The Spy (12 page)

“Did you retrieve any of their knives?” Bell asked when he had finished.

“All three.” George showed them to Bell. Alasdair MacDonald’s blood had dried on the blade that killed him. “Strange-looking things, aren’t they?”

Bell picked up one of the two others not stained and examined it. “It’s a Butterflymesser.”

“A who?”

“A German folding knife, modeled on a Balisong butterfly knife. Quite rare outside the Philippine Islands.”

“I’ll say. I’ve never seen one. German, you say?”

Bell showed him the maker’s mark incised on the tang of the blade. “Bontgen and Sabin of Solingen. Question is, where did they get them . . . ?” He looked the Camden detective full in the face. “How much money did you find in the dead men’s pockets?”

Detective George looked aside. Then he made a show of flipping through the pages of his handwritten case notes. “Oh, yeah, here it is—less than ten bucks each.”

Eyes cold, voice grim, Bell said, “I am not interested in recouping what might have gone astray before it was recorded as evidence. But the correct number—the actual amount of cash in their pockets—will indicate whether they were paid to do the killing. That amount, spoken privately between you and me, will be an important clue for my investigation.”

The Camden cop pretended to read his notes again. “One had eight dollars and two bits. The others had seven bucks, a dime, and a nickel.”

Isaac Bell’s bleak gaze dropped to the Butterflymesser he was holding. With a peculiar flick of his wrist, he caused the blade to fly open. It glinted like ice. He appeared to study it, as if wondering what use to put it to. Detective George, though deep in the confines of his own precinct, nervously wet his lips.

Bell said, “A workingman earns about five hundred dollars a year. A year’s pay to kill a man might seem the right amount to an evil person who would commit such an act for money. Therefore, it would help me to know whether those two killers who did not escape were carrying such a large sum.”

Detective George breathed a sigh of relief. “I guarantee you, neither packed such a roll.”

Bell stared at him. Detective George looked happy he had not lied. Finally Bell asked, “Mind if I keep one of these knives?”

“I’ll have to ask you to sign for it—but not the one they killed him with. We’ll need that for the trial if we ever catch the son of a bitch—which ain’t likely if he don’t come back to Camden.”

“He’s coming back,” Isaac Bell vowed. “In chains.”

‘
G
UTS’ DAVE KELLY—THE ONE YOU PUT A HOLE IN HIS head—and ‘Blood Bucket’ Dick Butler took their orders from a brain named Irv Weeks—the ‘Iceman,’ on account of he’s got cold blue eyes like ice, heart and soul to match. Being that Weeks is smarter than Kelly and Butler was by a long shot, and seeing how you described him hanging back waiting for his chance, I’ll lay money it was Weeks who got away.”

“With my bullet in his shoulder.”

“The Iceman is a tough customer. If it didn’t kill him, you can bet he’s hopped a freight train back to New York and paid a midwife to dig it out.”

Harry Warren, Van Dorn’s New York gang specialist, had come down on the train in response to Bell’s telephone call and gone straight to the Camden city morgue, where he identified the murderers Bell had shot as members of the Hell’s Kitchen Gopher Gang. Warren caught up with Bell at the police station. The two Van Dorns conferred in a corner of the detectives’ bull pen.

“Harry, who would send these Bowery Boy hellions all the way to Camden?”

“Tommy Thompson, the ‘Commodore,’ bosses the Gophers.”

“Does he traffic in hired killings?”

“You name it, Tommy does it. But there was nothing to stop these guys from hiring out on their own—so long as they paid Tommy his cut. Did the Camden cops find big money on the bodies? Or should I ask, did they
admit
to finding big money on the bodies?”

“They claim they didn’t,” Bell replied. “I made it clear that we are after bigger fish than thieving cops, and from the answer I got back I am reasonably certain that the amounts were small. Perhaps they would be paid afterward. Perhaps their boss kept the bulk of it.”

“Both,” said Harry Warren. He thought hard. “But it’s strange, Isaac. These gang boys usually stick close to home. Like I say, Tommy would do anything for dough, but Gophers and the like tend not to venture out of their own neighborhoods. Half of them couldn’t find Brooklyn, much less cross state lines.”

“Find out why they did this time.”

“I’ll try and brace Weeks soon as I learn where he’s recuperating and—”

“Don’t brace him. Send for me.”

“O.K., Isaac. But don’t count on much. No one’s keeping books on a deal like this. For all we know, it could have been personal. Maybe MacDonald poked one too many guys in the snoot.”

“Have you ever heard of a New York gangster using a Butterflymesser?”

“You mean the Philippine flip-open knife?”

Bell showed him the Butterflymesser.

“Yeah, there was a Duster who joined the Army to get away from the cops, ended up fighting in the Filipino insurrection. He brought one back and killed a gambler with it who owed him money. At least, that’s what they said, but I bet it was the cocaine. You know how ‘dust’ makes ’em paranoiac.”

