The Wrecker

22

ARCHIE ABBOTT, WHOSE BLUE-BLOODED FAMILY HAD FORBADE him to become an actor, belonged to a club in Gramercy Park called The Players. The Players had been founded nineteen years earlier by the stage actor Edwin Booth, the finest Hamlet of the previous century and the brother of the man who had shot President Lincoln. Mark Twain and General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose famously destructive march through Georgia had hastened the end of the Civil War, had joined the effort. Booth had deeded over his own home, and celebrated architect Stanford White had transformed it into a clubhouse before he was shot to death in Madison Square Garden by steel heir Harry Thaw.

Bell and Abbott met for a quick supper downstairs in the Grill. It was their first meal since a breakfast gulped at dawn in a Jersey City saloon. They climbed a grand staircase for coffee before they headed uptown to Forty-fourth Street and Broadway to see the Follies of 1907.

Bell paused in the Reading Room to admire a full-length portrait of Edwin Booth. The artist’s unmistakable style, a powerful mix of clear-eyed realism and romantic impressionism raised a tide of emotion in his heart.

“That was painted by a brother Player,” Abbott remarked. “Rather good, isn’t it?”

“John Singer Sargent,” said Bell.

“Oh, of course you recognize his work,” said Abbott. “Sargent painted that portrait of your mother that hangs in your father’s drawing room in Boston.”

“Just before she died,” said Bell. “Though you would never know it looking at such a beautiful young woman.” He smiled at the memory. “Sometimes I’d sit on the stair and talk to it. She looked impatient and I could tell she was saying to Sargent, ‘Finish up, already, I’m getting bored holding this flower.”’

“Frankly,” Abbott joked, “I’d rather answer to a painting than my mother.”

“Let’s get going! I have to stop at the office and tell them where to find me.” Like all Van Dorn offices in large cities, their headquarters in Times Square was open twenty-four hours a day.

Dressed in white tie and tails, opera capes and top hats, they hurried to Park Avenue, which they found jammed with hansom cabs, automobile taxicabs, and town cars creeping uptown. “We’ll beat this mess on the subway.”

The underground station at Twenty-third was ablaze in electric light and gleaming white tile. Passengers crowding the train platform ran the gamut from men and women out for the night to tradesmen, laborers, and housemaids traveling home. A speeding express train flickered through the station, windows packed with humanity, and Abbott boasted, “Our subways will make it possible for millions of New Yorkers to go to work in skyscrapers.”

“Your subway,” Bell observed drily, “will make it possible for criminals to rob a bank downtown and celebrate uptown before the cops arrive on the scene.”

The subway whisked them in moments uptown to Forty-second and Broadway. They climbed the steps into a world where night had been banished. Times Square was lit bright as noon by “spectaculars,” electric billboards on which thousands of white lights advertised theaters, hotels, and lobster palaces. Motorcars, taxicabs, and buses roared in the streets. Crowds rushed eagerly on wide sidewalks.

Bell cut into the Knickerbocker Hotel, a first-class hostelry with a mural of Old King Cole painted by Maxfield Parrish decorating the lobby. The Van Dorn office was on the second floor, set back a discreet distance from the grand stairway. A competent-looking youth with slicked-back hair and a sliver of a bow tie greeted clients in a tastefully decorated front room. His tailored coat concealed a sidearm he knew how to use. A short-barreled scatter gun was close at hand in a bottom drawer of his desk. He controlled the lock to the back room by an electric switch beside his knee.

The back room looked like an advertising manager’s office, with typewriters, green-glass lamps, steel filing cabinets, a calendar on the wall, a telegraph key, and a row of candlestick telephones on the duty officer’s desk. Instead of women in white blouses typing at the desks, a half dozen detectives were filling out paperwork, discussing tactics, or lounging on a break from house-dick lobby duty in the Times Square hotels. It had separate entrances for visitors whose appearance might not pass muster in the Knickerbocker’s fine lobby or were more comfortable entering and leaving a detective agency by the alley.

Catcalls greeted Bell’s and Abbott’s costumes.

“Gangway! Opera swells comin’ through!”

“You bums never seen a gentleman before?” asked Abbott.

“Where you headed dressed like penguins?”

“The Jardin de Paris on the roof of the Hammerstein Theater,” said Abbott, tipping his silk hat and flourishing his cane. “To the Follies of 1907.”

“What? You have tickets to the Follies?” they blurted in amazement. “How did you get your mitts on them?”

“Courtesy of the boss,” said Abbott. “The producer, Mr. Ziegfeld, owes Mr. Van Dorn a favor. Something about a wife that wasn’t his. Come on, Isaac. Curtain’s going up!”

