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

Senior men carried gold. Bell held it to the light. He could just make out the engraved No. 17 and it shook him to the core.

“Harry Warren.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Condon inhaled sharply, blinked, and looked away. ”Always the wrong man . . . Any idea what Harry was doing down here?”

“Last he told me, he was nosing around Warren Street.”

“Of all the ways to go,” said the cop. “Harry busted into more gang dens than you and I could shake a stick at and here he ends up an innocent bystander.”

“Where’s his body?”

“I don’t know that we’ll ever find it. He must have been right next to the damned thing. His badge landed in the Morgan lobby.”

Bell put it in his pocket. “Does the Bomb Squad have any idea what caused it?”

“Not yet. They found a wagon shaft and this horse with its guts blown out. Could have been some damned fool transporting powder. Some people saw a wagon right there where you see all the burn marks. And there are three or four foundation excavations nearby where the contractors would store dynamite. Fire department has the Bureau of Combustibles checking permits. But considering J. P. Morgan was every Bolshevik’s Bogey Man, I will not be surprised to learn it was a bomb.”

“It was a bomb,” said Bell. “It wasn’t an accident.”

He handed Condon the chunk of iron he had picked up.

“Recognize this?”

“Sash cord slug,” said the inspector, naming the counterweight used to open windows. “Could have blown out of one of these buildings.”

“You don’t find sash slugs in modern skyscrapers. Besides, see how it’s burnt? It could have been in the explosion.”

Condon grew red in the face. “If that’s so, then some cold-blooded radical was deliberately trying to kill or maim as many people as possible.”

“If it was,” Bell spoke with cold fury, “then the Red Scare boys deported the wrong radicals.”

Tragically, the foreigners like Johann Kozlov—not to mention Marion’s movie-folk friends—rounded up and deported in the Red Scare were immensely less dangerous than whoever detonated the bomb.

“Innocents,” he told Inspector Condon, “paid the price.”

His angry gaze fixed on the dead horse.

“Dick? Do you mind if I take a shoe?”

•   •   •

ISAAC BELL brought Harry Warren’s badge back to the office and dictated a directive: “The Van Dorn Agency will establish its own Bomb Investigations Department and contract to provide better information to the government than the Justice Department is getting from its Bureau of Investigation.”

He put Grady Forrer in charge of hiring the best specialists, made a note to ask Joe Van Dorn who his best contact was at Justice, and instructed Darren McKinney to find the sharpest Washington lobbyist that money could buy.

Next, he assembled the Gang Squad. Grieving detectives circled his desk.

“Does anyone know what Harry was doing on Wall Street?”

“He said he was going to Warren Street, Mr. Bell.”

“That’s what he told me.”

“How did he get down to Wall Street?”

They looked at Ed Tobin who had apprenticed under Harry. Ed said, “He could have spotted Trucks O’Neal on Warren Street and followed him down to Wall Street.”

“And then,” Bell asked, “he had the worst luck in the world walking past that wagon just when it went off?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t like coincidences,” said Bell. “And I don’t believe there’s a detective in this room who likes them either.”

“No argument there, Mr. Bell.”

Bell said, “Here’s how we find whether Harry Warren followed Trucks O’Neal to Wall Street. Keep searching for Trucks O’Neal. Check morgues and hospitals. If O’Neal’s among the victims, that’ll settle it. But if we find him alive and unhurt, we’ll have proof Harry wasn’t near Trucks when the dynamite went off. Find Trucks O’Neal! Start on Warren Street. Find that stable Harry was looking for. There can’t be that many still in business down there.”

A detective said, “I just got back from there, Mr. Bell. The only stable I found was locked up.”

“Go back. Watch the place. Meanwhile, look at this.”

Bell laid the battered scrap of gold on his deck. “Harry’s badge. Number 17. Cops found it blown through the front door of the Morgan Building.”

Around it he placed a horseshoe with a jagged nail and a patch of rubber stuck to it.

“From the horse that pulled the wagon that blew up . . . Find the farrier who shoed the horse that pulled the wagon that transported the dynamite that killed Harry Warren. The farrier will tell us who owned the wagon.”

•   •   •

“YURI DIED A HERO OF THE REVOLUTION,” Marat Zolner told Fern Hawley.

She was red-eyed and crying inconsolably. “Don’t pretend that you’re not glad that you lost your overseer.”

“Only until Moscow sends the next.”

“They’ll never find another like him.”

That, thought Zolner, is certainly my hope.

And not an empty hope. Ironically, Yuri’s Wall Street bombing would buy him time. With nearly forty dead, four hundred wounded, and photographs of the wreckage in every newspaper in the world, the Comintern had plenty to celebrate. So he was a hero, too, and it would be a while before the apparatchiks got brave enough to challenge him again.

Trucks O’Neal posed an immediate threat. When the Van Dorns caught up with him, the gangster knew too much. There was no doubt they would. Trucks had refused to hide in Detroit, so the only question was how soon. Worse, by now Trucks had had time to realize that he was a threat, which meant he would not let Zolner near enough to kill him. But Trucks was greedy. And greedy men were predictable.

•   •   •

GRADY FORRER pulled a recent issue of International Horseshoers’ Monthly Magazine from the Van Dorn Research Department’s library stacks and opened it on a desk in front of Apprentice Somers. Next to it he placed the horseshoe that Isaac Bell had brought back from the Wall Street bombing.

“What we have for our search for a particular farrier is a horseshoe and a nail and a scrap of rubber from what was likely a horseshoe pad. Now, this monthly is chockful of interesting articles about the goings-on in the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers