Coligney had stationed a cop to escort Bell inside, where he followed signs pointing to the Chamber of Horrors. On the way, he passed “The Municipal Joyride to the Catskill Mountains,” a huge cartoon of “Honest Jim” Fryer running over a small taxpayer in a town car, a depiction of the “Story and Shame of the Queensboro Bridge” that accused Tammany Hall Democrats of wasting $8,000,000 to build “nothing but an automobile highway” that should have been spent on preventing tuberculosis.
Down the basement stairs was the chief attraction, the Chamber of Tammany Horrors, and it was stronger stuff. Silhouettes of men, women, and children encircled the room like the rings of Hell, dramatizing the price of graft: the thirteen thousand New Yorkers who had died this year of preventable diseases; the children condemned to the streets by the shortage of schools.
Captain Coligney was waiting next to an exhibit illustrated by a floor-to-ceiling billboard: “How Tammany Hands Catskill Aqueduct Plums to its Favored Contractors.”
“A DA dick told me you dropped my name on him,” he greeted Bell.
“Only your name. I was trying to get a handle on Adlerman Martin.”
“I reckoned as much,” said Coligney. He jerked a thumb at the billboard. “Thought you’d like to see Part Two of this exhibit.”
Alderman James Martin was behind the billboard, barely out of the regular visitors’ sight. He was hanging by the neck. His face was blue, his tongue as thick and gray as a parrot’s, his body stiff.
Coligney said, “He wasn’t here when they closed last night. They found him this morning.”
“What time do they close?”
“Closed at eleven. Opened this morning at nine.”
“Are we supposed to believe he committed suicide from guilt?”
“Martin didn’t have a guilty bone in his body. But, at any rate, he’s been dead a lot longer than twelve hours. Which means he didn’t hang himself here.”
“Not likely he hanged himself elsewhere, either,” Bell noted. He inspected the body closely. “But it doesn’t look like he put up a struggle.”
Coligney agreed. “On the other hand, his pockets were empty, except for one thing.” He held up a business card, balancing the edges between his big fingers. Bell read it.
“Who is Davidson?”
“Onetime reformer. Saw where the money was made and woke up thoroughly Tammanized. Big wheel in the Contractors’ Protective Association.”
“What’s his card doing in Martin’s pocket?”
“I’d guess same reason Alderman Martin is hanging here: To make Tammany look even worse than the Chamber of Horrors.”
“So Davidson locked horns with whoever hanged Martin.”
Coligney nodded. “And they’ve just sent him a threat.”
Bell asked, “How much time would I have to interview Davidson before you make it official?”
Coligney found sudden interest in the ceiling. “My cops are busy. I’d imagine you have a day.”
“I’ll need two,” said Bell. Time for Research to scrutinize Davidson before he braced him.
The side-wheel river steamer Rose C. Stambaugh struggled to land at Storm King sixty miles up the Hudson from New York. Smoke fountained from the stack behind her wheelhouse, and her vertical beam engine, which stood like an oil derrick between her paddle wheels, belched steam that turned white in the cold air.
The pilot cussed a blue streak, under his breath, when a bitter gust—straight from the North Pole—stiffened the American flag flying from the stern and threatened to hammer his boat against the wharf. Winter could not shut down the river too soon for him.
Isaac Bell stood at the head of the gangway, poised to disembark. He wore a blue greatcoat and a derby and carried an overnight satchel. Red and green Branco’s Grocery wagons were lined up on the freight deck, stacked full of barrels and crates destined for the aqueduct crews at the heart of the great enterprise. The siphon that would shunt the Catskills water under the Hudson River would connect the Ashokan Dam with New York City.
The mules were already in their traces. The instant the gangway hit the wharf, Bell strode down it and pulled ahead of the long-eared animals clumping after him. Officials scattered when they saw him coming.
If his coat and hat made him look like a New York City police detective, or a high-ranking Water Supply Board cop, Isaac Bell was not about to say he wasn’t. Two birds with one stone on this trip included a second visit with J. B. Culp. This time, it would be on his home turf, Raven’s Eyrie, which Bell could see gleaming halfway up the mountain in the noonday sun. In his bag were evening clothes. First he would look like a police detective under the mountain.
He found the site where they were sinking a new access shaft to the siphon tunnel. The original shaft had been started too close to the mountain edge, where the granite proved too weak to withstand the aqueduct’s water pressure.
“Can I help you, sir?” the gate man asked warily.
“Where’s Davidson?”
“I’ll send somebody for him.”
“Just point me the way.”
The gate man pointed up the hill.
Bell stepped close, cop close. “Precisely where?”
“There’s a contractor’s shed about a hundred feet from the new shaft.”