The Assassin Read online

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  Bell told Archie Abbott to follow him when he was done helping Hatfield and sprinted to the station. He barely made the Sunset Express to New Orleans, where he transferred to the New York Limited.

  He settled into a writing desk in the club car and was composing a report from his notebook when women’s voices chorused like music in his ear: “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Bell.”

  Edna and Nellie Matters were headed to Washington, where Nellie was to address a suffragist delegation petitioning Congress. Her balloon was folded up in the express car. When the sisters said they were sleeping in upper and lower Pullman berths, Bell gave them his stateroom.

  Edna protested. Nellie thanked him warmly. “How can we repay you?”

  “Join me this evening in the dining car.”

  At dinner, Nellie entertained him, and the surrounding tables, with tales of runaway balloons. Edna, who had clearly heard it all before, listened politely as Nellie rattled on. “Sideways, the wind blows you into trees and telegraph wires. Low on gas, you fall from the sky. Emergency! Quick! Emergency gas!—”

  “Excuse me, young lady,” a clergyman interrupted from the table across the aisle. “I could not help but overhear. Where do you find emergency gas when you’re already flying in the air?”

  “I have special steel containers installed in my basket,” Nellie answered. “Lots of balloons do. It’s very handy having extra hydrogen.”

  “They must be heavy.”

  “They beat falling,” she dismissed him and turned her green eyes back on Bell. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Too quick, too much emergency gas, you soar too high and suffocate. The air gets so thin, you run out of oxygen . . .”

  Over the Neapolitan ice cream dessert, Bell echoed Archie’s earlier comment. “Strange how the three of us keep turning up together where crimes have occurred.”

  Edna replied, “I’m beginning to suspect you, Mr. Bell.”

  Nellie laughed. “I suspected him from the start.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  Nellie grinned at Edna. “Doesn’t he look suddenly serious?”

  “Like a detective,” said Edna. “Go on, we shouldn’t be teasing you.”

  “At least until he’s paid the dinner check,” said Nellie. “Actually, you really do look solemn. What is it?”

  “Spike Hopewell told me that your brother ran off and you never heard from him. Is that true?”

  Their mood changed in an instant. Nellie looked away. Edna nodded. “Yes. Actually, he was a Yale man, like you.”

  “Really? What class?”

  “You were probably several years ahead of him.”

  “He didn’t go back after his freshman year,” said Nellie.

  “Perhaps you knew him?” said Edna.

  “I don’t recall anyone named Matters.”

  “His name was Billy Hock.”

  “Billy Hock?” Bell looked at her curiously.

  “Yes,” said Edna. “He was my older brother.”

  “And my older half brother,” said Nellie.

  Isaac Bell said, “I never made the connection.”

  “We did,” said Edna. “Or we wondered. Do you remember now?”

  Bell nodded, recalling a slender, eager-to-please youngster, more a boy than a man. “Well, yes, I knew him, slightly . . .”

  Billy Hock had big, bright gray-green eyes as bright as Edna’s and Nellie’s. “He enrolled as a freshman my senior year. He was very young, youngest of the boys entering.”

  “Fifteen. He was small. Undersized.”

  Nellie said, “He tried out for crew. He would have made a perfect coxswain, being so light. But he was terrified of water. He always had a phobia about it.”

  “The crew rowers ragged him mercilessly,” said Edna.

  Bell nodded.

  “Until some upperclassman stepped in and put a stop to it.”

  “Yes.”

  “We wondered how.”

  “He could not abide bullies,” said Bell.

  “One boy against a team?” asked Nellie.

  “He trained at boxing.”

  Edna directed her level gaze into Bell’s eyes.

  “When I watched you and Archie boxing those men, I suddenly wondered was it you who stood up for our brother. Wasn’t it?”

  “I hadn’t realized the connection until this very moment. The different name. We didn’t discuss our families at college—unless our people were related—you must remember when you went off to college how we were all so glad to be away from home at that age.”

  Both women nodded.

  “So Billy Hock was the brother who ran away? Strange . . . I wondered at school how he would fare. When did he go?”

