“So he’s somewhere in New York.”
“Or boarding a train going anywhere in the country.” Bell stood from the table. “I better warn Wish just in case he’s headed to Cleveland.”
“Do you think he’ll take another shot at Rockefeller?”
“He’s had a week to stew while shoveling coal in a hundred-ten-degree stokehold. And he knows we’ll catch him in the end. He’ll want to wreak more damage than killing one man.”
“Wanting and doing are two different things. Like I said, Matters is a business man on the run. Even if he’s a mastermind, being on the run makes him a fish out of water.”
“Until he joins up again with his personal assassin.”
33
Isaac Bell knew the great industrial city of Bridgeport well, having gone down to college in nearby New Haven. Bridgeport had provided Yale students carousing grounds beyond the long arm of the chaplain. More recently, he had bought his Locomobile at the company’s Bridgeport factory.
He parked the big red auto in front of the Zimmerman & Brassard gun shop. The partners Zimmerman and Brassard had long since retired on fortunes made from the Civil War, leaving the shop to a talented apprentice with the business acumen to retain the famous name that was set above the door in gunmetal letters. He was middle-aged by now, a slight, precise man with a pencil-thin mustache and wire-rimmed spectacles.
“Mr. Beitel?” asked Bell.
Beitel turned from the electric lathe, where he was working, and nodded. He was wearing arm garters to keep his shirtsleeves above his wrists and a four-in-hand necktie snugged under a shop apron. Physically, he appeared the opposite of the powerful Dave McCoart, with one exception: like McCoart, the casually able manner in which he hefted a cutoff tool said he was an artist, a man who could already see the shape of what he would fashion from the length of metal stock that was turning on his lathe.
His workshop was as neat and precise as he. It had a sturdy bench with drawers and a lip around the top to keep things from rolling off, several vises, a chest for small tools and parts, and a converted bedroom bureau with large drawers. He had just opened one, and Bell saw pistols waiting to be repaired, sandpaper, abrasive cloth, and steel wool. There was a power grinder with stones and a wire brush, a drill press, and an all-angle drilling vise for mounting telescope sights, a motor sander, and the long bench lathe where he was turning a rifle barrel.
“Good morning,” said Bell. “I was at the Locomobile factory—ran into a little trouble on my way to Hartford—and they told me you were a particularly fine gunsmith, so I figured I’d stop on my way. My card. Jethro Smith.”
“Hartford?”
“Head office. My territory is in Oregon.”
“Who told you I was a fine gunsmith?”
“One of the mechanicians.”
“Really. Do you mind me asking which one?”
“The factory was a madhouse. They’re all excited about the Number 7 auto they’re entering in the Vanderbilt Cup. It’s next month, coming up soon.”
“Oh, I know. Everyone in Bridgeport’s planning to take the ferry over to Long Island . . . Which mechanician was it who mentioned me?”
“Let’s see . . . His name’s on the tip of my tongue.” It had been worth the six-hour drive through crowded towns to get his story straight at the auto factory. He snapped his fingers. “Gary! Gary . . . Crisci. Know him?”
“Gary Crisci? I sure do. That is, I know of him. They say he’ll be Number 7’s mechanician. He’s a top hand. I’m honored he’s heard of me. What’s your interest in guns, Mr. Smith?”
“Rifles.”
“Are you a marksman?”
“I shoot in the occasional match,” Bell answered modestly.
“Where?”
“Out west. Oregon. My territory.”
“Are you looking to buy a rifle?”
“I need a telescope mounted.”
Bell lifted his carpetbag onto the counter and opened it. He watched the gunsmith’s face as he pulled out the assassin’s Savage 99 and methodically inserted the barrel into the chamber.
The gunsmith was no actor. But not even the great Edwin Booth could hide his feelings if the blood drained out of his face as it did from Beitel’s, and Isaac Bell knew he had hit pay dirt at last.
