The Race

Josephine stood like a child beside him, her youthful face expressing bravery, Bell thought, and something more – a sense of adventure as if she were embarking into the unknown and hoping for the best.

Arrayed stiffly behind the couple was a family of what looked like farm folk dressed for church. Bell recognized the stone fireplace behind them. They had been married here at the camp in this vast, echoing room. A strong resemblance in all the faces, but Frost’s told Bell that no one but Josephine’s own family had attended.

He went outside. He circled the house and inspected the outbuildings. A carriage house had been converted to a firing range, with an arsenal of pistols and rifles locked in a glass case. Similar cases held collections of swords, cutlasses, flick-knives, and daggers.

The garage contained expensive automobiles – a Packard limousine, a Palmer-Singer Skimabout, a Lancia Torpedo – and several motorcycles. The stable of vehicles fit the picture forming in Bell’s mind of Frost as a restless recluse. He lived like a king but also like an outlaw. The camp was as much a hideout as it was an estate, and Frost, like all successful criminals, was prepared for a quick getaway. It seemed as if Harry Frost knew that, despite his wealth and power, it was only a matter of time before he would commit an atrocity that would make him a fugitive.

Bell looked into the blacksmith shop. The forge was cold. In the smithy’s scrap heap he saw horseshoes that had been twisted out of shape. Harry Frost’s Chicago calling card, Bell recalled, bent with Frost’s bare hands to demonstrate his almost inhuman strength, then thrown by his thugs through the bedroom windows of his rivals. It was an article of faith among the drunks in the West Side saloons that Frost had killed a Clydesdale with his fist.

Hanging above the twisted shoes, grimy with smoke, was a framed award that Frost had received for contributing money to a civic group. Bell turned on his heel and walked into the sun, whispering the newsboys’ names: Wally Laughlin, Bobby Kerouac, Joey Lansdowne. It had been an elaborate funeral, their fellows maintaining the newsboy tradition of hiring hearses and mourners and paying clerks to write obituaries and letters of condolence. Wally Laughlin, Bobby Kerouac, Joey Lansdowne, barely out of childhood, priests promising their mothers they’d find a better place in Heaven.

Bell entered the boathouse at the edge of the lake. Inside, he found flatboats and canoes and a sailboat with its mast shipped. From the boathouse he walked through tall grass to the aeroplane hangar. It contained enough parts to assemble several flying machines. But the machine he had seen through the open end was missing its engine and propellers.

He heard voices in the direction of the smokehouse.

Bell walked quietly toward them, keeping the squat windowless stone structure between him and whoever was talking on the other side. He stopped beside it. A voice was droning on and on. It sounded like a middle-aged or older man, talking some trapped listener’s ear off. Bell’s own ear was struck by the accent. The speaker spoke the flat a’s heard in the Adirondack region. But this was no local Upstate New Yorker, not with the unmistakable d’s for th sounds and snaky s’s of Chicago.

The subject of his monologue tagged him as a denizen of the notorious Levee District, where crime and vice were daily fare.

4

“YOU WANT TO MAKE A PILE MONEY, you get yourself a bordello – What’s that? No, no, no. Not here! Who’s your customers here? Cows? You go to Chicago! You go over dere by the West Side. You purchase a house for six thousand. You bring a carpenter by to build a buncha walls for a couple hundred bucks. You get ten girls. Twenty visits a night. Dollar a visit – you don’t want no cheap fifty-cent house – and you let the girls keep half. You pay the house off in two months. From then on, you’re making three thousand a month. Profit! ”

“I gotta go do my chores,” said a younger, slower voice.

Bell removed his broad-brimmed hat to venture a quick glance around the corner. The middle-aged talker was sitting on a barrel with his back to him. He had a bottle of beer in his hand and was wearing a city man’s derby, shirtsleeves, and vest. The younger was a farm boy in a straw hat. He was clutching a bucket and a rake.

“And don’t forget your profits selling booze to the visitors. And the girls. The girls always blow their easy money. They want morphine, cocaine, wine, you take your cut. Salesman comes by to sell’em dresses, you take your cut.”

“I gotta go, Mr. Spillane.”

The farmhand shuffled out of sight in the direction of the creamery.

When Bell rounded the corner of the smokehouse, and the man on the barrel whirled to face him, he instantly recognized the grizzled fifty-year-old from the wanted posters.

“Sammy Spillane.”

Spillane stared long and hard, trying to place him. It had been ten years. He pointed at Bell, shaking his finger, nodding his head. “I know you.”

“What are you doing here, Sammy? Was Harry Frost ru

“You’re a goddamned Van Dorn, that’s who you are.”

“How did you get out of Joliet?” Sammy’s pale skin told him he’d been locked up until recently.

“Time off for good behavior. Time to paste your nose into that pretty face.”

“You’re getting a little long in the tooth to mix it up, aren’t you, Sammy?”

“I am,” Sammy conceded. “But me old gal Sadie blessed me with two fine sons. Come out here, boys!” he called loudly. “Say hello to a genuine Van Dorn detective, who forgot to bring his pals with ’im.”

Two younger and bigger versions of Sammy Spillane stepped into the sunlight, yawning and rubbing sleep from their eyes. At the sight of Isaac Bell they darted back inside and returned with pick handles, slapping the heavy bulging ends menacingly in their palms. Bell did not doubt that they had learned their trade as strikebreakers intimidating union marchers. Their father, meanwhile, had drawn a Smith amp; Wesson revolver, which he pointed at Bell.

“What do you think of my boys, detective?” Spillane chortled. “Chips off the old block?”

“I’d have recognized them anywhere,” said Isaac Bell, looking the big young men up and down. “The resemblance is strongest in the squinty pig eyes. Though I do see a bit of their mother in those sloping foreheads. Say, Sammy, did you ever get around to marrying Sadie?”

The insult provoked them to charge simultaneously.

They came at the tall detective from both sides. They raised the pick handles expertly, tucking their elbows close to their torsos so they didn’t expose themselves and trusting in wrist action to swing the thick hickory shafts with sufficient power to smash bone.

Their attack momentarily blocked Sammy’s field of fire.

Bell kept it blocked by slewing sideways. When Sammy Spillane could see him again, Isaac Bell’s white hat was falling to the grass and the two-shot.44 derringer the detective had drawn from inside the crown was aimed squarely at his face. Sammy swung his revolver toward Bell. Bell fired first, and the Chicago gangster dropped his gun and fell off the barrel.

His sons halted their rush, surprised by the crack of gunfire and the sight of their father curled up on the ground, clutching his right arm and moaning in pain.

“Boys,” Bell told them, “your old man has decided to sit this one out. Why don’t you drop the lumber before you get hurt?”

They separated, flaring to either side. They stood twelve feet apart, each only six feet from Bell, an easy reach with the pick handles.

“You got one shot left, Mr. Detective,” said the bigger of the two. “What are you going do with it?”

Bell scooped his hat off the ground, clapped it on his head, and aimed at a spot between them. “I was fixing to shoot your brother in the knee, figuring he could use that pick handle as a cane for the rest of his life. Now I’m reassessing the situation. Wondering if you’re the one.” The gun barrel yawned from one to the other, then settled between them, rock steady.