A man of such perverted cleverness is sustained in such a life of assiduous evil by a certain twisted pride, a kind of Mephistophelean humor. Like any other veteran, when failure comes, he finds consolation and redemption of self-esteem in balancing a long line of successes against this one final failure. So Dr. Waite loved to talk, especially to Ray, whom he respected and liked as one who was almost as clever as himself, and a little luckier.
He told Ray that he had first planned to kill his wife’s brother, Percy, so that his wife would inherit the whole estate. Then if she did not behave, he would poison her. But, first, his restless soul had turned to his mother-in-law because she came in handier, when she came to live right in the house. He practiced on her with various disease germs; but, though she weakened, she did not, as they say, pass on.
Finally he called in a prominent New York physican, who found that Mrs. Peck was suffering from a kidney condition but said that it was not at all dangerous to her life. At last Mrs. Peck began to blame the New York climate for her ill health; and decided to go back home to Grand Rapids. Since that would remove her from Dr. Waite’s reach, he gave her arsenic in her food till she died. Then he called in the physician whose diagnosis had been kidney trouble, and announced that Mrs. Peck had died quietly in her sleep. The physician made no difficulty about a death certificate from heart failure.
Wearing deep mourning, Waite went home with his dead mother-in-law and her daughter, and wretchedly told how the poor woman had been converted to cremation. He was able to see to it that her ‘last wish” was fulfilled.
Next, he invited his inconsolable father-in-law to visit him in New York, and there Dr. Waite “consoled” him with all sorts of disease germs, which he put into the old man’s food, his throat spray, and his medicines. Old men are sometimes tough, and John Peck survived these germs, as well as long rides in rain storms and the use of icy wet sheets for pretended reasons of health. Dr. Waite’s hope that pneumonia would carry off the old wretch was disappointed. Then he released chlorine gas in the old man’s bedroom. Vainly.
Dr. Waite laughed aloud as he told Ray how he had wasted on the old man, “Oh, millions and millions—maybe billions of germs.”
The indestructible father-in-law proved so irritatingly immune that Dr. Waite was forced back on his old ally, arsenic. Yet, first, he called in a physician who admitted that there might be a mild heart-trouble and some intestinal looseness. But all he prescribed was rest and soft diet.
This treatment resulted in such apparent improvement that, sorrowfully, once more Dr. Waite called in the physician to say that his dear father-in-law had risen from his bed and started for the bathroom, only to collapse on the way. Dr. Waite feared that the poor man was dead.
The physician hastened over and found that his patient was indeed no more. He also made no trouble about issuing a death-certificate from heart disease.
Dr. Waite gave what he could of his strength to uphold his poor wife, who had now lost both her parents in her own home within six weeks. Then he kindly saw to it that the poor old man’s body was sent to the undertaker who had embalmed Mrs. Peck’s body. He arranged to ship the body to Grand Rapids and go with it to see to the cremation. He arranged for a drawing room on the train and left his dear dear wife nothing to do but weep.
Then his long line of almost unbroken luck had come to a short stop. He did not know of the mysterious telegram or the autopsy it had led to, but he had been puzzled by Percy’s insistence on keeping his wife in Grand Rapids. It had forced him to come on alone and walk into the net Ray had spread for him.
Most of his confession was made to Ray while Dr. Waite lay in a half coma on his bed in his apartment. He was alert though and bewildered enough to write in an unsteady hand an order to his brother to give Ray a check for One Thousand Dollars. He begged Ray to use this money to bribe the colored cook and others to forget what they might testify against him. Ray cherishes the photograph of that note as a quaint thing: a caught criminal trying to bribe the detective who caught him!
Ray did not tell him of the mysterious telegram but he was still frantic to know who had sent it and why. When at last he learned, the mystery was rather increased than solved. It was one of those things they call “womanly intuition”—that instinctive cunning which so often goes astray, but now and then seems almost superhuman. This was the story as Ray finally uncovered it.
After the death of her father, Mrs. Waite was so overcome with loneliness while killing time before the train left for Grand Rapids on her second funeral journey that she cast about for some relation to talk to. She telephoned to her cousin, Mrs. Elizabeth Hardwick, who lived in New Jersey and whom she had seen so rarely that Mrs. Hardwick was a stranger to Dr. Waite.
Mrs. Hardwick came over at once and did what she could to comfort Clara till they left for the train. Then she returned to New Jersey and called her family doctor. She was in a state of wild excitement and told how she had rung the door bell and been admitted by Dr. Waite. She exclaimed:
“When that man saw me standing there in the doorway, his eyes were the eyes of a criminal—or a madman.”
Her mood was so fierce that her doctor was startled. “You don’t think there could have been anything wrong about the deaths of that mother and father, do you?” he asked indulgently, knowing the strange whims of his patients.
Mrs. Hardwick answered, “I’ve no reason to think it. But I know it!”
He could not quiet her. She insisted on summoning various members of her family to talk it over. The doctor warned them that any false accusation against Dr. Waite would provoke a ghastly scandal and render them liable to a suit for libel. Since she would not be silenced, he suggested that she might send Percy a telegram under a false name and give it to her young daughter to take to the telegraph office. Then, even if Waite learned of it, he could only sue the daughter; and she had no funds to levy on.
Finally they concocted that telegram and made up a name to sign it with:
SUSPICION AROUSED. DEMAND AUTOPSY. DO NOT REVEAL TELEGRAM. K. ADAMS
So we come back around the circle to the beginning. A woman’s whisper of intuition had started an avalanche that rolled down on the perfection of Dr. Waite’s plans and smashed them. Such little meddlings of odd people or circumstances are always spoiling otherwise perfect crimes.
Dr. Waite’s highly intellectual and artistic work had been upset because the son of his two victims, suspecting nothing in the first case, had in the second obeyed a mysterious telegram from nowhere. His doctor and pastor had called in Ray Schindler and his army. In a whirlwind of energy they had saved the third candidate for death and frightened the lifelong criminal of all trades into trying to add himself to his catalogue of murders.
Science saved Dr. Waite for Justice. After the usual delay there was a trial. There had to be a defense; but the best that Waite’s lawyer could do was to try to prove him a “moral imbecile.” This was difficult after the amiable monster had sat in the witness box and chattily recounted to a fascinated jury how clever he had been till he became a little too clever. His charm mysteriously failed to sway the twelve and he was sentenced to death. As he was taken from the courtroom, an admirer in the crowd called out:
“Tough luck, Doc!”
“Don’t waste sympathy on me,” was the answer. “I took a chance and lost.”
He was the perfect gambler. He would not even let his lawyers appeal for the usual chain of new trials, or even for a commutation to life imprisonment.
Ray tried to salvage what he could from the ruins. The $10,000 Dr. Waite had paid to Kane, the undertaker, had really come from the money entrusted to him by Katherine Peck. So the District Attorney called on Kane to deliver it. The undertaker had suffered no little notoriety from the trial, in which his connection with the case was revealed. So he consented to surrender the money and went to his home on Long Island, attended by the District Attorney, and a flock of reporters and photographers.
He said that he and h
is partner had buried the sum in the backyard. And he did indeed dig up a cigar box, open it and find, not $10,000, but $6,666.67. Kane recalled his promise to give his partner one-third of the money for his silence; and he alleged that the partner had quietly collected his exact share while Kane was not looking.
But when Ray and Kane called on the partner, he blandly denied that he had ever seen the money or heard of the deal. And there was no way of disproving his statement, or of proving Kane’s. Yet Katherine Peck was lucky to get back even the $6,666.67, and still luckier to be allowed to live and enjoy it.
As an appendix to this life sketch of a gorgeous villain, Ray Schindler has written for me the following commentary:
“An interesting thing about many of the persons that we have arrested and sent to prison or death for all types of crimes including murder, is the fact that, after their conviction, they often solicited my friendship.
“Dr. Waite had a family consisting of mother, father, sister and brothers. They were all fine, well educated, honorable people. But, after his sentence, Waite would not allow any of them to call to see him.
“When I visited him in Bellevue Hospital, he admitted his guilt, but without remorse. He claimed that he had a Jekyll-Hyde personality. He said there was a little imp that jumped around in his brain and caused him to commit illegal acts, including murders. He called it his little green devil.’ That was his main point of self-defense.
‘While in Sing Sing awaiting the day of electrocution he again sent for me. There were certain messages he wished delivered to his family and he talked them over with me. He was most friendly with me, and I finally persuaded him to allow his brother to make one visit to take care of any family matters.”
The crimes of Dr. Waite were avenged and at least one murder thwarted. Such crimes are even now being carried on all about us. Thousands of murderers have been released and are at large. Some of them will try again, and countless others will make their debuts in murder. But the Waite case has one important significance. It is an answer to a question often asked:
“Are private detectives of value to the general public?”
Imagine those two bewildered men from Grand Rapids, that doctor and that preacher, calling on the district attorney of Grand Rapids or of New York for help. Even when Ray Schindler spread before the New York official the evidence he had collected with such tremendous swiftness and efficiency, he was dismissed from the office as a money-grafting nuisance. The District Attorney—and a good, honest one he was—not only gave the murderer a clean bill of health, but information as to Ray Schindler’s investigations.
If it had not been for a private detective, and one with a huge force, there can be little doubt that Waite would have murdered his wife in due time, and perhaps her rich aunt as well. Thus he would have accumulated perhaps a million or more as a climax to a life that had been one long succession of successful crimes. He might have married that other man’s wife, taken her to France and tired of her there. Then what?
A private detective not only outwitted and captured that most intelligent and ruthless fiend, but he did so in spite of the active opposition of the forces of the law. He undoubtedly prevented the murder of at least one heart-broken and devoted wife. How many further crimes that accomplished villain would have committed if left alone is a matter for the imagination. Dr. Waite’s case seems to justify Ray Schindler’s motto:
“A private detective is a public servant—a protector of people who have no other protection.”
3.
BEAUTY IN DISTRESS
“If you tell my husband, I’ll kill myself!”
The detective stared at the beautiful, desperate, sobbing woman, and felt that she meant what she said. The crime of which he suspected her was not a capital offense; and he was a private detective, not a public executioner.