—
“Are you all right, sir?” Bell asked solicitously. “You look pale.”
“It’s warm in here,” Beitel murmured.
“Warm subject,” said Bell.
The gunsmith took off his apron and folded it neatly on a chair. Bell extended the rifle. Beitel appeared to shrink before Bell’s eyes. But he took the gun, cradled it a moment, and laid it on the counter. Then he turned around as if Bell weren’t there and faced his lathe. He picked up a cutoff tool, fitted it to the tool rest, and pressed the bit to the stock turning on the machine. His hands were shaking. Sparks flew where the tool grooved the metal.
The motor whined as he adjusted a switch lever, gradually increasing the speed to two hundred revolutions per minute.
He looked up from the work and gazed slowly about the shop.
“I love this,” he said, addressing Bell over his shoulder.
Isaac Bell spoke very gently. “I cannot promise, but it is possible that this could work out in such a way that you could keep your shop. If you help me find the assassin for whom you altered this weapon.”
“The assassin?”
The gunsmith bent closer to the work as if seeking refuge in a familiar task. He seemed so rattled, he didn’t notice his loose necktie dangling close to the turning stock.
“Careful of your tie,” said Bell.
Beitel whispered, “I love h—”
“What did you say?”
“Go to hell!”
Isaac Bell vaulted over the counter. He was twelve inches from the man when Beitel deliberately let his tie touch the rapidly turning stock. It grabbed the cloth, which wrapped around it faster than the eye could see, and jerked him down hard on the lathe. His neck broke with a loud, dry snap.
Bell switched off the machine. He hung Beitel’s CLOSED sign in the window, lowered the front shades, and searched the shop thoroughly. When he was done, he telephoned the police. “It looks like there’s been an accident.”
—
“I’ve got a tough one for you, Grady,” Isaac Bell said when he telephoned Forrer long-distance from the Bridgeport train station.
“How tough?”
“The assassin’s telephone number.”
Beitel’s death had been no accident, and the assassin to whom Beitel had been so loyal that he had killed himself instead of betraying him had left no sign of his identity at Zimmerman & Brassard. But Beitel had not trusted his memory and had hidden on the back of a sheet of sandpaper a telephone number written so minutely that Bell needed a magnifying glass to read it.
Bell read it to Forrer. “The Bridgeport operators don’t know it. I don’t want to telephone until I know who will answer and where he is.”
“It could take a while.”
“I’ll be at the Sage Gun Company in two hours. If you don’t know by then, wire me care of Washington when you do. And pass it straight to Archie, and Weber & Fields, Wish Clarke, and Texas Walt.”
Bell shipped his Locomobile back to New York in a freight car and booked the first train to Grand Central. Hurrying across Manhattan to the ferry to New Jersey, he stopped at the Sage Gun Company on West 43rd, where he opened his carpetbag and handed Dave McCoart the Savage 99 and a narrow felt-lined box. McCoart removed a long, finely machined steel tube and whistled. “Where’d you get this?”
“The assassin’s gunsmith.”
“You can’t buy a better telescope than Warner & Swasey.”
Bell handed him the Savage 99. “Mount it on this, please.”
“I’ll
get right to it.”
“I found Beitel’s notebook.”
It was bound in black leather. The pages were filled with drawings and formulas written in a precise, artistic hand.
“Turn to the end, last four pages.”
McCoart read slowly and carefully, tracing drawings with a blunt finger.
“What’s he up to?” asked Bell.
“I think the guy is designing an exploding bullet.”
“Like an artillery shell?”
“In principle. But a heck of a lot smaller. I mean, this could be chambered in a .303.” He glanced up at Bell. “Like this Savage . . .”
“Do you think it will work?”
“If he’s able to execute what he’s drawn, yes. Judging by his quality work on this”—McCoart assembled the Savage’s chamber and barrel with a flick of his wrist and broke it down as swiftly—“the man is very, very good.”
