The Striker ib-6 Read online

  “They’re not going to print in the paper that Mrs. Thickneck bought a pink diamond necklace.”

  “We can read between the lines. Particularly in the Society sections. Match Chicago buyers in New York to upcoming balls in Chicago and get a jump on Mr. Rosania’s shopping plans.”

  “Interrupt him in the middle of the job?”

  “I’d rather grab him as he comes out.”

  “Fine plan, Isaac — two birds with one stone.”

  “Put him in a mood to talk.”

  “And a mighty modern idea about Mr. Forrer keeping up to date on the Society page. Old-fashioned I, meantime, will visit Black’s Social and Little’s Exchange.”

  “For what purpose?” Bell asked warily. Ed Black’s Social and Wes Little’s Exchange were both saloons.

  “There’s Little’s,” said Wish, nodding as they stepped out of Union Depot at a brightly lighted bar on the corner. “Black’s is a similar stone’s throw from the LaSalle Street Station where the Twentieth Century comes in.”

  “So?”

  “When their trains arrive from New York and it’s ‘quittin’ time,’ Pennsylvania Special express messengers hightail it around the corner to Little’s. And Twentieth Century Limited boys hoist a glass at Black’s. Don’t you reckon those heavily armed agents protecting valuables might recall which passengers coming home from New York stashed jewelry in their express car safes?”

  Isaac Bell conceded that Wish’s was the more savvy tactic.

  “Don’t waste time berating yourself, old son. You thought of catching the thief in the act. I just came up with a quainter way of anticipating it.”

  Bell grinned at his old partner. “I keep telling Mr. Van Dorn you’re the sharpest operator in his outfit.”

  “How delighted he must be to hear it.”

  * * *

  “Hold it right there, mister!”

  Two big men blocked Isaac Bell’s path into the Mine Workers’ union hall, which was on a street of saloons in the First Ward. Ragtime music clattered from player pianos on either side. The miners had installed steel shutters on their windows and a rifleman on the roof.

  “Hello, Mike. Terry. How are you?”

  The Van Dorn Protective Services agents looked more closely. “Isaac! Haven’t seen you since you apprenticed.”

  Mike Flannery and Terry Fein were a pair of handsome bruisers who made excellent hotel dicks at the Palmer House but laid no claim to the mental machinery required of an investigator.

  “Your mustache threw me off,” said Mike.

  “Mighty becoming,” said Terry. “The ladies’ll love it.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right. Is Mary Higgins in there with her brother?”

  “Showed up yesterday,” said Terry, adding a broad wink as he escorted Bell into the front room. “Amazing how many unionists suddenly have pressing business with her brother since she hit this town.”

  “Is Mary all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right!” Mary said, striding into the front room.

  She was buttoning a coat over her shirtwaist and trumpet skirt. A plain red hat, with neither ribbons nor feathers, was pinned to the portion of her hair swept up to the top of her head. The rest tumbled, glossy black, to her shoulders. Her eyes were as gray and unfathomable as a winter sky.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Isaac Bell could not say, Because you vanished in the middle of a riot while I was shadowing you — orders of Mr. Van Dorn, who thinks you’re up to something. Nor could he blurt out in front of her brother and the Protective Services boys, You are even more beautiful than I remembered.

  “I’m glad to see you, again,” he said. “You, too, Jim.”

  Jim Higgins took his hand. “Welcome to Chicago,” he said warmly.

  Mary did not offer her hand, and her smile was as remote as a nod to a casual acquaintance seen across a busy train station. “Brother, I’m going out. Nice to see you, Isaac.”

  “I hope to see you again.”

  “Are you in Chicago long?”

  “Hard to tell.”

  “Same here.”

  She swept out the door and was gone.

  “Who’s watching out for her?” Bell asked Mike and Terry.

  “No one.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “She won’t let us.”

  “But if Jim’s in danger, surely his sister is, too.”

  “We’ve already had the argument,” said Jim Higgins.

  “And lost,” chorused the Protective Services agents.

