The Wrecker

3

FOUR DAYS AFTER THE TUNNEL EXPLOSION, JOSEPH VAN DORN caught up with the fast-moving, far-roaming Osgood Hennessy in the Great Northern rail yard at Hennessyville. The brand-new city on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, near the Idaho border, reeked of fresh lumber, creosote, and burning coal. But it was already called the “Minneapolis of the Northwest.” Van Dorn knew that Hennessy had built here as part of his plan to double the Southern Pacific’s trackage by absorbing the northern cross-continent routes.

The founder of the illustrious Van Dorn Detective Agency was a large, balding, well-dressed man in his forties who looked more like a prosperous business traveler than the scourge of the underworld. He appeared convivial, with a strong Roman nose, a ready smile slightly tempered by a hint of Irish melancholy in his eyes, and splendid red burnsides that descended to an even more splendid red beard. As he approached Hennessy’s special, the sound of ragtime music playing on a gramophone elicited a nod of heartfelt relief. He recognized the lively, yearning melody of Scott Joplin’s brand-new “Search-Light Rag,” and the music told him that Hennessy’s daughter Lillian was nearby. The cantankerous president of the Southern Pacific Railroad was a mite easier to handle when she was around.

He paused on the platform, sensing a rush from within the car. Here came Hennessy, thrusting the mayor of Spokane out the door. “Get off my train! Hennessyville will never be annexed into your incorporated city. I will not have my rail yard on Spokane’s tax rolls!”

To Van Dorn, he snapped, “Took your time getting here.”

Van Dorn returned Hennessy’s brusqueness with a warm smile. His strong white teeth blazed in his nest of red whiskers as he enveloped the small man’s hand in his, booming affably, “I was in Chicago, and you were all over the map. You’re looking well, Osgood, if a little splenetic. How is the beauteous Lillian?” he asked, as Hennessy ushered him aboard.

“Still more trouble than a carload of Eye-talians.”

“Here she is, now! My, my, how you’ve grown, young lady, I haven’t seen you since-”

“Since New York, when father hired you to return me to Miss Porter’s School?”

“No,” Van Dorn corrected. “I believe the last time was when we bailed you out of jail in Boston following a suffragette parade that got out of hand.”

“Lillian!” said Hennessy. “I want notes of this meeting typed up and attached to a contract to hire the Van Dorn Agency.”

The mischievous light in her pale blue eyes was extinguished by a steady gaze that was suddenly all business. “The contract is ready to be signed, Father.”

“Joe, I assume you know about these attacks.”

“I understand,” Van Dorn said noncommittally, “that horrific accidents bedevil the Southern Pacific’s construction of an express line through the Cascades. You’ve had workmen killed, as well as several innocent rail passengers. ”

“They can’t all be accidents.” Hennessy retorted sternly. “Someone’s doing his damnedest to wreck this railroad. I’m hiring your outfit to hunt down the saboteurs, whether anarchists, foreigners, or strikers. Shoot ‘em, hang ’em, do what you have to do, but stop them dead.”

“The instant you telegraphed, I assigned my best operative to the case. If the situation appears as you suspect, I will appoint him chief investigator.”

“No!” said Hennessy. “I want you in charge, Joe. Personally in charge.”

“Isaac Bell is my best man. I only wish I had possessed his talents when I was his age.”

Hennessy cut him off. “Get this straight, Joe. My train is parked only three hundred eighty miles north of the sabotaged tunnel, but it took over seven hundred miles to steam here, backtracking, climbing switchbacks. The cutoff line will reduce the run by a full day. The success of the cutoff and the future of this entire railroad is too important to farm out to a hired hand.”

Van Dorn knew that Hennessy was used to getting his way. He had, after all, forged continuous transcontinental lines from Atlantic to Pacific by steamrollering his competitors, Commodore Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, outfoxing the Interstate Commerce Commission and the United States Congress, and staring down trust-busting President Teddy Roosevelt. Therefore, Van Dorn was glad for a sudden interruption by Hennessy’s conductor. The train boss stood in the doorway in his impeccable uniform of deep blue cloth, which was studded with gleaming brass buttons and edged with the Southern Pacific’s red piping.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir. They’ve caught a hobo trying to board your train.”

