The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  “He didn’t ask.”

  “Did it occur to you to mention them?” Bell asked patiently.

  “Figured he had his case with Mrs. Frost being the witness.”

  “Is there anyone who could show me where the shooting occurred?”

  To Bell’s surprise, Hodge sprang from his chair. He circled his desk, wooden leg clumping the floor. “I’ll take you. We better stop at the general store for a bunch of stogies. Shoo away the blackflies.”

  Puffing clouds of cigar smoke beneath their hat brims, the North River constable and the tall detective drove up the mountain in Hodge’s Model A Ford. When they ran out of road, Hodge attached a circle of wood to his peg so he didn’t sink into the mud, and they continued on foot. They climbed deer trails for an hour until the thick stands of fir trees and birch opened onto a wide meadow of matted winter-browned grass.

  “By this here tree is where I found the shell casings. Clear shot across to the lip of the gorge where Mrs. Frost saw Celere fall off.”

  Bell nodded. The cliff was a hundred and fifty yards across the meadow from the trees. An easy shot with a Marlin, even without a telescopic sight.

  “What do you suppose Celere was doing out on the rim?”

  “Scouting. The butler told me they went out for bear.”

  “So to go ahead like that, Celere must have trusted Frost?”

  “Folks said Mr. Frost was buying airplanes for his wife. I guess he’d trust a good customer.”

  “Did you find Celere’s rifle?” Bell asked.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you suppose happened to it?”

  “Bottom of the river.”

  “And the same for his field glasses?”

  “If he had ’em.”

  They walked out to the edge of the gorge. Isaac Bell walked along it, aware that he was not likely to see any signs of an event that occurred before winter snows had fallen and melted. At a point near a single tree that stood lonely sentinel with its roots clinging to the rim, he noticed a narrow shelf immediately below. It thrust out like a second cliff, six feet down and barely four feet wide. A falling body would have to clear it to plummet to the river. Gripping the roots where erosion had exposed them, he lowered himself to it and looked around. No rusty rifle. No field glasses. He peered over the side. It was a long way down to the glint of water at the bottom.

  He hauled himself back up to the meadow. As he stood, resting his hand on the tree for balance, he felt a hole in the bark. He looked more closely. “Constable Hodge? May I borrow your hunting knife?”

  Hodge unsheathed a strong blade that had been fashioned by honing a steel file. “Whatcha got there?”

  “A bullet lodged in the tree, I suspect.” Bell used Hodge’s knife to gouge the bark around the hole. He carved an opening large enough to dislodge a soft lead wad with his fingers in an effort not to scratch it with the blade.

  “Where the heck did that come from?”

  “Maybe Harry Frost’s rifle.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You’ll never know.”

  “Maybe I will,” said Bell, recalling a court case argued a few years earlier by Oliver Wendell Holmes where a bullet was matched to the gun that fired it. “Do you happen to have that rifle the boys found on the tracks?”

  “In my office. I’d have given it back to Mrs. Frost, but she left. Mr. Frost of course was long gone. Anyone left on the property out there is no one I would give a fine rifle to.”

  They returned to North River. Hodge helped Bell find a bale of cotton wool packing material at the railroad depot. They set it up at the empty end of the freight yard. Bell stuck his calling card in the center of the bale and paced off one hundred and fifty yards. Then he loaded two.45-70 shells into Frost’s Marlin, found the calling card like a bull’s-eye in the telescopic sight, and squeezed off a round.

  The bullet missed the card, missed the cotton wool bale, and twanged off an iron signal post above it.

  Constable Hodge looked pityingly at Isaac Bell. “I naturally assumed that a Van Dorn private detective would be conversant with firearms. Would you like me to shoot it for you?”

  “The scope is off-kilter.”

  “That’ll happen,” Constable Hodge said, dubiously. “Sometimes.”

  “It could have been damaged when it was dropped on the tracks.”

  Bell sighted in on the mark the bullet had pocked in the iron post and calculated the distance down. He levered out the spent shell, which loaded a fresh cartridge into the chamber, and squeezed the trigger. His calling card flew from the bale.

  “Now you’re getting the hang of it,” Hodge said. “Keep it up you could be a pretty good shot, young feller.”

