CAN’T FIND SCULLY.
STILL LOOKING.
RETURN C/O WESTERN UNION SCRANTON AND
PHILADELPHIA.
Bell growled a mild oath under his breath. They had split up to increase their chances of finding Scully. Ifthey didn’t find him by noon, it would fall to him to inform the boss that the detectives assigned to help Scully track the Frye Boys were instead tracking Scully.
Bell called for the research operative he had brought into the case. Grady Forrer was a grizzly bear of man with an immense chest and belly. He looked like a fellow you would want on your side in a barroom brawl. But his greatest strengths were a ferocious determination to track down the minutest details and a prodigious memory.
“Have you found out where home was for these hydrophobic skunks?” Bell asked. “Where did they grow up?”
The research man shook his head. “I’ve been beating my brains out, Isaac. Can’t find any set of three Frye brothers anywhere in New Jersey. Tried cousins. No go.”
Bell said, “I have an idea about that. What if they changed their name at the time of their first unauthorized withdrawal? That original robbery was in the middle of the state, if I recall. East Brunswick Farmers’ Mutual Savings.”
“Hick-town bank about halfway to Princeton.”
“We always ascribed their gunning down the teller and the customer to viciousness. But what if those three were stupid enough to rob the nearest bank to home?”
Grady Forrer stood up straighter.
“What if they murdered witnesses because they were recognized—even while wearing masks. Maybe the witnesses knew them as local boys. Little Johnny down the road grew up and got a gun. Remember their first note in blood? ‘Fear the Frye Boys.’ ”
“So maybe they weren’t so stupid, after all,” marveled the research man. “From then on everyone called them the ‘Frye Boys.’ ”
“Just like they wanted us to. Find a family near that East Brunswick bank with three brothers or cousins who suddenly disappeared. Even two brothers and a next-door neighbor.”
Bell wired the operatives sent to help Scully, and Scully himself, instructing them to head for East Brunswick.
Merci, Mademoiselle Duvall!
And who else has been steering my thoughts?
Which brought him straight back to his photograph of Arthur Langner’s suicide note. He laid it next to the snapshot he had taken yesterday morning of one of Langner’s handwritten patent applications. He pored over them with a magnifying glass, searching for inconsistencies that might suggest forgery. He could see none. But he was not an expert, which was why he had summoned the handwriting expert from Greenwich Village.
Dr. Daniel Cruson preferred the high-sounding title “graphologist.” His white beard and bushy eyebrows fit a man who spouted lofty theories about the European “talking cure” of Drs. Freud and Jung. He was also prone to statements like “The complex robs the ego of light and nourishment,” which was why Bell avoided him when he could. But Cruson possessed a fine eye for forgery. So fine that Bell suspected that “Dr. Graphology” made ends meet by cobbling up the occasional bank check.
Cruson inspected the photograph of the suicide note with a magnifying glass, then screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and repeated the process. At last he sat back in his chair, shaking his head.
Bell asked, “Do you see inconsistencies in that handwriting that might suggest it was penned by a forger?”
Cruson said, “You are a detective, sir.”
“You know I am,” Bell said curtly to head off a windy discourse.
“You are familiar with the work of Sir William Herschel?”
“Fingerprint identification.”
“But Sir William also believed that handwriting exposes character.”
“I am less interested in character than forgery.”
Cruson did not hear. “From this mere sample, I can tell that the man who wrote this note was eccentric, highly artistic, and very dramatic, too. Given to the grand gesture. Deeply sensitive with powerful feelings that could be overwhelming.”
“In other words,” Bell interrupted, bleakly conceding he would have to report the worst to Dorothy Langner, “the emotional sort likely to commit suicide.”
“So tragic to take his own life so young.”
“Langner wasn’t young.”
“Given time, with psychological analysis, he could have investigated the sources of his sorrow and learned to control his self-destructive impulses.”
“Langner was not young,” Bell repeated.
“He was very young.”
“He was sixty years old.”
