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

The shreds of it had caught in the thicket of beams under the trestle. Dangling above the rushing arroyo, he swung in among the supports and hauled himself up onto the tracks.

The freight train’s red lights were fading toward Los Angeles.

Bell started after them at a dead run. He would never catch it, but dawn was graying fresh rain clouds, and morning trains would soon crowd the line to the city.

Isaac Bell jumped off an express from Santa Barbara and telephoned the Van Dorn railcar from a coin telephone. Harry Warren answered, sounding jubilant.

“We nailed him, Isaac. John Buchanan.”

“Buchanan? How?”

“Dashwood did it. He found a Jekyll and Hyde program that Buchanan inscribed to one of his rich ladies—the banker’s wife he killed in Cleveland.”

“But he must inscribe programs to all of his rich ladies.”

“This one was for the Cincinnati show.”

“She was killed before Cincinnati.”

“That’s what Dashwood tumbled to! It was printed ahead of time. Only Buchanan could have given it to her. Here’s the best part: Buchanan’s got no alibi. He did one of his ‘disappearing acts’ that night. Young stood in for him. Buchanan claims he was sick and slept on the train. Train crew says no. They saw him leave. Buchanan refuses to say where he went.”

“Does he have a black eye?”

“What?”

“Does he have a black eye?”

“Who knows? He’s slathered with makeup. We got him in Glendale on his way to Marion’s movie.”

“Where’d you put him?”

“We got him right here in the car.”

“Scrub him off!”

“What?”

“Remove his makeup! On the jump!”

Bell waited, drumming his fingers, depositing more nickels when the operator asked for them. Harry Warren came back on the telephone. “No black eye. What’s the big idea?”

“Where are Jackson Barrett and Henry Young?”

“Taking pictures.”

“With Marion?”

Harry Warren laughed. “Nothing stops that wife of yours. The minute we grabbed Buchanan, she telephoned Young to stand in for him.”

“Who’s with her?”

“Barrett, Young, couple of camera guys, and that lights lady—Rennegal.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s raining. She gave the rest of the company the day off.”

“Hang on to Buchanan. Don’t give him to the cops ’til you hear from me.”

“Where are you going?”

“Glendale.”

49

Making up as fast as he could in a tiny hotel room on the outskirts of Glendale, eight miles from Los Angeles, Henry Young dabbed spirit gum on his nose. While it dried, he lighted a candle, kneaded some toupee paste into a soft lump, and melted the surface in the flame. He worked the thick paste onto his nose, altering the shape to make it appear broad and flat. A bushy wig already heightened his brow and had the grotesque effect of making his head look extremely wide.

Just as he was finishing his new nose with a bluish greasepaint that would turn his face a ghastly pale white for the camera, the door swung open so hard, it banged against the wall. Through it strode Isaac Bell.

“That’s a sensational effect, Mr. Young. I doubt your own mother would recognize you face-to-face.”

“What? What are you doing here?”

“Catching up. What are you doing?”

“Your wife asked me to stand in for Mr. Buchanan. He seems to have gotten arrested.”

“I have a question for you: How’s your eye feel?”

“My eye? Fine.”

“Show me.”

Henry Young wet his lips and looked around nervously. “I don’t understand, Mr. Bell.”

Bell snapped up a small bottle of olive oil.

“Wipe off that makeup and we both will.”

The rain was driving Marion Morgan Bell to extreme measures. It would not stop. She had yet to film a scene out of doors, and her leading lady, who was even more compelling on the screen than on the stage, was threatening to jump on the Golden State Limited to Chicago and the 20th Century home to “civilization.”

She had already lost John Buchanan—but that to a great cause, the end of Jack the Ripper’s rampage, which she couldn’t wait to hear about when Isaac returned from wherever that chase had taken him. She still had a star, in Jackson Barrett, and a stand-in, in Mr. Young. But no female “Mr. Young” existed who could replace the Isabella Cook, the “Great and Beloved.”

Her only chance was to show Isabella a compelling scene to recapture her interest in the movie and keep her engaged. And so with the rough-and-ready ingenuity she had learned making topical films on the fly, Marion moved her Dream Duel scene indoors—deep indoors—inside a collapsed tunnel abandoned by an interurban streetcar company.

It was tailor-made for filming a sword fight—the rubble an illusion of an ancient castle. It was a hundred feet long from the mouth to the rocks that partially blocked the back end, ten feet high and twelve feet wide, and so far away from town that they’d never be found by gawking tourists. Like a castle, the long, narrow, high-ceilinged hall had nooks and crannies indented in the rough walls—where she could hide her cameras.

Marilyn Rennegal—Marion’s equally rough-and-ready Cooper Hewitt operator on The Iron Horse film—had festooned the rocky ceiling with mercury-vapor lamps and dangled them with hundreds of white silk ribbons for visual effect. A dynamo outside the tunnel generated electricity for the lights. It was powered by an ingenious system of drive belts turned by the same eight-cylinder airplane motor that spun Marion’s wind machine. From inside, that contraption looked like an airplane about to fly into the tunnel at the expense of its wings.

The ninety-horsepower V-8 Curtiss Pusher airplane engine drove an enormous pusher propeller at fourteen hundred revolutions per minute. The wooden propeller’s blade faces were carved with a reverse twist to push air in front of it. It stood taller than a man, and when spinning at top speed, the varnished blades disappeared in a lethal blur.

Marion had plastered warnings inside the tunnel and out:

STAND CLEAR

Isaac Bell had neither returned to Los Angeles alive nor had his body been found. Perhaps another “perfect crime”?

That Van Dorn detectives had arrested John Buchanan seemed to