The Wrecker

4

THE ELECTRIC LIGHTS OF SANTA MONICA’S VENICE PIER illuminated the rigging of a three-masted ship docked permanently alongside it and the rooflines of a large pavilion. A brass band was playing John Philip Sousa’s “Gladiator March” in quick time.

The beachcomber turned his back to the bittersweet music and walked the hard-packed sand toward the dark. The lights shimmered across the waves and cast a frothy shadow ahead of him, as the cool Pacific wind flapped his ragged clothes. It was low tide, and he was hunting for an anchor he could steal.

He skirted a village of shacks. The Japanese fishermen who lived there had dragged their boats up on the beach, close to their shacks, to keep an eye on them. Just past the Japanese he found what he was looking for, one of the seagoing dories scattered along the beach by the United States Lifeboat Society to rescue shipwrecked sailors and drowning tourists. The boats were fully equipped for launching in an instant by volunteer crews. He pulled open the canvas and pawed in the dark, feeling oars, floats, tin bailers, and finally the cold metal of an anchor.

He carried the anchor toward the pier. Before he reached the edge of the light fall, he plodded up the sloping deep sand and into the town. The streets were quiet, the houses dark. He dodged a night watchman on foot patrol and made his way, unchallenged, to a stable, which like most stables in the area was in the process of being converted to accommodate motor vehicles. Trucks and automobiles undergoing repair were parked helter-skelter among the wagons, buggies, and surreys. The scent of gasoline mingled with that of hay and manure.

It was a lively place by day, frequented by hostlers, hackmen, wag oners, and mechanics, smoking and chewing and spinning yarns. But the only one up tonight was the blacksmith, who surprised the beachcomber by giving him a whole dollar for the anchor. He had only promised fifty cents, but he had been drinking and was one of those men who whiskey made generous.

The blacksmith got busy, eager to transform the anchor before anyone noticed it had been stolen. He started by cutting off one of the two cast-iron flukes, battering it repeatedly with hammer and cold chisel until it snapped away. He filed burrs to smooth the ragged break. When he held the anchor up to the light, what was left of it looked like a hook.

Sweating even in the cool of the night, he drank a bottle of beer and swallowed a deep pull from his bottle of Kellogg’s Old Bourbon before starting to drill the hole in the shank that the customer had asked for. Drilling cast iron was hard work. Pausing to catch his breath, he drank another beer. He finished at last, vaguely aware that one more swig of Kellogg’s and he would drill a hole in his hand instead of the hook.

He wrapped the hook in the blanket the customer had provided and put it in the man’s carpetbag. Head reeling, he picked up the fluke he had removed from where it had fallen in the sand beside his anvil. He was wondering what he could make with it when the customer rapped on the door. “Bring it out here.”

The man was standing in the dark, and the blacksmith saw even less of his sharp features than he had the night before. But he recognized his strong voice, his precise back east diction, his superior putting-on-airs manner, his height, and his city slicker’s knee-length, single-breasted frock coat.

“I said bring it here!”

The blacksmith carried the carpetbag out the door.

“Shut the door!”

He closed it behind him, blocking the light, and his customer took the bag with a brusque, “Thank you, my good man.”

“Anytime,” mumbled the blacksmith, wondering what in heck a swell in a frock coat was going to do with half an anchor.

A ten-dollar gold piece, a week’s work in these hard times, glittered through the shadows. The blacksmith fumbled for it, missed, and had to kneel in the sand to pick it up. He sensed the man looming closer. He looked over, warily, and he saw him reach into a rugged boot that didn’t match his fancy duds. Just then, the door behind him flew open, and light caught the man’s face. The blacksmith thought he looked familiar. Three grooms and an automobile mechanic staggered out the door, drunk as skunks, whooping with laughter when they saw him kneeling in the sand. “Damn!” shouted the mechanic. “Looks like Jim finished his bottle, too.”