“Impossible! Look at this hand. See the bold and easy flow. An older man’s writing cramps—the letters get smaller and trail off as the hands stiffen with age. This is beyond any doubt the handwriting of a man in his twenties.”
“Twenties?” echoed Bell, suddenly electrified.
“No older than thirty, I guarantee you.”
Bell had a photographic memory. Instantly he returned in his mind’s eye to Arthur Langner’s office. He saw the bookshelves lined with bound volumes of Langner’s patent applications. He had had to open several to find a sample for his camera. Those filed before 1885 were handwritten. The more recent were typed.
“Arthur Langner played the piano. His fingers would have been more supple than those of the average man his age.”
Cruson shrugged. “I am neither musician nor physiologist.”
“But if his fingers were not more supple, then this could be a forgery.”
Cruson huffed, “Surely you didn’t summon me here to analyze the personality of a forger. The more skillful the forgery, the less it would tell me about his personality.”
“I did not summon you here to analyze his personality but to confirm whether this is a forgery. Now you are telling me that the forger made a mistake. He copied Langner’s hand from an early sample of his handwriting. Thank you, Dr. Cruson. You’ve opened a new possibility in this case. Unless his piano playing made his handwriting like that of a young man, this is a forgery, and Arthur Langner was murdered.”
A Van Dorn secretary burst in waving a sheet of yellow paper. “Scully!”
The telegram from loner John Scully that he thrust into Isaac Bell’s hand was typically terse.
GOT YOUR WIRE. HAD SAME THOUGHT.
SO-CALLED FRYES SURROUNDED WEST OF EAST
BRUNSWICK.
LOCAL CONSTABULARY THEIR COUSINS.
CARE TO LEND A HAND?
“ ‘Surrounded’?” asked Bell. “Did Mike and Eddie catch up with him?”
“No, sir. All by himself, like usual.”
It looked like Scully had found the Fryes’ real names and trailed them home only to discover that the bank robbers were related to a crooked sheriff who would help them escape. In which case even the formidable Scully had bit off more than he could chew.
Bell scanned the rest of the telegram for directions.
WILLIARD FARM.
CRANBURY TURNPIKE TEN MILES WEST OF STONE
CHURCH.
LEFT TURNOFF FLAGGED.
MILK TRUCK ONE MILE.
Middle of nowhere in the Jersey farm country. It would take all day to get there connecting to local trains. “Telephone the Weehawken garage for my auto!”
Bell grabbed a heavy golf bag and raced down the Knickerbocker’s stairs and out to Broadway. He jumped into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the pier at the foot of 42nd Street. There he boarded the Weehawken Ferry to New Jersey, where he had parked his red Locomobile.
8
COMMODORE TOMMY’S SALOON ON WEST 39TH STREET hunched like a fortress in the ground floor and cellar of a crumbling brick tenement a quarter mile from the pier where Isaac Bell’s ferry cast off. Its door was narrow, its windows barred. Like a combination Congress, White House, and War Department, it ruled the West Side slum New Yorkers called Hell’s Kitchen. No cop had laid eyes on the inside of it in years.
/> Commodore Tommy Thompson, the saloon’s bullet-headed, thick-necked proprietor, was boss of the Gopher Gang. He collected tribute from criminals in the drug trade, prostitution and gambling, pickpockets and burglars, passed along a portion to bribe the police, and delivered votes to the Democratic political machine. He also dominated the lucrative business of robbing New York Central freight cars, his nickname testifying to a level of success in his field that rivaled railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s in his.
But that business was about to come to a bloody end, Commodore Tommy suspected, as soon as the railroad got around to organizing a private army to run his train robbers out of New York. So he was planning ahead. Which was why, as Isaac Bell’s ferry sped across the Hudson River, Commodore Thompson was shaking hands on a new deal with a couple of “queueless” Chinese—Americanized high-tone Chinamen who had chopped off the long pigtail worn by their immigrant countrymen.
