“Opera buffa is the funny kind. Like vaudeville comics.”
“This is not funny to me, Marco.”
“To me, it’s worth getting shot.”
“How? Why?”
“It’s just that if something were to happen to Preston Whiteway, you would inherit his newspaper empire.”
“I don’t want his empire. I just want to fly aeroplanes and win this race.” She searched his face, and added, “And be with you.”
“I suppose that I should feel grateful you still feel that way.”
“What would happen to Preston?”
“Oh, now Mr. Whiteway is ‘Preston’?”
“I can’t call my husband Mr. Whiteway.”
“No, I suppose you can’t.”
“Marco, what is it? What are you getting at?”
“I just wonder, will you keep helping me?”
“Of course . . . What did you mean, if something happens to Preston?”
“Such as Harry Frost, your insanely jealous former husband, murdering your new husband.”
“What are you saying?”
Marco reached over and turned back the sleeve of her blouse, uncovering the bandaged bullet wound on her forearm. “Nothing you don’t already know about the man.”
38
A LOUD, BRIGHT CARNIVAL pitched its tents near Dominguez Field, just south of Los Angeles, and was doing a roaring business from the spillover of the quarter-million spectators who thronged to cheer the arrival of the last two contestants for the Whiteway Cup and send them off to Fresno in the morning.
Eustace Weed was sick with fear over the impending order to contaminate Isaac Bell’s aeroplane fuel and had no desire to go to a carnival. But Mr. Bell insisted that “all work and no play made Jack a dull boy.” He backed up this observation with five dollars’ spending money and strict orders not to bring any change back from the midway. A friend of Mr. Bell’s, a guy Eustace’s age named Dash who’d been hanging around, placing a lot of bets on the race, ever since Illinois, walked over with Eustace from the rail yard and promised they’d meet up later to walk back to the support train.
Eustace won a teddy bear by knocking over wooden milk bottles with a baseball. He was debating mailing it to Daisy or delivering it in person—as if somehow everything would turn out fine—when the toothless old barker who handed him his prize whispered hoarsely, “You’re on, Eustace.”
“What?”
“Tomorrow morning. Drop it in Bell’s gasoline tank right before he takes off.”
“What if he sees me?”
“Palm it when you fill the tank so he don’t.”
“But he’s sharp as all heck. He might see me.”
The toothless old guy patted Eustace’s shoulder in a friendly way and said, “Listen, Eustace, I don’t know what this is about and I don’t want to. All I know is, the fellows who told me to pass you the message are as bad as they get. So I’m advising you, whoever this sharp Bell is, he better not see you.”
The carnival had a Ferris wheel in the middle. It looked eighty feet tall, and Eustace wondered would they leave Daisy alone if he rode to the top and killed himself by jumping off. Just then, Dash showed up.
“What happened? Lose all your money? You look miserable.”
“I’m O.K.”
“Hey, you won a teddy bear.”
“For my girl.”
“What’s her name?”
“Daisy.”
“Say, if you married her, she’d be Daisy Weed,” Dash joked like it was a new idea. Then he asked if Eustace was hungry and insisted on buying him a sausage and a beer that went down like sawdust and vinegar.
TWO HARD-FACED MEN with hooded eyes were waiting for Isaac Bell outside the Eagle Special’s hangar car. They were dressed in slouch hats, shirts with dirty collars, four-in-hand ties loose at the neck, and dark sack suits bulging with sidearms. One man had his arm in a sling that was noticeably fresher and whiter than his shirt, as was the bandage on his companion’s forehead. Josephine’s detective-mechanicians were eyeing them closely, scrutiny the two men returned with sullen bravado.
“Remember us, Mr. Bell?”
“Griggs and Bottomley. You look like you tangled with a locomotive.”
“Feel that way, too,” Griggs admitted.
Bell shook their hands, taking Bottomley’s left in deference to his sling, and told the detective-mechanicians, “They’re O.K., boys, Tom Griggs and Ed Bottomley, Southern Pacific rail dicks.”
The Van Dorns looked down their noses at the railroad police, who commonly represented the bottom of the private detective heap, until Bell added, “If you remember the Glendale wreck, Griggs and Bottomley were instrumental in getting to the bottom of it. What’s up, boys?”
“We had a hunch you’d be the Van Dorn ramrodding the Josephine case.”
Bell nodded. “Not something I want to read in the newspaper, but I am. And I have a funny feeling, based on the evidence of recent ministrations by the medicos, that you’re going to tell me you ran into Harry Frost.”
“Ed plugged him dead center,” said Griggs. “Gut-shot him. Didn’t even slow him down.”
“He wears a ‘bulletproof ’ vest.”
“Heard of them,” said Griggs. “I didn’t know they worked.”
“We do now,” observed Bottomley.
“Where did this happen?”
“Burbank. Dispatcher wired us someone was busting into a maintenance shop. Thieving louse was just piling into a motortruck when we got there. Louse opened fire. We shot back. He walked straight at us, walloped me in the head, and shot Tom in the arm.”
“By the time we could see straight,” said Bottomley, “he was gone. Found the motortruck in the morning. Empty.”
“What did he steal?”
“Five fifty-pound crates of dynamite, some blasting caps, and a coil of fuse,” answered Griggs.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Bell. “He loves his dynamite.”
“Sure, Mr. Bell. But what has Tom and me racking our brains is how’s he’s fixing to blow up a flying machine.”
“The race is headed to Fresno in the morning,” answered Bell. “I’ll telephone Superintendent Watt, tell him what you boys turned up, and ask him to set the entire California division of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police to inspecting main-line bridges and trestles for sabotage.”
“But flying machines don’t use bridges.”
“Their support trains do,” Bell explained. “And just between us, at this point in the race, after four thousand miles, the mechanicians and spare parts in