The customer whirled away and disappeared down the alley, leaving the blacksmith completely unaware that he had come within one second of being murdered by a man who killed just to be on the safe side.

FOR MOST OF THE forty-seven years that the state capital of California had been in Sacramento, Anne Pound’s white mansion had provided congenial hospitality for legislators and lobbyists a short three blocks away. It was large and beautiful, built in the uncluttered early Victorian style. Gleaming white woodwork fringed turrets, gables, porches, and railings. Inside the waxed-walnut front door, an oil painting of the lady of the house in her younger years graced the grand foyer. Her red-carpeted staircase was so renowned in political circles that the level of a man’s connections in the state could be gauged by whether he smiled knowingly upon hearing the phrase “The Steps to Heaven.”

At eight o‘clock this evening, the lady herself, considerably older and noticeably larger, her great mane of blond hair gone white as the woodwork, held court on a burgundy couch in the back drawing room, where she settled in billows of green silk. The room held many such couches, capacious armchairs, polished-brass cuspidors, gilt-framed paintings of nubile women in various states of undress, and a fine bar stacked with crystal. Tonight it was securely closed off from the front room by three-inch-thick mahogany pocket doors. Standing guard was an elegantly top-hatted bouncer, a former prizefighter believed to have knocked down “Gentleman Jim” Corbett in his heyday and who’d lived to tell the tale.

Isaac Bell had to hide a smile at how much Joseph Van Dorn was thrown off balance by the still-beautiful proprietress. A blush was spreading from beneath his beard, red as the whiskers. For all his oft-proven courage in the face of violent attack, Van Dorn was singularly straitlaced when it came to women in general and intimate behavior in particular. It was clear he would rather be sitting anywhere but in the back parlor of the highest-class sporting house in California.

“Shall we start?” asked Van Dorn.

“Miss Anne,” Bell said, courteously extending his hand to help her rise from the couch. “We thank you for your hospitality.”

As Bell walked her out the door, she murmured in a soft Virginia drawl how grateful she remained to the Van Dorn Detective Agency for apprehending, in the quietest manner, a vicious killer who had preyed on her hardworking girls. The monster, a twisted fiend whom the Van Dorn operatives had backtracked to one of Sacramento’s finest families, was locked forever in an asylum for the criminally insane, and no hint of scandal had ever alarmed her patrons.

Joseph Van Dorn stood up, and said in a low voice that carried, “Let’s get to it. Isaac Bell is in charge of this investigation. When he speaks, he speaks with my authority. Isaac, tell them what you have in mind.”

Bell looked from face to face before he spoke. He had worked with, or knew of, all the heads of the western cities’ agencies: Phoenix, Salt Lake, Boise, Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and the other agents Van Dorn had rounded up.

Among the standouts were the immense, powerfully built director of the San Francisco office, Horace Bronson, and short, fat Arthur Curtis, with whom Bell had worked on the Butcher Bandit case, on which they’d lost a mutual friend in Curtis’s partner, Glenn Irvine.

“Texas” Walt Hatfield, a barbed-wire-lean former ranger who specialized in stopping railroad express-car robberies, would be of particular value on this case. As would Kansas City’s Eddie Edwards, a prematurely white-haired gent who was expert at rousting city gangs out of freight yards, where sidelined trains were particularly vulnerable to robbery and sabotage.

The oldest in the room were ice-eyed Mack Fulton from Boston, who knew every safecracker in the country, and his partner, explosives expert Wally Kisley, dressed in his trademark three-piece drummer’s suit with a loud pattern bright as a checkerboard. Mack and Wally had teamed up since the early days in Chicago. Quick with a joke or a prank, they were known in the agency as “Weber and Fields” after the famous vaudeville comedians and producers of burlesque musicals on Broadway.

Last came Bell’s particular friend, Archie Abbott from New York, a near-invisible undercover man, sidling through Miss Anne’s kitchen door, dressed like a tramp looking for a handout.

