“Archie,” said Bell. “Go to Wichita.”
“Wichita? Sure you don’t want to go, Isaac?”
“Get on the fastest mail train. Wire me the second you know whether Reed Riggs was blackmailing Bill Matters . . . Wally and Mack! Go find Matters’ private railcar.”
“That’ll take forever.”
“Before Matters makes it back from Europe.”
Bell put on his hat, pulled the brim low over his eyes, and headed out the door. “Anyone needs me, I’ll be at the Normandie.” It was time to tap the deep well of the Boss’s experience with criminals and their crimes.
—
The Normandie Hotel’s ground-floor bar at Broadway and 38th catered to out-of-town salesmen and the wholesalers whose warehouse lofts occupied the West 30s side streets off the hotel district. Joseph Van Dorn’s corner table commanded the room, the long bar, and the steadily swinging saloon doors. On the table stood a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Operating in affable-businessman mode, peering about benignly, the founder of the detective agency could be mistaken for a top salesman, a “commission man” who paid his own expenses.
“If Riggs was blackmailing Matters, and if Spike’s so-called trick up his sleeve was to blackmail Matters, does throwing John D. Rockefeller off the Orient Express make him our assassin?” he asked Bell.
“Matters was sitting in the same auto, three feet away, when the assassin shot me in Baku.”
“He could have staged it. Paid a rifleman to shoot, pretending he was the assassin.”
“That could explain why he missed an easy shot,” Bell said. “But no, they’re not the same man. Matters is the mastermind, not the assassin.”
“If I were you,” said Van Dorn, “I would worry less about Matters than the assassin.”
“Bill Matters was gripped by a killing rage,” said Isaac Bell. “I guarantee he will make his way home from Europe and attack again.”
Van Dorn shook his head. “Matters is a business man on the run, not exactly his strength. The assassin is operating in a world he’s chosen.” He splashed Bushmills in both their glasses. “Don’t you find it curious we haven’t caught him?”
“Yet,” said Bell.
“This killer has taken every chance in the book,” said Van Dorn. “Shooting his victims in broad daylight. Shooting in public places. Staging elaborate scenarios—the Washington Monument monkeyshine was positively byzantine.”
“Clyde Lapham.”
“But hardly a singular event if you consider his shooting-duck trick and the killings of Reed Riggs and the poor fellow who fell in the oil vat.”
“Albert Hill.”
“Not to mention that woman who burned to death.”
“Mary McCloud.”
“And still we haven’t caught him. Either he is the luckiest devil alive or we are the sorriest detectives alive.”
“There’s another possibility,” said Bell.
“What’s that?”
“He’s not afraid of getting caught.”
“If he believes that,” said Van Dorn, “he is crack-brained and we should have hanged him long ago. There is no ‘perfect crime.’ And certainly no string of perfect crimes. No matter how craftily they plan, things go wrong and criminals get caught.”
“This killer is not afraid. He’s like the drunk who falls down but doesn’t get hurt; never tightens up, just lands soft in a heap.”
“Maybe he’s not afraid because he’s nuts.”
Bell said, “If he’s nuts, he’s a very slick nuts. Nothing fazes him. He never panics. Just changes course and slides away like mercury.”