The Gangster

  Culp laughed. “You won’t know your own name when these two get through with you. Go to it, boys.”

  He whipped Bell’s holster off the peg and took it with him.

  Lee put up his fists. “Shall we say fifteen rounds?”

  “Or until you get tired,” said Bell.

  “When he gets tired,” called Barry, “it’s my turn.”

  At the end of five rounds, Lee said, “Something tells me you didn’t learn that footwork at Yale.”

  “South Side,” said Bell.

  Lee was breathing hard. So was Bell. Barry was watching closely, learning his moves.

  “South Side of what?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Thought so.”

  Barry rang the bell.

  Lee backed slowly out of the ring after ten rounds. “Finish him.”

  Barry swung through the ropes, feet light on the canvas floor, which was slick with Lee’s blood. “O.K., Chicago. Time for lessons.”

  “You’ll have to do a lot better than your pal.”

  “First lesson: A good big man will always beat a good little man.” Barry glided at him, fast and hard.

  Isaac Bell was tired. His arms were getting heavy. His feet felt like he had traded his boots for horseshoes. His ear was ringing where he had caught a right. His cheek was swollen. No serious damage to his torso yet. Barry moved in, feeling for how tired Bell was.

  Bell locked eyes with the bigger man and threw some feints to send messages that he was still strong and dangerous. At the same time, he forced himself to override the desire to move fast, which would tire him even more. Barry kept coming, jabbing, feeling him out. Suddenly, he tricked Bell’s hands up with his own feint and landed a left hand to the tall detective’s chest. The slim, long-armed Lee had thrown stinging punches. Barry hit like a pile driver. Bell forced himself to stand tall and hide the damage.

  “Lee!” he called. “Come back.”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting bored. Why don’t you both get in the ring; we’ll make this quick.”

  “Your funeral.”

  Lee climbed in slowly, stiff, sore, and exhausted.

  “Hey, Barry, give your pal a hand, he’s moving like an old man.”

  Barry turned to help. Bell drove between them and somersaulted over the ropes.

  “He’s running for it,” yelled Barry, and both scrambled after him.

  Bell turned and faced them. “I’m not running, I’m evening the odds.”

  He had a twenty-pound Indian club in each hand.

  “Put those down or you’ll really get hurt.”

  “Teeth or knees, boys?”

  He swung the clubs at their faces. They raised fast hands to block and grab them. Bell had already changed course. The clubs descended, angling down and sideways. The heavy bulging ends struck like blunt axes. Barry gasped. Lee groaned. Both dropped their guard to clutch their kneecaps. But they weren’t down. Both were fighting men and both battered through their pain to lunge at Bell.

  Bell had already swept the clubs up and back to a horizontal position at head height. Gathering his strength in one last effort, he carried them forward simultaneously.

  Isaac Bell strolled into the Raven’s Eyrie dining room dressed for dinner in a midnight blue tuxedo. John Butler Culp was seated at the head of the table, Daphne Culp at some distance to his right, and a place setting across from her to Culp’s left. The Saint George, his horse, and dragon cellar had been moved close to curtain off the rest of the long, long mahogany table, creating a cozy space for their small party.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Culp,” he said to the beautiful Daphne. “I’m so sorry I’m late. Evening, J.B. Say, where’d you get the black eye?”

  Culp glowered.

  Mrs. Culp said, “Jenkins, don’t just stand there. Bring Mr. Bell a plate . . . Mr. Bell, are you quite all right? Your face is bruised. Butler, did you do that to Mr. Bell?”

  Bell leapt to defend his host. “Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t, even if he could . . . Oh, I almost forgot, J.B. The gentlemen who work for you in the gymnasium asked would it be possible for the cook to send soup or broth to their room. Something they can eat through a straw.”

  “O.K.,” said Culp. “You won this round.”

  “I have indeed,” said Bell. But he knew, and so did Culp, that he had won a hollow victory. One look at the tycoon, angry as he was, showed a man still absolutely secure in his belief that regardless of Bell’s suspicions, John Butler Culp was still insulated from the dirty work, still set so high above the law that he could plot the death of the President. The crime would proceed.

