The Assassin Read online

  “Not really.”

  “I would.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s assume that instead of the disc cartilage dissolving, something knocked cervical three clean out of Mr. Hill’s vertebral column.”

  “Like what?” asked the coroner, then answered his own question. “. . . Like a bullet.”

  “You’re right,” said Isaac Bell. “It could have been a bullet . . . Aren’t you tempted to have a look?”

  “The man’s already buried in the ground.”

  Bell said, “I’d still be tempted to have a look.”

  “I’m strictly against disinterring bodies. It’s just a mess of a job.”

  “But this poor fellow was just a heap of bones.”

  Dr. McGrade nodded. “That’s true. Those bones looked polished like he’d passed a hundred years ago.”

  “Good point,” said Bell. “Why don’t we have a look?”

  “I can lend you shovels,” said the jailer.

  —

  The coroner at Fort Scott, a railroad town where several lines converged, was a powerfully built young doctor with a chip on his shoulder.

  Isaac Bell asked, “Did you see any bullet wounds?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why do you say ‘of course not’?”

  “Read my testimony to the coroner’s jury.”

  “I have read it.”

  “Then you know that Reed Riggs was mangled beyond recognition after falling off a railroad platform under a locomotive.”

  “Yes. But—”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing in your written report indicates that you did any more than write down what the railroad police told you—that Mr. Riggs fell under the locomotive that rolled over him.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I am not implying,” said Isaac Bell, “I am saying forthrightly and clearly—to your face, Doctor—that you did not examine Mr. Riggs’ body.”

  “It was a mutilated heap of flesh and bone. He fell under a locomotive. What do you expect?”

  “I expect a public official who is paid to determine the cause of a citizen’s death to look beyond the obvious.”

  “Now, listen to me, Mr. Private Detective.”

  “No, Doctor, you listen to me! I want you to look at that body again.”

  “It’s been buried two weeks.”

  “Dig it up!”

  The coroner rose to his feet. He was nearly as tall as Isaac Bell and forty pounds heavier. “I’ll give you fair warning, mister, get lost while you still can. I paid my way through medical school with money I won in the prize ring.”

  Isaac shrugged out of his coat and removed his hat. “As we have no gloves, I presume you’ll accommodate me with bare knuckles?”

  —

  “What did you do to your hand?” asked Archie Abbott.

  “Cut it shaving,” said Bell. “What do you think of that water tank?”

  They were pacing Fort Scott’s St. Louis–San Francisco Railway station platform where refiner Reed Riggs had fallen to his death. “Possible,” said Archie, imagining a rifle shot from the top of a tank in the Frisco train yard to where they stood on the platform. “I also like that signal tower. In fact, I like it better. Good angle from the roof.”

  “Except how did he climb up there without the dispatchers noticing?”

  “Climbed up in the dark while a train rumbled by.”

  “How’d he get down?”

  “Waited for night.”

  “But what if he missed his shot and someone noticed him? He would be trapped with no escape.”

  “You’re sure that Riggs was shot?”

  “No,” said Bell, “not positive. There’s definitely a hole in his skull. In a piece of the temporal bone, which wasn’t shattered. But it could have been pierced by something other than a bullet. Banged against a railroad spike or a chunk of gravel.”

  “What did the coroner think?”

  “He was inclined to agree with my assessment.”

  —

  Bell and Archie took the train down to Coffeyville, a booming refinery town just above the Kansas–Indian Territory border. They located Albert Hill’s refinery and the tank in which Hill had died while repairing the agitator.

  They looked for sight lines. They climbed to the roof of the boiler house, four hundred yards’ distance, then to the roof of the barrel house. Both offered uninterrupted shots at the tank. The barrel house had its own freight siding to receive the lumber trains that delivered wood for the staves.

  “Rides in and out,” said Archie.

  “I’d go for the boiler house,” said Bell. “They’d never hear a shot over the roar of the furnaces.”

  “If there was a shot.”

