The Man with the Crimson Box

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  Vann paused a second, ruminatingly. Then went on.

  “Well, to continue, the Ingleside Hospital burned to the ground the day after the kidnaping. A quite legitimate conflagration, however, Beryl, and resulting from a nurse accidentally dropping some burning oil that was to make a healing vapor for some patient’s nose. No patients were killed in the fire—or even suffocated—all were gotten out safely—but the place, being very small, and rather old, was destroyed entirely—to its last X-ray plates—its records—everything! Though, with respect to our now imminent kidnaping trial, we have—today—in our files—a correspondence between the hospital and Wah Lung, describing in detail the operation that was to be done on his son; and that it was relatively safe; and the later correspondence stating that it was done. In fact, we even have his history card—which had been sent as a courtesy, to Wah Lung—so that their Chinese doctor could survey it!”

  Vann stopped to see if the girl was following everything. Which she was, for she asked promptly:

  “And did they, the night of Wah Lee’s disappearance, made demands on Mr. Wah Lung—for ransom money?”

  “No, Beryl. Not that night. No. They merely phoned him, that night, that if he would see his son alive again—he should sit quietly for a full week, and wait the terms of a ‘negotiation.’ No, they did not make the specific demands until October 8th—6 days afterward. And again—by phone only. They were careful, you see, not to write ransom letters. And no letters are available today. Though Wah Lung’s testimony is. Nor did they, as is usual, send particles of Wah Lee’s clothing—to assure the father that they really had him. And that helped a white scoundrel, 3 years later, to escape his just deserts. A man known, Beryl, as ‘Muscle-In.’ For he caught a sentence only for—well—for ‘muscling in’! The which will be made more clear, as I proceed. Now where was I? Well, they—the kidnaper or kidnapers—demanded of Wah Lung—the father—and by phone only—that he get $50,000 ransom money together. In five-dollar bills and ten-dollar bills. And that—on the night of October 15th—they gave him time, you see, to get this big sum together—he drop the bundle containing same from the back platform of a Chicago and Milwaukee electric train—on this side of the Illinois state line—where he would see a red flare blaze up. Which he did, Beryl. For he had gotten the $50,000 together. Quietly. And without ever having informed the ‘white police.’ And he dropped it—exactly as per instructions. But the boy—well, the boy did not return!

  “The kidnapers phoned, however, a few days later—and said that the boy had been taken on a plane to the Louisiana coast—and thence aboard a boat bound for South America—but that the boat had even now, due to a coded wireless message, turned about—and that the boy would be returned safe by November 1st, at latest. And the poor sucker of a father—he believed that! So—came November 1st. And another phone call said that the boat had docked in some bayou—the boy had been flown back as far as St. Louis—but was now ill, in the gang’s St. Louis hideout, with a mild case of scarletina, according to the verdict of the skilled gang doctor who was in attendance on him, and could not be moved for g days. There was no danger whatsoever, the negotiator said, and the boy would positively be back in Chicago by November 9th, absolutely. Came November 9th—and no boy! And no calls! Came November 15th, Beryl, and again there was no boy—and, of course, no more calls. And so Wah Lung, grief-stricken, reported all to the police. Even to the unimportant matter of the quarrel with the son. And how he had even paid the demanded ransom.

  “Fortunately, however,” Vann explained, “the numbers on one thousand of these $5 bills were of record, for a clerk in the First National Bank, who had gotten together for Wah Lung—at the latter’s request—a certain one-thousand old $5-bills, to be given in exchange for five new $1000-bills—suspected somehow from Wah Lung’s haggard appearance that they might be going to be used for ransom money—and so just made a complete record of their numbers. And—”

  “And these turned up at once I suppose, Mr. Vann?”

  “They did not, Beryl! No! By bad luck, this particular $5000-dollar component of the ransom money must have been the last of it ever to be passed. Perhaps it was suspected of being so-called ‘hot money’—who knows? And it is because none of those 1000 $5-bills turned up for three long years, that the case jumps straight to 1930—a point which lies exactly 10 years back of us.”

  “For,” explained Vann, “on the and of October that year a snaky-eyed stranger passed a $5-bill over the paying teller’s ledge in a Wilmette, Illinois bank—asking for change. And the clerk—one Chetwyn Robinson—had been the identical clerk who had made up that list of bill numbers in the First National Bank at Chicago here, 3 years before—and this particular bill, carrying a tiny triangular patch of red courtplaster patching, caught his attention like—like nobody’s business! And so, having that old listing of numbers still in his notebook, he compared the number on this bill—all outside range of. his cage, you understand, and while supposedly getting a new supply of $1-bills—and found it was really of the ransom bills. And so he tipped off the bank detective. Who followed the snaky-eyed chap. The latter,” continued Vann, “went straight to a little poorly furnished caretaker’s office and living quarters—up by way of a winding wooden stairway, above one of the dirt-floored rooms of the former Schlitzheim Brewery on Goose Island, the site of which had been for sale for years. This room, above which the caretaker’s quarters were, was this identical hexagonally shaped room I asked you about, Beryl—the so-called ‘testing room’ of the brewery.” Again Vann paused a second. “Well—the Wilmette detective at once summoned Chicago help—and both caretaker and snaky-eyed chap were arrested.

  “The snaky-eyed chap,” Vann went on, “to dispose of him for good and all in this exposition!—proved to be an ex-convict, one Job Breeden, who had been ‘in stir’—meaning, Beryl, in prison—in Columbus, Ohio, before, during and long after the Wah Lee kidnaping—and he was definitely cleared, by that fact, from charges either of kidnaping, extortion or anything else. His story, rendered at headquarters, was simply that the $5-bill he’d passed in Wilmette had been given him as ‘expenses’ on some work he was to do in that suburb for the caretaker—i.e., watching some domestic of whom, it seems, the caretaker was jealous!—and that, having done the work successfully, he’d come back to get an additional $5 fee promised him. But the caretaker—well he proved, Beryl, to be a better catch. Yes! For he was found to be one, Gus McGurk, possessor of a pedigree at the d.b.—meaning, Beryl, a record at the Detective Bureau. Known—so it showed there—as Big Gus—and also as Muscle-In, due to certain propensities he appeared to have for inserting himself into criminal propositions worked up by weaker criminals, and taking the profits! He was also the nephew of some politician and real estate man—one Fean McGurk—dead today, incidentally—who had been one of the last stockholders in the brewery, and who now represented it as real-estate sales agent, and who had, so it seems, the say as to who should be caretaker of the site and partly demolished structure. And he had been in the custom of tossing the caretakership—such as it might be worth—for no wages were connected with it!—to his nogood nephew, this Big Gus, whenever the latter asked for it; for Big Gus, as it soon appeared, used the caretakership whenever he needed a hangout or a hideout where there wouldn’t be too many eyes on him—or him activities.

  “Well,” Vann continued, “they searched Big Gus’s portmanteau—which was under the old cracked iron bed in the place; and they found, Beryl, not only a heading torn from the evening issue of the St. Louis Record of October 30th, 1927, bearing two Chinese characters put on in brush, and reading ‘Wah Lee’—but also complete parson’s suit—and by complete, I mean, complete even to the reversed ecclesiastical collar—but also—”

  “Just a minute, Mr. Vann,” put in the girl, puzzledly, “A parson’s suit? You mean, do you not, a—a clergyman’s suit?”

  “That’s right. Yes.”

  “Well—had t
his Big Gus been a clergyman, at one time—and maybe—”

  “Gone wrong? Heavens no, Beryl! The suit branded him definitely as being a member of the Parson Gang—if not in all likelihood its actual leader; a small gang or that day of which every member in it was known to have a parson’s suit—and all of whom frequently traveled about, dressed in such suits, at such times or in such districts where they were in danger of a police pick-up on suspicion. The old Parson Gang. Yes! But all broken up today, Beryl, thanks to various life sentences—and G-men bullets. Yes! And—but where was I? Oh, yes. Well, they found also $1000 of the ransom money in this fellow McGurk’s portmanteau. Every dollar of it—bar none—part of those 1000 $5-bills which Chetwyn Robinson, that bank clerk at the First National, had definitely passed to Wah Lung in I927. And therefore, red-hot ransom money! And last, but far from least, they found—in one of McGurk’s notebooks—a jotted-down telephone number which proved to have been a purely temporary number, assigned by the telephone company for one day only to the apartment of Wah Lung, during the hearing of some law suit regarding his regular number; and since this had happened right during the kidnaping negotiations, Wah Lung had given that temporary number to the kidnapers so that there should be no interruptions of negotiations.

  “And so,” Vann hastened on, with a glance at his watch and also at the train gates, “while Big Gus was held, unbooked, the police dug that brewery over—suspecting naturally that the Chinese boy might have been held right there—thanks to McGurk’s having had the caretakership off and on, now and then. Though, unfortunately, with no records extant of when. And they began their digging, naturally, in the, dirt-floored room at the base of the stairs which ran up to McGurk’s little quarters.”

  “The former testing room?” the girl put in, showing that she was following every angle.

  “Yes. And thank the Lord that room—of that entire labyrinth of rooms—is specifically and unmistakably identifiable in a court of law. The Lord is indeed good, this day, to the State’s Attorney’s office. For it—but any more questions?”

  “Well—they found the body, I take it? A headless body—as now I see?”

  “A fleshless, headless body, Beryl! Eaten by quicklime. The body of—quite obviously!—Wah Lee; and murdered—since the head itself was missing. And murdered after October 30th. And presumably murdered in an attempt to escape; or else because he’d gotten a clue to the identity of the place where he was being held. Or maybe even murdered by one of the gang, out of sheer wantonness—who knows?—after the ‘build-up’ of the ‘South American boat,’ and the St. Louis ‘hideout’ was carefully insinuated into the father’s mind. Since they kept him alive as long as that, Beryl—27 days—or 28 days—either near-escape on his part, or discovery on his part of the location of his hiding place, seemed the only possible answer. Anyway, to get back to our story, the police found a body. The body which failed—at least in the days of my particular predecessor in office, Fos Emmons!—to serve as a 100 per cent sure corpus delicti or victimus kidnapii—if I may coin some impromptu Latin! And simply because—but I’ll give you the fact ‘why’—in a minute. So—as I say, Big Gus was held—booked now, yes; but not indicted yet—while that place was dug over its entire extent, both for other possible victims and also for the missing head—though, unfortunately, dug only at the general level where that body had been found, or a foot or so lower at most, But lo!—the publicity attendant on the finding of the thing, which was presumably the corpse of Wah Lee, brought forth a parson in San Francisco—but a really genuine parson this one, Beryl—and a man, incidentally, who’s story was unassailable—one, The Reverend Horace Mylrea, of 601 Darien Way, Frisco—who declared that he had talked personally with Wah Lee in San Francisco on the date of November 25th, 1927—which date, Beryl, you’ll note was after the payment of the ransom money by Wah Lung—likewise after Wah Lung had applied to the Chicago police; and the youth, Mylrea averred, had told him disgustedly that his father had been a fool for parting with all that ransom money to those white gangsters. Mylrea claimed that he had originally met the boy while in Chicago, and that the boy—being there in Frisco—had called on him. And had told him also, incidentally, that he was on his way to Mexico. Also that he had gotten out of Chicago because of his father’s unwillingness that he pay court to a certain white girl. And that he actually had, that day in Jackson Park, gotten into a car with four men—but only because he felt faint. These four men, he told Mylrea, were making some kind of scientific test, with some kind of an instrument, of atmospheric electric discharge, rising towards dusk—and had obviously never come forward to the police later, because of the usual danger of being beaten up—individually—and collectively. They had—so Mylrea claimed Wah Lee had told him—let Wah Lee out near the old Northwestern Railway Station, where he had taken a train for the West. He had, moreover, he told Mylrea—so at least the latter claimed!—written his father, Wah Lung, from Denver, after reading how the latter had been bilked—but had not gotten either a reply or the return of his letter. And so had presumed his father was angry about the lost ransom money.

  “And on top of this amazing witness—reported by the Frisco police to have the highest reputability—came forward an old woman, Mrs. Mary Grubbs, who lived in a two or three-room shack on Goose Island just across a railway spur from the brewery. She was definitely known to have two sons, both sailors, and named Dolf and Brunker. And she told the State’s Attorney that the found body—rather, skeleton—was that of her son Dolf, whose head had been blown completely off, on April 3rd, 1927, by a large-bore elephant-hunting gun wielded by Brunker, her other son. The gun, she said, Brunker had brought from Africa; and she actually had it, as evidence of her facts! Brunker, she said, had fled immediately after the killing; and she and her husband, Sam—now, in 1930 dead!—in a panic had carried Dolfs headless body over to the dark brewery and, under cover of the night, buried it under the testing room floor—with plenty of quicklime from some factory lying further up the spur. The blown-to-pieces head of Dolf—brains, scalp and all!—in the shack, Sam had swept up, mopped up, and burned! And the fled son had never shown up.”

  “How—how awful!” said the girl.

  “Yeah?” said Vann, dryly. “Like a fiction story, isn’t it? Yes!”

  “Then—then she was not telling the truth?” the girl queried.

  “Wait!” said Vann. “Well, her story remained quite unshaken. And she had told it, she said, only because she knew that the police would be learning in short order that neither of her sons had been seen on Goose Island, or anywhere else, for the last three years—and that the police would assuredly be querying her as to whether they might have both been in the alleged kidnaping. And she wanted, she said, not only to clear them of any complicity in the matter—but to square Brunker before she died—for, she said, the shooting had been a quarrel and Dolf had actually made a gesture of drawing a revolver on Brunker. A good motive, you see she had—for coming forward.”

  Vann paused a second, then continued. “Well, Big Gus’s attorney, one Fleming Wiles—Big Gus wasn’t indicted yet, you understand—looking over the case pro and con, and also at the fact of these two unsolicited witnesses, went to Foster Emmons and said that Big Gus, indubitably caught dead-to-rights on possession of the ransom money, and of the phone number which branded him as having been the negotiator with Wah Lung, was willing to plead guilty to conspiracy and extortion. That, in short, Big Gus’s only admission was to the effect that he had heard—via the underworld—that some gang, trying to snatch Wah Lee, was failing utterly to find any trace of him; and then later, another rumor, less definite, that still another gang had snatched him—and that he was on a boat going towards South America; and so Big Gus had hurried in ahead of them all, and pulled a ‘Muscle-In.’ The evening St. Louis Record of October 30th, 1927, he had bought—so he claimed!—on October 31st, at the Out-of-Town Newsstand on Quincy and State Streets; and the Chinese signature—in brush!�
��on it, reading ‘Wah Lee,’ he had obtained—so he also claimed!—from some certain Chicago Japanese, to send to Wah Lung if, during the telephone conversation of November 1st, the latter would demand some proof that the negotiator actually had his son. For, Big Gus frankly stated—though through his lawyer only—he had intended to string the father as long as possible—to obscure the whole transaction. Big Gus, in fact, actually named, Beryl, a then-dead Japanese—one Suko Haburo—as the maker of the brush-made mark—an erudite Oriental rascal who was definitely known to have been mixed up, back in 1927, with white criminal activities. All a clever ‘muscling-in,’ so Big Gus claimed—on the gang who had abducted the boy—and on which gang the boy plainly must have died. And—so said Fleming Wiles, Big Gus’s lawyer!—Big Gus and he would fight to the death any attempt to make Big Gus guilty of actual kidnaping and murder. And so Emmons—realizing that not only were Chinese brush-made characters not legally identifiable as is handwriting—and that these, moreover, were cunningly attributed to a now-dead Jap!—and realizing likewise that if the two unexpected witnesses who had popped up in the case knocked out the identity of the headless corpse, and hence the charge of kidnaping for ransom, then the whole prosecutive castle would tumble down, and Big Gus would walk out free—came to an agreement with Big Gus’s attorney, the agreement providing that Big Gus was to plead guilty to extortion, and the state was to consent to a sentence of 15 years in the penitentiary. To be really frank, Beryl, Fos Emmons was a sort of—of weak sister, as well as a drinker; he’d been razzed unmercifully in the papers for failure to get certain convictions; and he was very glad, I think, to be able to send Big Gus up for a good stretch, and add a conviction to his professional record, even if it wasn’t a capital conviction. And so the upshot of it all was that Big Gus, on some date in late October 1930, plead guilty to conspiracy and extortion, and took 15 years in Moundsville. Entering there next day. And commencing his sentence immediately. Which sentence—under the good-behavior time-off schedules then in force, plus the modified retroactive regulations on that, passed last year—would have reduced to an even 10 years. And a not-so-hard 10 years, either—considering the 50,000 dollars he extorted. Nothing at all, indeed, such as would be served out in one of your British prisons. For Big Gus—so I was reliably informed about a year back by someone who goes out to the prison—has a fine rug in his cell—a gift of some convict who made it; a radio; an electric clock; and so little work to do that he actually has to stretch it out the best he can! This work even gives him enough of the run of prison that he is able to get a ‘snootful’ of prison-distilled alcohol now and then, and so hasn’t, at all, had a bad time of things. to easy years. For such things go fast. And—but, speaking of to years—there is one thing I must do at once—and no foolin’!”