Bell and Abbott met for a quick supper downstairs in the Grill. It was their first meal since a breakfast gulped at dawn in a Jersey City saloon. They climbed a grand staircase for coffee before they headed uptown to Forty-fourth Street and Broadway to see the Follies of 1907.
Bell paused in the Reading Room to admire a full-length portrait of Edwin Booth. The artist’s unmistakable style, a powerful mix of clear-eyed realism and romantic impressionism raised a tide of emotion in his heart.
“That was painted by a brother Player,” Abbott remarked. “Rather good, isn’t it?”
“John Singer Sargent,” said Bell.
“Oh, of course you recognize his work,” said Abbott. “Sargent painted that portrait of your mother that hangs in your father’s drawing room in Boston.”
“Just before she died,” said Bell. “Though you would never know it looking at such a beautiful young woman.” He smiled at the memory. “Sometimes I’d sit on the stair and talk to it. She looked impatient and I could tell she was saying to Sargent, ‘Finish up, already, I’m getting bored holding this flower.”’
“Frankly,” Abbott joked, “I’d rather answer to a painting than my mother.”
“Let’s get going! I have to stop at the office and tell them where to find me.” Like all Van Dorn offices in large cities, their headquarters in Times Square was open twenty-four hours a day.
Dressed in white tie and tails, opera capes and top hats, they hurried to Park Avenue, which they found jammed with hansom cabs, automobile taxicabs, and town cars creeping uptown. “We’ll beat this mess on the subway.”
The underground station at Twenty-third was ablaze in electric light and gleaming white tile. Passengers crowding the train platform ran the gamut from men and women out for the night to tradesmen, laborers, and housemaids traveling home. A speeding express train flickered through the station, windows packed with humanity, and Abbott boasted, “Our subways will make it possible for millions of New Yorkers to go to work in skyscrapers.”
“Your subway,” Bell observed drily, “will make it possible for criminals to rob a bank downtown and celebrate uptown before the cops arrive on the scene.”
The subway whisked them in moments uptown to Forty-second and Broadway. They climbed the steps into a world where night had been banished. Times Square was lit bright as noon by “spectaculars,” electric billboards on which thousands of white lights advertised theaters, hotels, and lobster palaces. Motorcars, taxicabs, and buses roared in the streets. Crowds rushed eagerly on wide sidewalks.
Bell cut into the Knickerbocker Hotel, a first-class hostelry with a mural of Old King Cole painted by Maxfield Parrish decorating the lobby. The Van Dorn office was on the second floor, set back a discreet distance from the grand stairway. A competent-looking youth with slicked-back hair and a sliver of a bow tie greeted clients in a tastefully decorated front room. His tailored coat concealed a sidearm he knew how to use. A short-barreled scatter gun was close at hand in a bottom drawer of his desk. He controlled the lock to the back room by an electric switch beside his knee.
The back room looked like an advertising manager’s office, with typewriters, green-glass lamps, steel filing cabinets, a calendar on the wall, a telegraph key, and a row of candlestick telephones on the duty officer’s desk. Instead of women in white blouses typing at the desks, a half dozen detectives were filling out paperwork, discussing tactics, or lounging on a break from house-dick lobby duty in the Times Square hotels. It had separate entrances for visitors whose appearance might not pass muster in the Knickerbocker’s fine lobby or were more comfortable entering and leaving a detective agency by the alley.
Catcalls greeted Bell’s and Abbott’s costumes.
“Gangway! Opera swells comin’ through!”
“You bums never seen a gentleman before?” asked Abbott.
“Where you headed dressed like penguins?”
“The Jardin de Paris on the roof of the Hammerstein Theater,” said Abbott, tipping his silk hat and flourishing his cane. “To the Follies of 1907.”
“What? You have tickets to the Follies?” they blurted in amazement. “How did you get your mitts on them?”
“Courtesy of the boss,” said Abbott. “The producer, Mr. Ziegfeld, owes Mr. Van Dorn a favor. Something about a wife that wasn’t his. Come on, Isaac. Curtain’s going up!”
