“Would you consider disappearing instead?”
“I have disappeared. I don’t like it.”
“What if I were to shoot Rockefeller?”
“No! Do not kill him. I want him to see this destroyed.”
“He’ll build again.”
“He’ll be too late. I invested in refineries at Philadelphia and Delaware and Boston and Texas. When I’ve blown Constable Hook off the map, I’ll control seaboard production. I want him to see that, too.”
This was startling information. It was also deeply disconcerting, for to be surprised was to admit a severe lapse in the sharp awareness that made a hunter a hunter instead of prey. Bill Matters was reinventing himself. But this hadn’t happened yesterday; he’d been reinventing all along.
“You’re like Rockefeller,” the assassin marveled.
Bill Matters laughed. “Master of the unexpected.”
“Then you’ll disappear?”
“To Europe . . . in style.”
“May I come with you?”
“Of course,” Matters said without hesitation. “I’ll keep you busy. I’m not retiring, only starting over.”
—
Movement in the street below caught the assassin’s eye. A strong man in overalls was rolling a wooden spool of copper cable. He disappeared below the overhang of the roof as he rolled it into the alley that led to the back of the saloon.
Matters asked, “What the devil is that?”
“Copper wire.”
“I can see that. Where’s he taking it?”
“The cellar.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s for me.”
Bill Matters looked hard at his assassin. “Now what game are you playing?”
“The unexpected. Just like Rockefeller. Or should I say, just like you.”
“What game?”
“Fast and loose.”
“With whom?”
“Isaac Bell.”
—
Heat lightning flickered repeatedly under a sullen midnight sky.
Gun in hand, Isaac Bell approached Bill Matters’ private railcar on foot. It was parked on a remote Saw Mill River valley siding of the Putnam Division twenty miles from New York City and less than ten from John D. Rockefeller’s Pocantico Hills estate.
Bell ignored the sweat burning his eyes and mosquitos whining around his ears. He walked on the wooden crossties so as not to crunch on the railbed ballast. But the flashes from distant storms threatened to give him away.
Van Dorn Research had traced the telephone number Bell had found at the assassin’s gunsmith to the private car platform at Pittsburgh’s Union Station. The Pittsburgh field office had learned that the telephone in Bill Matters’ car had been connected twice in the past six months to that platform. Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton had known which New York Central Railroad dispatchers to bribe to nail down its current location in Westchester County.
The detectives assigned to stand watch from a distance thought they had seen one figure enter the car hours ago just after dark. They had seen no one leave. Research procured Pullman Palace Car Company blueprints of the car’s floor plan. Bell memorized them, ordered the detectives out of sight, and went in alone.
He saw a sliver of light shine through the curtains as he drew close. A chimney stack broke the smooth roof line silhouette marking the galley and dining room in the front of the car. Those windows were dark, as were the windows in the rear.
At fifty feet away, he heard music. At twenty, he could distinguish the words of the hit song “Come Take a Trip in my Airship” playing on a gramophone.
The tenor Billy Murray was starting the last chorus. Bell sprinted forward to take advantage of the cover before the cylinder ran out.
Come take a trip in my airship.
Come take a sail ’mong the stars.
Come have a ride around Venus.
Come have a spin around Mars.
He climbed onto the rear platform.
No one to watch while we’re kissing,
No one to see while we spoon,
He opened the door. The music got louder.
Come take a trip in my airship,
And we’ll visit the man in the moon.
He was inside, back pressed to the door as he closed it quietly. This was the rear parlor, where the plush velvet seats could be converted to beds. He glided forward, toward the light, which was filtered by a curtain. The music was coming from the middle section, which the Pullman Company had configured for Matters as an office.
Suddenly a figure pushed through the curtain.
Bell slammed his arms around it in a vise grip.
36
A shriek brought Edna Matters bursting into the parlor with her .410 shotgun.
She saw Bell and lowered the gun.
“Thank God, it’s you.”
It was Nellie in Bell’s arms. He could feel her heart pounding fearfully. He let go. She gathered herself with repeated deep breaths.
“Hello, Isaac. We figured you’d show up. You could have knocked.”
“Our father is not here and we don’t know where he is,” said Edna.
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“No, Isaac. We would not.”
Nellie said, “Not until you understand that all he did was blow up in anger. Thanks to you, he didn’t kill Rockefeller. You saved him from committing a terrible crime in a grip of rage. No damage was done. We are grateful to you for that. But does he deserve jail, considering all he suffered?”
“What happens next time when I’m not there to stop him?”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Will his anger evaporate? I don’t think so.”
“He’ll get over it. He’s not a cold-blooded killer.”
Isaac Bell said, “He prepared a killing field. He opened the gangway connectors. He lured Rockefeller out there. He planned ahead of time how he would kill him. Any jury will call that premeditated murder.”
“It’s Rockefeller’s fault for cheating the poor man,” Nellie shot back.
“Father must have had a nervous breakdown,” said Edna. “It all comes back to Rockefeller driving him mad.”
