The Cutthroat

  “Who said that?”

  “Couple of sceneshifters . . . Do you?”

  “On occasion.”

  “You must be one slick fencer to survive that Dream Duel.”

  “So far, at least.”

  “And a heck of an actor to make Mr. Hyde as evil as they do.”

  Young smiled at the compliment. “Thank you, Quinn. It’s harder than dueling, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Do folks in the audience ever complain?”

  “No, bless them. They’ve been kind. I actually receive ovations. Often more sustained than Barrett’s or Buchanan’s.”

  “Do the stars mind?”

  “Green-eyed with jealousy?” asked Young, with another smile.

  “For all your extra applause.”

  “They’re too grateful for the chance to pull a disappearing act. And of course they’re not in the theater when I receive my applause. At least not the one I’m standing in for that night.”

  “Where do they go on their disappearing acts?”

  Henry Young shrugged. “Who knows. Mr. Barrett is probably off writing. He constantly tinkers with scripts.”

  “Buchanan a writer, too?”

  “Not that I’m aware of— What’s the time? I must go. Thanks for the smoke.”

  “Anytime, Mr. Young. Say, what’s the news? Are we closing?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  Harry Warren reported to Isaac Bell in the privacy of a windblown platform between two cars. They were into Colorado now, and Bell could feel the engine begin to strain on the light but constant grade that presaged the Rocky Mountains.

  “My gut said don’t push him any further. What do you think?”

  “You nailed his leverage. Barrett and Buchanan are willing to overlook Young’s past because they can count on him to stand in for their ‘disappearing acts.’ How long do they disappear?”

  “The news backstage is, Mr. Young fills in for one or two nights in a row.”

  “How often?”

  “Not often. Couple of times a month.”

  “Mr. Buchanan probably disappears with his rich girlfriends. Where do you suppose Barrett goes to write?”

  “I’ll ask around. Somebody’ll know.”

  “What do you think about Mr. Young?” Bell asked.

  “I don’t see how the stage manager would ever find the time to kill anybody.”

  “Archie says the same. So does Helen.”

  “How about you, Isaac?”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  The rumor that the Jekyll & Hyde Special would not stop for their scheduled performances in Denver was about to meet its test. The stage manager announced a full company meeting. Actors, musicians, sceneshifters, riggers, carpenters, wardrobe ladies, ticket sellers, and callboys crowded into the dining car and waited anxiously while stopped outside the city center in the 36th Street yard. Their locomotive took on water and their tender’s coal, and they waited some more when grocery trucks and butchers’ wagons parked beside the dining car. When the train was replenished, would it be shunted toward Union Station or onto the main line west across the Rockies?

  John Buchanan looked relaxed and in charge.

  Jackson Barrett, too, looked like he hadn’t a worry in the world.

  Maybe the worst rumors weren’t true?

  Are you kidding? Mr. Barrett and Mr. Buchanan are actors. Who knows what they’re thinking or how they feel?

  “O.K.,” said Buchanan. “Is everyone here? We have our cast. We have our backstage people and our out-front people. We have our train crew. We have our stewards and cooks. We have our guests—the angelic Mr. Bell, the journalistic Mr. Smith, and the ‘filmalistic’ Mrs. Marion Morgan Bell—more about her in a moment. We even have the pilot of our Jekyll and Hyde billboard in the sky, and if Mrs. Bradford looks too young to fly a biplane, look again, for she is a married woman and the mother of two little girls almost as pretty as she is.”

  “Get on with it,” Jackson Barrett muttered through an opaque smile.

  “Hazel Bradford,” Bell whispered to Marion, “set speed and altitude records last year.”

  Buchanan stepped back, and said, “Your turn.”

  Jackson Barrett said, “The rumors you’ve heard are NOT true. Our tour is NOT over.”

  Eighty people smiled.

  “So don’t worry. Our play lives on. And will continue to live on as no Broadway play ever has before.”

  Everyone leaned forward to hear what the devil that was supposed to mean.

  “After Denver and San Francisco, we will immediately steam down to Hollywood, which is just outside Los Angeles, where Marion Morgan Bell will transform our play into a movie. Yes, you heard right. A movie.”

  Buchanan said, “Our final performances will play to Marion Morgan Bell’s cameras rather than on the stage. We will continue salaries at their current rate. Anyone who absolutely must get back to New York, we understand, and will replace you.”

  “But,” said Barrett, “we hope that everyone will make the time to be watched by movie audiences forever.”

  Bell whispered to Marion, “Congratulations. You’ve got your four-reeler.”

  “Your investment syndicate doesn’t exist. How am I going to pay for it?”

  “I’ve already spoken with Uncle Andy that you’re coming straight from San Francisco to Los Angeles to set up a four-reeler of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

  The formidable Andrew Rubenoff, a onetime banking colleague of Bell’s father and a friend of Bell’s, had shifted his assets from steel, coal, and railroads to autos, airplanes, and movies and moved to California.

  Bell grinned. “He’s deeply impressed that you snagged Isabella. You have your syndicate, Rubenoff and Bell.”

