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The Cutthroat

“It’s your wife’s fault. The prospect of her movie obliterated closing-night blues. Everyone’s excited. I saw love affairs springing up all around me, and couples who had ceased to speak making cow eyes… Would someone tell the engineer to stop clattering the wheels?”

“We’re almost there.”

“I never thought I would be so happy to get off a train in Los Angeles…” She cast a dubious eye out the window. “Sunny Los Angeles? I see nothing but storm-swept orange groves and sodden cattle. Do you suppose this rain will follow us all the way to Hollywood?”

“Marion has rented a studio, just in case.”

When Bell spoke long-distance with her last night, she had ended her report with a grim, “But it’s still raining.”

* * *

No one had to light a fire under Joel Wallace.

Fourteen retired chorus girls — since Isaac Bell left London — fourteen strikeouts. Then all of a sudden, his new friend, Dolly, who he had met on this wild-goose chase, said that when her mother was in the chorus in Tra-la-la Tosca way back in 1891, she had known a girl who went with a boy named Spelvin.

Wallace waited for them in a tearoom on Piccadilly, around the corner from the Van Dorn field office. In they came, all spiffed-up for Central London. One look at her mother told Wallace that her daughter would age very nicely. Mother paused to reminisce with the tearoom manager, and Dolly forged ahead to Wallace’s table.

“I brought me mum, like you asked. She thinks you’re going to marry me.”

“Dolly, you know I’m not the marrying kind. I never lied, did I? Told you the night we met.”

“Well, you better not tell Mum that or she won’t talk to you.”

Joel Wallace’s cable found Isaac Bell in the rain-swept Los Angeles Arcade Depot rail yards, when Bell’s car rolled in on the back of the Jekyll & Hyde Special. It was a potent reminder that Joseph Van Dorn had tapped the right man to ramrod the London field office.

SPELVIN CON 1891

IMPERSONATING ITALIAN FENCING TEACHER

GIRLFRIEND DISAPPEARED

SPELVIN LAST SEEN LIVERPOOL STATION

ON MY WAY TO LIVERPOOL

It was one thing to impersonate an Italian, thought Bell, the Whitechapel barber Davy Collins being a prime example. But quite another to teach fencing, as Mr. Barrett trained Mr. Young. Double that to teach the exquisite skill of Italian fencing.

* * *

Detective Eddie Tobin waited at the Chelsea Piers in a fast launch. Joseph Van Dorn clambered aboard. Tobin started up a pair of eight-cylinder Wolseley-Siddeley gasoline engines that Isaac Bell had had shipped over from England and thundered across the crowded, smoke-shrouded harbor toward Staten Island.

Tobin, whose misshapen face reflected a terrible Gopher Gang beating when he was a Van Dorn apprentice, lounged at the helm like a man who had been born in a cockpit, nonchalantly dodging tugs, coal barges, railcar floats, victualing lighters, sail and steam freighters, and liners, at thirty knots. Ordered by Chief Inspector Bell to look afresh at the Oppenheim yacht explosion, the young detective had found a witness.

“How come the cops never talked to him?” Mr. Van Dorn wanted to know.

“He doesn’t talk to cops. And he won’t talk to us either, at least not directly.”

Van Dorn assumed the witness was one of his cousins as the tight-lipped Tobin-Darbee-Richards-Gordon-and-Scott clan of Staten Island scowmen included oysters tongers, tugboat men, coal pirates, and smugglers.

“The problem is, Mr. Van Dorn, it’s going to be hearsay.”

“I’m not building a court case,” Van Dorn growled. “All Isaac needs is ammunition.”

Into the harbor at St. George, Tobin slowed just enough for two muscle-bound oyster tongers to jump on from a pier head. Van Dorn nodded coolly but shook hands. Jimmy Richards and Marvyn Gordon were in and out of jail regularly, but they were by and large larcenous, not vicious, for which he would cut them some slack. Tobin raced out into the Kill Van Kull, slowing a mile in and cutting the engines when Richards and Gordon pointed at an oyster scow anchored beside a derelict schooner. A pretty, dark-haired girl stepped out of the low cabin. Van Dorn figured she was about fourteen.

“Molly, this is Mr. Van Dorn, who I told you about.”

Molly extended her hand to shake Van Dorn’s solemnly but invited no one aboard her boat.

Tobin said, “Molly’s father told her what he saw. She’s going to tell you.”

Molly said, “An old Italian greengrocer with a big hooked nose hired Father to take him to the yacht.”

“The Oppenheim yacht?”

“The one that blew up. He delivered crates of lettuce. The water was rough, and he got sick on the way back. Seasick. Sweating and throwing up. When Father helped him up to the dock, his nose fell off.”

“His nose—”

“And his big black mustache. The Italian kind.”