The Wrecker Read online

  “As I recall,” Bell said, “Broncho Billy played several different parts.”

  “I heard that he’s traveling the West on his own train now, making pictures.”

  “Yes,” said Bell. “Broncho Billy has started up his own picture studio.”

  “Don’t suppose that leaves him much time to wreck railroads,” Van Dorn said drily. “Which leaves us nowhere.”

  “Not quite nowhere,” said Bell.

  Van Dorn looked incredulous. “Our lumberjack recalls a famous actor whose image in a moving picture stuck in what’s left of his head.”

  “Look at this. I tested him to see how accurate he is.” He showed Van Dorn the sketch of himself.

  “Son of a gun. That’s pretty good. He drew this?”

  “While I was sitting there. He can really draw faces as they are.”

  “Not entirely. He’s got your ears all wrong. And he gave you a cleft in your chin just like Broncho Billy’s. Yours is a scar, not a cleft.”

  “He’s not perfect, but he’s pretty close. Besides, Marion says it looks like a cleft.”

  “Marion is prejudiced, you lucky devil. The point is, our lumberjack could have seen any one of Broncho Billy’s pictures. Or he might have seen him on the stage somewhere.”

  “But, either way, we know what the Wrecker looks like.”

  “Are you suggesting that he actually looks like Broncho Billy’s twin?”

  “More like a cousin.” Detail by detail, Bell pointed out the features of the lumberjack’s sketch. “Not his twin. But if the Wrecker’s face jogged the lumberjack’s memory of Broncho Billy, then we are looking for a man who has a similar broad high brow, a cleft chin, a penetrating gaze, an intelligent face with strong features, and big ears. Not Broncho Billy’s twin, exactly. But I would say that the Wrecker looks more in general like a matinee idol.”

  Van Dorn puffed angrily on his cigar. “Am I to instruct my detectives not to arrest ugly mugs?”

  Isaac Bell pushed back, demanding his boss see the possibilities. The more he thought about it, the more he felt they were on to something. “How old do you suppose this fellow is?”

  Van Dorn scowled at the drawing. “Anywhere from his late twenties to early forties.”

  “We are looking for a handsome man somewhere in his late twenties, thirties, or early forties. We’ll print copies of this. Take it around, show it to the hobos. Show it to stationmasters and ticket clerks wherever he might have fled on a train. Anyone who might have seen him.”

  “So far that’s no one. No one alive anyway. Except for your Michelangelo lumberjack.”

  Bell said, “I’m still betting on the machinist or the blacksmith who drilled that hole in the Glendale hook.”

  “Sanders’s boys might hit it lucky,” Van Dorn agreed. “It’s been in the newspapers enough, and, God knows, I’ve made it clear to him that his soft berth in Los Angeles is at risk of a transfer to Missoula, Montana. Failing that, maybe someone will see the Wrecker next time and survive the experience. And we do know there will be a next time.”

  “There will be a next time,” Bell agreed grimly. “Unless we stop him first.”

  12

  THE HOBO JUNGLE OUTSIDE OGDEN FILLED A THINLY WOODED spot between the railroad tracks and a stream that provided clean water for drinking and washing. It was one of the largest jungles in the country—nine rail lines converging in one place offered a steady flow of freight trains steaming night and day in every direction—and growing larger every day. As the Panic put factories out of business, more and more men rode the rails to find work. Their hats marked them as newcomers. City men’s derbies outnumbered miners’ caps and range riders’ J.B.s these days. There was even a sprinkling of trilbies and homburgs worn by former men of means who had never dreamed they would be down-and-out.

  A thousand hobos were hurrying to finish cleanup before dark. They scrubbed laundry and cookpots in cans of boiling water, hung laundered clothes on ropes and tree limbs and set pots upside down on rocks to dry. When night fell, they kicked dirt on their fires and sat back to eat meager meals in the dark.

