Dashwood played the devil’s advocate as Bell had taught him to. “Based on what?”
“Based on Pauline’s report that the Comintern sent a shipload of grain alcohol to The Bahamas. Nassau is only a hundred eighty miles from Miami, Bimini’s even closer, and Florida is a booze funnel into the entire South. He’ll have New York in the East, Detroit in the Midwest, and Florida in the South.
“At that point, he can paste a new label on millions of bottles—‘Genuine Old Cominterm, America’s Favorite.’”
Isaac Bell paced impatiently.
“Whisky haulers have heard about a booze tunnel under the Detroit River. Strong-arm men have heard about this tunnel. The cops have heard about this tunnel. Crooks have heard about this tunnel. Gangsters have heard about this tunnel. Wouldn’t you think that Detroit newspapermen have not only heard about this tunnel but would also have some inkling of where it is?”
“It’s a big story,” Scudder Smith agreed. He was toying with his hat and looked like a man who was reconsidering not drinking.
“You’re picking up bar tabs for every reporter in town,” Bell reminded him. “One of them must be writing the big story.”
“No editor would run it. It would get the reporter shot — which wouldn’t trouble most editors excessively — but it could get the editor himself shot, too, and that possibility would trouble him.”
Isaac Bell did not smile.
“Funny enough,” said Scudder. “You know who’s really looking for the tunnel?”
“Volstead officers,” said Bell. “The payoffs would make them rich men.”
“Or dead.”
Bell said, “Go back to the pressrooms, go back to the blind pigs where newspapermen hang out. There must be some cub reporter out there scrambling for a scoop that would make his name.”
Scudder Smith came back much sooner than Bell had expected.
“Now what?”
Scudder grinned ear to ear. “I have redeemed myself.”
“Did you find a reporter who found the tunnel?”
“No. But I found several reporters who know who might have shot Sam Rosenthal.”
“Might have?”
“I don’t know who actually pulled the trigger, but I definitely know who replaced him. Abe Weintraub, like we guessed. Admiral Abe.”
“I thought he disappeared. I thought he was dead.”
“So did I. So did they. But then I caught a rumor that the admiral was seen gumming his supper at the Hotel Wolverine.”
“‘Gumming’?”
“Apparently someone — an amazingly formidable someone — knocked Abe’s teeth out. I checked. I found a Wolverine waiter who said he ate sweetbreads. Sweetbreads and champagne. Sweetbreads are expensive. A meal you eat when you’re celebrating. As if you became the new Purples’ boss.”
“And easy to chew,” said Bell. “Any idea who knocked his teeth out?”
“Everyone agrees that whoever did it must be dead by now.”
“Was he dining alone?”
“That’s the best part. I showed the waiter Prince André’s photograph. He thought Prince André might be the guy Abe was eating sweetbreads with.”
Bell thought that this was too much to hope for. The most that Bill Lynch and Harold Harding had conceded, when shown the out-of-focus photograph, was a dubious “maybe” that it was the bootlegger who had commissioned Black Bird.
He asked, “Why was the waiter so talkative?”
“He needed money to leave Detroit.”
“Why?”
“I persuaded him, after I suggested that Abe might be the new boss of the Purples, that any association with Admiral Abe could be dangerous for his health. Including — or especially — witnessing who he eats sweetbreads with. Rightly or wrongly, the waiter decided to start over a thousand miles away. I — or, strictly speaking, Mr. Van Dorn — provided the means.”
“But it’s not impossible that the waiter told you what he thought you wanted to hear,” said Bell.
“May I suggest,” said Scudder, “that we have a field office full of valuable men to follow up on this?”
James Dashwood telegraphed on the private wire that he had traced Fern Hawley’s railcar to a Palm Beach, Florida, siding that served an oceanfront estate seventy miles north of Miami. Neither the car nor the estate was owned by her.
PALACE CAR RENTED.
ESTATE RENTED.
FERN FLOWN.
There was nothing innately suspicious about renting cars and estates. She could, indeed, be setting up early for the winter in Florida, where more and more of the rich headed when the weather got cold. Typically, though, society people of Fern’s means were building elaborate homes in Palm Beach and Miami. She could be testing the waters. But for what? Winter holidays or Marat Zolner’s empire?
The answer came in a contrite wire from Dashwood.
MISSED BLACK BIRD FLATCAR YESTERDAY MIAMI.
“Couple of prohibition dicks asking to see you, Isaac,” said Texas Walt.
Bell looked up from the sandwiches he was sharing at the kitchen chopping block with Leon Randolph, the Texas Walt’s Roadhouse cook whom he knew from the days Leon had cooked on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe’s Overland Limited.
“How did they know to find me here?”
“I wondered, too. I persuaded them to leave their artillery with the hatcheck.”
The bar was empty at this hour but for a bartender who was polishing a sawed-off shotgun.
Bell’s stern features darkened with such anger when he recognized the Volstead agents that Texas Walt’s hands would have strayed toward his Colts if the bartender didn’t already have them covered.
“We got to talk, Mr. Bell.”
Tom Clayton and Ed Ellis, the former Protective Services house detectives Bell had fired from the Hotel Gotham, looked prosperous. Their cheeks were pink from the barbershop, their hair slick. They wore signet rings on their fingers and remained somewhat handsome, despite imperfectly healed broken noses.
“We’ve already bribed your superiors,” Bell answered coldly.
“We know,” Ed Ellis said. “Bureau chief told us Texas Walt’s is hands-off.”
“It should be for what it cost us. Did you inform your chief that we’re Van Dorns?”
“No!” cried Clayton.
“We wouldn’t squeal on you!” said Ellis.
“Why not?”
“We don’t want to gum up your case.”
“Mighty big of you,” Bell said, more than a little puzzled.
“Can we talk in private?” asked Clayton.
“How’d you happen to land in Detroit?”
Clayton ducked his head.
Ellis rubbed his nose. “We knew we weren’t welcome in New York anymore.”
Clayton immediately said, “Hey, no hard feelings, Mr. Bell. We got what we deserved.”
“We just thank God they didn’t kill that little kid.”
“Detroit,” said Bell. “I asked how did you two end up in Detroit?”
“We figured the Detroit Prohibition Bureau had to be a gold mine, with all the booze coming from Canada.”
“Came out to wangle jobs,” said Clayton, and Ellis explained matter-of-factly, “Government doesn’t pay much, but the salary’s only a start, if you know what we mean.”
“You mean graft,” said Bell. “Hush money, payoffs, protection.”
“We ain’t lying to you.”
But their story didn’t add up. Congress had organized the Prohibition Bureau to be exempt from Civil Service regulations. As a result, its system of hiring agents was completely corrupt, and the bureau was hobbled by cronyism, nepotism, and patronage.