The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  Josephine expressed astonishment that Celere was alive. She said she had never given up hope that he had somehow survived. She took his hand and said, “Oh, you poor thing,” when he told his story. She seemed happy to see him, Bell thought, but she turned quickly to the business of the race.

  “You couldn’t have come at a better time, Marco. I need help keeping the aeroplane running. It’s getting pretty worn down. I’ll have my husband put you on the payroll.”

  “There is no need for that,” Celere replied gallantly, “I will work gratis. After all, it is in my interest, too, that my machine win the race.”

  “Then you better get to work,” said Bell. “Weather’s clearing. Weiner of Accounting just announced we’re taking off for Palm Springs.”

  MINDFUL THAT ISAAC BELL was watching him like a hawk, Marco Celere waited patiently to have a private conversation with Josephine. He made sure he was never alone with her until after she arrived at Palm Springs. Only the next morning, while they fueled the machine for the short flight to Los Angeles, did he dare to chance speaking. They were alone, pouring gasoline into the overhead gravity tank, while the mechanicians joined the police in clearing spectators from the field.

  Josephine spoke first. “Who died in the fire?”

  “I found a body in the hobo jungle. Now Platov doesn’t exist.”

  “Dead already?”

  “Of course. A poor old man. They die all the time. What did you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Maybe married life confuses you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is it like?” Marco teased. “Being Mrs. Preston Whiteway?”

  “I postponed my ‘honeymoon’ until after the race. You know that. I told you I would.”

  Marco shrugged. “This is like opera buffa.”

  “I don’t know anything about opera.”

  “Opera buffa is the funny kind. Like vaudeville comics.”

  “This is not funny to me, Marco.”

  “To me, it’s worth getting shot.”

  “How? Why?”

  “It’s just that if something were to happen to Preston Whiteway, you would inherit his newspaper empire.”

  “I don’t want his empire. I just want to fly aeroplanes and win this race.” She searched his face, and added, “And be with you.”

  “I suppose that I should feel grateful you still feel that way.”

  “What would happen to Preston?”

  “Oh, now Mr. Whiteway is ‘Preston’?”

  “I can’t call my husband Mr. Whiteway.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t.”

  “Marco, what is it? What are you getting at?”

  “I just wonder, will you keep helping me?”

  “Of course. . What did you mean, if something happens to Preston?”

  “Such as Harry Frost, your insanely jealous former husband, murdering your new husband.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Marco reached over and turned back the sleeve of her blouse, uncovering the bandaged bullet wound on her forearm. “Nothing you don’t already know about the man.”

  38

  A LOUD, BRIGHT CARNIVAL pitched its tents near Dominguez Field, just south of Los Angeles, and was doing a roaring business from the spillover of the quarter-million spectators who thronged to cheer the arrival of the last two contestants for the Whiteway Cup and send them off to Fresno in the morning.

  Eustace Weed was sick with fear over the impending order to contaminate Isaac Bell’s aeroplane fuel and had no desire to go to a carnival. But Mr. Bell insisted that “all work and no play made Jack a dull boy.” He backed up this observation with five dollars’ spending money and strict orders not to bring any change back from the midway. A friend of Mr. Bell’s, a guy Eustace’s age named Dash who’d been hanging around, placing a lot of bets on the race, ever since Illinois, walked over with Eustace from the rail yard and promised they’d meet up later to walk back to the support train.

  Eustace won a teddy bear by knocking over wooden milk bottles with a baseball. He was debating mailing it to Daisy or delivering it in person – as if somehow everything would turn out fine – when the toothless old barker who handed him his prize whispered hoarsely, “You’re on, Eustace.”

  “What?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Drop it in Bell’s gasoline tank right before he takes off.”

  “What if he sees me?”

  “Palm it when you fill the tank so he don’t.”

  “But he’s sharp as all heck. He might see me.”

  The toothless old guy patted Eustace’s shoulder in a friendly way and said, “Listen, Eustace, I don’t know what this is about and I don’t want to. All I know is, the fellows who told me to pass you the message are as bad as they get. So I’m advising you, whoever this sharp Bell is, he better not see you.”

