Free The Plague of Thieves Affair by Marcia Muller Page A

His appetites were as lusty as ever when it came to pleasures of the flesh, or had been until the past eighteen months or so. In that period of time, only one young lady had entered the flat in the evening and not left again until morning.
    Sabina was the cause of his waning interest in casual affairs, of course. All other women seemed to pale by comparison, even those whom some men—men who valued beauty above all else—might consider more attractive. It had taken him some time to admit to himself just how strong his feelings for her were. In the beginning of their relationship, seduction had been his primary goal; but as his respect and affection for her grew, lust had evolved into passion of a much more virtuous sort. He still wasn’t sure it was that nebulous emotion called love. How could he be, never having been in love before? But it must be something akin to it, for he’d never felt this way about any woman before.
    Since realizing and accepting this, he’d tried over and over to convince Sabina that his intentions were gentlemanly, even honorable. Her constant refusal of his attempts at social interaction led to the obvious conclusion that she simply didn’t care for him in the same way he cared for her, which saddened as well as frustrated him. But then had come the subtle change in her attitude, the acceptance of invitations to dinner, plays, concerts, the softened smiles and speculative looks. He couldn’t help wondering what had brought it on. Nothing he’d said or done. A simple matter of almost daily proximity building an affection that reciprocated his own? Something to do with her failed (happily failed) relationship with that society coxcomb, Carson Montgomery, last fall? Impossible to guess what went on inside a woman’s mind. Not that it really mattered why she had altered her stance, only that his ardor for her might yet be requited after all …
    These thoughts were on Quincannon’s mind as he let himself into the flat. He lit the gas in the parlor and the bedroom to chase away the evening chill. Usually, these rooms were his sanctuary and he minded not at all being alone in them, but tonight they had a different effect on him, their emptiness making him feel oddly lonely. In the five years of his partnership with Sabina, she had never once set foot in here. What would she think of the place if she ever did, with its collection of Civil War artifacts inherited from his father, the shelves of books of poetry and temperance tracts he collected, the massive rolltop desk with its overflowing clutter of papers, pipes, and tobacco canisters, the marble-topped buffet and gold-framed mirror decorated with paintings of nude nymphs? Approve? Disapprove? Lord, how he yearned to find out!
    He selected one of the tracts and took it to bed with him. It was one he’d read often before, not because he subscribed to the precepts of the temperance movement—he was not against alcohol per se, only his own use of it—but because it put him to sleep more quickly than any of the others. Written and printed by a flaming zealot named Ebenezer Talbot, one of the founders of the True Christian Temperance Society, it bore the title “A Bibulous Evening with Satan” and was luridly and ungrammatically inflammatory in its denunciation of the evils of drink. He was already half asleep by the time he reached the end of page 2.

 
    9
    QUINCANNON
    A light rain had begun to fall during the night and it was still slicking streets and sidewalks when Quincannon once again arrived at Golden State Steam Beer shortly before ten on Friday morning. He would have preferred not to confront and arrest Elias Corby at the brewery, after yesterday’s debacle, but it was a better choice than waiting until later in the day. He was bigger and stronger than the bookkeeper, and Corby was not the sort to panic as Caleb Lansing had. The coldly calculating fashion in which he had