The Wrecker ib-2 Read online

  “Heard about you,” Sanders said, offering a soft, manicured hand. “My boss wired from Sacramento, said you were coming down. I always wanted to meet you.”

  “Where’s the hook?”

  “The cinder dicks had already found it by the time we got here.”

  Sanders led Bell to a length of rail that had been bent like a pretzel. On one end was bolted a hook that looked like it had been fashioned from an anchor. “Is that blood or rust?”

  “Didn’t notice that.” Sanders opened a pearl-handled pocketknife and scratched at it. “Blood. Dried blood. Looks like he cut his hand on a burr of metal. Keen eyes, Mr. Bell.”

  Isaac ignored the flattery. “Find out who drilled this hole.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Bell?”

  “We can’t haul in every man in California with a cut on his hand, but you can find out who drilled that hole in this peculiar piece of metal. Canvas every machine shop and blacksmith in the county. Immediately. On the jump!”

  Isaac Bell turned on his heel and went to talk to the railroad dicks, who were watching sullenly. “Ever seen a hook like that before?”

  “Hunk of boat anchor.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He opened a gold cigarette case and passed it around. When the cinder dicks had smokes going and Bell had established their names, Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley, he asked, “If that fellow in the tree happened not to wreck the Limited, how do you think the real wrecker got away after he ditched the train?”

  The railway cops exchanged glances.

  Ed said, “That hook bought him plenty of time.”

  Then Tom said, “We found a track-inspection vehicle tipped over the side in Glendale. Got a report someone stole it from the freight depot at Burbank.”

  “O.K. But if he got to Glendale by handcar, it must have been three or four in the morning,” Bell mused. “How do you suppose he got away from Glendale? Streetcars don’t run that late.”

  “Could have had a automobile waiting for him.”

  “Think so?”

  “Well, you could ask Jack Douglas, except he’s dead. He was watching Glendale. Someone killed him last night. Ran him straight through like a stuck pig.”

  “First I heard,” said Bell.

  “Well, maybe you ain’t been talking to the right people,” replied the cinder dick, with a scornful glance at the dandified Sanders waiting nearby.

  Isaac Bell returned a thin smile. “What did you mean by ‘ran through’? Stabbed?”

  “Stabbed?” asked Ed. “When’s the last time you saw a stabbing dust both sides of a fellow’s coat? The man who killed him was either one strong son of a bitch or used a sword.”

  “A sword?” Bell repeated. “Why do you say a sword?”

  “Even if he were strong enough to stick him in one side and out the other with a bowie knife, he’d have a heck of a time trying to pull it out. That’s why folks leave knives in bodies. Damned things get stuck. So I’m thinking a long, thin blade, like a sword.”

  “That is very interesting,” said Bell. “A very interesting idea . . . Anything else I should know?”

  The cinder dicks thought on that for a long moment. Bell waited patiently, looking both in the eye. Superintendent Jethro Watt’s “orders from on high” to cooperate did not automatically percolate down to the cops in the field, particularly when they ran up against a supercilious Van Dorn agent like Larry Sanders. Abruptly, Tom Griggs came to a decision. “Found this in Jack’s hand.” He pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper and smoothed it with his grimy fin gers. Black lettering stood starkly in the sun.

  ARISE!

  FAN THE FLAMES OF DISCONTENT

  DESTROY THE FAVORED FEW

  So WORKINGMEN MAY LIVE!

  “I don’t suppose it was Jack‘s,” said Tom. “That old man weren’t the sort to turn radical.”

  “Looks like,” explained Ed, “Jack grabbed hold of it in their struggle.”

  Tom said, “Would have done better to grab his gun.”

  “So it would appear,” said Isaac Bell.

  “Strange thing is why he didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Bell.

  Tom said, “I mean you could make a mistake thinking that because Jack Douglas was ninety-two years old that he was asleep at the switch. Just last year, a couple of city boys came out to Glendale looking for easy pickings. Drew guns on Jack. He drilled one through the shoulder with that old hogleg of his and the other in the backside.”

