The Thief (Isaac Bell 5)

Isaac Bell sighed. “I’m afraid you leave me no choice but to help keep you alive and unkidnapped while you build a new Talking Pictures machine.”

“Help me? Why? It was terrible. All those people could have died.”

“Why? You’re a jackass. But you’re an honest jackass. I just gave you an easy out and you didn’t take it. All you had to do was blame the Professor, but you didn’t. That’s good enough for me.”

* * *

“Somebody put the fear of god into these Marzipan Boys,” Harry Warren told Isaac Bell that night at Van Dorn headquarters in the Knickerbocker Hotel, “which ain’t easy to do.”

“How’d they manage that?’

“The guy who led the raid on Pier 54?”

“What about him?”

As the agency’s New York gang specialist, rubbing shoulders with Gophers, Dusters, and Chinatown tongs, Detective Harry Warren had seen his share of evil in the slums. But his hands were shaking as he tugged a flask from his hip pocket, took a long pull on it, then passed it to Isaac Bell.

“They burned him alive in a brewery furnace.” Harry took the flask back, wiped it with his sleeve, and drank again. “The guy’s brother told me.”

“Why’d he tell you?”

“Good question. It was like whoever did this has different stripes than he’s used to. It was like the Gophers and the Marzipans and the Van Dorns and even the cops are on one side of a big hole in the street, like from an earthquake or something, and these folks roasting his brother are on the other.”

Bell asked, “What else did he tell you?”

“Nothing. Clammed up.”

Bell said, “Let’s go see him.”

* * *

Isaac Bell and Harry Warren made the rounds of dives in the East Eighties and finally found the dead man’s brother leaning on a saloon front under the Third Avenue El. He was fumbling for money in empty pockets. Hi name was Frank, and he was a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered German-American with a street fighter’s scarred face and fists. He assessed Isaac Bell in a glance and nodded his head as if to say he would fight the tall detective if he had to, but he didn’t want to. Bell read something else in the resigned nod, a confirmation of what Harry Warren had told him. The gangster had seen evil that shook him to the core.

They took Frank into the saloon and bought a bottle.

Bell said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

“Yeah.”

“Were you and Bruno close?”

“Used to be. When we was kids. Not so much now.”

“Did your brother tell you what the deal was at the pier?”

Frank shrugged. “Grab a fellow who got off the boat.”

“What did this fellow look like?”

“Twenties, five-six, mussed brown hair, blue eyes, pencil mustache.”

Clyde Lynds to a T.

“He say why?”

“No.”

“Did your brother say who you were grabbing the guy for?”