The garage contained expensive automobiles—a Packard limousine, a Palmer-Singer Skimabout, a Lancia Torpedo—and several motorcycles. The stable of vehicles fit the picture forming in Bell’s mind of Frost as a restless recluse. He lived like a king but also like an outlaw. The camp was as much a hideout as it was an estate, and Frost, like all successful criminals, was prepared for a quick getaway. It seemed as if Harry Frost knew that, despite his wealth and power, it was only a matter of time before he would commit an atrocity that would make him a fugitive.

Bell looked into the blacksmith shop. The forge was cold. In the smithy’s scrap heap he saw horseshoes that had been twisted out of shape. Harry Frost’s Chicago calling card, Bell recalled, bent with Frost’s bare hands to demonstrate his almost inhuman strength, then thrown by his thugs through the bedroom windows of his rivals. It was an article of faith among the drunks in the West Side saloons that Frost had killed a Clydesdale with his fist.

Hanging above the twisted shoes, grimy with smoke, was a framed award that Frost had received for contributing money to a civic group. Bell turned on his heel and walked into the sun, whispering the newsboys’ names: Wally Laughlin, Bobby Kerouac, Joey Lansdowne. It had been an elaborate funeral, their fellows maintaining the newsboy tradition of hiring hearses and mourners and paying clerks to write obituaries and letters of condolence. Wally Laughlin, Bobby Kerouac, Joey Lansdowne, barely out of childhood, priests promising their mothers they’d find a better place in Heaven.

Bell entered the boathouse at the edge of the lake. Inside, he found flatboats and canoes and a sailboat with its mast shipped. From the boathouse he walked through tall grass to the aeroplane hangar. It contained enough parts to assemble several flying machines. But the machine he had seen through the open end was missing its engine and propellers.

He heard voices in the direction of the smokehouse.

Bell walked quietly toward them, keeping the squat windowless stone structure between him and whoever was talking on the other side. He stopped beside it. A voice was droning on and on. It sounded like a middle-aged or older man, talking some trapped listener’s ear off. Bell’s own ear was struck by the accent. The speaker spoke the flat a’s heard in the Adirondack region. But this was no local Upstate New Yorker, not with the unmistakable d’s for th sounds and snaky s’s of Chicago.

The subject of his monologue tagged him as a denizen of the notorious Levee District, where crime and vice were daily fare.

Chapter 4

4