King of the Cracksmen

by Dennis O'Flaherty

  Chapter Eight

  Was it Australia or was it more like Staten Island? It had appeared there during the endless April rains, when Liam had spent so much time staring at the ceiling that he had seriously considered going outside and running around in the mud yelling and throwing things. At first the water stain had been just a kind of formless blotch but then it started filling out and spreading into map-like shapes until it took only a little imagination to see himself trekking through the Outback looking for gold. Or maybe strolling along the South Beach Boardwalk looking for a beer garden where he could get a stein of Ruppert’s and pick up a girl over from Brooklyn for an evening’s jollification.

  “Aaargh!”

  He’d had enough waiting. He slid off the bed and stood up to stretch, listening to his joints pop as he reached for the ceiling. Then he pulled out his watch (a nice Waltham railroad chronometer that he’d hooked from Brooks Brothers during his first weekend home after Gettysburg) and saw that the hands had barely moved since he looked at it last. At this rate it would be sometime next year when the blasted thing finally said nine o’clock.

  He threw himself onto the bed again, wincing at the screech of the spavined springs, and reached towards the bedside table for the nice new Leaves of Grass that he’d bought at Brentano’s before beginning his exile in the coalfields. He had just started thumbing through it in search of the “Song of the Open Road” when he heard a strange whirring noise approaching from the distance—like a colossal hummingbird with a screechy overtone like chalk on a blackboard. It took just a split second for the penny to drop before Liam leaped off the bed:

  “Damn it, no!”

  He grabbed his Colt off the dresser and clattered away down the stairs to the street.

  There was still a hint of light in the sky with the Summer Soltice so close, and Liam looked around feverishly for the source of the whirring … There! Just discernible against the night sky, not too high yet, maybe a hundred yards or so above the town and climbing, was a black Stanley Flyer with its engine heavily silenced. Liam didn’t think twice before raising his pistol, aiming well above the escaping machine and firing three shots after it. A total waste of time, but … damnation! Return fire winked towards him and a moment later the sound of shots and a nearby ricochet followed, prompting Liam to throw himself into a roll away from the spot where he’d been standing into the shelter of an ancient chestnut in Mrs. Finnegan’s front yard.

  For a moment or two, Liam just lay there catching his breath and listening to the sound of the Flyer fading into the distance. Then, a sudden flare of orange caught his peripheral vision and he jumped to his feet, looking for the source.

  There! Now he could see the flames plainly—it had to be Maggie’s house, there wasn’t anything else in that direction. It had jumped into his mind the moment he heard the distinctive thick whirring of a silenced Stanley Flyer: Morrison, something’s happened to Morrison! Liam shoved the Colt into his waistband and tore off down the street in the direction of the steadily growing fire.

  Why had he been chump enough to buy Morrison’s song-and-dance about having to “look into something”? If he really had seen Maggie’s killer—and the little man’s muck sweat had made that seem a good bet—then Liam should have wrung it out of him then and there! As it was all he had was hunches and scraps of evidence, not enough to collar Lukas and see him hanged for it which was what he’d set his heart on …

  “McCool! McCool, slow down!” Barlow’s shout and the thunder of hoofs behind him made Liam stop short and turn back to look: the Inspector was coming towards him at a gallop in a two-seater buggy, and with a sharp jerk on the reins he slowed it just enough for Liam to jump aboard.

  “Looks like it must be Miss O’Shea’s place,” Barlow said grimly.

  “Didn’t you leave a guard on it?”

  Barlow made a face. “Talk sense, McCool. The poor girl was already dead, what was the point of wasting a man watching her house?”

  “It isn’t Maggie I was thinking of. It was Morrison—I was going to give him five hundred dollars in gold for the name of the man he saw last night.”

  “Damnation!” Barlow shook his head, exasperated. “He must have seen him through the peephole.” “Peephole?”