  Campfires would have been welcomed. Northern Utah was cold in November, and snow flurries had blown repeatedly over the camp. Five thousand feet above sea level, it was exposed to westerly gales off nearby Great Salt Lake and easterly gusts tumbling down from the Wasatch Mountains. But the railroad bulls from the Ogden yards had raided the jungle with pistols and billy clubs three nights in a row to convince the burgeoning population to move on. No one wanted them back for the fourth, so it was no night for campfires. They ate in silence, worrying about the bulls and fearing winter.

  A hobo jungle, like any town or city, had neighborhoods whose boundaries were clear in the residents’ minds. Some areas were friendly, some safer than others. Downstream, farthest from the tracks, where the creek veered to join the Weber River, was a section best visited armed. There, the rules of live and let live gave way to take or be taken.

  The Wrecker headed there fearlessly. He was at home in outlaw land. Yet even he loosened the knife in his boot and moved his pistol from a deep pocket of his canvas coat to his waistband, where he could draw it quickly. Despite the absence of campfires, it was not entirely dark. The trains huffing constantly by pierced the night with their headlights, and the thin snow cover reflected the golden glow from the windows of passenger cars. A string of bright Pullmans started past, slowing for the nearby town, and by its light the Wrecker saw a hunched shadow shivering beside a tree, both hands in pockets.

  “Sharpton,” he called in a harsh voice, and Sharpton answered, “Right here, mister.”

  “Put your hands where I can see them,” commanded the Wrecker.

  Sharpton obeyed, partly because the Wrecker was paying money for service and partly out of fear. A bank and train robber who had served time in the penitentiary, Pete Sharpton knew a dangerous hombre when he met one. He had never seen his face. They had only met once before, when the Wrecker had tracked Sharpton down and braced him in the alley behind the livery stable where he rented a room. But he had been on the wrong side of the law his entire life and knew they did not come more deadly than this one.

  “Did you find your man?” the Wrecker asked.

  “He’ll do the job for a thousand dollars,” Sharpton answered.

  “Give him five hundred down. Make him come back for the second half after he has done the job.”

  “What’s to keep him from running off with the first five hundred? Found money, no risk.”

  “What will prevent him will be his clear understanding that you will hunt him down and kill him. Can you make that clear to him?”

  Sharpton chuckled in the dark. “Oh yes. Besides, he’s not that tough anymore. He’ll do as he’s told.”

  “Take this,” said the Wrecker.

  Sharpton felt the package with his fingers. “This isn’t money.”

  “You’ll have the money in a minute. This is the fuse I want him to use.”

  “You mind me asking why?”

  “Not at all,” the Wrecker said easily. “This looks exactly like a fast fuse. It would fool even an experienced safecracker. Do I assume correctly that yours is experienced?”

  “Blowing safes and express cars his whole life.”

  “As I asked for. Despite its appearance, this is actually a slow fuse. When he lights it, it will take longer to detonate the dynamite than he’s calculated.”

  “If it takes too long, it will blow up the train instead of just blocking the tracks.”

  “Does that pose difficulties for you, Sharpton?”

  “I’m just saying what’ll happen,” Sharpton said hastily. “If you want to blow up the train instead of just rob it, well I guess that’s none of my business. You’re paying the bill.”

  The Wrecker pressed a second package into Sharpton’s hand. “Here is three thousand dollars. Two thousand for you, a thousand for your man. You can’t count it in the dark. You’ll have to trust me.”
/>   13

  THE LUMBERJACK’S DRAWING OF THE WRECKER PAID OFF IN five days.

  A sharp-eyed Southern Pacific ticket clerk in Sacramento recalled selling an Ogden, Utah, ticket to a man who looked like the man that Don Albert had drawn. Even though his customer had a beard, and his hair was almost as blond as Isaac Bell‘s, there was something similar in the face, the clerk insisted.

  Bell interviewed him personally to ascertain that the clerk was not another fan of The Great Train Robbery, and was impressed enough to order operatives to canvass the train crews on the Ogden flyer.

  They hit pay dirt in Reno, Nevada. One of the flyer’s conductors, a resident of Reno, recalled the passenger too and agreed it could have been the man in the drawing, though he pointed out the difference in hair color.