  The carnival had a Ferris wheel in the middle. It looked eighty feet tall, and Eustace wondered would they leave Daisy alone if he rode to the top and killed himself by jumping off. Just then, Dash showed up.

  “What happened? Lose all your money? You look miserable.”

  “I’m O.K.”

  “Hey, you won a teddy bear.”

  “For my girl.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Daisy.”

  “Say, if you married her, she’d be Daisy Weed,” Dash joked like it was a new idea. Then he asked if Eustace was hungry and insisted on buying him a sausage and a beer that went down like sawdust and vinegar.

  TWO HARD-FACED MEN with hooded eyes were waiting for Isaac Bell outside the Eagle Special’s hangar car. They were dressed in slouch hats, shirts with dirty collars, four-in-hand ties loose at the neck, and dark sack suits bulging with sidearms. One man had his arm in a sling that was noticeably fresher and whiter than his shirt, as was the bandage on his companion’s forehead. Josephine’s detective-mechanicians were eyeing them closely, scrutiny the two men returned with sullen bravado.

  “Remember us, Mr. Bell?”

  “Griggs and Bottomley. You look like you tangled with a locomotive.”

  “Feel that way, too,” Griggs admitted.

  Bell shook their hands, taking Bottomley’s left in deference to his sling, and told the detective-mechanicians, “They’re O.K., boys, Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley, Southern Pacific rail dicks.”

  The Van Dorns looked down their noses at the railroad police, who commonly represented the bottom of the private detective heap, until Bell added, “If you remember the Glendale wreck, Griggs and Bottomley were instrumental in getting to the bottom of it. What’s up, boys?”

  “We had a hunch you’d be the Van Dorn ramrodding the Josephine case.”

  Bell nodded. “Not something I want to read in the newspaper, but I am. And I have a funny feeling, based on the evidence of recent ministrations by the medicos, that you’re going to tell me you ran into Harry Frost.”

  “Ed plugged him dead center,” said Griggs. “Gut-shot him. Didn’t even slow him down.”

  “He wears a ‘bulletproof ’ vest.”

  “Heard of them,” said Griggs. “I didn’t know they worked.”

  “We do now,” observed Bottomley.

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Burbank. Dispatcher wired us someone was busting into a maintenance shop. Thieving louse was just piling into a motortruck when we got there. Louse opened fire. We shot back. He walked straight at us, walloped me in the head, and shot Tom in the arm.”

  “By the time we could see straight,” said Bottomley, “he was gone. Found the motortruck in the morning. Empty.”

  “What did he steal?”

  “Five fifty-pound crates of dynamite, some blasting caps, and a coil of fuse,” answered Griggs.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Bell. “He loves his dynamite.”

  “Sure, Mr. Bell. But what has Tom and me racking our brains is how’s he’s fixing to blow up a flying machine.”

/>   “The race is headed to Fresno in the morning,” answered Bell. “I’ll telephone Superintendent Watt, tell him what you boys turned up, and ask him to set the entire California division of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police to inspecting main-line bridges and trestles for sabotage.”

  “But flying machines don’t use bridges.”

  “Their support trains do,” Bell explained. “And just between us, at this point in the race, after four thousand miles, the mechanicians and spare parts in their hangar cars are all that’s keeping them in the air. By any chance did you wound him at all?”

  “I think I creased his leg when I went down. Wouldn’t be surprised if he limps a mite.”

  “Well done,” said Isaac Bell.

  EUSTACE WEED DECIDED that since he had no other choice than to do this terrible thing to Isaac Bell, he would at least do it right so nothing bad happened to Daisy by mistake. That would be the worst, to get caught doing the terrible thing but also have Daisy hurt.

  To steady his nerves, he pretended that he was back in Tucson, hustling hick-town pool players in their hick-town parlor. One thing he knew for sure: if you wanted to win at pool, you had to trust yourself. At the end of the game, the dough was won by the guy who didn’t lose his nerve.

