“So maybe they weren’t so stupid, after all,” marveled the research man. “From then on everyone called them the ‘Frye Boys.’ ”
“Just like they wanted us to. Find a family near that East Brunswick bank with three brothers or cousins who suddenly disappeared. Even two brothers and a next-door neighbor.”
Bell wired the operatives sent to help Scully, and Scully himself, instructing them to head for East Brunswick.
Merci, Mademoiselle Duvall!
And who else has been steering my thoughts?
Which brought him straight back to his photograph of Arthur Langner’s suicide note. He laid it next to the snapshot he had taken yesterday morning of one of Langner’s handwritten patent applications. He pored over them with a magnifying glass, searching for inconsistencies that might suggest forgery. He could see none. But he was not an expert, which was why he had summoned the handwriting expert from Greenwich Village.
Dr. Daniel Cruson preferred the high-sounding title “graphologist.” His white beard and bushy eyebrows fit a man who spouted lofty theories about the European “talking cure” of Drs. Freud and Jung. He was also prone to statements like “The complex robs the ego of light and nourishment,” which was why Bell avoided him when he could. But Cruson possessed a fine eye for forgery. So fine that Bell suspected that “Dr. Graphology” made ends meet by cobbling up the occasional bank check.
Cruson inspected the photograph of the suicide note with a magnifying glass, then screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and repeated the process. At last he sat back in his chair, shaking his head.
Bell asked, “Do you see inconsistencies in that handwriting that might suggest it was penned by a forger?”
Cruson said, “You are a detective, sir.”
“You know I am,” Bell said curtly to head off a windy discourse.
“You are familiar with the work of Sir William Herschel?”
“Fingerprint identification.”
“But Sir William also believed that handwriting exposes character.”
“I am less interested in character than forgery.”
Cruson did not hear. “From this mere sample, I can tell that the man who wrote this note was eccentric, highly artistic, and very dramatic, too. Given to the grand gesture. Deeply sensitive with powerful feelings that could be overwhelming.”
“In other words,” Bell interrupted, bleakly conceding he would have to report the worst to Dorothy Langner, “the emotional sort likely to commit suicide.”
“So tragic to take his own life so young.”
“Langner wasn’t young.”
“Given time, with psychological analysis, he could have investigated the sources of his sorrow and learned to control his self-destructive impulses.”
“Langner was not young,” Bell repeated.
“He was very young.”
“He was sixty years old.”
“Impossible! Look at this hand. See the bold and easy flow. An older man’s writing cramps-the letters get smaller and trail off as the hands stiffen with age. This is beyond any doubt the handwriting of a man in his twenties.”
“Twenties?” echoed Bell, suddenly electrified.
“No older than thirty, I guarantee you.”
Bell had a photographic memory. Instantly he returned in his mind’s eye to Arthur Langner’s office. He saw the bookshelves lined with bound volumes of Langner’s patent applications. He had had to open several to find a sample for his camera. Those filed before 1885 were handwritten. The more recent were typed.
“Arthur Langner played the piano. His fingers would have been more supple than those of the average man his age.”
Cruson shrugged. “I am neither musician nor physiologist.”
“But if his fingers were not more supple, then this could be a forgery.”
Cruson huffed, “Surely you didn’t summon me here to analyze the personality of a forger. The more skillful the forgery, the less it would tell me about his personality.”
“I did not summon you here to analyze his personality but to confirm whether this is a forgery. Now you are telling me that the forger made a mistake. He copied Langner’s hand from an early sample of his handwriting. Thank you, Dr. Cruson. You’ve opened a new possibility in this case. Unless his piano playing made his handwriting like that of a young man, this is a forgery, and Arthur Langner was murdered.”
A Van Dorn secretary burst in waving a sheet of yellow paper. “Scully!”
The telegram from loner John Scully that he thrust into Isaac Bell’s hand was typically terse.
GOT YOUR WIRE. HAD SAME THOUGHT.
SO-CALLED FRYES SURROUNDED WEST OF EAST
BRUNSWICK.
LOCAL CONSTABULARY THEIR COUSINS.
CARE TO LEND A HAND?
“ ‘Surrounded’?” asked Bell. “Did Mike and Eddie catch up with him?”
“No, sir. All by himself, like usual.”
It looked like Scully had found the Fryes’ real names and trailed them home only to discover that the bank robbers were related to a crooked sheriff who would help them escape. In which case even the formidable Scully had bit off more than he could chew.
Bell scanned the rest of the telegram for directions.
WILLIARD FARM.
CRANBURY TURNPIKE TEN MILES WEST OF STONE
CHURCH.
LEFT TURNOFF FLAGGED.
MILK TRUCK ONE MILE.
Middle of nowhere in the Jersey farm country. It would take all day to get there connecting to local trains. “Telephone the Weehawken garage for my auto!”
Bell grabbed a heavy golf bag and raced down the Knickerbocker’s stairs and out to Broadway. He jumped into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the pier at the foot of 42nd Street. There he boarded the Weehawken Ferry to New Jersey, where he had parked his red Locomobile.
8
COMMODORE TOMMY’S SALOON ON WEST 39TH STREET hunched like a fortress in the ground floor and cellar of a crumbling brick tenement a quarter mile from the pier where Isaac Bell’s ferry cast off. Its door was narrow, its windows barred. Like a combination Congress, White House, and War Department, it ruled the West Side slum New Yorkers called Hell’s Kitchen. No cop had laid eyes on the inside of it in years.