The Race ib-4 Read online

  Whiteway was dressed in a suit with a silk necktie, and his hair was combed in grand golden waves. “I want you to know that I’ve put a lot of thought in what I am about to say to you,” he said, and began pacing about the narrow parlor. “Odd. I feel a little tongue-tied.”

  Josephine curled up in an overstuffed chair, tucked her bare feet under her, and watched him warily. “I hope you are not changing your mind,” she said. “I’m doing much better. My times are improving. I’ve been catching up. And now that the poor baronet is out of the race, I have a very good chance.”

  “Of course you have!”

  “Joe Mudd isn’t as fast. And Steve Stevens can’t keep going much longer.”

  “You’re going to win. I’m sure of it.”

  Josephine grinned. “That’s a relief. You looked so nervous, I thought you were dropping me. . But what are you trying to say?”

  Whiteway stood to his full height, thrust out his chest and belly, and blurted, “Marry me!”

  “What?”

  “I’ll make a wonderful husband, and you’ll be rich, and you can fly aeroplanes every day until we have children. . What do you say?”

  After a long silence, Josephine said, “I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s very nice of you to offer, but-”

  “But what? What could be better?”

  Josephine took a deep breath and climbed to her feet. Whiteway opened his arms to embrace her.

  “THEN WHAT HAPPENED?” whispered Marion when Bell reported to her at breakfast in the Josephine Special’s lavish dining car. Her enormous coral-sea green eyes were wide and so beautiful that for a long moment Bell lost his train of thought.

  “Did she say yes?” Marion prompted.

  “No.”

  “Good. Preston is too in love with himself to be a loving husband. If she’s as sweet a girl as I read in the newspapers, she deserves better.”

  “You’ve seen more of her than the newspaper readers.”

  “We’ve only said hello in passing. But I would have thought she would have answered ‘Maybe.’”

  “Why?” Bell asked.

  Marion thought on that. “She strikes me as someone who gets what she wants.”

  “It was a sort-of maybe. She said she had to think about it.”

  “I suspect she has no one to talk to. I’ll give her an ear. And an opinion, if she wants one.”

  “I was hoping you would say that,” said Bell. “In fact, I was hoping you would put your mind to what Harry Frost meant when he said that she and Celere were up to something.”

  Marion glanced out the window. A stiff wind was spinning miniature tornadoes of coal smoke, wheat chaff, and cinders around the trains. “No flying today. I will do it right now.”

  “I WANT TO BE LIKE YOU WHEN I GROW UP,” Josephine grinned at Marion. They were alone in the front parlor of Josephine’s private car, curled up in facing armchairs. Coffee cups sat between them untouched.

  “I hope I don’t seem that old. Besides, you are grown up. You’re driving a flying machine across the continent.”

  “That’s not the same. I want to be a straight shooter like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You told me straight off that Isaac overheard Preston asking me to marry him.”

  Marion said, “I also told you that I’m very curious what you think of his proposal.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, what does he want to marry me for?” She gave Marion one of her big open grins. “I’m just a silly girl two seconds off the farm.”

  “Men are strange creatures,” Marion smiled back. “Most of them. Maybe he loves you.”

  “He didn’t say he loved me.”

  “Well, Preston is not very bright in many ways. On the other hand, he is handsome.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And very, very wealthy.”

  “So was Harry.”

  “Unlike Harry, Preston, for all his many, many faults, is no brute.”

  “Yes, but he’s big like Harry.”

  “And getting bigger,” laughed Marion. “If he isn’t careful, he’ll end up like President Taft.”

  “Or Steve Stevens.”

  They both laughed. Marion watched her closely, and asked, “Are you considering it at all?”

  “Not at all. I don’t love him. I mean, I know he’d buy me aeroplanes. He said he’d buy me aeroplanes at least until we have children. Then wants me to stop flying.”

  “Good Lord,” said Marion, “Preston is even a bigger fool than I thought.”

  “You don’t think I should marry him. . do you?”

  Marion said, “I can’t tell you that. You have to know what you want to do.”

