“I will slit that damned reporter’s throat and shove his leg through it,” said Jeff.
Joe had no doubt that Jeff would kill the reporter if opportunity arose, or he might even create the opportunity. “Don’t,” he said. “Even Mother would catch wind of that newspaper report.”
Mother was holed up in the family’s Lower Merion Main Line estate. The only visitors to her fifty rooms and two hundred acres — which Joe and Jeff dreamed of one day inheriting to subdivide — were her bankers and her priest.
“What’s this about Treasure Island? We don’t have any money for another play.”
“Which is why,” Joe explained patiently, “we will maneuver Mr. Isaac Bell into buying into our investment in Jekyll and Hyde. If these murdered girls sink us, we’ll at least get some of our money out.”
“But why would Bell invest in Jekyll and Hyde when the papers are full of murdered girls?”
Joe Deaver said, “Partly to involve Barrett & Buchanan in his pipe dreams for Treasure Island and partly to secure employment in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a friend.”
Jeff Deaver grinned. At last, a motive he could understand. “Sounds like the insurance man fell for an actress.”
“Helen,” said Joe. “An attractive brunette who knows how to wear a gown. Bell claims she was a scholarship girl at Bryn Mawr who got taken under the wing of one of his investors.”
“A likely story.”
Joe shook his head emphatically. “Bell is as straitlaced as you’d expect of an insurance man. And I’m sorry to say Helen doesn’t come across as your average chorus girl on the make.”
“What part does she want?”
“Mr. Bell believes she should replace Barbara.”
“Barbara? No! Barbara makes a crackerjacks job of it. How do we know Bell’s friend is up to doing ‘general businesswoman’?”
Joe was running out of patience. He answered sharply.
“Your Barbara is paid twenty bucks a week to dust Jekyll’s library in one scene; speak the line ‘Mr. Hyde hasn’t come home yet, Dr. Jekyll’ in another; and get strangled any evening one of the regulars catches a cold. If Isaac Bell will cover half of our investment, I guarantee his friend Helen will be up to it.”
A Baltimore & Ohio fast freight from Pittsburgh slowed to enter the Cincinnati yards. A hobo dropped from a boxcar. A railroad detective ran after him with a billy club.
“Come here, you!”
Harry Warren did as he was told. His clothes were grimy, his hands and face smeared with coal soot, but a cop with a sharper eye might have noticed that he was fitter, stronger, and better fed than most who rode the rails.
“Where you think you’re going?”
“Hoping for Frisco.”
“You got yourself a long walk. And a busted head for stealing rides.” The yard bull whipped his billy skyward. “Tell your friends Cincinnati is off-limits.”
“Do you really want to try that?”
Warren’s tone was almost conversational. He waited for the yard bull to reconsider, but the man swung at him anyway. Seasoned hickory whistled. Parting the air that Harry Warren’s skull had occupied an instant earlier, the brutal blow ended up as a wild swing angled across the rail cop’s torso. When it smacked the gravel by his left foot, he was off balance, with his right side exposed.
Four inches of lead pipe had materialized in Harry Warren’s hand. He gauged his opportunity and applied the pipe to the yard bull’s skull well above his vulnerable temple with a force precisely calculated to flatten him facedown, head ringing, and legs too shaky to try to stand for several minutes.
“Which way’s the Lyric Theatre?”
“Huh?”
“The Lyric. Where they show Alias Jimmy Valentine. It’s about a detective trying to mistreat an innocent safecracker.”
An angry thumb gestured a route into the freight district.
Having ensured that he would be remembered as a tough who rode the rails if someone asked questions later, Harry Warren made a quick tour of streets clogged to a standstill by horse- and mule-drawn wagons, exasperated teamsters, and motor trucks belching blue exhaust. He breakfasted on sausages in saloons and washed them down with German beer. He met some local hard cases, and passed a pint of whiskey to a city cop; you never knew who’d come in handy later.
Quickly absorbing the nature of the city — skilled craftsmen packing saloons midday, their women working low-paying jobs in the factories — he worked his way to the section where they showed movies, vaudeville, and plays.
The Clark Theatre’s electrics ballyhooed
DR. JEKYLL and MR. HYDE
Direct from BROADWAY
JACKSON BARRETT & JOHN BUCHANAN
Present
The Height of Mechanical Realism
Two Sensational Scenic Effects
Posters out front showed a red airplane and a speeding subway.
Warren headed next door to the Lyric.
ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE
Direct from NEW YORK
“Top O. Henry Short Story Topped Onstage”
— VARIETY
“Nate Stewart’s expecting me,” he told the old guy at the stage door and gave a name trusted by the wrong element in Hell’s Kitchen. “Tell him Quinn’s here.”
The head carpenter had received a telegram of introduction from a New York guy who knew Harry Warren as Quinn. A boy was sent running. Nate Stewart hurried out with a welcoming handshake.
“How was your train?”
“Free,” Harry Warren replied, with an us-against-the-bigwigs grin that said he saved his ticket money for better things. “Still got room for a sceneshifter?”
“You timed it perfect. The sons of guns at Jekyll and Hyde poached my top hand when their feller lit out for the Oklahoma oil fields.”
Lucy Balant loved the Dow Drugs pharmacy at the corner of Fifth and Vine, just down the street from Alias Jimmy Valentine. It had a Becker’s “iceless” soda fountain — the latest thing to chill syrups, soda water, and ice cream mechanically instead of with ice — which made drinks ambrosially colder on a hot day. The fountain was surrounded by an octagonal marble counter and sixteen stools that had a rapid turnover, since it was near the train station. So for an actress who finally had a steady job, even if it was only as an understudy, and could afford a treat, it was perfect to drop in for a quick ginger ale. Plus, the soda jerkers made darned sure mashers didn’t bother a girl alone.
A tall, dark-haired lady detective took the stool beside her the second it was empty. “I hope you remember me, Lucy.”
“Vividly. What are you doing in Cincinnati?”
“Hunting Anna’s killer.”
“Because of what happened to the vaudeville dancer?”
“The same man.”
Lucy shuddered. “It was horrible. Like hearing about Anna all over again. Have you seen those posters?”