  Ed chuckled. “Jack told me he was getting soft. In the old days, he would have killed them both and scalped them. I said, ‘You didn’t miss by much, Jack. You plugged one in the shoulder and the other in the rear.’ But Jack said, ‘I said soft, not afflicted. I didn’t miss. I hit ’em right where I aimed. Shows I’m turning kindly in my old age.‘ So whoever got the drop on Jack last night knew how to handle himself.”

  “Particularly,” Tom added, “if all he had on him was a sword. Jack would have seen that coming a mile away. I mean, how does a man with a sword get the jump on a man with a gun?”

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing,” said Bell. “Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you very much.” He took out two of his cards and gave one to each. “If you ever need anything from the Van Dorn Agency, get in touch with me.”

  “I WAS RIGHT,” BELL told Joseph Van Dorn when Van Dorn summoned him to San Francisco. “But not right enough. He’s thinking even bigger than I imagined.”

  “Sounds like he knows his business,” said Van Dorn, grimly echoing the Southern Pacific maintenance director. “At least, enough to run circles around us. But how does he get around? Freight trains?”

  Bell answered, “I’ve sent operatives to question the hobos in every jungle in the West. And we’re asking every stationmaster and ticket clerk in every station he might have been near who bought a ticket on a long-distance flyer.”

  Van Dorn groaned. “The ticket clerks are even a longer shot than the hobos. How many passengers did Hennessy say the Southern Pacific carries per year?”

  “One hundred million,” Bell admitted.

  7

  WHEN ISAAC BELL TELEPHONED MARION MORGAN TO TELL her he had one hour free in San Francisco before he caught his train to Sacramento and could she possibly get off work early, Marion replied, “Meet me at the clock!”

  The Great Magneta Clock, the first master clock west of the Mississippi, which had come around the Horn by steamship, was famous already, even though it had been installed in the St. Francis Hotel only the week before. Dominating the Powell Street lobby of the St. Francis, the ornately carved Viennese timepiece resembled a very large grandfather clock and looked somewhat old-fashioned in the European mode. But it was, in fact, electrically powered, and it automatically controlled all the clocks in the vast hotel that towered over Union Square.

  The lobby was furnished with suites of chairs and couches arranged on oriental carpets. Parchment- and glass-shaded electric lamps cast a warm glow, which was reflected and multiplied in gilt mirrors. The air smelled sweetly of sawn wood and fresh paint. Eighteen months after the fires ignited by the Great Earthquake had gutted its interior, San Francisco’s newest and grandest hotel was open for business with four hundred eighty rooms, and a new wing planned for the following spring. It had instantly become the most popular hotel in the city. Most of the chairs and couches were occupied by paying guests reading newspapers. The headlines blared the latest rumors about the labor agitators and foreign radicals who had ditched the Coast Line Limited.

  Marion swept into the lobby first, so excited to see Isaac that she was oblivious to the open stares of admiration she drew from various gentlemen as they watched her pace before the clock. She wore her straw-blond hair high on her head, a fashionable style that drew attention to her long, graceful neck and the beauty of her face. Her waist was narrow, her hands delicate, and, judging how she seemed to flow across the carpet, the legs beneath her full skirt were long.

  Her coral-sea green eye
s flashed toward the clock as the minute hand inched upright and the Great Magneta struck three mighty gongs that resounded so much like the bells of a cathedral that they seemed to shake the walls.

  One minute later, Isaac strode into the lobby, tall and ruggedly handsome in a cream-colored woolen sack suit, crisp blue fold-collar shirt, and the gold-striped necktie she had given him that matched his flaxen hair and mustache. She was so delighted by the sight of him that all she could think to say was, “I’ve never seen you late before.”

  Isaac smiled back as he opened his gold pocket watch. “The Great Magneta is sixty seconds fast.” He let his eyes roam over her, saying, “And I’ve never seen you prettier.” Then he swept her into his arms and kissed her.

