“Possible, but if I were them, I’d stay on the boat out at sea. Come morning, I bet we find a small dinghy hidden in the dunes that the three men not staying here rowed ashore while their driver took his position at the marina.”
“If they did that, why bother getting a room? Why not launch the attack from the beach?”
“Come on, Chief, you’ve been here enough times. The public spaces are packed with folks. They’d be spotted immediately. Sneaking down from the deserted guest hallways maintains the element of surprise.”
“Not if they just used pistols and didn’t bother with a monstrous machine gun. Talk about your overkill, right?”
“That bothers me a bit, but not if you look at it from a propaganda perspective. The notoriety Viboras Rojas would gain by such an audacious assassination more than offsets the cost of a room.”
Wilson agreed. “I can see the newspapermen milking that story for all it’s worth.”
“Headlines for weeks, and not just here but in Panama too. Real shot in the arm for the cause,” Bell said. “If you don’t mind, I want to check the dining hall again.”
“Something bothering you?”
“Well, I don’t like being shot at, for one thing, but I want to look at the attack from the gunmen’s perspective. It’s a technique that helps me see how a crime is committed.”
“Suit yourself. I’ve got to check in on my guys downstairs to see if they learned anything from the guests and staff.” Wilson tipped his blue cap and strode from the room.
Bell gave him a moment to get down the stairs and then followed. He imagined one of the gunmen, armed with a pistol, would act as a scout, making sure no one would see the machine gunner walking the halls with the four-foot weapon cradled in his arms. Their room was just a short hallway and two corners from the main stairs. Call it fifteen seconds, at a fast walk.
Once they established their path was clear, the machine gunner would rush down the hall with the others, collecting the scout as they came, with the final man likely waiting at the bottom of the staircase. He’d have to ask Renny Hart about seeing a Panamanian loitering just before the assault.
Bell rushed down the steps, imagining himself cradling the thirty-pound Lewis gun. At the foot of the stairs, they would have seen Renny Hart loitering but would have thought nothing of it until the Van Dorn man reacted. Renny had to have rushed over and managed to shout a warning before he was struck with the butt of the machine gun. The force of the blow shoved him hard against the door, and an instant later they were inside the dining room.
The doors were already open for Bell’s reconstructive walk-through, so he entered the vaulted chamber. The bodies of the two Panamanians had been taken away, though the pools of blood remained as gruesome reminders. The floor was still littered with dozens upon dozens of empty shell casings. The men with pistols had been carrying .38 revolvers, so all the brass belonged to the Lewis. Bell studied the far end of the room where he’d been sitting with Densmore and the others. The range was tricky for a pistol shot unless the shooter was an expert marksman and stood perfectly still. This gave credence to Chief Wilson’s theory that the machine gun fire was meant to keep them pinned so the other shooters could get close.
The Lewis gun had left its mark on the far wall. The woodwork was in tatters, and all the windows had been shot out. The bullet holes were all about five feet up the wall, a detail Bell presumed had to do with the weapon’s uncontrollable barrel rise when firing on full auto.
The table that had protected the party was another matter. It still leaned drunkenly against the other table they’d smashed into. It had been struck in a cluster in the center of its top a dozen times or more and yet not a single round had penetrated the inch-and-a-half-thick aged oak. Without it, Bell suspected he and Densmore and the others would be on their way to the morgue and not the two shooters he’d taken down.
By the time he was finished scouring the room for additional clues, and possible inspiration, it was almost two in the morning. The lobby was quiet. A different manager was on duty. Bell asked the man if he could reserve a long-distance line for a nine o’clock call to National Studios in Hollywood.
Trying to escape Thomas Edison’s draconian rules for using his motion picture cameras and projectors, the major East Coast studios were slowly migrating to the sleepy town just outside L.A., taking advantage of cheap land, for sets and sound stages, and the almost three hundred sunny days per year, as well as the nearby interesting geographic locations. National Studios was in the process of courting Bell’s wife, Marion, to be one of their contract directors.
Movies were mostly being made using classically trained stage actors who were used to overemoting in order for their performance to reach the back of the theater. As a result, their portrayals on-screen tended to be rather exaggerated and campy. Marion instructed her actors to downplay their craft for the more intimate medium of film. As a result, she could draw raw emotion out of an actor better than anyone working in pictures. It made her movies feel more genuine. Despite her gender, she was one of the most bankable directors in the industry.
Bell couldn’t just cable her with his change of plan. This deserved a phone call.
He reserved a second long-distance line for nine-thirty. He needed to brief Joseph Van Dorn.
Bell let himself sleep for a couple hours, rousing just before dawn. He’d long ago trained himself to operate on very little sleep for up
