Nellie answered for her. “Edna got a job reporting on the Flyover for the Sun. The editor was thrilled by her Baku story.”
“How did you happen to find the car?”
“Easy as pie,” Nellie said. “This siding is one of Father’s favorites. It’s very pretty in the daylight and quiet. There’s never much traffic on the Putnam Division. He calls it his cottage in the country.”
“And you found no sign at all of your father?”
“None. Poke around, if you like. But look what we did find.”
Edna asked, “Do you remember when we were talking about my brother joining the Army?”
“Of course.”
“Look what we found,” said Nellie.
Edna said, “I was flabbergasted when Nellie showed me.”
She took a leather pouch from a drawer and laid it on the desk.
“May I?” Bell asked.
“Go on, pick it up.”
Bell held it to his nostrils. “Does your father smoke Cuban cigars?”
“No,” said Edna, and Nellie said, “He prefers a two-cent stogie. Open it, Isaac. Look what’s inside.”
It contained a medal, a fifty-dollar bill, and a sheet of fine linen-based stationery folded in quarters to fit the pouch. The medal was an extraordinarily heavy disk of gold engraved like a target, which hung by a red ribbon from a gold pin labeled “Rifle Sharpshooter.” The fifty was a treasury note.
“Turn it over,” said Nellie. “Look at the back.”
Bell saw that President Roosevelt had signed the back above the treasurer’s printed signature.
“Read the letter.”
Bell unfolded it carefully, as the paper appeared weakened by being opened many times. The letterhead jumped off the page:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington
Bell’s eye shot to the recipient’s address on the bottom left of the page.
Private Billy Jones
Newark Seventh Regiment
New Jersey
He read:
My dear Private Billy Jones,
I have just been informed that you have won the President’s Match for the military championship of the United States of America. I wish to congratulate you in person . . .
The president had closed:
Faithfully yours,
And signed in a bold hand:
Theodore Roosevelt
Nellie said, “He has to be our brother, don’t you think? Still alive in ’02.”
“How did this end up in your father’s car?”
“Billy may have hidden in the car when he first deserted. He knew the various places Father would park it.”
“He might have turned to Father for help,” said Edna.
“Would your father have ‘shielded’ him?” asked Bell, deliberately repeating the word that Brigadier Mills had used to speculate about Bill Matters and the deserter.
“Of course,” said Edna, and Nellie nodded vigorously.
“Would your father have tried to talk him into going back?”
Nellie said, “Father would have done whatever he thought was best for Billy’s future.”
“Where do you suppose Billy is now?” Bell asked.
Edna said, “I suspect he enlisted, again, under a different name. But if he did, maybe the reason we’ve heard nothing since is he died fighting the Filipino guerrillas.”
“I doubt he died in the Philippines,” said Bell. It looked to him that Brigadier Mills had read his man wrong . . . “Could I ask you something?”
“Which one of us?” asked Nellie.
“Both. If this marksman Billy Jones is your brother, Billy Hock, could you imagine him turning his skill to murder?”
“Are you asking is our brother the assassin?”
“I am asking do you imagine he could be?”
“We haven’t seen him in years,” said Edna. “Who knows who he’s become?”
“Could the boy you remember become a murderer?”
“No,” said Edna.
“Yes,” said Nellie.
“Why do you say yes, Nellie?”
“I knew him better than Edna. Isn’t that true, Edna?”
Edna said, “Yes, you two grew very close.” To Bell she added, “So close that I was jealous sometimes.”
Bell asked again, “Nellie, why do you say yes?”
“He was afraid. He was always afraid. So when you ask can I imagine him turning his skill to murder, I have to imagine him lashing out—first out of fear, then because lashing out banished fear, and finally . . .”
“Finally what?” asked Bell.
Edna echoed, “Finally what, Nellie? How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m just speculating.”
“But you just said you knew him well,” Bell pressed, convinced she was onto something.
Nellie shrugged. “What if finally lashing out banished fear? Then maybe lashing out could become . . . what? Pleasurable? Enjoyable? Something to aspire to.”
“We’re talking about murder,” said Edna.
“We were talking about our brother,” Nellie said sharply.
“But who could find murder enjoyable?”
“A madman,” said Isaac Bell.
“We were talking about our brother,” Nellie repeated. “We’re speculating about murder . . .” When she resumed speaking, she made an effort to lighten her tone, as if asking with a hopeful smile could eliminate the worst possibility. “What do you think, Isaac? You’re the detective. Is our brother the assassin?”
“I can’t sugarcoat it for you,” said Bell.
His sober tone stopped the conversation. Lost in private thoughts, they listened to the night sound of locusts singing in the heat. After a while, after mentally couching questions he knew that they could not answer, Bell rose abruptly. He found his hat and said good-bye.
“Where are you going?” asked Nellie.
“I have to catch a train.”
“Will you be back in time for my Flyover?”
“I’ll do my best.”
Edna called after him. “What do you mean by a ‘madman’?”