“I’m sorry, Edna, Nellie, but what he did in Germany was much worse than ‘blowing up in anger.’”
“Would you accept him being placed in an asylum?”
“Locked in an asylum.”
“Where they would treat him,” Nellie said eagerly. “With doctors. And medicine.”
“Maybe lawyers could convince a judge and jury to see it that way,” said Bell, “particularly if he were to turn himself in. Do you know where he is?”
They shook their heads, and Nellie said, “No. We honestly don’t know.”
“Has he been here?”
“We don’t think so,” said Nellie.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nothing of his in the car. We searched every closet and cabinet. Nothing.”
“How do you happen to be here?”
“We’re using Father’s car for headquarters,” said Nellie.
“Headquarters?”
“For the New Woman’s Flyover. Don’t you remember? I chartered a locomotive to move us to North Tarrytown in the morning.” And suddenly she was talking a mile a minute. The balloons, she said, were arriving from near and far. They were gathering in a hayfield she had rented from the owner of the Sleepy Hollow Roadhouse.
“For a dollar, Isaac, can you believe it?”
“I’ve met him,” said Bell. “I can believe it.”
She barely heard him. “Right next to Pocantico Hills! He hates Rockefeller. And he loves the idea of us soaring over his estate. He even persuaded the new village trustees to pipe gas out to the site—so we don’t have to generate our own, which is wonderful, it’s so much faster to inflate from mains—and he’s invited the women to pitch tents, and he’s opened the roadhouse baths to all of us. It’s a delightfully civilized campground. Excep
t for this infernal heat. But we’ll rise above the heat, won’t we?”
It was understandable, thought Bell, and a good thing, that she was hurling herself into the Flyover scheme to escape from facing her father’s grim future. “How about you, Edna? Are you ballooning, too?”
Nellie answered for her. “Edna got a job reporting on the Flyover for the Sun. The editor was thrilled by her Baku story.”
“How did you happen to find the car?”
“Easy as pie,” Nellie said. “This siding is one of Father’s favorites. It’s very pretty in the daylight and quiet. There’s never much traffic on the Putnam Division. He calls it his cottage in the country.”
“And you found no sign at all of your father?”
“None. Poke around, if you like. But look what we did find.”
Edna asked, “Do you remember when we were talking about my brother joining the Army?”
“Of course.”
“Look what we found,” said Nellie.
Edna said, “I was flabbergasted when Nellie showed me.”
She took a leather pouch from a drawer and laid it on the desk.
“May I?” Bell asked.
“Go on, pick it up.”
Bell held it to his nostrils. “Does your father smoke Cuban cigars?”
“No,” said Edna, and Nellie said, “He prefers a two-cent stogie. Open it, Isaac. Look what’s inside.”
It contained a medal, a fifty-dollar bill, and a sheet of fine linen-based stationery folded in quarters to fit the pouch. The medal was an extraordinarily heavy disk of gold engraved like a target, which hung by a red ribbon from a gold pin labeled “Rifle Sharpshooter.” The fifty was a treasury note.
“Turn it over,” said Nellie. “Look at the back.”
Bell saw that President Roosevelt had signed the back above the treasurer’s printed signature.
“Read the letter.”
Bell unfolded it carefully, as the paper appeared weakened by being opened many times. The letterhead jumped off the page:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington
Bell’s eye shot to the recipient’s address on the bottom left of the page.
Private Billy Jones
Newark Seventh Regiment
New Jersey
He read:
My dear Private Billy Jones,
I have just been informed that you have won the President’s Match for the military championship of the United States of America. I wish to congratulate you in person . . .
The president had closed:
Faithfully yours,
And signed in a bold hand:
Theodore Roosevelt
Nellie said, “He has to be our brother, don’t you think? Still alive in ’02.”
“How did this end up in your father’s car?”
“Billy may have hidden in the car when he first deserted. He knew the various places Father would park it.”
“He might have turned to Father for help,” said Edna.
“Would your father have ‘shielded’ him?” asked Bell, deliberately repeating the word that Brigadier Mills had used to speculate about Bill Matters and the deserter.
“Of course,” said Edna, and Nellie nodded vigorously.
“Would your father have tried to talk him into going back?”
Nellie said, “Father would have done whatever he thought was best for Billy’s future.”
“Where do you suppose Billy is now?” Bell asked.
Edna said, “I suspect he enlisted, again, under a different name. But if he did, maybe the reason we’ve heard nothing since is he died fighting the Filipino guerrillas.”
“I doubt he died in the Philippines,” said Bell. It looked to him that Brigadier Mills had read his man wrong . . . “Could I ask you something?”
“Which one of us?” asked Nellie.
“Both. If this marksman Billy Jones is your brother, Billy Hock, could you imagine him turning his skill to murder?”
“Are you asking is our brother the assassin?”
“I am asking do you imagine he could be?”
“We haven’t seen him in years,” said Edna. “Who knows who he’s become?”
