The Wrecker Read online

  A telegraph key rattled in the next room. Lillian Hennessy cocked her ear. When the noise stopped, the telegrapher hurried in with his transcription. Bell noticed that Lillian did not bother to read what was written on the paper, as she said to her father, “From Redding. Collision north of Weed. A workmen’s train fouled a signal. A materials train following didn’t know the freight was in the section and plowed into the back of it. The caboose telescoped into a freight car. Two train crew killed.”

  Hennessy leaped to his feet, red faced. “No sabotage? Fouled a signal, my eye. Those trains were bound for the Cascades Cutoff. Which means another delay.”

  Joseph Van Dorn stepped forward to calm the apoplectic railroad president.

  Bell moved closer to Lillian.

  “You know the Morse alphabet?” he asked quietly.

  “You’re observant, Mr. Bell. I’ve traveled with my father since I was a little girl. He’s never far from a telegraph key.”

  Bell reconsidered the young woman. Perhaps Lillian was more than the spoiled, headstrong only child she appeared to be. She could be a font of valuable information about her father’s inner circle. “Who is that lady who just joined us?”

  “Emma Comden is a family friend. She tutored me in French and German and tried very hard to improve my behavior”—Lillian blinked long lashes over her pale blue eyes and added—“at the piano.”

  Emma Comden wore a snug dress with a proper round collar and an elegant brooch at her throat. She was very much Lillian’s opposite, rounded where the younger woman was slim, eyes a deep brown, almost black, hair dark, lustrous chestnut with a glint of red, constrained in a French twist.

  “Do you mean you were educated at home so you could help your father?”

  “I mean that I was kicked out of so many eastern finishing schools that Father hired Mrs. Comden to complete my education.”

  Bell smiled back. “How can you still have time for French and German and the piano when you’re your father’s private secretary?”

  “I’ve outgrown my tutor.”

  “And yet Mrs. Comden remains ... ?”

  Lillian responded coolly. “If you have eyes, Mr. Detective, you might notice that Father is very fond of our ‘family friend.”’

  Hennessy noticed Isaac and Lillian talking. “What’s that?”

  “I was just saying that I’ve heard it said that Mrs. Hennessy was a great beauty.”

  “Lillian didn’t get that face from my side of the family. How much money are you paid to be a detective, Mr. Bell?”

  “The top end of the going rate.”

  “Then I have no doubt you understand that as the father of an innocent young woman, I am obliged to ask who bought you those fancy clothes?”

  “My grandfather Isaiah Bell.”

  Osgood Hennessy stared. He couldn’t have been more surprised if Bell had reported he had sprung from the loins of King Midas. “Isaiah Bell was your grandfather? That makes your father Ebenezer Bell, president of the American States Bank of Boston. Good God Almighty, a banker?”

  “My father is a banker. I am a detective.”

  “My father never met a banker in his life. He was a section hand, pounding spikes. You’re talking to a shirtsleeve railroader, Bell. I started out like he did, spiking rails to ties. I’ve carried my dinner pail. I’ve done my ten hours a day up through the grades: brakeman, engineer, conductor, telegrapher, dispatcher—up the line from track to station to general office.”

  “What my father is trying to say,” said Lillian, “is that he rose from pounding iron spikes in the hot sun to driving ceremonial gold spikes under a parasol.”

  “Don’t mock me, young lady.” Hennessy yanked another chart down from the ceiling. It was a blueprint, a fine-lined copy on pale blue paper that depicted in exquisite detail the engineering plans for a cantilevered truss bridge that spanned a deep gorge on two tall piers made of stone and steel.

  “This is where we’re headed, Mr. Bell, the Cascade Canyon Bridge. I hauled a top-hand engineer, Franklin Mowery, out of retirement to build me the finest railroad bridge west of the Mississippi, and Mowery’s almost finished. To save time, I built it ahead of the expansion by routing work trains on an abandoned timber track that snakes up from the Nevada desert.” He pointed at the map. “When we hole through here—Tunnel 13—we’ll find the bridge waiting for us. Speed, Mr. Bell. It’s all about speed.”

  “Do you face a deadline?” asked Bell.

