The subject of his monologue tagged him as a denizen of the notorious Levee District, where crime and vice were daily fare.
4
“YOU WANT TO MAKE A PILE MONEY, you get yourself a bordello—What’s that? No, no, no. Not here! Who’s your customers here? Cows? You go to Chicago! You go over dere by the West Side. You purchase a house for six thousand. You bring a carpenter by to build a buncha walls for a couple hundred bucks. You get ten girls. Twenty visits a night. Dollar a visit—you don’t want no cheap fifty-cent house—and you let the girls keep half. You pay the house off in two months. From then on, you’re making three thousand a month. Profit! ”
“I gotta go do my chores,” said a younger, slower voice.
Bell removed his broad-brimmed hat to venture a quick glance around the corner. The middle-aged talker was sitting on a barrel with his back to him. He had a bottle of beer in his hand and was wearing a city man’s derby, shirtsleeves, and vest. The younger was a farm boy in a straw hat. He was clutching a bucket and a rake.
“And don’t forget your profits selling booze to the visitors. And the girls. The girls always blow their easy money. They want morphine, cocaine, wine, you take your cut. Salesman comes by to sell’em dresses, you take your cut.”
“I gotta go, Mr. Spillane.”
The farmhand shuffled out of sight in the direction of the creamery.
When Bell rounded the corner of the smokehouse, and the man on the barrel whirled to face him, he instantly recognized the grizzled fifty-year-old from the wanted posters.
“Sammy Spillane.”
Spillane stared long and hard, trying to place him. It had been ten years. He pointed at Bell, shaking his finger, nodding his head. “I know you.”
“What are you doing here, Sammy? Was Harry Frost running an old folks’ home for retired bruisers?”
“You’re a goddamned Van Dorn, that’s who you are.”
“How did you get out of Joliet?” Sammy’s pale skin told him he’d been locked up until recently.
“Time off for good behavior. Time to paste your nose into that pretty face.”
“You’re getting a little long in the tooth to mix it up, aren’t you, Sammy?”
“I am,” Sammy conceded. “But me old gal Sadie blessed me with two fine sons. Come out here, boys!” he called loudly. “Say hello to a genuine Van Dorn detective, who forgot to bring his pals with ’im.”
Two younger and bigger versions of Sammy Spillane stepped into the sunlight, yawning and rubbing sleep from their eyes. At the sight of Isaac Bell they darted back inside and returned with pick handles, slapping the heavy bulging ends menacingly in their palms. Bell did not doubt that they had learned their trade as strikebreakers intimidating union marchers. Their father, meanwhile, had drawn a Smith & Wesson revolver, which he pointed at Bell.
“What do you think of my boys, detective?” Spillane chortled. “Chips off the old block?”
“I’d have recognized them anywhere,” said Isaac Bell, looking the big young men up and down. “The resemblance is strongest in the squinty pig eyes. Though I do see a bit of their mother in those sloping foreheads. Say, Sammy, did you ever get around to marrying Sadie?”
The insult provoked them to charge simultaneously.
They came at the tall detective from both sides. They raised the pick handles expertly, tucking their elbows close to their torsos so they didn’t expose themselves and trusting in wrist action to swing the thick hickory shafts with sufficient power to smash bone.
Their attack momentarily blocked Sammy’s field of fire.
Bell kept it blocked by slewing sideways. When Sammy Spillane could see him again, Isaac Bell’s white hat was falling to the grass and the two-shot .44 derringer the detective had drawn from inside the crown was aimed squarely at his face. Sammy swung his revolver toward Bell. Bell fired first, and the Chicago gangster dropped his gun and fell off the barrel.
His sons halted their rush, surprised by the crack of gunfire and the sight of their father curled up on the ground, clutching his right arm and moaning in pain.
“Boys,” Bell told them, “your old man has decided to sit this one out. Why don’t you drop the lumber before you get hurt?”
They separated, flaring to either side. They stood twelve feet apart, each only six feet from Bell, an easy reach with the pick handles.