“Could the boy you remember become a murderer?”
“No,” said Edna.
“Yes,” said Nellie.
“Why do you say yes, Nellie?”
“I knew him better than Edna. Isn’t that true, Edna?”
Edna said, “Yes, you two grew very close.” To Bell she added, “So close that I was jealous sometimes.”
Bell asked again, “Nellie, why do you say yes?”
“He was afraid. He was always afraid. So when you ask can I imagine him turning his skill to murder, I have to imagine him lashing out—first out of fear, then because lashing out banished fear, and finally . . .”
“Finally what?” asked Bell.
Edna echoed, “Finally what, Nellie? How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m just speculating.”
“But you just said you knew him well,” Bell pressed, convinced she was onto something.
Nellie shrugged. “What if finally lashing out banished fear? Then maybe lashing out could become . . . what? Pleasurable? Enjoyable? Something to aspire to.”
“We’re talking about murder,” said Edna.
“We were talking about our brother,” Nellie said sharply.
“But who could find murder enjoyable?”
“A madman,” said Isaac Bell.
“We were talking about our brother,” Nellie repeated. “We’re speculating about murder . . .” When she resumed speaking, she made an effort to lighten her tone, as if asking with a hopeful smile could eliminate the worst possibility. “What do you think, Isaac? You’re the detective. Is our brother the assassin?”
“I can’t sugarcoat it for you,” said Bell.
His sober tone stopped the conversation. Lost in private thoughts, they listened to the night sound of locusts singing in the heat. After a while, after mentally couching questions he knew that they could not answer, Bell rose abruptly. He found his hat and said good-bye.
“Where are you going?” asked Nellie.
“I have to catch a train.”
“Will you be back in time for my Flyover?”
“I’ll do my best.”
Edna called after him. “What do you mean by a ‘madman’?”
Bell stopped in the doorway. “A person without conscience. Without fear.”
“Who ‘banished fear,’ like Nellie says?”
Bell answered, “All any of us can really know about a madman is that he will be unpredictable.”
“If that’s true, how do you catch such a person?”
“Never give up,” said Bell, but stepped into the night with his mind fixed on a deadlier device. Be unpredictable, too.
—
The houses on either side of Bill Matters’ Oil City mansion looked abandoned. Their yards were overgrown, their windows blank. The garden in front of the Matterses’ house was baked brown. The curtains were drawn, reminding Isaac Bell that Brigadier Mills had described Matters grieving in the dark. They could be closed against the heat. It was even hotter in western Pennsylvania than New York. The train conductor informed Isaac Bell with grim satisfaction that since weather traveled west to east, New York was soon in for “the hinges of hell.”
No one answered when he pressed the buzzer button at the front gate. He picked the lock.
No one answered his knock on the front door and he picked that lock, too.
“Anyone home?” he called up the front stairs and down a hall.
He thought he smelled a faint aroma of cooked food and worked his way back to the kitchen. It was empty, with a single skillet of congealed bacon grease sitting on the range. He checked other rooms and found the parlor with the paper theaters that Mills had mentioned. As in the other rooms, the curtains were drawn. There was no Bill Matters sitting in the dark.
The kitchen door led
into the backyard, which was as big as the gardens of a country house and concealed from the streets and neighbors behind high wooden fences and dense fir trees. It was then that Bell realized the neighboring houses on either side were empty because Matters had bought and closed them, then fenced them off and added their backyards to his. He could hear the surrounding Oil City neighborhood but not see it.
There was a ramshackle quality to the place. An abandoned wooden derrick lay on its side tangled in vines next to lengths of wooden pipe almost as if Matters was contemplating a museum of early Pennsylvania oil history. He walked around the derrick and found a pond, its water thick with algae. Beside it was a marble gravestone. No name was chiseled on the stone, only an epitaph, which Isaac Bell recognized as William Shakespeare’s.
GOOD FREND FOR JESVS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE.
BLESE BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CVRST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.
From behind him, Bell heard, “Shakespeare’s not really buried here. The girls surprised me for my fortieth birthday. Raise your hands before you turn around.”
37
Isaac Bell raised his hands and turned around.
Matters was pointing his old Remington at him, and he was not alone. Rivers, the fit and remarkably unscarred old prizefighter, was holding a Smith & Wesson like a mechanical extension of his fist.
Bell addressed Matters. “They say no man is a hero to his butler. You must be the exception if Rivers gave up a cushy job in Gramercy Park to join you on the lam.”
“Mr. Matters gave me the cushy job when I was on the lam,” said Rivers. “Fair is fair.”
“Are you a murderer, too?”
“The jury thought so.”
“I’ll cover him,” said Matters. “He’s got a revolver in his shoulder holster. And if I’m not wrong, I think you’ll find a derringer in his hat.”
“Reach higher and stand very still,” said Rivers. He pocketed his gun and took the Bisley from Bell’s shoulder holster. “Fine pistol!”
The Assassin Page 25
