“Captain Falconer is the Navy’s Special Inspector of Target Practice. He became a gunnery expert after the battle of Santiago. Even though we sank every Spanish ship in Cuba, our guns scored only two percent hits. Captain Falconer vowed to improve that.”
The steeply sloped face of Agar Mountain loomed ahead. “Oh, look,” said Katherine. “We have it all to ourselves. No one’s here but us.” They stopped at the foot of the cliff. “Wasn’t that crazy man who killed himself blowing up his piano involved with battleships?”
“How did you hear about that?” asked Lakewood. The Navy had kept the tragedy out of the papers, admitting only that there had been an explosion at the Gun Factory.
“Everyone in Washington was talking about it,” said Katherine.
“Is that where you live?”
“I was visiting a friend. Did you know the man?”
“Yes, he was a fine man,” answered Lakewood, staring up the rocks, surveying a route. “In fact, he was on the captain’s yacht for the clambake.”
“I don’t believe I met him.”
“It was a darned sad thing . . . Terrible loss.”
Katherine Dee turned out to be a strong climber. Lakewood could barely keep up. He was new to the sport, and noticed that her fingers were so strong that she would raise her entire weight by the grip of one hand. When she did, she was able to swing her body to reach high for the next grip.
“You climb like a monkey.”
“That’s not a very nice compliment.” She pretended to pout as she waited for him to catch up with her. “Who wants to look like a monkey?”
Lakewood figured he better save his breath. When they were eighty feet off the ground and the tops of the trees looked like feathers far below, she suddenly pulled farther ahead of him.
“Say, where’d you learn to climb like that?”
“The nuns at my convent school took us climbing on the Matterhorn.”
At that moment, Grover Lakewood’s hands were spread wide, gripping crevices to either side, as he felt for his next toehold. Katherine Dee had reached a position fifteen feet directly above him. She smiled.
“Oh, Mr. Lakewood?”
He craned his neck to see her. It looked like she was holding a giant turtle in her strong white hands. Except it couldn’t be a turtle this early in the year. It was a large rock.
“Careful with that,” he called.
Too late.
It slipped from her hands. No it didn’t! She opened her hands.
6
LANGNER’S SUICIDE NOTE KEPT TICKLING THE BACK OF Isaac Bell’s mind.
He used his pass from the Navy Secretary to reenter the Gun Factory, opened the Polhem padlock on the design-loft door again, and searched Langner’s desk. A stack of special hand-laid stock that Langner apparently reserved for important correspondence matched the paper on which the suicide note was written. Beside it was a Waterman fountain pen.
Bell pocketed the pen, and stopped at the chemist’s laboratory where Van Dorn maintained an account. Then he took a streetcar up Capitol Hill to Lincoln Park, a neighborhood that was flourishing as Washingtonians moved up the Hill from the congested swampy areas around the Potomac River, which turned foul in the summer heat.
Bell found the Langner home directly across the street from the park. It was a two-story brick row house with green shutters and a wrought-iron fence around a small front yard. The Van Dorn auditor investigating Arthur Langner’s financial affairs had uncovered no evidence of a private income. Langner would have had to purchase this new house on his Gun Factory salary, which, the auditor had noted, equaled that of top managers in private industry.
The house looked newly built—as did all but a handful of old wooden structures on the side streets—and boasted tall windows. The brickwork was typically ornate, flaring skyward to an elaborate dentated cornice. But inside, Bell noted in a glance, the house was anything but typical. It was decorated in a spare, modern manner, with built-in cabinets and bookshelves, electric lamps, and ceiling fans. The furniture was up-to-date, too, and very expensive—airy yet strong pieces made by the Glaswegian Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Where, Bell had to ask, did Langner get the money to pay for Mackintosh furniture?
Dorothy was no longer dressed in black but in a silvery gray color that complemented her eyes and her raven hair. A man trailed her into the foyer. She introduced him as “My friend Ted Whitmark.”
Bell pegged Whitmark as a hail-fellow-well-met salesman sort. He looked the picture of success, with a bright smile on his handsome face, an expensive suit of clothes, and a crimson necktie speckled with Harvard College’s insignia.
“More than a friend, I’d say,” Whitmark boomed as he shook Bell’s hand with a hearty grip. “Closer to a fiancé, if you get my drift,” he added, tightening his grip emphatically.
“Congratulations,” said Bell, squeezing back.
Whitmark let go with an easy smile, and joked, “That’s some shake. What do you do in your spare time, shoe horses?”
“Would you excuse us for a moment, Mr. Whitmark?” Bell asked. “Miss Langner, Mr. Van Dorn asked me to have a word with you.”
