The Assassin Read online

  “Willard Hotel. Fast as you can.”

  Upon arrival, he dashed up the stairs into the Van Dorn offices.

  “The Boss wired my train at Danville. Said to come right over.”

  The front desk man spoke calmly into a voice tube. A blasé apprentice walked Archie into Joseph Van Dorn’s office. With his coat off and his sleeves rolled up his bulging forearms, Van Dorn, Archie thought, looked less the company proprietor than a prosperous bricklayer.

  “Abbott, you’re a Princeton man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve got something right up your alley.”

  “How can I help, sir?”

  Van Dorn nodded at the extra edition that Archie had tucked under his arm. “The ‘tourist’ who fell from the memorial shaft was not a tourist, and I don’t believe he fell. The papers don’t have it yet, but it was Clyde Lapham.”

  “Standard Oil?”

  “Rumor has it, he jumped. If he did, I want to know why. If he didn’t jump, I want to know who helped him out the window.”

  “May I ask, sir, what makes you think he didn’t jump?”

  “Our investigation has established that not one of the Standard Oil Gang has a guilty bone in his body. On the remote chance that one was ever stricken with remorse, it wouldn’t be Clyde Lapham. He had no doubt that making money was his divine right. Something’s fishy. That’s where you come in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Archie said, wondering what it had to do with being a Princeton graduate.

  “They won’t let our men near the monument. Were it a Navy facility, I would have no trouble gaining access. But I am not so well connected with the Army, and I’ve run head-on into a snob of a Colonel Dan Egan, who looks down on private detectives as not worthy of his exalted friendship. Do you get my drift?”

  Archie was suddenly on firm ground, with intimate knowledge of the fine distinctions of the social order. “Yes, sir. Army officers are more likely to be ill-bred and have chips on their shoulders than their Navy counterparts.”

  “This particular officer is carrying a chip bigger than a redwood. Fortunately, I’ve learned he has a son attending Princeton. I’m betting he’ll be mightily impressed by the fact that you matriculated, as well as by your manner, which is less that of a private detective than a privileged layabout. Not that I’m suggesting you lay about, necessarily, but I suspect you can act the part.”

  “I’ll rehearse,” Archie said drily.

  “You don’t have time,” Van Dorn shot back. “Colonel Egan is at the monument right now, in the middle of the night, leading what the Army optimistically calls an inquiry. Get over there and sweet-talk your way in before they trample the evidence and insert words in the mouths of witnesses.”

  Archie doubted he’d make much headway walking up to a full colonel and saying he went to Princeton. He ventured, “This might require more than ‘sweet talking,’ Mr. Van Dorn.”

  The Boss stared, his eyes suddenly hard. “The agency pays you handsomely to do ‘more than sweet talking.’”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “See that you do.”

  14

  Joseph Van Dorn was still at his desk when Archie reported back, shortly before midnight.

  “Suicide or murder?”

  “It’s more complicated than you might expect, Mr. Van Dorn.”

  The glower Van Dorn leveled at him reminded Archie Abbott of an encounter on safari with an East African rhinoceros. “Let me decide what I expect. In a word, ‘suicide’ or ‘murder’?”

  “In a word,” said Archie, “the Army was ‘hoodwinked.’”

  Joseph Van Dorn, so wintery a moment earlier, broke into a delighted smile—as Archie knew he would. Beaming at his old U.S. Marine Corps NCO sword, which hung from his coat tree, the Boss asked, “What did the Army fall for this time?”

  —

  Isaac Bell doubted there was room in Nellie Matters’ exciting life for a boyfriend. She was great company at dinner in the Royal’s beautiful dining car, entertaining him, and eavesdroppers at nearby tables, with tales of her suffragist travels, balloon mishaps, and rivalries with suffragettes—“the dread Amanda Faire”—while spinning like cotton candy her newly invented New Woman’s Flyover. By the time they got off the train in Jersey City, the suffragist’s publicity stunt details were in place. All that remained was to raise the money for a hundred balloons, a prospect she thought not at all daunting.