  He snugged the copper tube inside his left hand and kept it hidden while he poured the strained gasoline – and – castor oil mix into the American Eagle’s tank right under Isaac Bell’s nose. That way, he wouldn’t look suspicious pulling it from a pocket. Andy came over to report that the machine was ready. Bell turned away to speak to Andy. Eustace reached for the gas cap to screw it on with his right hand.

  Bell said, “Andy, let’s check the control post again.”

  Eustace passed his left hand over the open mouth of the tank.

  Isaac Bell’s thumb and forefinger closed around his wrist, hard as a steel shackle.

  “Eustace. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  EUSTACE WEED OPENED HIS MOUTH. He could not speak. Tears welled in his eyes.

  Bell watched him sternly. When he spoke, the chief investigator’s voice was glacial: “I’ll tell you what happened. You nod. Understand?”

  Eustace was trembling.

  “Understand?” Bell repeated.

  Eustace nodded.

  Bell let go his wrist, palming the copper tube as he did, shook it speculatively, then tossed it to Andy Moser, who took one look and glowered, “When the gas melts the wax, what’s inside leaks out. What is it? Water?”

  Eustace Weed bit his lip and nodded.

  Bell pulled a notepad from his coat. “Do you recognize this fellow?”

  Eustace Weed blinked at a drawing like you’d see in the newspaper.

  “A saloonkeeper in Chicago. I don’t know his name.”

  “How about this one?”

  “He worked for the saloonkeeper. He took me to him.”

  “And this one?”

  “He’s the other one who took me to see him.”

  “How about this man?”

  Bell showed him a sketch of a grim-faced man, more frightening than the others, who looked like a prizefighter who had never lost a bout. “No. I never saw him.”

  “This fellow is a Van Dorn detective who has lived for the past two weeks across the hall from Miss Daisy Ramsey and her mother. He shares his rooms with another fellow, a bigger fellow. When one has to go out, the other is there, across the hall. When Daisy goes to work at the telephone exchange, a Van Dorn man watches the sidewalk and another watches the telephone exchange. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Eustace?”

  “Daisy is safe?”

  “Daisy is safe. Now, tell me everything. Quickly.”

  “How do you know her name?”

  “I asked you her name back in Topeka, Kansas. You told me, confirming what we were already turning up in Chicago. It’s our town.”

  “But you can’t watch over her forever.”

  “We don’t have to.” Bell held up the pictures again. “These two will be locked back in Joliet prison to resume serving well-deserved twenty-year sentences. This saloonkeeper is about to go out of business and open a small dry-goods store in Seattle, a city to which he is moving for his health.”

  ON A REMOTE STRETCH of dun-colored ranchland between Los Angeles and Fresno, the Southern Pacific West Side Line that the air racers were supposed to follow crossed the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka amp; Santa Fe. Intersecting at that same point were local short-line railroads that served the raisin growers and cattlemen of the San Joaquin Valley. The resultant junction of rails, switches, and underpasses was so confusing that dispatchers and train conductors called it the Snake Dance. The Whiteway Cup Air Race stewards had marked the correct route with a conspicuous canvas arrow.

  Dave Mayhew, Harry Frost’s telegrapher, climbed down from a pole and read aloud his Morse alphabet transcriptions.

  “Josephine’s way in the lead. Joe Mudd had trouble getting off the ground. Now he’s stuck in a cotton field in Tipton.”

  “Where’s her support train?” asked Frost.

  “Keeping pace. Right under her.”

  “Where’s Isaac Bell?”

  “The Tulare dispatcher heard his motor sputtering when he saw Bell and Josephine fly over. No one’s spotted him since. The last dispatcher who spotted her said Josephine was flying alone.”

  “Where is Bell’s support train?”

  “Sidelined north of Tulare – probably where he went down.”

  Harry Frost pulled his watch from his vest and confirmed the time. By this hour, the water in his gas should have made Isaac Bell smash.

  “Get the auto,” he told Mayhew.

  With decent luck, Bell was dead. But, at the very least, the Van Dorn posed no threat to Frost’s plan to shoot Josephine out of the sky and wreck Whiteway’s support train.

