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“I can afford anything. But if you ever ask me for more than something is worth, I will regard it as an act of war.”
Commodore Tommy changed the subject. “I wonder what the Iceman has up his sleeve.”
DEADLY SNAKE HERE;
SERUM USEFUL IN INSANITY
POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL
AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES
Lachesis Muta Called “the Sudden Death”
by the Natives of Brazil
The wind plucked the sheet of newspaper out of the Washington Park grandstand just as Brooklyn came to bat in the eighth inning. Iceman Weeks watched it float across the infield, past Wiltse on the mound, past Seymour in center, straight toward where he was holed up-cuffless and collarless in drab flannel, disguised as a sorry-looking plumber’s helper-on the grass behind centerfield, where he wasn’t likely to run into any fans from New York.
If the Iceman were capable of loving anything, it was baseball. But he couldn’t risk being spotted in New York at tomorrow’s home opener at the Polo Grounds, so he was making do in the wilds of Brooklyn where no one knew him. His favorite Giants were lambasting the sorry Superbas. The Giants were hitting hard, and the cold wind blowing cinders, hats, and newspapers had no effect on Hooks Wiltse’s throwing arm. His left-handed twisters had dazzled the Brooklyn batters throughout the game, and by the bottom of the eighth New York was ahead 4 to 1.
Weeks’s ice-blue eyes locked on the juicy headline as the newspaper blew overhead.
POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL
AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES
He leaped off the grass and caught the paper in both hands.
Ball game forgotten, he read avidly, tracing each word with a dirty fingernail. The fact that Weeks could read at all put him miles ahead of most of the Gopher Gang. New York’s daily newspapers were packed with opportunities. The society pages reported when rich men left town for Newport or Europe, leaving their mansions empty. The shipping news gave notice about cargo to be plundered from the docks and Eleventh Avenue sidings. Theater reviews were a guide to pickpockets, obituaries a promise of empty apartments.
He read every word of the snake story, galvanized by hope, then started over. His luck had turned. The snake would recoup his losses from the worst hand ever dealt: Van Dorn detective Isaac Bell turning up in Camden the night they killed the Scotsman.
A lance-headed viper from Brazil, the most deadly of all known reptiles, will be exhibited tomorrow tonight before the Academy of Pathological Science at its monthly meeting at the Hotel Cumberland in 54th Street and Broadway.
The paper said that the sawbones were interested in the snake because a serum made from the lance-head’s deadly venom was used to treat nervous and brain diseases.
The Iceman knew the Cumberland.
It was a twelve-story, first-class hotel billed in the ads as “Headquarters for College Men.” That and the $2.50-a-night room fee ought to keep out the riffraff. But Weeks was pretty sure he could dress like a college man, thanks to his second advantage over ordinary gangsters. He was half real American. Unlike the full-blooded Micks in the Gophers, only his mother was Irish. The time he had met his father, the Old Man had told him that the Weekses were Englishmen who had landed here before the Mayflower. Wearing the right duds, why couldn’t he march into the lobby of the Hotel Cumberland like he belonged?
He figured that the Cumberland house dicks could be got around by twisting the arm of a bellboy to run interference for him. Weeks had one in mind, Jimmy Clark, who had a sideline distributing cocaine for a pharmacist on 49th, which had become a riskier business since the new law said that dust had to be prescribed by a doctor.
A human lives only one or two minutes after the poison enters the system. The viper’s venom seems to paralyze the action of the heart, and the victim stiffens and turns black.
He already had a setup. It wasn’t like he’d been hiding out doing nothing. Soon as he had learned where Isaac Bell slept when he was in town, he had finagled a laundress he knew into a job at the Yale Club of New York City, betting she could sneak him into the detective’s room.
Jenny Sullivan was fresh off the boat from Ireland and deep in hock for her fare. Weeks had bought her debt, intending to put her to work on the sheets instead of ironing them. But after Camden, he had persuaded people who had reason to do him a big favor to wangle Jenny a job at Bell’s club. That was when he wrote Commodore Tommy, offering to kill the detective. But he hadn’t yet managed to screw up the courage to hide under Bell’s bed with a pistol and tangle with him man-to-man.
Weeks was tough enough to have gouged Bell’s.380 slug out of his own shoulder with a boning knife rather than let some drunken doctor or midwife tip off Tommy Thompson as to his whereabouts. Tough enough to pour grain alcohol into the wound to stop infection. But he had already seen Bell in action. Bell was tougher-bigger, faster, and better armed-and only a mug got in a fight he could not win.
Better to match Bell with “the Sudden Death.”
The paper said that the curator of the Bronx Zoo reptile house would deliver the animal in a box made of thick glass.
“ ‘He can’t get out,’ ” the curator promised the Pathology Society doctors who were invited -to view the reptile.
Weeks reckoned that with a bullet hole in his shoulder, a box made of thick glass big enough to hold a four-foot-long poisonous snake would be too heavy for him to carry alone. And if he dropped it trying to carry it under one arm and the glass broke, look out! A bum shoulder would be the least of his problems. He needed help. But the boys he could trust to lend a hand were both dead-shot by the blazing-fast Van Dorn dick.
If he tried to recruit anyone to carry the glass box, the word would flash to Tommy Thompson that Iceman Weeks was back in town. Might as well tie his own hands behind his back and jump in the river. Save Tommy the trouble. Because you didn’t have to be a brain to figure out that Eyes O’Shay would order the Commodore to kill the man who’d been spotted by a Van Dorn dick while doing the killing Eyes had paid for. Weeks could swear until he was blue in the face that he woul
