The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

Van Dorn turned grave. “But in the event that a providential snowstorm doesn’t blind a sniper, how else are you closing the vise around Branco?”

“My operators are watching Culp’s gates and his boat landing round the clock.”

“I thought you told the President the river was frozen.”

“I put a man on an ice yacht.”

“Where’d you get an ice yacht?”

“Bought myself one in Poughkeepsie.”

“Who other than you knows how to sail it?”

“Archie Abbott.”

“I wondered where that fool had gotten to. What else are you doing?”

“I have a tapper up a pole listening to the Raven’s Eyrie telephone.”

“Outside the walls?” asked Van Dorn.

“Yes, sir. Outside.”

“What about telegraph?”

“It’s all in cipher.”

“I would lay off the telegraph wire. Culp conducts business from the estate. Telephone tapping is one thing; the law’s so murky. But we don’t want to be liable to charges of telegraph tapping for inside knowledge of Culp’s stock market trades. What else?”

“What else would the Chief Investigator recommend?” Bell asked his old mentor.

Van Dorn sat behind his desk silently for a while. He gazed into the middle distance, then made a tent with his fingers and stared inside it. At last he spoke. “Go back to that woman.”

“Francesca?”

“Find out what she didn’t tell you.”

Bell was itching to return to his detectives watching Raven’s Eyrie and guarding the siphon tunnel dig. “She already admitted to every crime in the book.”

Van Dorn said, “She knew she was headed to prison, at best, and more likely the hangman. She may have talked your ear off, but she’s drowning, Isaac. She had to hold on to something, something for herself.”

Archie Abbott woke before dawn in a cold bed in a cold room. He pulled on heavy underclothing and over it a snug suit of linen. Then he donned thick woolen hose, trousers, and waistcoat. He encased his feet in high felt boots. Finally, he buttoned a fur jacket over the woolen waistcoat and a pea jacket over the fur. He covered his head and ears with a fur hat and pulled goggles over his eyes.

He stepped outside, crossed the New York Central Railroad tracks, and hurried down to the frozen river. His ice yacht waited in a boathouse at the edge of the cove. The runners were frozen to the ice. He kicked them loose and pushed the yacht outside.

The breeze in the shelter of the cove was barely enough to stir the pennant at the masthead. But Isaac Bell had commissioned an exotic doozy from J. B. Culp’s own builder, with fifty extra feet of sail and lead ballast to try to keep from flipping upside down in a squall, and that breath of air started it moving like a restless horse. Abbott climbed hastily onto the car—the cockpit at the back end—and grabbed the tiller just as the yacht bolted onto the open river.

A bitter breeze struck the rigid sail. Abbott sheeted it in tight and concentrated on the tiller to dodge oversize ice hummocks, rocks along the shore, and wind skaters flashing by with sails on their backs. She was a light-footed gazelle. She felt like she was making thirty miles an hour until they overtook a New York Central express. Judging by the locomotive’s flattened smoke, Isaac Bell’s ice yacht was cracking forty-five.

When the sun cleared Breakneck Mountain and cast thin, cold rays on Storm King on the other side of the river, Archie turned the boat toward Raven’s Eyrie. Unlike the other Hudson River estates where lawns rose from the water’s edge, Culp’s place was easily recognized by the fir trees that screened its walls.

He crossed the frozen water in a flash and commenced the first of many cold, cold passes by Culp’s dock. Some Van Dorn had to freeze half to death keeping vigil and Abbott was the one, atoning for his stupidity and staying out of sight of the Boss on the slim chance that Antonio Branco may suddenly embark by ice yacht. At least Isaac hadn’t condemned him to be one of the operatives on hogshead duty—watching from inside the barrel left at the service entrance and spelling each other only in the dark—though he would have if Archie wasn’t too tall to fit.

Other boats started skittering down the river, flying Poughkeepsie and Hudson River Ice Yacht Club burgees and speeding, like his, on the edge of a smashup. Archie joined in impromptu races with them and the sail skaters. Bell had issued strict orders not to draw attention by winning races, for word of a new fast boat would get back to J. B. Culp in a flash. But it was still a welcome change of pace and a natural cover for the Van Dorn watch.

The visiting room in the women’s section of the Tombs was divided by a wall broken with a small mesh-covered window. Francesca Kennedy looked so gaunt that Isaac Bell suspected their steak dinner had been the last she had eaten. Her face was pale, her expression sullen.

“What are you doing here?”