  Hennessy looked sharply at Joseph Van Dorn. “Joe, can I assume that confidences are as safe with your detectives as they are with my attorneys?”

  “Safer,” said Van Dorn.

  “There is a deadline,” Hennessy admitted to Bell.

  “Imposed by your bankers?”

  “Not those devils. Mother Nature. Old Man Winter is coming, and when he gets to the Cascades that’s it for railroad construction ‘til Spring. I’ve got the best credit in the railroad business, but if I don’t connect the Cascades Cutoff to the Cascade Canyon Bridge before winter shuts me down even my credit will dry up. Between us, Mr. Bell, if this expansion stalls, I will lose any chance of completing the Cascades Cutoff the day after the first snowstorm.”

  Joseph Van Dorn said, “Rest easy, Osgood. We’ll stop him.”

  Hennessy was not soothed. He shook the blueprint as if to throttle it. “If these saboteurs stop me, it’ll take twenty years before anyone can tackle the Cascades Cutoff again. It’s the last hurdle impeding progress in the West, and I’m the last man alive with the guts to clear it.”

  Isaac Bell did not doubt that the old man loved his railroad. Nor did he forget the outrage in his own heart at the prospect of more innocent people killed and injured by the Wrecker. The innocent were sacred. But foremost in Bell’s mind at this moment was his memory of Wish Clarke stepping in his casual, offhanded way in front of a knife intended for Bell. He said, “I promise I will stop him.”

  Hennessy stared at him for a long time, taking his measure. Slowly, he settled into an armchair. “I’m relieved, Mr. Bell, having a top hand of your caliber.”

  When Hennessy looked to his daughter for agreement, he noticed that she was appraising the wealthy and well-connected detective like a new race car she would ask him to buy for her next birthday. “Son?” he asked. “Is there a Mrs. Bell?”

  Bell had already noticed that the lovely young woman was appraising him. Flattering, tempting too, but he did not take it personally. It was an easy guess why. He was surely the first man she had seen whom her father could not bully. But between her fascination and her father’s sudden interest in seeing her suitably married off, the moment was overdue for this particular gentleman to make his intentions clear.

  “I am engaged to be married,” he answered.

  “Engaged, eh? Where is she?”

  “She lives in San Francisco.”

  “How did she make out in the earthquake?”

  “She lost her home,” Bell replied cryptically, the memory still fresh of their first night together ending abruptly when the shock hurled their bed across the room and Marion’s piano had fallen through the front wall into the street.

  “Marion stayed on, caring for orphans. Now that most are settled, she has taken a position at a newspaper.”

  “Have you set a wedding date?” Hennessy asked.

  “Soon,” said Bell.

  Lillian Hennessy seemed to take “Soon” as a challenge. “We’re so far from San Francisco.”

  “One thousand miles.” said Bell “Much of it slow going on steep grades and endless switchbacks through the Siskiyou Mountains—the reason for your Cascades Cutoff, which will reduce the run by a full day,” he added, deftly changing the subject from marriageable daughters to sabotage. “Which reminds me, it would be helpful to have a railway pass.”

  “I’ll do better than that!” said Hennessy, springing to his feet. “You’ll have your railway pass—immediate free passage on any train in the country. You will also have a letter writ
ten in my own hand authorizing you to charter a special train anywhere you need one. You’re working for the railroad now.”

  “No, sir. I work for Mr. Van Dorn. But I promise to put your specials to good use.”

  “Mr. Hennessy has equipped you with wings,” said Mrs. Comden.

  “If only you knew where to fly ...” The beautiful Lillian smiled. “Or to whom.”

  When the telegraph key started clattering again, Bell nodded to Van Dorn, and they stepped quietly off the car onto the platform. A cold north wind whipped through the rail yard, swirling smoke and cinders. “I’ll need a lot of our men.”

  “They’re yours for the asking. Who do you want?”

  Isaac Bell spoke a long list of names. Van Dorn listened, nodding approval. When he had finished, Bell said, “I’d like to base out of Sacramento.”

  “I would have thought you’d recommend San Francisco.”

