The Cutthroat by Clive Cussler (popular books to read txt) 📗

wrinkled her pretty nose, and suddenly they were friends.

“I’m starving!”

He shrugged his cape off one shoulder and offered his arm.

“Step this way.”

Late that night, he propped Beatrice in a kitchen chair while he ate a cold supper. Just before dawn, he tied his cape around her, gathered her in his arms, and climbed down the steep stairs to the dock. The river smelled rank. The fierce current was so loud, he could barely hear her splash.

“Good night. You were lovely.”

How wrong he was about that.

32

Isaac Bell jumped off the extra-fare St. Louis Limited at Cincinnati and headed straight to the morgue in City Hospital. The talkative coroner, who greeted him on the front steps, started apologizing for the condition of the old building. “Dates back to the 1860s. We’re building a fine new hospital across town.”

“May I see the girl?”

A barge hand had spotted her butchered body jammed under an Ohio River wharf. The Van Dorn field office had already reported a dancer missing from the continuous vaudeville house where she worked, the same theater where the singer Rose Bloom had disappeared months earlier.

Beatrice Edmond had told a friend she was trying to land a part in a road company, but she had not said which one. The field office chief had found no one who had seen her at any of the Cincinnati theaters where tours were playing—not Tillie’s Nightmare, the Marie Dressler show at the Bethel, nor Alias Jimmy Valentine at the Lyric, nor Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Clark, and surely not Salome at the German.

“Her cape snagged on a wharf,” said the coroner, “or she’d have drifted to New Orleans before anyone noticed.”

“May I see her?” Bell asked again. Twenty-to-one, “her cape” was a standard department store item and twice the size a tiny girl would wear.

“Not much to see. The current banged her around, and the city sewage is as corrosive as you’d ex—”

A racket in the sky cut him off in the middle of a sentence.

BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT!

Isaac Bell looked up, astonished. He recognized the sound instantly, but the last thing he expected to hear over Cincinnati was the staccato blast of a rotary airplane engine at full throttle. A red streak of lightning shot past the hospital fifty feet above the Miami Canal and vanished in the direction of the Ohio River.

“Bet you don’t know what that is,” said the coroner.

Bell was an avid airman and knew exactly what it was. “A new Breguet Type IV tractor biplane with a Gnome rotary engine. But what’s he doing here?”

“Advertising! That’s—”

BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! drowned him out again.

The Breguet skimmed the mansard roof of the four-story hospital so close, it sent tiles flying, and Isaac Bell could not help grinning in envy of the lucky pilot. Then he saw the advertisement painted on the underside of the wings touting the show that Anna Waterbury had hoped would have a place for her:

JEKYLL

on the left wing and

AND HYDE

on the right.

The red plane flashed by trailing castor oil smoke that smelled like someone had blown out candles.

“First airplane that ever flew over Cincinnati,” said the coroner. “Booming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Tickets are going like hotcakes. I’m taking the wife on Saturday.

“Come on in,” said the coroner. “I have her on the table.”

Later, Isaac Bell wandered Cincinnati’s theater district, reading marquees and playbills and collecting programs. He stopped in front of the vaudeville house. Beatrice Edmond’s name was still on the bill. Her cape had been too big.

He took the theater programs to the two-room Van Dorn field office on Plum Street. The chief—Sedgwick, an eager young detective they had hired away from the Police Department and who had gained a reputation in New York for snappy telegrams in the middle of the night—was working late. Bell spread the programs on a table and opened his notebook.

He juggled the symbols in his mind, inverted the crescent moons, angled some horns, and tried to group them in patterns. Then he took out his fountain pen. He was sketching freehand in the margins of the theater programs when, reaching for another, he suddenly saw the crescent shapes as Jack the Ripper carved them.

“I need your private wire.”

“Want me to send for you?”

“I remember my Morse.”

Bell sat at the key and tapped out orders to New York in cipher.

CINCINNATI

ON THE JUMP

FORRER—LINK ROAD SHOWS TO MURDERS MAP

DASHWOOD—ASSIST CINCINNATI FIELD OFFICE

BRING RIPPER WARNING POSTERS

ABBOTT, MILLS, WARREN—ON THE QUIET

“Why on the quiet?” said a voice over his shoulder.

“Hello, Joe.” Bell stood up and shook Joseph Van Dorn’s enormous hand. “I thought I heard you come in.”

“New York told me you were here. I caught the B&O from Washington.”

“Why?”

“To determine where your investigation is going.”

Isaac Bell’s face lighted in a triumphant smile.

“It is going to town with bells on.”

“Why on the quiet?”

“I’m disguising my operators.”

“As what?”

“I’ll show you.”

Bell led Van Dorn to the table where his notebook lay open among the programs.

One by one, he pointed to the crescents with his pen.

“Here’s a smile,” he told Van Dorn.

“So?”

“Here’s a frown.”

“If you say so.”

“Mouths! Eyes!”

“Isaac!” Van Dorn exploded. “What in blue blazes are you talking about?”

“Mouths. Upturned and downcast. Eyes. Upturned and downcast—the raw ingredients.”

“OF WHAT?”

ACT THREE

BACKSTAGE

33

CINCINNATI

The Deaver brothers were getting jumpy.

“Explain, again,” Jeff demanded. “Who is Isaac Bell?”

“Mr. Bell,” said Joe Deaver, “is a Hartford, Connecticut, insurance executive who—”

“We don’t need insurance! We won’t own anything to insure if Jekyll and Hyde closes on the road.”

Jeff hadn’t shaved or left their hotel suite in days. It had fallen to Joe to go out into the world, where, as luck would have it, he had been approached by a potential savior.

“A rich Hartford,