“All right.” He left the office and closed the door behind him. “Harry, give me a copy of the thanks-but-no-thanks employment application,” he whispered.
Harry smiled, opened a drawer, and pulled out a lengthy printed form.
“Thank you,” she said when he handed it to her. She skimmed it. “I’m sorry. I can’t fill this out.”
“But you just said you’d provide ‘exhaustive’ information about yourself.”
“No, I said I’d submit myself to an exhaustive investigation.”
It occurred to Pinkerton that the woman might be slightly mad. “Mrs. Warne,” he said, “when did your husband die? Are you all alone in the world? Any relatives or friends in Chicago?”
“If you’re asking me for references, I have a banker, but I’d prefer not to give you his name.”
“I wasn’t, actually,” he said. “I was wondering if you were lonely and had come here out of a misguided notion the Pinkertons might provide some companionship.”
She smiled as if he’d made a joke. “Not at all. I came here to have my background checked by the nation’s best investigators and then to be employed as a detective.”
Suddenly Pinkerton thought it might be a good idea for someone to investigate this woman, because there was something decidedly peculiar about her. The Chicago police ought to be tipped off. “All right, then. Will you at least supply your address?”
“Why should I?” she said. “Surely your detectives can track it down.”
“Why should they have to?”
“Because in no better way can I demonstrate my skill in eluding followers and performing other necessary deception than by making your investigation of me as difficult as possible. Surely that’s a better reference for detective work than any banker’s word.”
He snorted. This was the strangest bird he’d ever met. “Excuse me.” He left the office and closed the door behind him again.
“Harry, send a man outside to follow the lady home,” he whispered.
Harry nodded.
Pinkerton held the door open for Mrs. Warne. “Very well,” he said. “I’m game. You can expect a letter from me within two days in which I’ll detail your personal history. Good evening.”
The streetlamps were lit when she exited under the sign of the Eye That Never Sleeps. Because she wore dark clothes and kept away from the lamps, the Pinkerton who followed her lost sight of her several times. The passages between buildings along the street were dark, but once he caught sight of a man lurking in an alley and wondered if he’d have to save the lady from attack. Eventually she took him on a tour of Michigan Avenue shops, the last of which was a corsetiere. The shop’s display window was heavily draped. The solid oak entrance bore a sign that said men were not permitted on the premises. He knew there might be an exit in the rear, but he couldn’t afford to leave his lookout in front.
As it turned out, Pinkerton had only himself to blame for sending a lone operative to follow a woman on a shopping spree.
The widow had eluded Tim Webster, one of his best operatives. After that it took Pinkerton’s men two days to inquire at banks for an account holder named Mrs. Kate or Katherine Warne. When they located her bank, they bribed a teller for her address. The teller also said she had opened the account only the day before she had shown up at the agency. Pinkerton contacted the police about the strange widow.
Then, a day later than promised, he wrote to her at the LaSalle Boarding House for Ladies on Dearborn Street:
I congratulate you on evading my man. We found your address through your bank, the First State Street Bank. In doing so, we confirmed what you said about having a bank account in good standing, but we also learned you opened the account only the day before you visited my office. If you still wish to pursue employment with my agency, please return to the office at four o’clock on Friday to complete the interview. Be prepared to supply basic information about yourself, including your husband’s full name, your maiden name, and your date and place of birth.
Harry greeted Mrs. Warne with a polite smile, then disappeared into Pinkerton’s office. When he emerged, he asked her again to take a seat in the waiting room. Fifteen minutes later, he escorted her into Pinkerton’s office, which was filled with stale cigar smoke. Before Pinkerton rose to greet her, he deposited a half-smoked cigar in a floor-standing glass and bronze holder.
Again Pinkerton had the feeling he was watching a wallflower fade into the wallpaper. She wore the same gray dress she had worn before and held the same bonnet and the same reticule in her gray-gloved hands. Without the bonnet, for the first time he could see her virtually colorless hair. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
It was a test, and she seemed to know it. “Of course not. I occasionally smoke a lady’s cheroot myself. I don’t suppose you have any?”
