The Cutthroat

  “Marion has rented a studio, just in case.”

  When Bell spoke long-distance with her last night, she had ended her report with a grim, “But it’s still raining.”

  No one had to light a fire under Joel Wallace.

  Fourteen retired chorus girls—since Isaac Bell left London—fourteen strikeouts. Then all of a sudden, his new friend, Dolly, who he had met on this wild-goose chase, said that when her mother was in the chorus in Tra-la-la Tosca way back in 1891, she had known a girl who went with a boy named Spelvin.

  Wallace waited for them in a tearoom on Piccadilly, around the corner from the Van Dorn field office. In they came, all spiffed-up for Central London. One look at her mother told Wallace that her daughter would age very nicely. Mother paused to reminisce with the tearoom manager, and Dolly forged ahead to Wallace’s table.

  “I brought me mum, like you asked. She thinks you’re going to marry me.”

  “Dolly, you know I’m not the marrying kind. I never lied, did I? Told you the night we met.”

  “Well, you better not tell Mum that or she won’t talk to you.”

  Joel Wallace’s cable found Isaac Bell in the rain-swept Los Angeles Arcade Depot rail yards, when Bell’s car rolled in on the back of the Jekyll & Hyde Special. It was a potent reminder that Joseph Van Dorn had tapped the right man to ramrod the London field office.

  SPELVIN CON 1891

  IMPERSONATING ITALIAN FENCING TEACHER

  GIRLFRIEND DISAPPEARED

  SPELVIN LAST SEEN LIVERPOOL STATION

  ON MY WAY TO LIVERPOOL

  It was one thing to impersonate an Italian, thought Bell, the Whitechapel barber Davy Collins being a prime example. But quite another to teach fencing, as Mr. Barrett trained Mr. Young. Double that to teach the exquisite skill of Italian fencing.

  Detective Eddie Tobin waited at the Chelsea Piers in a fast launch. Joseph Van Dorn clambered aboard. Tobin started up a pair of eight-cylinder Wolseley-Siddeley gasoline engines that Isaac Bell had had shipped over from England and thundered across the crowded, smoke-shrouded harbor toward Staten Island.

  Tobin, whose misshapen face reflected a terrible Gopher Gang beating when he was a Van Dorn apprentice, lounged at the helm like a man who had been born in a cockpit, nonchalantly dodging tugs, coal barges, railcar floats, victualing lighters, sail and steam freighters, and liners, at thirty knots. Ordered by Chief Inspector Bell to look afresh at the Oppenheim yacht explosion, the young detective had found a witness.

  “How come the cops never talked to him?” Mr. Van Dorn wanted to know.

  “He doesn’t talk to cops. And he won’t talk to us either, at least not directly.”

  Van Dorn assumed the witness was one of his cousins as the tight-lipped Tobin-Darbee-Richards-Gordon-and-Scott clan of Staten Island scowmen included oysters tongers, tugboat men, coal pirates, and smugglers.

  “The problem is, Mr. Van Dorn, it’s going to be hearsay.”

  “I’m not building a court case,” Van Dorn growled. “All Isaac needs is ammunition.”

  Into the harbor at St. George, Tobin slowed just enough for two muscle-bound oyster tongers to jump on from a pier head. Van Dorn nodded coolly but shook hands. Jimmy Richards and Marvyn Gordon were in and out of jail regularly, but they were by and large larcenous, not vicious, for which he would cut them some slack. Tobin raced out into the Kill Van Kull, slowing a mile in and cutting the engines when Richards and Gordon pointed at an oyster scow anchored beside a derelict schooner. A pretty, dark-haired girl stepped out of the low cabin. Van Dorn figured she was about fourteen.

  “Molly, this is Mr. Van Dorn, who I told you about.”

  Molly extended her hand to shake Van Dorn’s solemnly but invited no one aboard her boat.

  Tobin said, “Molly’s father told her what he saw. She’s going to tell you.”

  Molly said, “An old Italian greengrocer with a big hooked nose hired Father to take him to the yacht.”

  “The Oppenheim yacht?”