  But on the railroad ferry across the Hudson to New York City, Bell sensed a sudden shift toward the romantic. He credited the beautiful lights of the downtown skyscrapers and the chill wind they braved on deck. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and Nellie huddled close. Just as the boat landed, she curled deeper in his arm. “I don’t usually meet men I like. I don’t mean to say that I dislike men. But I just don’t find most of them that likeable. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” said Isaac Bell. “What is it you don’t find likeable?”

  “Is that a detective trait to always ask questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re as bad as my sister the reporter.”

  A hansom cab whisked them across town. She held his hand, and, all too soon, the cab pulled up to the Matters town house in Gramercy Park, a quiet oasis of a neighborhood that predated the Civil War. Just across the narrow park was one of Archie Abbott’s clubs, The Players. The cab clattered off. Bell walked Nellie to the front door. The house was made of brick with gleaming black shutters.

  “What a handsome house.”

  “We moved up in the world with the Standard,” Nellie replied as she slipped a key in the door. She whirled around suddenly and faced him. “Come back tomorrow evening to meet Father.”

  “As aspiring balloonist or gentleman caller?”

  Nellie Matters gave Isaac Bell her biggest smile. “Both.”

  She disappeared behind the door.

  He lingered on the sidewalk. He had to admit that he was more than a little dazzled by the vibrant and witty young woman.

  Suddenly he was alert, seeing movement from the corner of his eye. A slight figure, a woman in a cloak, materialized from the shadows of Gramercy Park. Lamplight crossed her face.

  “Edna?” he asked, caught off base by how happy he was to see her.

  “I was just coming home,” she answered. “I didn’t want to interrupt you and Nellie.”

  She seemed upset.

  “Are you all right?”

  Edna Matters paused to consider her answer. “Not entirely. I mean, I’m in a bit of a quandary.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “If I knew, it wouldn’t be a quandary, would it?”

  “Tell me what it is,” said Bell. “I’m a fair hand, sometimes, at sorting good from bad. Come on, we’ll take a walk.”

  The hour was late and the well-dressed couple might have drawn the attention of thieves who would attempt to separate them from their money. That is until a closer inspection revealed a gent light on his feet and cold of eye. They walked until the lights grew brighter on Broadway, its sidewalks crowded with people bustling in and out of hotels, restaurants, and vaudeville theaters.

  “I grew up with oil derricks,” Edna said suddenly. “Pipe lines and breakout tanks. And a father beaten repeatedly by the Standard.”

  “Is that how you came to write the History of Under-handed?”

  “Do you think I had a choice?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bell. “Nellie didn’t respond to your father’s losses by becoming a reporter.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that pursuing justice for women is the other side of the same coin?”

  “How?”

  “Of trying to make things right.”

  “No,” said Bell. “Enfranchisement is a cause, a worthy cause. Writing the truth is more like a calling. So maybe you’re right. Maybe you had no choice.”

  “You’re not making this easier.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what your quandary is. Not makin
g what easier?”

  She fell silent again. Bell tried to reengage her. “What about Nellie? Did she take your father’s losses as hard as you did?”

  Edna thought a moment. “Nellie loves him as fiercely as I do. But she wasn’t around for as much of it. She’s traveled ever since she put her teens and pinafores behind her. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

  “Maybe she was trying to get away from them.”

  “I don’t know. She’s always on the road—and at home wherever she alights.”

  “You travel, too.”

  “Like a hermit crab. I carry my home with me. No matter where I land at the end of the day, I’m at my typewriter. I thought it was time to stop writing, my crusade over.”

  “Is there a purpose to stop your writing?”

  “I thought I was ready to stop. But the new oil strikes make it a new story. And now the unrest in Baku threatens shortages that could upend the petroleum industry all over the world. Imagine what must be going through Mr. Rockefeller’s mind at a moment like this.”

  “What is in Baku for him?”