“I do,” he said, and opened a mahogany case so she could choose one. From her reticule she pulled an ivory holder, into which she inserted the cheroot, and she held it to her lips as he lit it for her. She exhaled and said, “Would you care to learn how I eluded your man?”
“Yes.”
“The corsetiere’s shop has an exit from the fitting room into an alley very near the omnibus route,” she said.
“Clever enough to prove you’re capable of evasion,” he said, “but I still need your bona fides. Will you tell me your husband’s name?”
“More than ‘Mr. Warne’ I cannot say.”
Pinkerton didn’t even try to hide his displeasure. “No woman as honest as you claim to be should object to telling me her husband’s name. How do I know you really are a widow rather than a female confidence trickster?”
“Do I look like a confidence trickster? Is that what you’re saying?” She removed the glove from her left hand and showed him her ring finger, with a pale indentation where a wedding band appeared once to have been.
“Where’s the ring?” he asked.
“I lost it.”
“I can’t hire you with so little information,” he said. “I couldn’t vouch for you to a client otherwise.”
“Why not? If any client asked, all you’d need to say is that your men did a thorough search of my background and found nothing objectionable.”
“What makes you think my men did anything but inquire at a few banks?” In fact, George Bangs had spent a long time discreetly investigating the boardinghouse. He’d learned enough about the proprietress, one Mrs. Wanda Jean Cole, to know she couldn’t be bribed to permit a private detective to rifle through a lodger’s dresser drawers. He’d also asked about the deportment of the women who lodged with Mrs. Cole and learned that none were of the sort who might sneak a gentleman friend into their rooms. There were six lodgers in all: a retired schoolteacher, the spinster sister of a Lutheran minister, an elderly German woman in her dotage, a wheelchair-bound invalid and her companion, and Mrs. Kate Warne, a widow who had taken the room only two days before she first visited the agency.
“My operatives are engaged in important matters. Why should I expend valuable resources to investigate you?” He thought he caught a bit of disappointment in her eyes, but she was a hard book to read. He couldn’t imagine what she was up to. “I can think of no legitimate reason not to supply a little information to any prospective employer.”
“With all respect, sir,” she said, “the great Allan Pinkerton isn’t just any prospective employer. A good detective, let alone a great one, ought to be able to investigate a prospective employee’s background easily. I don’t feel it should be my responsibility to do your job for you.”
Pinkerton’s face grew more florid than usual. “I wouldn’t accept a statement like that from a man.”
“I’m a very private person, if not yet a private detective,” she said. He thought he spotted a hint of fear in her eyes. “I value my constitutional right to be secure in my person.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me anything that isn’t in the public records. If it’s public, then it isn’t private. All I really n
eed is a birth certificate or marriage license. Or just tell me where you were during the last census.”
“I can’t give you that information,” she said. “However, I realized there was a chance you wouldn’t be satisfied with what you found out about me. Since I must find employment by the end of the month, even if it isn’t as a lady detective, I came prepared to make a bargain.”
So that’s it, Pinkerton thought. She really is a confidence trickster, and a brazen one at that.
“I keep all the records of my life in a small strongbox,” she said.
“And if we find the strongbox, you’ll turn over its contents to me?” His voice would have dissolved anyone else’s backbone, but Mrs. Warne still sat up ramrod straight.
“Yes.” She seemed to hold her breath while he considered the ramifications of accepting her offer. What she called a “bargain” sounded to him more like a wager. Pinkerton was working on a complicated investigation in the Deep South for the Adams Express Company. A clever, respectable-looking woman like Mrs. Warne might, indeed, be of some assistance in the more delicate aspects of the case. The risk was that if he failed to find the strongbox he’d be obliged to hire her even if she had larceny on her mind. He wasn’t above hiring a detective with a shady past, regardless of what he might have told her about requiring proof of integrity, but only if the man was honest about it and wanted to change his ways. But this wasn’t a matter of a shady past. It was a matter of no past at all.
