The Assassin Read online

  Twenty-seven hours later, a Van Dorn apprentice from the New Orleans field office ran into Union Terminal with another wire from Texas Walt.

  SHERIFF’S DEAD SUSPECT CLEARED

  C. C. GUSTAFSON AWAKE

  Isaac Bell swung aboard the westbound Sunset Express.

  BOOK TWO

  POISON

  TEXAS

  9

  Hummbuuulll, Texas!” bawled the conductor. “Humble, Texas! Next stop, Humble, Texas!”

  Isaac Bell was first at the vestibule door, ahead of a crowd of excited speculators jostling behind him. The still-speeding train leaned into a hard bend in the tracks, and he glimpsed something that made him open the corridor window to lean out in the humid heat. He saw hundreds of oil derricks surrounded by giant crude storage tanks. A sprawling boomtown of fresh-built barracks, boardinghouses, hotels, saloons, and a “ragtown” section of tents crowded both sides of the main line tracks. The sidings and railyards were black with rows of tank cars.

  But what had caught the Van Dorn detective’s eye was floating in the smoke-stained sky above the town—Nellie Matters’ yellow balloon with the block lettering on the bulge of the gas envelope that read VOTES FOR WOMEN. Where had she come from? Bell wondered. More to the point, had her beautiful sister Edna come with her?

  The ground shook suddenly at the very moment the Sunset Express pulled into the makeshift station with clanging bell and hissing air brakes. The tracks trembled and the Pullman cars rattled and everyone on the train ran to the windows. A fountain of oil spewed from the top of a derrick. The fountain rapidly thickened. Thundering out of the earth, the eruption blew the derrick to splinters and projected skyward nearly as high as Nellie Matters’ balloon.

  Bell gave the roaring spouter and its greasy brown spray a wide berth, judging the wind by the direction Nellie’s balloon was tugging the rope that tethered it above the fairground. Most of that dusty field had been turned into a “ragtown” taken up by tents. In the small open space that remained, fifty women in white summer dresses were waving EQUAL SUFFRAGE LEAGUES OF HOUSTON AND HUMBLE banners at Nellie’s balloon.

  Bell hurried past the fairground and cut down Main Street and into the Toppling Derrick, the boomtown’s biggest saloon. Waiting as promised at the bar was Texas Walt Hatfield, a tall, wiry, sun-blasted man with twin Colt six-shooters holstered in low-slung gun belts and a broad-brimmed J. B. Stetson hat. Beside him stood a feisty-looking gent with his arm in a sling and his neck swathed in bandages. His face wore the pallor of recent shock, but his eyes were bright.

  “Howdy, Isaac,” said Hatfield, shaking hands as casually as if they had last worked together yesterday instead of a year ago. “This here’s Mr. C. C. Gustafson.”

  “Craig Gustafson,” said the publisher, thrusting out his good hand.

  “Isaac Bell. Congratulations on being alive.”

  C. C. Gustafson proved to be as philosophical on the subject of getting shot as any Bell had met. “My little newspaper is just a fly nipping at the hide of Standard Oil. Fact is, I’m flattered they bothered to swat me.”

  Bell asked, “Do we have reason to believe that’s who shot you?”

  “I don’t know for sure this is true, but I have a vague memory forming in my mind that I was told that a Standard Oil Refinery Police chief arrived on the train the day before. That would have been Tuesday. I got shot on Wednesday.”

  “Can you recall any local enemies here in town you might have provoked?”

  “I haven’t stolen any horses and I haven’t burned any churches, and I can also eliminate angry husbands, since I don’t run around on my wife.”

  Isaac Bell glanced at the barbed-wire-lean, hawk-nosed Texas Walt for confirmation.

  The normally laconic former Ranger surprised him by drawling the longest sentence Bell had ever heard him speak: “Ah had the pleasure of meeting Janet Sue—that is to say, Mrs. C. C. Gustafson—at the hospital, and Ah can report that there ain’t a man in Texas who would entertain notions of running around on such a lady.”

