The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

Van Dorn hung up. Bell resumed pacing.

He stopped to regard a wall calendar, a promotional gift from the Commercial Graphophone salesman. 1906 was winding down fast, but what caught his eye was the advertisement that ballyhooed, “Tell it to the Graphophone.”

Bell wound up the spring motor and read his notes aloud into the mica diaphragm.

“What are you waiting for?

“An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?

“My mind is made up. The man must go.”

He shifted the recording cylinder to the stenographer’s transcribing machine, which had hearing tubes instead of a concert horn, and fit the tubes to his ears. His own voice reading the words sounded like a stranger in another room. Or two strangers downstairs in the library.

What are you waiting for?

An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?

My mind is made up. The man must go.

Isaac Bell heard what he had missed.

He headed to Research.

Grady Forrer started apologizing. “Sorry, Isaac. Slow going on the fixers. The tycoons use different men for different tasks. Twenty, at least, among them.”

“Forget that, I’ve narrowed it down to one-in-seven.” He slapped his list on Forrer’s desk. “The fixer who will hire the killer to murder the President is one of the men in the library.”

“Impossible. These men hold seats on the Stock Exchange and controlling interests in railroads, mines, banks, and industries. They’re as close as we’ll get to gods.”

“One of them only runs errands for the gods.”

“It’s not a conversation, not even a discussion. They’re not equal partners. The first speaker is the boss, the second an employee. I don’t care if he shouted or whispered. What are you waiting for? He is the boss. The fixer is not a tycoon, even though he’s in the tycoons’ club . . . I feel like an idiot, it took me so long.”

“O.K.” Forrer nodded. “I get it. I feel like an idiot, too. So how do we separate servants from gods?”

Bell said, “Start with where they live.”

The Social Register turned up addresses for four—Arnold, Claypool, Culp, and Nichols. Cross-checking telephone directory numbers with company records revealed New York City addresses for the other three. The newspaper society pages turned up the names and locations of the country estates for six of the men. The same six had Newport summer residences. In both cases—country homes and seaside cottages—the one exception was Brewster Claypool.

“He’s from the South,” said Bell. “Attended law school in Virginia. Maybe he’s got a plantation down there.”

There were Claypools in Virginia, including Brewster’s brothers, but Claypool himself owned no plantation.

“Not even a town house in New York. He lives in the Waldorf Hotel.”

“Perhaps,” said Forrer, “Claypool prefers the simple life.”

“A bachelor’s life,” countered Bell. He himself lived at the Yale Club when in New York, in what Marion called his monastic cell.

“What if he lives in a hotel because he isn’t as rich as the others?”

Research came up with Claypool’s connections to boards of directors in steel, telegraph, and streetcars, but mostly as an adviser. He was, in essence, a Wall Street lawyer who worked as a lobbyist. Like a stage manager, Claypool stayed behind the scenes and avoided the limelight, which fit the definition of a fixer at the highest level.

Interestingly, Research came up with no pictures of Claypool, none of the engravings of prominent men found in the Sunday supplements, and no up-to-date photographs. He was definitely an offstage operator.

Bell, who always dodged cameras in the interest of investigating incognito, knew full well the threat of the accidental photograph. “Find out where he vacations. Some camera fiend must have snapped him with a Kodak . . . Meantime, if Claypool is our fixer, who does he fix for?”

“Pull is an ancient elixir,” Brewster Claypool drawled in a soft Virginia accent. “Pull sweeps aside obstacles. But this can’t come as news to a Van Dorn detective.”