The Spy (8 page)

“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.

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

G
ET 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:

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.

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, “Do 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.”

Cruson huffed, “Surely you didn’t summon me here to analyze the personality of a forger. The more skillful the forgery, the less it would tell me about his personality.”

“I did not summon you here to analyze his personality but to confirm whether this is a forgery. Now you are telling me that the forger made a mistake. He copied Langner’s hand from an early sample of his handwriting. Thank you, Dr. Cruson. You’ve opened a new possibility in this case. Unless his piano playing made his handwriting like that of a young man, this is a forgery, and Arthur Langner was murdered.”

A Van Dorn secretary burst in waving a sheet of yellow paper.
“Scully!”

The telegram from loner John Scully that he thrust into Isaac Bell’s hand was typically terse.

“ ‘Surrounded’?” asked Bell. “Did Mike and Eddie catch up with him?”

“No, sir. All by himself, like usual.”

It looked like Scully had found the Fryes’ real names and trailed them home only to discover that the bank robbers were related to a crooked sheriff who would help them escape. In which case even the formidable Scully had bit off more than he could chew.

Bell scanned the rest of the telegram for directions.

Middle of nowhere in the Jersey farm country. It would take all day to get there connecting to local trains. “Telephone the Weehawken garage for my auto!”

Bell grabbed a heavy golf bag and raced down the Knickerbocker’s stairs and out to Broadway. He jumped into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the pier at the foot of 42nd Street. There he boarded the Weehawken Ferry to New Jersey, where he had parked his red Locomobile.

C
OMMODORE TOMMY’S SALOON ON WEST 39TH STREET hunched like a fortress in the ground floor and cellar of a crumbling brick tenement a quarter mile from the pier where Isaac Bell’s ferry cast off. Its door was narrow, its windows barred. Like a combination Congress, White House, and War Department, it ruled the West Side slum New Yorkers called Hell’s Kitchen. No cop had laid eyes on the inside of it in years.

Commodore Tommy Thompson, the saloon’s bullet-headed, thick-necked proprietor, was boss of the Gopher Gang. He collected tribute from criminals in the drug trade, prostitution and gambling, pickpockets and burglars, passed along a portion to bribe the police, and delivered votes to the Democratic political machine. He also dominated the lucrative business of robbing New York Central freight cars, his nickname testifying to a level of success in his field that rivaled railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s in his.

But that business was about to come to a bloody end, Commodore Tommy suspected, as soon as the railroad got around to organizing a private army to run his train robbers out of New York. So he was planning ahead. Which was why, as Isaac Bell’s ferry sped across the Hudson River, Commodore Thompson was shaking hands on a new deal with a couple of “queueless” Chinese—Americanized high-tone Chinamen who had chopped off the long pigtail worn by their immigrant countrymen.

Harry Wing and Louis Loh were hatchet men for the up-and-coming Hip Sing tong. They spoke good English, were duded up in snappy suits, and were, Thompson took for granted, deadly behind the mild expressions on their well-scrubbed pusses. He had recognized kindred spirits the instant they approached him. Like his Gophers, the Hip Sing profited by controlling the vice rackets with muscle, graft, and discipline. And like Tommy’s Gophers, the Hip Sing were driving out rivals and getting stronger.

The deal they had brought him was irresistible: Tommy Thompson’s Gopher Gang would allow the Chinese gangsters to open opium dens on Manhattan’s West Side. For half the take, the Commodore would protect the joint, supply the girls, and pay the cops. Harry Wing and Louis Loh would gain for the Hip Sing tong white middle-class customers with money to spend—the casual “ice cream users” afraid to venture into the back alleys of Chinatown. A square deal, as President Teddy Roosevelt would say. Done squarely, Sophie Tucker would sing.

THE NEWARK, New Jersey, auto patrol tried to catch Isaac Bell in a Packard.

His 1906 gasoline-powered Locomobile race car was painted fire-engine red. He had ordered the color from the factory to give slower drivers a better chance of seeing him in time to get out of the way. But the color, and the Locomobile’s thunderous exhaust, did tend to draw the attention of the police.