  “I went back to Miss O’Shea’s this afternoon, I wanted to talk to Morrison myself. But Kreutzer said he’d gone off somewhere in Oliver Finnegan’s steam jitney so I decided to have a look around his rooms without him.” He snorted disgustedly. “Turned out the little degenerate had drilled a peephole in his floor so he could spy on Miss O’Shea, and that means he must have seen the murder and recognized the murderer. The way I figure it, certain people …” he raised an eyebrow at Liam “… scared the murderer off by blowing up Henderson’s house with enough dynamite to flatten Grand Central, and as soon as the killer ran off Morrison grabbed his hat and headed for Maloney’s and a nice big double whiskey to soothe his nerves.”

  Liam groaned. “Can’t you make that nag move a little?”

  Barlow snapped the reins sharply and a few moments later they careened around the corner onto Maggie’s street so fast they almost galloped into the volunteer fire department’s pumper.

  “Whoa!” shouted Barlow, tugging on the reins, but Liam was already out of the buggy and running.

  As he pushed his way through a chaotic mob of gawkers, Coal & Iron bluecoats and volunteer firemen, Liam scanned the upper floor anxiously. Was there a chance of getting in to see if Morrison was still there, dead or alive? The moment the thought went through his mind there was a crackle of splintering glass and the windows of the upper floor burst open as billows of flame gushed out.

  “If he’s there, he’s done for,” Barlow said.

  “I’m going in.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  But Liam was already gone, tearing up the front steps and through the front door into the burning house.

  Squinting to keep the smoke from blinding him, Liam grabbed Maggie’s cloak off a hook in the hall and wound it around his head to keep his hair from catching fire as he took the stairs two at a time. The door to Lukas’ suite was open, and Liam noted even as he ran towards Morrison’s rooms that the fire seemed so far to be burning upwards rather than outwards—it had burnt through the wall shared by the two upstairs lodgers, but it had only burnt through to Lukas’ sitting room in a couple of places. Morrison didn’t smoke, so it didn’t take a genius to figure it for arson—Liam just hoped there was still something left to examine for clues.

  He grabbed the knob of Morrison’s door, cursed as it blistered his hand, then backed up and kicked the panel square in the middle. As if that was all it had been waiting for, the door burst out into the hallway and another billow of flames engulfed Liam.

  Thanks to Maggie’s cloak the worst of it seemed to be a thoroughly singed moustache, but one glance into the room was enough to make Liam drop flat to the floor. There was an inferno raging around the edges of the room—walls, curtains and furniture—and there was an empty red coal-oil can on the floor which gave Liam the picture in an instant: the killer had doused the perimeter of the room to make sure it would turn into a crematorium, saving the last few drops for Morrison, whose corpse lay in the middle of the floor with a gash up its middle that had poured his guts onto the floor.

  It would have taken more than a splash of coal oil to make that mess burn, but by the time the room had burned and taken the rest of the house with it, the incineration would have been complete. Throwing caution to the winds, Liam threw aside Maggie’s cloak, grabbed the corpse’s ankles and scuttled out into the hallway, staying as low as he could and dragging the grisly mess behind him.

  “Great God in Heaven!” shouted Barlow as Liam appeared in the doorway, smoking like a barbecued ham and dragging the burnt and bloody corpse behind him. The Inspector snatched a full bucket of water from one of the C & I bucket brigade and poured it over Liam’s head, and a moment later, spluttering and gasping, Liam was on his knees next
to the corpse going through its pockets.

  “How did that bastard know Morrison was going to talk?” Liam croaked hoarsely.

  Barlow grimaced. “I’ll give odds that’s where Morrison went this afternoon, he probably wanted to test whether he might get more than your five hundred from the killer.”

  “What’s this?” Liam exclaimed. Folded over twice and concealed in a buttoned pocket inside Morrison’s waistcoat was a thick sheaf of printed papers. Liam wiped the blood off on the grass and spread them out on the ground next to the corpse.

  “Our tickets for San Francisco.” Liam’s voice was thick with bitter grief.

  Barlow bent over for a closer look: “Yours for sure?”

  “Look there,” Liam said, pointing, “Maggie wrote ‘M’s’ on hers and ‘L’s’ on mine.” He wiped the blood off his hands and stood up, leaving the tickets on the ground. Then, with a furious snarl, he kicked the corpse hard enough to turn it over on its face.

