The Gangster (16 page)

Pull

Isaac Bell paced the New York field office bull pen, driven by a strong feeling that he had misinterpreted the Cherry Grove conversation. The words were clear; he had no doubt the brothel owner had heard most, if not all, with his ear pressed to an air vent.

What are you waiting for?

An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?

My mind is made up. The man must go.

But Bell could swear that he had missed what they meant. Though he knew his notes by heart, he read them again.

Would you please sit down?

My mind is made up. The man must go.

He paced among file cases. Then paused at a varnished wooden case that held the field office’s Commercial Graphophone—a machine for recording dictation.

A telephone rang. He reached over the duty officer’s shoulder and snatched it off the desk. “It’s Isaac, Mr. Van Dorn. How are you making out in Washington?”

“That depends entirely on how you’re making out in New York.”

Bell reported on the heroin holdup and the waterfront shoot-out. “Salata got away, Leone’s dead. The only thing we know for sure is the Black Hand is out of the counterfeiting business.”

“I am still waiting for the go-ahead to warn the President.”

“I have nothing solid yet,” said Bell.

Van Dorn hung up. Bell resumed pacing.

He stopped to regard a wall calendar, a promotional gift from the Commercial Graphophone salesman. 1906 was winding down fast, but what caught his eye was the advertisement that ballyhooed, “Tell it to the Graphophone.”

Bell wound up the spring motor and read his notes aloud into the mica diaphragm.

“What are you waiting for?

“An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?

“My mind is made up. The man must go.”

He shifted the recording cylinder to the stenographer’s transcribing machine, which had hearing tubes instead of a concert horn, and fit the tubes to his ears. His own voice reading the words sounded like a stranger in another room. Or two strangers downstairs in the library.

What are you waiting for?

An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?

My mind is made up. The man must go.

Isaac Bell heard what he had missed.

He headed to Research.

Grady Forrer started apologizing. “Sorry, Isaac. Slow going on the fixers. The tycoons use different men for different tasks. Twenty, at least, among them.”

“Forget that, I’ve narrowed it down to one-in-seven.” He
slapped his list on Forrer’s desk. “The fixer who will hire the killer to murder the President
is
one of the men in the library.”

“Impossible. These men hold seats on the Stock Exchange and controlling interests in railroads, mines, banks, and industries. They’re as close as we’ll get to gods.”

“One of them only runs errands for the gods.”

“It’s not a conversation, not even a discussion. They’re not equal partners. The first speaker is the boss, the second an employee. I don’t care if he shouted or whispered.
What are you waiting for?
He is the boss. The fixer is not a tycoon, even though he’s in the tycoons’ club . . . I feel like an idiot, it took me so long.”

“O.K.” Forrer nodded. “I get it. I feel like an idiot, too. So how do we separate servants from gods?”

Bell said, “Start with where they live.”

The Social Register turned up addresses for four—Arnold, Claypool, Culp, and Nichols. Cross-checking telephone directory numbers with company records revealed New York City addresses for the other three. The newspaper society pages turned up the names and locations of the country estates for six of the men. The same six had Newport summer residences. In both cases—country homes and seaside cottages—the one exception was Brewster Claypool.

“He’s from the South,” said Bell. “Attended law school in Virginia. Maybe he’s got a plantation down there.”

There were Claypools in Virginia, including Brewster’s brothers, but Claypool himself owned no plantation.

“Not even a town house in New York. He lives in the Waldorf Hotel.”

“Perhaps,” said Forrer, “Claypool prefers the simple life.”

“A bachelor’s life,” countered Bell. He himself lived at the Yale Club when in New York, in what Marion called his monastic cell.

“What if he lives in a hotel because he isn’t as rich as the others?”

Research came up with Claypool’s connections to boards of directors in steel, telegraph, and streetcars, but mostly as an adviser. He was, in essence, a Wall Street lawyer who worked as a lobbyist. Like a stage manager, Claypool stayed behind the scenes and avoided the limelight, which fit the definition of a fixer at the highest level.

Interestingly, Research came up with no pictures of Claypool, none of the engravings of prominent men found in the Sunday supplements, and no up-to-date photographs. He was definitely an offstage operator.

Bell, who always dodged cameras in the interest of investigating incognito, knew full well the threat of the accidental photograph. “Find out where he vacations. Some camera fiend must have snapped him with a Kodak . . . Meantime, if Claypool is our fixer, who does he fix for?”

“Pull is an ancient elixir,” Brewster Claypool drawled in a soft Virginia accent. “Pull sweeps aside obstacles. But this can’t come as news to a Van Dorn detective.”

