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“Two incidents don’t constitute a pattern for me—
nor do three, usually—but this was the fourth job, and I thought I had it figured out. At Cheyenne, I pieced together that the towns these thieves were hitting were getting progressively more westward, so Denver seemed like the logical next step. But the timing of the hits was a mystery. The two hotels appeared to have been robbed sometime four weeks ago. The thing was, the guests didn’t realize items had been removed from their stored luggage until days or weeks after the fact. I figure the thieves had cleared out of town long before anyone was onto them. But the railroad jobs were detected the day after the robbery, which didn’t give our thieves much time to move on.”
Bell paused. He was a natural storyteller and he held the four men rapt. “But the real mystery was how they managed to rob four locked rooms without leaving a bit of evidence that the locks had been tampered with. In addition, the hotel strong rooms were near enough to the reception desk that anyone loitering nearby would be seen and the area around the two depots was guarded by railroad bulls.”
“The yard dicks never saw anything?” McCallister’s partner, Gaylord, asked.
“And they circled the building all night,” Bell told him. “The final piece of the puzzle was this.”
Bell pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a garish advertisement for a traveling circus and showed the ringmaster, in top hat and with arms thrown wide, while in the background the artist had drawn roaring lions and a string of elephants performing a trick, all backgrounded by the inside of a brightly colored big top tent with a pair of trapeze artists swinging between the poles. The men all recognized it, for not three days earlier thousands of these flyers had been plastered all over the city because the Fraunhofer & Fraunhofer Circus was soon arriving for their last show of the season before they moved on to their winter-over headquarters outside of Los Angeles.
“Are you saying . . . ?” This from the postal manager, Porter.
“Sure am. Once I realized that this circus had either just played or was about to play the towns where the robberies took place, it all fell into place. I got lucky and caught up with the show in Fort Collins and managed to watch their final performance and stick around to observe them dismantling everything.”
“And you were able to finger the perpetrators by just catching the act?” McCallister seemed incredulous.
“Gentlemen, I have to go,” Jim Porter said. “I need to open the branch before the other employees show up for work.” He reached into his pocket for money to settle his bill, and since he’d eaten his normal breakfast, he knew the exact charge.
Bell shook his hand once again. “Mr. Porter, all you need to do this morning is to act as though nothing unusual is happening. You needn’t tell your staff anything at all. Our mark will come in shortly, no doubt. We are going to watch for him here. We will enter afterward, looking like customers, and accost the thief red-handed.”
The man was sweaty and appeared unwell, but Bell suspected that he habitually looked that way. Porter nodded gamely. “Okay.”
Bell and Northrop, the man from Washington, moved to a window table once Porter had left. The two police detectives stayed in the back of the little dining room and would take their cue from Isaac Bell.
As he suspected, the wait was a short one. Five minutes after the post office opened for the day, Bell watched a man in a black cape and high black hat make his way down the sidewalk. The day, like most of the month of November, was unseasonably warm, which was no doubt the reason the circus remained on tour this late in the year.
A truck with a chain drive briefly obscured Bell’s line of sight, but when it rumbled down the street, trailing dark exhaust, he saw his man again. Like he’d observed at the circus, the man moved with silken ease, as though his joints were fluid. Bell had only really seen him at a distance, but he recognized the jet-black mustache.
The man paused to talk to a drayman, who was feeding his horse stumps of carrots. His wagon was a simple flatbed. Bell surmised that the man had hired the horse and driver and they were setting a time to meet so the man could load up his three pieces of luggage and be on his way. If Bell’s guess was right, he wouldn’t bother rejoining the circus here in Denver. Bell believed that all the jobs leading up to this one had been practice runs, to hone the plan until it could be executed with military precision. Today was the big score, the one that would be such a payoff that only retirement afterward made sense.
The two men parted company. The driver returned to feeding his draft horse while the man from the circus mounted the three granite steps to the post office. Bell gave it another minute, then waved to McCallister and Gaylord. Bell touched something under his left arm to make certain it was there and then left the restaurant, its little chime on the door tinkling, the D.C. postal inspector at his arm.
Bell crossed the cobbled street, mounted the curb, and climbed the three steps. Through a decorative clear fringe on the otherwise-frosted glass door insert, Bell saw the man from the circus hand over his receipt for the three trunks. There was no sign of Porter, so Bell assumed he was in the back. The clerk who took the ticket acted as though this were any other transaction. The branch manager had kept mum on the impending arrest.
Bell opened the door and started a conversation midpoint with Northrop. “. . . told me it was going to cost twenty-five dollars to fix it and I told him I could buy a new one for that price and left his shop.”
“Good for you.” Northrop was a veteran of postal stings and played his part even though they hadn’t rehearsed anything.
Like many who are forced to wait in a line, the two men let their conversation lapse. Bell smiled at a woman in line ahead of them and got a smile back. Their quarry hadn’t turned, instead waited a little way off for his trunks to be brought through from inside the iron-barred cage where they’d spent the night. Moments later, the two detectives also entered the big post office branch. Gaylord got into one of the three lines while McCallister busied himself at a counter filling out an address on an envelope.
The handcart used to move larger items throughout the branch had a wheel badly in need of oil. Its squeak echoed off the tall coffered ceiling. Bell watched his man, sensing the anticipation coming off of him in waves, though outwardly he was the picture of studied nonchalance. Up close, he was handsome enough to star in one of Bell’s wife’s motion pictures. The clerk was struggling with the trolley because of its weight, and his shoes kept sliding on the polished floor, but eventually he got it through the gate separating postal employees from their customers.
The circus performer was about to place a possessive hand on one of the smaller trunks when Bell said in a clear voice, “Stop.”
Everyone in the branch turned to face him. The man cast a distrustful look Bell’s way.
“Aren’t you Rudolfo Latang, the magician?”
The man seemed to release a breath and let his shoulders relax. He smiled charmingly. “I am. Yes.” His accent was European but hard to pin down.
He turned back to his luggage to forestall further conversation, but Bell plowed on, playing the act a while longer. “I caught your show in Cheyenne over the weekend. You are one amazing performer. Sawing a woman in half like that. Darnedest thing I ever saw. But I think I figured out how you did it.”
Latang looked over his shoulder and said tersely, “I doubt that.”
Bell dropped his hayseed persona and said. “Let’s just see. Detectives?” At that, McCallister and Gaylord held up their shields and moved in close to the magician, shooing a few customers back so they had control over the suspect and no potential hostages could be taken if he tried something desperate.
“What is the meaning of this?” Latang blustered.
