The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“Was Anna Waterbury his first victim?”

“Good question.” Grady Forrer looked around at his army of unkempt bleary-eyed researchers. “You heard Mr. Bell. Do you have any questions for him?”

“I do, Mr. Bell,” said a scholarly-looking, middle-aged researcher. “The victim’s name was Anna Genevieve Pape. Why do you always call her Anna Waterbury instead of Anna Pape?”

“Because she wanted to be Anna Waterbury,” said Isaac Bell.

12

“There isn’t a body buried in L.A. that Tim Holian can’t jab with a spade.”

The subject of the oft-spoken compliment—Timothy J. Holian, the formidable chief of the Los Angeles, California, Van Dorn field office—shambled in and out of city agencies, perspiring freely, on a hot, dry spring day. He wore a battered panama hat that most private detectives would have long since handed down to a gardener, a greasy necktie, and an ill-cut sack suit hung heavy with pistols. He limped, having taken four bullets from the German spy Christian Semmler’s gunmen, two of whom he’d shot dead, in the blazing Thief case shoot-out that had all but annihilated the Los Angeles field office the year before.

The compliment referred to metaphorical bodies—the secrets behind scandals. There wasn’t a government clerk in the city’s morgue, hospitals, and police stations who wouldn’t do the Van Dorn a favor for cash or valuable information that could be used against enemies. If flesh-and-blood bodies were what Tim Holian wanted, flesh-and-blood bodies Tim Holian would have.

He soon shambled back to the office with lists of young women who had disappeared, lists of petite blond murder victims, lists of nameless bodies, and lists of mutilations. These he coordinated with lists his detectives had compiled from interviews with homicide cops and newspaper police reporters. Even after culling the unlikely from the likely, they still had a chilling number of strangled victims—six in the past three years, four of them hopeful actresses, one prostitute, and one librarian walking home alone.

Tim Holian telegraphed the results to New York, care of Chief Investigator Isaac Bell. He followed up by composing a personal letter for Bell. He was still writing it when the company wire rattled out a query from Bell himself:

EXPLANATION

Holian wired a shortened version of his letter, wherein he speculated that the extraordinary number of possible victims might testify to the lure of the filming of movies, a fast-growing business that drew so many young people to Los Angeles. This drew a second query from Bell.

WHY NONE BEFORE 1908?

Tim Holian wired back that 1908 marked the beginning of a flood of movie makers from the East Coast. Then he speculated:

MAYBE KILLER MOVIE MAN

Bell did not reply.

Charlie Post, chief of the one-man Denver field office, took a fresh look at an awful murder that occurred only last year. The eviscerated body of a doctor’s wife had been found in a gold smelter. She was from a prominent Colorado family, and her husband had been swiftly tried, convicted, and hung for the crime. The entire incident would have been a comedy of errors if it hadn’t been tragic.

Whoever had killed her—and Isaac Bell’s All Field Offices Alert had raised new doubts in a case that Post had never liked—had thrown her body into the smelter’s charge hopper. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have boiled to oblivion. But labor and owner hatreds being ferocious as they were in Denver, saboteurs had drawn the furnace fires to ruin the smelter. The molten ore had cooled, and when the killer dumped her body, it bounced on a hardened mass of ore and slag, where it was found the next morning by scab laborers imported to break the strike.

“Clearly,” the prosecutor had told the jury, “this doctor knew less about the smelting business than he did about surgery. Having butchered the poor woman like he was taught back east in medical school, he was tripped up by his ignorance of Colorado’s most important industry.”

Convinced more than ever that the case stunk, and emboldened by Bell’s alert, Post raided his emergency expense fund to bribe a coroner’s assistant to let him see photographs of the body.

“Son of a gun.”

Her arms and legs were stippled with the shallow crescent-shaped slices that Isaac Bell had ordered him to look for. He wired New York. Then he found a saloon. The murderer was Bell’s man. The doctor was innocent. And the best Charlie Post could hope for, as he raised a glass to toast—“Right and wrong”—loudly enough to catch the attention of the floor manager, was that husband and wife were reunited in Heaven.

“Telegram from Texas Walt Hatfield on the Western Union line, Mr. Bell.”

“Texas Walt Hatfield is a movie star. He doesn’t work for us anymore.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Bell. But he still knows the Van Dorn cipher.”

Bell looked over the typewritten lines of code and deciphered them in his head. Texas Walt—who had been masquerading as a stunt performer on the Thief case when movie makers hired him away to play cowboy parts—had not bothered to save money by reducing a telegram to a few words. The once famously terse Texan was no longer laconic, having gotten used to booming his movies in Photoplay and Motion Picture Story Magazine. As Bell read his wire, he could hear his old friend’s Texas drawl, which had grown more pronounced when he became a Western star.

Howdy, Isaac Old Son,

Rode the train to Albuquerque, New Mexico, yesterday. I had caught wind of a poor little dance hall gal cut up real bad last October. Then I caught wind of your All Field Offices Alert and it struck me she might be up your alley. Turned out, she probably is. Not only carved-up but decorated with them little half-moons you was asking about. Hope it helps.

Happy Trails.

Your good friend, Texas Walt Hatfield, former ranch hand, former Texas Ranger, former Van Dorn detective