Joseph Van Dorn stepped out of a Tenderloin District saloon that catered to actors and found the sidewalk blocked by a broad-shouldered hard case wearing a blue suit and a derby.
“Care to tell me why the founder of a private detective agency, with field offices in every city worth its name and foreign outposts in London, Paris, and Berlin, has spent two full days personally sleuthing around my precinct, asking about an actor manager who fell off a lady’s fire escape last October?”
“Keeping my hand in. How are you, Captain?”
The old friends shook hands warmly.
“How are you making out?”
“Better than your boys did in October.”
Honest Mike Coligney bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The husband everybody said was chasing Mr. Medick claims he wasn’t.”
“What do you expect him to say? A man died. He didn’t want to get charged with manslaughter.”
“He also says he wasn’t cuckolded.”
“That’s not what he said last October.”
“He thought he’d been cuckolded at the time, but now he says he was set up. Some ‘friend’ sent him a letter: ‘Dear sir, I thought you should know that your wife is running around on you.’”
“Do you believe him?”
“His wife swore she never cheated on him.”
“Do you believe her?”
“She swore it on her deathbed.”
“What deathbed? She couldn’t be older than thirty-five.”
“TB. Gone in March.”
Mike Coligney crossed himself. “Mother Mary . . . So what was Medick doing on her fire escape?”
“He got a letter, too. Supposedly from the lady.”
“I remember the letter. Along the line of ‘Come up the fire escape, I’ll let you in my back window.’”
“She swore she never wrote it,” said Van Dorn. “Same deathbed.”
“Who did?”
“Whoever threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape.”
“Except for one thing,” said Coligney. “Detective Division matched that letter to a typewriter in the lady’s office where she worked.”
“There are two ways of looking at the typewriter,” said Joseph Van Dorn. “Either she lied on her deathbed . . . or the person who threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape typed the letter on that typewriter.”
Coligney knew that and changed the subject. “Medick was supposed to be afraid of heights. Where’d he get the nerve to climb four stories of fire escapes?”
Joseph Van Dorn rubbed his red whiskers, took off his hat, and ran a big hand over his bald scalp. He blinked, and his deep-set Celtic eyes grew dark with melancholy. “According to the lady’s poor devil of a husband, she was a woman worth taking chances for.”
“So Medick knew her.”
“Hoped to know her better,” said Van Dorn, “encouraged by a letter written by someone who knew his weakness for other men’s wives.”
“How come no witness ever saw that ‘someone’?”
“But they did see him,” said Van Dorn. “He just didn’t look like someone who could throw a fit young actor off a fire escape.”
“What are you talking about, Joe?”
“I spoke with three people who remember an old man hanging around her building. One thought he was a tramp, another a ragpicker, another just a drunk. They all believed he was harmless.”
Isaac Bell read Van Dorn’s wire the night that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde closed in San Francisco.
FIRE ESCAPE
OLD MAN
ACTOR
45
LOS ANGELES
“In all my years on the stage,” groaned Isabella Cook, “I cannot recall a closing-night cast party the equal of last night’s. Nor a hangover more vicious. Oh, Isaac, what were we thinking?”
“Yours is not the only hangover on the train, if that’s any consolation.”
“How is yours?”
“About what I deserve,” Bell answered. In fact, with an awful sense he was running out of time, he had sipped dark cider in Manhattan cocktail glasses while he kept a clear, but ultimately fruitless, eye on Jackson Barrett, John Buchanan, and Henry Young.
“It’s your wife’s fault. The prospect of her movie obliterated closing-night blues. Everyone’s excited. I saw love affairs springing up all around me, and couples who had ceased to speak making cow eyes . . . Would someone tell the engineer to stop clattering the wheels?”
“We’re almost there.”
“I never thought I would be so happy to get off a train in Los Angeles . . .” She cast a dubious eye out the window. “Sunny Los Angeles? I see nothing but storm-swept orange groves and sodden cattle. Do you suppose this rain will follow us all the way to Hollywood?”
“Marion has rented a studio, just in case.”
When Bell spoke long-distance with her last night, she had ended her report with a grim, “But it’s still raining.”
No one had to light a fire under Joel Wallace.
Fourteen retired chorus girls—since Isaac Bell left London—fourteen strikeouts. Then all of a sudden, his new friend, Dolly, who he had met on this wild-goose chase, said that when her mother was in the chorus in Tra-la-la Tosca way back in 1891, she had known a girl who went with a boy named Spelvin.
Wallace waited for them in a tearoom on Piccadilly, around the corner from the Van Dorn field office. In they came, all spiffed-up for Central London. One look at her mother told Wallace that her daughter would age very nicely. Mother paused to reminisce with the tearoom manager, and Dolly forged ahead to Wallace’s table.
“I brought me mum, like you asked. She thinks you’re going to marry me.”
“Dolly, you know I’m not the marrying kind. I never lied, did I? Told you the night we met.”
“Well, you better not tell Mum that or she won’t talk to you.”
Joel Wallace’s cable found Isaac Bell in the rain-swept Los Angeles Arcade Depot rail yards, when Bell’s car rolled in on the back of the Jekyll & Hyde Special. It was a potent reminder that Joseph Van Dorn had tapped the right man to ramrod the London field office.
SPELVIN CON 1891
IMPERSONATING ITALIAN FENCING TEACHER
GIRLFRIEND DISAPPEARED
SPELVIN LAST SEEN LIVERPOOL STATION
ON MY WAY TO LIVERPOOL
It was one thing to impersonate an Italian, thought Bell, the Whitechapel barber Davy