“You got one shot left, Mr. Detective,” said the bigger of the two. “What are you going do with it?”
Bell scooped his hat off the ground, clapped it on his head, and aimed at a spot between them. “I was fixing to shoot your brother in the knee, figuring he could use that pick handle as a cane for the rest of his life. Now I’m reassessing the situation. Wondering if you’re the one.” The gun barrel yawned from one to the other, then settled between them, rock steady.
“You shoot him, you’ve gotta deal with me,” the smaller warned.
“Same here,” said the bigger, adding with a harsh laugh, “Mexican standoff. ’Cept you’re short a Mexican—Daddy, you all right?”
“No, dammit,” Sammy groaned. “I’m shot in the arm. Kill him before he blows your fool head off! Get him, both of you. Stick and slug! Now!”
Sammy Spillane’s sons charged.
Bell dropped the big one with his last bullet and shifted abruptly to let his brother’s pick handle whiz an inch from his face. Young Spillane’s momentum threw him off balance, and Bell raked the back of his neck with the derringer as he tumbled past.
He sensed movement behind him.
Too late. Sammy Spillane had retrieved the pick handle dropped by the son Bell had shot. Still on the ground, he swung it hard with his unwounded arm.
The hardwood shaft slammed into the back of Bell’s knee. It hardly hurt at all, but his leg buckled as if his tendons had turned to macaroni. He went down backwards, falling so hard that it knocked the wind out of his lungs.
For what felt like an eternity, Isaac Bell could neither see, breathe, nor move. A shadow enveloped him. He blinked his eyes, trying to see. When he could, he saw Spillane’s smaller son was standing astride him, lifting his pick handle over his head with both hands. Bell could see the thick bulge of wood blot out a chunk of the sky. He saw the man’s entire body tighten to put every ounce of his strength into the downward blow.
Bell knew that his only hope was to draw his automatic from the shoulder holster under his coat, but he still couldn’t move. The pick handle was about to descend on his skull.
Suddenly fueled by a rush of adrenaline, Bell found the strength to reach into his coat. Realizing he could move again, he immediately changed tactics, and instead of drawing his pistol, he kicked up between the man’s legs. He connected solidly with the hard toe of his boot.
Young Spillane froze, rigid as a statue. He stood with his arms locked high in the air. The pick handle began slipping from his paralyzed fingers. Before it hit the ground, an inch from Bell’s head, he tumbled backwards, screaming.
Isaac Bell stood up, brushed off his suit, and stepped on Sammy’s hand when he reached for his fallen Smith & Wesson.
“Behave yourself. It’s over.”
He checked that the brother he had shot was not bleeding from an artery and would survive. The man he had kicked caught his breath in deep gasps. He glowered at his father and brother on the ground beside him and up at the tall detective standing over them. Sucking air into his lungs, he groaned, “You got lucky.”
Isaac Bell opened his coat to reveal the Browning pistol in his shoulder holster. “No, sonny, you got lucky.”
“You had another gun? Why didn’t you use it?”
“Mr. Van Dorn’s a skinflint.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The agency has strict rules about wasting lead on stumblebum skunks. We also make a practice of leaving at least one skunk conscious to answer our questions. Where’s Harry Frost?”
“Why the hell would I tell you?”
“Because if you tell me,
I won’t turn you in. But if you don’t tell me, your daddy is going back to Joliet for assaulting me with a firearm, and you two are going down to Elmira for assaulting me with pick handles. And I’ll bet those New York cons doing their bit don’t like Chicago fellows.”
“The boys don’t know where Harry is,” Sammy Spillane groaned.
“But you do.”
“Harry went on the lam. Why would he tell me where he’s running?”
“He would tell you,” Bell answered with elaborate patience, “so that you would know where to go to help him, Sammy, with money, weapons, and your crook colleagues. Where is he?”
“Harry Frost don’t need no money from me. And he don’t need no ‘crook colleagues,’ neither.”
“A man can’t run without help.”
