The Spy Page 5

  Ted Whitmark didn’t like it but he had no choice but to exit, which he did with a grave “Don’t be keeping her too long, Bell. The poor girl is still recovering from the shock of her father’s death.”

  “This will just take a minute,” Bell assured him.

  Dorothy slid the pocket doors shut. “Thank you. Ted gets flatteringly jealous.”

  “I imagine,” said Bell, “he has many good qualities to have captured your hand.”

  She looked Bell straight in the face. “I am not rushing into anything,” she informed him in what the tall detective could not help but interpret as a blunt and flattering statement of interest from a very appealing woman.

  “What line is Ted in?” Bell asked, diplomatically changing the subject.

  “Ted sells foodstuffs to the Navy. In fact, he’s leaving soon for San Francisco to get ready to provision the Great White Fleet when it arrives. Are you married, Mr. Bell?”

  “I am engaged.”

  An unreadable smile danced across her beautiful lips. “Pity.”

  “To be perfectly honest,” said Bell, “it is not a pity. I am a very lucky man.”

  “Perfect honesty is a fine quality in a man. Are you visiting today for more important reasons than to not flirt with me?”

  Bell took out the fountain pen. “Do you recognize this?”

  Her face clouded. “Of course. That’s my father’s pen. I gave it to him for his birthday.”

  Bell handed it to her. “You may as well hold on to it, then. I took it from his desk.”

  “Why?”

  “To confirm that he had used it to write his letter.”

  “The so-called suicide letter? Anyone could have written that.”

  “Not quite anyone. Either your father or a skillful forger.”

  “You know my position on that. It is not possible that he killed himself.”

  “I will keep looking.”

  “What about the paper the letter was written on?”

  “It was his.”

  “I see… And the ink!” she said, suddenly eager. “How do we know it was written with the same ink as in his pen? Perhaps it wasn’t this pen. I bought it in a stationer’s shop. The Waterman Company must sell thousands.”

  “I’ve have already given samples of the ink in this pen and on the letter to a chemistry laboratory to ascertain whether the ink is different.”

  “Thank you,” she said, her face falling. “It’s not likely, is it?”

  “I’m afraid not, Dorothy.”

  “But if it is his ink, it still doesn’t prove he wrote that letter.”

  “Not beyond all doubt,” Bell agreed. “But I must tell you frankly that while each of these facts must be investigated, they are not likely to give us a definitive answer.”

  “What will?” she asked. She seemed suddenly bewildered. Tears glinted in her eyes.

  Isaac Bell was touched by her suffering and confusion. He took her hands in his. “Whatever it is, if it exists, we will find it.”

  “The Van Dorns never give up?” she asked with a brave smile.

  “Never,” Bell promised, although in his heart he had less and less hope that he could lay her pain to rest.

  She clung to his hands. When she finally let them go, she stepped closer and kissed his cheek. “Thank you. That’s all I can ask.”

  “I’ll keep in touch,” said Bell.

  “Would you stay for a cocktail?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t, thank you. I’m expected in New York.” As she walked him to the door, Bell glanced into the dining room and remarked, “That is a splendid table. Is it a Mackintosh?” “It sure is,” she answered proudly. “Father used to say if buying a piece of art that he could not afford meant eating beans for supper, he would eat beans for supper.”

  Bell had to wonder if Langner had gotten tired of beans and accepted a bribe from a steel mill. As he stepped through the gate he looked back. Dorothy was standing on the step, looking for all the world, he thought, like a fairy princess locked in a tower.

  THE B & O RAILROAD’S ROYAL LIMITED was the fastest and most luxurious train from Washington to New York. As night darkened the lead crystal windows, Isaac Bell used the quiet journey to review the hunt for the Frye Boys. The state line-jumping bank robbers that Van Dorn detectives had been tracking through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio had vanished somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. As had Detective John Scully.