  Bell dug the bullet out of the bale and wrapped it in a handkerchief along with the slug he had pulled from tree. He walked to the post office and mailed them to the Van Dorn laboratory in Chicago, requesting examination under a microscope to determine whether the bullet he had test-fired revealed rifling marks that resembled those on the bullet in the tree.

  “Is anyone living out at Frost’s camp?” he asked Hodge.

  “No one you’d want to meet. About the only thing still going is the creamery. They send milk into town to sell. Cook, maids, butler, gardeners, and gatekeeper, they all left when Mrs. Frost did.”

  Bell rented a Ford auto at the livery stable, and followed directions for several miles to the Frost camp. The first he saw of it was the gatehouse, an elaborate structure built of boulders and a grillwork of massive logs under its steep roof that gave the lie to the term “camp,” an Adirondack affectation similar to dubbing a Newport mansion a “cottage.” The gatekeeper’s living quarters, a large, handsome bungalow, was attached to it. No one came when he called and pounded on the door.

  He drove under the stone arch and onto a broad carriage drive. The drive was surfaced with crushed slate and graded in a manner far superior to the muddy, potholed public road from town. Piercing mile after mile of forest, the level roadbed gouged through hillsides and was carried across countless streams and brooks on hand-hewn stone culverts and bridges ornamented in the Arts and Crafts style.

  Bell drove through five miles of Harry Frost’s land before he finally saw the lake. Across the water stood a sprawling house of timbers, shingles, and stone. Large cottages and outbuildings surrounded the house, and in the distance were the barns and silos of the creamery. As the smooth slate drive skirted the lake and drew closer to the compound, he saw numerous outbuildings: blacksmith shop, smokehouse, laundry, and, at the far end of a broad lawn, an aeroplane hangar – a large, wide shed recognizable by the front elevators of a biplane poking out the gable end.

  Isaac Bell stopped the Ford under the porte-cochere of the main house, accelerated the motor slightly, and opened the coil switch. The place seemed deserted. With the motor off, the only sounds he could hear were the faint ticking of hot metal and the soft sigh of a cool breeze blowing off the lake.

  He knocked on the front door. No one answered. He tried the door. It was unlocked, a massive affair.

  “Hello!” Bell called loudly. “Is anyone home?”

  No one answered.

  He stepped inside. The foyer opened into a great hall, an immense chamber brightly lighted by tall windows. Twenty-foot-tall stone fireplaces dominated each end. Rustic chairs and couches clustered on woven carpets. Gloomy European oil paintings were hung in gold frames that glittered. Timbers soared high overhead. The walls and ceiling were papered with birch bark.

  The tall detective stalked from opulent room to opulent room.

  Anger began to heat his breast. Scion of a Boston banking family, and bequeathed a personal fortune by his grandfather, Isaac Bell was accustomed to the accoutrements of great wealth and no stranger to privilege. But this so-called camp had been paid for with riches founded on the suffering of innocent men, women, and children. Harry Frost had committed so many crimes forging his empire that it would be difficult to single one out were it not for a Chicago depot
bombing he had engineered to destroy a rival distributor. Frost’s dynamite had killed three newsboys waiting for their papers. The oldest had been twelve.

  Bell’s boot heels echoed though an empty corridor and down a stairway.

  At the foot of the stairs hulked a heavy oak door, studded with nailheads.

  Bell jimmied the lock and discovered a vast wine cellar carved from the living stone. He strode among the racks, noting excellent vintages from the last twenty years, a large number of the fine ’69 and ’71 clarets and some astonishingly rare bottles of 1848 Lafite, laid down nearly twenty years before Baron Rothschild bought the Médoc estate. Frost had even purchased a long row of Château d’Yquem bottles of the 1811 Comet Vintage. Although, based on the low quality of the art hanging upstairs, Bell suspected a crooked wine merchant’s variant on fake Academy paintings.

  Upon leaving the wine cellar, he stopped suddenly, arrested by the sight of a wedding photograph on a center table. Harry Frost, dressed up in top hat and morning coat, glowered truculently at the camera. Expensive tailoring could not hide his bulk, and the top hat made him appear even wider. Bell studied the photograph closely. Frost, he realized, was not the fat man a first glance might suggest. There was something lithe and long-legged about his stance, a man poised to spring. Violent as a longhorn, Joe Van Dorn had characterized him. Quick as one, too, Bell suspected. And as strong.