But Isaac Bell stood stock-still, staring at the telephones, which were lined up like soldiers. Something was nagging at him. Something forgotten. Something overlooked. Or a memory of something wrong.
The Jersey City powder pier leaped into his mind’s eye. He had a photographic memory, and he traced the pier’s reach from the land into the water, foot by foot, yard by yard. He saw the Vickers machine gun pointed at the gate that isolated it from the main yards. He saw the coal tenders he had ordered moved to protect the gate. He saw the string of loaded boxcars, the smoke, the tide-roiled water, the redbrick Communipaw passenger terminal with its ferry dock at the water’s edge in the distance ...
What was missing?
A telephone rang. The duty officer snapped up the middle one, which someone had marked as foremost with an urgent slash of showgirl’s lip rouge. “Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn! ... Yes, sir! He’s here ... Yes, sir! I’ll tell him. Good-bye, Mr. Van Dorn.”
The duty officer, cradling the earpiece, said to Isaac Bell, “Mr. Van Dorn says if you don’t leave the office this minute, you’re fired.”
They fled the Knickerbocker.
Archie Abbott, ever the proud tour guide, pointed out the two-story yellow façade of Rector’s Restaurant as they headed up Broadway. He took particular note of a huge statue out front. “See that griffin?”
“Hard to miss.”
“It’s guarding the greatest lobster palace in the whole city!”
LILLIAN HENNESSY LOVED MAKING her entrance at Rector’s. Sweeping past the griffin on the sidewalk, ushered into an enormous green-and-yellow wonderland of crystal and gold brilliantly lit by giant chandeliers, she felt what it must be like to be a great and beloved actress. The best part was the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that let everyone in the restaurant see who was entering the revolving door.
Tonight, people had stared at her beautiful golden gown, gaped at the diamonds nestled about her breasts, and whispered about her astonishingly handsome escort. Or, to use Marion Morgan’s term, her unspeakably handsome escort. Too bad it was only Senator Kincaid, still tirelessly courting her, still hoping to get his hands on her fortune. How much more exciting it would be to walk in here with a man like Isaac Bell, handsome but not pretty, strong but not brutish, rugged but not rough.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said Kincaid.
“I think we should finish our lobsters and get to the show... Oh, hear the band... Anna Held’s coming!”
The restaurant’s band always played a Broadway actress’s new hit when she entered. The song was “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”
Lillian sang along in a sweet voice in perfect pitch,In the northeast corner of my face,
and the northeast corner of the self-same place...
There she was, the French actress Anna Held, with her tiny waist shown off by a magnificent green gown much longer than she wore on stage, wreathed in smiles and flashing her eyes.
“Oh, Charles, this is so exciting. I’m glad we came.”
Charles Kincaid smiled at the astonishingly rich girl leaning across the tablecloth and suddenly realized how truly young and innocent she was. He would bet money that she’d learned the tricks she played with her beautiful eyes by studying Held’s every gesture. Very effectively too, he had to admit, as she gave him a well-practiced up-from-under blaze of pale blue.
He said, “I’m so glad you telephoned.”
“The Follies are back,” she answered blithely. “I had to come. Who wants to go to a show alone?”
That pretty much summed up her attitude toward him. He hated that she spurned him. But when he got done with her father, the o
ld man wouldn’t have two bits to leave in his will while he would be rich enough to own Lillian, lock, stock, and barrel. In the meantime, pretending to court her gave him the excuse he needed to spend more time around her father than he would have been permitted in his role of tame senator casting votes on issues dear to the railroad corporations. Let Lillian Hennessy spurn her too old, vaguely comic, gold-digging suitor, a hopeless lover as unremarkable and unnoticed as the furniture. He would own her in the end—not as a wife but an object, like a beautiful piece of sculpture, to be enjoyed when he felt the urge.
“I had to come, too,” Kincaid answered her, silently cursing the Rawlins prizefighters who’d failed to murder Isaac Bell.
This night of all nights, he had to be seen in public. If Bell was not growing suspicious, he would soon. By now, an early sense of something wrong must have begun percolating in the detective’s mind. How long before Bell’s wanted poster jogged the memory of someone who had seen him preparing destruction? The oversize ears in the sketch would not protect him forever.
What better alibis than the Follies of 1907 in Hammerstein’s Jardin de Paris?
Hundreds of people would remember Senator Charles Kincaid dining at Rector’s with the most sought-after heiress in New York. A thousand would see the Hero Engineer arrive at the biggest show on Broadway with an unforgettable girl on his arm—a full mile and half away from a “show” that would outshine even the Follies.
“What are you smiling about, Charles?” Lillian asked him.
“I’m looking forward to the entertainment.”
23
PIRACY WAS RARE ON THE HUDSON RIVER IN THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century. When Captain Whit Petrie saw a raked bow loom out of the rain, his only reaction was to blow Lillian I‘s whistle to warn the other boat not to get too close. The sonorous blast of steam woke McColleen, the railroad dick who was snoozing on the bench in the back of the wheelhouse as Lillian I churned north past Yonkers, fighting an ebb tide and a powerful river current.
“What’s that?”
“Vessel under sail ... Damned fool must be deaf.”
The looming bow was still bearing down on him, close enough to reveal that the sails silhouetted against the dark sky were schooner-rigged. Whit Petrie lowered a wheelhouse window to see better and heard the thump of her auxiliary gasoline engine driving hard. He yanked his whistle pull again and put the wheel over to veer away before they collided. The other boat veered with him.
“What the hell?”
By now, McColleen was on his feet, all business, yanking a revolver from his coat.
A shotgun bellowed, blowing out the windows and blinding McColleen with flying glass. The railway dick fell back, crying out in pain and clutching his face and firing blindly. Captain Petrie drew on bred-in-the-bone Jersey City street-fighter instincts. He whirled his wheel hard over to ram the attacker.
It was the right tactic. The heavily laden steam lighter would be certain to cut the wooden schooner in half. But Lillian I‘s worn rudder linkage, long neglected by the New Jersey Central Railroad and now the Southern Pacific, failed under the wrenching maneuver. Steering gear carried away, rudder gone, the dynamite boat stalled partway into the sharp turn and wallowed helplessly. The schooner slammed alongside, and a gang of men stormed aboard, howling like banshees and firing guns at anyone who moved.
THE JARDIN DE PARIS was a makeshift theater on the roof of Hammerstein’s Olympia. This cold, rainy night, canvas curtains were lowered to keep out the wind but did little to muffle the noise of the gasoline buses on Broadway below. But no one holding a ticket looked anything but happy to be there.
Tables and chairs were arranged on a flat floor more like a dance hall than an auditorium. But the management had added elaborate boxes to attract what Archie Abbott called “a better class of audience.” The boxes were newly built on a sweeping horseshoe-shaped platform on top of a pagoda that spanned the elevator entrance. Florenz Ziegfeld, the producer of the Follies, had given the Van Dorn detectives the best of those seats. They offered a clear, close view of the stage and a sweeping panorama of the rest of the boxes, which were filling with men wearing white tie and tails and women in gowns fit for a ball.
Scanning the arriving audience, Bell suddenly locked eyes with Lillian Hennessy as she took a seat across the way. She looked more beautiful than ever in a gold gown and with her blond hair piled high upon her head. He smiled at her, and her face lit up with genuine pleasure, forgiving him apparently for wrecking her Packard automobile. In fact, he reflected worriedly, she was smiling at him like a girl on the brink of total infatuation—which was the last thing either of them needed.
“Look at that girl!” blurted Abbott.
“Archie, if you lean out any farther, you’ll fall into the cheap seats.”
“Worth it if she’ll weep over my body—you’ll tell her how I died. Wait a minute, she’s smiling at you.”
“Her name is Lillian,” said Bell. “That Southern Pacific steam lighter you were gawking at this afternoon is named after her. As is everything that floats that’s owned by the railroad. She’s old Hennessy’s daughter.”
“Rich, too? God in heaven. Who’s the stuffed shirt with her? He looks familiar.”
“Senator Charles Kincaid.”
“Oh yes. The Hero Engineer.”
