A well-built middle-aged man with a beard that was showing flecks of gray limped into the office carrying a leveled Colt Bisley.
Isaac Bell looked him over. “‘Mr. Potter,’ you will disappoint the many who hoped that Henry Clay drowned in the Ohio River.”
Congdon said, “Mr. Clay became Mr. Potter so that I could help him live in great comfort, free of the electric chair.”
“In exchange,” said Bell, “for killing your enemies and rivals.”
Congdon said, “I’m disappointed that you don’t seem one bit surprised. I had hoped to see your jaw drop.”
“Joseph Van Dorn suspected years ago that Clay had to be your assassin. Who else, he asked, could be as cold-blooded? And he described you to a T, Congdon: a man wise enough to see Henry Clay’s talents and greedy enough to employ them.”
Clay’s expression turned cold at Bell’s mention of Van Dorn. “That bulge in your coat where you used to pack your Colt Army, and subsequently a Bisley, is now, I’m informed, a Browning No. 2. Put it on Mr. Congdon’s desk.”
Bell surrendered his favorite pistol of many years, a Belgian-made semiautomatic modified to fire an American .380 caliber cartridge.
“I presume you replaced the sleeve gun I took away from you in New York. Drop it, too.”
Bell shook the derringer out of his sleeve and handed it over.
“And the pocket pistol.”
“You have a long memory,” said Bell.
“It’s kept me alive. Put it on the desk.”
Bell placed the tiny one-shot on the desk.
“And the knife in your boot.”
“Want me to throw it at anything?”
“If you still can, hit the edge of that bookshelf.”
Bell threw overhand. The knive struck like a flash of lightning.
James Congdon howled in dismay. The blade had pierced the portrait of his latest wife, depicted as a shapely goddess in silk gauze, and stood quivering in the lady’s nose. Bell used the distraction to glide behind the shimmering white Rodin marble.
“Sorry, I missed.”
Clay leveled his gun.
“What if you miss me and shoot your boss’s favorite statue?”
Clay started toward him, saying, “I’ll get so close, I can’t miss.”
“Be careful!” Congdon shouted.
As Clay turned to assure him, Bell whipped his two-shot derringer from his hat.
“Drop it!”
Henry Clay stopped in his tracks. His startled expression seemed to shout Where the hell did that come from?
Bell said, “Live and learn. Toss your gun over there, on the carpet.”
Clay shrugged with a faint knowing smile and did as Bell ordered. Then he looked at Judge Congdon. The old man caressed the bronze statuette on his desk. “You’re wrong, Chief Inspector. The statue you’re hiding behind is not my favorite. This is my favorite.”
“I can’t believe you prefer that little thing to this magnificent marble.”
In answer, the financier jerked the steam lever.
• • •
ISAAC BELL, Henry Clay, and James Congdon all looked up at the ceiling.
Only Bell smiled.
He stuck out his hand. Warm water dripped onto his palm.
“It appears to be raining in your office. And on your parade.”
Congdon jerked the steam lever again. Nothing happened. Frantically, he tugged the statue again and again, slamming it down, jerking it upright, slamming it down.
Bell said, “I thought it sensible to shut the steam-conditioning valves to your office.”
Congdon’s long, thin frame sagged, and he slipped off his feet into his chair.
“But how did you know?”
Bell moved swiftly forward and swept the guns off the desk onto the floor before Congdon or Clay got any ideas. “Judge Congdon, you are under arrest for the murder of Mary Higgins.”
Henry Clay’s expression shifted from flummoxed to deeply puzzled.
“You were out of the room earlier, Clay. You didn’t hear me charge your boss with murdering a young woman in 1902.”
“Are you crazy, Bell?”
“I wish I were,” Isaac Bell answered sadly. “I would give anything to be wrong. But she died a horrible death right here in this office.”
“Mary died in Pittsburgh.”
“Mary Higgins was found in Pittsburgh. Many were led to believe that Mary was scalded to death helping you blow up the militia’s steamboat.”
Clay shook his head. “Mary didn’t help me. I had no idea she was aboard. She must have used that boy disguise she used in Denver.”
