The Wrecker

28

“SOMEHOW THE WRECKER CAUGHT WIND OF THE DEAL,” ABBOTT answered.

“No!” Bell shot back. “Osgood Hennessy knew he had to acquire a dominating interest in the Jersey Central in the deepest secrecy or his rivals would have stopped him. No one ‘catches wind’ of that old pirate’s intentions until he wants them to.”

Bell snatched up the nearest telephone.

“Book two adjoining staterooms on the Twentieth Century Limited, with through connections to San Francisco!”

“Are you saying the Wrecker has inside knowledge of the Southern Pacific?” asked Archie.

“Somehow, he does,” said Bell, grabbing his coat and hat. “Either some fool spilled the beans. Or a spy deliberately passed on the information about Hennessy’s plans. Either way, he’s no stranger to Hennessy’s circle.”

“Or in it,” said Abbott, trotting alongside as Bell strode from the office.

“He’s certainly close to the top,” Bell agreed. “You’re in charge of shutting down the Jersey City operation. Move every man you can to the Cascades Cutoff. Now that he lost out in New York, I’m betting the Wrecker will hit there next. Catch up with me as soon as you can.”

“Who’s in Hennessy’s circle?” asked Archie.

“He’s got bankers on his board of directors. He’s got lawyers. And his special train tows Pullman sleepers packed with engineers and superintendents managing the cutoff.”

“It will take forever to investigate them all.”

“We don’t have forever,” said Bell. “I’ll start with Hennessy himself. Tell him what we know and see who comes to mind.”

“I would not telegraph such a question,” said Archie.

“That’s why I’m heading west. For all we know, the Wrecker’s spy could be a telegrapher. I have to speak with Hennessy face-to-face.”

“Why don’t you charter a special train?”

“Because the Wrecker’s spy might take notice and figure something’s up. Not worth the day I’d save.”

Abbott grinned. “That’s why you booked two adjoining staterooms. Very clever, Isaac. It’ll look like Mr. Van Dorn took you off the Wrecker case and assigned you to another job.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Personal protection service?” Archie answered innocently. “For a certain lady in the moving-picture-news line returning home to California?”

THE SAN FRANCISCO TELEGRAPHERS’ strike had ended disastrously for their union. The majority had returned to work. But some telegraphers and linemen made bitter by highhanded company tactics had turned to sabotage, cutting wires and burning telegraph offices. Among these renegades, one band found a new paymaster in the Wrecker, a mysterious figure who communicated with messages and money left in railroad-station luggage rooms. On his orders, they rehearsed a nationwide disruption of the telegraph system. At a crucial moment, he would isolate Osgood Hennessy from his bankers.

The Wrecker’s linemen practiced the old Civil War tactic of cutting key telegraph wires and reconnecting the ends with bypass wires so that the splices could not be detected by eye from the ground. It would take many days to restore communication. Since northern California and Oregon were not yet connected to the eastern states by telephone, the telegraph was still the only method of instantaneous intracontinental communication. When the Wrecker was ready, he could launch a coordinated attack that would hurl the Cascades Cutoff fifty years back in time to the days when the fastest means of communication was mail sent by stagecoach and Pony Express.

In the meantime, he had other uses for disgruntled telegraphers.

His attack on the Southern Pacific in New York had been a disaster. Isaac Bell and his detectives and the railroad police had turned what would have been the final stake in the heart of the Southern Pacific Railroad into near victory. His effort to discredit the Southern Pacific had failed. And after his attack, the Van Dorn Agency had moved swiftly, conspiring with the newspapers to paint the railroad president as a hero.

A bloody accident would turn things around.

The railroads maintained their own telegraph systems to keep the trains moving swiftly and safely. Single-tracked lines, which were still in the majority, were divided into blocks maintained by strict rules of entry. A train given permission to be in a block possessed the right-of-way. Only after it passed through the block, or was sidetracked onto a siding, was another train permitted in the block. Observations that a train had left a block were communicated by telegraph. Orders to pull off onto a siding were sent by telegraph. Acknowledgment of those orders was made by telegraph. That a train was stopped safely on the siding had to be confirmed by telegraph.

But the Wrecker’s telegraphers could intercept orders, stop them, and change them. He had already caused a collision by this method, a rear ender on the Cascades Cutoff that had telescoped a materials train into a work train’s caboose, killing two crewmen.

A bloodier accident would erase Isaac Bell’s “victory.”

