AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There’s a lady out here to see you and the gent you’re with. Miss Dorothy Langner. Should I let her in?”
“No. Tell her I’ll be out there shortly.” He hung up. “Continue, Ted. What has happened this time?”
“They want me to turn over one of my trucks going into the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”
“Who?”
“This smooth guy named O’Shay. I heard somebody call him Eyes. Must be his nickname. Do you know who I mean?”
“When do they want the truck?”
“Tomorrow. When the New Hampshire is loading food and munitions. She just finished her shakedown, and she’ll be ferrying a Marine Expeditionary Regiment to Panama to keep the Canal Zone election peaceful. My New York outfit got the provisions contract.”
“How big a truck?”
“The biggest.”
“Big enough to carry a couple of torpedoes?”
Whitmark chewed his lip. “Oh, God. Is that what they want it for?”
The door from the reception room opened, and Harry Warren walked in. Bell was turning back to Ted Whitmark when a sudden motion at the door caught his eye and he saw Dorothy Langner in a black sheath dress and black feathered hat slip through it right behind Harry Warren, who said, “Help you, ma’am?”
“I’m looking for Isaac Bell,” she said in her clear, musical voice. “There he is, I see him.” She rushed toward Bell’s desk, reaching into her handbag.
Whitmark jumped to his feet. “Hello, Dorothy. Told you I’d talk to Bell. This’ll square us, won’t it?”
Dorothy Langner searched his face. Then she looked at Bell. “Hello, Isaac. Is there someplace I could talk to Ted for a moment, in private?” Her beautiful silvery eyes were blank, and Bell had the eeriest sensation that she was blind. But she couldn’t be blind, she had just marched in under her own steam.
“I believe that Mr. Van Dorn’s office is empty. I’m sure he won’t mind.”
He guided them into Van Dorn’s office, closed the door, and stood close to it listening. He heard Whitmark repeat, “This will square us, won’t it?”
“Nothing will square us.”
“Dorothy?” asked Ted. “What are you doing?”
The answer was the sharp crack of a gunshot. Bell threw open the door. Ted Whitmark lay on his back, blood pouring from his skull. Dorothy Langner dropped the nickel pistol she was holding onto Whitmark’s chest, and said to Isaac Bell, “He killed my father.”
“Yamamoto Kenta killed your father.”
“Ted didn’t set the bomb, but he’s been passing information about Father’s work on Hull 44.”
“Did Ted tell you that?”
“He tried to get rid of his guilt confessing to me.”
Harry Warren rushed in, gun drawn, and knelt by the body. Then he grabbed Van Dorn’s telephone. “She missed,” he told Bell, and said to the operator, “Get a doctor.”
“How badly is he hurt?” asked Bell.
“She only creased him. It’s his scalp that’s bleeding so much.”
“He won’t die?”
“Not from this. In fact, I think he’s starting to wake up.”
“She didn’t shoot him,” said Bell.