  “You see, if I win the fifty thousand dollars, I’ll have my own money. I’ll buy my own aeroplanes.”

  Marion said, “Dear, if you win the cross-country race, they’ll be lining up to give you aeroplanes.”

  “Really?”

  “I am sure of it. They know that customers will buy aeroplanes you fly. So marrying Preston really has nothing to do with aeroplanes, does it?”

  “If I win.”

  “Isaac says you have no doubt you’ll win. And,” she added with another laugh, “he has no doubt you’ll win. He’s bet three thousand dollars on you.”

  Josephine nodded distractedly and looked out her railcar window. The wind was still rattling the glass. She closed her eyes and started to form words with her lips, then pressed her lips tightly together. She was aching to talk, Marion thought. It seemed as if Preston’s proposal was forcing to her think about things she would prefer not to.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s really troubling you?”

  Josephine pursed her lips and exhaled sharply. “Can you keep a secret?” Her hazel eyes bored pleadingly into Marion’s.

  “No,” Marion answered, “I can’t. Not from Isaac.”

  Josephine rolled her eyes. “Why are you so honest, Marion?”

  “I prefer to be,” said Marion. “What do you want to tell me?”

  “Nothing. . When I saw Marco shot, I was so surprised.”

  “I would think so.”

  “It was the last thing I expected.”

  “AND THEN,” Marion Morgan confessed to Isaac Bell, “I blundered. Instead of keeping my silly mouth shut while she completed her thought, I said something imbecilic like ‘Who would expect to see one’s husband shoot one’s friend?’ and Josephine shut up tight as a clam.”

  “The last thing she expected,” Bell mused, “implying she expected something else to happen. As if she was ‘up to something,’ just like Harry Frost said. . Is she going to marry Preston?”

  “She finally said, no, absolutely not.”

  “Will she change her mind?”

  “Only if she were to fear that she would definitely not win the race.”

  “Because she wouldn’t win the fifty thousand dollars, and Preston is rich?”

  “You should have seen her eyes light up when I told her that if she wins inventors will give her aeroplanes. I don’t think she ever thought of that before. It’s like she doesn’t think very far ahead. She’ll do anything she has to to keep herself in flying machines. Including marrying Preston. But only for the machines. She’s not the kind of girl who wants a bunch of kids, jewels, and houses.”

  “Which reminds me,” asked Isaac Bell, taking Marion in his arms, “when are you going to marry me?”

  Marion looked at the emerald on her finger. Then she smiled into his eyes. She traced his golden mustache with the tip of her finger and kissed him firmly on his lips. “The moment you absolutely insist. You know I would do anything for you. But until then, I am very, very happy and totally content to be your fiancée.”

  THE KANSAN WIND howled all that day and through the night and into the next morning.

  With no one flying anywhere, Andy Moser took the opportunity to completely disassemble Bell’s Gnome and put it back together, cleaned, polished, tuned, and tweaked.
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  Joe Mudd’s bricklayers, masons, plasterers, and locomotive firemen tore the Liberator’s engine down into small pieces and finally isolated the cracked copper tube that was the source of the oil leak which kept turning the red machine black.

  Russian Dmitri Platov directed Steve Stevens’s mechanicians in another futile effort to permanently synchronize the biplane’s twin motors. When Stevens complained rudely and threatened to dock everyone’s salary, the usually easygoing thermo engine inventor stalked away to help Josephine take the head off her Antoinette to replace a leaky gasket.

  Isaac Bell watched them. Platov kept talking to her in an urgent, low voice. Bell wondered whether she was discussing Whiteway’s proposal with the Russian – an odd thought, but their conversation seemed so intense. Whenever he drifted close to overhear, they stopped talking.

  “ WHY IS DETECTIVE BELL LURKING?” asked Marco Celere, giving Bell a friendly wave with his Dmitri Platov slide rule.

  “He’s looking out for me.”

  “Surely he is not afraid for your safety in the presence of kindly Platov?”

  “I doubt he’s afraid of anything,” said Josephine.

