The Assassin (Isaac Bell 8)

“I have to catch a train.”

“Will you be back in time for my Flyover?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Edna called after him. “What do you mean by a ‘madman’?”

Bell stopped in the doorway. “A person without conscience. Without fear.”

“Who ‘banished fear,’ like Nellie says?”

Bell answered, “All any of us can really know about a madman is that he will be unpredictable.”

“If that’s true, how do you catch such a person?”

“Never give up,” said Bell, but stepped into the night with his mind fixed on a deadlier device. Be unpredictable, too.

—

The houses on either side of Bill Matters’ Oil City mansion looked abandoned. Their yards were overgrown, their windows blank. The garden in front of the Matterses’ house was baked brown. The curtains were drawn, reminding Isaac Bell that Brigadier Mills had described Matters grieving in the dark. They could be closed against the heat. It was even hotter in western Pennsylvania than New York. The train conductor informed Isaac Bell with grim satisfaction that since weather traveled west to east, New York was soon in for “the hinges of hell.”

No one answered when he pressed the buzzer button at the front gate. He picked the lock.

No one answered his knock on the front door and he picked that lock, too.

“Anyone home?” he called up the front stairs and down a hall.

He thought he smelled a faint aroma of cooked food and worked his way back to the kitchen. It was empty, with a single skillet of congealed bacon grease sitting on the range. He checked other rooms and found the parlor with the paper theaters that Mills had mentioned. As in the other rooms, the curtains were drawn. There was no Bill Matters sitting in the dark.

The kitchen door led

into the backyard, which was as big as the gardens of a country house and concealed from the streets and neighbors behind high wooden fences and dense fir trees. It was then that Bell realized the neighboring houses on either side were empty because Matters had bought and closed them, then fenced them off and added their backyards to his. He could hear the surrounding Oil City neighborhood but not see it.

There was a ramshackle quality to the place. An abandoned wooden derrick lay on its side tangled in vines next to lengths of wooden pipe almost as if Matters was contemplating a museum of early Pennsylvania oil history. He walked around the derrick and found a pond, its water thick with algae. Beside it was a marble gravestone. No name was chiseled on the stone, only an epitaph, which Isaac Bell recognized as William Shakespeare’s.

GOOD FREND FOR JESVS SAKE FORBEARE,

TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE.

BLESE BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,

AND CVRST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.

From behind him, Bell heard, “Shakespeare’s not really buried here. The girls surprised me for my fortieth birthday. Raise your hands before you turn around.”

37

Isaac Bell raised his hands and turned around.

Matters was pointing his old Remington at him, and he was not alone. Rivers, the fit and remarkably unscarred old prizefighter, was holding a Smith & Wesson like a mechanical extension of his fist.

Bell addressed Matters. “They say no man is a hero to his butler. You must be the exception if Rivers gave up a cushy job in Gramercy Park to join you on the lam.”

“Mr. Matters gave me the cushy job when I was on the lam,” said Rivers. “Fair is fair.”

“Are you a murderer, too?”

“The jury thought so.”