The Thief (Isaac Bell 5)

“What sort of funny feeling?”

“That you were being…” Bell stopped talking and looked the tall Texan in the face. This was not a question he would ask most detectives. But Walt Hatfield was a natural-born hunter who had been raised by Comanche Indians. Of the Van Dorns Isaac Bell had worked with, Hatfield was by far the most sensitive to his surroundings.

“Watched?” asked Hatfield.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“Shore did feel watched, now that you mention it. Didn’t pay it much mind at the moment, what with fellows cranking cameras.”

Bell’s eyes were suddenly burning.

“You, too, Isaac?”

“I had a feeling.”

“Where?”

“The recording room on the fourth floor.”

“How about in Clyde’s laboratory?”

“Possibly there, but not as strong a sensation.”

“Reckon someone’s peeping through a judas hole in the room next door?”

“One way to find out.”

Bell stepped across the hall to see Larry Saunders, the recently promoted head of the Los Angeles office. Saunders, a trim, stylish man, wore a white linen suit like Bell’s, for the warm city. But unlike Bell’s, which was artfully tailored to conceal a good-sized automatic and a spare magazine, with room for a sleeve gun and pocket pistols when the occasion called for it, Saunders’s suit was cut so tightly that the Los Angeles detective would be hard-pressed to hide a weapon larger than a stiletto. Saunders’s hat rack held a white derby and several silk scarves. The derby, Bell hoped, had room for a derringer. Saunders’s patent leather pumps certainly did not.

“Larry, who would you recommend I send over to City Hall to inspect the architect’s plans for the Imperial Building?”

“Holian.”

“I think I’ve met him. Big-in-the-belly fellow who looks like a saloonkeeper?”

“He’s the one, though I’ve seen Tim do a credible job of imitating a brothel bouncer, too.”

“I don’t want this getting back to the owner of the building.”

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Bell. Holian’s got the city clerks eating out of his hand. There isn’t a body buried in Los Angeles he couldn’t jab with a spade. They’ll do as he asks and do it with a smile.” Saunders rubbed his mustache, a pencil-thin affair that Texas Walt had likened, privately, to a “dance hall gal’s eyebrow,” and said, “It wouldn’t hurt if Holian could share a little wealth while he’s poking around.”

“Charge as much as he needs against the Talking Pictures account. Tell him I want layouts of the fourth floor, eighth floor, and penthouse — every room and every closet.”

35

Isaac Bell received a long, speculative report from Grady Forrer by telegraph, which was a hundred times faster than mail but lacked the subtlety and precision of a letter and offered little opportunity for the give-and-take of a conversation by telephone. Clyde Lynds had claimed that his electrical microphone would one day spawn devices for amplifying feeble electrical currents for long-distance telephones to span the continent. That day could not come soon enough for Isaac Bell.

Back and forth he and Grady Forrer transmitted on the Van Dorn private wire. The upshot was that Grady had turned up the name of a private German merchant bank—Hamburg Bankhaus—which the Research department suspected of funneling money to Imperial Film.

POSITIVE?

REASONABLY.

KRIEG-IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS?

NOT YET.

KRIEG-HAMBURG BANKHAUS CONNECTIONS?