The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  Isaac Bell pointed at an open trapdoor in the floor of the car.

  “He lowered himself down the traction rope.”

  “Impossible. There’s no way a man could hold on to that greasy cable.”

  Bell dropped into the elevator car and looked down through the trap. His sharp eyes spotted twin grooves in the grease that thickly coated the braided steel wire that formed the traction rope. He showed the sergeant.

  “Where the heck did he get a cable brake?”

  “He came prepared,” said Bell, climbing up the side of the car to run for the stairs.

  “Any idea who he was?”

  “Harry Frost.”

  Fear flickered across the old soldier’s face. “We were chasing Harry Frost?”

  “Don’t worry. He won’t get far.”

  “Chicago’s his town, mister.”

  “It’s our town, too, and Van Dorns never give up.”

  26

  THAT EVENING, Isaac Bell parked a big Packard Model 30 within pistol shot of the three-story mansion on Dearborn Street that housed the Everleigh Club, the most luxurious bordello in Chicago. He kept the bill of a chauffeur’s cap low over his eyes and watched two heavyset Van Dorns climb the front steps. Out-of-town men who would not be recognized by the doorman and floor managers, they were dressed in evening clothes to appear to be customers wealthy enough to patronize the establishment. They rang the bell. The massive oak door swung open, the detectives were ushered in, and it swung shut behind them.

  Bell watched the sidewalks for cops and gangsters.

  Stealthy movement beside a pool of streetlamp light caught his attention. A slight figure, a young man in a wrinkled sack suit and bowler hat, eased past the light, then veered across the sidewalk on a route that took him close enough to the Packard for Bell to recognize him.

  “Dash!”

  “Hello, Mr. Bell.”

  “Where the devil did you come from?”

  “Mr. Bronson gave me permission to report in person. Got me a free ride guarding the Overland Limited’s express car.”

  “You’re just in time. Do you have your revolver?”

  James Dashwood drew from a shoulder holster a long-barreled Colt that had been smithed to a fare-thee-well. “Right here, Mr. Bell.”

  “Do you see those French doors on the third-floor balcony?”

  “Third floor.”

  “Those stairs lead up from the balcony to the roof. I’d prefer not to engage in a public gun battle with anyone trying to escape from that room through those doors. Do you see the knob?”

  Dashwood’s keen eyes penetrated the shadows to focus on the barely visible two-inch bronze knob. “Got it.”

  “If it moves, shoot it.”

  Bell tugged his gold watch from its pocket and traced the second hand. “In twenty seconds, our boys will knock on the hall door.”

  Twenty-three seconds later, the knob turned. Dashwood, who had been trained by his mother – a former shootist with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – fired once. The knob flew from the door.

  “Hop in,” said Bell. “Let’s hear what this fellow has to tell us.”

  Moments later, the heavyset Van Dorns exited the front of the bordello, balancing a man between them like friends helping a drunk. Bell eased the Packard along the curb, and they bundled the man into the backseat.

  “Do you realize who I am?” he blustered.

  “You are Alderman William T. Foley, formerly known as ‘Brothel Bill,’ less for your handsome mug than for your managemental prowess in the vice trade.”

  “I’ll have you arrested.”

  “You’re running for reelection on the reform ticket.”

  “The alderman was carrying these,” said one of the detectives, presenting Bell with two pocket pistols, a dagger, and a sap.

  “Where is Harry Frost?”

  “Who?” Bill Foley asked innocently. Like any successful Chicago criminal who had graduated to public office, Foley could recognize Van Dorn detectives when seated between them in the back of a Packard. He was emboldened by the knowledge that they were less likely to shoot him in an alley or drown him in Lake Michigan than certain other parties in town. “Harry Frost? Never heard of him.”

  “You were spending his money tonight in the most expensive sporting house in Chicago. Money he paid you this afternoon to cash a five-thousand-dollar check at the First Trust and Savings Bank. Where is he?”

  “He didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

  “Too bad for you.”

  “What are you going to do, turn me in to the sheriff? Who happens to be my wife’s uncle.”

