“Which El? Ninth Avenue?”
“Right. Cops took him to the closest hospital.”
“Cops? Why not ambulance?”
“He was walking under his own steam. Cops found him stumbling down from the Church stop at Saint Paul’s. You know, at 59th?”
“I know where it is.”
The Ninth Avenue Elevated Line, which ran right beside Roosevelt Hospital, started all the way downtown at South Ferry at the edge of the harbor and passed through Chelsea on the way up. A wounded rumrunner could just possibly have come ashore at either of those points and made it to the train.
McKinney said, “I’ll send the boys back to Roosevelt.”
“No. I’ll do it.” It was a very slim chance. But it beat hanging around helpless to do anything for Joe Van Dorn.
“How’s the Boss?” McKinney asked.
“I don’t know yet. They’re operating.”
“Of all the crazy things . . .”
“What do you mean?”
“That Mr. Van Dorn happened to be there, on that cutter, of all patrols. How many bootleggers go to the trouble of shooting at the Coast Guard? Anyone with half a brain knows it’s safer to surrender and let your lawyers bust you loose.”
“Good question,” said Bell. He hurried back to the waiting room, thinking that Joe had indeed run into an unlikely piece of bad luck. As McKinney said, most rumrunners knew it was not worth risking their lives in a shoot-out with the Coast Guard.
Still no word from the surgeons. Bell asked Dorothy, “Are you all right here? There’s something I have to look into.” She was deathly pale, and he could see she was nearing the end of her rope.
Captain Novicki flung a brawny arm around her shoulders and boomed, “You get the louses who shot him, Isaac. I’ll look after Dorothy and Joe like a mother bear.”
• • •
ISAAC BELL flagged a cab and raced across town through light late-night traffic. It was less than fifteen minutes from Bellevue to Roosevelt Hospital, a giant three-hundred-fifty-bed red brick building. The hospital and the fortresslike Roman Catholic church of St. Paul the Apostle stood between the Irish and Negro slums of Hell’s Kitchen to the south and San Juan Hill to the north. “Blind pigs,” windowless illegal drinking parlors, darkened the ground floors of tenements. A train rattled overhead as he ran under the El and into the hospital. He gave the front-desk receptionist a look at his gold Van Dorn chief investigator badge, slipped him five dollars, and asked to speak with the patient admitted earlier with a gunshot wound.
“Top floor,” the receptionist told him. “Last room at the end of the hall. Private room, with a police guard.”
“How badly is he wounded?”
“He made it under his own steam.”
In the elevator, Bell folded a sawbuck for the cop.
The elevator opened on the soapy odor of a freshly mopped floor. The hall was empty, the tiles glistening.
Bell hurried down the long corridor. The elevator scissored shut behind him.
Ahead, he heard the sharp bang of a small-caliber pistol.
He ran toward the sound, pulling his Browning from his shoulder holster, and rounded the corner. He saw a stairwell door to his left. The door to the room to his right was half open. He heard a loud groan and saw on the floor blue-uniformed trouser legs and scuffed black brogans. Cop shoes. He pushed inside. A New York Police Department officer lay on his back, holding his head, eyes squeezed shut. He groaned again, “It hoits awful.”
On the bed, a blond-haired man in hospital garb lay on his side, curled like a fetus, his chin tucked tightly to his chest. The gunshot Bell had heard had been fired point-blank. A tiny red hole half the diameter of a dime pierced the back of his neck, with a ring of blood seared around the rim.
3
THE WINDOW WAS OPEN.
Bell thrust his head out. The square top of St. Paul’s south tower stood at eye level across the street. Beneath the window, the hospital’s sheer façade dropped twelve stories to the pavement.