The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“I don’t see how the stage manager would ever find the time to kill anybody.”

“Archie says the same. So does Helen.”

“How about you, Isaac?”

“I’m not so sure.”

The rumor that the Jekyll & Hyde Special would not stop for their scheduled performances in Denver was about to meet its test. The stage manager announced a full company meeting. Actors, musicians, sceneshifters, riggers, carpenters, wardrobe ladies, ticket sellers, and callboys crowded into the dining car and waited anxiously while stopped outside the city center in the 36th Street yard. Their locomotive took on water and their tender’s coal, and they waited some more when grocery trucks and butchers’ wagons parked beside the dining car. When the train was replenished, would it be shunted toward Union Station or onto the main line west across the Rockies?

John Buchanan looked relaxed and in charge.

Jackson Barrett, too, looked like he hadn’t a worry in the world.

Maybe the worst rumors weren’t true?

Are you kidding? Mr. Barrett and Mr. Buchanan are actors. Who knows what they’re thinking or how they feel?

“O.K.,” said Buchanan. “Is everyone here? We have our cast. We have our backstage people and our out-front people. We have our train crew. We have our stewards and cooks. We have our guests—the angelic Mr. Bell, the journalistic Mr. Smith, and the ‘filmalistic’ Mrs. Marion Morgan Bell—more about her in a moment. We even have the pilot of our Jekyll and Hyde billboard in the sky, and if Mrs. Bradford looks too young to fly a biplane, look again, for she is a married woman and the mother of two little girls almost as pretty as she is.”

“Get on with it,” Jackson Barrett muttered through an opaque smile.

“Hazel Bradford,” Bell whispered to Marion, “set speed and altitude records last year.”

Buchanan stepped back, and said, “Your turn.”

Jackson Barrett said, “The rumors you’ve heard are NOT true. Our tour is NOT over.”

Eighty people smiled.

“So don’t worry. Our play lives on. And will continue to live on as no Broadway play ever has before.”

Everyone leaned forward to hear what the devil that was supposed to mean.

“After Denver and San Francisco, we will immediately steam down to Hollywood, which is just outside Los Angeles, where Marion Morgan Bell will transform our play into a movie. Yes, you heard right. A movie.”

Buchanan said, “Our final performances will play to Marion Morgan Bell’s cameras rather than on the stage. We will continue salaries at their current rate. Anyone who absolutely must get back to New York, we understand, and will replace you.”

“But,” said Barrett, “we hope that everyone will make the time to be watched by movie audiences forever.”

Bell whispered to Marion, “Congratulations. You’ve got your four-reeler.”

“Your investment syndicate doesn’t exist. How am I going to pay for it?”

“I’ve already spoken with Uncle Andy that you’re coming straight from San Francisco to Los Angeles to set up a four-reeler of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

The formidable Andrew Rubenoff, a onetime banking colleague of Bell’s father and a friend of Bell’s, had shifted his assets from steel, coal, and railroads to autos, airplanes, and movies and moved to California.

Bell grinned. “He’s deeply impressed that you snagged Isabella. You have your syndicate, Rubenoff and Bell.”

With that, the tall detective strolled casually from the dining car, accepting congratulations from well-wishers. He kept smiling until he was alone in his private car at the back of the train, where he laid his long fingers on his telegraph key and pondered what to send.

He was running out of time. The show would be in and out of San Francisco and on the way to Los Angeles before he knew it. If he didn’t arrest the Cutthroat before Marion finished the movie, the murderer would have his “immortality” and nothing would stop him from murdering another girl the next day.

Closing night in Denver, while Marion roamed the Princess Theatre backstage scouting angles for her cameras, Isaac Bell watched Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from an eighth-row house seat on the aisle. The fans and critics who raved about the famous Dream Duel when Jekyll’s potion triggered hallucinations had not been exaggerated. Bell was impressed.

He had fenced for Yale and still practiced religiously. At the Fencers Club on 45th Street, his best opponent was U.S. Navy saber champion Lieutenant Kenneth Ash, whenever both men found themselves in New York. Together, the detective and the naval attaché were developing a new attack—the “back shot”—which had judges scratching their heads and opponents bewildered.

In Jekyll and Hyde, the actors’ swordsmanship was miles above swordplay taught in drama schools. They were saber fighters of the first rank, Buchanan quick and powerful, Barrett possibly his superior, but not by much.