  “The one that blew up. He delivered crates of lettuce. The water was rough, and he got sick on the way back. Seasick. Sweating and throwing up. When Father helped him up to the dock, his nose fell off.”

  “His nose—”

  “And his big black mustache. The Italian kind.”

  Van Dorn wired Isaac Bell in Los Angeles.

  YACHT

  OLD MAN

  ACTOR AGAIN

  “Now we know that he doesn’t kill only for twisted pleasure,” Bell confided in Marion, whom he had been consoling with a late supper after another day of rain had forced her to take her cameras indoors. “He kills for profit, too.”

  “He killed to get control of the show.”

  The Cleveland field office was not thrilled to have an investigation reviewed by a detective as young as James Dashwood. That Dashwood reported directly to Chief Investigator Isaac Bell did not make the Cleveland boys love him more.

  “Interesting,” Dashwood commented politely after a painstaking examination of photographs from the morgue.

  “Yeah, what’s interesting?”

  “Well, that you could conclude that the murderer did not carve crescent shapes on the victim’s arms.”

  “Which we did.”

  “On the other hand, these marks on her legs could be interpreted as crescent-shaped.”

  “They could also be interpreted as stab wounds inflicted during their struggle.”

  “What struggle? The coroner concluded that death was rapid, if not instantaneous, due to this wound in her throat, or this separation of vertebrae C3 and C4 . . .”

  The Cleveland chief concealed a longing to march Dashwood off a Lake Erie pier. “Is there anything else?”

  “There is something odd about this theater program that Mr. Buchanan inscribed to the lady.”

  “My pleasure,” John Buchanan had written over his name in the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cast list. And under it, his signature. Both flowed in a clear, bold English round hand, decorated with beautiful hooks and dramatic flourishes.

  “What about it?”

  “You did a remarkable job of documenting their ‘visits’ with each other.”

  “Rich folk don’t go to a lot of trouble to hide it. If the lady’s husband didn’t notice, or didn’t want to notice, who’s going to call them on it?”

  “And it was genius discovering the husband’s girlfriend.”

  “Thank you, sonny.”

  “But what is it about this program? It’s driving me nuts— May I keep it, please?”

  “You’ll have to sign a receipt.”

  “My pleasure,” said Dashwood.

  The Cutthroat had waited too long.

  The rain had slowed everything to a maddening crawl.

  It was time—long past time—to attack.

  A vital murder.

  A joyous slaughter.

  46

  Joel Wallace outdid himself with his second cable to Isaac Bell:

  EMPTY COTTON SHIPS

  LIVERPOOL TO NEW ORLEANS

  NO PAPERS

  With little hope for more than a list culled from old newspapers, and even less for a quick answer as to where the murderer had gone next twenty years ago, Bell wired the New Orleans field office:

  GIRLS MURDERED AUGUST–DECEMBER 1891

  A letter arrived at the railcar. The envelope was addressed to Isaac Bell, c/o the Arcade Depot, where the Jekyll & Hyde Special was parked.

  The letter inside read

  Dear Boss,

  Mile 342. SP. Midnight.

  Come alone, old boy.

  At the end of the day, isn’t it just between us?

  I couldn’t blame you if you don’t come alone.

  Or don’t come at all.

  I ask too much of bravery.

/>   One of us is immortal, and you know it isn’t you.

  “Twenty-to-one, it’s a hoax,” he told Archie Abbott.

  “You going anyway?”

  “Have to.”

  “Alone?”

  “Like the man says.”

  Bell recognized the handwriting as similar to the “My funny little games” letter that Jack the Ripper wrote to the Central News Agency in 1888—which Scotland Yard had thought authentic and put up on posters in the fruitless hope someone who knew him would recognize the handwriting.

  A crescent was inked under Jack the Ripper’s signature, which anyone could have picked up reading the papers. But “Dear Boss” was more intriguing, as that first letter to the Yard had also been directed to “Dear Boss.”

  “What the heck is ‘Mile 342. SP’?” asked Archie Abbott.

  Bell showed him a map.