  Bell raced to Nevada, ran him down at his home, and asked casually, as if only making conversation, whether the conductor had seen the The Great Train Robbery. He planned to, the conductor answered, the next time it showed at the vaudeville house. His missus had been pestering him to take her for a year.

  From Reno, Bell caught an overnight express to Ogden, and had dinner as the train climbed through the Trinity Mountains. He sent telegrams when it stopped at Lovelock and received several replies when it stopped at Imlay, and he finally fell asleep in a comfortable Pullman as it steamed across Nevada. The wires awaiting him at Montello, just before they crossed the Utah border, had nothing new to report.

  Nearing Ogden, midday, the train sped across Great Salt Lake on the long redwood trestles of the Lucin Cutoff. Osgood Hennessy had spent eight million dollars and clear-cut miles of Oregon forest to build the new, level route between Lucin and Ogden. It shortened the Sacramento—Ogden trip by two hours and dismayed Commodore Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, his rivals on the southern and northern routes. At the point where Bell was so close to the rail-junction city that he could see the snowcapped peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to Ogden’s east, his train ground to a halt.

  The tracks were blocked six miles ahead, the conductor told him.

  An explosion had derailed the westbound Sacramento Limited.

  BELL JUMPED TO THE ground and ran alongside the train to the front end. The engineer and fireman had dismounted from their locomotive and were standing on the ballast, rolling cigarettes. Bell showed them his Van Dorn identification, and ordered, “Get me as close to the wreck as you can.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Detective, I take my orders from the dispatcher.”

  Bell’s derringer appeared in his hand suddenly. Two dark muzzles yawned at the engineer. “This is a matter of life and death, starting with yours,” said Bell. He pointed at the cowcatcher on the front of the locomotive, and said, “Move this train to the wreck and don’t stop until you hit debris!”

  “You wouldn’t shoot a man in cold blood,” said the fireman.

  “The hell he wouldn‘t,” said the engineer, shifting his gaze nervously from the derringer to the expression on Isaac Bell’s face. “Get up there and shovel coal.”

  The locomotive, a big 4-6-2, steamed six miles before a brakeman with a red flag stopped them where the tracks disappeared in a large hole in the ballast. Just beyond the hole, six Pullmans, a baggage car, and a tender lay on their sides. Bell dismounted from the locomotive and strode through the wreckage. “How many hurt?” he asked the railroad official who was pointed out to him as the wreck master.

  “Thirty-five. Four seriously.”

  “Dead?”

  “None. They were lucky. The bastard blew the rail a minute early. The engineer had time to reduce his speed.”

  “Strange,” said Bell. “His attacks have always been so precisely timed.”

  “Well, this’ll be his last. We got him.”

  “What? Where is he?”

  “Sheriff caught him in Ogden. Lucky for him. Passengers tried to lynch him. He got away, but then one of them spotted him later, hiding in a stable.”

  Bell found a locomotive on the other side of the wreck to run him into Union Depot.

  The jailhouse was situated in Ogden’s mansard-roofed City Hall a block from the railroad station. Two top Van Dorn agents were there ahead of him, the older Weber-and-Fields duo of Mack Fulton and Wally Kisley. Neither was cracking jokes. In fact, both men looked glum.

  “Where is he?” Bell demanded.

  “It’s not him,” said Fulton wearily. He seemed exhausted, Bell thought, and for the first time he wondered if Mack should be considering retirement. Always lean, his face was shrunken as a cadaver’s.

  “Not who blew the train?”

  “Oh, he blew the train all right,” said Kisley, whose trademark three-piece checkerboard suit was caked with dust. Wally looked as tired as Mack but not ill. “Only he’s not the Wrecker. Go ahead, you take a crack at him.”

  “You’ll have a better chance of getting him to talk. He sure as hell won’t admit a word to us.”

  “Why would he talk to me?”

  “Old friend of yours,” Fulton explained cryptically. He and Kisley were both twenty years older than Bell, celebrated veterans and friends, who were free to say whatever popped in their heads even though Bell was boss of the Wrecker investigation.