  With that, the tall detective strolled casually from the dining car, accepting congratulations from well-wishers. He kept smiling until he was alone in his private car at the back of the train, where he laid his long fingers on his telegraph key and pondered what to send.

  He was running out of time. The show would be in and out of San Francisco and on the way to Los Angeles before he knew it. If he didn’t arrest the Cutthroat before Marion finished the movie, the murderer would have his “immortality” and nothing would stop him from murdering another girl the next day.

  Closing night in Denver, while Marion roamed the Princess Theatre backstage scouting angles for her cameras, Isaac Bell watched Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from an eighth-row house seat on the aisle. The fans and critics who raved about the famous Dream Duel when Jekyll’s potion triggered hallucinations had not been exaggerated. Bell was impressed.

  He had fenced for Yale and still practiced religiously. At the Fencers Club on 45th Street, his best opponent was U.S. Navy saber champion Lieutenant Kenneth Ash, whenever both men found themselves in New York. Together, the detective and the naval attaché were developing a new attack—the “back shot”—which had judges scratching their heads and opponents bewildered.

  In Jekyll and Hyde, the actors’ swordsmanship was miles above swordplay taught in drama schools. They were saber fighters of the first rank, Buchanan quick and powerful, Barrett possibly his superior, but not by much.

  Where did I see you, Mrs. Bell?

  The Cutthroat watched Marion Morgan Bell while she was deep in conversation with the head carpenter and the head rigger. The tall blonde was as beautiful as any actress yet seemed oblivious to the effect she had on the seasoned backstage hands. The men were following her around like a pair of puppies and vying with each other to capture her attention with the intricacies of moving the subway car and biplane out of the Princess Theatre and back on the train.

  Where did I see you?

  44

  SAN FRANCISCO

  The Jekyll & Hyde Special was racing on the Nevada flats, whipping
past telegraph poles at seventy miles per hour. But thanks to improvements in Thomas Edison’s electrostatic induction, Isaac Bell did not have to climb them to tap the lines. Edison’s “grasshopper telegraphy” did the job for him, jumping Bell’s orders from his private car to the wires beside the railroad tracks the instant he touched the key.

  He sent three last-ditch messages in a swift hand.

  Dashwood—whom Bell had ordered back to St. Louis to sit in on the postmortem examination of Rick Cox—received

  CLEVELAND

  BANKER’S WIFE

  DISAPPEARING ACT GIRLFRIEND?

  Joseph Van Dorn was glad-handing Justice Department prosecutors in the agency’s Washington, D.C., field office in the New Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue when he received

  LEND A HAND NEW YORK

  FIRE ESCAPE

  YACHT

  Van Dorn sent blistering wires to his men, who had turned up nothing but goose eggs in either of those investigations. Then he caught the B&O’s Royal Blue to New York, read the goose-egg reports word for word, and headed into the theater districts.

  Joe Wallace’s message from Isaac Bell read

  SPELVIN

  FULL SPEED

  The Cutthroat was still on the train to San Francisco when he finally remembered where he had seen the woman.

  Columbus, Ohio.

  Last month, before Chicago, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.

  An evening performance.

  The house manager was delaying the curtain, and he had peeked out at the audience to see why it was being held. Typically, a couple were taking their own sweet time strolling to their seats on the aisle—local luminaries, the usual richest man in town who had married the prettiest girl—an ordinary occurrence of which he had thought nothing at the time as he ducked back from the curtain to take his place. In fact, he had barely noticed them, for what had caught his eye was a woman directly behind them. She was walking alone, as poised as a duchess escorted by cavalry, into the theater to see him again onstage. Blond and perfect. His heart had soared. Emily.

  No, not Emily, Mrs. Isaac Bell. Why were you in Columbus?

  And who are you, Mr. Bell?

  Are you the leader of the new faces?

  I think you are. I think you command them. I think you are hunting me.

  I don’t know why. I doubt you’re a copper. But I don’t care who you are, Mr. Bell. No dead man can lock me up.

  You first. Then your lovely wife. Back-to-back.

  A vital murder.

  A joyous slaughter.

  “May I join you?” Isaac Bell asked Henry Young, who was sitting with a cup of coffee in the dining car. The train was crawling up the Sierra Nevada pushed by two extra engines. The mountains, deep in spring snow, looked as remote as the far side of the moon, but soon the special would crest at Donner Pass—only five short hours from San Francisco.

  “Of course, Mr. Bell.”

  “It occurs to me, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sitting down before.”

  Young smiled. He looked ten years younger, and the twitch in his cheek had vanished.

  “And you look very happy.”

  “I am,” said the stage manager. “I had my best night’s sleep in a year.”

  “You’re not troubled that the tour is almost over?”

  “I am thrilled. I let The Boys talk me into this one against my better judgment. Touring is a young man’s game. Give me a Broadway play I load once instead of fifty times. Mind you, every stage manager should learn his trade on the road. Earn the right to stay home and then stay home.”

  “I’ve heard you’re quite the fencer.”

  Young replied with a modest shrug. “I’m a student fencer.”

  “Who’s your teacher?”

