Bell ripped the hoses from the steel hydrogen tanks and wrestled the heavy cylinders over the side, one after another, until they were gone. There wasn’t much else to throw, but he was still falling. He hurled the dragline out of the basket.
For a moment, he entertained the fantasy of landing in the woods, where springy treetops might slow him down. But the balloon was aiming at the farmhouse. The shade trees might slow him down, but it was soon apparent he was not on course for the shade trees either. Quite suddenly he was directly over a barn. In another instant, he was close enough to distinguish roof shingles. The weather vane on the peak was shaped like a rooster. The dragline touched. Did it slow him slightly? He grabbed the basket ropes and braced for the crash.
The basket hit the roof, splintering shingles, and blasted through them into the hayloft. Bales of hay had no effect on the impact. The loft floor collapsed. The basket hung up in the rafters and stopped, abruptly. In the still air, the near-empty gasbag settled down over the barn.
Isaac Bell dropped from the bottom of the basket to the floor.
He was reeling to his feet when a red-faced farmer burst into the barn.
Bell took out his wallet. “I will pay for your roof. May I use your telephone?”
“I don’t want women voting!” the farmer yelled.
“What?”
“My whole damned barn says Votes for Women.”
“Do you have a telephone?”
“No.”
“Rent me a horse that can make it to the nearest railroad station.”
—
Bell wired the New York field office
FIND NELLIE MATTERS?
GUARD ROCKEFELLER.
He caught a local train to New Haven and called the office on a Southern New England Company long-distance public telephone while he waited for an express. Nellie Matters, Grady Forrer reported, had escaped in another balloon.
“She can’t hide in a balloon.”
“Night is falling,” said Grady. “She can hide all night.”
“Guard Rockefeller,” Bell repeated.
“Rockefeller is safe. We’ve got an army around him.”
“I’ll be there soon as I can.”
Long before the express pulled into Grand Central, Isaac Bell had a very clear idea of what Nellie Matters believed John D. Rockefeller valued more than life. When he got to Manhattan, he rounded up every Van Dorn detective in the city and chartered steam launches to ferry them across the harbor to Constable Hook.
42
Hey, you!”
Nellie Matters closed her hand around the derringer in her pocket. She had almost made it home free to The Hook saloon.
“You! Stop right there!”
I belong here, she reminded herself. In the persona of her disguise, she had every right to be hurrying along this street that paralleled the chain-link refinery fence. But the man who shouted at her was sweating in the heavy blue, brass-buttoned uniform of a Constable Hook cop. She pitched her alto voice down to a range between a raspy tenor and a thin baritone.
“What’s up?”
The cop cast a sharp eye on her workman’s duds. Her wig, the finest money could buy, was a thick mop of curly brown hair barely contained by a flat cap. A narrow horsehide tool bag hung from her shoulder strap. A pair of nickel-plated side-cutting pliers protruding from an end pocket was supposed to be the finishing varnish coat on a portrait of a journeyman electrician. No one in the refinery city had challenged it until now.
“How old are you?”
I belong here! “How old am I?” she shot back. “Twenty-four next month. How old are you?”
The cop looked confused. She let go of the gun in her pocket and drew his attention to her tool bag by shifting it from her left shoulder to her right.
“Jeez. From behind, youse looked like a kid cutting school.”
“That’s a good one,” Nellie laughed. “I ain’t played hooky since they kicked me out of eighth grade.”
The cop laughed, too. “Sorry, bud. They stuck me on truant patrol.”
“Tell you what, pal. If your sergeant set a quota, I’m short enough to go in with you. But I can’t stay long. Gotta go to work.”
The cop laughed again. “You’re O.K.”
“I surely am,” she said to herself as the cop wandered off and she hurried to The Hook saloon. “I am O.K. as O.K. can be . . . And how are you, Isaac?”
