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“Was he dining alone?”
“That’s the best part. I showed the waiter Prince André’s photograph. He thought Prince André might be the guy Abe was eating sweetbreads with.”
Bell thought that this was too much to hope for. The most that Bill Lynch and Harold Harding had conceded, when shown the out-of-focus photograph, was a dubious “maybe” that it was the bootlegger who had commissioned Black Bird.
He asked, “Why was the waiter so talkative?”
“He needed money to leave Detroit.”
“Why?”
“I persuaded him, after I suggested that Abe might be the new boss of the Purples, that any association with Admiral Abe could be dangerous for his health. Including—or especially—witnessing who he eats sweetbreads with. Rightly or wrongly, the waiter decided to start over a thousand miles away. I—or, strictly speaking, Mr. Van Dorn—provided the means.”
“But it’s not impossible that the waiter told you what he thought you wanted to hear,” said Bell.
“May I suggest,” said Scudder, “that we have a field office full of valuable men to follow up on this?”
• • •
JAMES DASHWOOD telegraphed on the private wire that he had traced Fern Hawley’s railcar to a Palm Beach, Florida, siding that served an oceanfront estate seventy miles north of Miami. Neither the car nor the estate was owned by her.
PALACE CAR RENTED.
ESTATE RENTED.
FERN FLOWN.
There was nothing innately suspicious about renting cars and estates. She could, indeed, be setting up early for the winter in Florida, where more and more of the rich headed when the weather got cold. Typically, though, society people of Fern’s means were building elaborate homes in Palm Beach and Miami. She could be testing the waters. But for what? Winter holidays or Marat Zolner’s empire?
The answer came in a contrite wire from Dashwood.
MISSED BLACK BIRD FLATCAR YESTERDAY MIAMI.
• • •
“COUPLE OF PROHIBITION DICKS asking to see you, Isaac,” said Texas Walt.
Bell looked up from the sandwiches he was sharing at the kitchen chopping block with Leon Randolph, the Texas Walt’s Roadhouse cook whom he knew from the days Leon had cooked on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe’s Overland Limited.
“How did they know to find me here?”
“I wondered, too. I persuaded them to leave their artillery with the hatcheck.”
The bar was empty at this hour but for a bartender who was polishing a sawed-off shotgun.
Bell’s stern features darkened with such anger when he recognized the Volstead agents that Texas Walt’s hands would have strayed toward his Colts if the bartender didn’t already have them covered.
“We got to talk, Mr. Bell.”
Tom Clayton and Ed Ellis, the former Protective Services house detectives Bell had fired from the Hotel Gotham, looked prosperous. Their cheeks were pink from the barbershop, their hair slick. They wore signet rings on their fingers and remained somewhat handsome, despite imperfectly hea
led broken noses.
“We’ve already bribed your superiors,” Bell answered coldly.
“We know,” Ed Ellis said. “Bureau chief told us Texas Walt’s is hands-off.”
“It should be for what it cost us. Did you inform your chief that we’re Van Dorns?”
