2
BY 1908, THE VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY MAINTAINED a presence in all American cities of consequence, and its offices reflected the nature of each locality. Headquarters in Chicago had a suite in the palatial Palmer House. Dusty Ogden, Utah, a railroad junction, was served by a rented room decorated with wanted posters. New York’s offices were in the sumptuous Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street. And in Washington, D.C., with its valuable proximity to the Department of Justice-a prime source of business-Van Dorn detectives operated from the second floor of the capital city’s finest hotel, the new Willard on Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House.
Joseph Van Dorn himself kept an office there, a walnut-paneled den bristling with up-to-date devices for riding herd on the transcontinental outfit he commanded. In addition to the agency’s private telegraph, he had three candlestick telephones capable of long-distance connections as far west as Chicago, a DeVeau Dictaphone, a self-winding stock ticker, and an electric Kellogg Intercommunicating Telephone. A spy hole let him size up clients and informants in the reception room. Corner windows overlooked the Willard’s front and side entrances.
From those windows, a week after Arthur Langner’s tragic death at the Naval Gun Factory, Van Dorn watched apprehensively as two women stepped down from a streetcar, hurried across the bustling sidewalk, and disappeared inside the hotel.
The intercommunicating phone rang.
“Miss Langner is here,” reported the Willard’s house detective, a Van Dorn employee.
“So I see.” He was not looking forward to this visit.
The founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was a heavily built, bald-headed man in his forties. He had a strong Roman nose, framed by bristling red whiskers, and the affable manner of a lawyer or a businessman who had earned his fortune early and enjoyed it. Hooded eyes masked a ferocious intelligence; the nation’s penitentiaries held many criminals gulled into letting the big gent close enough to clamp on the handcuffs.
Downstairs, the two women riveted male attention as they glided through the Willard’s gilt-and-marble lobby. The younger, a petite girl of eighteen or nineteen, was a stylishly dressed redhead with a vivacious gleam in her eyes. Her companion was a tall, raven-haired beauty, somber in the dark cloth of mourning, her hat adorned with the feathers of black terns, her face partially veiled. The redhead was clutching her elbow as if to give her courage.
Once across the lobby, however, Dorothy Langner took charge, urging her companion to sit on a plush couch at the foot of the stairs.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“No thank you, Katherine. I’ll be fine from here.”
Dorothy Langner gathered her long skirts and swept up the stairs.
Katherine Dee craned her neck to watch Dorothy pause on the landing, turn back her veil, and press her forehead against a cool, polished marble pillar. Then she straightened up, composed herself, and strode down the hall, out of Katherine’s sight and into the Van Dorn Detective Agency.
Joseph Van Dorn shot a look through the spy hole. The receptionist was a steady man-he would not command a Van Dorn front desk were he not-but he appeared thunderstruck by the beauty presenting her card, and Van Dorn noted grimly that the Wild Bunch could have stampeded in and left with the furniture without the fellow noticing.
“I am Dorothy Langner,” she said in a strong, musical voice. “I have an appointment with Mr. Joseph Van Dorn.”
Van Dorn hurried into the reception room and greeted her solicitously.
“Miss Langner,” he said, the faintest lilt of Irish in his voice softening the harder tones of Chicago. “May I offer my deepest sympathy?”
“Thank you, Mr. Van Dorn. I appreciate your seeing me.”
Van Dorn guided her into his inner sanctum.
Dorothy Langner refused his offer of tea or water and got straight to the point.
“The Navy has let out a story that my father killed himself. I want to hire your detective agency to clear his name.”
Van Dorn had prepared as much as possible for this difficult interview. There was ample reason to doubt her father’s sanity. But his wife-to-be had known Dorothy at Smith College, so he was obliged to hear the poor woman out.
“I am of course at your service, but-”
“The Navy says that he caused the explosion that killed him, but they won’t tell me how they know.”
“I wouldn’t read too much into that,” said Van Dorn. “The Navy is habitually secretive. What does surprise me is they tend usually to look after their own.”
“My father deliberately established the Gun Factory to be more civilian than naval,” Dorothy Langner replied. “It is a businesslike operation.”
“And yet,” Van Dorn ventured cautiously, “as I understand it, civilian factories have recently taken over many of its duties.”
“Certainly not! Fours and 6s, perhaps. But not the dreadnought guns.”
“I wonder whether that shift troubled your father.”
“Father was accustomed to such shifts,” she answered drily, adding with a faint smile, “He would say, ‘The slings and arrows of my misfortunes are the tugs and pulls of Congress and local interests.’ He had a sense of humor, Mr. Van Dorn. He knew how to laugh. Such men don’t kill themselves.”
“Of course,” Van Dorn said gravely.
The Kellogg rang again.
Saved by my Bell, Van Dorn thought to himself. He stepped to the wall where the instrument was mounted, picked up the earpiece, and listened.
“Send him in.”
To Dorothy Langner he said, “I asked Isaac Bell, my best operative, to step down from an important bank robbery case in order to look into the circumstances of your father’s death. He is ready to report.”
The door opened. A man in a white suit entered with an economy of motion unexpected in one so tall. He was well over six feet, leanly built-not more than one hundred seventy-five pounds-and looked to be about thirty years old. The full mustache that covered his upper lip was gold, as was his thick, neatly trimmed hair. His face had the robust appearance of an outdoorsman who was no stranger to sun and wind.
His large hands hung still at his sides. His fingers were long and precisely manicured, although an observer keener than the grieving Dorothy Langner might have noticed that the knuckles of his right hand were red and swollen.
“Miss Langner, may I present chief investigator Isaac Bell?” Isaac Bell assessed the beautiful young woman with a swift, penetrating glance. Mid-twenties, he estimated her age. Intelligent and self-possessed. Desolated by grief yet extraordinarily attractive. She turned to him beseechingly.