  “Don’t worry, Isaac,” said Jim, “I’m taking her to Pittsburgh. The boys are watching me, and we’ll all stick close.”

  * * *

  Henry Clay made absolutely sure that none of the Van Dorns had shadowed her before he followed Mary Higgins inside a nickelodeon in a long, narrow converted storefront on Halsted Street. A coin piano banged away in a corner, and the audience was howling at a comedy on the screen, Appointment by Telephone, in which a couple drinking champagne at lunch was spotted through the restaurant window by the man’s wife.

  Clay located Mary in the back row, where he had instructed her to sit. His heart took him by surprise, soaring when the projection light jumped from the screen to her beautiful face. She was the only person in the theater not laughing.

  Before he could reach her, a man stood up and moved a few seats over to sit next to her. Suspecting one of the mashers who preyed on women who sat alone in nickelodeons, Clay rushed to the seat next to him. He had guessed right. The man was already laying a hand on Mary’s leg. She slapped it away. The masher whispered, “Don’t play hard to get.”

  Clay took the masher’s hand in his right, clamped his left over his mouth to muffle his scream, and broke his finger. “Leave quietly,” he whispered in his ear. “If I hear a peep out of you or ever see you again, I’ll break the other nine.”

  The masher stumbled away, moaning, and Clay slipped into the seat he had vacated. Loud laughter and the coin piano allowed them to speak in low tones without fear of being overheard.

  “I’ve lined up fifty barges and a couple of towboats.”

  Nothing in her manner suggested whether she had noticed what he had done to the masher, and he could not tell whether that was because he had done it smoothly or because she didn’t care. Her reply was all business.

  “Mr. Claggart, where did the money come from? Fifty barges and two towboats must cost a fortune.”

  “Empty barges are going cheap at the moment. What with the operators fearing the strike will diminish production. Pittsburgh is awash in empties.”

  “Fifty barges and the services of two steamboats still must cost money.”

  “Don’t you read the papers?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s been a slew of bank and payroll robberies in the Chicago area, out toward Evanston and Cicero and all the way down to Hammond and Gary.”

  “What do bank robberies have to do with the coal strike?”

  “Not every bank robber is in it for personal gain,” Clay answered. “Some support worthy causes.”

  The idea of labor radicals raising money by robbing banks had a ring of truth, he thought. And regardless of her scruples, if any, about robbing capitalist banks, they would be nothing compared to her scruples about financing her brilliant barge scheme with Judge James Congdon’s Wall Street money.

  He glanced at her to see how the lie registered.

  She was staring straight ahead at the show on the screen. The wife stalked into the restaurant. Crockery flew. Tables were overturned. The woman scorned procured a horsewhip from somewhere and flailed away, and the audience roared as she chased her husband and his girlfriend around the restaurant. Henry Clay feasted on Mary’s compelling profile, waiting, thinking, She’s got to laugh. She’s not made of stone.

  * * *

  Mary Higgins had been troubled from the first by the money. It seemed that whatever Claggart needed, he had access to limitl
ess funds. But she found it difficult to believe that the bank robbers, who had inspired all sorts of lurid reporting in the newspapers, were nobler than common criminals. Albeit skillful ones who had managed enough successful robberies to inflame so much attention. With the Spanish War long gone from the headlines, and a reluctance on the part of many newspapers to lend the mine strike credence by writing about it, their editors were probably getting desperate.

  But none of that guaranteed the robbers were supporting the strike.

  She felt as she had since she first met Claggart in New York. She could not entirely trust the man. Despite his radical talk, his underlying motive was a mystery. But she hadn’t thought through how much money it would take to accomplish blocking the river, and she had little choice but to subscribe to the old saying Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. What if it was a trick by the owners? What kind of trick, she had no idea.

  All she knew for sure was that she had thrown her lot in with someone she knew nothing about. She had seen a man of action when he saved her from the cops. And now she had just observed a vicious streak, brutalizing the masher, who would think twice about molesting other women. And she had to admit that Claggart’s reaction could have been inflamed by the fact that he was falling for her.