“What are you bothering me for? I’m running a railroad here. Turn him over to the sheriff.”

“He claims that Mr. Van Dorn will vouch for him.”

A tall man entered Hennessy’s private car, guarded by two heavyset railway police. He wore the rough garb of a hobo who rode the freight trains looking for work. His denim coat and trousers were caked with dust. His boots were scuffed. His hat, a battered cow-poke’s J. B. Stetson, had shed a lot of rain.

Lillian Hennessy noticed his eyes first, a violet shade of blue, which raked the parlor with a sharp, searching glance that penetrated every nook and cranny. Swift as his eyes were, they seemed to pause on each face as if to pierce the inner thoughts of her father, Van Dorn, and lastly herself. She stared back boldly, but she found the effect mesmerizing.

He was well over six feet tall and lean as an Arabian thorough-bred. A full mustache covered his upper lip, as golden as his thick hair and the stubble on his unshaven cheeks. His hands hung easily at his sides, his fingers were long and graceful. Lillian took in the determined set to the chin and lips and decided that he was about thirty years old and immensely confident.

His escort stood close by but did not touch him. Only when she had torn her gaze from the tall man’s face did she realize that one of the railroad guards was pressing a bloody handkerchief to his nose. The other blinked a swollen, blackened eye.

Joseph Van Dorn allowed himself a smug smile. “Osgood, may I present Isaac Bell, who will be conducting this investigation on my behalf?”

“Good morning,” said Isaac Bell. He stepped forward to offer his hand. The guards started to follow after him.

Hennessy dismissed them with a curt “Out!”

The guard dabbing his nose with his handkerchief whispered to the conductor who was herding them toward the door.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the conductor. “They want their property back.”

Isaac Bell tugged a leather-sheathed sap of lead shot from his pocket. “What’s your name?”

“Billy,” came the sullen reply. Bell tossed him the sap, and said coldly, with barely contained anger, “Billy, next time a man offers to come quietly, take him at his word.”

He turned to the man with the black eye. “And you?”

“Ed.”

Bell produced a revolver and passed it to Ed, butt first. Then he dropped five cartridges into the guard’s hand, saying, “Never draw a weapon you haven’t mastered.”

“Thought I had,” muttered Ed, and something about his hang-dog expression seemed to touch the tall detective.

“Cowboy before you joined the railroad?” Bell asked.

“Yes, sir, needed the work.”

Bell’s eyes warmed to a softer blue, and his lips spread in a congenial smile. He slid a gold coin from a pocket concealed inside his belt. “Here you go, Ed. Get a piece of beefsteak for that eye, and buy yourselves a drink.”

The guards nodded their heads. “Thank you, Mr. Bell.”

Bell turned his attention to the president of the Southern Pacific Company, who was glowering expectantly. “Mr. Hennessy, I will report as soon as I’ve had a bath and changed my clothes.”

“The porter has your bag,” Joseph Van Dorn said, smiling.

THE DETECTIVE WAS BACK in thirty minutes, mustache trimmed, hobo garb exchanged for a silver-gray three-piece sack suit tailored from fine, densely woven English wool appropriate to the autumn chill. A pale blue shirt and a dark violet four-in-hand necktie enriched the color of his eyes.

Isaac Bell knew that he had to start the case off on the right foot by establishing that he, not the imperious railroad president, would boss the investigation. First, he returned Lillian Hennessy’s warm smile. Then he bowed politely to a sensual, dark-eyed woman who entered quietly and sat in a leather armchair. At last, he turned to Osgood Hennessy.

“I am not entirely convinced the accidents are sabotage.”

“The hell you say! Labor is striking all over the West. Now we’ve got a Wall Street panic egging on radicals, inflaming agitators.”

