The Assassin Read online

  It struck Isaac Bell that the assassin’s remarkable shooting was merely a means. He had been thinking about him as a sniper. Now he had to think about him as a murderer who would use various means to kill.

  “You were going to tell me the supposed artist’s name.”

  Forrer nodded. “At this point, it moves into the realm of the bizarre. The artist called himself Isaac Bell.”

  “What?”

  “He knows you’re working up the case, Isaac.”

  Isaac Bell stood out of his chair and stalked through the empty lounge to the tall windows that overlooked West 44th Street. A thin smile formed on his lips.

  “He’s calling you out!” said Forrer, who had grown up in the Deep South where calling a man out meant parking yourself on his front lawn with a gun in your hand until he came out shooting.

  “Sounds that way.” Bell stared down at 44th Street. Carriages and motor limousines were returning for the night to the many stables and garages on the block.

  Suddenly he stared unseeing out the window. “At last.”

  “At last what?” Forrer asked.

  “At last he’s made a mistake.”

  “Thinking he can take you?”

  “That, too.”

  The tall detective turned abruptly and crossed the big room in several strides, his face alight with energy. “We’re finally getting something. Let’s find out who this champion really is.”

  Forrer climbed out of his chair and rose to his full height. “I’ll go back to the office.” He kept a cot there, and Bell knew that after a short nap he would dive into his files. Assistants and apprentices arriving for work early would find their boss deep in newspapers and magazines and telegrams from the agency’s private wires.

  Bell walked him down to the front door.

  “There’s something else I want you to look into.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Edna Matters has an interesting theory.” He told him Edna’s theory about John D. Rockefeller’s newspaper code.

  Forrer was intrigued by the idea of far-flung Rockefeller operatives reading the newspapers for his instructions. “Not to mention those hundreds of ‘correspondents’ spying for Standard Oil around the world, reading the papers and realizing what he wants information on.”

  “Can you crack it?”

  “It isn’t only what he says,” Forrer explained, “but when he says it. He’s referring to things they already know, telling them now we wait, now we get ready, now we move.”

  “Check your files back to January when Rockefeller was in Cannes.”

  “I’ll start earlier.”

  “The phrase about watching children digging in the sand appears only in recent weeks.”

  “I’ll pay particular attention to it. What do you want me to tell Mr. Van Dorn?”

  “Tell him the assassin is not quite as professional as he thinks he is.”

  “He’s going to ask me what you mean. I’d like to have an answer ready.”

  “Tell him the assassin is a show-off.”

  “What do you suppose he’ll make of that?”

  “He’ll make of it what he taught me: Show-offs trip themselves up when they forget to watch where they’re going.”

  “And where are you going, Isaac?”

  “Westchester.”

  “To see the great man?”

  “To see what makes him tick . . . Here’s another thought for Mr. Van Dorn. If our assassin is willing to throw people out windows instead of shooting them, then he’s even less predictable than a professional sniper.”

  They shook hands.

  “Wait a minute! Do we know why Clyde Lapham was in Washington?”

  Forrer said, “I assume—”

  “I thought the Research Department never assumes.”

  “I’ll get right on it . . . Hey, where are you going?”

  Isaac Bell was striding into the street, waving a fistful of money at a chauffeur about to garage an Acme Opera Limousine. “Grady!” he called over his shoulder. “Do me a favor and send wires in my name to Nellie Matters and John D. Rockefeller. Apologize for breaking tomorrow’s appointments and ask would it be convenient to reschedule for the day after.”

  “Now where are you going?”

  “Back to Washington.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I’ll make the Congressional Express.” He paid the yawning chauffeur to speed him to the railroad ferry at 42nd Street.

  The one a.m. express was fully booked. Even his railroad pass couldn’t get him a berth. He whipped out his Van Dorn badge and sprinted to the fortified express car at the head of the train. There would be no berth with crisp sheets there, either, nor even a comfortable chair. But the express messenger, responsible for jewels, gold, bearer bonds, and banknotes, was glad to have the company of another armed guard. Bell waited until the train was safely rolling at sixty miles an hour, then made his bed on canvas sacks stuffed with a hundred thousand in National Bank notes. He awakened to stand watch, pistol drawn, at station stops in Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore.

