The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

You first. Then your lovely wife. Back-to-back.

A vital murder.

A joyous slaughter.

“May I join you?” Isaac Bell asked Henry Young, who was sitting with a cup of coffee in the dining car. The train was crawling up the Sierra Nevada pushed by two extra engines. The mountains, deep in spring snow, looked as remote as the far side of the moon, but soon the special would crest at Donner Pass—only five short hours from San Francisco.

“Of course, Mr. Bell.”

“It occurs to me, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sitting down before.”

Young smiled. He looked ten years younger, and the twitch in his cheek had vanished.

“And you look very happy.”

“I am,” said the stage manager. “I had my best night’s sleep in a year.”

“You’re not troubled that the tour is almost over?”

“I am thrilled. I let The Boys talk me into this one against my better judgment. Touring is a young man’s game. Give me a Broadway play I load once instead of fifty times. Mind you, every stage manager should learn his trade on the road. Earn the right to stay home and then stay home.”

“I’ve heard you’re quite the fencer.”

Young replied with a modest shrug. “I’m a student fencer.”

“Who’s your teacher?”

“Mr. Barrett.”

“They say you can handle yourself.”

“Mr. Barrett is a gifted teacher. I had the advantage of being a dancer when I was a kid, which makes one fluid, shall we say. But I still give ninety per cent of the credit to Mr. Barrett’s instruction. Basics, like relaxing the grip for point control. Fluidity—as in dance.”

“Did he teach Mr. Buchanan, too?”

“I believe he ‘polished’ him. I gather Mr. Buchanan was adept to begin with.”

“You said you danced?”

“My aunts and uncles were hoofers. The Dancing Bookers.”

“Of course. Booker’s your middle name. Did you dance in England?”

“Canada.”

“Do you know what a ‘panto’ is?”

“Panto? Panto . . . Oh, the English pantomime. Christmas shows for children.”

“Do you have pantos in Canada?”

“No. Perhaps in some of the other British colonies, but not in Canada. You’re full of questions today, Mr. Bell.”

“Every day,” Isaac Bell shot back. “Every day with all of you on this train is a chance to learn a lot at once about the stage.”

Joseph Van Dorn stepped out of a Tenderloin District saloon that catered to actors and found the sidewalk blocked by a broad-shouldered hard case wearing a blue suit and a derby.

“Care to tell me why the founder of a private detective agency, with field offices in every city worth its name and foreign outposts in London, Paris, and Berlin, has spent two full days personally sleuthing around my precinct, asking about an actor manager who fell off a lady’s fire escape last October?”