“You don’t get it, Mr. Detective. Harry has dough stashed in every bank in the country. You track him in New York, he’ll get dough in Ohio. You follow him to Ohio, he’ll be shaking hands with a bank manager in California.”
Bell watched the wounded gangster through narrowed eyes. Spillane was describing a fugitive who thoroughly understood how big and fragmented America was, the kind of modern criminal that even a continental outfit like the Van Dorn Detective Agency found difficult to track across state lines and through myriad jurisdictions. He made a mental note to have the Van Dorn field offices circulate wanted posters to every bank manager in their territory. Admittedly a long shot, as banks numbered in the tens of thousands.
“I suppose he has pals everywhere, too?”
“Not ‘pals’ you’d call friends. But guys he helped so they’d help him back. How do you think I got here after Joliet? Harry looked out for people who could help when he needed it. Always. From the first newsie I beat—from the first time I worked in his sales department—Harry Frost was always there for me.”
“If he knows you’ll help him, he must have told you where he was headed. Where is he?”
“Daddy don’t know, mister,” chorused Sammy’s sons.
“Mr. Frost was scared they’d throw him back in the bughouse.”
“He wouldn’t tell nobody.”
Isaac Bell saw that this was going nowhere. “How did Frost make his getaway?”
“Hopped a freight.”
The railroad tracks through the village of North River ran north and south. North to Canada. South to Saratoga and Albany, and from there Boston, Chicago, or New York Any direction he chose. “Northbound freight?” Bell asked. “Or southbound?”
“North.”
South, thought Bell. And with Whiteway’s publicists “booming” Josephine’s participation in the race, locating the aviatrix would be as simple as buying a newspaper.
“I have one more question,” said Isaac Bell. “If you lie again, I’ll put all three of you back in prison. Where is Marco Celere?”
Sammy Spillane and his sons exchanged baffled glances.
“The Italian? What do you mean, where?”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“What the hell do you think Harry’s running from?”
BELL GOT BUSY ON THE QUESTIONS he had to answer to capture Harry Frost before he hurt Josephine. Waiting for the train to Albany, he wired Grady Forrer, Van Dorn’s research man in New York, for a report on what Harry Frost had been up to since he retired at the young age of thirty-five and asked him to scour the newspapers for a wedding announcement that might shed light on how Frost had met and married Josephine.
As his train was approaching, he fired off a telegram to Archie Abbott at Belmont Park, where the competitors were gathering in the mile-and-a-half racetrack’s infield, instructing him to ask Josephine when and how she first met Marco Celere.
Archie’s reply was waiting at the Albany station.
Josephine met Celere last year in San Francisco, when she and her husband went to California for an aviation meet. Marco Celere had recently immigrated there from Italy.
Who, exactly, was the flying-machine inventor?
Bell wired James Dashwood, a hardworking young Van Dorn detective in the San Francisco office, to investigate Marco Celere’s activities there.
Were the aviatrix and her instructor lovers? Or was Frost jealous for no reason? It was a difficult question. Constable Hodge had reported that Frost and his wife did not socialize in North River. No one in the town knew them as a couple. And Marco Celere was an outsider who lived at the Frosts’ secluded camp while working on his aeroplane. Bell would have to pose the delicate question to Josephine himself.
The Interboro Rapid Transit subway whisked Bell from Grand Central Terminal to the basement entrance of the Hotel Knickerbocker, where the Van Dorn Detective Agency maintained New York offices. He found Grady Forrer in the subterranean bar off the downstairs lobby. Research had failed to find any newspaper announcement about Frost’s wedding, but Forrer had managed to turn up some gossip. Josephine was an Adirondack dairy farmer’s daughter—a local North River girl who had grown up a few short miles from Frost’s lavish camp—information that the closemouthed Constable Hodge had not volunteered.
Bell went upstairs to the office and telephoned him long-distance.
“Joe Josephs’s girl,” John Hodge answered. “Heck of a tomboy, but pretty as a picture—and about as independent as I’ve ever seen. A good kid, though. Sweet-natured.”
“Do you know how she and Frost met?”
