The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“But they did see him,” said Van Dorn. “He just didn’t look like someone who could throw a fit young actor off a fire escape.”

“What are you talking about, Joe?”

“I spoke with three people who remember an old man hanging around her building. One thought he was a tramp, another a ragpicker, another just a drunk. They all believed he was harmless.”

Isaac Bell read Van Dorn’s wire the night that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde closed in San Francisco.

FIRE ESCAPE

OLD MAN

ACTOR

45

LOS ANGELES

“In all my years on the stage,” groaned Isabella Cook, “I cannot recall a closing-night cast party the equal of last night’s. Nor a hangover more vicious. Oh, Isaac, what were we thinking?”

“Yours is not the only hangover on the train, if that’s any consolation.”

“How is yours?”

“About what I deserve,” Bell answered. In fact, with an awful sense he was running out of time, he had sipped dark cider in Manhattan cocktail glasses while he kept a clear, but ultimately fruitless, eye on Jackson Barrett, John Buchanan, and Henry Young.

“It’s your wife’s fault. The prospect of her movie obliterated closing-night blues. Everyone’s excited. I saw love affairs springing up all around me, and couples who had ceased to speak making cow eyes . . . Would someone tell the engineer to stop clattering the wheels?”

“We’re almost there.”

“I never thought I would be so happy to get off a train in Los Angeles . . .” She cast a dubious eye out the window. “Sunny Los Angeles? I see nothing but storm-swept orange groves and sodden cattle. Do you suppose this rain will follow us all the way to Hollywood?”

“Marion has rented a studio, just in case.”

When Bell spoke long-distance with her last night, she had ended her report with a grim, “But it’s still raining.”

No one had to light a fire under Joel Wallace.

Fourteen retired chorus girls—since Isaac Bell left London—fourteen strikeouts. Then all of a sudden, his new friend, Dolly, who he had met on this wild-goose chase, said that when her mother was in the chorus in Tra-la-la Tosca way back in 1891, she had known a girl who went with a boy named Spelvin.

Wallace waited for them in a tearoom on Piccadilly, around the corner from the Van Dorn field office. In they came, all spiffed-up for Central London. One look at her mother told Wallace that her daughter would age very nicely. Mother paused to reminisce with the tearoom manager, and Dolly forged ahead to Wallace’s table.

“I brought me mum, like you asked. She thinks you’re going to marry me.”

“Dolly, you know I’m not the marrying kind. I never lied, did I? Told you the night we met.”

“Well, you better not tell Mum that or she won’t talk to you.”

Joel Wallace’s cable found Isaac Bell in the rain-swept Los Angeles Arcade Depot rail yards, when Bell’s car rolled in on the back of the Jekyll & Hyde Special. It was a potent reminder that Joseph Van Dorn had tapped the right man to ramrod the London field office.

SPELVIN CON 1891

IMPERSONATING ITALIAN FENCING TEACHER

GIRLFRIEND DISAPPEARED

SPELVIN LAST SEEN LIVERPOOL STATION

ON MY WAY TO LIVERPOOL