The Bootlegger by Clive Cussler (novels in english TXT) 📗

swayed, eyes popped wide, feet frozen to the floor, blood pouring from his mouth. Zolner dropped him to the carpet with a second bone-smashing blow of the lead pipe.

At the front door of the speakeasy he counted the money Tony had waiting, piled it into his satchel, and returned fifty dollars.

“What’s this for?”

“You need a new carpet.”

Before crossing Central Park to Fern’s town house, Zolner made one more stop on the Upper West Side to buy a Prohibition agent breakfast at the Bretton Hall Hotel. For five hundred dollars, the federal officer told him about a government raid planned against a leading whisky runner’s downtown warehouse.

“Where will they take the booze?”

“Customs. The Appraisers’ Stores, down in the Village.”

Zolner passed the agent a bottle wrapped in burlap.

“What’s this?”

“The real McCoy. Haig & Haig.”

6

“EVERYONE DOWN HERE is praying for Mr. Van Dorn . . . Well, not everyone, but you know what I mean.”

Dr. Shepherd Nuland, the New York County Medical Examiner, indicated a crowd of unclaimed corpses hanging upright in a refrigerated vault and then shook Isaac Bell’s hand warmly. It was an elevator ride and a short walk from Joe Van Dorn’s hospital room to Bellevue’s morgue.

“How’s he doing?”

“The docs aren’t making any promises,” said Bell.

“And how are you doing, Isaac?”

“I’ll feel better after I’ve seen the rumrunner who got shot at Roosevelt Hospital.”

“Figured you might. I’ll do him myself. You take notes.”

He gave Bell a white apron and a gauze face mask scented with oil of cloves and led him to a postmortem table where the body of the murdered rumrunner waited under a sheet. A stenographer was standing by. Nuland told him to go to lunch, and tugged off the sheet.

The Medical Examiner’s blithe disregard for official procedure was a wrenching reminder of Joe Van Dorn’s great gift for friendship. Rich, powerful, and accomplished men across the continent would jump to lend him a hand. Gather debts but never flaunt them, he had taught Bell from the first day of his apprenticeship. Forgive small sins. Offer help. Give favors, they’ll be returned.

Isaac Bell opened his notebook to take Nuland’s dictation.

“Caucasian male. Twenty-five to thirty years old. Sturdy. Muscular.”

Bell saw a large bandage around the man’s left thigh that the bedclothes had hidden last night. The Medical Examiner cut it off with scissors and whistled in amazement. “One tough hombre to walk on that.”

Two bullets had perforated the flesh. The examiner measured them as an inch and a half apart. He glanced at Bell. “Tight pattern.”

“Lewis gun.”

Bell wrote rapidly in a clear hand as Nuland went on to describe numerous healed bullet and knife wounds that scarred limbs and trunk, a broken nose, and missing teeth. The examiner noted that some of the scars were quite old, acquired in childhood.

“Your classic street-gang kid . . . All right, let’s see what finally caught up with him.”

Nuland noted the absence of an exit wound in the throat, mouth, and face, then wrestled the body onto its belly. There were more healed scars on the back of the torso and a single large hole in the posterior thigh where the Lewis gun slugs had exited jointly. Finally, he addressed the tiny, half-a-dime-size wound that Bell had seen just under the hairline in the nape of the neck.

“Point-blank range, small bore . . . Twenty-five caliber, probably . . . Powder tattooing around the flame zone . . . Powder grains embedded in the corneum . . . Powder grains in the mucosum . . .”

He scraped the grains from the skin’s outer and inner layers onto glass slides.

“Denser pattern of powder tattooing below the wound . . .” He looked up at Bell. “This Frenchman during the war worked out a system to gauge whether a bullet wound was courtesy of the Germans or self-inflicted . . . The Army wanted proof to prosecute malingerers who tried to get out of the trenches by shooting themselves in the leg. If we can believe Monsieur Chavigny, the heavier concentration under this wound indicates the bullet entered on an upward slant. Hand me that saw—let’s go find it . . . How you holding up, Isaac, need a bucket?”

“Getting hungry . . . Shall I run and get us sandwiches?”

“Corned beef . . . But let’s find the bullet first.”

Bell handed him a hammer and a chisel.

“Thanks . . . Where . . . ? Oh, thanks.” He took the forceps from Bell. “Aha! That’s why it didn’t come out his mouth. It’s in his brain! . . . Here we are. A little .25, just like I told you.”

Isaac Bell stared at the mangled remains of the man who had either been the thug who machine-gunned Joe Van Dorn or an accomplice.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why what?” said Nuland, holding the slug to the light.

“Why didn’t it exit from his mouth?”

“Good question . . . Looks to me like the guy’s head was bent forward—sharply—chin to chest.” Nuland demonstrated by tucking his own chin to his chest. “Bullet angles into the nape, under or through the occipital bone—through, in this instance—and up into the skull. Easy on the victim. Dead in a flash, no pain.”

“Easy on the killer, too,” said Isaac Bell.

“How do you mean?”

“No death struggle, no blood.”

•   •   •

“DO YOU HAVE TIME to see me off, Isaac?” asked Pauline Grandzau.

The doctors allowed no one but Dorothy, Captain Novicki, and Isaac Bell in Joseph Van Dorn’s room, which didn’t stop detectives from rushing to Bellevue to offer condolences to his wife and wish the Boss well and donate blood in the event of additional operations. The most striking visitor, by far, was Fräulein Privatdetektive Pauline Grandzau, chief of the Berlin field office.

The beautiful young German had won her detective spurs before the war when she was a teenage library student who helped Isaac Bell solve the Thief case.

“Are you going back already?” Bell asked. He was rushing off to the police laboratory, where, he had just learned, they were examining a pistol shell found in the murdered rumrunner’s hospital room. “Seems like you just got here.”

“I’m afraid so. Nieuw Amsterdam sails this afternoon.”

He reached automatically for his pocket watch, then shot his cuff instead to check the time. Strapped to his wrist was the perfect substitute for a