And what could be bloodier than two locomotives hauling work trains packed with laborers colliding head-on? When his train to San Francisco stopped in Sacramento, he checked a satchel in the luggage room containing orders and a generous envelope of cash and mailed the ticket to an embittered former union official named Ross Parker.

“GOOD NIGHT, MISS MORGAN.”

“Good night, Mr. Bell. That was a delicious dinner, thank you.”

“Need help with your door?”

“I have it.”

Five hours after her passengers walked the famous red carpet to board at Grand Central Terminal, the 20th Century Limited was racing across the flatlands of western New York State at eighty miles an hour. A Pullman porter, gaze discreetly averted, shuffled along the narrow corridor outside the staterooms, gathering shoes that the sleeping passengers had left out to be shined.

“Well, good night, then.”

Bell waited for Marion to step into her stateroom and lock the door. Then he opened the door to his stateroom, changed into a silk robe, removed his throwing knife from his boots and put them outside in the corridor. The speed of the train caused ice to tremble musically in a silver bucket. In it was chilling a bottle of Mumm. Bell wrapped the dripping bottle in a linen napkin and held it behind his back.

He heard a soft knock on the interior door and threw it open.

“Yes, Miss Morgan?”

Marion was standing there in a dressing gown, her lustrous hair cascading over her shoulders, her eyes mischievous, her smile radiant.

“Could I possibly borrow a cup of champagne?”

LATER, WHISPERING SIDE BY SIDE as the 20th Century rocketed through the night, Marion asked, “Did you really win a million dollars at poker?”

“Almost. But half of it was my money. ”

“That’s still a half million. What are you going to do with it?”

“I was thinking of buying the Cromwell Mansion.”

“Whatever for?”

“For you.”

Marion stared at him, puzzled and intrigued and wanting to know more.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Isaac. “And you may be right. It might be filled with ghosts. But an old coot I played cards with told me that he always gave his new wife a stick of dynamite to redecorate the house.”

“Dynamite?” She smiled. “Something to consider. I loved the house from the outside. It was the inside I couldn’t stand. It was so cold, like him … Isaac, I felt you flinch before. Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“What’s this?”

She touched a wide yellow bruise on his torso, and Bell recoiled despite himself.

“Just a couple of ribs.”

“Broken?”

“No, no, no … Just cracked.”

“What happened?”

“Bumped into a couple of prizefighters in Wyoming.”

“How do you have time to pick fights when you’re hunting the Wrecker?”

“He paid them.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. Then she smiled. “A bloody nose? Doesn’t that mean you’re getting close?”

“You remember. Yes, it was the best news I’d had in a week … Mr. Van Dorn thinks we’ve got him on the run.”

“But you don’t?”

“We’ve got Hennessy’s lines heavily guarded. We’ve got that sketch. We’ve got good men on the case. Something’s bound to break our way. Question is, does it break before he strikes again.”

“Have you been practicing your dueling?” she asked only half jesting.

“I got a session in every day in New York,” Bell told her. “My old fencing master hooked me up with a naval officer who was very good. Brilliant fencer. Trained in France.”

“Did you beat him?”

Bell smiled and poured more champagne into her glass. “Let’s just say that Lieutenant Ash brought out the best in me.”

JAMES DASHWOOD FILLED HIS notebook with a list of the blacksmiths, stables, auto garages, and machine shops he visited with the lumberjack sketch. The list had just topped a hundred. Discouraged, and weary of hearing about Broncho Billy Anderson, he telegraphed Mr. Bell to report that he had canvassed every town, village, and hamlet in Los Angeles County, from Glendale in the north to Mon tebello in the east to Huntington Park in the south. No blacksmith, mechanic, or machinist had recognized the picture, much less admitted to fashioning a hook out of an anchor.

“Go west, young man,” Isaac Bell wired back. “Don’t stop ‘til your hat floats.”

Which brought him late the next afternoon by Red Train trolley to Santa Monica on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. He wasted a few minutes, uncharacteristically, walking out on the Venice Pier to smell the salt water and watch girls bathing in the low surf. Two in bright costumes had their legs bared almost to their knees. They ran to a blanket they had spread next to a lifeboat that was on the beach ready to be rolled from the sand to the water. Dashwood noticed another lifeboat a half mile down the beach poised in the distant haze. Each surely had an anchor under its canvas. He berated himself for not thinking of Santa Monica sooner, squared his scrawny shoulders, and hurried into town.