Bell said, “If someone detonates a bomb in here, every outlaw on the continent will be buying drinks.”

Their laughter was subdued. Texas Walt Hatfield asked the question that was on many minds, “Isaac, you fixing to tell us why we’re hunkered down in a sportin’ house like we was longhorns canyon-skulking on roundup morning?”

“Because we’re up against a saboteur who thinks big, plans smart, and doesn’t give a hoot who he kills.”

“Well, now that you put it that way-”

“He is a vicious, ruthless murderer. He’s done so much damage already and killed so many innocent people that the hobos took notice and nicknamed him ‘the Wrecker.’ His target appears to be the Southern Pacific Railroad Cascades Cutoff. The railroad is our client. The Wrecker is our target. The Van Dorn Detective Agency has two jobs: protect the client by stopping the Wrecker from doing any more damage and catch him with enough proof to hang him.”

Bell nodded briskly. A male secretary in shirtsleeves sprang forward to drape a railroad map over a picture of nymphs in their bath. The map depicted the western railroads from Salt Lake City to San Francisco that served California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona.

“To pinpoint the railroad’s most vulnerable locations, I’ve invited Jethro Watt, superintendent of railway police, to fill you in.”

The detectives responded with derisive mutters.

Isaac Bell quieted them with a cold glance. “We all know the shortcomings of the railroad dicks. But Van Dorn hasn’t the manpower to cover eight thousand miles of track. Jethro has information we couldn’t learn on our own. So if anyone in this room says anything to make Superintendent Watt less than enthusiastically cooperative, he’ll answer to me.”

At Bell’s command, the secretary ushered in Superintendent Watt, who in appearance did not contradict the detectives’ low expectations of railway police. From the greasy hair pasted to the forehead above his ill-shaven, bad-tempered face to his grimy collar, wrinkled coat and trousers, to his scuffed boots to the bulges in his clothing that bespoke cannon-caliber sidearms, saps, and billy clubs, Jethro Watt, who was nearly as tall as Isaac Bell and twice as wide, looked like the prototype for every yard bull and cinder dick in the country. Then he opened his mouth and surprised them all.

“There’s an old saying: ‘Nothing is impossible for the Southern Pacific.’

“What railroad men mean by that is this: We do it all. We grade our own road. We lay our own track. We build our own locomotives and rolling stock. We erect our own bridges-forty in the new expansion, in addition to Cascade Canyon. We bore our own tunnels-they’ll be fifty before we’re done. We maintain our own machinery. We invent special High Sierra snowplows for winter, fire trains for summer. We are a mighty enterprise.”

With neither a softer tone nor the hint of smile, he added, “On San Francisco Bay, our ferry passengers crossing from Oakland Mole to the City claim that our machine shops even bake the doughnuts we sell on our boats. Like ‘em or not, they still eat ’em. The Southern Pacific is a mighty enterprise. Like us or not.”

Jethro Watt’s bloodshot eye fell on the ornate bar heaped high with a pyramid of crystal decanters, and he wet his lips.

“A mighty enterprise makes many enemies. If a fella climbs out of the wrong side of bed in the morning, he’ll blame the railroad. If his crop fails, he’ll blame the railroad. If he loses his farm, he’ll blame the railroad. If his union can’t raise his wages, he’ll blame the railroad. If he gets laid off in a Panic, he’ll blame the railroad. If his bank closes and can’t return his money, he’ll blame the railroad. Sometimes he gets mad enough to transact a little business with the express car. Robbing trains. But worse than robbing trains is sabotage. Worse, and harder to stop because a mighty enterprise makes a mammoth target.

“Sabotage by angry fellas is why the company maintains an army of police to protect itself. An enormous army. But like any army, we need so many soldiers we can’t pick and choose, and sometimes we must recruit what others more privileged might call the dregs . . .”

He glowered around the room, and half the detectives there expected him to whip out a blackjack. Instead, he concluded, with a cold, derisive smile, “The word has come down from on high that our army is to assist you gentlemen detectives. We are placed at your service, and my boys are instructed to take orders from you gentlemen.

