The Striker

Landladies. A unionist finally out of prison. Bits. Pieces. Bits of nothing. Suddenly, you get lucky with a clerk who makes change for the El. Right around the corner. A hundred feet from this building. Then back to bits of nothing. Finally, a stroke of luck.”

Bell turned to Congdon.

“The brokerage house of Thibodeau & Marzen went bankrupt in the Panic of ’07. There were lawsuits by the dozen. Judge James Congdon’s name surfaced in court. Turned out you owned the broker. And thanks to an old detective who once told me that sometimes dead ends turn around, I had in my files a copy of a private wire transmitted on Thibodeau & Marzen’s leased telegraph line to Henry Clay’s alias, John Claggart.”

Bell turned back to Henry Clay. “But I still had no final absolute, provable connection. Until, one night, I got lucky again. An elevator runner, a temporary filling in that evening and who left town the day after, was all of a sudden back ten years later. His uncle was still the superintendent of the building. The nephew’s hopes hadn’t panned out. And his uncle gave him a job.”

Bell shifted his gaze to Congdon for a long moment, then back to Henry Clay.

“The lucky detective stopped by — as he had regularly — and this time found the new elevator runner and recognized him as the temporary who had been working that night ten years ago.

“‘Sure, I remember that girl. She was a looker. But, boy, did she look mad.’”

Bell’s voice thickened. “I asked, ‘When did you take her back down?’

“‘Didn’t,’ he said. ‘She never come down on my shift and I was on for darn near ten hours straight.’ And I asked again, ‘You ran her to what floor?’

“‘Top floor. Mr. Congdon’s own private floor.’

“‘Are you sure?’

“‘Sure I’m sure. Orders were, you had to call ahead to go to Mr. Congdon’s floor. I called ahead. Mr. Congdon said, “Bring her up.” I brought her up.’

“Mary Higgins died right here in this office. Right beside your boss’s statue.”

“It was self-defense!” Congdon shouted.

“What?” said Clay.

“She did not come here to ‘confront’ me. She came to kill me.”

Isaac Bell said, “I never doubted that Mary Higgins was a woman of the highest moral standard. You just confirmed it with your confession that you thought she intended to kill you.”

“I made no confession.”

“I just heard it from your own lips.”

“It’s your word against mine.”

“And his,” said Isaac Bell.

Henry Clay, who was listening stone-faced, asked James Congdon, “Did you kill Mary?”

Congdon pulled a pistol from his desk. Clay stared at it, his face lighting with recognition. “She told me she could never kill anyone. I believed her. I still do.”

“She changed her mind,” said Congdon. “A lady’s prerogative.”

“Where did you get that gun?”

“I’ll explain after we tend to Mr. Bell.”

“That’s a Colt Bisley. Mary took mine.”

Congdon heard the threat in Clay’s voice and whirled with his pistol.

Clay dove to the carpet with astounding speed, scooped up the gun he had dropped, and shot first, lacing two bullets into the old man’s chest. Congdon tumbled backwards, jerking his trigger as he fell. His bullet struck The Kiss, shattering the marble. Congdon’s eyes locked in mourning on the ruin.

Clay stood over him. “But how did you move Mary’s body to the steamboat in Pittsburgh?”

James Congdon answered with his dying breath.

“You weren’t the only ambitious fool who worked for me.”

Henry Clay’s shoulders sagged as Congdon’s had in his defeat. He shook his head in dismay. Then he turned to Isaac Bell. “You never gave up, and you got the man who killed Mary.”

“But Judge Congdon didn’t kill Terry Fein, Mike Flannery, young Captain Jennings, Black Jack Gleason, and countless others caught in your schemes. Henry Clay, you’re under arrest.”

Clay’s amber eyes were dead with defeat, but his pistol was rising with superhuman speed. Isaac Bell shot it out of his hand. It fell on Congdon’s chest. Clay gazed at it a moment, clutching his fingers. His empty gaze shifted to Bell’s derringer, and his eyes came alive.

“Looks like a .22,” he said. “And only one shot left. Do you think you can stop Henry Clay with one bullet?”

The door behind him banged opened and a big voice boomed, “Isaac could stop you with one shot between your murderous eyes. But I made him swear to me that I would get the first seven shots if you gave us the slightest excuse to pull the trigger.”

Henry Clay looked over his shoulder and down the barrel of Van Dorn’s Colt M1911 semiautomatic pistol and raised his hands.

“Pick up that telephone and call Congdon’s train,” Van Dorn ordered.

“Train?”

Isaac Bell explained, “You’ve got a date with the electric chair. Sing Sing’s on the way to Chicago. We’ll drop you there for safekeeping until your trial.”

* * *

Marion Bell knew from experience that after her husband solved a case, he would tell her everything that had happened when he was ready to. But this time was special. When he glided across Wall Street and slipped soundlessly into the auto, she sensed that he wanted to tell her now but couldn’t form the words, and might never.

She started the Marmon, pulled away from the curb into the empty street, steered around the corner, and headed up Broadway. Isaac Bell sat quietly, watching the boisterous late-night city streets. When they got to Forty-second Street, Marion turned left toward the Hudson River.

“Where are we going?” asked Bell. Archie’s town house, where they stayed in New York, was up in the East Sixties.

“Home.”

Bell considered her answer for a couple of blocks. Home was three thousand miles away in San Francisco, where they first met six years ago at the time of the Earthquake. It was a two- or three-month trip in an auto, depending on the weather and the state of the roads, and a Marmon Speedster probably wasn’t up to it. Of course Marion knew that, which meant she had a plan. They had married two years ago on the Mauretania, and he knew her well enough by now to know she had a plan.

“Joe Van Dorn won’t let me off for that long.”

“I’ll bet we could make the Mississippi in ten days.”

“Depending on the roads.”

“And ten nights.”

“We’ll run out of roads beyond the Mississippi.”

“Then we’ll put the car on a special at St. Louis. Home on the train in four days.”

Bell leaned over to read the gauges. “You filled the gasoline tank.”

“There’s a picnic basket in the trunk.”

Marion drove onto the ferry, and they went up to the passenger deck and stood at the railing, watching the lights of Manhattan. In the middle of the river she asked, “What did Congdon say?”

“He confessed.”

“What did you say?”

“I said good-bye to my old friend Mary Higgins.”