The Assassin

“Telescope?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe that’s why the assassin missed.” Bell turned back to the newspaper publisher.

“Can you tell me what you remember?”

“The window broke. I was setting type for my editorial by the light of the window. All at once, the glass shattered.”

“What happened next?”

“I’m afraid my answer is not going to help you, Detective Bell. What happened next was I woke up in a strange bed with my wife holding a cool cloth to my brow. Looked around. Walt was standing nearby with his hands on his guns as if to discourage additional potshots.”

Bell asked, “Would you feel up to visiting your newspaper?”

“I was heading there when Walt suggested we have a snort, and then you walked in.”

They walked the long way to the Humble Clarion, taking back streets and alleys to skirt the mob collected around the gusher. The riggers were struggling to cap the new well, while ditchdiggers excavated a catch basin to contain the oil that was raining down like a monsoon. The train had gone. Most of the men aboard it had stayed.

The Clarion occupied the first floor of a corner building. C. C. Gustafson led them into the composing room where he set type. “It was that window,” he said. “My wife replaced the glass, and finished setting the editorial for me. After picking up all the type that went flying.”

Bell looked for bullet holes in the walls. He remarked that the office had been freshly painted.

“Janet Sue cleaned up the mess soon as the sheriff was done looking things over.”

“Did Mrs. Gustafson happen to mention how many bullet holes she plastered before painting?”

“She told me three.”

Bell looked to Hatfield. “How many rounds had been fired from the Springfield the sheriff found?”

“One.”

Isaac Bell stood in the window. It fronted on the side street. Across the street was a frame building under construction. Carpenters building the platform were hammering floorboards onto ground-floor joists. The otherwise-open lot allowed a long view over low-lying neighbors to the tall false front that topped the two-story Toppling Derrick saloon on the far side of Main Street three blocks away.

—

Averell Comstock walked at a remarkably brisk pace for a man his age thanks, he was quick to boast, to a regimen he had started when he first came to New York twenty years ago. He walked every midmorning from the office at 26 Broadway to the East River, where he could order oysters shucked fresh off the boat. He ignored the ketchup and crackers, preferring the briny taste of the bivalves unadulterated, and leaving room for coffee and cake from a food stall on Fulton Street, where he had fallen half in love with a middle-aged widow who had a hard face softened by beautiful blue eyes.

She stirred in the sugar for him. Just this week she had begun to insist on refilling his cup at no charge, stirring in more sugar with a pretty smile. What would she think, Comstock wondered, if she learned that the old man in the ancient coat was ten thousand times richer than any customer she had ever served?

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“A little under the weather.” For several days he had felt not quite himself.

“I thought you looked pale. I hope you’ve not been eating oysters. They say there’s typhoid fever.”

“I eat only those from Staten Island,” he said. “It’s the Jamaica Bay oysters that carry the typhoid.”

“Well, I hope you feel better.”

“Well enough to walk down here,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

He drained the second cup and hurried off. “Back to the salt mines. See you tomorrow.”

Mrs. McCloud put another sugar bowl on the counter and hid the one from which she had sweetened the old man’s coffee.

“Make sure you wash the spoon.”

Mrs. McCloud looked up. The man in the old-fashioned frock coat and fancy trilby hat was back, furtive and cold-eyed as a steerer who sends clients to a shyster lawyer.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“What do you care?”

She glanced up Fulton for another glimpse of the tall old man’s top hat bobbing slowly through the crowd that thronged the sidewalk. A street car blocked her view. “I couldn’t care less.”

Heading back to the office, Averell Comstock was surprised when he had to stop and rest halfway there, pale and trembling.

—

Isaac Bell and Texas Walt Hatfield looked for the assassin’s shooting hide on the roof behind the Toppling Derrick saloon’s false front. They agreed that the sight lines were there, an easy shot three hundred yards to the Clarion’s side window. With the roar of drinkers below celebrating new riches, it was doubtful anyone in the saloon would hear a shot, much less do anything about it. No other building looked down on the roof, ensuring privacy and time to draw a bead and wait.

Bell walked the perimeter. The roof sloped slightly to allow rainwater to spill off into a gutter. He saw a golden glint in the gutter, knelt down, pulled from the grit and hardened sediment that lined the wooden trough an empty cartridge shell.

“A wildcat,” said Bell, showing it to Hatfield. A standard factory-made Savage .303 brass case had been reshaped to accommodate customized powder and bullet loads for greater range and impact.

“Man’s loading his own,” said Hatfield.

“I’d expect that for his accuracy,” said Bell. A great marksman, which the assassin surely was, would use the so-called wildcat in conjunction with a finely machined chamber and a custom-made barrel. “But I’m surprised he didn’t scoop it up before he ran. It’s a heck of a telltale.”

“Maybe he knew he missed,” said Hatfield. “Got rattled.”

“Maybe . . . Odd, though. The .303 is made for the Savage 99.”

“Fine weapon. Though a mite light.”

“I wonder why he uses such a light gun. That 1903 Springfield would be more accurate.”

“But heavier.”

“His kill in Kansas was nearly seven hundred yards.”

“A man looks like a flyspeck at that range.”

“That’s why I assumed a Springfield.”

“Do you suppose he’s a little feller?” Hatfield wondered.

“Too small to hold a more accurate heavy gun? Might explain why he has to improve the Savage cartridge. Probably smithed his rifle to a farewell, too.” Bell pocketed the cartridge. “O.K. Let’s see where he went.”

Hatfield had been raised by Comanche Indians and was an expert tracker. Prowling the tar roof, he spotted a minute imprint of the corner of a bootheel, and found it repeated several yards into an alley. Step-by-step, mark by barely decipherable mark, in crusted mud, oil-soaked earth, and dried manure, they followed the sniper’s escape route down alleys and over a railroad track and into a stable’s corral, where they lost the trail in hoofprints.

“Mounted up here and rode off.”

The stable hands were vaqueros too old and lame to quit their jobs to get rich in the oil fields. Walt Hatfield addressed them in Spanish and translated for Bell. Two men had left quickly on horses they had boarded in the stable and had ordered saddled up an hour earlier.

“Two men?”

“One big, one little.”

“Were they carrying rifles?”

“No guns.”

—

Humble’s hotels were jam-packed, and the rooming houses were stifling, but Texas Walt had rustled up clean rooms above a stable. They sluiced off the dust of the long, hot day in horse troughs and headed back to the Toppling Derrick where, earlier, Bell had tipped generously to guarantee a table for supper.

They passed the fairground on the way. The suffragist rally had dispersed, and a crowd of the oil field hands camping there was carousing under tarpaulins that sheltered a board-on-barrels saloon. Off to one side, Bell spotted a familiar-looking wall tent pitched beside a buckboard wagon. A black iron pot was suspended over a cook fire.

“Walt, you may be dining alone.”