  That thought chilled Bell to the marrow: wheels were in motion, gathering speed like a locomotive fresh from the roundhouse, oiled, coaled, and watered, switched to the main line, tracks cleared, and nothing could stop it, not even Culp himself . . . Not quite no one, he thought on reflection. The one aspect that even Culp couldn’t control was that Bell knew. He couldn’t prove it yet. But he knew and he could stop it or die trying.

  “Detective Bell,” Culp said, “you’re smiling as if very pleased with yourself.”

  Bell put down his knife and fork and leveled his gaze at the statue of Saint George, his horse, and the dragon. “Please pass the salt.”

  Mrs. Culp laughed out loud. “Mr. Bell, you’re the first guest who’s had the nerve to say that to him—Butler, at least smile, for gosh sakes.”

  “I’m smiling,” said Culp.

  “It doesn’t look that way.”

  “It will.”

  24

  “You look like you’ve been pounding rivets with your face,” Harry Warren greeted Isaac Bell at the office.

  “Slipped in the bathtub . . . I read Finn’s obituary on the train; hard to tell, between the lines, who he really was.”

  “A first-rate heeler. Old-school, hard-drinking, hail-fellow-well-met. But not one to cross. Strictly backroom, and connected direct to Boss Fryer. Except you won’t find a witness in the world to testify to that.”

  “Probably our direct connection to Claypool. If he weren’t dead.”

  “By the way, Claypool doesn’t need our protection. The boys spotted a pack of off-duty police detectives camping at his office round the clock.”

  “That cinches it. Claypool knows he’s next.”

  “With his pull, he’ll have the best protection. O.K. I shook Branco’s hand. Now what?”

  “Right hand?”

  “Of course.”

  “Notice anything about it?”

  Warren thought a moment. “Yeah. He’s got a couple of weird calluses on his fingers.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Inside his index and middle fingers. Nearly an inch long.”

  “That’s what I noticed the other night in Little Italy. Sort of recalled them the first time we shook hands. What do you suppose they’re from?”

  Harry Warren shrugged. “You tell me.”

  Isaac Bell took out his pocket knife. “Watch my fingers.”

  “I’m watching.”

  He opened the blade. “These fingers, index and middle.”

  Harry’s eyes gleamed. “From opening it again and again and again.”

  “Practice.”

  “Cute way around the weapon laws.”

  “Branco told me about them. Though he left out the practicing.”

  Warren stared. “Wait a minute. Wrong hand. That’s your left hand pulling the blade. I shook his right hand.”

  “He’s left-handed. I saw him catch an orange that went flying. Snapped it out of the air faster than a rattlesnake.” Bell folded his knife closed, then opened it again. “Of course, no matter how fast you whip it out, you still only have a short blade.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Harry Warren.
“I’ve seen Sicilian pen knives with handles so thin, you could shove it into the slit the blade makes.”

  “A legal stiletto?”

  “Until you stick it in somebody.”

  His friends at Tammany Hall took over Tony Pastor’s vaudeville house for Brandon Finn’s wake.

  Isaac Bell brought Helen Mills with him. “Keep your eyes peeled for Brewster Claypool. Question is, is he next? Assuming Finn was at the top link of a chain down to ‘Kid Kelly’ Ghiottone, did Finn get his orders from Claypool?”

  Bell’s theory that doorkeepers and floor managers did not question the presence of a man with a good-looking young girl on his arm proved correct and they mingled in the crush of politicians, cops, contractors, priests, and swells, eavesdropping and asking questions carefully.

  Two things were obvious: Brandon Finn had been loved. And the rumors that he may have been murdered baffled his friends. Who, Bell heard asked again and again, would want to hurt him?

  As the drinking went on, tongues loosened and—as at any good wake for a loved man—tales of Finn’s exploits began to spawn heartfelt laughter that rippled and rolled around the theater. Helen, who had a gift for getting men to talk, reported twice to Bell that Finn—dubbed admiringly as the “last of the big spenders”—had been spending even more freely than usual the night before he died.

