“Will you be back in time for my Flyover?”
“I’ll do my best.”
Edna called after him. “What do you mean by a ‘madman’?”
Bell stopped in the doorway. “A person without conscience. Without fear.”
“Who ‘banished fear,’ like Nellie says?”
Bell answered, “All any of us can really know about a madman is that he will be unpredictable.”
“If that’s true, how do you catch such a person?”
“Never give up,” said Bell, but stepped into the night with his mind fixed on a deadlier device. Be unpredictable, too.
The houses on either side of Bill Matters’ Oil City mansion looked abandoned. Their yards were overgrown, their windows blank. The garden in front of the Matterses’ house was baked brown. The curtains were drawn, reminding Isaac Bell that Brigadier Mills had described Matters grieving in the dark. They could be closed against the heat. It was even hotter in western Pennsylvania than New York. The train conductor informed Isaac Bell with grim satisfaction that since weather traveled west to east, New York was soon in for “the hinges of hell.”
No one answered when he pressed the buzzer button at the front gate. He picked the lock.
No one answered his knock on the front door and he picked that lock, too.
“Anyone home?” he called up the front stairs and down a hall.
He thought he smelled a faint aroma of cooked food and worked his way back to the kitchen. It was empty, with a single skillet of congealed bacon grease sitting on the range. He checked other rooms and found the parlor with the paper theaters that Mills had mentioned. As in the other rooms, the curtains were drawn. There was no Bill Matters sitting in the dark.
The kitchen door led into the backyard, which was as big as the gardens of a country house and concealed from the streets and neighbors behind high wooden fences and dense fir trees. It was then that Bell realized the neighboring houses on either side were empty because Matters had bought and closed them, then fenced them off and added their backyards to his. He could hear the surrounding Oil City neighborhood but not see it.
There was a ramshackle quality to the place. An abandoned wooden derrick lay on its side tangled in vines next to lengths of wooden pipe almost as if Matters was contemplating a museum of early Pennsylvania oil history. He walked around the derrick and found a pond, its water thick with algae. Beside it was a marble gravestone. No name was chiseled on the stone, only an epitaph, which Isaac Bell recognized as William Shakespeare’s.
GOOD FREND FOR JESVS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE.
BLESE BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CVRST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.
From behind him, Bell heard, “Shakespeare’s not really buried here. The girls surprised me for my fortieth birthday. Raise your hands before you turn around.”
37
Isaac Bell raised his hands and turned around.
Matters was pointing his old Remington at him, and he was not alone. Rivers, the fit and remarkably unscarred old prizefighter, was holding a Smith & Wesson like a mechanical extension of his fist.
Bell addressed Matters. “They say no man is a hero to his butler. You must be the exception if Rivers gave up a cushy job in Gramercy Park to join you on the lam.”
“Mr. Matters gave me the cushy job when I was on the lam,” said Rivers. “Fair is fair.”
“Are you a murderer, too?”
“The jury thought so.”
“I’ll cover him,” said Matters. “He’s got a revolver in his shoulder holster. And if I’m not wrong, I think you’ll find a derringer in his hat.”
“Reach higher and stand very still,” said Rivers. He pocketed his gun and took the Bisley from Bell’s shoulder holster. “Fine pistol!”
“Keep it,” said Matters. “Detective Bell doesn’t need it.”
Rivers stuck it in his belt with a grin.
Bell said, “If you like that, wait ’til you see my derringer.”
Rivers knocked Bell’s hat off his head. He snatched it from the grass, dipped into the crown, and removed the miniature, custom-built single-shot derringer Dave McCoart had lent him while he built him a replacement for the two-shot Bell had lost in Russia.
“Wow! You’re a high-class walking arsenal. Look at this—”
Rivers had made two mistakes. In picking up the tall detective’s hat, he had placed himself partly between Bell and Matters. And he had already let Bell distract him. In the split second before Matters could move to clear his field of fire, Bell kicked with all his might, rocketing his left boot deep into the prizefighter’s groin. Then he dropped to the grass and reached into his right boot, drawing and casting his throwing knife in a single motion.
Bill Matters cried out in shock and pain. The heavy Remington six-shooter fell from his convulsing fingers and he stared in horrified disbelief at the razor-sharp blade that had passed between the bones of his wrist. The flat metal shaft quivered from the front of his arm and a full inch of the point protruded red and glistening from the skin on the back.
Bell picked up the Remington and brought it down like a sledgehammer on Rivers’ skull as the gasping butler tried to straighten up. Then he whirled back at Matters and landed a blow with the old pistol that knocked the oil man flat.
He had one pair of handcuffs. He secured Matters to an iron ring in the oil rig, took the guns from the unconscious Rivers, removed his whiskey flask and his bootlaces, dragged him forty feet away, and tied him to the rig by his thumbs. He returned to Matters.
“What are you going to do?” asked Matters.
“Take my knife back, to start,” said Bell. He yanked it out of his wrist, wiped the blood off on Matters’ shirt, and sheathed it back in his boot.
“I’ll bleed to death.”
“Not before you answer a heap of questions.” He screwed the cap off Rivers’ flask and poured whiskey into the wound the knife had slit. Matters sucked air. “Beats infection. Now, Bill, let’s talk.”
The rage that Bell had seen explode on the Bremen boat train flared red-hot in Matters’ eyes. Bell said, “It’s over. I’ve got you dead to rights. There is no escape. It’s time to talk. Where is your assassin?”
Slowly, the fire faded.
“Where? Where is the assassin?”
“You’re looking at him.”
“You shot your old partner Spike Hopewell? What about Albert Hill and Reed Riggs, and C. C. Gustafson in Texas?”
“Them, too.”
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“Hunting in the woods. I was a natural. Good thing, too. Bloodsucking bank foreclosed when Father died. The sheriff drove off our pigs and cows and turned my mother and me out of the home. We lived on the game I shot. Later, I ran away to the circus and a Wild West Show.”
Isaac Bell reminded Bill Matters that they had been sitting together in the Peerless with Rockefeller when the assassin fired at them in Baku.
“I paid a Cossack a thousand rubles to throw off suspicion.”
“Did you pay him to wound me or kill me?”
Matters looked Bell in the face. “Wound. My girls were sweet on you. I reckoned it might turn out well for one of them.”
“No one ever denied you were a loving father. Did you arm the Cossack with one of your Savages?”
“I didn’t have any with me. He used his own rifle.”
“Really?” said Bell. “The 1891 Russian Army Mosin is about as accurate as a pocket pistol. The short-barrel Cossack version is worse— You were never the assassin. Why are you trying to protect a hired hand with your own life?”