“Show us!” said Bloom. “Maybe we’ve seen him.”
Bell took one from his coat, pushed plates aside, and spread it on the table.
Bloom took one look. “That’s the actor! In The Great Train Robbery. ”
“Is it really the actor?” asked Kincaid.
“No. But there is a similarity to Broncho Billy Anderson.”
Kincaid trailed his fingers across the sketch. “I think he looks like me.”
“Arrest this man!” laughed Ken Bloom.
“He does,” said Congdon. “Sort of. This fellow has chiseled features. So does the Senator. Look at the cleft in the chin. You’ve got one of those too, Charles. I heard a bunch of damned fool women in Washington squawking like hens that you look like a matinee idol.”
“My ears aren’t that big, are they?”
“ No.”
“That’s a relief,” said Kincaid. “I can’t be a matinee idol with big ears.”
Bell laughed. “My boss warned us, ‘Don’t arrest any ugly mugs.”’
Curiously, he looked from the sketch to the Senator and back to the sketch. There was a similarity in the high brow. The ears were definitely different. Both the suspect in the sketch and the Senator had intelligent faces with strong features. So did a lot of men, as Joseph Van Dorn had pointed out. Where the Senator and the suspect diverged, in addition to ear size, was the penetrating gaze. The man who had struck the lumberjack with a crowbar looked harder and filled with purpose. It was hardly surprising that he had looked intense to the man he was attacking. But Kincaid did not seem driven by purpose. Even at the height of their betting duel, Kincaid had struck him as essentially self-satisfied and self-indulgent, more the servant of the powerful than powerful himself. Although, Bell reminded himself, he had wondered earlier whether Kincaid playing the fool was an act.
“Well,” said Kincaid, “if we see this fellow, we’ll nab him for you.
“If you do, stay out of his way and call for reinforcements,” Bell said soberly. “He is poison.”
“All right, I’m off to bed. Long day. Good night, Mr. Bell,” Kincaid said cordially. “Interesting playing cards with you.”
“Expensive, too,” said Judge Congdon. “What are you going to do with all those winnings, Mr. Bell?”
“I’m going to buy my fiancee a mansion.”
“Where?”
“San Francisco. Up on Nob Hill.”
“How many survived the earthquake?”
“The one I’m thinking of was built to stand for a thousand years. The only trouble is, it might hold ghosts for my fiancee. It belonged to her former employer, who turned out to be a depraved bank robber and murderer.”
“In my experience,” Congdon chuckled, “the best way to make a woman comfortable in a previous woman’s house is to hand her a stick of dynamite and instruct her to enjoy the process of redecorating. I’ve done it repeatedly. Works like a charm. That might apply to former employers, too.”
Charles Kincaid rose and said good nigh
t all around. Then he asked, casually, almost mockingly, “Whatever happened to the depraved bank robber and murderer?”
Isaac Bell looked the Senator in the eye until the Senator dropped his gaze. Only then did the tall detective say, “I ran him to ground, Senator. He won’t hurt anyone ever again.”
Kincaid responded with a hearty laugh. “The famous Van Dorn motto: ‘We never give up.”’
“Never,” said Bell.
Senator Kincaid, Judge Congdon, and the others drifted off to bed, leaving Bell and Kenny Bloom alone in the observation car. Half an hour later, the train began to slow. Here and there, a light shone in the black night. The outskirts of the town of Rawlins took shape. The Overland Limited trundled through dimly lit streets.
THE WRECKER GAUGED THE train’s speed from the platform at the end of the Pullman car that housed his stateroom. Bell’s sketch had shaken him far more than his enormous losses at poker. The money meant nothing in the long run, because he would soon be richer than Congdon, Bloom, and Moser combined. But the sketch represented a rare piece of bad luck. Someone had seen his face and described him to an artist. Fortunately, they’d got his ears wrong. And thank God for the resemblance to the movie star. But he could not count on those lucky breaks confusing Isaac Bell for much longer.