  “For personal reasons, yes. I would prefer the opportunity to be in the same city with my fiancée. But Sacramento has the faster rail connections up the Pacific Coast and inland. Could we assemble at Miss Anne’s?”

  Van Dorn did not conceal his surprise. “Why do you want to meet in a brothel?”

  “If this so-called Wrecker is taking on an entire continental railroad, he is a criminal with a broad reach. I don’t want our force seen meeting in a public place until I know what he knows and how he knows it.”

  “I’m sure Anne Pound will make room for us in her back parlor,” Van Dorn said stiffly. “If you think that’s the best course. But tell me, have you discovered something else beyond what you just reported to Hennessy?”

  “No, sir. But I do have a feeling that the Wrecker is exceptionally alert.”

  Van Dorn replied with a silent nod. In his experience, when a detective as insightful as Isaac Bell had a “feeling” the feeling took shape from small but telling details that most people wouldn’t notice. Then he said, “I’m awfully sorry about Aloysius.”

  “Came as something of a shock. The man saved my life in Chicago.”

  “You saved his in New Orleans,” Van Dorn retorted. “And again in Cuba.”

  “He was a crackerjack detective.”

  “Sober. But he was drinking himself to death. And you couldn’t save him from that. Not that you didn’t try.”

  “He was the best,” Bell said, stubbornly.

  “How was he killed?”

  “His body was crushed under the rocks. Clearly, Wish was right there at the precise spot where the dynamite detonated.”

  Van Dorn shook his head, sadly. “That man’s instincts were golden. Even drunk. I hated having to let him go.”

  Bell kept his voice neutral. “His sidearm was several feet from his body, indicating he had drawn it from his holster before the explosion.”

  “Could have been blown there by the explosion.”

  “It was that old single-action Army he loved. In the flap holster. It didn’t fall out. He must have had it in his hand.”

  Van Dorn countered with a cold question to confirm Bell’s conjecture that Aloysius Clarke had tried to prevent the attack. “Where was his flask?”

  “Still tucked in his clothing.”

  Van Dorn nodded and started to change the subject, but Isaac Bell was not finished.

  “I had to know how he got there in the tunnel. Had he died before or in the explosion? So I put his body on a train and brought it to a doctor in Klamath Falls. Stood by while he examined it. The doctor showed me that before Wish was crushed, he had taken a knife in the throat.”

  Van Dorn winced. “They slashed his throat?”

  “Not slashed. Pierced. The knife went in his throat, slid between two cervical vertebrae, severed his spinal cord, and emerged out the back of his neck. The doctor said it was done clean as a surgeon or a butcher.”

  “Or just lucky.”

  “If it was, then the killer got lucky twice.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Getting the drop on Wish Clarke would require considerable luck in the first place, wouldn’t you say?”

  Van Dorn looked away. “Anything left in the flask?”

  Bell gave his boss a thin, sad smile. “Don’t worry, Joe, I would have fired him, too. It was dry as a bone.”

  “Attacked from the front?”

  “It looks that way,” said Bell.

  “But you say Wish had already drawn his gun.”

  “That’s right. So how did the Wrecker get him with a knife?”

  “Threw it?” Van Dorn asked dubiously.

  Bell’s hand flickered toward his boot and came up with his throwing knife. He juggled the sliver of steel in his fingers, weighing it. “He’d need a catapult to drive a throwing knife completely through a big man’s neck.”

  “Of course ... Watch your step, Isaac. As you say, this Wrecker must be one quick-as-lightning hombre to get the drop on Wish Clarke. Even drunk.”

  “He will have the opportunity,” vowed Isaac Bell, “to show me how quick.”

  4

  THE ELECTRIC LIGHTS OF SANTA MONICA’S VENICE PIER illuminated the rigging of a three-masted ship docked permanently alongside it and the rooflines of a large pavilion. A brass band was playing John Philip Sousa’s “Gladiator March” in quick time.

  The beachcomber turned his back to the bittersweet music and walked the hard-packed sand toward the dark. The lights shimmered across the waves and cast a frothy shadow ahead of him, as the cool Pacific wind flapped his ragged clothes. It was low tide, and he was hunting for an anchor he could steal.