Bell stopped in the doorway. “A person without conscience. Without fear.”
“Who ‘banished fear,’ like Nellie says?”
Bell answered, “All any of us can really know about a madman is that he will be unpredictable.”
“If that’s true, how do you catch such a person?”
“Never give up,” said Bell, but stepped into the night with his mind fixed on a deadlier device. Be unpredictable, too.
—
The houses on either side of Bill Matters’ Oil City mansion looked abandoned. Their yards were overgrown, their windows blank. The garden in front of the Matterses’ house was baked brown. The curtains were drawn, reminding Isaac Bell that Brigadier Mills had described Matters grieving in the dark. They could be closed against the heat. It was even hotter in western Pennsylvania than New York. The train conductor informed Isaac Bell with grim satisfaction that since weather traveled west to east, New York was soon in for “the hinges of hell.”
No one answered when he pressed the buzzer button at the front gate. He picked the lock.
No one answered his knock on the front door and he picked that lock, too.
“Anyone home?” he called up the front stairs and down a hall.
He thought he smelled a faint aroma of cooked food and worked his way back to the kitchen. It was empty, with a single skillet of congealed bacon grease sitting on the range. He checked other rooms and found the parlor with the paper theaters that Mills had mentioned. As in the other rooms, the curtains were drawn. There was no Bill Matters sitting in the dark.
The kitchen door led into the backyard, which was as big as the gard
ens of a country house and concealed from the streets and neighbors behind high wooden fences and dense fir trees. It was then that Bell realized the neighboring houses on either side were empty because Matters had bought and closed them, then fenced them off and added their backyards to his. He could hear the surrounding Oil City neighborhood but not see it.
There was a ramshackle quality to the place. An abandoned wooden derrick lay on its side tangled in vines next to lengths of wooden pipe almost as if Matters was contemplating a museum of early Pennsylvania oil history. He walked around the derrick and found a pond, its water thick with algae. Beside it was a marble gravestone. No name was chiseled on the stone, only an epitaph, which Isaac Bell recognized as William Shakespeare’s.
GOOD FREND FOR JESVS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE.
BLESE BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CVRST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.
From behind him, Bell heard, “Shakespeare’s not really buried here. The girls surprised me for my fortieth birthday. Raise your hands before you turn around.”
37
Isaac Bell raised his hands and turned around.
Matters was pointing his old Remington at him, and he was not alone. Rivers, the fit and remarkably unscarred old prizefighter, was holding a Smith & Wesson like a mechanical extension of his fist.
Bell addressed Matters. “They say no man is a hero to his butler. You must be the exception if Rivers gave up a cushy job in Gramercy Park to join you on the lam.”
“Mr. Matters gave me the cushy job when I was on the lam,” said Rivers. “Fair is fair.”
“Are you a murderer, too?”
“The jury thought so.”
“I’ll cover him,” said Matters. “He’s got a revolver in his shoulder holster. And if I’m not wrong, I think you’ll find a derringer in his hat.”
“Reach higher and stand very still,” said Rivers. He pocketed his gun and took the Bisley from Bell’s shoulder holster. “Fine pistol!”
“Keep it,” said Matters. “Detective Bell doesn’t need it.”
Rivers stuck it in his belt with a grin.
Bell said, “If you like that, wait ’til you see my derringer.”
Rivers knocked Bell’s hat off his head. He snatched it from the grass, dipped into the crown, and removed the miniature, custom-built single-shot derringer Dave McCoart had lent him while he built him a replacement for the two-shot Bell had lost in Russia.
“Wow! You’re a high-class walking arsenal. Look at this—”
Rivers had made two mistakes. In picking up the tall detective’s hat, he had placed himself partly between Bell and Matters. And he had already let Bell distract him. In the split second before Matters could move to clear his field of fire, Bell kicked with all his might, rocketing his left boot deep into the prizefighter’s groin. Then he dropped to the grass and reached into his right boot, drawing and casting his throwing knife in a single motion.
Bill Matters cried out in shock and pain. The heavy Remington six-shooter fell from his convulsing fingers and he stared in horrified disbelief at the razor-sharp blade that had passed between the bones of his wrist. The flat metal shaft quivered from the front of his arm and a full inch of the point protruded red and glistening from the skin on the back.
Bell picked up the Remington and brought it down like a sledgehammer on Rivers’ skull as the gasping butler tried to straighten up. Then he whirled back at Matters and landed a blow with the old pistol that knocked the oil man flat.
He had one pair of handcuffs. He secured Matters to an iron ring in the oil rig, took the guns from the unconscious Rivers, removed his whiskey flask and his bootlaces, dragged him forty feet away, and tied him to the rig by his thumbs. He returned to Matters.
“What are you going to do?” asked Matters.
“Take my knife back, to start,” said Bell. He yanked it out of his wrist, wiped the blood off on Matters’ shirt, and sheathed it back in his boot.
“I’ll bleed to death.”