  He guided her to a pair of chairs where he could watch the entire lobby with the aid of several mirrors, and they ordered tea with lemon cake from a waiter in a tailcoat.

  “What are you looking at?” Bell asked. She was staring at him with a soft smile on her beautiful face.

  “You turned my life upside down.”

  “That was the earthquake,” he teased her.

  “Before the earthquake. The earthquake was only an interruption.”

  Ladies Marion Morgan’s age were supposed to have married years before, but she was a levelheaded woman who enjoyed her independence. At thirty, with years of experience supporting herself working as a senior secretary in the banking business, she had lived on her own since graduating with her law degree from Stanford University. The handsome, wealthy suitors who had begged for her hand in marriage had all been disappointed. Perhaps it was the air of San Francisco, so filled with endless possibilities, that gave her courage. Perhaps it was her education by handpicked tutors and her loving father after her mother died. Perhaps it was living in modern times, the excitement of being alive in the bold first years of the new century. But something had filled her with confidence and a rare ability to take real pleasure in the circumstance of being alone.

  That is, until Isaac Bell walked into her life and made her heart quicken as if she were seventeen years old and on her first date.

  I am so lucky, she thought.

  Isaac took Marion’s hand.

  For a long moment, he found it difficult to speak. Her beauty, her poise, and her grace never failed to move him. Staring into her green eyes, he finally said, “I am the happiest man in San Francisco. And if we were in New York right now, I would be the happiest man in New York.”

  She smiled and looked away. When she looked back to meet his eyes, she saw that his gaze had shifted to a newspaper headline: DITCHED!

  Train wrecks were a part of daily life in 1907, but to have a Los Angeles flyer crash and knowing that Isaac rode trains all the time was terrifying. Oddly, she worried less about the dangers in his work. They were real, and she had seen his scars. But to worry about Isaac encountering gunmen and knife fighters would be as irrational as fretting about a tiger’s safety in the jungle.

  He was staring at the paper, his face dark with anger. She touched his hand. “Isaac, is that train wreck about your case?”

  “Yes. It’s at least the fifth attack.”

  “But there is something in your face, something fierce, that tells me it is very personal.”

  “Do you remember when I told you about Wish Clarke?”

  “Of course. He saved your life. I hope to meet him one day to thank him personally.”

  “The man who wrecked that train killed Wish,” Bell said coldly.

  “Oh, Isaac. I’m so sorry.”

  With that, Bell filled her in, as was his custom with her, detailing all he knew of the Wrecker’s attacks on Osgood Hennessy’s Southern Pacific Cascades Cutoff and how he was trying to stop them. Marion had a keen, analytical mind. She could focus on pertinent facts and see patterns early in their development. Above all, she raised critical questions that honed his own thinking.

  “Motive is still an open question,” he concluded. “What ulterior motive is driving him to such destruction?”

  “Do you believe the theory that the Wrecker is a radical?” Marion asked.

  “The evidence is there. His accomplices. The radical poster. Even the target-the railroad is a prime villain to radicals.”

  “You sound dubious, Isaac.”

  “I am,” he admitted. “I’ve tried to put myself in his shoes, tried to think like an angry agitator-but I still can’t imagine the wholesale slaughter of innocent people. In the heat of a riot or in a strike, they might attack the police. While I will not condone such violence, I can understand how a man’s thinking gets twisted. But this relentless attack on ordinary people … such viciousness makes no sense.”

  “Could he be a madman? A lunatic?”

  “He could. Except that he is remarkably ambitious and methodical for a lunatic. These are not impulsive attacks. He plans them meticulously. And he plans his escape just as carefully. If it’s madness, it’s under fine control.”

  “He may be an anarchist.”

  “I know. But why kill so many people? In fact,” he mused, “it’s almost as if he is trying to sow terror. But what does he gain by sowing terror?”

  Marion answered, “The public humiliation of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.”

  “He is certainly achieving that,” said Bell.

  “Maybe instead of thinking like a radical or an anarchist or a madman, you should think like a banker.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked at her, uncomprehending.