  “I’d knock it out of him,” said the sheriff. “But your boys said to wait for you, and the railroad company tells me Van Dorn calls the tune. Damned foolishness, in my opinion. But no one’s asking my opinion.”

  Bell strode into the room where they had the prisoner manacled to a table affixed solidly to the stone floor. An “old friend,” to be sure, the prisoner was Jake Dunn, a safecracker. On the end of the table was a neat, banded stack of crisp five-dollar bills, five hundred dollars’ worth, according to the sheriff, clearly payment for services rendered. Bell’s first grim thought was that now the Wrecker was hiring accomplices to do his murderous work for him. Which means he could strike anywhere and be long gone before the strike happened.

  “Jake, what in blazes have you gotten mixed up in this time?”

  “Hello, Mr. Bell. Haven’t seen you since you sent me to San Quentin.”

  Bell sat quietly and looked him over. San Quentin had not been kind to the safecracker. He looked twenty years older, a hollow shell of the hard case he had been. His hands were shaking so hard it was difficult to imagine him setting a charge without detonating it accidentally. Relieved at first to see a familiar face, Dunn shriveled now under Bell’s gaze.

  “Blowing Wells Fargo safes is robbery, Jake. Wrecking passenger trains is murder. The man who paid you that money has killed innocent people by the dozen.”

  “I didn’t know we were wrecking the train.”

  “You didn’t know that blowing the rails out from under a speeding train would cause a wreck?” Bell said in disbelief, his face dark with disgust. “What did you think would happen?”

  The prisoner hung his head.

  “Jake! What did you think would happen?”

  “You gotta believe me, Mr. Bell. He told me to blow the rail so the train would stop so they could hit the express car. I didn’t know he was gonna put her on the ground.”

  “What do you mean? You’re the one who lit the fuse.”

  “He switched fuses on me. I thought I was lighting a fast fuse that would detonate the charge in time for the train to stop. Instead, it burned slow. I couldn’t believe my eyes, Mr. Bell. It was burning so slow the train was going to run right over the charge. I tried to stop it.”

  Bell stared at him coldly.

  “That’s how they caught me, Mr. Bell. I ran after it, trying to stomp it out. Too late. They saw me, and after she hit the ground they lit out after me like I was the guy who shot McKinley.”

  “Jake, you’ve got the hangman’s rope around your neck and one way to get it loose. Take me to the man who paid you this money.”

  Jake Dunn shook his head violently. He looked, Bell thought, frantic as a wolf with a leg caught in a trap. But no, not a wolf. There was no raw power in him, no nobility. Truth be told, Dunn look
ed like a mongrel dog that had fallen for bait left for bigger game.

  “Where is he, Jake?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why are you lying to me, Jake?”

  “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  “You wrecked a train, Jake. You’re damned lucky you didn’t kill anybody. If they don’t hang you, they’ll put you in the penitentiary for the rest of your life.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  Bell changed tactics abruptly.

  “How’d you happen to get out of prison so soon, Jake? What did you serve, three years? Why’d they let you go?”

  Jake regarded Bell with eyes that were suddenly wide open and guileless. “I got the cancer.”

  Bell was taken aback. He had no truck with lawbreakers, but a killing disease reduced a criminal to just an ordinary man. Jake Dunn was no innocent, but he was quite suddenly a victim who would suffer pain and fear and despair. “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t realize.”

  “I guess they figured to set me loose to die on my own. I needed the money. That’s how I took this job.”

  “Jake, you were always a craftsman, never a killer. Why are you covering for a killer?” Bell pressed.

  Jake answered in a hoarse whisper. “He’s in the livery stable on Twenty-fourth, across the tracks.”

  Bell snapped his fingers. Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton rushed to his side. “Twenty-fourth Street,” said Bell. “Livery stable. Cover it, station the sheriff’s deputies on the outer perimeter, and wait for me.”

  Jake looked up. “He’s not going anywhere, Mr. Bell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I went back to get my second half of the money, I found him upstairs, in one of the rooms they rent out.”