The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“If we decide to go forward with Treasure Island, I would like to spend time with your Jekyll and Hyde company—backstage, and aboard your train when you leave for the West.”

“You’ll find it quite dull, Mr. Bell,” said Buchanan. “Strictly business.”

“Melodramas are short on the ‘chorus girls’ of lore,” said Barrett.

“I’m recently married,” Bell grinned back at him. “No need of chorus girls. But I’m obliged to learn enough ins and outs of the theater arts to protect my partners.”

“Let’s hitch your car to our train,” said Jackson Barrett.

“Ride along to San Francisco,” said John Buchanan.

“You’ll be our caboose.”

“I could not ask for more,” said Isaac Bell.

36

The Cutthroat brushed spirit gum on his upper lip and cursed out loud. He had just shaved, his skin was raw, and it stung like the devil. It would sting even worse when he removed the mustache, this time an enormous affair trimmed in the walrus style. He fanned the lace backing with his souvenir program and fixed it under his nose.

He was dressed in blue-striped overalls over a red-checked shirt, which he had bulked up with horsehair padding. Now he perched a battered derby on his head and wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose. Pipe cutters, wrenches, hacksaw, files, and a gasoline blowtorch arrayed in a wooden toolbox completed the portrait of a master gas fitter. He even had a card from the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company emblazoned with the motto “Heat with gas, light with electricity.” The company was expanding, enjoying great success with modern, up-and-coming customers like the Van Dorn Detective Agency on Plum Street.

He hefted the toolbox on his shoulder, sauntered out of his yellow cottage by the river, walked to the streetcar stop, and rode into the center of town. Off near Plum Street, he walked to the Van Dorn office on the ground floor of a substantial-looking building. The private back door was down an alley, but he walked in the street entrance.

They had one wall plastered with wanted posters—including a copy of the imaginatively aged one of himself that had riveted his eye in the red-light district. The sharp-eyed young detective, working in vest and shirtsleeves, had a pistol in a shoulder holster. He jumped up from his desk with an eager-to-help smile.

“Hello there. What can I do for you?”

“I’m supposed to check your meter.”

The detective opened a door to the cellar stairs. “Give a shout if you need anything.”

“Thank you.” The Cutthroat paused on the steps to look at the wall of posters. “Do you think you’ll catch all those guys?”

“That’s our job.”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Catch them all?”

“We never give up.”

“Never?”

The Cutthroat studied his poster. He recognized the hand of a newspaper illustrator back in London. A decent artist, but the likeness wasn’t specific. He was tempted to stand beside it, yank off his walrus mustache, and ask, “Look familiar?”

He could use every tool in his box. Theater lights were all electric now, but he had learned gas fitting back in his apprentice days when footlights, wing lights, and border lights burned “town gas.” Here in Cincinnati, it was the new and abundant and more potent “natural,” taken from the ground instead of manufactured from coal.

He found the live-gas inlet pipe, found the master cock, and closed it. He removed the meter from the inlet and outlet pipes. The inlet and outlet holes were supposed to be tightly corked to keep air away from the residual gas inside the meter. Instead, he left them open and laid the meter on the cellar floor, directly under the service pipe, which would get you sacked in a flash by any supervisor who noticed. Then he bridged the inlet and outlet pipes with a prethreaded length of lead pipe, in which he had drilled a microscopic pinhole. He opened the master cock. The gas that leaked slowly through the pinhole would gather in the cellar.

Air entering the uncorked meter would form a highly volatile mix with the gas inside it. He slipped the end of a long length of slow-burning fuse in one of the holes, uncoiled it along the cellar wall, and lit the fuse. When the slowly smouldering flame finally ignited the air–gas mix in the meter, that small explosion would set off the rest of the accumulated gas as powerfully as a blasting cap exploded dynamite.

He climbed the stairs and closed the door.

“What’s that I smell?” asked the detective.

The Cutthroat plucked the blowtorch from his box. “I had to sweat a pipe.”