  “The Southern Pacific Railroad counts track miles from San Francisco. That puts Milepost 342 a hundred and twenty miles up the coast from Los Angeles, between Gaviota and El Capitan.”

  The tracks hugged the Santa Barbara Channel shore.

  “Middle of nowhere,” said Archie.

  “Nothing but a water tank.”

  “What if he pulls something?”

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll be mighty disappointed.”

  “Why don’t I just tag along a ways back?” Abbott asked.

  “He’ll be looking for you.”

  Abbott knew his friend too well. Because he blamed himself for Anna’s death, Isaac Bell would go alone—rather than risk frightening him off—fight alone, and come back alone with a captive or a body—or alone in a coffin—and no force on earth could stop him.

  “Twenty-to-one, it’s a hoax,” Bell repeated.

  “By whom?”

  “My old friend Abbington-Westlake is ‘having me on,’ as the Britons say. His forgers could imitate the Ripper’s handwriting. But they made a mistake with this word.”

  “‘Immortal’?”

  “The Ripper wrote slang: ‘Fix me’ and ‘buckled’ for ‘arrest’; ‘codding’ for ‘playing jokes’; ‘work’ and ‘job’ for ‘murder.’ Calling me Boss, they got right. But not ‘immortal.’ More to the point, he’s never sent a letter since he left London. Scotland Yard did him a huge favor claiming he was dead, and he’s kept it that way.”

  “He can’t resist playing his games—like the crescent code—now he’s playing games with you.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Isaac Bell.

  “Isaac, let me come with you.”

  “I want you here with Marion.”

  “O.K. Of course. I’ll watch her. Listen, it’s still raining. I lifted a cowboy slicker from Wardrobe. You take it.”

  Bell went to the Southern Pacific freight yards. The rain that had plagued Marion since they arrived in Los Angeles was falling steadier than ever, and he was glad of Archie’s full-length waterproof oilskin. He bribed a yard bull with a ten-dollar gold piece to put him into an empty freight car headed up the California coast. Six hours later, he jumped down when the slow-moving train shunted onto the Mile 342 water siding.

  Dusk was gathering and the rain had thickened. Fair-size waves were breaking on the sandy shore, and the cold fog drifting off the water bore the icy breath of the Pacific Ocean, which the channel joined a few miles to the west. He lost sight of the red caboose lantern when the freight train trundled back onto the main line and crossed the trestle bridge that spanned the canyon.

  He had four hours before midnight to ferret out surprises.

  The water tank, which had a huge pivot spout to replenish steam engines’ boilers, was raised high above the tracks on legs. The single main line track paralleled the channel. The water siding ran just inland of it. Inland of the siding was a sandy path for maintenance carts. Just beyond the switch where the water siding rejoined the main line, the land dropped into a canyon. The rain-swollen arroyo that had scoured the canyon with eons of floodwater rushed thirty feet under a trestle bridge. Bell climbed down and confirmed that no one was hiding in the undersupports.

  Thunder began rumbling. The rain fell harder.

  The open area under the water tank offered shelter. But after inspecting it and climbing a side ladder to the roof of the tank to make sure he was alone, Bell chose to button up his slicker and conceal himself within girders of the trestle. From that forest of steel, he watched the tank and the tracks in both directions. If the letter was not fake, the Cutthroat would arrive as Bell had, on a train that stopped for water, or in a wagon or auto or on horseback on the cart path.

  Several trains did pull in, watered, and steamed away. Others steamed past without stopping, and passenger Limiteds with locomotives and tenders designed to go longer distances roared by at seventy miles an hour, their golden windows glowing warm through the rain and fog.

  Five hours later, at one in the morning, the Cutthroat had not shown up. The rain poured, lightning bolts split the black sky, and Bell surmised he had indeed been set up by Abbington-Westlake. A southbound freight pulled onto the siding. No one but the brakeman got off, and as it huffed slowly from the tank, Bell considered running after it to hop a ride back to Los Angeles. He decided to stick it out until dawn.