  “I have irritated Standard Oil for years,” said Gustafson, “and currently can claim some part of the effort in the Texas State House to ban the monopolistic vultures from doing business in our state.”

  Bell asked, “What do you remember of the shooting?”

  “Not a heck of a lot, as I was just telling Walt. It’s coming back, but slow.”

  “Mr. Gustafson only woke up yesterday morning,” Hatfield told Bell.

  “I’m surprised they let you out of the hospital so soon.”

  “My wife has a theory that hospitals kill people, being full of sick people with infections. She marched me home the second I could walk.”

  Bell turned to Hatfield. “Who’s the dead suspect the sheriff cleared?”

  “Found facedown on top of a Springfield ’03 with his neck busted.”

  “As if he fell while running to escape?”

  “Until friends remarked that he was near blind without his glasses, which had got busted that morning in a poker table dispute.”

  “Did you manage a look at the rifle?”

  Hatfield said, “The sheriff cooperated. The rifle smelled recently fired. Four rounds still in the magazine, which holds five.”

  “Telescope?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe that’s why the assassin missed.” Bell turned back to the newspaper publisher.

  “Can you tell me what you remember?”

  “The window broke. I was setting type for my editorial by the light of the window. All at once, the glass shattered.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I’m afraid my answer is not going to help you, Detective Bell. What happened next was I woke up in a strange bed with my wife holding a cool cloth to my brow. Looked around. Walt was standing nearby with his hands on his guns as if to discourage additional potshots.”

  Bell asked, “Would you feel up to visiting your newspaper?”

  “I was heading there when Walt suggested we have a snort, and then you walked in.”

  They walked the long way to the Humble Clarion, taking back streets and alleys to skirt the mob collected around the gusher. The riggers were struggling to cap the new well, while ditchdiggers excavated a catch basin to contain the oil that was raining down like a monsoon. The train had gone. Most of the men aboard it had stayed.

  The Clarion occupied the first floor of a corner building. C. C. Gustafson led them into the composing room where he set type. “It was that window,” he said. “My wife replaced the glass, and finished setting the editorial for me. After picking up all the type that went flying.”

  Bell looked for bullet holes in the walls. He remarked that the office had been freshly painted.

  “Janet Sue cleaned up the mess soon as the sheriff was done looking things over.”

  “Did Mrs. Gustafson happen to mention how many bullet holes she plastered before painting?”

  “She told me three.”

  Bell looked to Hatfield. “How many rounds had been fired from the Springfield the sheriff found?”

  “One.”

  Isaac Bell stood in the window. It fronted on the side street. Across the street was a frame building under construction. Carpenters building the platform were hammering floorboards onto ground-floor joists. The otherwise-open lot allowed a long view over low-lying neighbors to the tall false front that topped the two-story Toppling Derrick saloon on the far side of Main Street three blocks away.

  —

  Averell Comstock walked at a remarkably brisk pace for a man his age thanks, he was quick to boast, to a regimen he had started when he first came to New York twenty years ago. He walked every midmorning from the office at 26 Broadway to the East River, where he could order oysters shucked fresh off the boat. He ignored the ketchup and crackers, preferring the briny taste of the bivalves unadulterated, and leaving room for coffee and cake from a food stall on Fulton Street, where he had fallen half in love with a middle-aged widow who h
ad a hard face softened by beautiful blue eyes.

  She stirred in the sugar for him. Just this week she had begun to insist on refilling his cup at no charge, stirring in more sugar with a pretty smile. What would she think, Comstock wondered, if she learned that the old man in the ancient coat was ten thousand times richer than any customer she had ever served?

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “A little under the weather.” For several days he had felt not quite himself.

  “I thought you looked pale. I hope you’ve not been eating oysters. They say there’s typhoid fever.”

  “I eat only those from Staten Island,” he said. “It’s the Jamaica Bay oysters that carry the typhoid.”

  “Well, I hope you feel better.”

  “Well enough to walk down here,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

  He drained the second cup and hurried off. “Back to the salt mines. See you tomorrow.”

  Mrs. McCloud put another sugar bowl on the counter and hid the one from which she had sweetened the old man’s coffee.