“It is true,” Bell answered, “that the San Francisco streetcar strike and the Western Union telegraphers’ strike embittered labor unionists. And even if the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners standing trial in Boise did conspire to murder Governor Steunenberg-a charge I doubt, as the detective work in that case is slipshod-there was obviously no shortage of vicious radicals to plant the dynamite in the Governor’s front gate. Nor was the murderer who assassinated President McKinley the only anarchist in the land. But-”

Isaac Bell paused to turn the full force of his gaze on Hennessy. “Mr. Van Dorn pays me to capture assassins and bank robbers everywhere on the continent. I ride more limited trains, expresses, and crack flyers in a month than most men will in a lifetime.”

“What do your travels have to do with these attacks against my railroad?”

“Train wrecks are common. Last year, the Southern Pacific paid out two million dollars for injuries to persons. Before 1907 is over, there’ll be ten thousand collisions, eight thousand derailments, and over five thousand accidental deaths. As a frequent passenger, I take it personally when railroad cars are rammed inside each other like a telescope.”

Osgood Hennessy flushed pink with incipient fury. “I’ll tell you what I tell every reformer who thinks the railroad is the root of all evil. The Southern Pacific Railroad employs one hundred thousand men. We work like nailers transporting one hundred million passengers and three hundred million tons of freight every year!”

“I happen to love trains,” Bell said, mildly. “But railwaymen don’t exaggerate when they say that the tiny steel flange that holds the wheel on the track is ‘One inch between here and eternity.”’

Hennessy pounded the table. “These murdering radicals are blinded by hate! Can’t they see that railway speed is God’s gift to every man and woman alive? America is huge! Bigger than squabbling Europe. Wider than divided China. Railroads unite us. How would people get around without our trains? Stagecoaches? Who would carry their crops to market? Oxen? Mules? A single one of my locomotives hauls more freight than all the Conestoga wagons that ever crossed the Great Plains-Mr. Bell, do you know what a Thomas Flyer is?”

“Of course. A Thomas Flyer is a four-cylinder, sixty-horsepower Model 35 Thomas automobile built in Buffalo. It is my hope that the Thomas Company will win the New York to Paris Race next year.”

“Why do you think they named an automobile after a railroad train?” Hennessy bellowed. “Speed! A flyer is a crack railroad train famous for speed! And-”

“Speed is wonderful,” Bell interrupted. “Here’s why …”

That Hennessy used this section of his private car as his office was evinced by the chart pulls suspended from the polished-wood ceiling. The tall, flaxen-haired detective chose from their brass labels and unrolled a railroad map that represented the lines of California, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington. He pointed to the mountainous border between northern California and Nevada.

“Sixty years ago, a group of pioneer families calling themselves the Donner Party attempted to cross these mountains by wagon train. They were heading for San Francisco, but early snow blocked the pass they had chosen through the Sierra Nevada. The Donner Party was trapped all winter. They ran out of food. Those who did not starve to death survived by eating the bodies of those who died.”

“What the devil do cannibalistic pioneers have to do with my railroad?”

Isaac Bell grinned. “Today, thanks to your railroad, if you get hungry in the Donner Pass it’s only a four-hour train ride to San Francisco’s excellent restaurants.”

Osgood Hennessy’s stern face did not allow for much difference between scowls and smiles, but he did concede to Joseph Van Dorn, “You win, Joe. Go ahead, Bell. Speak your piece.”

Bell indicated the map. “In the past three weeks, you’ve had suspicious derailments here at Redding, here at Roseville and at Dunsmuir, and the tunnel collapse, which prompted you to call on Mr. Van Dorn.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” Hennessy snapped. “Four track layers and a locomotive engineer dead. Ten off the job with broken limbs. Construction delayed eight days.”

“And one railway police detective crushed to death in the pioneer tunnel.”

“What? Oh yes. I forgot. One of my cinder dicks.”

“His name was Clarke. Aloysius Clarke. His friends called him Wish.”

“We knew the man,” Joseph Van Dorn explained. “He used to work for my agency. Crackerjack detective. But he had his troubles.”

Bell looked each person in the face, and in a clear voice spoke the highest compliment paid in the West. “Wish Clarke was a man to ride the river with.”

Then he said to Hennessy, “I stopped in hobo jungles on my way here. Outside Crescent City on the Siskiyou line”-he pointed on the map at the north coast of California-“I caught wind of a radical or an anarchist the hobos call the Wrecker.”