  “Easy, lad,” Barlow said gently, “that won’t do you any good.”

  Liam growled an inarticulate retort. Then he grabbed another bucket of water from one of the C & I’s, rolled up his sleeves and washed the blood off his hands and forearms as well as he could, ending by scooping double handfuls of water onto his face and rubbing until most of the soot was gone and he felt a little better.

  “He must have watched through that peephole while the killer stole our money and Maggie’s diary,” he said to Barlow. “Then as soon as he left, Morrison scurried downstairs and looked for anything else that wasn’t tacked down. Once he found the tickets, all he needed was enough money—mine or the murderer’s, whichever one of us was paying top dollar—to go off and have his Great Adventure. Greedy little coward.” His lips quirked into the semblance of a grin: “Sorry I kicked him, it was just me thinking about him sitting there drinking my whiskey and sniveling about the Orient, and all the while him with our train tickets tucked up snug in his waistcoat.”

  Barlow laid his hand on Liam’s shoulder and gave him a shake. “Come on,” he said, “let’s have a look around and see if we can find anything that points us towards the murderer.”

  Barlow took a coal-oil lantern from a bluecoat, turned the wick up as far as it would go without smoking and then led the way towards the back as both of them scanned the ground intently.

  “It must have been one of Boylan’s people this time,” Liam said, thinking out loud. “I’m sure as can be that Lukas is off in New York scheming his next move and he’ll have told Boyo to keep a weather eye and clean up all the traces.” A flash of enlightenment hit him: “Right! Morrison spent most of his evenings at Maloney’s—he would have seen Boylan and Lukas with their heads together. So he goes to Boyo today and tells him it’s all up with his boss if he doesn’t come up with a better offer than five hundred.”

  Barlow shook his head. “If that’s how it happened, why did Morrison use Finnegan’s steamer to go gallivanting? He could have walked to Maloney’s in five minutes.” Then, seeing Liam frown with concentration as he looked for an answer, Barlow held up a hand to stop him: “Anyway, the fact is our friend Boylan is probably half-way to New York himself, by now. When Miss Fox and I went looking for him at Maloney’s we were told he was ‘away.’ It took a little persuasion to get the rest of it, but it turned out that’s where he was away to—he told his lads he’d be back in three or four days.”

  “I can see fresh marks from the Flyer’s anchor on the ground and the trees,” Liam muttered distractedly, “but I don’t see any new footprints. There was a good heavy shower a couple of hours ago—you’d think if the killer walked this way to the house …” He broke off abruptly and pointed towards the edge of the circle of light cast by Barlow’s lantern. “Look over there, see what I see?”

  As they moved closer with the light, it revealed a series of indistinct impressions in the mud, spaced like footprints and going from a tree with fresh chain cuts in its bark to the back steps.

  Barlow shook his head disgustedly. “Tie a couple of burlap sacks around your feet and you’re in business. If this was one of Boylan’s little helpers, he’ll have been told to leave no trace this time and threatened with hanging by his thumbs if he does.” He frowned as something occurred to him and then shook his head, looking irritated: “The only problem is, you said the Flyer was black. Boyo knows as well as anybody that painting a Flyer black is a Federal offense—only the Department of Public Safety is permitted to use black Flyers.”

  “That settles it,” Liam said. His jaw was set hard and his eyes glittered with angry resolve. “There’s nothing more to be done in this two-bit burg, I’m going back to the city.”

  Barlow examined him for a moment and then nodded. “Just remember, you’re to see McPherson in Pottsville before you leave. And when you hit New York, don’t let the grass grow before you report in to Mr. Pilkington.”

  “He’d better not have anything more to tell me than, ‘Thanks for a job well done and you can stop worrying about your grandma,’” Liam said. “If he tries to go back on his word I’ll make him rue the day, and I don’t give a tinker’s damn if his darling Willie runs the DPS’ Secret Service or the Department of Heaven itself, God included!”