  “You’re running for reelection on the reform ticket. Our client publishes a newspaper in this town that you would not want as your enemy.”

  “I’m not afraid of Whiteway’s papers,” Foley sneered. “Nobody in Chicago gives a hang for that California pup who-”

  Bell cut him off. “The people of Chicago may continue to put up with your bribery and corruption a bit longer, but they will draw the line at even a hint that Alderman William T. Foley would endanger the life of Miss Josephine Josephs, America’s Sweetheart of the Air.”

  Foley wet his lips.

  “Where,” Bell repeated, “is Harry Frost?”

  “Left town.”

  “Alderman Foley, do not try my patience.”

  “No, I ain’t kidding. He left. I saw him leave.”

  “On what train?”

  “In an auto.”

  “What kind?”

  “Thomas Flyer.”

  Bell exchanged a glance with James Dashwood. The Thomas was a rugged cross-country auto, which was why Bell had chosen them for his support train. Such a vehicle – capable of traversing bad roads and open prairie, and even straddling railroad tracks when washouts and broken ground made all else impassable – would make Frost dangerously mobile.

  “Which way did he go?”

  “West.”

  “Saint Louis?”

  Alderman Foley shrugged. “I got the impression more like Kansas City – where your air race is going, if I can believe what I read in the newspapers.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “He had a mechanician and a driver.”

  Bell exchanged another look with Dash. There was five hundred miles of increasingly open country between Chicago and Kansas City, and Frost was prepared for the long haul.

  “Both are gunmen,” Foley added.

  “Names?”

  “Mike Stotts and Dave Mayhew. Stotts’s the driver. Mayhew’s the mechanician. Used to be a telegrapher ’til they caught him selling horse-race results to the bookies. Telegraphers are sworn to secrecy, you know.”

  “What I don’t know,” said Bell, frowning curiously at Foley, “is why you’ve turned unusually talkative all of a sudden, Alderman. Are you making this up as we go along?”

  “Nope. I just know Harry ain’t coming back. I done him his last favor.”

  “How do you know Frost isn’t coming back?”

  “Never thought I’d see the day, but you damned Van Dorns ran him out of town.”

  ISAAC BELL LED JAMES DASHWOOD into a chophouse to feed him supper while the kid reported what he had discovered in San Francisco.

  “Last you wired me, Dash, you found that Celere and Di Vecchio were both in San Francisco last summer. Celere had arrived earlier, working as a translator, then built a biplane he subsequently sold to Harry Frost, who shipped it back to the Adirondacks and hired Celere to work on Josephine’s flying machines at their camp. Both Celere and Di Vecchio had fled Italy one step ahead of their creditors. Di Vecchio killed himself. What new do we know?”

  “They got in a fight.”

  Two immigrant Italian fishermen, Dashwood explained, had overheard a long and angry shouting match in the street outside their boardinghouse. Di Vecchio accused Marco Celere of stealing his wing-strengthening design.

  “I already know that,” said Bell. “Celere would claim it was the other way
around. What else?”

  “Di Vecchio started it, shouting that Celere copied his entire machine. Celere shouted back that if that was true, why had the Italian Army bought his machines and not Di Vecchio’s?”

  “What did Di Vecchio answer?”

  “He said that Celere had poisoned the market.”

  Bell nodded impatiently. This, too, he had already heard from Danielle. “Then what?”

  “Then he started yelling that Celere better keep his hands off his daughter. Her name is-”

  “Danielle!” said Bell. “What did keeping his hands off his daughter have to do with the Italian Army buying his aeroplane design?”

  “Di Vecchio shouted, ‘Find another woman to do your dirty work.’”

  “What dirty work?”

  “He used a word that my translators found very hard to repeat.”

  “A technical word. Alettone?”

  “Not technical. The girl knew what it meant, but she was afraid to say it in front of Mother Superior.”

  “Mother Superior?” Bell echoed, fixing his protégé with a wintery eye. “Dash, what have you been up to?”

  “They were nuns.”

  “Nuns?”

