The Thief

stagecoaches— You see what I mean, it’s technical, but that’s what I was thinking.”

“Did you wonder why Irina hired you?”

“No.”

“You weren’t at all surprised?”

“There are many women in the movie business, but more men, and I’ve found that women do like to work with women. Also, she knows that I’ve made topical films, so I’m comfortable taking pictures on the fly. Why do you ask?”

Bell smiled. “I believe you know my feelings about coincidences.”

“You dislike them, intensely.”

“Irina works for a firm that has caught my interest in the Talking Pictures case.”

“Imperial. Where you have Clyde set up.”

“But Imperial turns out to be something of an enigma. They’re spending a lot more money than they earn. No one knows where they get the money. They’ve raised an army of private detectives who are driving the Edison bulls out of Los Angeles.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“They seem to be doing it to court the independents.”

“That’s a brilliant way to ensure plenty of fresh product.”

“And suddenly they’re offering my wife a job. I have to wonder.”

“Oh. Well, put your mind to rest on that score. Irina didn’t telephone to offer me the job.”

“She didn’t?”

“She telephoned wondering when I might be coming to Los Angeles and to say hello and to ask my recommendation for someone to take pictures for The Iron Horse. I mentioned a few people who I thought would be up to it — Christina Bialobrzesky, for one. You remember her?”

“The ‘Polish countess’ with the New Orleans accent.”

“Irina thanked me, and then just as we were saying good-bye, almost as an afterthought, she asked would I have any interest in it.”

“Why didn’t she ask you first?”

“She assumed I was tied up with Preston. I assured her I was not. At any rate, to make a long story short, here I am — a genuine coincidence.”

“I am relieved to hear that,” said Isaac Bell. “But just to be on the safe side, how would you like to be a genuine detective?”

“Under you?”

“So to speak,” Bell returned her smile.

“What would it entail?”

“Keeping alert — with an eye to your own safety — to note anything out of the ordinary.”

“I must say that everything Irina told me about The Iron Horse was absolutely what I would expect of a firm that is making moving pictures.”

“I want to know what they are doing in addition to making moving pictures.”

* * *

The Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Los Angeles field office was located in a two-story warehouse on Second Street on the edge of a section devoted to lumber, hardware, machinery, and paint. While the Los Angeles detectives longed loudly for as stylish an address as their counterparts enjoyed in New York, Chicago, and Washington, their comings and goings went unobserved by the wrong element thanks to a variety of entrances through back alleys and neighboring businesses.

Texas Walt Hatfield sauntered in, flicking sawdust off his boots with his bandanna, as Isaac Bell arrived scraping metal shavings off his. Both men were dressed to work in guise, Hatfield in cowboy gear and Bell in flying machine helmet and goggles, with a wide motorcycle belt cinched around his waist.

Hatfield reported nothing new or suspicious in the penthouse cinematography studio stages atop the Imperial Building. Bell had little to add. The picture taking for The Brewer’s Daughter had been wrapped up this afternoon, and he had already been offered another job by the same Imperial director on an as-yet-untitled picture involving a motorcycle and a runaway freight train.

“Let me ask you something, Walt.”

“Shoot,” said Walt, suddenly all ears because Isaac Bell did not usually preface questions with “Let me ask you something.” Something out of the ordinary was on the chief investigator’s mind.

“At any time when you are up in that studio, did you get a funny feeling?”

“What sort of funny feeling?”

“That you were being…” Bell stopped talking and looked the tall Texan in the face. This was not a question he would ask most detectives. But Walt Hatfield was a natural-born hunter who had been raised by Comanche Indians. Of the Van Dorns Isaac Bell had worked with, Hatfield was by far the most sensitive to his surroundings.

“Watched?” asked Hatfield.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“Shore did feel watched, now that you mention it. Didn’t pay it much mind at the moment, what with fellows cranking cameras.”

Bell’s eyes were suddenly burning.

“You, too, Isaac?”

“I had a feeling.”

“Where?”

“The recording room on the fourth floor.”

“How about in Clyde’s laboratory?”

“Possibly there, but not as strong a sensation.”

“Reckon someone’s peeping through a judas hole in the room next door?”

“One way to find out.”

Bell stepped across the hall to see Larry Saunders, the recently promoted head of the Los Angeles office. Saunders, a trim, stylish man, wore a white linen suit like Bell’s, for the warm city. But unlike Bell’s, which was artfully tailored to conceal a good-sized automatic and a spare magazine, with room for a sleeve gun and pocket pistols when the occasion called for it, Saunders’s suit was cut so tightly that the Los Angeles detective would be hard-pressed to hide a weapon larger than a stiletto. Saunders’s hat rack held a white derby and several silk scarves. The derby, Bell hoped, had room for a derringer. Saunders’s patent leather pumps certainly did not.

“Larry, who would you recommend I send over to City Hall to inspect the architect’s plans for the Imperial Building?”

“Holian.”

“I think I’ve met him. Big-in-the-belly fellow who looks like a saloonkeeper?”

“He’s the one, though I’ve seen Tim do a credible job of imitating a brothel bouncer, too.”

“I don’t want this getting back to the owner of the building.”

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Bell. Holian’s got the city clerks eating out of his hand. There isn’t a body buried in Los Angeles he couldn’t jab with a spade. They’ll do as he asks and do it with a smile.” Saunders rubbed his mustache, a pencil-thin affair that Texas Walt had likened, privately, to a “dance hall gal’s eyebrow,” and said, “It wouldn’t hurt if Holian could share a little wealth while he’s poking around.”

“Charge as much as he needs against the Talking Pictures account. Tell him I want layouts of the fourth floor, eighth floor, and penthouse — every room and every closet.”

35

Isaac Bell received a long, speculative report from Grady Forrer by telegraph, which was a hundred times faster than mail but lacked the subtlety and precision of a letter and offered little opportunity for the give-and-take