He scanned the drawings again.
“Grisly imagination. A near miss with one of these would not be a miss. As for a ‘flesh wound,’ call the gravediggers.”
“More likely, the assassin’s imagination.”
“Did he happen to say how far he’s gotten with it?”
“He’s dead. His lathe grabbed his tie. Broke his neck.”
“Damned fool wearing a tie around a lathe.”
“He meant to kill himself.”
“There’s loyalty, for you,” said McCoart. He handed Bell back the notebook. “Well, at least he’s not going to finish this awful thing.”
“I reckon he already has.”
“Did you find any fulminate of mercury?”
“Plenty.”
“Did you find any cartridges?”
“There are none in the shop.”
“Hopefully, he was still experimenting.”
“I’m not counting on that,” said Isaac Bell.
“Did he say anything?”
“He said he was in love.”
“In love? And he killed himself? Are you going to talk to her?”
“I couldn’t hear her name.”
—
Like most upper-crust brothels, Miss Dee’s ten-dollar parlor house on North Wichita Street was a hangout for politicians and prosperous business men. Compared to New York or Chicago, its setting was less than glamorous, on a street bordered by a lumberyard, a blacksmith, a foundry, gas storage tanks, and tenements.
Wichita, thought Archie, where expectations were modest.
“Come right in,” the madam greeted him warmly. Wealthily dressed men made good customers. Handsome, wealthy customers with exquisite manners were a rare treasure. She remarked that she had not seen him before. Archie said he was not from Kansas. She said that she was not surprised and asked what in particular she could do for him.
“Would it be possible to make the acquaintance of a young lady named Jane?”
“Very possible, we have several Janes.”
Archie drew on Mack and Wally’s description. “Jane of hair as red as mine and eyes like lapis lazuli.”
“That Jane.”
“Is she still here?”
“Still here,” the madam said grimly.
“You don’t sound pleased,” said Archie.
“She’s tough on the business. The old geezers fall hard for her. One of these days, fisticuffs in my parlor will end in a heart attack.”
“I hope I’ll be immune,” said Archie.
“Frankly,” said the madam, “I hope you fall so hard, you take her home with you . . .”
—
Archie popped the question on the train to Chicago, a city that the round and bright-eyed Jane told him she had always wanted to visit. Archie had promised a paid vacation and a shopping trip (at Van Dorn expense). If Mr. Van Dorn balked, he would hit Isaac up for the dough. Any luck, Jane’s gratitude would materialize as the name of her dead admirer’s blackmail victim. Best of all, while in Chicago he could sink his teeth back into the Rosania case.
Archie waited until they were highballing out of St. Louis before he asked about Reed Riggs. Jane’s lapis lazuli eyes darkened, turning a sad, stony blue.
“Reed was a good man. A gent like you, Archie. Not fancy like you, but a gent in his heart. That’s why he couldn’t follow through. He was no blackmailer. It just seemed like a good idea to save his refinery, but when push came to shove he couldn’t do it.”
“Did he ever actually approach the victim?”
“He told me he went to New York and talked to him.”
“At 26 Broadway?” Archie asked casually.
Jane laid a plump hand on the back of Archie’s. “Stay a gent, Archie. Don’t try to trick me.”
Archie said, “I understand that you would never dishonor Reed Riggs’ memory by betraying the name of the man he decided not to blackmail. But what if I told you that the man we think it was just tried to kill John D. Rockefeller?”
Jane said, “Most people would think he had a pretty good idea.”
“And if I told you that we suspect he killed Mr. Riggs?”
“Reed died in an accident.”
“It is possible it was not an accident.”
“Can you prove that?”
“I cannot prove it was murder,” Archie admitted, “though we have a pretty good idea how the killer did it.”