“A radical! Just like I said.”

“The hobos know little about him, but they fear him. Men who join his cause are not seen again. From what I have gleaned so far, he may have recruited an accomplice for the tunnel job. A young agitator, a miner named Kevin Butler, was seen hopping a freight train south from Crescent City.”

“Toward Eureka!” Hennessy broke in. “From Santa Rosa, he cut up to Redding and Weed and onto the Cascades Cutoff. Like I’ve been saying all along. Labor radicals, foreigners, anarchists. Did this agitator confess his crime?”

“Kevin Butler will be confessing to the devil, sir. His body was found beside Detective Clarke’s in the pioneer tunnel. However, nothing in his background indicates the ability to carry out such an attack by himself. The Wrecker, as he is called, is still at large.”

A telegraph key rattled in the next room. Lillian Hennessy cocked her ear. When the noise stopped, the telegrapher hurried in with his transcription. Bell noticed that Lillian did not bother to read what was written on the paper, as she said to her father, “From Redding. Collision north of Weed. A workmen’s train fouled a signal. A materials train following didn’t know the freight was in the section and plowed into the back of it. The caboose telescoped into a freight car. Two train crew killed.”

Hennessy leaped to his feet, red faced. “No sabotage? Fouled a signal, my eye. Those trains were bound for the Cascades Cutoff. Which means another delay.”

Joseph Van Dorn stepped forward to calm the apoplectic railroad president.

Bell moved closer to Lillian.

“You know the Morse alphabet?” he asked quietly.

“You’re observant, Mr. Bell. I’ve traveled with my father since I was a little girl. He’s never far from a telegraph key.”

Bell reconsidered the young woman. Perhaps Lillian was more than the spoiled, headstrong only child she appeared to be. She could be a font of valuable information about her father’s inner circle. “Who is that lady who just joined us?”

“Emma Comden is a family friend. She tutored me in French and German and tried very hard to improve my behavior”-Lillian blinked long lashes over her pale blue eyes and added-“at the piano.”

Emma Comden wore a snug dress with a proper round collar and an elegant brooch at her throat. She was very much Lillian’s opposite, rounded where the younger woman was slim, eyes a deep brown, almost black, hair dark, lustrous chestnut with a glint of red, constrained in a French twist.

“Do you mean you were educated at home so you could help your father?”

“I mean that I was kicked out of so many eastern finishing schools that Father hired Mrs. Comden to complete my education.”

Bell smiled back. “How can you still have time for French and German and the piano when you’re your father’s private secretary?”

“I’ve outgrown my tutor.”

“And yet Mrs. Comden remains … ?”

Lillian responded coolly. “If you have eyes, Mr. Detective, you might notice that Father is very fond of our ‘family friend.”’

Hennessy noticed Isaac and Lillian talking. “What’s that?”

“I was just saying that I’ve heard it said that Mrs. Hennessy was a great beauty.”

“Lillian didn’t get that face from my side of the family. How much money are you paid to be a detective, Mr. Bell?”

“The top end of the going rate.”

“Then I have no doubt you understand that as the father of an innocent young woman, I am obliged to ask who bought you those fancy clothes?”

“My grandfather Isaiah Bell.”

Osgood Hennessy stared. He couldn’t have been more surprised if Bell had reported he had sprung from the loins of King Midas. “Isaiah Bell was your grandfather? That makes your father Ebenezer Bell, president of the American States Bank of Boston. Good God Almighty, a banker?”

“My father is a banker. I am a detective.”

“My father never met a banker in his life. He was a section hand, pounding spikes. You’re talking to a shirtsleeve railroader, Bell. I started out like he did, spiking rails to ties. I’ve carried my dinner pail. I’ve done my ten hours a day up through the grades: brakeman, engineer, conductor, telegrapher, dispatcher-up the line from track to station to general office.”

“What my father is trying to say,” said Lillian, “is that he rose from pounding iron spikes in the hot sun to driving ceremonial gold spikes under a parasol.”

