The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)
Page 84
A racket in the sky cut him off in the middle of a sentence.
BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT!
Isaac Bell looked up, astonished. He recognized the sound instantly, but the last thing he expected to hear over Cincinnati was the staccato blast of a rotary airplane engine at full throttle. A red streak of lightning shot past the hospital fifty feet above the Miami Canal and vanished in the direction of the Ohio River.
“Bet you don’t know what that is,” said the coroner.
Bell was an avid airman and knew exactly what it was. “A new Breguet Type IV tractor biplane with a Gnome rotary engine. But what’s he doing here?”
“Advertising! That’s—”
BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! drowned him out again.
The Breguet skimmed the mansard roof of the four-story hospital so close, it sent tiles flying, and Isaac Bell could not help grinning in envy of the lucky pilot. Then he saw the advertisement
painted on the underside of the wings touting the show that Anna Waterbury had hoped would have a place for her:
JEKYLL
on the left wing and
AND HYDE
on the right.
The red plane flashed by trailing castor oil smoke that smelled like someone had blown out candles.
“First airplane that ever flew over Cincinnati,” said the coroner. “Booming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Tickets are going like hotcakes. I’m taking the wife on Saturday.
“Come on in,” said the coroner. “I have her on the table.”
Later, Isaac Bell wandered Cincinnati’s theater district, reading marquees and playbills and collecting programs. He stopped in front of the vaudeville house. Beatrice Edmond’s name was still on the bill. Her cape had been too big.
He took the theater programs to the two-room Van Dorn field office on Plum Street. The chief—Sedgwick, an eager young detective they had hired away from the Police Department and who had gained a reputation in New York for snappy telegrams in the middle of the night—was working late. Bell spread the programs on a table and opened his notebook.
He juggled the symbols in his mind, inverted the crescent moons, angled some horns, and tried to group them in patterns. Then he took out his fountain pen. He was sketching freehand in the margins of the theater programs when, reaching for another, he suddenly saw the crescent shapes as Jack the Ripper carved them.
“I need your private wire.”
“Want me to send for you?”
“I remember my Morse.”
Bell sat at the key and tapped out orders to New York in cipher.
CINCINNATI
ON THE JUMP
FORRER—LINK ROAD SHOWS TO MURDERS MAP
DASHWOOD—ASSIST CINCINNATI FIELD OFFICE
BRING RIPPER WARNING POSTERS
ABBOTT, MILLS, WARREN—ON THE QUIET
“Why on the quiet?” said a voice over his shoulder.