“She was never aboard the Vulcan King. Not alive. She died here, in New York. Mary’s brother swore that she could not have been in Pittsburgh because Mary wrote him that she was going to New York to confront the saboteur’s boss—your boss. No one believed Jim Higgins. But why would he say it unless he was addled with grief or telling the truth? So I asked questions. Turns out, I was not the only man sweet on her.”
Clay was listening closely.
Bell said, “I’ll bet you boasted to her, hoping to impress her— She was the kind of girl a fellow would do most anything to impress. You did brag, didn’t you? Bragged how you had partnered up with the most powerful man in Wall Street.”
“I didn’t brag.”
“Maybe you got puddingheaded when she slipped you the knockout drops.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Give Van Dorns some credit. The pharmacist she bought the chloral from told me. You gave Mary Congdon’s name, didn’t you?”
“I must have.”
“You signed her death warrant.”
Clay looked at Congdon, who was slumped behind his desk. “Did you hurt her?”
Congdon said, “It’s a trick, you idiot.”
Clay looked to Bell. The color of Bell’s eyes had darkened to a steely blue. He directed them straight at the rogue detective. “We never give up,” he said softly. “You know that better than anybody. It was Mr. Van Dorn’s motto from the beginning, wasn’t it?”
Clay stared. Then he lowered his eyes and nodded agreement. “Yes, from the beginning.”
Isaac Bell said, “It took me ten years to trace her steps from Pittsburgh to New York, to Wall Street, to this building, to this office. You know your business, Clay, you know how it works. A word here, a hint there, a memory, a glimpse. It’s easier when it’s a pretty girl who struck the eye. Ticket agents. Train conductors. Landladies. A unionist finally out of prison. Bits. Pieces. Bits of nothing. Suddenly, you get lucky with a clerk who makes change for the El. Right around the corner. A hundred feet from this building. Then back to bits of nothing. Finally, a stroke of luck.”
Bell turned to Congdon.
“The brokerage house of Thibodeau & Marzen went bankrupt in the Panic of ’07. There were lawsuits by the dozen. Judge James Congdon’s name surfaced in court. Turned out you owned the broker. And thanks to an old detective who once told me that sometimes dead ends turn around, I had in my files a copy of a private wire transmitted on Thibodeau & Marzen’s leased telegraph line to Henry Clay’s alias, John Claggart.”
Bell turned back to Henry Clay. “But I still had no final absolute, provable connection. Until, one night, I got lucky again. An elevator runner, a temporary filling in that evening and who left town the day after, was all of a sudden back ten years later. His uncle was still the superintendent of the building. The nephew’s hopes hadn’t panned out. And his uncle gave him a job.”
Bell shifted his gaze to Congdon for a long moment, then back to Henry Clay.
“The lucky detective stopped by—as he had regularly—and this time found the new elevator runner and recognized him as the temporary who had been working that night ten years ago.
“‘Sure, I remember that girl. She was a looker. But, boy, did she look mad.’”
Bell’s voice thickened. “I asked, ‘When did you take her back down?’
“‘Didn’t,’ he said. ‘She never come down on my shift and I was on for darn near ten hours straight.’ And I asked again, ‘You ran her to what floor?’
“‘Top floor. Mr. Congdon’s own private floor.’
“‘Are you sure?’
“‘Sure I’m sure. Orders were, you had to call ahead to go to Mr. Congdon’s floor. I called ahead. Mr. Congdon said, “Bring her up.” I brought her up.’
“Mary Higgins died right here in this office. Right beside your boss’s statue.”
“It was self-defense!” Congdon shouted.
“What?” said Clay.
“She did not come here to ‘confront’ me. She came to kill me.”
Isaac Bell said, “I never doubted that Mary Higgins was a woman of the highest moral standard. You just confirmed it with your confession that you thought she intended to kill you.”
“I made no confession.”
“I just heard it from your own lips.”
“It’s your word against mine.”
“And his,” said Isaac Bell.
Henry Clay, who was listening stone-faced, asked James Congdon, “Did you kill Mary?”
Congdon pulled a pistol from his desk. Clay stared at it, his face lighting with recognition. “She told me she could never kill anyone. I believed her. I still do.”
“She changed her mind,” said Congdon. “A lady’s prerogative.”
“Where did you get that gun?”
“I’ll explain after we tend to Mr. Bell.”
“That’s a Colt Bisley. Mary took mine.”
Congdon heard the threat in Clay’s voice and whirled with his pistol.
Clay dove to the carpet with astounding speed, scooped up the gun he had dropped, and shot first, lacing two bullets into the old man’s chest. Congdon tumbled backwards, jerking his trigger as he fell. His bullet struck The Kiss, shattering the marble. Congdon’s eyes locked in mourning on the ruin.
Clay stood over him. “But how did you move Mary’s body to the steamboat in Pittsburgh?”
James Congdon answered with his dying breath.
“You weren’t the only ambitious fool who worked for me.”
Henry Clay’s shoulders sagged as Congdon’s had in his defeat. He shook his head in dismay. Then he turned to Isaac Bell. “You never gave up, and you got the man who killed Mary.”
“But Judge Congdon didn’t kill Terry Fein, Mike Flannery, young Captain Jennings, Black Jack Gleason, and countless others caught in your schemes. Henry Clay, you’re under arrest.”
Clay’s amber eyes were dead with defeat, but his pistol was rising with superhuman speed. Isaac Bell shot it out of his hand. It fell on Congdon’s chest. Clay gazed at it a moment, clutching his fingers. His empty gaze shifted to Bell’s derringer, and his eyes came alive.
“Looks like a .22,” he said. “And only one shot left. Do you think you can stop Henry Clay with one bullet?”
The door behind him banged opened and a big voice boomed, “Isaac could stop you with one shot between your murderous eyes. But I made him swear to me that I would get the first seven shots if you gave us the slightest excuse to pull the trigger.”
Henry Clay looked over his shoulder and down the barrel of Van Dorn’s Colt M1911 semiautomatic pistol and raised his hands.
“Pick up that telephone and call Congdon’s train,” Van Dorn ordered.
“Train?”
Isaac Bell explained, “You’ve got a date with the electric chair. Sing Sing’s on the way to Chicago. We’ll drop you there for safekeeping until your trial.”
• • •
MARION BELL knew from experience that after her husband solved a case, he would tell her everything that had happened when he was ready to. But this time was special. When he glided across Wall Street and slipped soundlessly into the auto, she sensed that he wanted to tell her now but couldn’t form the words, and might never.
She started the Marmon, pulled away from the curb into the empty street, steered around the corner, and headed up Broadway. Isaac Bell sat quietly, watching the boisterous late-night city streets. When they got to Forty-second Street, Marion turned left toward the Hudson River.
“Where are we going?” asked Bell. Archie’s town house, where they stayed in New York, was up in the East Sixties.
“Home.”
Bell considered her answer for a couple of blocks. Home was three thousand miles away in San Francisco, where they first met six years ago at the time of the Earthquake. It was a two- or three-month trip in an auto, depending on the weather and the state of the roads, and a Marmon Speedster probably wasn’t up to it. Of course Marion knew that, which meant she had a plan. They had married two years ago on the Mauretania, and he knew her well enough by now to know she had a plan.
“Joe Van Dorn won’t let me off for that long.”
“I’ll bet we could make the Mississippi in ten days.”
“Depending on the roads.”
“And ten nights.”
“We’ll run out of roads beyond the Mississippi.”
“Then we’ll put the car on a special at St. Louis. Home on the train in four days.”
Bell leaned over to read the gauges. “You filled the gasoline tank.”
“There’s a picnic basket in the trunk.”
Marion drove onto the ferry, and they went up to the passenger deck and stood at the railing, watching the lights of Manhattan. In the middle of the river she asked, “What did Congdon say?”
“He confessed.”
“What did you say?”
“I said good-bye to my old friend Mary Higgins.”
• • •
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The Striker Page 28