It was the most harrowing situation that had ever confronted my friend, Raymond Schindler, in all his years of dealing with multitudinous crimes and criminals. His head and his experience told him that the guiltiest people are often afterward utterly unable to believe their own guilt. It is a rare murderer who does not, in all solemnity, even in the face of the last Judgment Seat, protest his innocence of a killing proved beyond the doubting even of a sentimental American jury.
Ray had long since learned that a woman can be beautiful as heaven and false as hell; that, with the wide eyes of guilelessness, she can plead for belief in the most conscienceless lies; that she can dodge and double like a cornered fox trying to escape the hounds.
Yet this woman was so peculiarly persuasive that Ray’s heart told him she was guiltless. And yet again, the facts he had discovered in spite of her were beyond dispute; and she had not told him everything as she had insisted she had.
Many caught criminals threaten suicide merely as a last trick. But Ray was convinced that this exquisite creature would really take her own life if he did his inescapable duty.
And so the detective sat imploring the trapped criminal to spare him! Call her, for convenience and mercy, “Mrs. Carrington.” That will be the only untrue thing in this crowded history of a most unusual crime and criminal with a sudden conclusion that surprised the detective as he had never been surprised before during a long life in which the unexpected is the expectable routine. So Ray pleaded:
“Mrs. Carrington, my dear lady, you know that I want to help you. I’ll do anything I can to help you. But you must help me to help you. Even if I were not in duty bound to tell your husband what I have found out—with no help from you, my dear—it is too late for me to keep your secret to myself. I have already told the man who employed me what I discovered. I asked him to wait for further action; but I cannot ask him to suppress the facts. If I did ask him, he would think me as crazy as you’re driving me by your unwillingness to take me into your confidence and tell me everything.
“I was called into the case, to my eternal regret, by an official of an insurance company. Your husband demands forty thousand dollars to cover the loss of the jewels he gave you. You say they were stolen. You did not tell your husband, or the insurance adjuster, or me, that on the very day you reported the so-called theft you made up a package that could have contained those very jewels and sent it by registered mail to a woman in Kansas City. Since suspicion is my trade I assume that the woman is a cover for a man. But I don’t know yet, though I have instructed some Kansas City detectives to find out all they can and telephone me.
“When I turned up the sending of that mysterious package you denied that the jewels were in it. You still deny it; but you won’t tell me what was in it; or why you sent it, or anything about the woman you sent it to. And yet you ask me to believe you, and be as false to my employer who trusts me as—as—”
She grimly finished the difficult sentence for him: “As I was false to the husband who trusted me?”
She was deathly calm now and she spoke to Ray with a kindliness and understanding that pierced his heart.
“I don’t blame you for thinking me doubly guilty—a thief and a faithless wife. I can see now why you have to tell the insurance people and why you have to tell my husband. I can’t expect them to spend forty thousand dollars to save my life. So I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but take it myself. I couldn’t live to face my dear husband when he knows what you have found. It’s a pretty sad finish to a life of such devotion and happiness as we’ve had, but—”
A sudden storm of protest swept through her tortured soul and she cried: “It doesn’t matter about me, but oh, for God’s sake, find some way to spare him. He is so good! He was so good to me! He loved me as I always loved him. In God’s name, don’t tell him!”
She flung herself to her knees before the detective and lifted to him a face beautiful even in its agony and its reek of tears. And there were tears in the detective’s eyes.
Beautiful women—or homely women—do not have to throw themselves at Ray Schindler’s feet to make him eager to be kind. In his eyes, the private dete
ctive’s whole business is one of benevolence, a protection of people’s rights and properties and good names, often their very lives, from the thieves, blackmailers, murderers, all the forms of vermin that infest our existence and cannot be stopped or caught by the police or the detectives of the law.
But now Ray was baffled. Sent to find a criminal, he found himself confronted with the choice between disloyalty and dishonesty. He caught Mrs. Carrington’s frantic hands in his own and tried to coax her back to a life she found unendurable if some mysterious, unguessable truths were known. He argued with her as with a frenzied child; but all in vain. She wept herself into such a state of exhaustion that she sank to the floor, and only her pitiful upward palms begged him to grant the impossible.
Up to this point the case had been familiar enough in the work of the Schindler Bureau of Investigation. The man we call Carrington was a Brooklyn manufacturer, successful enough and devoted enough to have given his wife, during their sixteen years of happy life together, jewelry valued at fifty thousand dollars. For some years he had carried an insurance policy of forty thousand dollars covering them.
The Carringtons had lived for years in an old and unpretentious house in Brooklyn. Though he was wealthy enough to have given his wife such a fortune in gems, she preferred to keep only one servant in the house, a rather belligerent old German cook, though a cleaning woman came in three times a week. She must have had quite enough to do, for the house was not only a home but a menagerie and an aviary. Canaries sang and parrots screamed. An even dozen cats wandered about purring, meowling, or spitting, while an impudent and chittering monkey tried to be everywhere at once. The house even included that old-fashioned trade mark of wealth, a glassed-in conservatory filled with potted plants and caged birds.
The Complete Detective Page 6