  Dinner aboard the Royal, the equal of Delmonico’s or the new Plaza Hotel, was served in a mahogany-paneled dining car. Bell had Maryland rockfish and a half bottle of Mumm, and reflected upon how much Dorothy Langner reminded him of his fiancée. Clearly, were she not grieving for her father, Dorothy would be a quick-witted, interesting woman, much like Marion Morgan. The women had similar backgrounds: each lost her mother young and had been educated more than most women thanks to doting fathers who were accomplished men and wanted their daughters to exercise their talents fully.

  Physically, Marion and Dorothy could not be more different. Dorothy’s hair was a glossy black mane, Marion’s a gleaming straw blond; Dorothy’s eyes were a compelling blue-gray, Marion’s an arresting coral-sea green. Both were tall, slim, and lithe. And both, he thought with a smile, could stop traffic by merely stepping into the street.

  Bell checked his gold pocket watch as the Royal pulled into its Jersey City terminal. Nine o’clock. Too late to visit Marion at her hotel in Fort Lee if she was shooting pictures tomorrow. The laugh was on him. Marion was directing a two-reel moving picture about imaginary bank robbers while he was chasing real ones. But a movie drama, he had already learned from observing her at work, took as much planning and detail work as the real thing. And for that, a girl needed her sleep.

  He scanned the newsstands and the papers that boys were hawking when he got off the train. Headlines dueled for attention. Half proclaimed a fantastic variety of Japanese threats to the Great White Fleet if-as was rumored-President Roosevelt ordered it close to the Japanese Islands. Half blamed the murder of a New York school-teacher on Chinese white slavers. But it was the weather banners Bell was searching, hoping for a bad forecast.

  “Excellent!” he exclaimed aloud. The Weather Bureau predicted clouds and rain.

  Marion would not have to rise at dawn to catch every available ray of sunlight.

  He hurried from the terminal. The sixteen-mile trolley ride to Fort Lee would take at least an hour, but there might be a better way. The Jersey City Police were experimenting with a motor patrol like New York’s across the river and, as he expected, one of their six-cylinder Ford autos was sitting in front of the terminal manned by a sergeant and patrolman formerly of the Mounted Division.

  “Van Dorn,” Bell addressed the sergeant, who looked a little lost without his horse. “It’s worth twenty dollars to get me to Cella’s Park Hotel in Fort Lee.”

  Ten would have done it. For twenty, the sergeant cranked the siren.

  THE RAIN STARTED as the racing police Ford crested the Palisades. Flinging mud, it tore down Fort Lee’s Main Street, skidded along the trolley tracks, and whisked past a movie studio whose glass walls glittered in its feeble headlamps. Outside the village, they pulled up to Cella’s, a large white two-story frame building set in a picnic grounds.

  Bell bounded across the front porch with a big grin on his face. The dining room, which turned into a bar at night, was still open and doing a roaring business as the actors, directors, and cameramen conceded that without sunlight to film by, tomorrow was a lost day. A gang of pitch-perfect singers was grouped around the piano harmonizing,

  “You can go as far as you like with me

  In my merry Oldsmobile.”

  He spotted Marion at a corner table, and his heart nearly stopped. She was laughing, deep in conversation with two other women directors whom Bell had met before: Christina Bialobrzesky, who claimed to be a Polish countess but whose accent sounded to Bell’s ear like New Orleans, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed Mademoiselle Duvall of
Pathé Frères.

  Marion looked up. She saw him standing in the doorway and jumped to her feet with a radiant smile. Bell rushed across the room. She met him halfway, and he picked her up in his arms and kissed her.

  “What a wonderful surprise!” she exclaimed. She was still in her working clothes-shirtwaist, long skirt, and a snug jacket. Her blond hair was heaped up in back, out of her way, exposing her long, graceful neck.

  “You look lovely.”

  “Liar! I look like I’ve been up since five in the morning.”

  “You know I never lie. You look terrific.”

  “Well, so do you. And then some… Have you eaten?”

  “Dinner on the train.”

  “Come. Join us. Or would you rather we sit alone?”

  “I’ll say hello first.”

  The hotel proprietor approached, beaming with fond memories of Bell’s last visit and rubbing his hands. “Champagne, again, Mr. Bell?”

  “Of course.”

  “For the table?”

  “For the room!”

