He told the Van Dorn operator to place a long-distance call to the Philadelphia field office.
“Helen, I want you to go to Waterbury, Connecticut. Get Anna’s mother to talk to you. Find out if the girl kept a diary. If she did, read it.”
“To find if she had a boyfriend, who might have followed her to New York?”
“Exactly.”
“I thought you were sure she didn’t.”
“I’m not sure of anything anymore, including whether the murder was personal. So we’re back to the question we ask about every crime: Who had motive?”
“Who had a motive?” asked Joseph Van Dorn.
“A boyfriend, or a disappointed suitor, or a lunatic,” said Bell.
“In other words,” growled the Boss, “you’ve learned nothing about him.”
The powerfully built, red-whiskered founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was a hard-nosed, middle-aged Irishman who had immigrated to America, alone, at age fourteen. Prosperous now by his own hand, “the Boss” had been born with little more than the charm and natural good cheer to cloak his fierce ambition and a deep hatred of criminals who abused the innocent. His manner, that of a friendly businessman, had surprised many a convict who found himself manacled facedown on the floor, having allowed the big, smiling gent to get close.
Isaac Bell had apprenticed under Joseph Van Dorn. The Boss had introduced the banker’s son to the lives lived by people he dubbed “the other ninety-seven percent of humanity” and had trained a champion college boxer in the “art of manly defense” bred to win street fights with fists, guns, and knives. To say that Isaac Bell would march into Hades with Van Dorn on short notice would be to underestimate his gratitude.
“Your report states that Mike Coligney’s plainclothes boys found her body.”
“The actor whose home was the apartment where the girl was murdered used his landlady’s telephone to call the police.”
“As well he should, for a police matter,” Van Dorn said sharply with a sharper glance at his Chief Investigator.
Bell said, “He called the police because he had no way of knowing that Anna Waterbury’s father hired the Van Dorn Detective Agency to find his daughter.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that the client believed in us and trusted us. The Van Dorn Detective Agency is morally bound to find her killer.”
Joseph Van Dorn shook his head. “The police have the men—patrol officers and detectives and their informants.”
“We are more qualified to find the guilty man and build a case that sticks.”
“It is a police matter,” said the Boss. “Leave it to the police. They know the neighborhood.”
“I’ve already sent Helen Mills to Waterbury to persuade Anna’s mother to let her read the girl’s diary.”
“What for?”
“In case,” said Isaac Bell, “the murderer didn’t live in the neighborhood.”
9
When the Springfield, Massachusetts, Christ Church choir practiced for Easter service, every singer cocked her ear to hear Mary Beth Winthrop set the standard for the first sopranos.
“Lift up your heads,
O ye gates,
and be yet lift up,
ye everlasting doors . . .”
Tenors and basses responded,
“Who is the King of Glory?
Who is the King of Glory?”
Mary Beth Winthrop raised her eyes to the stained-glass rose window and prayed:
Faster. Put on some steam.
Glaciers rumbled at a quicker tempo than choirmaster Fluecher conducting the boys through endless “Who is the King of Glory”s.
Faster, please.
Mr. Fluecher heard a note he didn’t like and stopped them dead. Rapping his knuckles on his music, he compared the tenors’ pitch to a derailing freight train.
A fire. A small fire in a wastepaper basket.
The smoke would drive them out of the church and in the confusion no one would notice her gallop to the Shubert Theatre. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which had come to Springfield for a week, straight from Boston and New York, was leaving today for Albany. But not before Barrett & Buchanan replaced the soprano who sang “Amazing Grace,” a cappella, in the funeral scene. A piece of a biplane had fallen on the poor girl and a wonderful opportunity had blossomed only five blocks from Christ Church at the Shubert.
Right now, at this very moment, they were hearing singers try out for the role while Mary Beth—who sang in perfect pitch always, “and even would in a locomotive factory,” Mr. Fluecher claimed when he held her up as an example to the others—was stuck in choir practice. Not only could she outsing each and every one of them, she could also act circles around any girl in Springfield.
Maybe her yellow hair was not as long and thick as she would like, which wasn’t to say it was stringy. And she knew she wasn’t as pretty as the girls who couldn’t sing on pitch. Not with her round moon face. Except, when she looked closely at pictures on sheet music and magazines, the stars’ faces were as round as dinner plates—a shape that caught attention and projected their voices. So it didn’t matter not being as pretty. She would get the part. If she weren’t stuck in choir practice.
At last, it was over, and she ran all the way to the theater.
The sight of pieces of a New York City subway car rolling from the stage door alley on a freight wagon told her she was too late. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was leaving town. Company members were walking to the railroad station, the stagehands were striking the sets, and the Shubert’s manager was directing assistants on ladders who were changing the marquee:
*MATINEE TOMORROW*
ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE
Direct from NEW YORK and PHILADELPHIA
“Top O. Henry Short Story Topped Onstage”
—VARIETY
Mary Beth Winthrop wandered away, numb with grief, until she sank to a park bench and wept. She had missed the reading. Some other girl got the role.