“Describe this strongbox,” he said.
“It’s roughly the length and width of that envelope on your desk,” she said. “It’s polished brass, one inch deep, and has a small keyhole. No markings anywhere on it. If you find it in a week, you must promise not to pick the lock or open it by force, but instead deliver it to my hands intact.” She removed the half-smoked cheroot from its holder and stubbed it out. “When you hand it to me intact, I’ll give you the contents and you’ll hire me.”
“And if we don’t find it?” he said.
“You’ll hire me without further ado.”
“You’re asking me to find a needle in a haystack,” he said.
“Isn’t that what you do for a living?”
“Let’s shake on it,” Pinkerton said. He didn’t often offer to shake a woman’s hand. She had a good, firm handshake.
The moment she left the office, he told Harry to have Webster tail her. “And tell him not to lose her this time.”
Then he called three other operatives into his office: Bangs, Joe Howard, and Tom MacDonald. He explained the challenge. George Bangs would team up with Webster, and they would take the night watch over the woman. While Webster followed her away from the agency, Bangs would head straight to the LaSalle Boarding House for Ladies, and when Webster and the woman eventually got there, Bangs would fill him in on the plan. Howard and MacDonald would take the day watch.
One operative from both pairs would follow her whenever she left the boardinghouse, while the other would sit tight and watch the house, and if the opportunity arose would look for a way to get into her room and search for the strongbox.
“What do we do if she leaves the boardinghouse and spends the night somewhere else?” Bangs said.
“I have a feeling this isn’t the kind of woman who sleeps anywhere but in her own bed,” Pinkerton said. “At least, she pretends to be, but if she spends the night with a man, I want to know right away, because I’ll call off the investigation.”
The next morning, Pinkerton met with Bangs and Webster after they had been relieved by Howard and MacDonald. “Did she leave on your watch? Where did she go?” he asked.
“No,” said Webster. “Went straight home from here and didn’t leave again while we were there.”
“Could she have left through a back door without being seen?”
“The only other door’s on the side of the house, the basement door,” said Bangs. “We could see both.”
“Let’s face it,” said Pinkerton, “she came here prepared. She’d already concealed the strongbox when she made me the offer. The most likely place is somewhere in the boardinghouse. We already know that neither the proprietress nor the other residents are likely to let us in. So work something out with Howard and MacDonald. We need to find a way to get inside and search the place.”
He sent them off, then poked his head out at Harry. “Any appointments scheduled for this morning? Good, I don’t want to be disturbed.” After that he sat behind his desk, smoking one cigar after another, blowing smoke rings, and staring at the wall into which the wallflower widow had seemed to fade.
A small strongbox filled with papers could be concealed in many places, but since it contained the secrets of an intelligent woman and since she had described it as being of a type that could easily be broken into—or she wouldn’t have had to warn him against opening it—then it was most likely concealed in a very secure place.
He poked his head out at Harry once more. “Send somebody to the First State Street Bank again and find out if Mrs. Warne has a safe-deposit box there. Send the operative in here the minute he gets back.”
He closed the door, sat back down, lit another cigar, and blew more smoke rings. The next most logical, secure place for a flimsy strongbox would be a locker or the lost and found at a train station.
He walked to the door and poked his head out at Harry. “Send somebody to all the train stations. Slip a quarter to the guys at the lost and found and see if any of them have a small brass strongbox with a keyhole. Size about nine by five by one inch deep. Slip a couple of quarters to the stationmaster to get a look inside the public lockers. Send the operative in to see me as soon as he gets back.”
