The Cutthroat

“I’ve heard you’re quite the fencer.”

Young replied with a modest shrug. “I’m a student fencer.”

“Who’s your teacher?”

“Mr. Barrett.”

“They say you can handle yourself.”

“Mr. Barrett is a gifted teacher. I had the advantage of being a dancer when I was a kid, which makes one fluid, shall we say. But I still give ninety per cent of the credit to Mr. Barrett’s instruction. Basics, like relaxing the grip for point control. Fluidity — as in dance.”

“Did he teach Mr. Buchanan, too?”

“I believe he ‘polished’ him. I gather Mr. Buchanan was adept to begin with.”

“You said you danced?”

“My aunts and uncles were hoofers. The Dancing Bookers.”

“Of course. Booker’s your middle name. Did you dance in England?”

“Canada.”

“Do you know what a ‘panto’ is?”

“Panto? Panto… Oh, the English pantomime. Christmas shows for children.”

“Do you have pantos in Canada?”

“No. Perhaps in some of the other British colonies, but not in Canada. You’re full of questions today, Mr. Bell.”

“Every day,” Isaac Bell shot back. “Every day with all of you on this train is a chance to learn a lot at once about the stage.”

* * *

Joseph Van Dorn stepped out of a Tenderloin District saloon that catered to actors and found the sidewalk blocked by a broad-shouldered hard case wearing a blue suit and a derby.

“Care to tell me why the founder of a private detective agency, with field offices in every city worth its name and foreign outposts in London, Paris, and Berlin, has spent two full days personally sleuthing around my precinct, asking about an actor manager who fell off a lady’s fire escape last October?”

“Keeping my hand in. How are you, Captain?”

The old friends shook hands warmly.

“How are you making out?”

“Better than your boys did in October.”

Honest Mike Coligney bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The husband everybody said was chasing Mr. Medick claims he wasn’t.”

“What do you expect him to say? A man died. He didn’t want to get charged with manslaughter.”

“He also says he wasn’t cuckolded.”

“That’s not what he said last October.”

“He thought he’d been cuckolded at the time, but now he says he was set up. Some ‘friend’ sent him a letter: ‘Dear sir, I thought you should know that your wife is running around on you.’”

“Do you believe him?”

“His wife swore she never cheated on him.”

“Do you believe her?”

“She swore it on her deathbed.”

“What deathbed? She couldn’t be older than thirty-five.”

“TB. Gone in March.”

Mike Coligney crossed himself. “Mother Mary… So what was Medick doing on her fire escape?”

“He got a letter, too. Supposedly from the lady.”

“I remember the letter. Along the line of ‘Come up the fire escape, I’ll let you in my back window.’”

“She swore she never wrote it,” said Van Dorn. “Same deathbed.”

“Who did?”

“Whoever threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape.”

“Except for one thing,” said Coligney. “Detective Division matched that letter to a typewriter in the lady’s office where she worked.”

“There are two ways of looking at the typewriter,” said Joseph Van Dorn. “Either she lied on her deathbed… or the person who threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape typed the letter on that typewriter.”

Coligney knew that and changed the subject. “Medick was supposed to be afraid of heights. Where’d he get the nerve to climb four stories of fire escapes?”

Joseph Van Dorn rubbed his red whiskers, took off his hat, and ran a big hand over his bald scalp. He blinked, and his deep-set Celtic eyes grew dark with melancholy. “According to the lady’s poor devil of a husband, she was a woman worth taking chances for.”

“So Medick knew her.”

“Hoped to know her better,” said Van Dorn, “encouraged by a letter written by someone who knew his weakness for other men’s wives.”

“How come no witness ever saw that ‘someone’?”

“But they did see him,” said Van Dorn. “He just didn’t look like someone who could throw a fit young actor off a fire escape.”

“What are you talking about, Joe?”

“I spoke with three people who remember an old man hanging around her building. One thought he was a tramp, another a ragpicker, another just a drunk. They all believed he was harmless.”

* * *

Isaac Bell read Van Dorn’s wire the night that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde closed in San Francisco.

FIRE ESCAPE

OLD MAN

ACTOR

45

LOS ANGELES

“In all my years on the stage,” groaned Isabella Cook, “I cannot recall a closing-night cast party the equal of last night’s. Nor a hangover more vicious. Oh, Isaac, what were we thinking?”

“Yours is not the only hangover on the train, if that’s any consolation.”

“How is yours?”

“About what I deserve,” Bell answered. In fact, with an awful sense he was running out of time, he had sipped dark cider in Manhattan cocktail glasses while he kept a clear, but ultimately fruitless, eye on Jackson Barrett, John Buchanan, and Henry Young.