  —

  “Greek fire saved Constantinople from the Arab navies, Mrs. McCloud.”

  The widow who owned the coffee stand on Fulton Street was tied to a kitchen chair with a gag in her mouth. Bill Matters watched from the doorway.

  The assassin, who was perched on the rim of the bathtub that shared the tiny space with the chair, a table, and a cookstove, loosened the gag and asked, “Who else did you tell?”

  The woman was brave. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “Oh, I will know . . . Greek fire burned on water. In fact, it continues to burn even when you splash water on it. Which the invading Arabs discovered when it incinerated their ships. It was made by a secret formula as closely guarded as the workings of the Standard Oil Company. The recipe is long lost. But every guess of its ingredients includes naphtha.”

  The assassin held up a gallon tin of naphtha, a familiar solvent sold in hardware stores, and punched holes in the top with a pocketknife.

  “You’ll find naphtha in the Bible, Mrs. McCloud, a word to describe burning liquid. It’s mentioned in the Old Testament. The name meant ‘purification.’ Assyrians dipped their arrows in naphtha to shoot fire at their enemies.”

  “You think you scare me?”

  The assassin tightened the gag.

  “Today in our modern, gentler age, we use naphtha to clean clothes and dissolve grease and paint. But since the auto became popular, it is especially important to give gasoline its kick. Have you ever seen gasoline catch fire? Imagine the leaps of flame that naphtha produces. Who, Mrs. McCloud? Who else did you tell that I gave you the powder that you fed to the old man?”

  She shook her head. She was watching the tin, but there was still more contempt than fear in her eyes.

  The assassin upended the tin and poured the naphtha on her head, soaking her hair and her shabby housedress, then loosened the gag and asked again in the same quiet, persistent voice, “Who else did you tell that I gave you powder to put in Mr. Comstock’s coffee?”

  The assassin signaled that it was now Matters’ turn. Steeling himself to act, Matters scraped a kitchen match on the cookstove’s grate. Flame flared in a burst of pungent smoke.

  “Who else?”

  “No one. I swear it.”

  “No one but the messenger you sent to blackmail me,” said Matters.

  “I didn’t tell him everything. Just enough to scare you to make you pay.”

  “You did that all right.”

  “Where is he?” she asked, eyes locked on the flame.

  “Who? Your blackmail messenger? He died. After he told us where to find you.” Matters turned to the assassin, who was watching intently. “She believes me, and now I believe her.”

  Mrs. McCloud’s entire body sagged with despair, and she whispered, “My son.”

  “Ask her,” said the assassin, “how she traced me to you.”

&
nbsp; Bill Matters said to Mrs. McCloud, “You heard the question. What made you think I was the one to blackmail?”

  The widow suddenly looked twenty years older and had tears in her eyes. She whispered, “My son followed the old man to his office. He saw you together. He saw you meet every day in a tearoom. Like you had secrets away from the office.”

  “Your son was a good guesser.” To the assassin he said, “I believe her. Do you?”

  The assassin stepped closer and stared into Mrs. McCloud’s eyes.

  “Say it again: No one else.”

  “No one else. I swear it.”

  “Do you believe her?” Matters asked again.

  “I told you, I believe her.”

  “All right.”

  “But,” said the assassin, “she will never leave you in peace until she dies.”

  Bill Matters pondered in silence. Suddenly he heard his own voice babbling foolishness. “What could she say? Who would believe her?”

  The assassin said, “They will dig Comstock up and administer the Marsh test. What do you suppose they will find in his remains?”

  Matters shook his head, though he knew of course.

  “Poudre de succession! That is French, you poor man, for ‘inheritance powder,’ which is a euphemism for ‘arsenic.’ In other words, they will hang you for poisoning Averell Comstock.”