  To Stotts, Frost said, “Move the pointer.”

  Mike Stotts ran onto the Southern Pacific main line, rolled up the canvas arrow pointing north and unrolled it pointing northwest up the short line that angled toward the dry hills that rimmed the valley to the west. Then he threw the switch to divert Josephine’s train in the same direction.

  Dave Mayhew drove a brand-new Thomas Flyer onto the short line. Frost and Stotts climbed in, and the three raced northwest.

  39

  THE ONLY NOISE ISAAC BELL HEARD was the wind humming in the wing stays as he volplaned his yellow machine in gently descending circles. Beef cattle grazed peacefully under him, and a flock of white pelicans stayed on course, proof that he was passing over the ground as silently as a condor.

  A storm from the distant Pacific was surmounting the coastal mountains, and the shadow cast by his machine flickered and faded as the sun was covered and uncovered by cloud fragments racing ahead of the heavy thunderheads. As his shadow crept across the rolling hills in lazy curves, Bell maneuvered carefully so as not to let it fall on the Thomas Flyer racing ahead of a dust trail on the short-line tracks.

  There were three men in the Thomas. Bell was too high in the air to identify them, even with his field glasses. But the massive bulk of the figure hunched in the backseat of the open auto, and the canvas arrow that had been shifted away from the main line, coupled with poor Eustace’s attempt to sabotage his engine, told him it had to be Harry Frost.

  He had spotted the dust trail ten miles after he followed the canvas arrow at the Snake Dance junction and immediately shut off the noisy Gnome. Josephine was safe on the ground thirty miles back, fuming at the delay despite an official time-out sanctioned by Preston Whiteway to give Bell the opportunity to capture Frost.

  Bell turned back toward the junction and restarted the Gnome. When he saw the long yellow line that was the Josephine Special, he swooped down to the train, skimmed the roof of the hangar car, which bristled with rifle-toting detectives, turned around again, and led the train after the Thomas, rising to only five hundred feet above the locomotive.

  After ten minutes he thought tha
t they would have caught up, but the tracks were empty and the dust trail gone. A broad dry creek appeared ahead, a dip in the rolling land, as the tracks began veering alongside the foothills of the Coast Range mountains. It was bridged by a long wooden trestle.

  The tall detective held his control wheel in one hand and scrutinized the trestle with his field glasses. The maze of timbers would offer excellent cover for men with rifles. And they could have hidden the Thomas in its shadows. But he saw neither the men nor their auto. Suddenly he heard two sharp explosions – louder than the roar of the Gnome. He knew they weren’t gunshots. Nor had they come from the trestle but from directly beneath him, as if from the locomotive.

  The big black Atlantic slowed abruptly. Its high drive wheels ground sparks from the rails as the engineer fought to stop his long train as fast as he could. The loud reports, Bell realized, had been caused by torpedoes – detonating caps of fulminate of mercury attached to the rails with lead straps to signal trouble ahead. When a locomotive passed over them, they exploded loudly enough for the engineer and fireman to hear over the roar of the firebox and the thunder of the steam.

  Bell saw white smoke spewing from the brake shoes under every car, and the train clashed and banged to a halt halfway across the trestle. Instantly, the locomotive emitted five puffs of steam from its whistle. Five whistles signaled a brakeman to jump from the rear car – Preston Whiteway’s private carriage – and run back along the tracks waving a red flag to warn trains steaming behind it that the special had stopped suddenly for an emergency and was blocking the tracks. By then Bell had overflown the train and the trestle.

  He saw the glitter of sunlight on glass.

  In the same instant, he spotted the Thomas parked in the shadow of a rail-maintenance shack. The sun flashed again on a telescope sight. He counted two rifles braced on the roof of the shack, spitting red fire.

  It was a brilliantly laid trap – the train stopped as a distraction, the rock-steady shooting position, the shock of total surprise. And Bell knew that if he were the young aviatrix whose name was painted on the side of his yellow monoplane, Frost would have killed her in the second hail of fire when she veered away instinctively, thus presenting a bigger target broadside.