The first place he walked into was typical of the many livery stables he had visited. It was a sprawling wooden structure big enough to shelter a variety of buggies and wagons for rent, with stalls for numerous horses, and a new mechanic’s section with wrenches, grease guns, and a chain hoist for motor repairs. A bunch of men were sitting around jawing: stablemen, grooms, auto mechanics, and a brawny blacksmith. By now, he had seen enough to know all these types and was no longer intimidated.

“Horse or car, kid?” one of them yelled.

“Horseshoes,” said James.

“There’s the blacksmith. You’re up, Jim.”

“Good afternoon, sir,” said James, thinking that the blacksmith looked morose. Big as the man was, his cheeks were hollow. His eyes were red, as if he didn’t sleep well.

“What can I do for you, young fella?”

By now, Dashwood had learned to ask his questions privately. Later, he would show the sketch to the whole group. But if he started off in front of all of them, it would turn into a debate that resembled a saloon brawl.

“Can we step outside? I want to show you something.”

The blacksmith shrugged his sloping shoulders, got up from the milk crate he was sitting on, and followed James Dashwood outside next to a newly installed gasoline pump.

“Where’s your horse?” the blacksmith asked.

Dashwood offered his hand. “I’m a Jim, too. James. James Dashwood.”

“I thought you wanted horseshoes.”

“Do you recognize this man?” Dashwood asked, holding up the sketch with the mustache. He watched the blacksmith’s face and, to his astonished delight, he saw him recoil. The man’s unhappy face flushed darkly.

Dashwood’s heart soared. This was the blacksmith who had fashioned the hook that had derailed the Coast Line Limited. This man had seen the Wrecker.

“Who are you?” asked the blacksmith.

“Van Dorn investigator,” James answered proudly. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, and the blacksmith was running full tilt down an alley.

“Stop!” Dashwood yelled, jumped to his feet, and gave chase. The blacksmith ran fast for a big man and was surprisingly agile, whipping around corners as if he were on rails, losing no speed in his mad turns and jinks, up and down alleys, through backyards, tearing through laundry hung from clotheslines, around woodsheds, toolsheds, and gardens and onto a street. But he hadn’t the stamina of a man just out of boyhood who neither smoked nor drank. Once they were out in the open, Dashwood gained on him for several blocks. “Stop!” he kept shouting, but no one on the sidewalks was inclined to get in the path of such a big man. Nor was there a constable or watchman in sight.

He caught up in front of a Presbyterian church on a tree-lined street. Grouped on the sidewalk were three middle-aged men in suits, the minister in a dog collar, the choirmaster gripping a sheaf of music, and the deacon holding the congregation’s account books under his arm. The blacksmith barreled past them, with James hot on his tail.

“Stop!”

Only a yard behind, James Dashwood launched himself into a flying tackle. As he flew, he took a heel on the chin, but he still managed to close his skinny arms around the blacksmith’s ankles. They crashed to the sidewalk, rolled onto a lawn, and scrambled to their feet. James clung to the blacksmith’s arm, which was as thick as the young detective’s thigh.

“Now that you caught him,” called the deacon, “what are you going to do with him?”

The answer came from the blacksmith himself in the form of a wide fist ribbed with thick knuckles. When James Dashwood came to, he was lying on the grass, with the three men in suits peering down curiously at him.

“Where’d he go?” said James.

“He ran off.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere he wanted to, I’d reckon. Are you all right, sonny?”

James Dashwood rose swaying to his feet and wiped the blood off his face with a handkerchief his mother had given him when he moved to San Francisco to work for the Van Dorn Detective Agency.

“Did any of you recognize that man?”

“I believe he’s a blacksmith,” said the choirmaster.

“Where does he live?”

“Don’t know,” he answered, and the minister said, “Why don’t you let be whatever got between you, son? Before you get hurt.”

Dashwood staggered back to the livery stable. The blacksmith was not there.

“Why’d Jim run off?” a mechanic asked.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“He’s been acting strange, lately,” said a stable hand.

“Stopped drinking,” said another.

“That’ll do it,” said a groom, laughing.

“The church ladies claim another victim. Poor Jim. Getting so a man’s not safe on the streets when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union holds a meeting.”

With that, grooms, stable hands, and mechanics broke into a song that James had never heard but they all seemed to know:Here’s to a temperance supper,

With water in glasses tall,

And coffee and tea to end with-

And me not there at all!

James took out another copy of the sketch. “Do you recognize this man?”