“Don’t mock me, young lady.” Hennessy yanked another chart down from the ceiling. It was a blueprint, a fine-lined copy on pale blue paper that depicted in exquisite detail the engineering plans for a cantilevered truss bridge that spanned a deep gorge on two tall piers made of stone and steel.

“This is where we’re headed, Mr. Bell, the Cascade Canyon Bridge. I hauled a top-hand engineer, Franklin Mowery, out of retirement to build me the finest railroad bridge west of the Mississippi, and Mowery’s almost finished. To save time, I built it ahead of the expansion by routing work trains on an abandoned timber track that snakes up from the Nevada desert.” He pointed at the map. “When we hole through here-Tunnel 13-we’ll find the bridge waiting for us. Speed, Mr. Bell. It’s all about speed.”

“Do you face a deadline?” asked Bell.

Hennessy looked sharply at Joseph Van Dorn. “Joe, can I assume that confidences are as safe with your detectives as they are with my attorneys?”

“Safer,” said Van Dorn.

“There is a deadline,” Hennessy admitted to Bell.

“Imposed by your bankers?”

“Not those devils. Mother Nature. Old Man Winter is coming, and when he gets to the Cascades that’s it for railroad construction ‘til Spring. I’ve got the best credit in the railroad business, but if I don’t connect the Cascades Cutoff to the Cascade Canyon Bridge before winter shuts me down even my credit will dry up. Between us, Mr. Bell, if this expansion stalls, I will lose any chance of completing the Cascades Cutoff the day after the first snowstorm.”

Joseph Van Dorn said, “Rest easy, Osgood. We’ll stop him.”

Hennessy was not soothed. He shook the blueprint as if to throttle it. “If these saboteurs stop me, it’ll take twenty years before anyone can tackle the Cascades Cutoff again. It’s the last hurdle impeding progress in the West, and I’m the last man alive with the guts to clear it.”

Isaac Bell did not doubt that the old man loved his railroad. Nor did he forget the outrage in his own heart at the prospect of more innocent people killed and injured by the Wrecker. The innocent were sacred. But foremost in Bell’s mind at this moment was his memory of Wish Clarke stepping in his casual, offhanded way in front of a knife intended for Bell. He said, “I promise I will stop him.”

Hennessy stared at him for a long time, taking his measure. Slowly, he settled into an armchair. “I’m relieved, Mr. Bell, having a top hand of your caliber.”

When Hennessy looked to his daughter for agreement, he noticed that she was appraising the wealthy and well-connected detective like a new race car she would ask him to buy for her next birthday. “Son?” he asked. “Is there a Mrs. Bell?”

Bell had already noticed that the lovely young woman was appraising him. Flattering, tempting too, but he did not take it personally. It was an easy guess why. He was surely the first man she had seen whom her father could not bully. But between her fascination and her father’s sudden interest in seeing her suitably married off, the moment was overdue for this particular gentleman to make his intentions clear.

“I am engaged to be married,” he answered.

“Engaged, eh? Where is she?”

“She lives in San Francisco.”

“How did she make out in the earthquake?”

“She lost her home,” Bell replied cryptically, the memory still fresh of their first night together ending abruptly when the shock hurled their bed across the room and Marion’s piano had fallen through the front wall into the street.

“Marion stayed on, caring for orphans. Now that most are settled, she has taken a position at a newspaper.”

“Have you set a wedding date?” Hennessy asked.

“Soon,” said Bell.

Lillian Hennessy seemed to take “Soon” as a challenge. “We’re so far from San Francisco.”

“One thousand miles.” said Bell “Much of it slow going on steep grades and endless switchbacks through the Siskiyou Mountains-the reason for your Cascades Cutoff, which will reduce the run by a full day,” he added, deftly changing the subject from marriageable daughters to sabotage. “Which reminds me, it would be helpful to have a railway pass.”

“I’ll do better than that!” said Hennessy, springing to his feet. “You’ll have your railway pass-immediate free passage on any train in the country. You will also have a letter written in my own hand authorizing you to charter a special train anywhere you need one. You’re working for the railroad now.”

“No, sir. I work for Mr. Van Dorn. But I promise to put your specials to good use.”

“Mr. Hennessy has equipped you with wings,” said Mrs. Comden.

