“Spur-of-the-moment?”
“Whenever I like,” she smiled back.
Bell said, “I would like to meet your father.”
“How should I introduce you?” Nellie asked. “Father will not cotton to a private detective investigating his corporation.”
“I’m not on the commission case anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long story,” said Bell.
“We have time for a long story. It’s six hours to New York.”
“Let’s just say it won’t be an official visit,” Isaac Bell lied.
Only part a lie. The chance to observe Spike Hopewell’s former partner in his own home would be absolutely official, but it would not require much pretense to act the part of a man who desired to visit Bill Matters’ daughter. Either daughter.
“Why don’t you introduce me as a gentleman caller?”
“Father won’t believe you. He knows I am not the sort of woman who sits at home waiting for gentleman callers.”
“Then tell him I’m a man hoping for a ride in your balloon.”
“You can ride in my balloon anytime you’ll make a speech for women’s votes.”
“Actually, I rode in a balloon once, in the circus. Is that where you discovered balloons? In the circus?”
“I prefer theaters to circuses. They’re more fantastical.”
“I don’t agree. I ran away to a circus when I was a boy.”
“You must tell me about the circus sometime.”
“How about now?”
“Spur-of-the-moment?”
“Whatever you like.”
“I would like to eat dinner,” said Nellie Matters. “I’m hungry, and it’s my turn to take you.”
At Central Station, the twelve-year-old boys peddling the Washington Post Late Extra Edition were shrill as a flock of jays.
“Tourist falls from Washington Monument.”
“Extra! Extra! Tourist falls!”
Archie Abbott tossed pennies for the paper and ran to the horse cabs. Mr. Van Dorn had sent a wire care of the Danville, Virginia, stationmaster ordering him to report the instant his train pulled into Washington. Top hands like Isaac Bell took direct summons from the Boss for granted, but this was his first one ever.
“Willard Hotel. Fast as you can.”
Upon arrival, he dashed up the stairs into the Van Dorn offices.
“The Boss wired my train at Danville. Said to come right over.”
The front desk man spoke calmly into a voice tube. A blasé apprentice walked Archie into Joseph Van Dorn’s office. With his coat off and his sleeves rolled up his bulging forearms, Van Dorn, Archie thought, looked less the company proprietor than a prosperous bricklayer.
“Abbott, you’re a Princeton man.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve got something right up your alley.”
“How can I help, sir?”
Van Dorn nodded at the extra edition that Archie had tucked under his arm. “The ‘tourist’ who fell from the memorial shaft was not a tourist, and I don’t believe he fell. The papers don’t have it yet, but it was Clyde Lapham.”
“Standard Oil?”
“Rumor has it, he jumped. If he did, I want to know why. If he didn’t jump, I want to know who helped him out the window.”
“May I ask, sir, what makes you think he didn’t jump?”
“Our investigation has established that not one of the Standard Oil Gang has a guilty bone in his body. On the remote chance that one was ever stricken with remorse, it wouldn’t be Clyde Lapham. He had no doubt that making money was his divine right. Something’s fishy. That’s where you come in.”
“Yes, sir,” Archie said, wondering what it had to do with being a Princeton graduate.
“They won’t let our men near the monument. Were it a Navy facility, I would have no trouble gaining access. But I am not so well connected with the Army, and I’ve run head-on into a snob of a Colonel Dan Egan, who looks down on private detectives as not worthy of his exalted friendship. Do you get my drift?”
Archie was suddenly on firm ground, with intimate knowledge of the fine distinctions of the social order. “Yes, sir. Army officers are more likely to be ill-bred and have chips on their shoulders than their Navy counterparts.”
“This particular officer is carrying a chip bigger than a redwood. Fortunately, I’ve learned he has a son attending Princeton. I’m betting he’ll be mightily impressed by the fact that you matriculated, as well as by your manner, which is less that of a private detective than a privileged layabout. Not that I’m suggesting you lay about, necessarily, but I suspect you can act the part.”
“I’ll rehearse,” Archie said drily.
“You don’t have time,” Van Dorn shot back. “Colonel Egan is at the monument right now, in the middle of the night, leading what the Army optimistically calls an inquiry. Get over there and sweet-talk your way in before they trample the evidence and insert words in the mouths of witnesses.”
Archie doubted he’d make much headway walking up to a full colonel and saying he went to Princeton. He ventured, “This might require more than ‘sweet talking,’ Mr. Van Dorn.”
The Boss stared, his eyes suddenly hard. “The agency pays you handsomely to do ‘more than sweet talking.’”
“I’ll do my best.”
“See that you do.”
14
Joseph Van Dorn was still at his desk when Archie reported back, shortly before midnight.
“Suicide or murder?”
“It’s more complicated than you might expect, Mr. Van Dorn.”
The glower Van Dorn leveled at him reminded Archie Abbott of an encounter on safari with an East African rhinoceros. “Let me decide what I expect. In a word, ‘suicide’ or ‘murder’?”
“In a word,” said Archie, “the Army was ‘hoodwinked.’”
Joseph Van Dorn, so wintery a moment earlier, broke into a delighted smile — as Archie knew he would. Beaming at his old U.S. Marine Corps NCO sword, which hung from his coat tree, the Boss asked, “What did the Army fall for this time?”
Isaac Bell doubted there was room in Nellie Matters’ exciting life for a boyfriend. She was great company at dinner in the Royal’s beautiful dining car, entertaining him, and eavesdroppers at nearby tables, with tales of her suffragist travels, balloon mishaps, and rivalries with suffragettes—“the dread Amanda Faire”—while spinning like cotton candy her newly invented New Woman’s Flyover. By the time they got off the train in Jersey City, the suffragist’s publicity stunt details were in place. All that remained was to raise the money for a hundred balloons, a prospect she thought not at all daunting.
But on the railroad ferry across the Hudson to New York City, Bell sensed a sudden shift toward the romantic. He credited the beautiful lights of the downtown skyscrapers and the chill wind they braved on deck. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and Nellie huddled close. Just as the boat landed, she curled deeper in his arm. “I don’t usually meet men I like. I don’t mean to say that I dislike men. But I just don’t find most of them that likeable. Do you know what I mean?”
“No,” said Isaac Bell. “What is it you don’t find likeable?”
“Is that a detective trait to always ask questions?”
“Yes.”
“You’re as bad as my sister the reporter.”
A hansom cab whisked them across town. She held his hand, and, all too soon, the cab pulled up to the Matters town house in Gramercy Park, a quiet oasis of a neighborhood that predated the Civil War. Just across the narrow park was one of Archie Abbott’s clubs, The Players. The cab clattered off. Bell walked Nellie to the front door. The house was made of brick with gleaming black shutters.