  Marion answered in a clear, steady voice. “Imagine what it is costing Osgood Hennessy.”

  Bell nodded thoughtfully. The irony of “thinking like a banker” was not lost on a man who had turned his back on an obligatory career in his own family’s powerful bank. He touched her cheek. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve given me a lot to ponder.”

  “I’m relieved,” said Marion, and teasingly added, “I’d rather you ponder than get into gunfights.”

  “I like gunfights,” Bell bantered back. “They focus the mind. Though in this case we may be talking about sword fights.”

  “Sword fights?”

  “It’s very strange. He killed Wish and another man with what appears to be some kind of sword. The question is: how does he get the drop on a man with a gun? You can’t hide a sword.”

  “What about a sword cane? Plenty of men in San Francisco carry sword canes for protection.”

  “But just unsheathing it, drawing the blade out of the cane, would give a man with a gun all the time he needed to shoot first.”

  “Well, if he comes after you with a sword, he’ll be sorry. You fenced for Yale.”

  Bell shook his head with a smile. “Fenced, not dueled. There’s a big difference between sport and combat. I recall my coach, who had been a duelist, explaining that the fencing mask hides your opponent’s eyes. As he put it, the first time you fight a duel, you are shocked to meet the cold gaze of a man who intends to kill you.”

  “Were you?”

  “Was I what?”

  “Shocked.” She smiled. “Don’t pretend to me you’ve never fought a duel.”

  Bell smiled back. “Only once. We were both very young. And the sight of spurting red blood soon convinced us that we didn’t really want to kill each other. In fact, we’re still friends.”

  “If you’re looking for a duelist, there can’t be too many of them left in this day and age.”

  “Likely, a European,” mused Bell. “Italian or French.”

  “Or German. With one of those horrible Heidelberg scars on his cheek. Didn’t Mark Twain write that they pulled the surgeon’s stitches apart and poured wine in their wounds to make the scars even uglier?”

  “Probably not a German,” said Bell. “They’re known for the plunging blow. The thrust that killed Wish and the other fellow was more in the style of an Italian or a Frenchman.”

  “Or the student of?” Marion suggested. “An American who went to school in Europe. There are plenty of anarchists in F
rance and Italy. Maybe that’s where he became one.”

  “I still don’t know how he takes a man with a gun by surprise.” He demonstrated with a gesture. “In the time it takes to draw a sword, you can step in and punch him in the nose.”

  Marion reached across the teacups and took Bell’s hand. “To tell the truth, I would be delighted if a bloody nose is the most I have to worry about.”

  “At this point, I would love a bloody nose, or even a flesh wound or two.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “You remember Weber and Fields?”

  “The funny old gents.” Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton had taken her to dinner while passing through San Francisco recently and kept her laughing all evening.

  “Wally and Mack always say, ‘Bloody noses are a sure sign of progress. You know you’re close when your quarry pokes you in the snoot.’ Right now, I could use a good poke in the snoot.” The comment brought a smile to their faces.

  Two women, fashionably dressed in the latest hats and gowns, entered the hotel lobby and crossed it in a flourish of feathers and silk. The younger was so striking that many of the lowered newspapers remained on their owners’ laps.

  Marion said, “What a beautiful girl!”

  Bell had already seen her in a mirror.

  “The girl wearing pale blue,” said Marion.

  “She is Osgood Hennessy’s daughter, Lillian,” said Bell, wondering if it was coincidence that had brought Lillian to the St. Francis while he was here, and suspecting it was not.

  “Do you know her?”

  “I met her last week aboard Hennessy’s special. She’s his private secretary.”

  “What is she like?”

  Bell smiled. “She has pretensions to being a seductress. Flashes her eyes like that French actress.”

  “Anna Held.”

  “She is intelligent, though, and savvy about business. She’s very young, spoiled by her adoring father, and, I suspect, very innocent when it comes to matters of the heart. The dark-haired woman with her used to be her tutor. Now she’s Hennessy’s mistress.”