“If only you knew where to fly …” The beautiful Lillian smiled. “Or to whom.”

When the telegraph key started clattering again, Bell nodded to Van Dorn, and they stepped quietly off the car onto the platform. A cold north wind whipped through the rail yard, swirling smoke and cinders. “I’ll need a lot of our men.”

“They’re yours for the asking. Who do you want?”

Isaac Bell spoke a long list of names. Van Dorn listened, nodding approval. When he had finished, Bell said, “I’d like to base out of Sacramento.”

“I would have thought you’d recommend San Francisco.”

“For personal reasons, yes. I would prefer the opportunity to be in the same city with my fiancee. But Sacramento has the faster rail connections up the Pacific Coast and inland. Could we assemble at Miss Anne’s?”

Van Dorn did not conceal his surprise. “Why do you want to meet in a brothel?”

“If this so-called Wrecker is taking on an entire continental railroad, he is a criminal with a broad reach. I don’t want our force seen meeting in a public place until I know what he knows and how he knows it.”

“I’m sure Anne Pound will make room for us in her back parlor,” Van Dorn said stiffly. “If you think that’s the best course. But tell me, have you discovered something else beyond what you just reported to Hennessy?”

“No, sir. But I do have a feeling that the Wrecker is exceptionally alert.”

Van Dorn replied with a silent nod. In his experience, when a detective as insightful as Isaac Bell had a “feeling” the feeling took shape from small but telling details that most people wouldn’t notice. Then he said, “I’m awfully sorry about Aloysius.”

“Came as something of a shock. The man saved my life in Chicago.”

“You saved his in New Orleans,” Van Dorn retorted. “And again in Cuba.”

“He was a crackerjack detective.”

“Sober. But he was drinking himself to death. And you couldn’t save him from that. Not that you didn’t try.”

“He was the best,” Bell said, stubbornly.

“How was he killed?”

“His body was crushed under the rocks. Clearly, Wish was right there at the precise spot where the dynamite detonated.”

Van Dorn shook his head, sadly. “That man’s instincts were golden. Even drunk. I hated having to let him go.”

Bell kept his voice neutral. “His sidearm was several feet from his body, indicating he had drawn it from his holster before the explosion.”

“Could have been blown there by the explosion.”

“It was that old single-action Army he loved. In the flap holster. It didn’t fall out. He must have had it in his hand.”

Van Dorn countered with a cold question to confirm Bell’s conjecture that Aloysius Clarke had tried to prevent the attack. “Where was his flask?”

“Still tucked in his clothing.”

Van Dorn nodded and started to change the subject, but Isaac Bell was not finished.

“I had to know how he got there in the tunnel. Had he died before or in the explosion? So I put his body on a train and brought it to a doctor in Klamath Falls. Stood by while he examined it. The doctor showed me that before Wish was crushed, he had taken a knife in the throat.”

Van Dorn winced. “They slashed his throat?”

“Not slashed. Pierced. The knife went in his throat, slid between two cervical vertebrae, severed his spinal cord, and emerged out the back of his neck. The doctor said it was done clean as a surgeon or a butcher.”

“Or just lucky.”

“If it was, then the killer got lucky twice.”

“How do you mean?”

“Getting the drop on Wish Clarke would require considerable luck in the first place, wouldn’t you say?”

Van Dorn looked away. “Anything left in the flask?”

Bell gave his boss a thin, sad smile. “Don’t worry, Joe, I would have fired him, too. It was dry as a bone.”

“Attacked from the front?”

“It looks that way,” said Bell.

“But you say Wish had already drawn his gun.”

“That’s right. So how did the Wrecker get him with a knife?”

“Threw it?” Van Dorn asked dubiously.

Bell’s hand flickered toward his boot and came up with his throwing knife. He juggled the sliver of steel in his fingers, weighing it. “He’d need a catapult to drive a throwing knife completely through a big man’s neck.”

“Of course … Watch your step, Isaac. As you say, this Wrecker must be one quick-as-lightning hombre to get the drop on Wish Clarke. Even drunk.”

“He will have the opportunity,” vowed Isaac Bell, “to show me how quick.”