“In other words, the Butterflymesser is not common in New York.”

“That Duster’s was the only one I ever heard of.”

BELL RACED TO NEW YORK.

He hired a driver and mechanic to drive his Locomobile back while he took the train. A police launch, provided by Detective George, who was delighted to help him leave Camden, ran him across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, where he caught a Pennsylvania Railroad express. When he arrived at the Knickerbocker Hotel, light in the afternoon sky still glowed on the green copper roof, but nearer the street the red brick, French renaissance façade was growing dim.

He telephoned Joseph Van Dorn long-distance in Washington.

“Excellent job on the Frye Boys,” Van Dorn greeted him. “I just had lunch with the Attorney General, and he is tickled pink.”

“Thank John Scully. I only held his coat.”

“How much longer to wrap up the Langner suicide?”

“This is bigger than Langner,” Bell retorted, and he told Van Dorn what had transpired.

“Four murders?” Van Dorn asked incredulously.

“One for sure—the one I witnessed. One likely—Langner.”

“Depending upon how much credence you put in that crackpot Cruson.”

“And the other two we have to investigate.”

“All connected by battleships?” Van Dorn asked, still sounding incredulous.

“Every victim worked in the dreadnought program.”

“
If
they’re all victims, who’s behind it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t suppose you know why either.”

“Not yet.”

Van Dorn sighed. “What do you need, Isaac?”

“Van Dorn Protection Services to guard Farley and Wheeler.”

“To whom do I bill those services?”

“Put it on the cuff ’til we figure who the client is,” Bell answered drily.

“Very amusing. What else do you need?”

BELL ISSUED INSTRUCTIONS to the crew of operatives Van Dorn put at his call—temporarily, as his call with the boss had made clear. Then he took the subway downtown and a trolley across the Brooklyn Bridge. John Scully met him in a Sand Street lunchroom a stone’s throw from the fortresslike gates of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The cheap restaurant was starting to fill up as day shifts ended at the yard and surrounding factories, and boilermakers, drop forgers, tank testers, reamers, and patternmakers, machinists, coppersmiths, pipe fitters, and plumbers rushed in for supper.

Scully said, “Near as I can discover, Kent’s on the up-and-up. All he does is work and work some more. Devoted as a missionary. I’m told he hardly ever leaves his drawing table. He’s got a bedroom attached to his drawing loft, where he stays most nights.”

“Where does he stay the rest of the nights?”

“Hotel St. George when a certain lady from Washington comes to town.”

“Who is she?”

“Well, that’s the funny thing. She’s the daughter of your exploding-piano guy.”

“Dorothy Langner?”

“What do you think of that?”

“I think Farley Kent is a lucky man.”

THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD surrounded a large bay of the East River between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Williamsburg Bridge. Designated a “battleship yard,” and officially named the New York Navy Yard, its factories, foundries, dry docks, and shipways employed six thousand ship workers. Tall brick walls and iron gates enclosed twice the acreage of the Washington Navy Yard. Isaac Bell showed his Navy pass at the Sand Street Gate, which was flanked by statues of eagles.

He found Farley Kent’s drawing loft in a building dwarfed by enormous ship sheds and gantry cranes. Night had blackened the high windows, and the draftsmen worked by electric lamps. Kent was young, barely out of his twenties, and deeply shaken by Alasdair Mac-Donald’s murder. He mourned that MacDonald’s death would cripple America’s development of large-ship turbines. “It will be a long while before the United States Navy will be able to install advanced turbines in our dreadnoughts.”

“What is Hull 44?” Bell asked.

Kent looked away. “Hull 44?”

“Alasdair MacDonald implied that it was important.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“He spoke freely about Arthur Langner and Ron Wheeler and Chad Gordon. And about you, Mr. Kent. Clearly, you five men worked closely. I am sure you know what Hull 44 means.”

“I told you. I do not know what you are talking about.”

Bell regarded him coldly. Kent looked away from his stern face.

“ ‘Hull 44,’ ” the detective said, “were your friend’s dying words. He would have told me what it meant if he had not died. Now it’s up to you.”

“I can’t—I don’t know.”

Bell’s features hardened until they looked like they had been cut from stone. “That powerful man held my hand like a child and tried to tell me why he was murdered. He could not get the words out. You can.
Tell me!
”

Kent bolted into the hallway and yelled loudly for the sentries.

Six U.S. Marines escorted Bell out the gates, their sergeant polite but unmoved by Bell’s pass. “I recommend, sir, that you telephone for an appointment with the commandant of the yard.”

Scully was waiting in the lunchroom. “Have yourself some supper. It’s a swell grub station. I’ll watch for Kent.”

“I’ll spell you in fifteen minutes.”

Bell could not remember when he had last eaten. He was just raising a sandwich from his plate when Scully dashed back and motioned him to the door. “Kent broke from the gate like the favorite at the Kentucky Derby. Heading east on Sand. Wearing a tall-crowned black derby and a tan topcoat.”