Harry Wing and Louis Loh were hatchet men for the up-and-coming Hip Sing tong. They spoke good English, were duded up in snappy suits, and were, Thompson took for granted, deadly behind the mild expressions on their well-scrubbed pusses. He had recognized kindred spirits the instant they approached him. Like his Gophers, the Hip Sing profited by controlling the vice rackets with muscle, graft, and discipline. And like Tommy’s Gophers, the Hip Sing were driving out rivals and getting stronger.
The deal they had brought him was irresistible: Tommy Thompson’s Gopher Gang would allow the Chinese gangsters to open opium dens on Manhattan’s West Side. For half the take, the Commodore would protect the joint, supply the girls, and pay the cops. Harry Wing and Louis Loh would gain for the Hip Sing tong white middle-class customers with money to spend—the casual “ice cream users” afraid to venture into the back alleys of Chinatown. A square deal, as President Teddy Roosevelt would say. Done squarely, Sophie Tucker would sing.
THE NEWARK, New Jersey, auto patrol tried to catch Isaac Bell in a Packard.
His 1906 gasoline-powered Locomobile race car was painted fire-engine red. He had ordered the color from the factory to give slower drivers a better chance of seeing him in time to get out of the way. But the color, and the Locomobile’s thunderous exhaust, did tend to draw the attention of the police.
Before he reached East Orange he had left the Newark cops in the dust.
In Elizabeth they came after him on a motorcycle. Bell lost sight of the machine long before Roselle. And now the countryside was opening up.
The Locomobile had been built for the speedway and held many records. Attaching fenders and lights for street driving had tamed it not at all. In the hands of a man with nerves of steel, a passion for speed, and the reflexes of a cat, the big sixteen-liter machine cut a fantastic pace on New Jersey’s farm roads and blasted through sleepy towns like a meteor.
Clad boot to chin in a long linen duster, his eyes shielded by goggles, his head bare so he could hear every nuance of the four-cylinder engine’s thunder, Bell worked the shifter, clutch, and horn in relentless tandem, accelerating on straights, sliding through bends, warning farmers, livestock, and slower vehicles that he was coming through. He would have enjoyed himself immensely were he not so worried about John Scully. He had left the lone-wolf detective in a lurch. The fact that Scully had fallen into the lurch on his own meant nothing. As case boss, he was responsible for looking after his people.
He drove with his big hands low on the spoked steering wheel. When he had to slow in towns, it took both hands to lever the massive beast into turns. But when he poured on the speed on the farm roads, she grew beautifully responsive. One hand was enough, as he repeatedly reached out to pump up the fuel pressure and blow the horn. He rarely touched the brakes. There was little point. The men in Bridge-port, Connecticut, who built the Locomobile had supplied a stopping system that relied on squeezing the chain shafts—a halfhearted afterthought amounting to little more than no brakes at all. Isaac Bell didn’t care.
As he roared out of Woodbridge, a one-twenty-horsepower Mercedes GP roadster tried to give him a run for his money. Bell pressed the Locomobile’s accelerator pedal to the floor and kept the road to himself.
9
WHAT’S THIS?” ASKED COMMODORE TOMMY THOMPSON.
“He says he got a proposition fer yer.”
Tommy’s bouncers, two broken-nosed fighters who had murdered his numerous rivals over the years, were standing close on either side of a refined gentleman they had escorted into his backroom office.
In cold silence, Tommy Thompson sized up what appeared to be a genuine Fifth Avenue swell. He was a medium-built man about his own age, thirty. Medium height, expensive gold-headed cane, expensive long black coat with a velvet collar, costly fur hat, kid gloves. Heat was pouring from the coal stove, and the man quietly removed his gloves, revealing a heavy ring studded with jewels, and unbuttoned his coat. Under his coat, the Gopher Gang leader could see a solid-gold watch chain thick enough to hold a brewery horse and a dark blue broadcloth suit of clothes. Tommy could have entertained three chorus girls for a week in Atlantic City for what the swell had paid for his boots.
The swell said not a word. He stood utterly still after removing his gloves and opening his coat, except for when he lifted a hand to smooth the tip of his narrow mustache with his thumb, which he then hooked in his vest pocket.
A cool customer, Commodore Tommy decided. He also decided that if all the cops in New York chipped in they still could not afford to disguise a detective in such an outfit. Even if they could raise the dough, there wasn’t a cop in the city who could paint that born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth expression on his mug. So the gang boss asked, “What do you want?”
“Can I assume,” the swell asked, “that you are indeed the leader of the Gopher Gang?”
Commodore Tommy grew wary, again. The swell was not a complete stranger to Hell’s Kitchen. He had pronounced the gang’s name correctly—as “goofer.” Not like the newspapers spelled it for Fifth Avenue readers. Where had he learned to say goofer?
“I asked you what do you want?”
“I want to pay you five thousand dollars for the services of three murderers.”
Tommy Thompson sat up straight. Five thousand dollars was a hell of a lot money. So much money that he forgot all about goofer and gopher and threw caution to the winds. “Who do you want murdered?”
“A Scotsman named Alasdair MacDonald needs killing in Camden, New Jersey. The murderers must be adept with knives.”
“Oh, must they, now?”
“I have the money with me,” said the swell. “I will pay you first and trust you will deliver.”
Tommy Thompson turned to his bouncers. The bruisers were grinning mirthlessly. The swell had just made a fatal mistake in admitting he had the dough on him.
“Take his five thousand dollars,” Tommy ordered. “Take his watch. Take his ring. Take his gold-headed cane and his coat and his fur hat and his suit and his boots, and throw the son of a bitch in the river.”
They moved as one, surprisingly fast for big men.
The swell’s coat and tailored suit concealed a powerful frame. The stillness of his stance masked blinding speed. In the space of a heartbeat, one bouncer was sprawled on the floor, stunned and bloodied. The other was pleading for mercy in a high-pitched squeal. The swell had clamped his head under one arm, while he pressed his thumb to the bouncer’s eye.
Commodore Tommy gaped in astonished recognition.
Fitted over the swell’s thumbnail gleamed a razor-sharp gouge. The tip pressed the corner of the bouncer’s eye, and it was clear to the pleading gangster—and to Commodore Tommy—that with a flick of his thumb the swell could scoop the man’s eye out of his head like a grape.
“Jaysus, Jaysus, Jaysus,” breathed Tommy. “You’re Brian O’Shay.”
At the sound of that name the bouncer, whose eye was a fraction of an inch from being extracted from its socket, began to weep. The other, still struggling for breath on the floor, gasped
, “Can’t be. Eyes O’Shay is dead.”
“If he was,” said Commodore Tommy, “he’s back from it.”
The Gopher Gang leader stared in wonder.
Brian “Eyes” O’Shay had vanished fifteen years ago. No wonder he knew goofer. If Eyes hadn’t vanished, they’d still be battling each other to boss Hell’s Kitchen. Barely out of childhood, O’Shay had mastered the gang weapons—slingshot, lead pipe, brass knuckles, and axheads in his boots—and even gotten his mitts on a police revolver. But O’Shay had been most feared for gouging out rivals’ eyes with a specially fitted copper thumbnail.
“You’ve moved up in the world,” said Tommy, getting over his shock. “That gouge looks like it’s pure silver.”
“Stainless steel,” said O’Shay. “Holds an edge and don’t corrode.”
“So you’re back. And rich enough to pay people to do your killing for you.”
“I won’t offer twice.”
“I’ll take the job.”
Eyes O’Shay moved quickly, raking the bouncer’s cheek even as he released him. The man screamed. His hands flew to his face. He blinked, removed his hands, and stared at the blood. Then he blinked again and smiled with gratitude. Blood was streaming from a slice that traversed cheekbone to jaw, but his eyes were intact.
“Get up!” Commodore Tommy ordered. “Both of ya. Go get the Iceman. Tell him to bring Kelly and Butler.”
They hurried out, leaving Tommy Thompson alone with O’Shay. Tommy said, “This ought to put an end to the rumors that I killed you.”
“You could not on your best day, Tommy.”
The Gopher Gang boss protested the insult and the contempt behind it. “Why you talking like that? We was partners.”