“Wouldn’t a Wall Street lawyer prefer to go
around
obstacles?”

Brewster Claypool laughed. He was a little wisp of a man, wearing an exquisitely tailored pearl-gray suit, bench-made English shoes, and a blasé smile that concealed an all-seeing eye and a brain as systematic as a battleship’s centralized fire director.

“Excellent distinction, Detective.”

From the windows of Brewster’s office on the top floor of a building at Cortlandt and Broadway, Bell could see into the steel cagework of the Singer skyscraper under construction. The new building would block Claypool’s view of Trinity Church and the harbor long before it rose to become the tallest building in the world, but, at the moment, the view included a close look at ironworkers creeping like spiders on the raw steel.

Claypool said, “May I ask to what do I owe the pleasure of your presence? Your letter was intriguing, and I was impressed, if not flattered, when you quoted my notion that it is humiliating to confess ignorance of anything in Wall Street. Beyond that, I felt curiosity mingled with admiration, having caught wind of the Van Dorn success in retrieving a kidnapped child from the Black Hand. Extraordinary how your operatives found their way straight into the lion’s den.”

“That is not commonly known,” said Bell.

“I do not make a business of common knowledge,” said Claypool. “But tell me this. Have you noticed a sudden quiet in the Black Hand camp? Little activity other than small-potatoes attacks on hapless pushcarts.”

“Few peeps out of them lately,” Bell agreed, wondering why Claypool was showing off for him by establishing credentials
beyond the canyons of Wall Street. “The Salata Gang got its nose bloodied by the Irish, and things have quieted down since.”

For a man who enjoyed boasting, Claypool appeared oddly immune to flattery. Suddenly blunt, he asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Bell?”

“The Van Dorn Agency needs a man to provide inside information.”

Claypool looked genuinely puzzled by the offer of employment. “I’m sure that private detectives are better up in gangsters than I. My interest in the underworld is peripheral to my other interests.”

“This is not about gangsters.”

“About what, then?”

Isaac Bell pointed out the window. He traced with his finger the route of a crosstown street that began at the East River and ended at Broadway, hard against Trinity Church’s graveyard.

“Wall Street?” Claypool gave him a broad wink and joked, “Tread cautiously, Detective. President Roosevelt will clap you in irons.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bell. The slick Claypool did not strike him as recklessly bold. That he blithely dropped the name of Roosevelt suggested he was unaware of a plot against the President. If so, Bell’s “fixer hunt” had just hit as dead an end as Wall Street’s graveyard.

“The manipulation of insider information by Wall Street tycoons is among Teddy’s most despised bugaboos . . . But surely you know that.”

Bell said, “You don’t have to be a tycoon to manipulate inside information . . . But surely you know that.”

Still acting vaguely amused, Brewster Claypool geared up his Southern drawl. “Spoken as a private detective who believes he already has inside information—about
me
.”

“I do have such information,” said Bell. “We’ve learned a lot about you.”

“Why did you look into me?”

“I just told you. The Van Dorn Agency is seeking the services of an inside man. Diligent investigation into your ‘interests’ indicated that we would find that man in you.”

Claypool regarded the tall detective speculatively. “Services rendered by inside men are expensive.”

“But not as expensive as services performed by a tycoon.”

“Don’t rub it in, Detective. You’ve already made it clear that you know I am not a tycoon.”

“But I am among the very few who know that,” said Bell. “Most people, including people who should know better, assume that you are as great a magnate as your associates. They put you in the class of tycoons like Manfred Arnold, William Baldwin, John Butler Culp, Gore Manly, Warren D. Nichols, or even Jeremy Pendergast.”

If Claypool recognized an alphabetical list of members of the Cherry Grove Gentlemen’s Society in attendance the night the President’s life was threatened, he gave nothing away, drawling only, “I am flattered to be regarded in such company. But as you’ve already deduced, I am only a hardworking lawyer. By keeping my ear to the ground, my finger on the pulse, and my eye
on the ball, I cultivate clients a thousand times wealthier than I could even dream of becoming.”

Bell said, “The fact that you are assumed to run with such company forces the Van Dorn Agency to offer a higher fee.”

Claypool’s reply was brisk and to the point. “Save your money. I’ll take my fee in trade.”

“Done,” said Bell, extending his hand. If Claypool were innocent, then the Van Dorn Detective Agency had just gained a shrewd source inside the upper echelons of American business; if Claypool were guilty, the Van Dorns were inside the inside man.

They shook on it, and Brewster Claypool asked, “What can I tell you about Wall Street?”

Isaac Bell leveled a cold-eyed gaze at the window. “Who down there hates the President of the United States enough to kill him?”