  “I told you,” said Bell. “Albert Hill’s number two cervical vertebra appeared to have been nicked.”

  Archie said, “Based on how he killed Spike Hopewell, the assassin is capable of hitting both Hill and Riggs. But he’s one lucky assassin that no one saw him. Or coolly deliberate in choosing his moment.”

  Isaac Bell disagreed. “That may be true of Albert Hill. But when Riggs was shot, the timing was dictated by the approach of the locomotive. In both cases, the shots were fired by a marksman as calculating and accurate as the killer who shot Spike Hopewell.”

  “If there were shots fired at all,” said Archie, and Wally Kisley agreed, saying, “There could have been shots, and shots would explain how the victims happened to fall, but they could have just as easily fallen as Spike Hopewell suggested to Isaac: one drunk, one overcome by fumes.”

  Bell said, “I have Grady Forrer looking into their backgrounds.” Forrer was head of Van Dorn Research.

  —

  Isaac Bell went looking for Edna Matters Hock and found her loading her tent onto her buckboard. He gave her a hand. “Where you headed?”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “In a wagon?”

  “Pittsburgh, Kansas.”

  “I was going to ask could you print me that aerial photograph your sister snapped, but you’ve packed your Kodak machine . . .”

  “Actually, I made an extra. I thought you’d ask to see it.”

  She had it in an envelope. She handed it to Bell. “Oh, there’s a second photograph that Nellie took before the fire. So you have a before the fire and an after.”

  “She flew over before?”

  “By coincidence. She was hoping to address a convention in Fort Scott, but the wind changed and the balloon drifted over here. I hope the pictures help.”

  Bell thanked her warmly. “Speaking of coincidence,” he told her, “my father served as an intelligence officer in the Civil War and he tried to take balloon daguerreotypes of Confederate fortifications.”

  “I’ve never seen an aerial of the Civil War.”

  “He said that the swaying motion blurred the pictures. When the wind settled down, a rebel shot the camera out of his hands.”

  “Quite a different war story.”

  “Actually,” Bell smiled, “he rarely talked about the war. The very few times he did, he told a humorous tale, like the balloon.”

  “I really must go.”

  He helped her onto the wagon. “It was a pleasure meeting you. I hope to see you again.”

  Edna Matters Hock gave him a long look with her gray-green eyes. “I would like that, Mr. Bell. Let us hope it happens.”

  “Where are you going next?”

  “After Pittsburgh, I’m not sure.”

  “If I were to wire the paper sometime, perhaps they could put us in touch.”

  “I’ll tell them to,” she said.

  They shook hands. “Oh, please say good-bye to Mr. Abbott.”

  Bell promised he would. Edna spoke to the mule
and it trotted off.

  Bell took the photographs to Wally Kisley. Wally gave a low whistle.

  “Fascinating. I’ve never had a look like this before.”

  The photograph Nellie Matters had snapped after the fire looked like raindrops on a mud puddle. All that was left of the storage tanks were circular pockmarks in the ground. The brick furnaces of the refinery stood like ruined castles. The steel pots were warped, staved in, or completely flattened. The remains of the derricks looked like bones scattered by wild animals.

  The picture she had taken before the fire was shrouded in smoke, but Spike’s refinery still looked almost as orderly as an architect’s blueprint. What stood out was the logic of Hopewell’s design to efficiently move the crude oil through the process of brewing gasoline.

  “Now you see, Isaac, they couldn’t have picked a better tank to blow. Look at this.”

  “But their target was the gasoline tank. Why didn’t they blow it first off?”

  “Couldn’t get to it. Out in the open like it was, in plain sight, there’s no way to lay the explosives and set up the target duck. But look here. They could not have chosen a tank better positioned for the first explosion to start things rolling. Someone knows his business.”

  —

  Ice-eyed Mack Fulton, an expert on safecrackers, arrived from New York dressed in funereal black. He had news for Archie Abbott. “Jewel thief the New York cops are calling the Fifth Avenue Flier sounds a lot to me like your Laurence Rosania, in that he’s got an eye for top quality and beauty.”