He closed the door, sat back down, and blew more smoke rings. If the strongbox was in none of those places, he’d have his detectives make a list of all the places she visited while they followed her, including the corsetiere’s shop. He would send his handsomest detective to call on all the shopgirls. Just after noon, he sent the operative nicknamed Ladies’ Lad Leo to chat up the shopgirls on Michigan Avenue.
Six days later, the strongbox still had not been found.
By the time Kate Warne entered his life, Allan Pinkerton had given up legwork. His potbelly made it hard to enter a building surreptitiously in broad daylight, let alone squeeze through windows at midnight. But he wanted to be the one to search the boardinghouse. That meant the only way in was to jigger the lock on the basement door.
When they were sure Kate Warne wasn’t there, Howard and MacDonald drove a wagon carrying a huge piano crate to the alley beside the boardinghouse. They unloaded the crate at the mouth of the alley with as little commotion as possible, so curious neighbors wouldn’t be drawn to the spot. Howard stood watch, and MacDonald cried “Yeehaw!” to the horse pulling the wagon and drove it up onto the boardwalk across the street, terrifying passersby and distracting everyone while a potbellied burglar behind the piano crate picked the lock on the basement door.
Pinkerton was convinced that Kate Warne was every bit as private a person as she claimed to be, so that meant she wouldn’t trust her secrets to a flimsy strongbox hidden anywhere in a boardinghouse full of strangers except her own room.
With an Eye That Never Sleeps cocked toward the kitchen door, he crept up the back stairs to her third-floor room. The lock was so easy to pick he wondered why she had even bothered to lock it. In case a cleaning woman tried to enter, he locked the door behind him with a skeleton key, then surveyed the room.
An oval mirror hung at head height beside the door. A rag rug covered the floor. One double-hung window with a lace curtain faced the house next door. The only picture on the walls was a watercolor of a weathered old lean-to, signed W. J. COLE, ’54. It concealed no wall safe, nor had he expected it to, but he was habitually thorough in his searches.
A bed with a brass headboard was pushed against one wall. Between it and the window stood a deal chest of drawers, over which hung another mirror. On the other side of the bed was a small tabl
e covered with a doily, on which stood an oil lamp. Against the wall opposite the window stood a large, mirrored chifforobe with nothing in it but a dressing gown and an empty hatbox. The chifforobe was too heavy for him to move away from the wall, so that meant Kate Warne couldn’t have moved it, either. The deal chest held only a few undergarments, which it especially embarrassed him to finger through, because from the mirror above it his own Eyes That Never Sleep watched over him. He edged the chest of drawers away from the wall and looked behind it. Nothing. The drawer in the table held a Bible and a small pewter-handled mirror. There was nothing under the mattress, but under the bed pillow was a small brass case with a mirror. He hadn’t imagined a plain woman could be so vain.
In the end, the only possible place of concealment was under the floorboards covered by the rag rug. But when he’d rolled up the rug and moved it out of the way, he saw that the thick, dark varnish on the boards was unmarred and better preserved than the rest of the floor. The floorboards didn’t conceal a hidey-hole.
The strongbox simply was not there.
Then it hit him. He felt a complete fool. He’d been bested by a mere woman. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? She must carry the strongbox in that damn reticule from which she had fetched the Derringer and the cheroot holder, and which no doubt contained many other strange accoutrements of womanhood. It made him wonder if all women knew that all men fear the contents of a woman’s reticule.
“I’ve found the strongbox,” Pinkerton wrote her. “If possible, please come to the agency tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, which is before my first client is scheduled to arrive. Be prepared to reveal the contents of the strongbox. If your credentials are adequate, then I’ll hire you as a private detective.”
At precisely nine, Harry ushered the black-veiled Mrs. Warne into Pinkerton’s office. Pinkerton rose to greet her, unable to suppress a smug grin, until he saw she didn’t have the reticule with her. There was nothing in her gloved hands. She never intended to let me read the papers in the strongbox, he thought. She can’t admit defeat.
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Mystery Box Page 24