  “I won’t tell a soul,” said Mrs. McCloud. “I promise.”

  Bill Matters kept shaking his head. He could not abide the woman’s fear. Mary McCloud’s scornful contempt had underscored the deadly threat of blackmail. But her fear pried open his heart. He did not doubt that most men were his enemies. But not women. Twice widowed, father of daughters given to him by women he loved, he heard himself whisper a coward’s confession.

  “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “That’s what you have me for,” said the assassin.

  16

  When Isaac Bell got back from Washington, D.C., he borrowed a Stanley Steamer from a good friend of Archie Abbott, a well-off New Yorker who, as Archie put it, “passed his days in a quiet, blameless, clubable way.” He drove north of Manhattan into Westchester, passing through Spuyten Duyvil, Yonkers, and Dobbs Ferry. The road, paved with concrete in some sections, asphalted in others, graveled here and there, and along a few stretches still dirt, passed country clubs, prosperous farms, and taverns catering to automobilists from the city. He arrived in North Tarrytown in a traffic jam of farm wagons, gasoline trucks, and autos all packed with workmen.

  It was Election Day, the town constable explained. The wagons, trucks, and autos were ferrying three hundred of John D. Rockefeller’s estate gardeners, masons, road builders, laborers, and house servants to the North Tarrytown polls to vote for Rockefeller’s choices of trustees.

  “Will he win?” Bell asked.

  “He always does,” said the constable, who surely owed his job to the incumbents. “But, this year, the butcher is waging a mighty campaign.”

  He pointed Bell in the direction of the Rockefeller estate. Soon the bustle of the town was forgotten, dwarfed by vast building improvements—grading new roads, damming rivers, digging lakes, erecting stables and guesthouses, and laying out a golf course—that appeared to absorb the surrounding farms and entire villages. Rounding a blind bend, he saw an old tavern that stood alone in the sea of mud. A sign on the roof named it

  SLEEPY HOLLOW ROADHOUSE

  A hand-painted addition stated

  NOT FOR SALE

  NOT EVEN TO YOU, MR. PRESIDENT

  Bell swerved off the road and stopped in front with a strong hunch that the proprietor of the Sleepy Hollow Roadhouse would be more than willing to tell him a thing or two about Rockefeller’s local activities. He ordered a glass of beer and got an earful.

  “Retired, the man is lethal,” said the very angry tavern owner. “If the nation thinks that Standard Oil is an octopus, they should see him operate in Pocantico Hills—where, just so you know, my family logged and fished, and farmed those fields across the road, for two hundred years before that sanctimonious pirate pulled up stakes in Cleveland to foist himself on New York and, by extension, our small hamlet.”

  Mine host paused for breath. Isaac Bell asked, “What makes him sanctimonious?”

  “He’s a teetotaler. It galls the heck out of him that I’m selling drinks right outside his front gate. He put my competitor out of business by buying up every house in the hamlet that supplied his customers. But he can’t do that to me because my customers drive their autos up from the city like you.”

  “So it’s a standoff.”

  “As much as one man can stand off against an octopus. Who knows which way he’ll come at me next.”

  “Is he here often?”

  “Too often. Here all the time, now that he’s built his own golf course.”

  “How big is the estate?” said Bell.

  “Three thousand acres and counting. The man can drive for days on his own roads and never use the same one twice.”

  Isaac Bell found the gates open and unmanned. The driveway swept through dense forest, open hayfield, and mowed lawns as green as any he had seen in England. Bridle paths, and carriage roads of crushed slate, crisscrossed the drive and disappeared under shade trees. Clearings at bends in the driveway offered sudden, startling vistas of the Hudson River.

  He passed stables and a coach barn, guest cottages, gardens, both sunken and walled, a teahouse, and a conservatory under construction, its graceful framework awaiting glass. A powerhouse was hidden behind a stone outcropping with its chimney disguised by a clump of tall cedars. The drive climbed a gentle slope to a plateau that looked out on the river and circled a large mansion in the early stage of construction. Masons swarmed on scaffolds, buttressing deep cellar holes with stonework.