He received a chorus of nos. He braced for a “Broncho Billy” or two, but apparently none of them went to the pictures.

“Where does Jim live?” he asked.

No one would tell him.

He went to the Santa Monica Police Department, where an elderly patrolman led him to the chief of the department. The chief was a fifty-year-old, well-groomed gentleman in a dark suit, with his hair cut close on the sides in the modern way. Dashwood introduced himself. The chief acted cordially and said he was happy to help a Van Dorn operative. The blacksmith’s last name was Higgins, he told Dashwood. Jim Higgins lived in a rented room above the stable. Where would he go to hide out? The chief had no idea.

Dashwood stopped at the Western Union office to telegraph a report to the Sacramento office to be forwarded to wherever Isaac Bell was. Then he walked the streets, as darkness fell, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man. At eleven, when the last streetcar left for Los Angeles, he decided to rent a room in a tourist hotel instead of riding back to town so he could start hunting early in the morning.

A LONE HORSEMAN ON a glossy bay rode a ridge that overlooked the remote single-tracked Southern Pacific line just south of the Oregon border. Three men, who were grouped around a telegraph pole squeezed between the track and an abandoned tin-roofed barn, spotted him silhouetted against the sharp-blue sky. Their leader removed his broad-brimmed Stetson and swept it in a slow full circle over his head.

“Hey, what are you doing, Ross? Don’t wave hello like you’re inviting him down here.”

“I’m not waving hello,” said Ross Parker. “I’m waving him off.”

“How the hell is he going know the difference?”

“He forks his horse like a cowhand. A cowhand knows damned well the cattle rustlers signal for Mind your own damned business and sift sand away from us.”

“We ain’t rustling cattle. We ain’t even seen any cattle.”

“The principle is the same. Unless the man is a total fool, he’ll leave us alone.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“We’ll blow his head off.”

Even as Ross explained waving off to Andy, who was a city slicker from San Francisco, the horseman turned his animal away and dropped from sight behind the ridge. The three went back to work. Ross ordered Lowell, the lineman, to climb the pole with two long wires connected to Andy’s telegraph key.

Had the cowboy on the ridge ridden closer, he would have seen that they were unusually heavily armed for a telegraph crew working in 1907. Decades after the last Indian attack, Ross Parker packed a .45 holster on his hip and a Winchester rifle behind his saddle. Lowell had a coach gun, a sawed-off shotgun, slung over his back within easy reach. Even the city boy, the telegrapher Andy, had a .38 revolver tucked in his belt. Their horses were tied in the shade of a clump of trees, as they had come in cross-country instead of along the tracks on a handcar.

“Stay up there!” Ross ordered Lowell. “This won’t take long.” He and Andy settled down beside the old barn.

In fact, it was nearly an hour before Andy’s key started clattering, having intercepted a train dispatcher’s orders to the operator at Weed, north of their position. By then, all three had backed against the barn, dozing in the sun out of the cool wind.

“What’s he saying?” asked Ross.

“The dispatcher is sending train orders to the Weed operator. He’s telling him to signal the southbound freight to take the siding at Azalea.”

Ross checked his copy of the schedule.

“O.K. The northbound work train is passing Azalea siding in half an hour. Change the orders to give the southbound freight authority clear to Dunsmuir.”

Andy did as directed, altering the train orders to tell the southbound freight that the track was clear when in fact a work train was racing north with carloads of laborers. An experienced telegrapher, he mimicked the “fist” of the Dunsmuir dispatcher so the Weed operator would not realize a different man was operating the key.

“Uh-oh. They want to know what happened to the scheduled northbound?” Scheduled trains had authority over extras.

Ross was prepared for this. He didn’t bother opening his eyes.

“Tell them the scheduled northbound just reported by telegraphone that it’s on the siding at Shasta Springs with a burned-up journal box.”

This false message suggested that the northbound had broken down and its crew had switched it off the main line onto a siding. Then they had reached up to the telegraph wires with the eighteen-foot sectional “fishpole” carried in the caboose to hook a portable telegraphone on the wires. The telegraphone permitted rudimentary voice communication. The Weed operator accepted the explanation and passed on the false orders that would place the two trains on a collision course.

“Get up there, Lowell,” Ross ordered, still not opening his eyes. “Pull your wires down. We’re done.”

“Lowell’s behind the barn,” said Andy. “Went to take a leak.”

“Delicate of him.”

Things were going exactly as planned until a rifle barrel poked around the side of the barn and pressed hard against the telegrapher’s head.