  That caught Archie’s interest because Rosania was known to leave ugly pieces behind regardless of value. They compared notes. Like the discriminating Rosania, Mack’s Fifth Avenue Flier robbed safes on mansions’ upper floors.

  “New York cops think he’s scaling walls, but I’m wondering if he’s talking his way upstairs, romancing the ladies and charming the gents, like your guy.”

  “How’d he get there so fast?” asked Archie. A recent robbery in New York had taken place less than a day after a Rosania-sounding job in Chicago.

  “20th Century Limited?”

  “If he’s pulled off half the jobs we think, he can afford it.”

  “He gets to play the New York and Chicago fences off each other, too. Bargain up the price. That reminds me, Isaac. I brought you a note from Grady Forrer.”

  Bell tore open the envelope from Research.

  But to his disappointment, Forrer had not discovered any special connections between Spike Hopewell, Albert Hill, and Reed Riggs—no mutual partners, no known feuds. All they had in common was being independent oil men. Even if all of them were shot, the shootings were not related on a personal level.

  “O.K.,” said Bell. “The only fact I know for sure is that Spike Hopewell was shot. Two questions, gents. By whom? And why?”

  Archie said, “Hopewell had an enemy who hated him enough to kill and just happened to be a crack shot at seven hundred yards.”

  “Or,” said Mack Fulton, “Hopewell had an enemy who hated him enough to hire someone to kill him who happened to be a crack shot at seven hundred yards.”

  “Or,” said Wally Kisley, “Hopewell had an enemy who hated him enough to hire a professional assassin to kill him whose weapon of choice was a rifle with an effective range of over seven hundred yards.”

  Bell said, “I’m betting on Wally’s professional.”

  “That’s because a professional makes it more likely that your other two victims were actually shot. But, oh boy, Isaac, you’re talking about amazing shooting.”

  “For the moment, let’s agree they were shot. Who’s the mastermind?”

  “All three independent oil men were battling Standard Oil.”

  “Was Hopewell a Congregationalist by any chance?” Wally Kisley asked. He grinned at Mack Fulton. The joke-cracking partners were known in the Van Dorn Agency as “Weber & Fields,” for the vaudeville comedians.

  “Presbyterian.”

  “Too bad,” said Wally. “We could have arrested Rockefeller if he was.”

  The newspapers were full of stories about a Congregationalist Convocation in Boston that had turned down a million-dollar donation by John D. Rockefeller because Rockefeller’s money was “tainted.”

  “That money sure is tainted,” chorused Wally and Mack. “’Tain’t yours! ’Tain’t mine!”

  “Listen close,” said Bell, grinning. “The last words Hopewell said to me was that he had what he called tricks up his sleeve to build his tidewater pipe line. Wally and Mack, talk to everyone in Kansas who knew him. Find out his plan.”

  “You got it, Isaac.”

  “Archie? Run down Big Pete Straub. Find out where he was when Spike was shot. Find out if maybe I winged him with my Winchester. But watch yourself.”

  “Thank you, Mother. But I think I can handle him.”

  “That’s your call,” Bell shot back firmly, “if he’s alone. But if he’s running with a bunch, get ahold of Wally and Mack before you brace him. I’ll be back soon as I can.”

  “Where you going, Isaac?”

  “Washington, D.C.”

  “But you don’t have anything to report.”

  “I’m not going to report.”

  “Then what are you going for?”

  “To shake up the Boss.”

  7

  By 1905 the Van Dorn Detective Agency spanned the continent, with field offices in major cities and many towns. It maintained national headquarters at the Palmer House in Chicago, where Joseph Van Dorn had founded the fast-growing outfit. But Van Dorn himself—gambling that a private detective agency with a national reach could profit by contracting its services to a federal government ill-equipped to hunt modern criminals across state lines—spent more and more time in his Washington, D.C., field office.

