The Cutthroat

“Pinchback?” Bell asked. “A bit up-to-date for an operetta.”

“I thought so, too. Maybe the young lady took him shopping.”

Bell passed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go. Take a week off, give some poor girl a break.”

“If I don’t get her, some other guy will.”

* * *

Four men followed Isaac Bell from Grand Central and paced him on the other side of 44th Street. Snappy dressers — presentable for the neighborhood, if somewhat flashy in two-tone shoes — they might have been out-of-town buyers just off the train, or junior advertising men, except for their socks. The modern breed of Gopher street gangster favored yellow hose. They were still there when he crossed Fifth Avenue. A traffic cop shot them a look, but he had his hands full sorting carriages from motor trucks.

Bell did not expect them to make their move on the block between Fifth and Sixth. Shared by garages and carriage houses, the Yale, New York Yacht, and Harvard clubs, and the Iroquois and Algonquin hotels, there were too many people. At Sixth Avenue, he crossed quickly under the El and stopped suddenly in the shadows of the overhead train trestle with his back to a stanchion.

4

The Gophers cut across traffic and blocked the sidewalk. Up close, scarred faces and missing teeth left no doubt they meant business. For reasons often debated by the Van Dorn Gang Squad, the shortest Gopher always did the talking.

“Friend of the family?”

Isaac Bell said, “Out of my way, boys.”

The others took up the chorus and edged closer.

“Mr. Do-good?”

“Friend of the family.”

“You’re gonna learn — stay outta people’s businesses.”

The tallest made two mistakes. He forged ahead of the others and he lowered one hand to reach for his blackjack. Bell took advantage with a one-two combination that knocked the gangster to the pavement. Guard up — left hand and forearm protecting his chin and gut, right positioned to slough off a punch or throw his own — he bloodied a nose with a lightning jab and back-stepped as fast as he had waded in.

“Last chance, boys. Out of my way.”

The short guy laughed. He thrust out his hand with a sharp twist and his blackjack slid from his sleeve into his palm. “Last chance? Gonna fight three of us?”

“Not while wearing my best suit.”

Bell flared open his coat, revealing the use-polished grips of the Colt automatic in his shoulder holster. “I will shoot two and fight the last man standing.”

* * *

Isaac Bell headed to the Bellevue Hospital morgue late the following afternoon, where he showed Anna’s photograph to a recently appointed assistant coroner.

“I have no Anna Pape. And no Anna Waterbury.”

“Any unknowns?” Bell asked.

The new assistant was working hard to modernize the obsolete institution that had been run for too many years by a commission of elected, often unqualified, and occasionally corrupt coroners. Improvements included making a record of the dead with photographs. He flipped through the file pages, and Bell agreed when he said, “No kids like this one — funny you should ask, though. We might have a younger woman coming in later. Sounded like a murder. One of the bosses went over himself.”

“Where?”

“In the Tenderloin.”

Bell asked for the address, caught the trolley across 34th Street, and strode swiftly down Eighth Avenue to West 29th Street. Captain Mike Coligney was standing outside a run-down building of flats. He was talking to a coroner Bell did not know personally and ignoring shouted questions from newspaper reporters held at bay by uniformed cops. Bell walked past, exchanged a private glance with Coligney, and waited half a block away until the official drove off in a Marmon.

Coligney greeted him gravely. “Sorry, Isaac, she could be your girl.”

“Who found her?”

“The actor who lives here claims he came home from a month in the Midwest. He swears he didn’t know her. We’re holding him while we check, but it looks fairly certain he only left Pittsburgh this morning — the show he was in got canceled. She’s been dead at least a day.”

The reporters’ shouts grew insistent. At an imperious glance from Coligney, his cops herded them farther down the street. He said to Bell, “I have six daughters. I won’t have salacious speculation about a child from a good home. It’s not that she was some unfortunate streetwalker.”

“Did the neighbors hear anything?” Bell asked.

“Not in the flat. Not in the hallway. Not in the lobby. We’re guessing she came under her own steam. In which case, she knew her killer.”

“Unless she was carried in.”

“We’ve got no witnesses to that. No, it looks personal. Vicious. Jealous rage.”

“May I see her?” asked Bell.

Coligney hesitated. Bell said, “A fresh pair of eyes can only help.”

“You’ll write me a report.”

“Of course. Thanks, Mike.”

Coligney raised a cautioning hand. “I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything. But just so you know before you go in there, Isaac. She’s really been carved up.”

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