  She wondered what she would think and what she would do if the bank robbers were suddenly caught by the police. If they turned out to be ordinary criminals, then Mr. Claggart would have a lot of explaining to do. Until then, she resolved to keep her wits about her and watch him closely.

  26

  Isaac Bell found Wish Clarke drunk in little’s exchange. He walked him out of the saloon, heaved him into a hansom cab, and gave the driver an enormous five-dollar tip to deliver him to the inexpensive hotel around the corner from the Palmer House, where Van Dorns rented rooms in Chicago.

  Wish grabbed his arm as Bell tried to shut the cab’s door. “No jewels of note aboard the Pennshulvania Speshule.”

  “I’ll check the Twentieth Century messengers at Black’s.”

  “Shorry I let you down, Ishick. It cashes up wish me now and again.”

  “Make me a promise, Aloysius.”

  “Anythin’.”

  “Go straight to bed. I’ll need you in the morning.”

  The driver flicked his reins and the cab clattered off.

  Bell hurried on foot down Clarke, over the rail yards on Harrison Street, and waited for a tall-masted schooner to pass before he could cross the South Branch of the Chicago River on an ancient cast-iron jackknife bridge. It took a long time to creak back down, and he recalled that when he apprenticed in Chicago there were cries to replace it with a modern bascule bridge. But Chicago’s corrupt aldermen could not agree who would do the work and who would pay for it.

  Black’s Social, like Little’s Exchange, was a cut above the ordinary workingman’s saloon, being near the LaSalle Street terminus for New York Central passenger trains. Drinks were not cheap, and the free lunch was correspondingly lavish, served by a chef in white who presided over the newest of innovations, a stainless steel steam table. The customers were businessmen, clerks, and drummers dressed in sack suits and sporting vests, watch chains, and a variety of head- and neckwear.

  The express messengers were easy to spot if you knew what to look for. While dressed like businessmen or clerks or drummers, they had the steadier gaze of men who worked at a profession with a high mortality rate. Protecting gold, cash, bearer bonds, and jewels locked in their fortified express cars, they routinely encountered masked robbers whose methods of attack ranged from derailing trains to blasting open cars with dynamite and shooting the survivors. They were famous for shooting back.

  Bell, like every Van Dorn, often caught free train rides in their express cars as the messengers enjoyed the company of gun-toting detectives who knew their business. He greeted some he knew, bought drinks, and established who was currently working on the 20th Century Limited, the New York Central train most likely patronized by passengers who could afford fifteen-carat diamonds.

  Bell had been at it several hours when Wish walked in in a clean suit and went straight to the coffee urn at the lunch table. He downed a cup black, poured another, and wandered over to join Bell. “How are we doing?”

  “The Twentieth Century is running five consists,” Bell answered, meaning that five separate trains carried the 20th drumhead to accommodate demand. “I found messengers from four of them, no luck. The fifth is coming in any minute. How are you doing?”

  “Tip-top,” said Wish, observing the crowded saloon through slitted eyes. He was swaying slightly on his feet but looked otherwise indestructible. “There’s your fellow walking in now. Ben Lent. I’ve ridden with him. He’s all right.”

  Ben Lent was short and powerfully built. The scars on his cheeks looked more likely from bullets than fists. He greeted Wish warmly, kidded him about the coffee cup, “Where a glass ought to be,” and shook hands hello with Bell. And with Ben Lent, just off the last train of the day, they hit the jackpot. Bell described the necklace that Laurence Rosania was supposedly intending to steal.

  “Mrs. Stambaugh.”

  Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke exchanged glances.

  “Mrs. Stambaugh?”

  “Rose Stambaugh?”

  “The lady herself. And still quite a looker, I don’t mind saying. She stopped personally in the car to ask me to keep a special eye on it.”

  Wish grinned at Isaac Bell. “Doubt your Society page Furrier would have tumbled to Mrs. Stambaugh.”

