smiling, Quincannon still glowering.
    At length Holmes said, “Well, John. May I call you John?”
    “No.”
    “Shall we discuss our theories about last night’s