  Bell himself heard the phrase “came into big money” several times.

  He speculated that the money had come from outside the Tammany chain, which would pay him in patronage rather than cash. He told Helen that an outsider had tapped Finn to send a request down the line to “Kid Kelly.”

  “What,” she asked, “did he want from Ghiottone?”

  “Keep in mind he did not want it specifically from Ghiottone—the whole point was not to know any names—but wanted someone who could deliver like Ghiottone.”

  “A murderer.”

  “Only the guy who paid Finn knows for sure. But since we know what was said at the Cherry Grove, we have to presume they want a murderer.” Bell pointed. “There’s Mike Coligney. I’ll introduce you. He’ll look out for you while I pay my respects to Mr. Finn’s companion.”

  “I don’t need looking out for.”

  “Mourners are eyeing you cheerfully.”

  Bell maneuvered close to Rose Bloom, Finn’s paramour’s stage name, and spoke loudly enough for her to hear over the roar of a thousand mourners. “Brandon Finn cuts a finer figure laid out in his coffin than the rest of us do standing up.”

  “Doesn’t he?” she cried, whirling from a clutch of men vying for her ear to take in the speaker of the compliment.

  Bell was not exaggerating. The dead man’s checked suit was tailored like a glove. A diamond stickpin glittered in his necktie. Three perfectly aligned cigars thrust from his breast pocket like a battleship turret, and his derby was cocked triumphantly over one eye. Even the Mayor McClellan campaign button in his lapel proclaimed a winner.

  Rose Bloom had red eyes from weeping and a big brassy voice. “He was always the handsomest devil.”

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” Bell said, extending his hand and bowing over hers. It was not hard to imagine what a couple they had made, a “Diamond Jim” Brady and Lillian Russell pair having a ball, with New York at their feet.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Bell. Isaac Bell. My deepest condolences.”

  “Oh, Mr. Bell. The things you don’t plan for. Just gone. Suddenly gone.”

  “They say the Lord knows what’s right, but it doesn’t seem fair at the time, does it? Were you together at the end?”

  “The very night before. We had the most splendid dinner. At Delmonico’s. In a private booth.” Her voice trailed off and her eyes teared up.

  “A favorite of his, I presume?”

  “Oh, yes, his absolute favorite—not that we went regular. Much too expensive to eat there regular.”

  “I’m sure he’s smiling down on us, glad he took you to Delmonico’s his last night. Certainly not a night to save money.”

  She brightened. “Brandon’s luck held to the end. Didn’t cost him a penny. A Wall Street swell poked his head in the booth and picked up the check.”

  Men were pressing from every direction to catch her attention, and Bell knew he was running out of time. “Was this the swell?” He opened his hand to reveal Helen Mills’ snapshot of Brewster Claypool and watched her face. She knew him.

  Before he turned away, he looked directly into her eyes. “Again, Miss Bloom, my condolences. I grieve, too, that you lost your good man.”

  Outside on 14th Street, he sent Helen back to the office with orders for Harry Warren to dispatch operators to the Waldorf Hotel and the Cherry Grove. “Tell him I’ve gone to Claypool’s office.”

  “It’s after hours, Mr. Bell.”

  “Claypool knows he’s next. He reckons he’s safe at his office surrounded by cops.”

  “How does he know he’s in trouble?”

  “He’s the last link alive between Culp on top and Ghiottone’s choice of a Black Hand assassin.”

  To Isaac Bell’s eye, Brewster Claypool’s bodyguards looked like former detectives demoted when Commissioner Bingham overhauled the bureau. They were shabbily dressed, unkempt men, and had not been up to the job of protecting Claypool.

  Bell found one in the elevator, one in the hall, and two inside Claypool’s office, all unconscious or slumped on the floor, holding their heads. He smelled gun smoke. Pistol in hand, he crashed into Claypool’s private office. There he found a detective, unconscious on the carpet with a Smith & Wesson in his hand, and the Black Hand gang leader, Charlie Salata, shot dead.