  “Isaac!” said Marion. “There are fifty people in here.”

  “Nothing in my grandfather Isaiah’s will says I can’t spend a portion of his five million dollars on a toast to the beauty of Miss Marion Morgan. Besides, they say that Grandfather had an eye for the ladies.”

  “So five million was not all you inherited.”

  “And when they get drunk, they won’t notice us slipping upstairs to your room.”

  She led him by the hand. Christina and Mademoiselle Duvall were also still in their work clothes, though the flamboyant Frenchwoman wore her usual riding pants. She kissed Bell’s cheeks and called him “Eee-zahk.”

  “This week we all three are each shooting about bank row-bears, Eee-zahk. You must give me inspector tips.”

  “She wants more than tips,” Marion whispered with a grin.

  “Are bank row-bears not the symbol of Americain freedom?” Mademoiselle Duvall demanded.

  Bell returned a grim smile. “Bank robbers are symbols of death and terror. The trio I’m chasing at the moment routinely shoot everyone in the building.”

  “Because they fear to be recognized,” said the French director. “My bank row-bears will shoot no one because they will be of the poor and known by the poor.”

  Christina rolled her eyes. “Like Row-ben Hoods?” she asked acerbically.

  “Just so the audience knows who’s who,” Marion suggested, “you better make them wear masks.”

  “A mask can only mask a stranger,” said Mademoiselle Duvall.

  “Were I to don a mask”-she demonstrated with her scarf, drawing the silk across her Gallic nose and sensual mouth so that only her eyes were visible-“Eee-zahk will still recognize me by my gaze.”

  “That’s because you’re making eyes at him,” laughed Marion.

  Isaac Bell’s expression changed abruptly.

  “Is not my fault! Eee-Zahk is too handsome to contain myself. For that, I would have to pull the wool over my eyes.”

  Now they noticed his features harden. He appeared remote and cold. Mademoiselle Duvall reached out and touched his arm. “Chéri,” she apologized. “You are too serious. Forgive my behavior if I was inapproprié.”

  “Not at all,” Bell said, patting her hand distractedly as he gripped Marion’s tightly under the table. “But you have given me a strange idea. Something to think about.”

  “No more thinking tonight,” said Marion.

  Bell stood up. “Excuse me. I have to send a wire.”

  The hotel had a telephone that he used to call the New York office and dictate a wire to be sent to John Scully care of every Van Dorn post in the region where the detective had last been heard from.

  NAME CHANGED FRYES HEADED HOME NEAR

  FIRST JOB IN NEW JERSEY

  Marion was smiling in the lobby next to the stairs. “I said good night for you.”

  7

  GET DOWN TO GREENWICH VILLAGE AND BRING BACK Dr. Cruson,” Isaac Bell ordered an apprentice when he rushed into Van Dorn’s Knickerbocker office early the next morning. “You are authorized to take a taxi both ways. On the jump!”

  Dr. Daniel Cruson was a handwriting expert.

  The apprentice raced off.

  Bell read his telegrams. The laboratory in Washington confirmed that the ink on Arthur Langner’s note was the same ink in Langner’s pen. He was not surprised.

  A wire from Pennsylvania demonstrated the shortcomings of John Scully’s lone-wolf approach to detecting. The operatives who Joe Van Dorn had assigned to assist Scully while Bell investigated the Arthur Langner death had sent:

  CAN’T FIND SCULLY.

  STILL LOOKING.

  RETURN C/O WESTERN UNION SCRANTON AND

  PHILADELPHIA.

  Bell growled a mild oath under his breath. They had split up to increase their chances of finding Scully. Ifthey didn’t find him by noon, it would fall to him to inform the boss that the detectives assigned to help Scully track the Frye Boys were instead tracking Scully.

  Bell called for the research operative he had brought into the case. Grady Forrer was a grizzly bear of man with an immense chest and belly. He looked like a fellow you would want on your side in a barroom brawl. But his greatest strengths were a ferocious determination to track down the minutest details and a prodigious memory.

  “Have you found out where home was for these hydrophobic skunks?” Bell asked. “Where did they grow up?”

