That night, as soon as the lights went out in the Kruska home, Jack Stilwell, one of Ray’s operatives, hid in the bushes and threw stones at the dog. The beast howled and leapt in fury. The lights went on in the house and Kruska and Heideman hurried out to see what prowler had excited the dog. They walked around the house but there was no trace of a trespasser.
The poor dog got a good scolding and Heideman and Kruska went back into the house. The lights went out. All was still.
Exactly an hour later, Stilwell resumed his bombardment and the dog renewed his uproar. His indignant owner put his head out and indulged in a few comments and warnings. An hour later, the dog went into hysterics again. Any disapproval he may have inspired was kept indoors, but the light went on and off in Heideman’s window every time the dog made his hourly outburst. Peace came only with the daybreak.
The next night the dog began again his oratorio exactly at midnight. Kruska lighted up, marched around the house, cursed the dog, and went back in. With a maddening monotony the dog yelped and snarled every midnight for nine nights. Kruska’s light did not go on again, but Heideman’s did. It stayed on longer and longer. His shadow could be seen on his window shade. It was evident that he was pacing the floor.
Finally it was learned that Heideman had gone to his employer and said that the dog was getting on his nerves. Since he had never taken a vacation in all his three years, he thought he would like a respite of ten days in New York. Kruska said he had certainly earned it and wished him a happy time.
Heideman did not know that guardian angels from the Schindler stable shadowed him to the furnished room he rented in the German quarter near Fourteenth Street.
It is hard for the reader of what followed to realize the countless hours and the expense of time, money, and sleeplessness it cost Ray’s staff to watch that young man’s every movement. It is easy and brief to tell how it was discovered that he took his meals at the same little German restaurant with a regularity as to hours; but it took dreary days of watchful waiting to learn this.
Next was the business called “roping.” It is Ray’s principle that the suspect must never be approached by an operative. He must always approach the operative. Ray set one of his staff, Karl Neimeister, to the grim job of forcing Heideman to strike up an acquaintance with him. Ray picked Neimeister because he had been born in the same province as Heideman and knew the region perfectly.
His harrowing task was to reach the German restaurant ten minutes ahead of Heideman thrice daily and pay no attention to him. This went on for days before, at one crowded hour, Heideman chose the empty seat at Neimeisters table. Neimeister paid no attention to him, but went on reading his copy of the German daily paper, the Staats-Zeitung. Neimeister left first and took his paper with him. The next day the lonely Heideman sat down with Neimeister and commented on an item in the paper, which he read while it concealed Neimeister’s indifferent face.
Even Job might have lost his patience if he had practiced being a private detective, but Neimeister managed to kill time for a week or two until Heideman invited him to a movie, then to a pinochle game. It was soon discovered that they came from the same neighborhood.
Ray had provided Neimeister with a bank credit and a banker to back up his fairy-tale that Neimeister had quarreled with his father and left for America, only to learn that his father had died and left him an estate of $90,000, from which the executor was paying Neimeister $75 a week till the inheritance could be legally cleared. This accounted for Neimeister’s means of existence and his leisure. He took Heideman along to the bank one day while he drew the money, and the bank officials played their roles like good actors.
Ray is forever recruiting the strangest people to play parts he may cast them in when he is producing one of his specta-torless dramas.
Within a week Heideman was so fond of Neimeister and so sick of his lonely existence that he proposed taking a room together to save them both money.
It is not hard to get anybody to tell his life story. It is hard to keep most people from doing just that. Neimeister knew Heideman’s past better than it was told to him. For one thing Heideman said nothing about having ever worked in New Jersey. He said he had always worked on Staten Island. This alone proved that he had special reasons for extending his “vacation.”
It was Ray Schindler’s hope that Neimeister could somehow wheedle Heideman into confessing his crime to his friend. But he showed no such inclination. Slowly as time dragged on, it was running out perilously fast for poor Williams in his cell. The prosecutor was impatient to be rid of him by way of the Chair.
This was before the lie detector had been perfected; but Professor Hugo Muensterberg, then at Harvard, had attracted attention by his “spymograph” which recorded changes in blood pressure under the influence of various emotions.
Ray longed to reenact the crime at Asbury Park and test Heideman’s reactions. But there was no way of bringing him to the test without alarming him.
Ray did the next best thing. He persuaded the manager of Heideman’s favorite movie theater to run a short Italian horror-film which Ray had found. It cost $80 to persuade the manager. The film showed a young girl fleeing through a forest to escape from a fiend. She ran on until she had to jump off a cliff to escape him.
Ray put four operatives in the seats in front of, at the side of, and behind Heideman, when Neimeister easily persuaded him to drop in and see a show.
During the desperate flight of the little girl Heideman began to pant and squirm. When she leapt over a cliff and her broken little body was shown, Heideman leapt to his feet and told Neimeister that he had a splitting headache and must go for some medicine.
Neimeister let him go, and met him later in their room, where Heideman said his headache was better. He did not mention the film. Neither did Neimeister.