Bell returned Kincaid’s nod coolly. He was not surprised that Kincaid’s check for poker losses had still not arrived at the Yale Club. Men who dealt from the bottom of the deck tended not to pay their debts when they thought they could get away with it.
“The Senator certainly got lucky.”
“I don’t think so,” said Bell. “She’s too rich and independent to fall for his line.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She told me.”
“Why would she confide in you, Isaac?”
“She was polishing off her third bottle of Mumm.”
“So you got lucky.”
“I got lucky with Marion, and I’m going to stay lucky with Marion.”
“Love,” Archie mock mourned in a doleful voice as the houselights began to dim, “stalks us like death and taxes.”
A grand dowager, wrapped in yards of silk, behatted in feathers, and dripping diamonds, leaned from the next box to rap Abbott’s shoulder imperiously with her lorgnette.
“Quiet down, young man. The show is starting... Oh, Archie, it’s you. How is your mother?”
“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Vanderbilt. I’ll tell her you asked.”
“Please do. And Archie? I could not help but overhear. The gentleman with you is correct. The young lady has little regard for that loathsome legislator. And, I must say, she could handily repair your family’s tattered fortunes.”
“Mother would be delighted,” Abbott agreed, adding in a mutter for only Bell to hear, “As Mother regards the Vanderbilts as uncultivated ‘new money,’ you can imagine her horror were I to bring home the daughter of a ‘shirtsleeve railroader.”’
“You should be so lucky,” said Bell.
“I know. But Mother’s made it clear, no one below an Astor.”
Bell shot a look across the boxes at Lillian, and a brilliant scheme leaped full blown into his mind. A scheme to derail Miss Lillian’s growing infatuation with him and simultaneously get poor Archie’s mother off Archie’s back. But it would require the restraint of a diplomat and the light touch of a jeweler. So all he said was, “Pipe down! The show is starting.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF the Hudson River, a mile west of Broadway, the pirated Southern Pacific steam lighter Lillian I dashed downstream. The outflowing tide doubled the speed of the current, making up for the time they had lost repairing her steering gear. She steamed in company with the wooden sailing schooner that had captured her. The wind was southeast, thick with rain. The schooner’s sails were close-hauled, her gasoline engine churning its hardest to keep up with Lillian I.
The schooner’s captain, the smuggler from Yonkers, felt a twi
nge of sentiment for the old girl who was about to be blown to smithereens. A minor twinge, Yatkowski thought, smiling, having been paid twice the value of the schooner to drown the steam lighter’s crew in the river and stand by to rescue the Chinaman when they sent her on her last voyage. The boss paying the bills had made it clear: look out for the Chinaman until the job was done. Bring him back in one piece. The boss had use for the explosives expert.
THE ANNA HELD GIRLS, acclaimed by the producer to be “the most beautiful women ever gathered in one theater,” were dancing up a storm, in short white dresses, wide hats, and red sashes, as they sang “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”
“Some of those women are imported straight from Paris,” Abbott whispered.
“I don’t see Anna Held,” Bell muttered back, familiar as any man in the nation under the age of ninety with the French actress’s expressive eyes, eighteen-inch waist, and resultantly curvaceous hips. Her skin, it was claimed, was conditioned by daily baths in milk. Bell glanced across at Lillian Hennessy, who was watching with rapt attention, and he suddenly realized that her tutor, Mrs. Comden, was shaped very much like Anna Held. Did President Hennessy pour her milk baths?
Abbott applauded loudly, and the audience followed suit. “For some reason, known best to Mr. Ziegfeld,” he told Bell over the roar, “Anna Held is not one of the Anna Held Girls. Even though she’s his common-law wife.”
“I doubt the entire Van Dorn Detective Agency can get him out of that fix.”
The Follies of 1907 raced on. Burlesque comedians argued about a bar bill in German accents like Weber and Fields and a suddenly sobered Bell fixed on Mack and Wally. When Annabelle Whitford came on stage in a black bathing costume as the Gibson Bathing Girl, Abbott nudged Bell and whispered, “Remember the nickelodeon when we were kids? She did the butterfly dance.”