  Celere began chiseling the old head gasket off Josephine’s engine block. “You are somewhat prickly today, my dear.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Starting with Mr. Whiteway’s proposal?”

  “What do you think?” she retorted sullenly.

  “I think you should marry him.”

  “Marco!”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Marco, that’s disgusting. How could you want me to marry another man?”

  “He’s more than ‘another man.’ He’s the richest newspaper publisher in America. He, and his money, could be very helpful to you. And me.”

  “What good will it do us if I’m married to him?”

  “You would leave him for me, when the time is right.”

  “Marco, it makes me sick to think you would want me to be with him.”

  “Well, I’d expect you to postpone the honeymoon until after the race. Surely you could plead the necessity to concentrate on winning.”

  “What about the wedding night?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

  THE WINDS DROPPED. The Weather Bureau published reports that it might be calm for a few hours. Late in the afternoon, the racers swarmed off the Morris County Fairgrounds. Before dark, all alighted safely in Wichita, where Preston Whiteway strode dramatically into the glare of Marion Morgan’s Picture World Cooper-Hewitt mercury-arc lamps.

  Marion’s operators were cranking two movie cameras, the second being an expense Whiteway had refused to bear until now despite Marion’s insistence that two cameras would create exciting shifts of view that would draw bigger audiences. She had one camera aimed at the publisher, the other trained to capture the reactions of the newspaper reporters.

  Tomorrow, Whiteway announced, would be an official off day. It would not count against the fifty-day limit because, “Tomorrow I am going to throw the biggest party the state of Kansas has ever seen to celebrate my engagement to Miss Josephine Josephs – America’s Sweetheart of the Air.”

  Marion Morgan looked up from her station between the cameras to lock astonished gazes with Isaac Bell. Bell shook his head in disbelief.

  A San Francisco Inquirer correspondent had been primed to call out, “When’s the wedding, Mr. Whiteway, sir?” Other Whiteway employees chorused, as they had been instructed to, “Do we have to wait until the race is over?”

  “Josephine wouldn’t hear of it,” Whiteway boomed back heartily. “At my beautiful bride’s special request we’re having a Texas-sized wedding in the great city of Fort Worth’s North Side Coliseum, which is known far and wide as ‘the most opulent and dynamic pavilion in the entire Western Hemisphere.’ We’ll be married the moment the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup and fifty thousand dollars flies into Fort Worth, Texas.”

  Marion flashed Bell a private grin and mouthed the word “Shameless.”

  Bell grinned back, “Unabashedly.”

  But there was no denying that when “booming” his air race, Preston Whiteway could lather up the public hotter than P. T. Barnum, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Mark Twain combined.

  The only question was, why had Josephine changed her mind? Her times were improving, often surpassing the others. And her flying machine was running beautifully. She had no reason to fear she couldn’t win the race.

  32

  INVESTIGATE DMITRI PLATOV,

  Isaac Bell wired Van Dorn researchers in Chicago and New York. He was sure that the Russian inventor had somehow influenced Josephine to marry Preston Whiteway. Why Platov would want her to marry Whiteway was an enigma. But what intrigued the tall detective as much was how Platov had the power to change Josephine’s mind about a decision as deeply important and intensely personal as marriage.

  Bell could not ignore such mystery about a man who had the run of the air race infields and was welcomed in every hangar car. Particularly since Dmitri Platov had volunteered to fill in for Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s murdered mechanician days before the Englishman’s propeller broke loose and smashed him into a Kansas creek. And if there was any one mechanician in the race who knew his business, it was Platov.

  The researchers’ preliminary report, wired back in half a day, was baffling.

  The only information on Dmitri Platov was found in Van Dorn files that contained newspaper clippings about the Whiteway Cup preparations at Belmont Park, and Isaac Bell’s own reports from the infield. Similarly, newspaper reporters had described, with varying degrees of accuracy, Platov’s revolutionary thermo engine, but only in articles about its destruction in the accident that had killed Steve Stevens’s chief mechanician.