  “Make sure you wash the spoon.”

  Mrs. McCloud looked up. The man in the old-fashioned frock coat and fancy trilby hat was back, furtive and cold-eyed as a steerer who sends clients to a shyster lawyer.

  “What’s in it?” she asked.

  “What do you care?”

  She glanced up Fulton for another glimpse of the tall old man’s top hat bobbing slowly through the crowd that thronged the sidewalk. A street car blocked her view. “I couldn’t care less.”

  Heading back to the office, Averell Comstock was surprised when he had to stop and rest halfway there, pale and trembling.

  —

  Isaac Bell and Texas Walt Hatfield looked for the assassin’s shooting hide on the roof behind the Toppling Derrick saloon’s false front. They agreed that the sight lines were there, an easy shot three hundred yards to the Clarion’s side window. With the roar of drinkers below celebrating new riches, it was doubtful anyone in the saloon would hear a shot, much less do anything about it. No other building looked down on the roof, ensuring privacy and time to draw a bead and wait.

  Bell walked the perimeter. The roof sloped slightly to allow rainwater to spill off into a gutter. He saw a golden glint in the gutter, knelt down, pulled from the grit and hardened sediment that lined the wooden trough an empty cartridge shell.

  “A wildcat,” said Bell, showing it to Hatfield. A standard factory-made Savage .303 brass case had been reshaped to accommodate customized powder and bullet loads for greater range and impact.

  “Man’s loading his own,” said Hatfield.

  “I’d expect that for his accuracy,” said Bell. A great marksman, which the assassin surely was, would use the so-called wildcat in conjunction with a finely machined chamber and a custom-made barrel. “But I’m surprised he didn’t scoop it up before he ran. It’s a heck of a telltale.”

  “Maybe he knew he missed,” said Hatfield. “Got rattled.”

  “Maybe . . . Odd, though. The .303 is made for the Savage 99.”

  “Fine weapon. Though a mite light.”

  “I wonder why he uses such a light gun. That 1903 Springfield would be more accurate.”

  “But heavier.”

  “His kill in Kansas was nearly seven hundred yards.”

  “A man looks like a flyspeck at that range.”

  “That’s why I assumed a Springfield.”

  “Do you suppose he’s a little feller?” Hatfield wondered.

  “Too small to hold a more accurate heavy gun? Might explain why he has to improve the Savage cartridge. Probably smithed his rifle to a farewell, too.” Bell pocketed the cartridge. “O.K. Let’s see where he went.”

  Hatfield had been raised by Comanche Indians and was an expert tracker. Prowling the tar roof, he spotted a minute imprint of the corner of a bootheel, and found it repeated several yards into an alley. Step-by-step, mark by barely decipherable mark, in crusted mud, oil-soaked earth, and dried manure, they followed the sniper’s escape route down alleys and over a railroad track and into a stable’s corral, where they lost the trail in hoofprints.

  “Mounted up here and rode off.”

  The stable hands were vaqueros too old and lame to quit their jobs to get rich in the oil fields. Walt Hatfield addressed them in Spanish and translated for Bell. Two men had left quickly on horses they had boarded in the stable and had ordered saddled up an hour earlier.

  “Two men?”

  “One big, one little.”

  “Were they carrying rifles?”

  “No guns.”

  —

  Humble’s hotels were jam-packed, and the rooming houses were stifling, but Texas Walt had rustled up clean rooms above a stable. They sluiced off the dust of the long, hot day in horse troughs and headed back to the Toppling Derrick where, earlier, Bell had tipped generously to guarantee a table for supper.

  They passed the fairground on the way. The suffragist rally had dispersed, and a crowd of the oil field hands camping there was carousing under tarpaulins that sheltered a board-on-barrels saloon. Off to one side, Bell spotted a familiar-looking wall tent pitched beside a buckboard wagon. A black iron pot was suspended over a cook fire.

  “Walt, you may be dining alone.”

  Drawing near the tent, he heard her typewriter clattering. He knocked on the post. She kept typing like a Gatling gun. But the canvas flew open and out stepped a slim young woman with short, wispy chestnut hair, bright eyes, and a brighter smile. Her voice rang.