  “Claypool!”

  Bell looked to see if he was hiding in the closets and the washroom, but Claypool wasn’t there. He went to the windows that faced the Singer Building. He opened one and looked down. The office was twelve stories above Cortlandt Street. There was no balcony Claypool could have escaped to, and nothing to climb up the side of the building to the roof.

  Bare light bulbs sparkled across the street inside the cagework of the Singer Building. Work had ceased for the night, and the steel columns, which had risen several tiers since Bell had been here last, were deserted, the derricks still, the hoisting engines silent. He could hear trolleys, a noisy motor truck, and horseshoes clattering in the street. Movement caught his attention. Five stories above the sidewalk, he saw the silhouette of a man climbing open stairs in the Singer frame—a night watchman or fire watch.

  Bell hurried back to the closets, recalling that one had been mostly empty. He inspected it carefully this time and found a door concealed in the back, its knob hidden under a winter coat. The door opened on a stairwell.

  “Claypool!”

  Silence. No answer, no footsteps. It was possible that Claypool had escaped during the battle, his retreat covered, perhaps, by the wounded detective who had shot Salata.

  Bell went back to the windows. The man climbing the Singer steelwork stopped and looked down. Immediately, he lunged toward a ladder and scrambled higher. Bell leaned against the glass to see. Two stories below, another man climbed after him. He was limping, slowed by his “winging” gait.

  25

  Brewster Claypool collapsed into a triangle of cold steel, formed by a column, a crossbeam, and a diagonal wind brace, where he could hide from the monster chasing him. It was hide and pray or simply fall to his death, he was so exhausted. Even a physical culture devotee like J. B. Culp would be hard-pressed to climb as many stairs and ladders as he had—five, before he lost count—and he could not recall the last time he had climbed stairs when an elevator was available.

  He had heard the monster’s footsteps when he wedged his trembling legs into the triangle, still climbing down there, somewhere down in the dark. Now he’d lost track of him. Muffled by the wind? Or had he stopped? Was he stan
ding stock-still, listening for his prey? For Claypool was prey. He had no doubt of that, prey in a situation that all the pull on earth could not get him out of. He tried to drag air silently into his storming lungs.

  Gradually he caught his breath, gradually he began to hope that the killer had given up. Could he somehow just stay inside this little steel crook in the corner of the skyscraper until dawn filled it with workmen? Would he freeze to death? The wind had begun to gust and it was fierce up here. No wonder the engineers riddled the structure with wind braces.

  “Mista Claypool.”

  The voice was inches from his ear, and he was so shocked and frightened that he shouted, “Who are you? What do you want from me?”

  “Who told you to tell Finn to hire an assassin?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Then why did you barricade yourself with bodyguards when Finn died?”

  In the shrewd, conniving worlds that Brewster Claypool had dominated his entire career, there was no one smarter than a “railroad lawyer”—except a Wall Street lawyer. But when he heard that question in the dark, Brewster Claypool felt every brainstorm he had ever had drain from his head; every parry, every counterstroke, every rejoinder.

  “Why?”

  Then, all the gods be praised, his brain began to churn.

  “Why bodyguards?” he replied smoothly, speaking into the dark wind as if they had settled into club chairs at the Union League. “Because I watched as men were killed, one after another, each at a higher station. Were these the crimes of a madman? Or a man with a brilliant scheme? But when Brandon Finn died, I knew that the ‘why’ of it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the killing would continue, and I had better take precautions—Ahhh!”

  A blade bit into his cheek and cut a line to his lip.

  Isaac Bell felt warm, sticky liquid dripping on the ladder as he climbed to the seventh tier of the Singer Building cage and smelled the piercing metallic scent of blood. He looked up. Ten feet above his head, he saw the shadows of two men grappling, one tall and broad, the other a wisp of a spider. Claypool didn’t have a chance.