  Bell was wondering in which of the older or newly built smaller buildings Rockefeller actually lived when he noticed below the plateau a canyon-like cut through a stone hill. He drove into it along a flat roadbed. Drill marks in the vine-tangled stone sides, ballast crunching under his tires, and chunks of coal glittering in the sun indicated it was an old railroad cut abandoned decades earlier. He emerged on the far side of the hill beside a cluster of weathered cow barns that appeared to be the remnants of a dairy farm subsumed by the estate.

  Sturdy poles carried strands of telegraph, telephone, and electric wire into the biggest barn. Isaac Bell parked the Steamer and pressed a button at the door. A buzzer sounded inside.

  John D. Rockefeller himself opened the door. He was dressed as he had been when Bell saw him last in Joseph Van Dorn’s office, in elegantly tailored broadcloth, winged collar and four-in-hand necktie, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and gold cuff links. His eyes were bleak.

  “What exactly happened to Clyde Lapham?”

  “You can answer that better than I,” said Bell.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me why you sent Clyde Lapham to Washington.”

  “What makes you think I did?”

  “I know you did. I want you to tell me why.”

  “How could you possibly know that I sent Clyde Lapham to Washington?”

  “Van Dorn detectives make friends with local cops.”

  “I thought you resigned your position.”

  “Word of my resignation hasn’t reached my friends in the Washington police. Why did you send Clyde Lapham to Washington?”

  “To give the poor man something to do.”

  “Poor man?”

  “Clyde Lapham was the brightest, widest-awake, most progressive business man. But he was beginning to go down the hill. It finally became apparent that he had had his day because he was losing his mind to dementia.”

  “Why did you send him?”

  “You apparently know already. Why this charade?”

  “I don’t know if I can trust you, sir. I want to hear it from you.”

  The old man didn’t like hearing that, and Bell half expected to be e
scorted off the property. Instead, Rockefeller said, “I asked Clyde Lapham to discuss a contribution of money to a minister who is raising funds to build a monument to President Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Thank you,” said Bell. For a moment, he debated asking why Rockefeller paid a secret visit to the Persian embassy, but that would definitely get him thrown out on his ear. He had learned nothing more of it on his quick return to Washington and had left Archie Abbott in charge of probing his friends in the State Department.

  “To answer your question,” Bell said, “Clyde Lapham was murdered.”

  Rockefeller’s expression did not change, but his shoulders sagged perceptibly. He stepped back, indicating Bell should enter, and without a word led the way through a foyer into a high-ceilinged drawing loft. Draftsmen in vests and shirtsleeves were bent over drawing boards, working in the pure glow of north-facing skylights. Bell saw building plans and landscape designs taking shape. Finished blueprints were spread on worktables, where civil engineers and architects were guiding foremen through the intricacies of upcoming work. Rockefeller paused at a table where a draftsman was drawing the steel frame for a stone bridge, traced a line with his finger, and politely ordered a correction.

  He continued down a hallway of shut doors. Not visible until they had rounded a corner was a door with frosted glass in the upper panel. Bell followed him through it and saw instantly that the supposedly retired president of Standard Oil was leading a double life at Pocantico Hills, actively managing vast improvements of his new estate while continuing to command his industrial enterprise.

  The frosted-glass door opened on a business office as modern as any on Wall Street, staffed by secretaries and bookkeepers, and equipped with private telegraph, overseas cable, telephone lines, and ticker tape machines. Rockefeller led Bell through the din into his private office, closed the door, and stood behind his desk.

  “That you’re here,” he said, “tells me you’ve come to do what I asked: stop the assassin and end the slander of Standard Oil.”

  Bell said, “I will concentrate on the assassin and leave the slander to you.”

  “How do you know that Clyde Lapham was murdered?”

  Bell related the events at the Washington Monument step-by-step.