The Spy (Isaac Bell 3) - Page 20
Bell had a photographic memory. Instantly he returned in his mind’s eye to Arthur Langner’s office. He saw the bookshelves lined with bound volumes of Langner’s patent applications. He had had to open several to find a sample for his camera. Those filed before 1885 were handwritten. The more recent were typed.
“Arthur Langner played the piano. His fingers would have been more supple than those of the average man his age.”
Cruson shrugged. “I am neither musician nor physiologist.”
“But if his fingers were not more supple, then this could be a forgery.”
Cruson huffed, “Surely you didn’t summon me here to analyze the personality of a forger. The more skillful the forgery, the less it would tell me about his personality.”
“I did not summon you here to analyze his personality but to confirm whether this is a forgery. Now you are telling me that the forger made a mistake. He copied Langner’s hand from an early sample of his handwriting. Thank you, Dr. Cruson. You’ve opened a new possibility in this case. Unless his piano playing made his handwriting like that of a young man, this is a forgery, and Arthur Langner was murdered.”
A Van Dorn secretary burst in waving a sheet of yellow paper. “Scully!”
The telegram from loner John Scully that he thrust into Isaac Bell’s hand was typically terse.
GOT YOUR WIRE. HAD SAME THOUGHT.
SO-CALLED FRYES SURROUNDED WEST OF EAST
BRUNSWICK.
LOCAL CONSTABULARY THEIR COUSINS.
CARE TO LEND A HAND?
“ ‘Surrounded’?” asked Bell. “Did Mike and Eddie catch up with him?”
“No, sir. All by himself, like usual.”
It looked like Scully had found the Fryes’ real names and trailed them home only to discover that the bank robbers were related to a crooked sheriff who would help them escape. In which case even the formidable Scully had bit off more than he could chew.
Bell scanned the rest of the telegram for directions.
WILLIARD FARM.
CRANBURY TURNPIKE TEN MILES WEST OF STONE
CHURCH.
LEFT TURNOFF FLAGGED.
MILK TRUCK ONE MILE.
Middle of nowhere in the Jersey farm country. It would take all day to get there connecting to local trains. “Telephone the Weehawken garage for my auto!”
Bell grabbed a heavy golf bag and raced down the Knickerbocker’s stairs and out to Broadway. He jumped into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the pier at the foot of 42nd Street. There he boarded the Weehawken Ferry to New Jersey, where he had parked his red Locomobile.
8
COMMODORE TOMMY’S SALOON ON WEST 39TH STREET hunched like a fortress in the ground floor and cellar of a crumbling brick tenement a quarter mile from the pier where Isaac Bell’s ferry cast off. Its door was narrow, its windows barred. Like a combination Congress, White House, and War Department, it ruled the West Side slum New Yorkers called Hell’s Kitchen. No cop had laid eyes on the inside of it in years.
Commodore Tommy Thompson, the saloon’s bullet-headed, thick-necked proprietor, was boss of the Gopher Gang. He collected tribute from criminals in the drug trade, prostitution and gambling, pickpockets and burglars, passed along a portion to bribe the police, and delivered votes to the Democratic political machine. He also dominated the lucrative business of robbing New York Central freight cars, his nickname testifying to a level of success in his field that rivaled railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s in his.
But that business was about to come to a bloody end, Commodore Tommy suspected, as soon as the railroad got around to organizing a private army to run his train robbers out of New York. So he was planning ahead. Which was why, as Isaac Bell’s ferry sped across the Hudson River, Commodore Thompson was shaking hands on a new deal with a couple of “queueless” Chinese-Americanized high-tone Chinamen who had chopped off the long pigtail worn by their immigrant countrymen.
Harry Wing and Louis Loh were hatchet men for the up-and-coming Hip Sing tong. They spoke good English, were duded up in snappy suits, and were, Thompson took for granted, deadly behind the mild expressions on their well-scrubbed pusses. He had recognized kindred spirits the instant they approached him. Like his Gophers, the Hip Sing profited by controlling the vice rackets with muscle, graft, and discipline. And like Tommy’s Gophers, the Hip Sing were driving out rivals and getting stronger.
The deal they had brought him was irresistible: Tommy Thompson’s Gopher Gang would allow the Chinese gangsters to open opium dens on Manhattan’s West Side. For half the take, the Commodore would protect the joint, supply the girls, and pay the cops. Harry Wing and Louis Loh would gain for the Hip Sing tong white middle-class customers with money to spend-the casual “ice cream users” afraid to venture into the back alleys of Chinatown. A square deal, as President Teddy Roosevelt would say. Done squarely, Sophie Tucker would sing.
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