  He skirted a village of shacks. The Japanese fishermen who lived there had dragged their boats up on the beach, close to their shacks, to keep an eye on them. Just past the Japanese he found what he was looking for, one of the seagoing dories scattered along the beach by the United States Lifeboat Society to rescue shipwrecked sailors and drowning tourists. The boats were fully equipped for launching in an instant by volunteer crews. He pulled open the canvas and pawed in the dark, feeling oars, floats, tin bailers, and finally the cold metal of an anchor.

  He carried the anchor toward the pier. Before he reached the edge of the light fall, he plodded up the sloping deep sand and into the town. The streets were quiet, the houses dark. He dodged a night watchman on foot patrol and made his way, unchallenged, to a stable, which like most stables in the area was in the process of being converted to accommodate motor vehicles. Trucks and automobiles undergoing repair were parked helter-skelter among the wagons, buggies, and surreys. The scent of gasoline mingled with that of hay and manure.

  It was a lively place by day, frequented by hostlers, hackmen, wag oners, and mechanics, smoking and chewing and spinning yarns. But the only one up tonight was the blacksmith, who surprised the beachcomber by giving him a whole dollar for the anchor. He had only promised fifty cents, but he had been drinking and was one of those men who whiskey made generous.

  The blacksmith got busy, eager to transform the anchor before anyone noticed it had been stolen. He started by cutting off one of the two cast-iron flukes, battering it repeatedly with hammer and cold chisel until it snapped away. He filed burrs to smooth the ragged break. When he held the anchor up to the light, what was left of it looked like a hook.

  Sweating even in the cool of the night, he drank a bottle of beer and swallowed a deep pull from his bottle of Kellogg’s Old Bourbon before starting to drill the hole in the shank that the customer had asked for. Drilling cast iron was hard work. Pausing to catch his breath, he drank another beer. He finished at last, vaguely aware that one more swig of Kellogg’s and he would drill a hole in his hand instead of the hook.

  He wrapped the hook in the blanket the customer had provided and put it in the man’s carpetbag. Head reeling, he picked up the fluke he had removed from where it had fallen in the sand beside his anvil. He was wondering what he could make with it when the customer rapped on the door. “Bring it out here.”

  The man was standing in the dark, and the blacksm
ith saw even less of his sharp features than he had the night before. But he recognized his strong voice, his precise back east diction, his superior putting-on-airs manner, his height, and his city slicker’s knee-length, single-breasted frock coat.

  “I said bring it here!”

  The blacksmith carried the carpetbag out the door.

  “Shut the door!”

  He closed it behind him, blocking the light, and his customer took the bag with a brusque, “Thank you, my good man.”

  “Anytime,” mumbled the blacksmith, wondering what in heck a swell in a frock coat was going to do with half an anchor.

  A ten-dollar gold piece, a week’s work in these hard times, glittered through the shadows. The blacksmith fumbled for it, missed, and had to kneel in the sand to pick it up. He sensed the man looming closer. He looked over, warily, and he saw him reach into a rugged boot that didn’t match his fancy duds. Just then, the door behind him flew open, and light caught the man’s face. The blacksmith thought he looked familiar. Three grooms and an automobile mechanic staggered out the door, drunk as skunks, whooping with laughter when they saw him kneeling in the sand. “Damn!” shouted the mechanic. “Looks like Jim finished his bottle, too.”

  The customer whirled away and disappeared down the alley, leaving the blacksmith completely unaware that he had come within one second of being murdered by a man who killed just to be on the safe side.

  FOR MOST OF THE forty-seven years that the state capital of California had been in Sacramento, Anne Pound’s white mansion had provided congenial hospitality for legislators and lobbyists a short three blocks away. It was large and beautiful, built in the uncluttered early Victorian style. Gleaming white woodwork fringed turrets, gables, porches, and railings. Inside the waxed-walnut front door, an oil painting of the lady of the house in her younger years graced the grand foyer. Her red-carpeted staircase was so renowned in political circles that the level of a man’s connections in the state could be gauged by whether he smiled knowingly upon hearing the phrase “The Steps to Heaven.”