  “That same summer, right after his freshman year,” said Edna.

  “He was adventurous,” said Nellie. “Just like me—always running around and trying new things.”

  “We never heard from him again,” said Edna.

  Nellie said, “Sometimes I blame myself. I became a kind of model for him, even though I was younger. He saw me running around—one second I was entranced by balloons, then I was trying to be an actress, then I ran off to be an acrobat in the circus—remember, Edna?”

  “I remember Father laughing when the ringmaster walked you home.”

  “On a white horse! He said I was too young. I said, ‘O.K., take me home on a white horse!’ . . . And he did . . . I gave Billy courage. I only hope it didn’t push him toward the Army.”

  “No, it didn’t,” Edna said, laying a reassuring hand on her sister’s arm. “If anything, it gave him courage to go away to Yale. Father,” she explained, turning to Bell, “so wanted Billy to attend Yale because many ‘Oil Princes’ went to college there—Comstock’s son, Lapham’s son, Atkinson’s nephews.”

  “Billy and I talked about joining the Army. The Spanish war was brewing—the papers were full of it—and boys were signing up.” Bell had tried, caught up in the excitement, but his father, a Civil War veteran, had intervened forcefully, arguing with unassailable logic that there were better causes to die for than “a war started by newspapers to sell newspapers.”

  Edna said, “We guess that Billy enlisted under an assumed name. Lied about his age. We fear he was lost either in the swamps of Cuba or the Philippine jungle. We never heard. If he did join, he must have changed his name and lied about his family.”

  “But we don’t really know what happened,” said Nellie. “Except that it nearly destroyed our poor father.”

  —

  “You cut it close,” said Joseph Van Dorn.

  Isaac Bell lifted his gold watch from his pocket, sprang the lid, and let Van Dorn read the dial. Then he shook his head at the latest addition to the Boss’s Willard Hotel office, a modern, glass-cased table clock from Paris. “Your O’Keenan electric, imported at untold expense, is running fifty-seven seconds fast.”

  “Sit down,” said Van Dorn. “He’s in my private waiting room. But brace yourself. The poor devil lost all his hair to some disease.”

  “Alopecia totalis.”

  “Even his eyebrows and mustache. I had a look through the peephole. He’s smooth as a cue ball.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Bell, “it’s not catching . . . Now, sir, we need a plan.”

  They spoke for two minutes, Van Dorn dubious, Bell prepared with persuasive answers. When the tall detective had prevailed, the Boss murmured into a voice tube and his visitor was ushered in from the private entrance.

  12

  Mr. Rockefeller.”

  The retired president of the Standard Oil Corporation was a tall, sixty-six-year-old, two-hundred-pound man. He had piercing eyes that burned in an enormous hairless head, an icily quiet manner, and a powerful presence that reminded Isaac Bell of the long-reigning heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries.

  John D. Rockefeller shook hands with Joseph Van Dorn and nodded to Bell when Van Dorn introduced him as “my top investigator.” He refused a chair and got straight to the
point.

  “An assassin is discrediting Standard Oil by attacking enemies of the trust. The public, inclined to believe the worst, gossips that Standard Oil is behind the attacks.”

  “It’s the price for hitting the big time,” Van Dorn said sympathetically. “You get blamed for everything.”

  “This outcry against us is wrong. The public cannot seem to understand that we are not monsters. We are merely efficient—enormously more efficient than our competitors. Oil is not the biggest business in America. Coal is bigger. Railroads are bigger. Steel is bigger. Yet, we own coal. We control railroads. We own steel. Why? Not because we’re monsters, but because they are chaotic, embroiled in murderous rivalry, each conducting his own business independently of the other and in sharp competition. We cooperate.”

  Van Dorn glanced at Bell. Bell had been the Boss’s personal apprentice when he started at the agency straight out of college and Van Dorn had taught him the trade on Chicago’s West Side—as dangerous a city ward as could be found anywhere in the country. Like Apache braves who had stalked game and hunted enemies side by side since boyhood, they could communicate with signs known only to them.