  Bell agreed. Mrs. Stambaugh’s jewelry-shopping expedition to New York would never make the Society pages of either city. She could easily afford the expensive necklace that attracted Rosania, but her vast fortune was neither inherited nor earned in the conventional manner, as Rose Stambaugh had been for forty years the greatly admired proprietress of the finest brothel in Chicago.

  “That must be some necklace for Rosania to risk a lynching if he’s caught,” said Wish. “Everyone loves Mrs. Stambaugh — cops, judges, politicians, even the Cardinal. You remember, Isaac. I took you to meet her once.”

  “I sure do.” Bell recalled a shapely little blonde of uncertain years with an hourglass figure, an arresting smile, and a welcoming glint in her fiery blue eyes.

  “When was this?” Bell asked Lent.

  “Last week.”

  Bell said to Wish Clarke, “There’s a charity ball for the news boys tomorrow night at the Palmer House. Do you think the bluenoses will let her into that?”

  “They’ll take her money anywhere since she retired.”

  “Does she still live on Dearborn?”

  “Moved to a mansion on the North Shore.”

  * * *

  The two detectives rented a Baker Electric Runabout and found the new Stambaugh mansion just as night fell. It was enormous, fenced by heavy wrought iron on three sides and open to Lake Michigan on the fourth. Golden light streamed from many windows, and music wafted on the wind blowing off the lake. They parked the Baker on the darkest stretch of the street in a space between an Aultman Steamer and a long five-passenger Apperson Tonneau and watched from the shadows of the leather top. Every half hour, one of them took a walk around the neighborhood.

  A policeman came along and peered in the car.

  “Van Dorn,” Wish told him and slipped him three dollars.

  Buggies clip-clopped past, and occasionally a grand carriage rolled behind a team of four. Another cop stopped and peered in. Wish gave him three dollars. More carriages passed, stopping at parties at other mansions along the street. Wish expressed the concern that Rose Stambaugh was wearing her new necklace to host a party, but Bell assured him, judging by the Aultman and the Apperson, that her gathering tonight was not big enough to rate the display and it would be locked in her safe, awaiting Rosania.

  “She’ll save it for the Palmer House.”

  A third cop came along. Wish gave him three dollars. Bell worried that the bribe seekers would scare Rosania off. When
a fourth appeared soon after, he said, “I’ll do this one.” He plunged his hand deep in his pocket, sprang from the Baker.

  “What do we have here?” asked the cop, a tall, jowly man with a walrus mustache hung like a Christmas ornament on a bad-tempered face.

  “A twenty-dollar gold piece,” said Isaac Bell, holding it up. “What’s your name?”

  “Muldoon,” the cop lied.

  “Keep ten, Muldoon. Share the rest with the boys and save them the trip.” He held on to it until the cop nodded, agreeing that he would be the last, and left.

  At midnight, the music stopped. Musicians filed out of the Stambaugh service entrance. Three men in dinner jackets exited the front gate, laughing, and piled into the Apperson. A couple left the mansion holding hands, raised steam on the Aultman, and drove away. Lights began going out.

  “This is looking like a bust,” Wish muttered.

  “I’ll take another look around.”

  Bell made sure no one was coming and got out of the Baker. The wind was picking up, getting brisk, and it carried a sound that it took him a moment to place, as it was not a noise he associated with a city street. He darted around the fence and stared at the lake, which was dark but for shipping lights and channel markers. He raced back to the car.

  Wish saw him coming and stepped down.

  “He came on a boat. I heard the sails flapping.”

  Bell and Wish Clarke rounded the corner of the fence and ran along it to the water. The mansion had a dock, and Bell could see a small sloop tied to it with its mast bare.

  “He dropped the sails. He’s in the house.”

  “That son of gun is quick,” said Wish. “He’ll be in and out while most safecrackers would still be building their nerve.”

  They climbed the iron fence and found a spot in the shrubbery from where they could watch both the house and the boat. Thirty minutes passed. Bell began to get anxious. “Wish, cover the front door in case he leaves on foot.”

  Wish hurried to the street.

  Bell kept watching. Moments later, a shadow emerged from a second-story window and descended the back wall of the mansion.