But Isaac Bell stood stock-still, staring at the telephones, which were lined up like soldiers. Something was nagging at him. Something forgotten. Something overlooked. Or a memory of something wrong.

The Jersey City powder pier leaped into his mind’s eye. He had a photographic memory, and he traced the pier’s reach from the land into the water, foot by foot, yard by yard. He saw the Vickers machine gun pointed at the gate that isolated it from the main yards. He saw the coal tenders he had ordered moved to protect the gate. He saw the string of loaded boxcars, the smoke, the tide-roiled water, the redbrick Communipaw passenger terminal with its ferry dock at the water’s edge in the distance …

What was missing?

A telephone rang. The duty officer snapped up the middle one, which someone had marked as foremost with an urgent slash of showgirl’s lip rouge. “Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn! … Yes, sir! He’s here … Yes, sir! I’ll tell him. Good-bye, Mr. Van Dorn.”

The duty officer, cradling the earpiece, said to Isaac Bell, “Mr. Van Dorn says if you don’t leave the office this minute, you’re fired.”

They fled the Knickerbocker.

Archie Abbott, ever the proud tour guide, pointed out the two-story yellow facade of Rector’s Restaurant as they headed up Broadway. He took particular note of a huge statue out front. “See that griffin?”

“Hard to miss.”

“It’s guarding the greatest lobster palace in the whole city!”

LILLIAN HENNESSY LOVED MAKING her entrance at Rector’s. Sweeping past the griffin on the sidewalk, ushered into an enormous green-and-yellow wonderland of crystal and gold brilliantly lit by giant chandeliers, she felt what it must be like to be a great and beloved actress. The best part was the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that let everyone in the restaurant see who was entering the revolving door.

Tonight, people had stared at her beautiful golden gown, gaped at the diamonds nestled about her breasts, and whispered about her astonishingly handsome escort. Or, to use Marion Morgan’s term, her unspeakably handsome escort. Too bad it was only Senator Kincaid, still tirelessly courting her, still hoping to get his hands on her fortune. How much more exciting it would be to walk in here with a man like Isaac Bell, handsome but not pretty, strong but not brutish, rugged but not rough.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Kincaid.

“I think we should finish our lobsters and get to the show… Oh, hear the band… Anna Held’s coming!”

The restaurant’s band always played a Broadway actress’s new hit when she entered. The song was “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”

Lillian sang along in a sweet voice in perfect pitch,In the northeast corner of my face,

and the northeast corner of the self-same place…

There she was, the French actress Anna Held, with her tiny waist shown off by a magnificent green gown much longer than she wore on stage, wreathed in smiles and flashing her eyes.

“Oh, Charles, this is so exciting. I’m glad we came.”

Charles Kincaid smiled at the astonishingly rich girl leaning across the tablecloth and suddenly realized how truly young and innocent she was. He would bet money that she’d learned the tricks she played with her beautiful eyes by studying Held’s every gesture. Very effectively too, he had to admit, as she gave him a well-practiced up-from-under blaze of pale blue.

He said, “I’m so glad you telephoned.”

“The Follies are back,” she answered blithely. “I had to come. Who wants to go to a show alone?”

That pretty much summed up her attitude toward him. He hated that she spurned him. But when he got done with her father, the old man wouldn’t have two bits to leave in his will while he would be rich enough to own Lillian, lock, stock, and barrel. In the meantime, pretending to court her gave him the excuse he needed to spend more time around her father than he would have been permitted in his role of tame senator casting votes on issues dear to the railroad corporations. Let Lillian Hennessy spurn her too old, vaguely comic, gold-digging suitor, a hopeless lover as unremarkable and unnoticed as the furniture. He would own her in the end-not as a wife but an object, like a beautiful piece of sculpture, to be enjoyed when he felt the urge.

“I had to come, too,” Kincaid answered her, silently cursing the Rawlins prizefighters who’d failed to murder Isaac Bell.

This night of all nights, he had to be seen in public. If Bell was not growing suspicious, he would soon. By now, an early sense of something wrong must have begun percolating in the detective’s mind. How long before Bell’s wanted poster jogged the memory of someone who had seen him preparing destruction? The oversize ears in the sketch would not protect him forever.

What better alibis than the Follies of 1907 in Hammerstein’s Jardin de Paris?

Hundreds of people would remember Senator Charles Kincaid dining at Rector’s with the most sought-after heiress in New York. A thousand would see the Hero Engineer arrive at the biggest show on Broadway with an unforgettable girl on his arm-a full mile and half away from a “show” that would outshine even the Follies.

“What are you smiling about, Charles?” Lillian asked him.

“I’m looking forward to the entertainment.”