Jane looked out the window. Her beautiful eyes had recovered their natural color and her spirits had risen. It was cheerfulness that the geezers fell for, Archie guessed, as much as her round shape. “Archie, what you just said rings true. When Reed died, he left me the only thing he possessed. His decency. I hate to think of the poor man dying in fear. When they told me he fell under the train, I decided he had fainted.”
Archie said, “If he was killed the way we believe he was, he never knew what hit him, or even saw it coming. One moment he was alive, the next he was not.”
“How can you know that?”
Archie described in detail the assassin’s shooting perch that he and Isaac Bell had discovered in a Fort Scott train yard.
Jane turned from the window and touched Archie’s cheek. The conductor passing through the car noted their red hair and his stern face broke into a smile as he wondered, mother and son off to Chicago? More likely, maiden aunt and her favorite nephew.
“I will speak one name aloud,” said Archie. “Only one. Can you please nod if he’s the man Reed changed his mind about blackmailing?”
“Part of me wants to cover my ears.”
“No need,” said Archie. “I won’t say his name until you agree.”
“I still want to cover them.”
“I will say this. If it is who I think it is, then I can guarantee that Reed died just as I described and never felt a thing.”
She looked at him and believed him and Archie exulted. Jackpot!
34
Bet you a duck I can hit four in a row.”
“Bet a duck? What are you talking about?”
“If I hit four ducks,” said the assassin, “you give me one.”
It was too hot to stroll at the Hudson County Fair—ninety-five degrees even after dark. The midway was deserted except for ice cream stands and an enterprising kid selling chips of ice to press to sweaty foreheads. The heat made people cranky, and the owner of the shooting gallery, whose parade of moving ducks had attracted no gunfire for hours, was in no mood for jokers.
“You hit the duck, you win a prize. You win a cigar—if you’re old enough to smoke ’em.” He peered dubiously at the short, slight boyish figure leaning on the counter. “Or you get a dog.” He pointed at a plaster bulldog painted blue. “You hit the duck four times, you win a teddy bear for your girl—if you got one. The duck’s the target. You don’t win the target.”
“Afraid I’ll hit four?”
&
nbsp; “You won’t hit three.”
“For the duck.”
The assassin dropped a nickel on the counter for five shots and fired three so quickly, the rifle bolt seemed to blur. Three moving ducks fell down and popped up. The owner nudged a hidden lever and the parade speeded up.
The assassin smiled, “Faster won’t save you,” fired again, and hit a fourth, then shifted slightly so that the barrel angled in the general direction of the man who owned the stand. “Do I have any left?”
“One.”
“Give me my duck.”
—
A butler wearing the uniform of a United States Army orderly showed Isaac Bell into a reception room off the front foyer of the Mills mansion on Dupont Circle. Brigadier Mills’ daughter, Helen, was every bit “the looker” Archie had made her out to be—a tall, lean brunette with long arms, demanding brown eyes, and an intriguingly low voice.
Bell went straight at her. “It is a pleasure to meet a lady with a famous left hook.”
A puzzled Helen Mills arched both her eyebrows.
“Should I duck?” asked Bell. “I’m a friend of Archie Abbott.”
She looked Isaac Bell over, inspecting him closely. “Only if the louse sent you to apologize.”
“I came on my own.”
“Are you on Mr. Abbott’s mission?”
“Mr. Abbott was on my mission. And to be straight with you, it’s your father, Brigadier Mills, I must meet.”
“What is the matter with you men from New York? Why don’t you just call at my father’s office? His bark is worse than his bite. He is actually quite approachable.”
“Not on this subject. It is deeply personal.”
“At least you’re honest about it. Archie was misleading.”
“To be fair to my old, old friend,” said Bell, “we must assume that when Archie laid eyes on you, he was swept off his feet and therefore not operating at his best.”
She did not appear to dislike compliments. She inspected Bell some more and smiled as if she liked what she saw. “I’ll make you a deal, Detective Bell. Stay for lunch. If you’re still here when my father gets home, I’ll introduce you.”