  Josephine stood like a child beside him, her youthful face expressing bravery, Bell thought, and something more – a sense of adventure as if she were embarking into the unknown and hoping for the best.

  Arrayed stiffly behind the couple was a family of what looked like farm folk dressed for church. Bell recognized the stone fireplace behind them. They had been married here at the camp in this vast, echoing room. A strong resemblance in all the faces, but Frost’s told Bell that no one but Josephine’s own family had attended.

  He went outside. He circled the house and inspected the outbuildings. A carriage house had been converted to a firing range, with an arsenal of pistols and rifles locked in a glass case. Similar cases held collections of swords, cutlasses, flick-knives, and daggers.

  The garage contained expensive automobiles – a Packard limousine, a Palmer-Singer Skimabout, a Lancia Torpedo – and several motorcycles. The stable of vehicles fit the picture forming in Bell’s mind of Frost as a restless recluse. He lived like a king but also like an outlaw. The camp was as much a hideout as it was an estate, and Frost, like all successful criminals, was prepared for a quick getaway. It seemed as if Harry Frost knew that, despite his wealth and power, it was only a matter of time before he would commit an atrocity that would make him a fugitive.

  Bell looked into the blacksmith shop. The forge was cold. In the smithy’s scrap heap he saw horseshoes that had been twisted out of shape. Harry Frost’s Chicago calling card, Bell recalled, bent with Frost’s bare hands to demonstrate his almost inhuman strength, then thrown by his thugs through the bedroom windows of his rivals. It was an article of faith among the drunks in the West Side saloons that Frost had killed a Clydesdale with his fist.

  Hanging above the twisted shoes, grimy with smoke, was a framed award that Frost had received for contributing money to a civic group. Bell turned on his heel and walked into the sun, whispering the newsboys’ names: Wally Laughlin, Bobby Kerouac, Joey Lansdowne. It had been an elaborate funeral, their fellows maintaining the newsboy tradition of hiring hearses and mourners and paying clerks to write obituaries and letters of condolence. Wally Laughlin, Bobby Kerouac, Joey Lansdowne, barely out of childhood, priests promising their mothers they’d find a better place in Heaven.

  Bell entered the boathouse at the edge of the lake. Inside, he found flatboats and canoes and a sailboat with its mast shipped. From the boathouse he walked through tall grass to the aeroplane hangar. It contained enough parts to assemble several flying machines. But the machine he had seen through the open end was missing its engine and propellers.

  He heard voices in the direction of the smokehouse.

  Bell walked quietly toward them, keeping the squat windowless stone structure between him and whoever was talking on the other side. He stopped beside it. A voice was droning on and on. It sounded like a middle-aged or older man, talking some trapped listener’s ear off. Bell’s own ear was struck by the accent. The speaker spoke the flat a’s heard in the Adirondack region. But this was no local Upstate New Yorker, not with the unmistakable d’s for th sounds and snaky s’s of Chicago.

  The subject of his monologue tagged him as a denizen of the notorious Levee District, where crime and vice were daily fare.

  4

  “YOU WANT TO MAKE A PILE MONEY, you get yourself a bordello – What’s that? No, no, no. Not here! Who’s your customers here? Cows? You go to Chicago! You go over dere by the West Side. You purchase a house for six thousand. You bring a carpenter by to build a buncha walls for a couple hundred bucks. You get ten girls. Twenty visits a night. Dollar a visit – you don’t want no cheap fifty-cent house – and you let the girls keep half. You pay the house off in two months. From then on, you’re making three thousand a month. Profit! ”

  “I gotta go do my chores,” said a younger, slower voice.

  Bell removed his broad-brimmed hat to venture a quick glance around the corner. The middle-aged talker was sitting on a barrel with his back to him. He had a bottle of beer in his hand and was wearing a city man’s derby, shirtsleeves, and vest. The younger was a farm boy in a straw hat. He was clutching a bucket and a rake.