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself,” said Van Dorn, uncharacteristically blunt.

  John D. Rockefeller fixed him with his cold gaze. “The next time someone tells you that Standard Oil is an octopus, Mr. Van Dorn, you may tell them for me that the ‘octopus’ keeps his books straight, his inventory in order, his bank accounts positive, and pays his debts when due. He is not hoodwinked by alluring prospects. He keeps his powder dry. The octopus is organized and disciplined and the rest of them . . . they are not.”

  “If the octopus is ready to get down to brass tacks,” said Van Dorn, “let’s take up the business of this meeting.”

  “I intend to hire the Van Dorn Detective Agency to catch the assassin and end the slander.”

  “You’re too late,” said Isaac Bell. “The man committed suicide in Humble, Texas.”

  “I have rarely heard anything so ridiculous,” said Rockefeller. “You have your facts wrong.”

  —

  “Not unless you know something that we don’t about Standard Oil policeman Big Pete Straub,” said Bell.

  “I do,” Rockefeller said blandly.

  “We are all ears,” said Van Dorn.

  “Mr. Straub suffered a medical condition the doctors call foot drop. His nerves were damaged by an injury he sustained in the course of a labor dispute. The damage, which was irreparable, caused paralysis of the flexor muscles.”

  “Right foot or left?” asked Bell.

  “Mr. Straub could not move the toes of his right foot. Had he desired to trigger a rifle with his toe, he would have bared his other foot.”

  Van Dorn scowled as if embarrassed his detective was found lacking.

  Isaac Bell almost smiled. He felt oddly relieved. That light Savage rifle in that big man’s hands did not feel right. And their attempt to penetrate Standard Oil had just paid off in a totally unexpected bonus.

  “Did your refinery police detectives tell you this?” asked Van Dorn.

  “Straub’s superiors reported the condition when they read the accounts in the newspapers. Do you see how perfectly silly that verdict of suicide is?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rockefeller, I do,” said Isaac Bell. “He was murdered. The killing was made to look like suicide. Mr. Straub was not the assassin.”

  Bell spoke coolly, but his head was spinning with questions. The lightweight gun. How to explain such extraordinary accuracy? A circus or Wild West Show performer, hardly likely. He was grasping at straws. The assassin could be an ordinary-size man with a penchant for the Savage 99 and the means and knowledge to have the factory weapon smithed to such a degree, it was custom-made. Like the weapon he had left with Straub’s body.

  Rockefeller said, “Van Dorn, I want you to stop wasting your time with the investigation in Washington and put your firm’s full effort into catching the assassin.”

  Isaac Bell and Joseph Van Dorn knew that Bell’s ploy to infiltrate Standard Oil had hooked their man. Now the job was to reel in the cagey president.

  Van Dorn said, “You have your own private detective force. Why don’t you put them to work?”

  “They’re not the men for this job. I want the best and I’ll pay for it.”

  Bell and Van Dorn exchanged what appeared to be puzzled glances. “But we are already investigating you for the Corporations Commission,” Van Dorn protested. “As I’m sure you know.”

  Rockefeller said, “You will recall my instructions that I enter your offices, unaccompanied, by a private entrance.”

  Joseph Van Dorn’s grand roman nose wrinkled as if he smelled something unpleasant.

  “Mr. Rockefeller, what does your method of arrival have to do with anything?”

  “We do not have to inform the Corporations Commission that you’re working for me.”

  Joseph Dorn’s mouth tightened. His nostrils flared. His cheeks turned red as his whiskers as he ceased to draw breath. His voice took on a low, steely note that left no doubt that were Rockefeller a younger man, he would drag him down the Willard Hotel’s grand staircase by the scruff of his neck and throw him out the door onto Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “I have given my word to my client, the commission. My word is my bond. A sacred oath.”

  “This is more urgent,” said Rockefeller.

  Van Dorn started to retort.

  Isaac Bell interrupted. “We should concentrate on the assassin. He is the clear and immediate danger.”

  “No,” said Van Dorn. “The agency is honor-bound to do both.”