  Bell pondered the meaning of such a lack of information. It jibed with Danielle Di Vecchio’s assertion that she had never met Platov at the International Aeronautical Salon in Paris nor even heard his name there.

  Was it possible that Platov had never been at the Paris air meet? But if he had not been in Paris, then from whom had Marco Celere bought his so-called jet engine?

  Bell wired Research:

  CONCENTRATE ON THERMO ENGINE.

  ON THE JUMP!

  Then he called Dashwood into his headquarters car. “I’m taking you off the gamblers. Watch Dmitri Platov. Don’t let him know, but stick to him like his shadow.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “He’s making me uncomfortable,” said Bell. “He could be as innocent as he looks. But he had the opportunity to sabotage the Englishman’s pusher.”

  “Could he be Harry Frost’s inside man?” asked Dashwood.

  “He could be anything.”

  ISAAC BELL HALED the few Van Dorns in the Southwest he could get his hands on to defend Josephine’s wedding from Harry Frost’s Colt machine guns. As the private detectives hurried into Fort Worth and reported aboard the Eagle Special, he drummed in his strategy: “Make it impossible for Harry Frost to sneak close enough to do damage. Ransack your contacts. There are darned few of us, but if we pool our links to lawmen, railroad police, informers, gamblers, and criminals beholden to us, we can try to establish a perimeter equal to the Colts’ range and keep him outside it.”

  The stolen Colts’ long range was the threat. The machine guns were deadly up to a mile. But Frost could nearly treble the threat by elevating the barrels to loft indirect “plunging fire,” where bullets would rain down on the party indiscriminately from a distance as great as four thousand five hundred yards – the better part of three miles.

  “Not as tough as it sounds,” Bell assured the Van Dorns. “Fort Worth’s sheriff is kindly lending a hand with a whole passel of temporary deputies, including ranch hands in the immediate area. They’ll recognize strangers. And we’re getting railroad dicks. The Texas amp; Pacific line and the Fort Worth amp; Denver are cooperating.”
r />   “What if Harry Frost gets the same idea and hires his own locals?” asked a Los Angeles detective who had just stepped off the train, wearing a cream-colored bowler hat and a pink necktie.

  Bell said, “What do you say to that, Walt?” nodding to his old friend “Texas” Walt Hatfield, who had arrived on horseback.

  Lean as a steel rail and considerably tougher, the former Texas Ranger turned Van Dorn detective squinted under the brim of his J. B. Stetson at the California dandy. “Nothin’ to stop Frost from roundin’ up a salty bunch,” he drawled. “But he can’t drive them into town, as they would be types well known by peace officers. However, Isaac,” he said to Bell, “spottin’ Harry Frost ain’t stoppin’ him. I reckon from readin’ reports of your adventures thus far, Frost ain’t scairt of nothin’. He’d charge Hell with a bucket of water.”

  Bell shook his head. “Don’t count on Frost acting rashly. We’ll see no reckless attack, no hopeless charge. He told me straight, he’s not afraid of dying. But only after he kills Josephine.”

  HAVING SET UP HER CAMERAS and Cooper-Hewitt lamps in the North Side Coliseum, Marion Morgan joined Isaac Bell in his Van Dorn headquarters car. Bell complimented her new split riding skirt, which she had discovered in a Fort Worth department store that catered to wealthy ranchers’ wives, then asked, “How does the wedding venue look?” Preoccupied with establishing the perimeter, he had yet to inspect the inside of the coliseum.

  Marion laughed. “Do you recall how Preston described it?”

  “‘The most opulent and dynamic pavilion in the entire Western Hemisphere’?”

  “He left out one word: ‘livestock.’ The opulent and dynamic livestock pavilion is where they hold their National Feeders and Breeders cattle show. Josephine laughed so hard, she started crying.”

  “She’s a dairy farmer’s daughter.”

  “She said, ‘I’m getting married in a cow barn.’ In actual fact, it’s a grand building. Plenty of light for my cameras. Skylights in the roof, and electricity for my lamps. I’ll do fine. How about you?”