  It was still pitch-dark when the rain stopped abruptly. The wind shifted north—crisp and chill. The fresh weather swept the clouds from the sky, and Bell saw his first stars since they crossed the Rocky Mountains. A million of them shone so brightly that they lighted whitecaps on the Santa Barbara Channel, a quarter-mile stretch of the railroad in both directions, and penetrated the dark within the trestle.

  Bell sprinted to the black shadow under the water tank.

  The starlight revealed something moving on the siding, about a hundred yards away at the switch where it linked to the main line. It was coming toward Bell very slowly. Long minutes passed before it hardened into a bent figure plodding on the rails. It drew within twenty yards, close enough for Bell to see that he was an elderly tramp, hobbling on a crooked staff.

  Bell unbuttoned his slicker and loosened the Colt in his shoulder holster.

  The tramp began to sing. He had a weak, reedy voice.

  At first, Bell heard only faint snatches of a lyric:

  “. . . mirth and beauty . . .

  . . . frail forms fainting . . .”

  At twenty yards, he recognized the Stephen Foster lament.

  “Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

  Oh! Hard times come again no more . . .”

  At ten yards, Bell could smell him.

  The tramp reeked like death, the homeless man’s unwashed stench of months of filth accumulated deep in the fibers of his rain-drenched shirt and overalls. He had the long white beard of a Civil War veteran, which would make him a very old man in his seventies or eighties—as old as Bell’s father, whose Old Soldier beard was as white. Bell stepped out from under the tank, out of the shadows, and let the starlight fall on his face. The tramp did not acknowledge him but veered warily to avoid him, staggering across the siding and onto the main line. Starlight gleamed on steel; he had a hook for a left hand. One eye was covered by a patch. His slouch hat drooped, as soaked through as his clothes, and he had strapped his possessions around his shoulders in a ragged rucksack. Bell thought of his father, sleeping warm and dry in his Greek Revival town house on Louisburg Square.

  Safe on the main line, the tramp resumed his song:

  “Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,

  While we all sup sorrow with the poor . . .”

  Just before he reached the trestle, he stopped and faced the sea and stared as if mesmerized by the stars glistening on the wild water. He turned and gazed at the trestle. He looked back at the sea and down in the canyon. The wind carried another whiff of his deathly smell, and Bell suddenly realized this
was no masquerade. It was the end of the line. The old man was staring at the sea as if to say good-bye to beauty before he jumped from the trestle.

  “There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;

  Oh! Hard times come again no more.”

  Suddenly Bell heard a train. It was coming from the west, and in the starlight he saw a locomotive rounding the curve with a string of low-slung flatcars, another slow-moving freight. The old man saw it, too, and plodded onto the trestle.

  Many would have let him seek the respite he would never find in life. Godspeed! But there was something stern and hopeful in Isaac Bell that would not give up hope on the most hopeless. A hot bath, clean clothes, and a square meal could change everything, and if the Ripper letter was a hoax, at least it had put him here on the railroad tracks at a moment that called for action.

  “Hold on, old-timer!”

  The veteran heard him. His head turned slightly, but instead of stopping, he pushed along with his staff to go faster. The locomotive’s dull headlight angled in from the curve, which made the beam bounce among the girders. No whistle. The engineer saw nothing amiss in the crazy leaping shadows. The old man opened his arms wide, embracing the end.

  Bell ran full tilt after him, shouting over the rumble of the locomotive, “Hold on, sir! Let me help.”

  He halved the distance between them, and halved it again. He thought he might make it—the engineer still didn’t see them, but the train had slowed for the curve. He put on a burst of speed and was reaching for the old man’s shoulder when he heard the sizzle of steel unsheathed.

  47

  Blade high, the Cutthroat whirled in a lightning pivot.

  Isaac Bell’s right arm stretched forward and whipped the loose tail of his slicker at it. The Cutthroat’s blade sliced the oilcloth like tissue paper, and for one precious instant he had startled the Cutthroat, throwing the murderer off balance. His first blow missed Bell’s arm. The Cutthroat slashed again, slicing the slicker to shreds.