“What time does he get in?”
“We dine late.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” said Isaac Bell, “but how can I resist?” It occurred to him that if Edna Matters wasn’t whirling in his brain, and Nellie Matters not pirouetting on the edges, he might half hope that the Army would post Helen’s father to Indian Territory for the weekend.
Helen’s alto voice made her sound older than Archie had reported she was. Much older. She turned out to be a girl starting her second year at Bryn Mawr College. She admitted over lunch to being at loose ends about her future. But one thing for sure, she told Bell. She was determined to do more than marry and raise children.
Bell discovered that newspaperwoman E. M. Hock and suffragist Nellie Matters were heroes to Helen and her classmates; that he knew both women made him almost as heroic in her eyes. He offered advice, and before her father got home, he had convinced her to aim her studies toward a career even bolder than Edna’s and Nellie’s.
Brigadier General G. Tannenbaum Mills had fathered young Helen at a late age. Short, wide, and stiff-necked, he looked old enough to be her grandfather but was in fact as vigorous as a longhorn, and as ornery. Helen made him a cocktail, and at her urging he invited Bell into his study. The walls were hung with swords, dueling pistols, and Bowie knives.
Bell found it tough going trying to convince the old mossback that hanging a murderer was more important than shielding the Army from the embarrassment of a years-ago desertion. Mills repeated his argument in a voice trained to be heard over the thunder of a cavalry charge. “The Army is a more fragile institution than civilians suppose. Reputation is all. To suffer a black eye and deliver that black eye to the president is—”
“Lieutenant K.K.V. Casey,” Isaac Bell interrupted.
“What?”
“Private Howard H. Gensch . . . Sergeant Clarence Orr.”
“Why are you—?”
“They are marksmen.”
“I know that!”
“Lieutenant Casey won the President’s Medal in 1903. Private Gensch won the President’s Medal last year. Sergeant Orr won this year.”
“Why are you bandying their names?”
“Surely the United States Army isn’t ashamed of such marksmen.”
“What do they have to do with Private Jones?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, sir. Neither Lieutenant Casey, Private Gensch, nor Sergeant Orr are Private Billy Jones. Give your soldiers their due and help me hang a killer.”
“How?” Mills growled.
“Have you ever heard of a Standard Oil executive named Bill Matters?”
Mills put down his glass. “I wondered if you would ask.”
“You know of him?”
“Oh, yes.”
Isaac Bell leaned closer, which put the veteran officer in mind of a cougar about to land on him with all four feet. “Tell me how.”
“When we investigated Billy Jones’ desertion,” Mills said, “we discovered certain items the boy had left behind that we were able to trace—or so we thought. I went, personally, to the man that our investigation revealed was very likely Billy Jones’ father. That his son had disappeared around the time that Private Jones joined the Army seemed to cinch it.”
“What ‘item’ did he leave behind?”
“Ticket stubs from an opera house. Shakespeare shows. We traced them to Oil City, Pennsylvania.”
“Bill Matters lived in Oil City. He raised his daughters there before he moved to New York.”
“He still maintained a home in ’02. For all I know, still does. Anyway, I found him in Oil City.”
“Why did you go personally?”
“I would not put the officers under me in the position of offending a powerful man who might well have had no connection with the deserter other than the fact he was grieving for a missing son who had run off back in ’98 to enlist for the war.”
“Was the marksman Bill Matters’ son?”
Brigadier Mills looked Isaac Bell in the eye and Bell found it easy to imagine him as a young officer leading his men into a storm of lead. “I’m not proud of this,” he said, “but it was my job to cover things up. I went to Matters’ house. I spoke with him in private. He was alone there. I found him sitting in the dark. Mourning the boy.”
“In ’02? But that was years after he disappeared.”
“He still mourned him. I promised that nothing we discussed would leave the room. I made my case. The cross-grained SOB refused to believe me. He was certain—dead certain—that the marksman was not his missing son.”
Bell said, “Detectives run into similar denials by the parents of criminals.”
The general’s answer was uncharacteristically roundabout. “I’ve led men my whole life, Bell. Gettysburg. The west. Cuba. The Philippines. I can read men. I know what they’re thinking before they do. Bill Matters was telling the truth! The marksman Billy Jones was not his boy.”
“And yet?” Bell asked.
“And yet what?” Mills fired back.
“And yet I sense your, shall we say, disquiet? If not doubt?”
Angered, Mills looked away. He stared at his collection of weapons. He hesitated, face working, as if he was debating the merits of shooting Bell versus running him through. Finally, he spoke.
“Maybe you read men, too. You’re right. Something was off there. I don’t know what, but something was way off, out-of-kilter.”
“What?”
“Bill Matters knew that his boy was not the marksman. But he was not surprised that I had come calling.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was not surprised that I had connected him to the marksman who won the President’s Medal of 1902. Even as he sat there in the dark denying the theater stubs were his.”
“Maybe they weren’t.”