  “If you’re not Isaac Bell, my sister’s famed descriptive powers have deserted her.”

  She thrust out her hand.

  “Nellie Matters. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  Bell swept his hat off his head, took her delicate fingers in his, and stepped close. When he had seen Nellie through binoculars, he had thought of her features as less fine than her sister’s. But with only inches between them, her resemblance to Edna was stronger. She had the same gray-green eyes, the same silken hair, the same beautiful nose. All that seemed magnified were her expressive eyebrows and fuller lips.

  “I was hoping you would return to earth,” he said.

  “Only briefly.”

  The typing stopped. Edna called, “Invite him to supper.”

  “Does he like varmint stew?”

  “It’s not varmint stew. It’s jackrabbit.”

  “I love jackrabbit,” said Bell. “One of you must be quite a shot.”

  Nellie laughed. “Not exactly. Edna blasted them with her .410. We’ll be cracking teeth on buckshot.”

  Edna emerged from the tent, and Bell’s first thought was that Nellie was gorgeous, an utterly beautiful woman, but there was something about Edna—her stillness and her steady gaze—that blocked the breath in his throat.

  She said, “We’ll chew carefully. How are you, Mr. Bell?”

  “Happy to see you. What brings you to Humble?”

  “Same thing that brought you, I’d imagine. C. C. Gustafson.”

  “Are you reporting for the Derrick?”

  She did not answer directly, saying instead that C. C. Gustafson was a good friend and an important source for her research.

  Nellie asked whether he was investigating the shooting.

  “Mr. Gustafson doesn’t remember much.”

  Edna said, “His memory is returning. He told me that the day before he was shot he had heard that Big Pete Straub arrived on the train.”

  Nellie laughed. “Mr. Bell, you really ought to hire my sister to assist in your investigation.”

  Bell kept to himself that Gustafson had already told him that and said, “I reckon Edna’s too busy—and far too expensive—but what a nice coincidence you find yourselves here together.”

  “We often travel together,” said Nellie. “Particularly to places like this where a woman’s better off not alone.” A nod indicated the tarpaulin saloon, where the men were getting loud. “Two women are somewhat m
ore formidable than one girl on her own, don’t you think?”

  “Just ask those jackrabbits.”

  “Will you stay to supper?”

  “Let me run and find some wine.”

  “In Humble? Good luck.”

  Bell grinned. “What do you prefer with jackrabbit?”

  Edna grinned. “A chilled Riesling, wouldn’t you say, Nellie?”

  Nellie tossed Isaac Bell a second challenge. “On a hot night with a jackrabbit and a handsome gentleman, I’m in a mood for champagne!”

  “I’ll be right back,” said Bell.

  “Where are you going?” they chorused after him. “Houston?”

  “New Orleans!” Bell called over his shoulder and kept going.

  “Don’t be late.”

  Bell went straight to the Toppling Derrick and asked Walt Hatfield, “Which did you say was the highest-class sporting house in town?”

  “Things didn’t work out with the lady reporter?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Easy does it, old son. Just joshin’ you. The French Quarter was the one I mentioned. Around the corner and over a couple of streets.”

  Bell found the French Quarter’s kitchen door down an alley and slipped the cook two twenty-dollar gold pieces. He returned to Edna’s tent with a whiskey keg under his arm. The barrelhead had been removed. The sisters peered in.

  “Ice? Where did you get ice?”

  Bell said, “Forgive me, Edna, but Riesling proved impossible. Will you settle for a Chablis?”

  Edna said, “I am devastated. But I’ll settle for Chablis. Just this once.”

  “What about me?” Nellie cried. “Where’s my champagne?”

  “Moët & Chandon?”

  “Are you serious?”

  Bell pulled dripping bottles from the ice.

  Nellie said, “Edna, one of us should grab this fellow before he gets away. You are quite the provider, Mr. Bell.”

  “Here’s my suggestion,” said Bell. “First we share champagne and save the Chablis for the jackrabbit.”