—
Isaac Bell sealed off the Constable Hook oil refinery with armed Protective Services operators commanded by Van Dorn detectives. He put white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards in charge because Edwards specialized in locking out the slum gang train robbers who plagued many a city’s railroad yards. The company cops, whom the Van Dorns regarded as strikebreaking thugs in dirty uniforms, resented the invasion and resisted mightily until word from the Eleventh Floor of 26 Broadway reverberated across the harbor like a naval broadside.
“Mr. Rockefeller expects every refinery police officer to do his duty by assisting the Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect Standard Oil property.”
Even before Rockefeller knocked the refinery cops in line, Eddie Edwards was glad-handing the chiefs of the Constable Hook Police Department, the refinery’s private fire department, and the city’s volunteer fire department. These savvy, by-the-book moves bore immediate fruit. Cops were assigned to guard every high point in the city where a sniper might set up shop. Standard Oil transferred battalions of extra firemen from other refineries. The ranks of the Constable Hook volunteers were swelled by volunteers from every town in New Jersey. Standard Oil tugboats from its Brooklyn and Long Island City yards arrived equipped with fire nozzles and were soon joined by Pennsylvania Railroad and New Jersey Central Railroad tugs and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s fleet from St. George. Then a beat cop assigned to the high school truant squad reported encountering a short, slight, youthful electrician who fit one of the Van Dorn Agency descriptions of how the assassin might look disguised as a man.
“In the city,” Eddie Edwards told Isaac Bell. “So short and skinny, the cop thought he was a kid. Near the fence. Not inside.”
“Yet,” said Bell.
Bell questioned the cop personally and came away fairly certain he had seen Nellie. Her breakdown 99 would fit easily in the electrician’s horsehide tool bag the cop described. He wondered for the twentieth time whether she had gotten her hands on any of Beitel’s exploding bullets. A few well-placed shots would set six hundred acres ablaze. Her presence confirmed exactly what she had told him. She was out to avenge her father by destroying what Rockefeller loved most. More than life, more than money, the magnate loved what he had built, and the Constable Hook refinery was the biggest thing he had ever built.
“Isaac!” It was Wally Kisley, out of breath. “Found a duck.”
The cops exchanged baffled looks.
Bell and Wally headed into the refinery on the run. The Van Dorns blanketing the place under explosives expert Wally’s guidance had discovered the shooting gallery target on a twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank.
“She’s here,” said Isaac Bell. “This nails it.”
“With her sense of humor intact,” said Wally.
The duck was high up on the huge tank, near the top. This one was painted red and stuck to the metal wall with a magnet. Electrical wire attached to its rail bracket ran down the tank. Nellie had concealed the wire artfully by snugging it against the heavy copper cable that grounded the tank’s lightning rod.
“Can you disarm it without blowing us up?”
“I’ll answer that after I find what she hooked to the other end of this wire.”
The two detectives traced it down the side of the tank to its concrete footing. Wally said, “Nice job hiding the wire. Doubt our guys would have noticed if the duck weren’t bright red.”
“She’s showing off.”
The wire snaked halfway around the bottom of the tank, hugging its edges, and still paralleling the lightning rod ground wir
e until it veered across the oil-soaked ground and disappeared down a storm drain. Bell snapped his fingers. A husky Van Dorn Protective Services operative lumbered over with a toolbox.
“Lift the grate. Don’t disturb the wire.”
The P.S. man inserted a crowbar in a drain slot and pried the cast-iron grate out of its seat. It was very heavy. Bell gave him a hand tipping it out of the way while Wally held the wire.
Bell wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?” he asked.
“Oil fumes.” The blistering-hot weather caused oil, kerosene, and naphtha to vaporize. The air reeked of flammable gases.
“No, it’s worse.”
“You’re right. Like something’s rotting.”
Bell said, “I wonder how a hundred-pound woman picked up this grate. Wally, give that wire a tug.”
“I don’t know what it’s attached to yet.”
“I do. And it won’t explode.”
“Then you tug it.” He stepped away and made a show of covering his ears.