  “Half the world’s oil. And a well-established route to the customers. If they burn the Baku fields, who will supply the Russians’ and the Nobels’ and the Rothschilds’ markets? JDR, that’s who, even if it’s true he retired, which I never believed . . . Listen to me! I’m too obsessed with JDR to stop reporting on him. Just when I think I’m done, I learn something new.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve heard rumors—speculation, really—that Rockefeller uses his publicists to communicate secretly with his partners. They plant a story. It gets printed and reprinted in every paper in the world, and those who know his code get his message . . . Boy!”

  She gave two pennies to a passing newsboy hawking the early-morning edition of the Sun and scanned the paper in the blazing window of a lobster palace. “Here! I’ve traced this one back to last January. It’s supposedly a letter he wrote to his Sunday school class from his vacation to France. ‘Delightful breezes. I enjoy watching the fishermen with their nets on the beach, and gazing upon the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. The days pass pleasantly and profitably.’”

  Bell said, “It sounds perfectly ordinary. So ordinary, you wonder why the papers print it.”

  “Any pronouncement the richest man in America makes is automatically news. They change details to keep it up to date. After he returned from Europe they added the introductory ‘I recall, when I was in France,’ et cetera. Recently they added ‘the sun rising.’ I’m sure it’s a message. Maybe it doesn’t matter—except it might, and I can’t stop writing about him . . .” She leafed through the paper. “Here’s another I’ve been following in the social sections. I cannot for the life of me figure it out, but it has to be code.” She read, “‘Monmouth County Hounds, Lakewood. First Drag Hunt of the season. John D. Rockefeller in his automobile was in line at the start, but soon dropped out.’ And this, supposedly about him playing golf. ‘Standard Oil President Rockefeller was gleeful over his foursome victory. Dominated the links with long sweeping drives—’ Why are you staring at me, Mr. Bell?”

  “You should see your face. You’re on fire. Congratulations!”

  “For what?’”

  “An excellent decision not to retire.”

  Suddenly a ragged chorus of young voices piped, “Extra! Extra!”

  Gangs of newsboys galloped out of the Times building. They scattered up and down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, waving extra editions and shouting the story.

  “Rich old man jumps off Washington Monument.”

  Bell bought a paper. He and Edna leaned over the headline

  TYCOON SUICIDE

  STANDARD OIL MAGNATE LEAPS TO DEATH FROM WASHINGTON MONUMENT

  and raced down the column and onto the second page.

  “Why do you think he did it?” asked Bell. “Guilt?”

  Edna Matters shook her head. “Clyde Lapham would have to look up ‘guilt’ in the dictionary to get even a murky idea of its meaning.”

  “Maybe he felt the government closing in,” said Bell, knowing the Van Dorn investigation had yet to turn up enough evidence to please a prosecutor.

  “If he jumped,” said Edna, “because he felt the government breathing down his neck, then his last living thought must have been I should have taken Rockefeller with me.” She cupped Bell’s cheek in her hand. “Isaac, I must go home. I have to look into this . . . I bet you do, too.”

  —

  At the Yale Club on 44th Street, where Isaac Bell lodged when in New York, Matthew, the night hall porter, ushered him inside.

  “Mr. Forrer telephoned ahead and asked that I slip him in privately by the service door. I put him in the lounge.”

  Bell bounded up the stairs.

  The Main Lounge, a high-ceilinged room of couches and armchairs, was deserted at this late hour but for the chief of Van Dorn Research, who occupied most of a couch. Forrer wore wire-rimmed spectacles, as befit his station as a scholar. Scholarly he was, but a very large man, as tall as Bell and twice as wide. Bell had seen him disperse rioters by strolling among them.

  “The Boss and I have been burning up the wires. All hell’s broken loose on the Corporations Commission case.”

  “I just read the Lapham story. Do we know for sure he killed himself?”

  “No. All we know is what Archie Abbott learned when he wormed his way into the official investigation. Mr. Van Dorn was impressed, which he isn’t always with Archie.”