  It was at the new and unabashedly lavish Willard Hotel, two blocks from the White House, and Isaac Bell noted that it had grown by several more rooms since his last visit. He credited the Boss’s warming friendship with President Roosevelt, his industrious courting of the powers who ruled the Justice Department and the U.S. Navy, his honest name, his colorful reputation, broadcast in Sunday supplement features, and his Irish charm.

  Van Dorn’s private office was a sumptuous walnut-paneled inner sanctum designed to make bankers, industrialists, senators, and cabinet secretaries feel at home. It was equipped like the nerve center of a great railroad, with numerous telephones, voice tubes, an electric intercom, a self-winding stock ticker, and a telegraph key for the agency’s private wire. Windows on two sides offered a preview of clients and informants arriving on Pennsylvania Avenue or 14th Street, and it had a spy hole for sizing up prospects in the reception room.

  The Boss was a large, solid man in his forties with a friendly smile that could turn cold in a flash. He was bald, his skull a shiny, high dome, his cheeks and chin thick with red whiskers. Bristly brows, red as his beard and sideburns, shaded his eyes. Only when he opened them wide to stare a man full in the face did he reveal enormous intelligence and colossal determination. He could be mistaken for a well-off business man. Criminals who made that mistake, and they were legion, were marched off in handcuffs.

  Van Dorn glanced up at Isaac Bell with genuine affection.

  He was leaning over the mouthpiece of one of the three candlestick telephones on his desk, with one meaty fist pressing the earpiece to his ear. The other gripped a voice tube into which he issued a terse request. He replaced the voice tube stopper, roared orders into the telephone, banged the earpiece back on its hook, snatched up another telephone and purred, “Senator Stevens, I cannot recall such hospitality as was extended by you and Mrs. Stevens this past weekend . . .”

  A secretary, in vest, bow tie, and shoulder-holstered, double-action Colt, hurried in, placed a typewritten letter on the desk, exchanged cylinders in the DeVeau Dicta
phone, and hurried out with the full one.

  “. . . Thank you, Senator. I hope you can join me for lunch at the Cosmos Club . . . Oh, yes, I belong. I can assure you that no one was more surprised than I when they tapped me to join. Who knows what the membership committee was thinking . . . I look forward to seeing you next week.”

  He returned the earpiece to its hook and signed the letter on his desk.

  “Good to see you, Isaac.”

  “Good morning, sir. You’re looking prosperous.”

  “Busy as a one-armed paperhanger. What brings you back from Kansas?”

  “What may sound, at first, like a strange request.”

  “I’ll judge what is strange. What do you want?”

  “I want you to inveigle John D. Rockefeller into hiring the agency to arrest the marksman who murdered Spike Hopewell.”

  Van Dorn sat back and regarded the tall detective speculatively.

  “That is strange . . . even by your standards. Why would Rockefeller do that? He knows we’re investigating him for the Corporations Commission.”

  “I brought you the latest newspapers from Topeka and Kansas City.”

  Bell spread the Kansas Watchman, the Kansas City Journal, and the Kansas City Star on Van Dorn’s desk and showed him the headlines about the murder of Spike Hopewell. Then he opened them to the editorials.

  Van Dorn read quickly. “They’re howling for Rockefeller’s hide. They’re practically claiming that Rockefeller pulled the trigger. Do they know something about the president of Standard Oil that we don’t?”

  “Rockefeller did not shoot anyone, of course. But the killing is making him look even worse than the people of Kansas thought he was. And since Standard Oil locked up their pipe lines and their tank cars—and they were already mad as hornets about crude dropping to seventy cents a barrel and kerosene jumping to seventeen cents a gallon—they equate him with the devil.”

  Van Dorn looked dubious. “You’re suggesting that if we catch the killer at Rockefeller’s behest, it will improve his reputation.”

  “According to E. M. Hock, he has a slew of publicists on his payroll to improve his reputation. Being blamed for murder can’t be making their job any easier.”