“We have no secrets here,” said Whitmark. “At least, none that are any business of a detective.”
“That’s all right, Ted,” said Dorothy, laying a hand on his arm and giving him a kind smile. “There’s gin in the kitchen. Why not mix us cocktails while Mr. Bell reports?”
Ted Whitmark didn’t like it but he had no choice but to exit, which he did with a grave “Don’t be keeping her too long, Bell. The poor girl is still recovering from the shock of her father’s death.”
“This will just take a minute,” Bell assured him.
Dorothy slid the pocket doors shut. “Thank you. Ted gets flatteringly jealous.”
“I imagine,” said Bell, “he has many good qualities to have captured your hand.”
She looked Bell straight in the face. “I am not rushing into anything,” she informed him in what the tall detective could not help but interpret as a blunt and flattering statement of interest from a very appealing woman.
“What line is Ted in?” Bell asked, diplomatically changing the subject.
“Ted sells foodstuffs to the Navy. In fact, he’s leaving soon for San Francisco to get ready to provision the Great White Fleet when it arrives. Are you married, Mr. Bell?”
“I am engaged.”
An unreadable smile danced across her beautiful lips. “Pity.”
“To be perfectly honest,” said Bell, “it is not a pity. I am a very lucky man.”
“Perfect honesty is a fine quality in a man. Are you visiting today for more important reasons than to not flirt with me?”
Bell took out the fountain pen. “Do you recognize this?”
Her face clouded. “Of course. That’s my father’s pen. I gave it to him for his birthday.”
Bell handed it to her. “You may as well hold on to it, then. I took it from his desk.”
“Why?”
“To confirm that he had used it to write his letter.”
“The so-called suicide letter? Anyone could have written that.”
“Not quite anyone. Either your father or a skillful forger.”
“You know my position on that. It is not possible that he killed himself.”
“I will keep looking.”
“What about the paper the letter was written on?”
“It was his.”
“I see . . . And the ink!” she said, suddenly eager. “How do we know it was written with the same ink as in his pen? Perhaps it wasn’t this pen. I bought it in a stationer’s shop. The Waterman Company must sell thousands.”
“I’ve have already given samples of the ink in this pen and on the letter to a chemistry laboratory to ascertain whether the ink is different.”
“Thank you,” she said, her face falling. “It’s not likely, is it?”
“I’m afraid not, Dorothy.”
“But if it is his ink, it
still doesn’t prove he wrote that letter.”
“Not beyond all doubt,” Bell agreed. “But I must tell you frankly that while each of these facts must be investigated, they are not likely to give us a definitive answer.”
“What will?” she asked. She seemed suddenly bewildered. Tears glinted in her eyes.
Isaac Bell was touched by her suffering and confusion. He took her hands in his. “Whatever it is, if it exists, we will find it.”
“The Van Dorns never give up?” she asked with a brave smile.
“Never,” Bell promised, although in his heart he had less and less hope that he could lay her pain to rest.
She clung to his hands. When she finally let them go, she stepped closer and kissed his cheek. “Thank you. That’s all I can ask.”
“I’ll keep in touch,” said Bell.
“Would you stay for a cocktail?”
“I’m afraid I can’t, thank you. I’m expected in New York.” As she walked him to the door, Bell glanced into the dining room and remarked, “That is a splendid table. Is it a Mackintosh?” “It sure is,” she answered proudly. “Father used to say if buying a piece of art that he could not afford meant eating beans for supper, he would eat beans for supper.”
Bell had to wonder if Langner had gotten tired of beans and accepted a bribe from a steel mill. As he stepped through the gate he looked back. Dorothy was standing on the step, looking for all the world, he thought, like a fairy princess locked in a tower.
THE B & O RAILROAD’S ROYAL LIMITED was the fastest and most luxurious train from Washington to New York. As night darkened the lead crystal windows, Isaac Bell used the quiet journey to review the hunt for the Frye Boys. The state line-jumping bank robbers that Van Dorn detectives had been tracking through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio had vanished somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. As had Detective John Scully.
Dinner aboard the Royal, the equal of Delmonico’s or the new Plaza Hotel, was served in a mahogany-paneled dining car. Bell had Maryland rockfish and a half bottle of Mumm, and reflected upon how much Dorothy Langner reminded him of his fiancée. Clearly, were she not grieving for her father, Dorothy would be a quick-witted, interesting woman, much like Marion Morgan. The women had similar backgrounds: each lost her mother young and had been educated more than most women thanks to doting fathers who were accomplished men and wanted their daughters to exercise their talents fully.