“I found him in a back parlor. He refused to leave the room or turn on the lights. So we talked in the dark. My eyes adjusted until I saw that the room was filled with toy theaters. You know what I mean?”
“Paper stage sets. You can buy them in New York theaters.”
“His parlor was full of them. But he sat there steadfastly denying that the theater stubs were his.”
Bell said, “You seemed to be suggesting that Matters knows who the deserter is.”
“I am not ‘suggesting,’ I am telling you that Matters knew beyond doubt that the marksman who deserted was not his missing boy.”
“Why?” asked Bell. “How could he know?”
“Either he knew exactly where his missing boy was in 1902 the day Billy Jones won the President’s Medal or—”
“Or he knows the marksman,” said Isaac Bell.
The brigadier said, “In my firm opinion, the deserter was not his boy. He is someone else.”
Isaac Bell was tumbling possibilities in his mind when he heard the old general say, “And now, sir, what are your designs on my daughter?”
“Helen? I’ve already proposed an offer.”
“Proposed? The girl is barely eighteen. She’s got college ahead of her.”
“I made every effort to convince her and she agreed to apply for an apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency as soon as she graduates.”
“What the devil makes you think my daughter could be a detective?”
“Helen’s got a mean left hook . . . Could we go back to reading men, sir? . . . I believe something is still on your mind. Something you’ve left unsaid about the marksman.”
Mills nodded. “It’s only speculation. I can’t offer proof.”
“I’d still like to hear it.”
“I’d bet money that Matters was shielding him.”
35
Are you sure you want to blow this all to smithereens?” asked the assassin.
“Sure as I know my n
ame,” said Bill Matters.
They were standing out of sight of the street in a glassed widow’s walk on the roof of The Hook saloon five stories above the Standard Oil Constable Hook refinery’s front gate. Originally erected by a sea captain who made his fortune in whale oil, the widow’s walk was festooned with wooden spires and elaborate bronze lightning rods fashioned like harpoons. Matters was safe here for a while, even with Isaac Bell closing in, for he owned the saloon lock, stock, and barrel.
He could see the gut-churning proof that the refinery had prospered just as he and Spike Hopewell had dreamed it would when they built the first stage on the neck of land that thrust into New York Harbor north of Staten Island. After stealing it, the Standard had enlarged it repeatedly on the same lines they had surveyed. Orderly rows of tanks and stills covered the hilly cape. Seagoing tank steamers lined up at the oil docks. And the village had grown these last six years from a raucous boomtown into a jam-packed city of tenements and factories, shops, churches, and schools—home to twenty thousand workers and their wives and children.
The assassin swept binoculars from the biggest naphtha tank across the city and up the tank-covered hill to the top of the tallest Standard Oil fire company tower, then back down the slope, over the rooftops, and back to the naphtha tank, which the red duck marked for a bull’s-eye.
The heat had intensified and the humidity had thickened. Old-timers were comparing it to the deadly temperatures of ’96, even the heat wave of ’92 that killed thousands in the seaboard cities. It was stifling inside the widow’s walk, and the heat shimmered so violently from the tanks that everything seemed to be in motion. It would take every ounce of the assassin’s skill to calculate how it would bend the flight of a bullet.
“Would you consider disappearing instead?”
“I have disappeared. I don’t like it.”
“What if I were to shoot Rockefeller?”
“No! Do not kill him. I want him to see this destroyed.”
“He’ll build again.”
“He’ll be too late. I invested in refineries at Philadelphia and Delaware and Boston and Texas. When I’ve blown Constable Hook off the map, I’ll control seaboard production. I want him to see that, too.”
This was startling information. It was also deeply disconcerting, for to be surprised was to admit a severe lapse in the sharp awareness that made a hunter a hunter instead of prey. Bill Matters was reinventing himself. But this hadn’t happened yesterday; he’d been reinventing all along.
“You’re like Rockefeller,” the assassin marveled.
Bill Matters laughed. “Master of the unexpected.”
“Then you’ll disappear?”
“To Europe . . . in style.”
“May I come with you?”
“Of course,” Matters said without hesitation. “I’ll keep you busy. I’m not retiring, only starting over.”
—
Movement in the street below caught the assassin’s eye. A strong man in overalls was rolling a wooden spool of copper cable. He disappeared below the overhang of the roof as he rolled it into the alley that led to the back of the saloon.
Matters asked, “What the devil is that?”
“Copper wire.”
“I can see that. Where’s he taking it?”
“The cellar.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s for me.”
Bill Matters looked hard at his assassin. “Now what game are you playing?”
“The unexpected. Just like Rockefeller. Or should I say, just like you.”
“What game?”
“Fast and loose.”
“With whom?”
“Isaac Bell.”
—
Heat lightning flickered repeatedly under a sullen midnight sky.
Gun in hand, Isaac Bell approached Bill Matters’ private railcar on foot. It was parked on a remote Saw Mill River valley siding of the Putnam Division twenty miles from New York City and less than ten from John D. Rockefeller’s Pocantico Hills estate.
