“In an auto.”
“What kind?”
“Thomas Flyer.”
Bell exchanged a glance with James Dashwood. The Thomas was a rugged cross-country auto, which was why Bell had chosen them for his support train. Such a vehicle – capable of traversing bad roads and open prairie, and even straddling railroad tracks when washouts and broken ground made all else impassable – would make Frost dangerously mobile.
“Which way did he go?”
“West.”
“Saint Louis?”
Alderman Foley shrugged. “I got the impression more like Kansas City – where your air race is going, if I can believe what I read in the newspapers.”
“Is he alone?”
“He had a mechanician and a driver.”
Bell exchanged another look with Dash. There was five hundred miles of increasingly open country between Chicago and Kansas City, and Frost was prepared for the long haul.
“Both are gunmen,” Foley added.
“Names?”
“Mike Stotts and Dave Mayhew. Stotts’s the driver. Mayhew’s the mechanician. Used to be a telegrapher ’til they caught him selling horse-race results to the bookies. Telegraphers are sworn to secrecy, you know.”
“What I don’t know,” said Bell, frowning curiously at Foley, “is why you’ve turned unusually talkative all of a sudden, Alderman. Are you making this up as we go along?”
“Nope. I just know Harry ain’t coming back. I done him his last favor.”
“How do you know Frost isn’t coming back?”
“Never thought I’d see the day, but you damned Van Dorns ran him out of town.”
ISAAC BELL LED JAMES DASHWOOD into a chophouse to feed him supper while the kid reported what he had discovered in San Francisco.
“Last you wired me, Dash, you found that Celere and Di Vecchio were both in San Francisco last summer. Celere had arrived earlier, working as a translator, then built a biplane he subsequently sold to Harry Frost, who shipped it back to the Adirondacks and hired Celere to work on Josephine’s flying machines at their camp. Both Celere and Di Vecchio had fled Italy one step ahead of their creditors. Di Vecchio killed himself. What new do we know?”
“They got in a fight.”
Two immigrant Italian fishermen, Dashwood explained, had overheard a long and angry shouting match in the street outside their boardinghouse. Di Vecchio accused Marco Celere of stealing his wing-strengthening design.
“I already know that,” said Bell. “Celere would claim it was the other way around. What else?”
“Di Vecchio started it, shouting that Celere copied his entire machine. Celere shouted back that if that was true, why had the Italian Army bought his machines and not Di Vecchio’s?”
“What did Di Vecchio answer?”
“He said that Celere had poisoned the market.”
Bell nodded impatiently. This, too, he had already heard from Danielle. “Then what?”
“Then he started yelling that Celere better keep his hands off his daughter. Her name is-”
“Danielle!” said Bell. “What did keeping his hands off his daughter have to do with the Italian Army buying his aeroplane design?”
“Di Vecchio shouted, ‘Find another woman to do your dirty work.’”
“What dirty work?”
“He used a word that my translators found very hard to repeat.”
“A technical word.
“Not technical. The girl knew what it meant, but she was afraid to say it in front of Mother Superior.”
“Mother Superior?” Bell echoed, fixing his protege with a wintery eye. “Dash, what have you been up to?”
“They were nuns.”
“Nuns?”
“You always told me people want to talk. But you have to make them comfortable. The girl was the only Italian translator I could get the fishermen to talk to. Once they started telling the story, they wouldn’t shut up. I think because the nun was so beautiful.”
Isaac Bell reached across the tablecloth to slap Dashwood on the shoulder. “Well done!”
“But finding her was what took me so long. Anyway, she was translating great guns until that word stopped her dead. I pleaded with them. I even offered to pray with them, and she finally whispered, ‘Gigolo.’”
“Di Vecchio accused Marco Celere of being a gigolo?”
Bell was hardly surprised, recalling that soon after Josephine and Harry Frost appeared in San Francisco the young bride had persuaded her husband to buy Celere’s biplane. “Did he mention any specifics?”
“Di Vecchio said that Celere persuaded an Italian Army general’s daughter to get him to buy his machine. From what they heard, the fisherman thought it wasn’t the first time he’d gotten women to make deals for him.”
“Did he accuse Celere of taking money from women?”
“There was some sort of engine he bought at a Paris air meet. It sounded like a woman put up the money. But in San Francisco, he was broke again. I think the Army deal fell through.”
“The machine smashed with the general on it.”
“
“Did Di Vecchio accuse Celere of trying a gigolo stunt with Danielle?”
“That’s what Di Vecchio was warning him off about. ‘Don’t touch my daughter.’”
“Sounds like your fishermen stumbled onto a heck of a shout fest.”
“They didn’t exactly stumble. They lived there, too.”
Bell watched the young detective’s face closely. “You’ve turned up a lot of information, Dash, maybe enough to make it worth the wait. Did you get a lucky break or did you know what you were looking for?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Bell. Don’t you see? They were arguing outside the hotel where Di Vecchio died. The night he died.”
27
ISAAC BELL FIXED HIS PROTEGE with an intense gaze, his mind leaping to the possibility that an angry argument had ended in murder. “The
“The same night,” answered James Dashwood. “In the same house where Di Vecchio asphyxiated himself by blowing out a gaslight and leaving the gas on.”
“Are you certain he killed himself?”
“I looked into the possibility. That’s why I thought I should report face-to-face, to explain why I’m thinking what I’m thinking.”
“Go on,” Bell urged.
“I was already investigating the suicide, like you ordered, when I heard about the shouting match. You told me about Marco Celere’s original name being Prestogiacomo. I discovered he was staying there under that name. You always say you hate coincidences, so I reckoned there had to be a connection. I spoke with the San Francisco coroner. He admitted that they don’t do much investigating into how an Italian immigrant happens to die in San Francisco. There’s a lot of them in the city, but they keep to themselves. So I wondered, what if I pretended that