Physically, Marion and Dorothy could not be more different. Dorothy’s hair was a glossy black mane, Marion’s a gleaming straw blond; Dorothy’s eyes were a compelling blue-gray, Marion’s an arresting coral-sea green. Both were tall, slim, and lithe. And both, he thought with a smile, could stop traffic by merely stepping into the street.
Bell checked his gold pocket watch as the Royal pulled into its Jersey City terminal. Nine o’clock. Too late to visit Marion at her hotel in Fort Lee if she was shooting pictures tomorrow. The laugh was on him. Marion was directing a two-reel moving picture about imaginary bank robbers while he was chasing real ones. But a movie drama, he had already learned from observing her at work, took as much planning and detail work as the real thing. And for that, a girl needed her sleep.
He scanned the newsstands and the papers that boys were hawking when he got off the train. Headlines dueled for attention. Half proclaimed a fantastic variety of Japanese threats to the Great White Fleet if—as was rumored—President Roosevelt ordered it close to the Japanese Islands. Half blamed the murder of a New York school-teacher on Chinese white slavers. But it was the weather banners Bell was searching, hoping for a bad forecast.
“Excellent!” he exclaimed aloud. The Weather Bureau predicted clouds and rain.
Marion would not have to rise at dawn to catch every available ray of sunlight.
He hurried from the terminal. The sixteen-mile trolley ride to Fort Lee would take at least an hour, but there might be a better way. The Jersey City Police were experimenting with a motor patrol like New York’s across the river and, as he expected, one of their six-cylinder Ford autos was sitting in front of the terminal manned by a sergeant and patrolman formerly of the Mounted Division.
“Van Dorn,” Bell addressed the sergeant, who looked a little lost without his horse. “It’s worth twenty dollars to get me to Cella’s Park Hotel in Fort Lee.”
Ten would have done it. For twenty, the sergeant cranked the siren.
THE RAIN STARTED as the racing police Ford crested the Palisades. Flinging mud, it tore down Fort Lee’s Main Street, skidded along the trolley tracks, and whisked past a movie studio whose glass walls glittered in its feeble headlamps. Outside the village, they pulled up to Cella’s, a large white two-story frame building set in a picnic grounds.
Bell bounded across the front porch with a big grin on his face. The dining room, which turned into a bar at night, was still open and doing a roaring business as the actors, directors, and cameramen conceded that without sunlight to film by, tomorrow was a lost day. A gang of pitch-perfect singers was grouped around the piano harmonizing,
“You can go as far as you like with me
In my merry Oldsmobile.”
He spotted Marion at a corner table, and his heart nearly stopped. She was laughing, deep in conversation with two other women directors whom Bell had met before: Christina Bialobrzesky, who claimed to be a Polish countess but whose accent sounded to Bell’s ear like New Orleans, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed Mademoiselle Duvall of Pathé Frères.
Marion looked up. She saw him standing in the doorway and jumped to her feet with a radiant smile. Bell rushed across the room. She met him halfway, and he picked her up in his arms and kissed her.
“What a wonderful surprise!” she exclaimed. She was still in her working clothes—shirtwaist, long skirt, and a snug jacket. Her blond hair was heaped up in back, out of her way, exposing her long, graceful neck.
“You look lovely.”
“Liar! I look like I’ve been up since five in the morning.”
“You know I never lie. You look terrific.”
“Well, so do you. And then some . . . Have you eaten?”
“Dinner on the train.”
“Come. Join us. Or would you rather we sit alone?”
“I’ll say hello first.”
The hotel proprietor approached, beaming with fond memories of Bell’s last visit and rubbing his hands. “Champagne, again, Mr. Bell?”
“Of course.”
“For the table?”
“For the room!”
“Isaac!” said Marion. “There are fifty people in here.”
“Nothing in my grandfather Isaiah’s will says I can’t spend a portion of his five million dollars on a toast to the beauty of Miss Marion Morgan. Besides, they say that Grandfather had an eye for the ladies.”
“So five million was not all you inherited.”
“And when they get drunk, they won’t notice us slipping upstairs to your room.”
She led him by the hand. Christina and Mademoiselle Duvall were also still in their work clothes, though the flamboyant Frenchwoman wore her usual riding pants. She kissed Bell’s cheeks and called him “Eee-zahk.”
“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,” s
aid 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.
NAME CHANGED FRYES HEADED HOME NEAR
FIRST JOB IN NEW JERSEY
Marion was smiling in the lobby next to the stairs. “I said good night for you.”
7
GET 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:
The Spy Page 5