Bell ignored the sweat burning his eyes and mosquitos whining around his ears. He walked on the wooden crossties so as not to crunch on the railbed ballast. But the flashes from distant storms threatened to give him away.
Van Dorn Research had traced the telephone number Bell had found at the assassin’s gunsmith to the private car platform at Pittsburgh’s Union Station. The Pittsburgh field office had learned that the telephone in Bill Matters’ car had been connected twice in the past six months to that platform. Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton had known which New York Central Railroad dispatchers to bribe to nail down its current location in Westchester County.
The detectives assigned to stand watch from a distance thought they had seen one figure enter the car hours ago just after dark. They had seen no one leave. Research procured Pullman Palace Car Company blueprints of the car’s floor plan. Bell memorized them, ordered the detectives out of sight, and went in alone.
He saw a sliver of light shine through the curtains as he drew close. A chimney stack broke the smooth roof line silhouette marking the galley and dining room in the front of the car. Those windows were dark, as were the windows in the rear.
At fifty feet away, he heard music. At twenty, he could distinguish the words of the hit song “Come Take a Trip in my Airship” playing on a gramophone.
The tenor Billy Murray was starting the last chorus. Bell sprinted forward to take advantage of the cover before the cylinder ran out.
Come take a trip in my airship.
Come take a sail ’mong the stars.
Come have a ride around Venus.
Come have a spin around Mars.
He climbed onto the rear platform.
No one to watch while we’re kissing,
No one to see while we spoon,
He opened the door. The music got louder.
Come take a trip in my airship,
And we’ll visit the man in the moon.
He was inside, back pressed to the door as he closed it quietly. This was the rear parlor, where the plush velvet seats could be converted to beds. He glided forward, toward the light, which was filtered by a curtain. The music was coming from the middle section, which the Pullman Company had configured for Matters as an office.
Suddenly a figure pushed through the curtain.
Bell slammed his arms around it in a vise grip.
36
A shriek brought Edna Matters bursting into the parlor with her .410 shotgun.
She saw Bell and lowered the gun.
“Thank God, it’s you.”
It was Nellie in Bell’s arms. He could feel her heart pounding fearfully. He let go. She gathered herself with repeated deep breaths.
“Hello, Isaac. We figured you’d show up. You could have knocked.”
“Our father is not here and we don’t know where he is,” said Edna.
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“No, Isaac. We would not.”
Nellie said, “Not until you understand that all he did was blow up in anger. Thanks to you, he didn’t kill Rockefeller. You saved him from committing a terrible crime in a grip of rage. No damage was done. We are grateful to you for that. But does he deserve jail, considering all he suffered?”
“What happens next time when I’m not there to stop him?”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Will his anger evaporate? I don’t think so.”
“He’ll get over it. He’s not a cold-blooded killer.”
Isaac Bell said, “He prepared a killing field. He opened the gangway connectors. He lured Rockefeller out there. He planned ahead of time how he would kill him. Any jury will call that premeditated murder.”
“It’s Rockefeller’s fault for cheating the poor man,” Nellie shot back
.
“Father must have had a nervous breakdown,” said Edna. “It all comes back to Rockefeller driving him mad.”
“I’m sorry, Edna, Nellie, but what he did in Germany was much worse than ‘blowing up in anger.’”
“Would you accept him being placed in an asylum?”
“Locked in an asylum.”
“Where they would treat him,” Nellie said eagerly. “With doctors. And medicine.”
“Maybe lawyers could convince a judge and jury to see it that way,” said Bell, “particularly if he were to turn himself in. Do you know where he is?”
They shook their heads, and Nellie said, “No. We honestly don’t know.”
“Has he been here?”
“We don’t think so,” said Nellie.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nothing of his in the car. We searched every closet and cabinet. Nothing.”
“How do you happen to be here?”
“We’re using Father’s car for headquarters,” said Nellie.
“Headquarters?”
“For the New Woman’s Flyover. Don’t you remember? I chartered a locomotive to move us to North Tarrytown in the morning.” And suddenly she was talking a mile a minute. The balloons, she said, were arriving from near and far. They were gathering in a hayfield she had rented from the owner of the Sleepy Hollow Roadhouse.
“For a dollar, Isaac, can you believe it?”
“I’ve met him,” said Bell. “I can believe it.”
She barely heard him. “Right next to Pocantico Hills! He hates Rockefeller. And he loves the idea of us soaring over his estate. He even persuaded the new village trustees to pipe gas out to the site—so we don’t have to generate our own, which is wonderful, it’s so much faster to inflate from mains—and he’s invited the women to pitch tents, and he’s opened the roadhouse baths to all of us. It’s a delightfully civilized campground. Except for this infernal heat. But we’ll rise above the heat, won’t we?”
It was understandable, thought Bell, and a good thing, that she was hurling herself into the Flyover scheme to escape from facing her father’s grim future. “How about you, Edna? Are you ballooning, too?”