  “Mr. Barrett.”

  “They say you can handle yourself.”

  “Mr. Barrett is a gifted teacher. I had the advantage of being a dancer when I was a kid, which makes one fluid, shall we say. But I still give ninety per cent of the credit to Mr. Barrett’s instruction. Basics, like relaxing the grip for point control. Fluidity—as in dance.”

  “Did he teach Mr. Buchanan, too?”

  “I believe he ‘polished’ him. I gather Mr. Buchanan was adept to begin with.”

  “You said you danced?”

  “My aunts and uncles were hoofers. The Dancing Bookers.”

  “Of course. Booker’s your middle name. Did you dance in England?”

  “Canada.”

  “Do you know what a ‘panto’ is?”

  “Panto? Panto . . . Oh, the English pantomime. Christmas shows for children.”

  “Do you have pantos in Canada?”

  “No. Perhaps in some of the other British colonies, but not in Canada. You’re full of questions today, Mr. Bell.”

  “Every day,” Isaac Bell shot back. “Every day with all of you on this train is a chance to learn a lot at once about the stage.”

  Joseph Van Dorn stepped out of a Tenderloin District saloon that catered to actors and found the sidewalk blocked by a broad-shouldered hard case wearing a blue suit and a derby.

  “Care to tell me why the founder of a private detective agency, with field offices in every city worth its name and foreign outposts in London, Paris, and Berlin, has spent two full days personally sleuthing around my precinct, asking about an actor manager who fell off a lady’s fire escape last October?”

  “Keeping my hand in. How are you, Captain?”

  The old friends shook hands warmly.

  “How are you making out?”

  “Better than your boys did in October.”

  Honest Mike Coligney bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The husband everybody said was chasing Mr. Medick claims he wasn’t.”

  “What do you expect him to say? A man died. He didn’t want to get charged with manslaughter.”

  “He also says he wasn’t cuckolded.”

  “That’s not what he said last October.”

  “He thought he’d been cuckolded at the time, but now he says he was set up. Some ‘friend’ sent him a letter: ‘Dear sir, I thought you should know that your wife is running around on you.’”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “His wife swore she never cheated on him.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “She swore it on her deathbed.”

  “What deathbed? She couldn’t be older than thirty-five.”

  “TB. Gone in March.”

  Mike Coligney crossed himself. “Mother Mary . . . So what was Medick doing on her fire escape?”

  “He got a letter, too. Supposedly from the lady.”

  “I remember the letter. Along the line of ‘Come up the fire escape, I’ll let you in my back window.’”

  “She swore she never wrote it,” said Van Dorn. “Same deathbed.”

  “Who did?”

  “Whoever threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape.”

  “Except for one thing,” said Coligney. “Detective Division matched that letter to a typewriter in the lady’s office where she worked.”

  “There are two ways of looking at the typewriter,” said Joseph Van Dorn. “Either she lied on her deathbed . . . or the person who threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape typed the letter on that typewriter.”

  Coligney knew that and changed the subject. “Medick was supposed to be afraid of heights. Where’d he get the nerve to climb four stories of fire escapes?”

  Joseph Van Dorn rubbed his red whiskers, took off his hat, and ran a big hand over his bald scalp. He blinked, and his deep-set Celtic eyes grew dark with melancholy. “According to the lady’s poor devil of a husband, she was a woman worth taking chances for.”

  “So Medick knew her.”

  “
Hoped to know her better,” said Van Dorn, “encouraged by a letter written by someone who knew his weakness for other men’s wives.”

  “How come no witness ever saw that ‘someone’?”

  “But they did see him,” said Van Dorn. “He just didn’t look like someone who could throw a fit young actor off a fire escape.”

  “What are you talking about, Joe?”

  “I spoke with three people who remember an old man hanging around her building. One thought he was a tramp, another a ragpicker, another just a drunk. They all believed he was harmless.”

  Isaac Bell read Van Dorn’s wire the night that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde closed in San Francisco.

  FIRE ESCAPE

  OLD MAN

  ACTOR

  45

  LOS ANGELES

  “In all my years on the stage,” groaned Isabella Cook, “I cannot recall a closing-night cast party the equal of last night’s. Nor a hangover more vicious. Oh, Isaac, what were we thinking?”

  “Yours is not the only hangover on the train, if that’s any consolation.”

  “How is yours?”

  “About what I deserve,” Bell answered. In fact, with an awful sense he was running out of time, he had sipped dark cider in Manhattan cocktail glasses while he kept a clear, but ultimately fruitless, eye on Jackson Barrett, John Buchanan, and Henry Young.

  “It’s your wife’s fault. The prospect of her movie obliterated closing-night blues. Everyone’s excited. I saw love affairs springing up all around me, and couples who had ceased to speak making cow eyes . . . Would someone tell the engineer to stop clattering the wheels?”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “I never thought I would be so happy to get off a train in Los Angeles . . .” She cast a dubious eye out the window. “Sunny Los Angeles? I see nothing but storm-swept orange groves and sodden cattle. Do you suppose this rain will follow us all the way to Hollywood?”