  “I agree with Mr. Rockefeller,” Bell said staunchly. “This killer will murder again. Hanging a murderer is far more important—and more honorable—than parsing the intentions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which the Supreme Court will probably overturn anyway.”

  Van Dorn clenched his fists. “If you feel so strongly that the intentions of a shilly-shallying Congress and a vacillating court are more important than my agency’s honor, you are free to resign your position and join Mr. Rockefeller.”

  Rockefeller turned on his heel and headed for the door. “I’ll be at my estate in Westchester, New York, Mr. Bell, where you can call on me.”

  —

  The assassin entered the Washington Monument carrying a carpetbag and joined a group of men and women waiting for the elevator to take them to the top of the memorial shaft. They returned the bright smile and hearty hello expected of fellow out-of-town visitors and made room when the car arrived. Piloted by a self-important operator, who seemed to take pleasure in opening and closing the door at a glacial pace, it climbed five hundred feet in twelve slow minutes, a heart-pounding eternity of grating cables, wheels, and rails made even longer by the endless din of tourist chatter and the sudden exclamations as they spotted among the memorial stones that decorated the interior walls lumps of rock from their own states. It gets easier every day to be a snob, thought the assassin.

  The door opened at last to the smell of turpentine and paint.

  —

  The so-called Lincoln Memorial was nothing more than a mud patch, and Clyde Lapham was having a hard time concentrating on the do-gooder’s speech. His eye kept wandering toward an exposed tree root that reminded him of a snake slithering up an Allegheny riverbank. The old man remembered the snake so vividly from his boyhood that he could smell the water and hear the flies buzzing around his head. He swore he saw its fast tongue exploring the air with expectant flickers.

  “‘The Great Emancipator,’” the do-gooder droned in his ear. “‘Savior of the Union’ . . . Fitting to rise opposite the monument to our first president, don’t you think, sir?”

  “That snake . . .”

  “Beg your pardon, Mr. Lapham?”

  “You see that snake . . .” Lapham’s voice trailed off as he lost interest in whether the do-gooder raising money to build the Lincoln Memorial could see the snake. He
could see the snake.

  The do-gooder pointed at the Washington Monument. It was taller than a New York City skyscraper. Unlike New York skyscrapers, it stood alone. Far, far away. And far behind it, the dome of the Capitol rose into the sky like . . . like . . . he didn’t care what it was like. But here, in the mud, the snake.

  He tried to remember why he was here instead of back in New York. The do-gooder wanted money from the Standard, and the boys at Number 26 had given him the job of riding the train down to Washington to reckon if it was the kind of thing Mr. Rockefeller would want to write a check to. Or so they said. Lapham had his suspicions. They just wanted him out of the office so they could cut him out of another private deal.

  “How much money are you begging for?”

  “Begging? May I quote Mr. Rockefeller himself on the subject of philanthropy? ‘I am proud,’ he said, ‘of my ability to beg money for the good of mankind.’”

  “How much would this thing cost?”

  “Well, sir, if Congress won’t act, it’s up to patriotic men of means like yourself and Mr. Rockefeller. As Mr. Rockefeller has undertaken to support many fine causes in his retirement—”

  “Retirement?” Clyde Lapham snorted. “Rockefeller retired? You must be kidding . . .” His voice trailed off. He had just remembered they weren’t ever supposed to say that. He corrected himself. “Retirement. You’re right. He’s retiring. Retired. Retired. Goddamned-sure retired.”

  The do-gooder, a churchman, recoiled at the sound of an oath.

  “How much will this thing cost?” Lapham repeated.

  “Well . . .” The do-gooder rubbed his hands. “Wouldn’t that depend, sir—Mr. Lapham—on the size of the monument?”

  “Big as that one?” Lapham asked, pointing at the five-hundred-fifty-five-foot, four-sided obelisk erected to the memory of George Washington. He stared at it. His eye fixed on a barely visible square hole near the top. As the tree root reminded him of the snake, that square hole made him think of a wagon riding up the sheer wall of the pillar. He could even see the horses pulling it in the patterns of the marble building blocks.