  “And don’t forget your profits selling booze to the visitors. And the girls. The girls always blow their easy money. They want morphine, cocaine, wine, you take your cut. Salesman comes by to sell’em dresses, you take your cut.”

  “I gotta go, Mr. Spillane.”

  The farmhand shuffled out of sight in the direction of the creamery.

  When Bell rounded the corner of the smokehouse, and the man on the barrel whirled to face him, he instantly recognized the grizzled fifty-year-old from the wanted posters.

  “Sammy Spillane.”

  Spillane stared long and hard, trying to place him. It had been ten years. He pointed at Bell, shaking his finger, nodding his head. “I know you.”

  “What are you doing here, Sammy? Was Harry Frost running an old folks’ home for retired bruisers?”

  “You’re a goddamned Van Dorn, that’s who you are.”

  “How did you get out of Joliet?” Sammy’s pale skin told him he’d been locked up until recently.

  “Time off for good behavior. Time to paste your nose into that pretty face.”

  “You’re getting a little long in the tooth to mix it up, aren’t you, Sammy?”

  “I am,” Sammy conceded. “But me old gal Sadie blessed me with two fine sons. Come out here, boys!” he called loudly. “Say hello to a genuine Van Dorn detective, who forgot to bring his pals with ’im.”

  Two younger and bigger versions of Sammy Spillane stepped into the sunlight, yawning and rubbing sleep from their eyes. At the sight of Isaac Bell they darted back inside and returned with pick handles, slapping the heavy bulging ends menacingly in their palms. Bell did not doubt that they had learned their trade as strikebreakers intimidating union marchers. Their father, meanwhile, had drawn a Smith amp; Wesson revolver, which he pointed at Bell.

  “What do you think of my boys, detective?” Spillane chortled. “Chips off the old block?”

  “I’d have recognized them anywhere,” said Isaac Bell, looking the big young men up and down. “The resemblance is strongest in the squinty pig eyes. Though I do see a bit of their mother in those sloping foreheads. Say, Sammy, did you ever get around to marrying Sadie?”

  The insult provoked them to charge simultaneously.

  They came at the tall detective from both sides. They raised the pick handles expertly, tucking their elbows close to their torsos so they didn’t expose themselves and trusting in wrist action to swing the thick hickory shafts with sufficient powe
r to smash bone.

  Their attack momentarily blocked Sammy’s field of fire.

  Bell kept it blocked by slewing sideways. When Sammy Spillane could see him again, Isaac Bell’s white hat was falling to the grass and the two-shot.44 derringer the detective had drawn from inside the crown was aimed squarely at his face. Sammy swung his revolver toward Bell. Bell fired first, and the Chicago gangster dropped his gun and fell off the barrel.

  His sons halted their rush, surprised by the crack of gunfire and the sight of their father curled up on the ground, clutching his right arm and moaning in pain.

  “Boys,” Bell told them, “your old man has decided to sit this one out. Why don’t you drop the lumber before you get hurt?”

  They separated, flaring to either side. They stood twelve feet apart, each only six feet from Bell, an easy reach with the pick handles.

  “You got one shot left, Mr. Detective,” said the bigger of the two. “What are you going do with it?”

  Bell scooped his hat off the ground, clapped it on his head, and aimed at a spot between them. “I was fixing to shoot your brother in the knee, figuring he could use that pick handle as a cane for the rest of his life. Now I’m reassessing the situation. Wondering if you’re the one.” The gun barrel yawned from one to the other, then settled between them, rock steady.

  “You shoot him, you’ve gotta deal with me,” the smaller warned.

  “Same here,” said the bigger, adding with a harsh laugh, “Mexican standoff. ’Cept you’re short a Mexican – Daddy, you all right?”

  “No, dammit,” Sammy groaned. “I’m shot in the arm. Kill him before he blows your fool head off! Get him, both of you. Stick and slug! Now!”

  Sammy Spillane’s sons charged.

  Bell dropped the big one with his last bullet and shifted abruptly to let his brother’s pick handle whiz an inch from his face. Young Spillane’s momentum threw him off balance, and Bell raked the back of his neck with the derringer as he tumbled past.

  He sensed movement behind him.