  With that, he turned on his heel and headed off into the smoky darkness. Barlow nodded, and said more or less to himself:

  “Good luck, young McCool.”

  Chapter Nine

  One thing Mr. P. harped on when his operatives were working undercover was staying in character. Liam had long ago lost track of the number of times he had sat through tutorials on “personation skills” at the Pilkington Agency headquarters on Union Square, the Old Man expansive in his overstuffed armchair, his stout frame clad in black broadcloth and starched linen, his rosy cheeks framed with fluffy white mutton-chop whiskers, pontificating about detective work while Liam sat like a naughty boy in his straightbacked wooden chair looking out the window towards Tiffany’s jewelry store and thinking what a treat it would be to slip in there some morning around 2:00 a.m. to fill his pockets with sparklers.

  Just about then, of course, he’d remember how the warders in the Tombs liked to punctuate their lessons with a billy to the kidneys and his attention would snap back to the Old Man’s disquisition on sleuthing:

  “… and just tell me how in Tophet the brainless ninny could have expected to get away with personating a conductor on the Pennsy if he couldn’t name the stops between Philadelphia and Harrisburg? I assure you, my boy, when it comes to entering into a role and living it with every fiber of your being, Edwin Booth himself can’t hold a candle to a seasoned Pilkington operative at the top of his form!”

  Over and over, Mr. P. had reminded Liam that once he was in the Mollies’ territory he could no longer think like the free-spending King of the Silk-Stocking Cracksmen; instead, he must remind himself that he was a flat-broke fugitive, pressed for every penny. Which had boiled down in practice to endless irksome details like not spending good money on transportation for his regular excursions from Henderson’s Patch to Pottsville.

  Liam had really loathed this ordeal. As far as Boylan and the others were concerned, when he took those weekly trips to town he was going to Pottsville to oversee the progress of their tunnel from the basement of a house near the prison to a spot directly under the spectator’s seats in the prison yard. In reality, though, he was in Pottsville to report to Seamus McPherson, the star of Pilkington’s International Detective Agency, now deeply incognito as a hypochondriac clergyman on the third floor of Pottsville’s Excelsior Hotel and as welcome to Liam as bagful of snakes.

  Today, thank God, he had finally been able to shuck off the hitching-a-ride routine and instead of sitting amongst a wagonload of muddy piglets he had dipped into the money belt that had once held his reserve for the journey West with Maggie and used it instead for the first leg of his trip East to find her killer, making the journey on the front seat of Oliver Finnegan’s steam jitney, clean and presentable in one
of his cheap dark suits and glorying in the thought that everything he saw out the window he was seeing for the last time.

  If there was one pesky fly in Liam’s ointment, it was Ollie’s answer to his quizzing about Morrison’s last trip. It turned out that after his encounter with Liam the mousy accountant had hired Ollie to take him to Pottsville “to send some telegrams and pay a call or two.” Now that he could translate that as “to visit the scum who’d killed Maggie and blackmail him,” Liam had a momentary fantasy of telling Ollie to drive straight to the murderer’s lair and settling his hash then and there. Unfortunately Morrison had been sharp enough to ditch Ollie the minute they got to town, arranging to meet him at the train station a couple of hours later, and there was precious little likelihood of the killer’s having hung around this dump any longer than he had to.

  Where had that miserable little pill Morrison gone while he’d been in Pottsville? Chances were that Liam would never know, but that didn’t stop him from racking his brains over the question for the rest of the drive.

  Finally, after an hour or so of jouncing over rutted dirt roads, Oliver putt-putted onto the smooth paving stones of Pottsville’s main street and Liam pointed towards a red-white-and blue-striped pole and a sign announcing “Orsini’s Barber Shop.”

  “Right over there, Ollie me lad!”

  Pressing a shiny new gold eagle on the delighted boy, Liam jumped out and strode off down the pavement, whistling.

  Inside Orsini’s, a foppishly dressed young man with luxuriant Dundreary whiskers and a gold watch chain that could have anchored a small yacht was holding forth in an irritable tenor, his voice occasionally breaking with emotion: