Night Probe! - Cussler Clive (онлайн книги бесплатно полные txt) 📗

"A grisly business," Preston Beatty exclaimed with an odd sort of pleasure. "One thing to butcher a human body, but quite another to serve it for dinner."

"Would you care for another beer?" asked Pitt.

"Please." Beatty downed the final swallow in his glass. "Fascinating people, Hattie and Nathan Pilcher. You might say they came up with the perfect solution for disposing of the corpus delicti." He motioned around the bar, which was busy with the early evening two-for-one drinks crowd. "This tavern we're sitting in rests on the very foundations of Pilcher's inn. The townspeople of Poughkeepsie burned down the original in 1823 when they learned of the ghastly deeds that had gone on behind its walls."

Pitt gestured for a barmaid. "What you're saying is that the Pilchers murdered overnight guests for their money and then put them on the menu."

"Yes, exactly." It was clear that Beatty was in his element. He recited the events with relish. "No way to take a body count, of course. A few scattered bones were dug up. But the best guess is that the Pilchers cooked between fifteen and twenty innocent travelers in the five years they were in business."

Professor Beatty was considered the leading authority on unsolved crimes. His books sold widely in Canada and the United States and had on occasion touched the nonfiction best-seller lists. He slouched comfortably in the booth and peered at Pitt through blue-green eyes over a salt-and-pepper beard. His age, Pitt guessed from the stern, craggy features and the silver-edged hair, was late forties. He looked more like a hardened pirate than a writer.

"The truly incredible part," Beatty continued, "is how the killers were exposed."

"A restaurant critic gave them a bad review," Pitt suggested.

"You're closer than you know." Beatty laughed. "One evening a retired sea captain stopped overnight. He was accompanied by a manservant, a Melanesian he'd brought on board his ship many years before in the Solomon Islands. Unfortunately for the Pilchers, the Melanesian had once been a cannibal and his educated taste buds correctly identified the meat in the stew."

"Not very appetizing," said Pitt. "So what happened to the Pilchers? Were they executed?"

"No, while awaiting trial they escaped and were never seen again."

The beers arrived and Beatty paused while Pitt signed the tab.

"I've pored through old crime reports here and in Canada trying to connect their modus operandi with later unsolved murders, but they passed into oblivion along with Jack the Ripper.

"And Clement Massey," said Pitt, broaching the subject on his mind.

"Ah, yes, Clement Massey, alias Dapper Doyle." Beatty spoke as if fondly recalling a favorite relative. "A robber years ahead of his time. He could have given lessons to the best of them."

"He was that good?"

"Massey had style and was incredibly shrewd. He planned all his jobs so they looked like the work of rival gangs. As near as I can figure, he pulled off six bank holdups and three train robberies that were blamed on someone else."

"What was his background?"

"Came from a wealthy Boston family. Graduated Harvard summa cum laude. Established a thriving law practice that catered to the social elite of Providence. Married a prominent socialite who bore him five children. Elected twice to the Massachusetts senate."

"Why would he rob banks?" Pitt asked incredulously.

"For the hell of it," Beatty replied. "As it turns out, he handed over every penny of his ill-gotten gains to charity."

"How come he was never glamorized by the newspapers or old pulp magazines?"

"He had vanished from the scene long before his crimes were tied to him," Beatty replied. "And that came only after an enterprising newspaper reporter proved that Clement Massey and Dapper Doyle-were one and the same. Naturally, his influential friends and colleagues saw to it that the scandal was quickly covered up. There wasn't enough hard evidence for a trial anyway."

"Hard to believe that Massey was never recognized during a holdup."

"He seldom went along," Beatty laughed. "Like a general directing a battle behind the lines, he usually stayed in the background. All the jobs were pulled out of state, and even his own gang didn't know his true identity. Actually, he was recognized on one of the few occasions he directed a robbery at first hand. But the witness' testimony was scoffed at by the investigating marshal. After all, who could believe that a respected state senator was a closet bandit?"

"Odd that Massey didn't wear a mask."

"A psychological turn-on," said Beatty. "He probably flaunted himself just to experience the excitement that comes from crowding your luck. A double life can be a super challenge for some men. And yet deep down, they want to get caught. Like a husband cheating on his wife who throws lipstick covered handkerchiefs in the family laundry hamper."

"Then why the Wacketshire depot robbery? Why did Massey risk everything for a paltry eighteen bucks?"

"I've spent more than one night staring at the ceiling over that enigma." Beatty looked down at the table and moved his glass around. "Except for that caper, Massey never pulled a job that paid less than twenty-five grand."

"He disappeared right after that."

"I'd get lost too if I was the cause of a hundred deaths." Beatty took a long swallow of his beer. "Because he ignored the stationmaster's plea to stop the train and allowed women and children to plunge into a cold river, he became enshrined in the annals of crime as a savage mass murderer instead of a Robin Hood.

"How do you read it?"

"He wanted to rob the train," Beatty answered matter-of-factly. "But something went wrong. There was a bad storm that night. The train was running late. Maybe he was thrown off schedule. I don't know. Something screwed up his plans."

"What was on the train for a robber?" asked Pitt.

"Two million in gold coin."

Pitt looked up. "I read nothing about a gold shipment on the St. Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces struck in nineteen fourteen at the Philadelphia mint. Bound for the banking houses in New York. I think Massey got wind of it. The railroad officials thought they were being clever by rerouting the gold car over half the countryside instead of dispatching it direct over the main track. Rumors were, the car was attached to the Manhattan Limited in Albany. No way to prove anything, of course. The loss, if there was a loss, was never reported. The bank bigwigs probably figured it better suited their image to hush the matter up."

"That may explain why the railroad nearly went broke trying to salvage the train."

"Perhaps." Beatty became lost in the past for a minute. Then he said, "Of all the crimes I've studied, in all the police archives of the world, Massey's penny ante robbery at Wacketshire intrigues me the most."

"It smells for another reason."

"How so?"

"This morning a lab found traces of iron sulfide in samples taken from the Deauville-Hudson bridge."

Beatty's eyes narrowed. "Iron sulfide is used in black powder."

"That's right. It looks like Massey blew the bridge."

Beatty appeared stunned by the revelation. "But why? What was his motive"

"We'll find the answers," said Pitt, "when we find the Manhattan Limited."