“Are you quite all right, miss?”
She looked up. An older gentleman with a kind face was leaning over her, balanced on a cane. “What’s the matter?” he asked, and when her tears flowed harder, he sat beside her and offered a snowy handkerchief with his initials embroidered in red. “Here, miss. Dry your eyes.”
She did as he said, and sniffled, “Thank you, sir.”
“Can you tell me what’s the matter?” he asked again, and Mary Beth Winthrop found herself suddenly pouring out every hope and dream in her heart to a complete stranger. He listened intently, nodding, never interrupted. When she was done, he asked, “Would you tell me your name?”
“Mary Beth.”
“What a pretty name. It suits you. Don’t worry, Mary Beth. You’ll get another chance.”
“In Springfield? Never. Nothing like this ever comes to Springfield. Jekyll and Hyde was my only way out of here. I’ll have to stay home and marry some stupid—”
“No, no, no. I meant you’ll get another chance today.”
“What do you mean? For Jekyll and Hyde?”
“Of course.”
“But they’re striking the sets. They’re leaving.”
“I’ll arrange it.”
“Are you in the company?”
He smiled. “No.”
“Then how can you arrange it?”
“Do you know what an angel is?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“In the theater, an angel is a man who invests money in a show—puts up the cash. So, no, I am not a member of the Jekyll and Hyde company. But they regard me as their friend. Their very, very good friend. Now, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes. Yes!”
“Then come with me.”
He walked her to a small hotel.
“We’ll go in the back way. The stage manager stays in the annex. But he wants it private.”
“Isn’t he loading the train?”
“He’ll be saying good-bye to an old friend, if you know what I mean, before he joins the train. But before his old friend joins him, we—that is to say, you—will sing for him. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Did you bring your music with you?”
“Right here.”
“Good. In we go now. Just let’s make sure we are not spotted. Because he will be very unhappy if we inadvertently give him away. And you do not want to sing for an unhappy man— Oh, by the way, if you are shocked, you have every right to be. But please remember, not everyone in the theater behaves this way. There are plenty of happily married, faithful thespians—and even some stagestruck angels.” He tugged off his glove and showed her his wedding ring.
Mary Beth clutched her music and followed him up the alley. He opened a door and led the way up a narrow back staircase, opened another door, glanced down a hall, then touched his finger to his lips for silence and started down it, with Mary Beth close behind. He opened the door with a room key, slipped in, and beckoned her to follow. It was a small room, barely large enough to hold a bed and a steamer trunk, where she would have expected an armchair.
On the trunk was the familiar red and white wagon call card you displayed on a door or in the window to signal the Adams Express driver of a delivery to be picked up. The call card partly covered an address written on a shipping label:
—dale, arizona territory. ppp ranch, attention range boss peters
He closed the door, tossed his cane on the bed, and shrugged his cape off his shoulders.
“Look at me,” he said.
Mystified, she looked up and sucked in a startled breath. She had not realized how compelling his gaze was. His eyes were a stony shade of blue, and they pierced hers with the concentrated force of bottled lightning. “Where . . .” she started to ask. Where was the stage manager? Her eyes drifted back to the address label. She recognized the sender’s name, a deacon in her own church. “Where—”
He snapped his fingers.
“Look at me!”
The rigor in his voice rivaled the force of his eyes, and for an awful moment she felt that she had no choice but to obey. At the edge of her vision she saw his hands fly at her face.
Quick and athletic, the young woman dodged instinctively, whipping her head back and away from his hands. Only when she tried to scream and could not make a sound did she realize that he had tricked her into exposing her throat.
Half the sport, half the pleasure of the game, was to plan the plan. Plan, anticipate, hope. And savor, knowing they would never catch a master of self-discipline and restraint. This time, the Cutthroat had planned as painstakingly as he had for Anna Waterbury in New York. Then all he had had to do was wait. And hope for the exact right candidate to come along. God bless her, she had. Unlike Lillian—when he found himself stalking Boston Common on sudden impulse—there would be no interruptions in Springfield, no lovers rutting in the dark, no unfinished job, no dog walkers, no cops.
The room was paid in advance, booked for a week. It was situated at the end of the hall in the back of the house. The hotel across the alley catered to salesmen, who were out working all day, carousing in saloons half the night, and stumbling home so blotto they would not notice a pig slaughtered next door. The room had its own private bathroom with a deep porcelain tub longer than the girl was tall.
10
The express wagon driver swore to anyone who would listen that his horses knew how to read. Or if his team could not read, they at least had a fine eye for the shape and color of the Adams call card. He never had to tighten the reins to stop when they saw the red and white rectangle hanging from a doorknob.
A heavy steamer trunk bound for the Arizona Territory was waiting to be picked up, the charges prepaid. He wrestled it into the wagon and continued his rounds until he saw the company’s one-ton power wagon, which ran on a twenty-eight-cell Exide electric battery and bore the sign THIS WAGON CARRIES INTERSTATE COMMERCE TRAFFIC ONLY.