  The research man shook his head. “I’ve been beating my brains out, Isaac. Can’t find any set of three Frye brothers anywhere in New Jersey. Tried cousins. No go.”

  Bell said, “I have an idea about that. What if they changed their name at the time of their first unauthorized withdrawal? That original robbery was in the middle of the state, if I recall. East Brunswick Farmers’ Mutual Savings.”

  “Hick-town bank about halfway to Princeton.”

  “We always ascribed their gunning down the teller and the customer to viciousness. But what if those three were stupid enough to rob the nearest bank to home?”

  Grady Forrer stood up straighter.

  “What if they murdered witnesses because they were recognized-even while wearing masks. Maybe the witnesses knew them as local boys. Little Johnny down the road grew up and got a gun. Remember their first note in blood? ‘Fear the Frye Boys.’ ”

  “So maybe they weren’t so stupid, after all,” marveled the research man. “From then on everyone called them the ‘Frye Boys.’ ”

  “Just like they wanted us to. Find a family near that East Brunswick bank with three brothers or cousins who suddenly disappeared. Even two brothers and a next-door neighbor.”

  Bell wired the operatives sent to help Scully, and Scully himself, instructing them to head for East Brunswick.

  Merci, Mademoiselle Duvall!

  And who else has been steering my thoughts?

  Which brought him straight back to his photograph of Arthur Langner’s suicide note. He laid it next to the snapshot he had taken yesterday morning of one of Langner’s handwritten patent applications. He pored over them with a magnifying glass, searching for inconsistencies that might suggest forgery. He could see none. But he was not an expert, which was why he had summoned the handwriting expert from Greenwich Village.

  Dr. Daniel Cruson preferred the high-sounding title “graphologist.” His white beard and bushy eyebrows fit a man who spouted lofty theories about the European “talking cure” of Drs. Freud and Jung. He was also prone to statements like “The complex robs the ego of light and nourishment,” which was why Bell avoided him when he could. But Cruson possessed a fine eye for forgery. So fine that Bell suspected that “Dr. Graphology” made ends meet by cobbling up the occasional bank check.

  Cruson inspected the photograph of the suicide note with a magnifying glass, then screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and repeated the process. At last he sat back in his chair, shaking his head.

  Bell asked, “D
o you see inconsistencies in that handwriting that might suggest it was penned by a forger?”

  Cruson said, “You are a detective, sir.”

  “You know I am,” Bell said curtly to head off a windy discourse.

  “You are familiar with the work of Sir William Herschel?”

  “Fingerprint identification.”

  “But Sir William also believed that handwriting exposes character.”

  “I am less interested in character than forgery.”

  Cruson did not hear. “From this mere sample, I can tell that the man who wrote this note was eccentric, highly artistic, and very dramatic, too. Given to the grand gesture. Deeply sensitive with powerful feelings that could be overwhelming.”

  “In other words,” Bell interrupted, bleakly conceding he would have to report the worst to Dorothy Langner, “the emotional sort likely to commit suicide.”

  “So tragic to take his own life so young.”

  “Langner wasn’t young.”

  “Given time, with psychological analysis, he could have investigated the sources of his sorrow and learned to control his self-destructive impulses.”

  “Langner was not young,” Bell repeated.

  “He was very young.”

  “He was sixty years old.”

  “Impossible! Look at this hand. See the bold and easy flow. An older man’s writing cramps-the letters get smaller and trail off as the hands stiffen with age. This is beyond any doubt the handwriting of a man in his twenties.”

  “Twenties?” echoed Bell, suddenly electrified.

  “No older than thirty, I guarantee you.”

  Bell had a photographic memory. Instantly he returned in his mind’s eye to Arthur Langner’s office. He saw the bookshelves lined with bound volumes of Langner’s patent applications. He had had to open several to find a sample for his camera. Those filed before 1885 were handwritten. The more recent were typed.

  “Arthur Langner played the piano. His fingers would have been more supple than those of the average man his age.”

  Cruson shrugged. “I am neither musician nor physiologist.”

  “But if his fingers were not more supple, then this could be a forgery.”