  “You always told me people want to talk. But you have to make them comfortable. The girl was the only Italian translator I could get the fishermen to talk to. Once they started telling the story, they wouldn’t shut up. I think because the nun was so beautiful.”

  Isaac Bell reached across the tablecloth to slap Dashwood on the shoulder. “Well done!”

  “But finding her was what took me so long. Anyway, she was translating great guns until that word stopped her dead. I pleaded with them. I even offered to pray with them, and she finally whispered, ‘Gigolo.’”

  “Di Vecchio accused Marco Celere of being a gigolo?”

  Bell was hardly surprised, recalling that soon after Josephine and Harry Frost appeared in San Francisco the young bride had persuaded her husband to buy Celere’s biplane. “Did he mention any specifics?”

  “Di Vecchio said that Celere persuaded an Italian Army general’s daughter to get him to buy his machine. From what they heard, the fisherman thought it wasn’t the first time he’d gotten women to make deals for him.”

  “Did he accuse Celere of taking money from women?”

  “There was some sort of engine he bought at a Paris air meet. It sounded like a woman put up the money. But in San Francisco, he was broke again. I think the Army deal fell through.”

  “The machine smashed with the general on it.”

  “That’s why Di Vecchio kept yelling that Celere sold them a lousy flying machine and ruined it for other inventors.”

  “Did Di Vecchio accuse Celere of trying a gigolo stunt with Danielle?”

  “That’s what Di Vecchio was warning him off about. ‘Don’t touch my daughter.’”

  “Sounds like your fishermen stumbled onto a heck of a shout fest.”

  “They didn’t exactly stumble. They lived there, too.”

  Bell watched the young detective’s face closely. “You’ve turned up a lot of information, Dash, maybe enough to make it worth the wait. Did you get a lucky break or did you know what you were looking for?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Bell. Don’t you see? They were arguing outside the hotel where Di Vecchio died. The night he died.”

  27

  ISAAC BELL FIXED HIS PROTÉGÉ with an intense gaze, his mind leaping to the possibility that an angry argument had ended in murder. “The same night?”

  “The same night,” answered James Dashwood. “In the same house where Di Vecchio asphyxiated himself by blowing out a gaslight and leaving the gas on.”

  “Are you certain he killed himself?”

  “I looked into the possibility. That’s why I thought I should report face-to-face, to explain why I’m thinking what I’m thinking.”

  “Go on,” Bell urged.

  “I was already investigating the suicide, like you ordered, when I heard about the shouting match. You told me about Marco Celere’s original name being Prestogiacomo. I discovered he was staying there under that name. You always say you hate coincidences, so I reckoned there had to be a connection. I spoke with the San Francisco coroner. He admitted that they don’t do much investigating into how an Italian immigrant happens to die in San Francisco. There’s a lot of them in the city, but they keep to themselves. So I wondered, what if I pretended that the dead man wasn’t Italian but American? And pretended he wasn’t poor but earning three thousand dollars a year, and had a house and maids and a cook? What questions would I ask when that fellow got gassed in a hotel room?”

  Bell concealed a proud smile, and asked sternly, “What do you conclude?”

  “Gas is a heck of a way to get away with killing someone.”

  “Did you turn up any clues that would support such speculation?”

  “Di Vecchio had a big bump on his head, the night clerk told me, like he fell out of bed when he passed out. Could have woke up groggy, tried to get up, and fell. Or he could have been conked on the head by the same fellow who turned on the gas. Trouble is, we’ll never know.”

  “Probably not,” Bell agreed.

  “Could I ask you something, Mr. Bell?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why did you ask me to investigate his suicide?”

  “I’m driving the last flying machine Di Vecchio built. It does not operate like a machine made by a man who would kill himself. It is unusually sturdy, and it flies like a machine made by a man who loved making machines and was looking forward to making many more. But that is merely an odd feeling, not evidence.”

  “But if you add your odd feeling to the odd bump on Di Vecchio’s head, together they’re sort of like a coincidence, aren’t they?”

  “In an odd way,” Bell smiled.