“Not the sort of thing I’d busy my head about.”
As for Harry Frost’s activities since he retired, Research reported that he traveled around the world on big-game hunts. In which case, why had Frost missed such an easy shot at Celere? The hunter fired five shots. The last three at Josephine’s flying machine, two of which hit, she had reported to Constable Hodge. If the scope was improperly sighted, and he missed the first shot, an experienced rifleman would have noticed and compensated, even if he had to rely on the rifle’s iron sight. It seems highly unlikely he missed twice, Bell reasoned. The bullet in the tree could have been the first shot, the one that Josephine had seen wing Celere but not kill him. So the second killed him. Frost missed the third when he shot at her aeroplane—understandable, as big-game hunters had little experience shooting at flying machines. But he had corrected again, and the fourth and fifth nearly killed her.
TWO DAYS LATER, the Chicago laboratory reported that, under a microscope, the bullet Bell had test-fired had revealed rifling marks that might resemble those on the bullet in the tree, but the bullet in the tree was too battered for the laboratory to be positive. The Van Dorn gunsmith did agree with Bell’s speculation that the bullet in the tree could have passed through the body of the man it killed. Or only creased him, he suggested. Or missed him completely. Which was a reason, other than the river, to explain the lack of a corpse.
5
“GOOD THING THE HORSES AREN’T RUNNING,” Harry Frost muttered aloud. “They’d choke on the smoke.”
Frost had never seen so many trains crowding the Belmont Park Terminal.
Back in the old days, when he was one of the regular sporting men arriving at the brand-new track in their private cars, it would get pretty crowded on race day, with thirty ten-car electrics delivering spectators from the city. But nothing like this. It looked to him like every birdman in the country was steaming in, with support trains of hangar cars and Pullmans and diners and dormitories for their mechanicians—every car painted with the hero’s name like a rolling billboard. Locomotives belched about the rail yard, switch engines shuttled express and freight cars onto extra sidings. When the electric train he had ridden out from Long Island City let him off, it was on the last open platform.
He spotted Josephine’s train first off.
All six cars, even her hangar car, were painted yellow—the color that that San Francisco snake Whiteway painted everything he owned. All six cars shouted “Josephine” from their sides in a bold red headline font, outlined and drop-shadowed like the cover of the
sheet music for that damned song.
The song Preston Whiteway had commissioned had marched across the country like an invading army. No matter where Harry Frost fled, it was impossible to escape the tune, banged out by saloon piano players, rattling from gramophones, hummed by men and women in the street, storming through his skull like a steam calliope.
Up, up . . . higher . . . The moon is on fire . . . Josephine . . . Goodbye!
Good-bye, it would be. Red-faced with rage, Harry Frost strode out of the terminal. Not only had Josephine betrayed their marriage, not only had Celere betrayed the trust that had suckered him into investing thousands in his inventions, now they had made him a fugitive.
He had consulted lawyers secretly. Every single one warned that if it ever went to trial, a conviction for a second murder charge would be a catastrophe. His wealth would not help a second time around. His political connections, the best money could buy, would disappear when the newspapers whipped his “day in court” into a Roman circus. When he cornered a New York Court of Appeals judge in his mistress’s Park Avenue apartment, the man had told Frost flat out that his only hope of escaping the hangman would be to rot the rest of his life in the insane asylum.
But capturing him would not be easy, they would discover. He had lived like a hermit since he was released from Matawan. Even before, his face had never been well known to the public. That “Newsstand King” stuff was confined to the business. Average citizens, like those leading the rush out of the terminal toward the Belmont grandstand, had never seen his picture.
Besides, he smiled, stroking the full beard and mustache he had grown, now he himself saw a stranger in the mirror. The beard had made him look twenty years older by growing in surprisingly gray compared to his heavy crown of black hair, which had barely begun to be salt-and-peppered. Eyeglasses with the lenses tinted in the European way made him look a little like a German professor. Although wearing his flat sportsman’s cap, he might even pass himself off as an Irish writer.