“Not before you answer a heap of questions.” He screwed the cap off Rivers’ flask and poured whiskey into the wound the knife had slit. Matters sucked air. “Beats infection. Now, Bill, let’s talk.”
The rage that Bell had seen explode on the Bremen boat train flared red-hot in Matters’ eyes. Bell said, “It’s over. I’ve got you dead to rights. There is no escape. It’s time to talk. Where is your assassin?”
Slowly, the fire faded.
“Where? Where is the assassin?”
“You’re looking at him.”
—
“You shot your old partner Spike Hopewell? What about Albert Hill and Reed Riggs, and C. C. Gustafson in Texas?”
“Them, too.”
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“Hunting in the woods. I was a natural. Good thing, too. Bloodsucking bank foreclosed when Father died. The sheriff drove off our pigs and cows and turned my mother and me out of the home. We lived on the game I shot. Later, I ran away to the circus and a Wild West Show.”
Isaac Bell reminded Bill Matters that they had been sitting together in the Peerless with Rockefeller when the assassin fired at them in Baku.
“I paid a Cossack a thousand rubles to throw off suspicion.”
“Did you pay him to wound me or kill me?”
Matters looked Bell in the face. “Wound. My girls were sweet on you. I reckoned it might turn out well for one of them.”
“No one ever denied you were a loving father. Did you arm the Cossack with one of your Savages?”
“I didn’t have any with me. He used his own rifle.”
“Really?” said Bell. “The 1891 Russian Army Mosin is about as accurate as a pocket pistol. The short-barrel Cossack version is worse— You were never the assassin. Why are you trying to protect a hired hand with your own life?”
“What hired hand?”
“It’s not in your character to protect the assassin. You are not an honorable man. Will you look me in the eye and tell me you’re an honorable man?”
“Honorable never put game on the table.”
“Then why are you protecting your hired killer?”
“There is no hired killer. I did my own killing.”
“And poisoned Averell Comstock and threw Lapham off the monument?”
“I did what I had to do to advance in the company.”
“You’re trying, and failing, to protect a hired killer.”
“Why would I bother?” asked Matters.
“Only one answer makes sense.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“The assassin is your stepson.”
“My stepson?”
“Billy Hock.”
“You could not be more wrong.”
“Your stepson who ran away and joined the Army.”
“I never thought of Billy as my stepson. He was my son. Just as both my daughters are my daughters.”
“Call him what you will,” said Bell, “he became the finest sharpshooter in the Army. You made him a murderer.”
Matters’ expression turned bleak. There was no more anger in him. “My son is dead.”
“No, your son is your own personal murderer.”
“I know he is dead.”
“Your daughters don’t know. The Army doesn’t know. How do you know?”
“I found his body.”
38
The tall detective, who was leaning close to interrogate the handcuffed criminal, rocked back on his heels. He stared, eyes cold, mind racing. He paced a tight circle, cast an eye on the still-unconscious Rivers, gazed across the pond, and down at Matters. The man was as skilled a liar as Bell had ever encountered. And yet . . .
“If Billy was dead, why would Edna and Nellie tell me that h
e ran away from home and joined the Army?”
“That was my story. I told them that. It was better to let the girls think he died a soldier.”
“How did he die?”
“He drowned in that pond.”
“Here? In your backyard? But you never reported his death.”
“I buried him myself.”
“Why?”
“To protect the girls.”
“From what?”
“He committed suicide. The poor kid tied a rope around his neck. He tied the other end to a concrete block. Then he picked up the block and waded into the pond until the mud got him and the block dragged his head under. I saw his foot. His trouser leg had trapped air and it floated. Don’t you understand, Bell? The girls loved him. The idea that he was so unhappy that he would commit suicide would destroy them. I know, because I still ask myself every day what did I do wrong? What could I have done better?”
“Spike said you were never the same after that.”
“Spike was right.”
“Why did you have Spike shot?”
“Spike wasn’t as dumb as I thought. Or as ‘honorable.’ He figured out what I was up to, and when the Standard started breathing down his neck in Kansas, he threatened to tell Rockefeller that I was out to destroy him. He thought I could help him, that I could stop the Standard from busting up his business . . . Before you start blaming some other innocent, I repeat, I didn’t ‘have Spike shot.’ I shot him myself.”
“No you didn’t,” said Bell. “You were a thousand miles away at Constable Hook at your regularly scheduled meeting with Averell Comstock.”
“I was not at Constable Hook. I was in Kansas.”
“Van Dorn detectives read it in Comstock’s diary,” said Bell. “You were not in Kansas the day Spike was shot. And before you cook up a new lie, Comstock’s secretary confirmed that indeed you did show up for that meeting, on time, as always . . .”
Matters tugged at the handcuffs. In a bitter voice he asked, “When did you start checking up on me?”
“We checked up on all the new men who were in a position to attack Standard Oil from within the company. After you tried to kill Mr. Rockefeller, we naturally focused full attention on you. Where did you bury Billy?”