He hailed the driver, and they transferred the Arizona trunk.
“Heavy.”
They noticed the return address and laughed. “Bibles.”
The power wagon delivered the trunk to the freight depot attached to Springfield’s Union Station, where it was put aboard an Adams Express car on the Albany-bound Boston section of the Lake Shore Limited. The train was broken up in Albany, the Chicago-bound passenger coaches hooked to the Lake Shore, the Adams Express car shunted to a New York Central fast freight headed for St. Louis, via Buffalo, Cleveland, and Indianapolis.
The fast freight was hauled by Mikado 2-8-2 locomotives especially suited to speeding on the flat, water-level line. They were scheduled to be replaced with freshly watered and coaled engines every two hundred miles. But the first Mikado never made it past Herkimer, New York. Steaming at forty miles an hour, it was suddenly switched off the main line. It jumped the tracks before the surprised engineer could hit his air brakes and plunged down the embankment into the Mohawk River, dragging five express cars with it.
Scant moments behind it, the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited extra-fare passenger flyer was overtaking on the next track at eighty miles an hour. Like a cracking bullwhip, the caboose on the back of the wrecked train had been flung off its rails onto 20th’s track. The rocketing Limited’s engineer saw it in the beam of his electric headlamp. He slammed on his air brakes, threw his Johnson bar across its full arc to reverse his drivers, and prayed.
It was no coincidence that a top Van Dorn detective like white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards was riding in the express car on the 20th Century Limited. Isaac Bell had his best railroad specialists hunting a gang of train robbers, and Edwards was headed for points west, riding free. Van Dorns were welcome guests in the rolling fortresses when crack passenger trains carried fortunes in gold, jewels, bearer bonds, and banknotes. Amenities were sparse—a Thermos flask, a mail sack for a mattress, a canvas bag of hundred-dollar bills for a pillow—and sleep was interrupted to draw guns at station stops, but the famously tightfisted Mr. Van Dorn liked saving money on train fares. He also wanted his men rubbing shoulders with express agents, who had the latest information on criminals in the robbery line.
The instant the 20th Century Limited’s brakes and back-spinning drive wheels brought the speeding train to a grinding, clashing halt, Edwards grabbed a riot gun. The conductor pounded on the locked door. “Fast freight on the ground.”
Edwards piled out with the train crew to help, still gripping the riot gun in the event that thieves had caused the wreck. The veteran detective’s instincts were proved right by the sudden crackle of rifle and pistol fire. The express agent ran back to guard the 20th’s express car. Eddie Edwards ran toward muzzle flashes in the dark.
He established that three or four train robbers were raking the wrecked train with gunfire and that a single express agent was firing back from an overturned car. Then he leveled his pump-action weapon in the direction that would do the most good and opened up. The train robbers had the advantage of numbers and their rifles’ longer range. Detective Edwards had a rapid-firing weapon and ice water in his veins.
An all-roads rail pass personally endorsed by Osgood Hennessy, the president of the Southern Pacific, was among Isaac Bell’s most valued possessions. He was greeted warmly on a New York Central & Hudson night mail racing out of Grand Central, and he arrived at the Mohawk River crash as dawn was breaking.
A wreck train was lifting a caboose off the track with a crane. Freight cars lay half in the water. Crates and trunks were scattered on the riverbank. Hundreds of yards of track had been torn into heaps of twisted steel and splintered crossties. The entire site was littered with spilled clot
hing, paper, and shattered barrels spewing excelsior. Clumps of those thin poplar-wood shavings that had cushioned the barrels’ contents, tossed on the wind like miniature tumbleweeds.
Eddie Edwards greeted him with the lowdown.
“They chocked a switch frog with iron wedges. That shunted the fast freight onto that siding. As she was steaming at forty miles per hour, she jumped the tracks. And that’s just the first thing they did wrong.”
“What else did they do wrong?”
“Derailed the wrong train. They thought they were robbing the Twentieth Century, which was coming along next. She was doing eighty, and if they’d derailed her, she’d have flown across the river and halfway to Canada.”
“That makes no sense,” said Bell. “The bunch we’re tracking never made that kind of mistake.”
“They’re not ours,” said Edwards. “Just some amateurs who went drinking until it sounded like a good idea.”
“I wondered about them working so far east.”
“I got three of them chained to a tree. To call them criminals would be an insult to the outlaw classes. Sorry you came all the way up here.”
“Might as well have a look while I am,” said Bell.
Edwards showed him the switch frog jammed open with metal wedges. They worked their way across the torn-up siding and down the embankment. The wreck gang would have its work cut out for them, laying a new siding so they could position their crane to lift five express cars out of the river. There was paper everywhere. An empty steamer trunk floated, turning lazily on still water. Suddenly caught in an eddy, it drifted into the main current, sinking deeper and deeper. Barrels floated after it.