  “But like you say, Mr. Bell, we’ll never know. Di Vecchio’s dead, and so’s the fellow who might have conked him.”

  “Maybe. .” said Isaac Bell, thinking hard. “Dash? This engine in the Paris air meet that Di Vecchio said Celere bought with a woman’s money. You said some sort of engine. What did you mean by ‘some sort of engine’?”

  Dashwood grinned. “That confused the heck out of the poor nuns. Threw them for a loop.”

  “Why?”

  “The fishermen called it polpo. Polpo means ‘octopus.’”

  “What kind of engine is like an octopus?” asked Bell. “Eight-cylinder Antoinette, maybe.”

  “Well, they also call the octopus a devilfish. Only that doesn’t make sense when it comes to engines.”

  Bell asked, “What happened when the nuns got confused?”

  “The fishermen tried another word. Calamaro.”

  “What is that? Squid?”

  “That’s what Maria said it meant. Maria was the pretty nun.”

  “An engine like a squid or an octopus? They’re quite different, actually: squid long and narrow with tentacles in back, octopus round and squat with eight arms. Dash, I want you to go to the library. Find out what Mr. Squid and Mr. Octopus have in common.”

  EUSTACE WEED, Andy Moser’s Chicago-born helper who Isaac Bell had hired so Andy could spend time investigating the mechanical causes of the racers’ smashes, asked for the evening off to say good-bye to his girl, who lived on the South Side.

  “Just get back before sunrise,” Andy told him. “If the weather holds, they’ll be starting out for Peoria.”

  Eustace promised he’d be back in plenty of time – a promise he knew he would keep if only because Daisy’s mother would be sitting on the other side of the parlor door. His worst fears proved true. At nine p.m., Mrs. Ramsey called from the other room, “Daisy? Say good night to Mr. Weed. It’s time for bed.”

  Eustace and the beautiful red-haired Daisy locked eyes, each certain it would be a better time for bed if Mother weren’t there. But Mother was, so Eustace called, politely, “Good night, Mrs. Ramsey,” and received a firm “Good night” through th
e closed door. In an unexpected flash of insight, Eustace realized that Mrs. Ramsey was not as coldheartedly unromantic as he had assumed. He took Daisy in his arms for a proper good-bye kiss.

  “How long before you’re back?’ she whispered when they came up for air.

  “We’ll be racing three more weeks, if all goes well, maybe four. I hope I’ll be home in a month.”

  “That’s so long,” Daisy groaned. Then out of nowhere she asked, “Is Josephine pretty?”

  In his second wise flash of insight that evening, Eustace answered, “I didn’t notice.”

  Daisy kissed him hard on the mouth and pressed her body against his until her mother called through the door, “Good night!”

  Eustace Weed stumbled down the stairs, his head reeling and his heart full.

  Two toughs were blocking the sidewalk, West Side boys.

  It looked to Eustace like he had a fight on his hands, and one he wasn’t likely to win. Running for it seemed the better idea. He was tall and thin and could probably leave them in the dust. But before he could move, they spread out and, to his astonishment and sudden fear, flashed open flick-knives.

  “The boss wants to see you,” one said. “You gonna come quiet?”

  Eustace looked at the knives and nodded his head. “What’s this about?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  They fell in on either side and walked him a couple of blocks to a street of saloons, where they entered a dimly lighted establishment and led him through the smoky barroom to a back-room office. The saloonkeeper, a barrel-bellied man in a bowler hat, vest, and necktie, sat behind a desk. On it, heated by a candle, bubbled a little cast-iron pot of boiling paraffin. It gave off a smell similar to the burnt castor scent of Gnome engine exhaust. Beside the pot was a short length of copper pipe, a water pitcher with a narrow spout, a leather sack a little longer than the pipe, and a vicious-looking blackjack with a flexible handle and a thick head.

  “Shut the door.”

  The toughs did and stood by it. The saloonkeeper beckoned Eustace to approach his desk. “Your name is Eustace Weed. Your girl is Daisy Ramsey. She’s a looker. Do you want to keep her that way?”

  “What do you-”