Bell hauled on the wire. It pulled easily from the storm drain. “There’s what stinks.”
The wire was wrapped around a raw chicken leg that was putrefying in the heat. Pinned to the meat was a sheet of paper. Nellie had written, “Hello, Wally. Give my regards to Isaac.”
“The lunatic is taunting you, Isaac.”
Bell looked up at the sky and pondered Wally’s remark. Dark, anvil-topped thunderheads were marching out of the west, as they had every afternoon of the heat wave. “Nellie is a lunatic,” he agreed, “but she is one smart lunatic. If she’s taunting me, she has a plan. I just don’t know what it is yet.” Eyes still on the sky, Bell recalled Edna asking what he meant by a “madman,” never realizing the assassin was a “madwoman.” His answer to her was his answer to Wally now.
“Unpredictable.”
How to catch her? Be unpredictable, too? But there was the rub. What did Nellie Matters expect?
—
The infernal heat was finally her friend.
Nellie Matters was stymied by the combined presence of the Van Dorns, the Standard Oil cops, and the city police. Isaac—of course he rallied them, who else?—had robbed her of the high ground, every tower, every cupola, every hilltop she could use for a shooting blind. Her first choice, the remote fire department watchtower on top of the highest hill on Constable Hook, had cops guarding the ladder. So much for climbing with a pretty smile and a bullet for the lone fireman on duty.
Her alternate choice, the widow’s walk on The Hook saloon, offered short-range shots at storage tanks above the city and the oil docks below. Close shots were doubly tempting with the heat cooking crazy, flight-bending thermals. But the widow’s walk would be suicide. With a score of cops and detectives congregating at the nearby refinery gates, she could not escape.
The heat was her friend. Hot weather caused oil to vaporize. It charged the air with volatile gases. So what if Isaac Bell had stolen her high ground? Nellie Matters would play fast and loose. Get ready for the unexpected, Isaac. A surprise is lurking under you. Flamboyant, theatrical, showy Nellie Matters will take the low ground.
The heat boiled thunderstorms. Thunderstorms hurled lightning.
Lightning ignited the volatile gases that collected in the tops of oil tanks. Every tank at Constable Hook bristled with lightning rods because Rockefeller’s ultramodern enterprise obeyed the laws of physics that stated that lightning blew unprotected oil tanks to Kingdom Come. Those who challenged the law were directed next door to Bayonne, where lightning strikes a few years back had ignited fires that burned for three days and left the operation a shadow of its former self.
Nellie walked down wooden stairs deep into The Hook saloon’s cellar. The walls were rough-hewn stone. Round tree trunks formed the beams that had supported the upper floors for two hundred years. The original brick sewer, disused now except to carry rainwater from the building’s gutters, led under Constable Street into the storm drains that riddled the refinery hillside.
She was not prone to reflection, much less self-examination, but she knew that something different resided in her makeup that refused to be afraid. Which wasn’t to say there weren’t things she disliked, primary among them any threat of being restrained. To crawl into a three-foot-diameter drainpipe was to be restrained in the extreme. But she had no choice.
She climbed into it with her nickel-plated side-cutting pliers and the end of the cable she had had delivered on a spool. It unrolled freely as she dragged it through the sewer. She knew she was inside the refinery fence when the brick-walled sewer connected with the modern concrete drainpipe.
Dull light poured down from a drain. She had to pass another. The third was her goal, beside the twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank where she had left Isaac a target duck and a rotten chicken leg. The cable grew heavy as it got longer and dragged on the concrete. As she crawled under the second drain she heard thunder. There were two things she did not want to imagine: a sudden rainstorm that would drown her or a bolt of lightning striking the cable. She reminded herself that being electrocuted by lightning was much less likely than being drowned by rain because she had wisely waited to attach the cable to a lightning rod—four lightning rods, in fact—until the end was aimed at the tank and she was out of the drainpipe. The third grate appeared. Almost there. She heard another peal of thunder, closer this time. She crawled directly under the grate. Raindrops wet her face. She lifted the end of the cable to the grate and used the pliers to fasten it to the cast iron with a twist of wire.
