The Race

“Will she change her mind?”

“Only if she were to fear that she would definitely not win the race.”

“Because she wouldn’t win the fifty thousand dollars, and Preston is rich?”

“You should have seen her eyes light up when I told her that if she wins inventors will give her aeroplanes. I don’t think she ever thought of that before. It’s like she doesn’t think very far ahead. She’ll do anything she has to to keep herself in flying machines. Including marrying Preston. But only for the machines. She’s not the kind of girl who wants a bunch of kids, jewels, and houses.”

“Which reminds me,” asked Isaac Bell, taking Marion in his arms, “when are you going to marry me?”

Marion looked at the emerald on her finger. Then she smiled into his eyes. She traced his golden mustache with the tip of her finger and kissed him firmly on his lips. “The moment you absolutely insist. You know I would do anything for you. But until then, I am very, very happy and totally content to be your fiancee.”

THE KANSAN WIND howled all that day and through the night and into the next morning.

With no one flying anywhere, Andy Moser took the opportunity to completely disassemble Bell’s Gnome and put it back together, cleaned, polished, tuned, and tweaked.

Joe Mudd’s bricklayers, masons, plasterers, and locomotive firemen tore the Liberator’s engine down into small pieces and finally isolated the cracked copper tube that was the source of the oil leak which kept turning the red machine black.

Russian Dmitri Platov directed Steve Stevens’s mechanicians in another futile effort to permanently synchronize the biplane’s twin motors. When Stevens complained rudely and threatened to dock everyone’s salary, the usually easygoing thermo engine inventor stalked away to help Josephine take the head off her Antoinette to replace a leaky gasket.

Isaac Bell watched them. Platov kept talking to her in an urgent, low voice. Bell wondered whether she was discussing Whiteway’s proposal with the Russian – an odd thought, but their conversation seemed so intense. Whenever he drifted close to overhear, they stopped talking.

“ WHY IS DETECTIVE BELL LURKING?” asked Marco Celere, giving Bell a friendly wave with his Dmitri Platov slide rule.

“He’s looking out for me.”

“Surely he is not afraid for your safety in the presence of kindly Platov?”

“I doubt he’s afraid of anything,” said Josephine.

Celere began chiseling the old head gasket off Josephine’s engine block. “You are somewhat prickly today, my dear.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“Starting with Mr. Whiteway’s proposal?”

“What do you think?” she retorted sullenly.

“I think you should marry him.”

“Marco!”

“I’m serious.”

“Marco, that’s disgusting. How could you want me to marry another man?”

“He’s more than ‘another man.’ He’s the richest newspaper publisher in America. He, and his money, could be very helpful to you. And me.”

“What good will it do us if I’m married to him?”

“You would leave him for me, when the time is right.”

“Marco, it makes me sick to think you would want me to be with him.”

“Well, I’d expect you to postpone the honeymoon until after the race. Surely you could plead the necessity to concentrate on winning.”

“What about the wedding night?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

THE WINDS DROPPED. The Weather Bureau published reports that it might be calm for a few hours. Late in the afternoon, the racers swarmed off the Morris County Fairgrounds. Before dark, all alighted safely in Wichita, where Preston Whiteway strode dramatically into the glare of Marion Morgan’s Picture World Cooper-Hewitt mercury-arc lamps.

Marion’s operators were cranking two movie cameras, the second being an expense Whiteway had refused to bear until now despite Marion’s insistence that two cameras would create exciting shifts of view that would draw bigger audiences. She had one camera aimed at the publisher, the other trained to capture the reactions of the newspaper reporters.

Tomorrow, Whiteway announced, would be an official off day. It would not count against the fifty-day limit because, “Tomorrow I am going to throw the biggest party the state of Kansas has ever seen to celebrate my engagement to Miss Josephine Josephs – America’s Sweetheart of the Air.”

Marion Morgan looked up from her station between the cameras to lock astonished gazes with Isaac Bell. Bell shook his head in disbelief.

A San Francisco Inquirer correspondent had been primed to call out, “When’s the wedding, Mr. Whiteway, sir?” Other Whiteway employees chorused, as they had been instructed to, “Do we have to wait until the race is over?”

“Josephine wouldn’t hear of it,” Whiteway boomed back heartily. “At my beautiful bride’s special request we’re having a Texas-sized wedding in the great city of Fort Worth’s North Side Coliseum, which is known far and wide as ‘the most opulent and dynamic pavilion in the entire Western Hemisphere.’ We’ll be married the moment the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup and fifty thousand dollars flies into Fort Worth, Texas.”

Marion flashed Bell a private grin and mouthed the word “Shameless.”

Bell grinned back, “Unabashedly.”

But there was no denying that when “booming” his air race, Preston Whiteway could lather up the public hotter than P. T. Barnum, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Mark Twain combined.

The only question was, why had Josephine changed her mind? Her times were improving, often surpassing the others. And her flying machine was running beautifully. She had no reason to fear she couldn’t win the race.

32

INVESTIGATE DMITRI PLATOV,

Isaac Bell wired Van Dorn researchers in Chicago and New York. He was sure that the Russian inventor had somehow influenced Josephine to marry Preston Whiteway. Why Platov would want her to marry Whiteway was an enigma. But what intrigued the tall detective as much was how Platov had the power to change Josephine’s mind about a decision as deeply important and intensely personal as marriage.

Bell could not ignore such mystery about a man who had the run of the air race infields and was welcomed in every hangar car. Particularly since Dmitri Platov had volunteered to fill in for Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s murdered mechanician days before the Englishman’s propeller broke loose and smashed him into a Kansas creek. And if there was any one mechanician in the race who knew his business, it was Platov.

The researchers’ preliminary report, wired back in half a day, was baffling.

The only information on Dmitri Platov was found in Van Dorn files that contained newspaper clippings about the Whiteway Cup preparations at Belmont Park, and Isaac Bell’s own reports from the infield. Similarly, newspaper reporters had described, with varying degrees of accuracy, Platov’s revolutionary thermo engine, but only in articles about its destruction in the accident that had killed Steve Stevens’s chief mechanician.

Bell pondered the meaning of such a lack of information. It jibed with Danielle Di Vecchio’s assertion that