“Mr. Bell and I have already had a long talk with the company’s top engineers and superintendents. Mr. Bell knows what we know. Namely, if this so-called Wrecker wants to disrupt our Cascades Cutoff, he can attack us six ways from Sunday:

“He can wreck a train by tampering with the switches that shunt trains around one another. Or he can manipulate the telegraph by which division superintendents control train movements.

“He can burn a bridge. He’s already dynamited a tunnel, he can blow another.

“He can attack our shops and foundries that serve the cutoff. Most likely, Sacramento. And Red Bluff, where they fabricate truss rods for the Cascade Canyon Bridge.

“He can set fire to our roundhouses when they’re crowded full of locomotives undergoing maintenance.

“He can mine the rails.

“And every time he succeeds and folks get killed, he will panic our workmen.

“At Mr. Bell’s request, we have dispatched our ‘army’ to the places where the railroad is most at risk. Our ’soldiers’ are in place and await you gentlemen’s requests. Now Mr. Bell will pinpoint those places for you while I go pour me a snort.”

Watt plunged across the parlor without apology, heading directly to the crystal-laden bar.

Isaac Bell said, “Listen close. We have our work cut out for us.”

By MIDNIGHT, YOUNG WOMEN’S laughter had replaced the solemn proceedings in Miss Anne’s back parlor. The Van Dorn detectives had dispersed, slipping away quietly to their hotels alone or in pairs, leaving only Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott in Miss Anne’s library, a windowless room deep in the mansion, where they continued to pore over the railroad maps.

Archie Abbott strained the authenticity of his tramp costume by pouring a twelve-year-old Napoleon brandy into a crystal balloon snifter and inhaling with refined appreciation.

“Weber and Fields made a good point about powder-house burglaries. Missing explosives are a red flag.”

“Unless he buys some at the general store.”

Archie raised his glass in a toast. “Destruction to the Wrecker! May the wind blow in his face and the hot sun blind him!”

Archie’s carefully styled accent sounded as if he hailed from New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. But Archie had numerous accents he could fashion to fit his costume. He had become a detective only after his family, blue-blooded but impoverished since the Panic of ‘93, had forbidden him becoming an actor. The first time they’d met, Isaac Bell was boxing for Yale when the unenviable chore of defending the honor of Princeton had fallen to Archibald Angell Abbott IV

“All bases covered?”

“Looks that way.”

“How come you don’t look happier, Isaac?”

“As Watt said, it’s a big railroad.”

“Oh yes.” Abbott took a sip of brandy and leaned over the map again. His high brow knitted. “Who’s watching the Redding Yards?”

“Lewis and Minalgo were nearest by,” said Bell, not happy with his answer.

“‘And the former was a lulu,”’ said Archie, quoting the much-loved baseball poem “Casey at the Bat,” “‘and the latter was a cake.”’

Bell nodded agreement, and, thinking through his roster, said, “I’ll move them down to Glendale and put Hatfield in charge of Redding.”

“Glendale, hell. I’d move ‘em to Mexico.”

“So would I, if I could spare the men. But Glendale’s mighty far off. I don’t think we have to worry too much about Glendale. It’s seven hundred miles from the Cascades route . . .” He pulled out his gold watch. “We’ve done all we can tonight. I’ve got an extra room in my hotel suite. If I can sneak you past the house dick dressed like that.”

Abbott shook his head. “Thanks, but when I came through the kitchen earlier, Miss Anne’s cook promised me a midnight supper.”

Bell shook his head at his old friend. “Only you, Archie, could spend the night in a whorehouse and sleep with the cook.”

“I checked the train schedule,” Abbott said. “Give my regards to Miss Marion. You’ve got time to catch the night flyer to San Francisco.”

“I was planning to,” said Bell, and strode quickly into the night, heading for the railroad station.