Then she turned around in the cramped space and started crawling back to the saloon as fast as she could. The last thing she wanted was to be wiring the other end of the copper cable to The Hook saloon’s ground wire when a thunderbolt struck the harpoon lightning rods on the roof of the widow’s walk.
—
Isaac Bell was making the rounds of his men guarding the oil docks—the huge piers on the Kill Van Kull where the refinery was loading tank ships with kerosene, gasoline, and naphtha—when a puff of icy air announced another squall sizzling in from the Upper Bay. In the middle of the tight little storm he saw one of his chartered steam launches heading for the dock. Its bow was weighted down by Grady Forrer, who stood gripping a coiled line and ignoring the rain.
Bell stepped forward, Forrer threw the line skillfully, and in a moment they were conversing in the partial shelter of a loading shed. “One of my boys was rereading the assassin reports,” Forrer bellowed over the wind, the falling rain, and the huffing of several steam engines. “He reminded me that we learned that Bill Matters was moving up the ladder when he was invited to join a Standard Oil Gang private venture.”
Thunder echoed down the tank-covered hills. A bolt of lightning lit the rooftops of the city. Another bolt blazed over the tanks above the city and landed harmlessly on a lightning rod.
“It made him one of the boys to partner up with Averell Comstock and Clyde Lapham, even though it was a sort of joke subsidiary.”
“What kind of joke?”
“Shares in a Constable Hook saloon.”
“Here?”
“Across from the front gate. They named it The Hook.”
Bell bolted into the storm.
Forrer raced alongside him, slipping and sliding on the oily path. “Comstock and Lapham are dead. Matters is in jail.”
“Leaving Nellie to ‘inherit.’”
—
Nellie Matters was finishing connecting the copper cable she had strung from the naphtha tank to the heavy wire that grounded the saloon’s lightning rod. The thunderstorm raging outside was the biggest in days. The sooner she could let go of the highly conductive cable, the better.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
One of the bartenders had come down the stairs they’d been specifically ordered not to.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“What are you, an electrician?”
Her bag was open. The Savage and its telescope wer
e in the bottom, still wrapped in their horse blanket. But tools were out. She said, “You’re not supposed to be down here.”
He finally recognized her as “Eddie,” the nephew of the new owner.
“Sorry, Eddie. Where’s your uncle? Haven’t seen him around.”
“Went to Atlantic City to get away from this heat.”
“What are you doing?”
“My uncle wants this wired here.”
“What for?”
“Why don’t you ask him when he gets back?”
“Something fishy’s going on.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I had a job as an electrician’s helper. That’s a ground wire you’re messing with.”
He grabbed her arm. “Man, you’re skinny.”
—
Isaac Bell left Grady Forrer far behind as he ran full tilt up the refinery hill, through the front gates, and across Constable Street. He had noticed The Hook saloon. It looked like an old sea captain’s house with a widow’s walk on the roof. He shoved through the swinging doors.
The barroom was empty except for a floor manager, who shouted from behind the bar, “We’re closed!”
“Where are the cops watching the widow’s walk?”
“Home,” said the floor manager. “We don’t pay off cops to hang around— Hey, where you going?”
Bell paused at the foot of the stairs only long enough to turn the full force of his eyes on the man. “Stay there, you won’t get hurt.”
He bounded up three full stories, then into a sweltering attic, and up steep stairs onto the widow’s walk fully expecting to find the assassin aiming her rifle. But the room was empty. Nellie was not in it. Thunder pealed. He stalked to the windows and glared out at the refinery. He knew with every fiber in his being that he was close. But she was not here.
—
A derringer slug in the shoulder had knocked the fight and the curiosity out of the nosy bartender. Nellie pointed the gun in his face, fished steel handcuffs from the bottom of her tool bag, and tossed them to him. “Put one on your wrist.”
The Assassin Page 28
