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 she had never met Platov at the International Aeronautical Salon in Paris nor even heard his name there.
Was it possible that Platov had never been at the Paris air meet? But if he had not been in Paris, then from whom had Marco Celere bought his so-called jet engine?
Bell wired Research:
CONCENTRATE ON THERMO ENGINE.
ON THE JUMP!
Then he called Dashwood into his headquarters car. “I’m taking you off the gamblers. Watch Dmitri Platov. Don’t let him know, but stick to him like his shadow.”
“What am I looking for?”
“He’s making me uncomfortable,” said Bell. “He could be as innocent as he looks. But he had the opportunity to sabotage the Englishman’s pusher.”
“Could he be Harry Frost’s inside man?” asked Dashwood.
“He could be anything.”
ISAAC BELL HALED the few Van Dorns in the Southwest he could get his hands on to defend Josephine’s wedding from Harry Frost’s Colt machine guns. As the private detectives hurried into Fort Worth and reported aboard the Eagle Special, he drummed in his strategy: “Make it impossible for Harry Frost to sneak close enough to do damage. Ransack your contacts. There are darned few of us, but if we pool our links to lawmen, railroad police, informers, gamblers, and criminals beholden to us, we can try to establish a perimeter equal to the Colts’ range and keep him outside it.”
The stolen Colts’ long range was the threat. The machine guns were deadly up to a mile. But Frost could nearly treble the threat by elevating the barrels to loft indirect “plunging fire,” where bullets would rain down on the party indiscriminately from a distance as great as four thousand five hundred yards – the better part of three miles.