  “What did Archie learn?”

  “Someone—if not Lapham, then presumably our assassin—pulled an elaborate fast one on the Army, who operate the monument. So elaborate that it can only be characterized as baroque.”

  “‘Baroque’? What do you mean, baroque? Complicated?”

  “More than complicated. Bizarre. Whimsical as an elaborate prank, except a man died. It’s hard to imagine they pulled it off. Harder to reckon why they went to such trouble to kill one old man.”

  “How could he fit out the window?” asked Bell. “They barred them up after that lunatic Anti-Saloon Leaguer tried to jump with a banner.”

  “The bars were forced open with a barn jack.”

  “It takes time to crank a barn jack. Why didn’t anyone stop him?”

  “No one saw. The window on the west had been cordoned off from the observation area with canvas drapes to ensure the privacy of an artist painting the view.”

  “Where was the artist?”

  “No one is exactly sure they ever saw the artist. He left behind his paint box and his easel but no painting. According to Archie, it’s not clear he did more than set up his easel. And before you ask his name, it was very likely a false name.”

  “What was it?”

  “This is where things turn complicated. I’ll get to his name in a moment.”

  “I’ve had a very long day, Grady. What is going on?”

  “I don’t know. Other than to say that the Army—or at least the U.S. Army colonel in command of the Washington Monument, whom Archie interviewed—gave the artist permission to paint the view privately behind canvas curtains because permission was requested as a personal favor by a famous Army sharpshooter.”

  15

  He won the President’s Medal in 1902.”

  Isaac Bell sank in his armchair to ponder that. “In other words, he’s the best.”

  “The most accurate marksman in 1902.”

  “They shoot up to a thousand yards,” said Bell. “What’s his name?”

  “Private Billy Jones.”

  “People who are legitimately named Jones and Smith should be issued special identifying cards to prove they didn’t make it up.”

  “Private Billy ‘Jones’ deserted the First Regiment of Newark, New Jersey National Guard, shortly after he won his medal.”

  “Why did the Army give permission to paint in the monument? Why didn’t they just arrest him?”

  “He didn’t ask the entire Army. H
e asked the idiot colonel in command of the monument. Mailed him a letter. The damned fool had not heard the news that their champion sharpshooter deserted. It happened three years ago and it’s likely the Army covered it up, being embarrassed.”

  “Not to mention terrified to tell TR,” said Bell.

  A smile lit Forrer’s solemn expression. “Grim thought, Isaac. Teddy is not a president that a career officer would want to disappoint.”

  “So no one saw the bars jacked open behind the canvas erected for an artist no one saw. Therefore, no one saw whether old Lapham jumped or was thrown.”

  “Two men brought him there. Doctors.”

  “Then we’ll start with the doctors.”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Now what?” asked Bell.

  “The Army hasn’t informed the police yet, so the news reporters don’t know, but Archie’s friend the half-wit colonel admitted the doctors vanished, and no one knows if they really were doctors or merely carrying medical bags.”

  “Further suggesting it was murder,” said Bell.

  Forrer repeated a saying Bell had heard from him often: “The job of the chief of Van Dorn Research is to sort fact from assumption.”

  “You are provoking me toward sarcasm, Grady. If it wasn’t murder, then the men pretending to be doctors who delivered Lapham to the top of the monument carried a barn jack in their medical bag and left it with Lapham, who used it to jack open the bars so he could jump out the window.”

  “Seen that way, it does suggest murder,” Forrer admitted.

  “But like you just said, why go to so much trouble to kill one old guy? You could pop him on the head and say he fell off his chair . . . In fact, it’s less complicated than showy.”

  “Did our assassin use the name of a famous sharpshooter, gambling that the colonel didn’t know he was a deserter?”

  “Or is our assassin the deserter himself? He’s proven himself a champion marksman.” Bell shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would he draw such attention to himself if he’s been safely disappeared for three years?”