Having recruited a movie manager, Ray went next to his friend the publisher of the Staats-Zeitung and induced him to print on the front page of one copy a brief story about a young man named Frank Heideman, who had worked for a florist named Kruska in Asbury Park at the time of the murder of a little girl. The item said that a hammer had been found that might have been the instrument used and the sheriff wanted to show it to Heideman in the hope that he might know whose hammer it was. But according to the article Heideman had long overstayed his vacation and his employer was worried lest he might have met with some accident.
While they were at breakfast, Neimeister glanced at the paper and then shoved it to Heideman, saying in German something to this effect:
“That’s funny, Frank. Here’s a fellow with your very name in the paper.”
It can be imagined how keenly Neimeister kept his eyes on Heideman as he read the story. Startled at first, he regained the self-control that had steeled him so long. He said calmly:
“That’s me all right. I did work for Kruska at Asbury Park, but only for three weeks, and I didn’t like the job so I came up here. I was there when the murder took place, but they’ve got the killer in jail now. They don’t need me.”
Neimeister quietly suggested that it would be a nice thing for Heideman to go down to Asbury Park and help them out. But Heideman did not think it was a nice idea at all. So Neimeister was once more at a dead end.
A good detective earns his money and more, and rarely tastes the sweets of fame. His greatest performances are enacted and improvised with only a small audience or none. There is no applause, and no praise from the critics.
A great actor is paid big money. His picture is put up on billboards and published in the papers. He calls himself an artist and may well be one. But he memorizes lines written for him by somebody else and he gives and takes cues to and from other actors whose lines have also been memorized. If the actor is lucky he plays the same part with the same expressions six nights a week and at two matinees for as long as may be.
The writer of plays considers drama the highest of high arts. He invents or borrows characters and plots and works them out at his le
isure, changing his situations and his text till all runs smoothly to the conclusion of a happy or a tragic ending as he prefers. If the public agrees with his opinion of his work, the play runs on and on, perhaps for years, perhaps for centuries. Many troupes may play it at the same time in different languages. Posterity may acclaim the author a Euripides, a Molière, a Shakespeare, a Chekhov, or a Pulitzer Prize winner.
For this play-business which Shakespeare called a “two hours’ traffic,” the public gives its time, its money, its applause, its homage and its gratitude.
But the poor detective must write his own play as he goes along and act it with whatever actors may make their exits and entrances. He has a rough notion of the plot as he’d like to write it out, but he knows he never will. He has a dream of a last act, but never knows when or where it will be played and with what result. He must take whatever clues may be flung at him and improvise his replies to fit. He may spend long nights and days in watching a door or a window in rain or snow or frying sun, without attracting a bit of that attention which is the regular actor’s meat and drink. At any moment he may have to make pursuit afoot or by car or train, and it may lead him through city streets, villages, deserts, forests, or overseas. At any moment he may find himself in an ambush where he will be beaten or slain, or worse yet, recognized.
And for all this, his reward is usually only a living wage and a life of oblivion and anonymity. Once in a while he may gain recognition by some brilliant fluke covering an age of almost unendurable monotony. But the best he is likely to get is to be told that he is another Sherlock Holmes, or a rival of some other imaginary sleuth whose work is carefully cut out for him by an imaginative author.
Once in ages the detective acquires fame and fortune by managing a detective bureau where, like a general, he lays the plans and supervises the strategy while he sends other men into the firing line.
So it was with young Karl Neimeister. For weeks and weeks he sought and endured the society of a stodgy young gardener whom he knew to be capable of mad frenzies and most horrible murder. He slept in the same room with this unpredictable maniac, and spent his waking hours trying to win from him confidence and a confession without once betraying his own identity or his true purpose. When it was safe he reported to his superiors what little he had learned and took his orders over the telephone.
Meanwhile, his employer was busy on a dozen other cases, and growing increasingly afraid that the innocent Negro would be put to death before he could win from the real murderer not only a confession, but a confession that could not be repudiated and could not be broken down in open court.
Convinced beyond a doubt of Heideman’s guilt, Ray found it maddening not to seize him and hand him over to the Asbury Park prosecutor. But the prosecutor was just as convinced that Thomas Williams was the murderer, and Ray had no proof at all that could change his mind.
The item Ray had had published in the Staats-Zeitung was a desperate resort. It had resulted in Heideman’s confession that he had been in Asbury Park, which Ray knew already. But the knowledge that his presence was wanted in Asbury Park by the sheriff drove Heideman into a panic. He grew so restless in his sleep that he said he wanted to get out into the quiet of the country. Neimeister reported this to the office and Ray jumped at the idea. At his direction Neimeister proposed a quiet place in Yonkers. Heideman enjoyed the change, but was as far as ever from showing any signs of making a confidant of Neimeister.
The time was growing desperately short and Ray was driven to desperate measures. He talked it over with his brother Walter, saying:
“All murderers want to unburden their souls, and Heideman wants to unburden his; but he doesn’t really trust Neimeister. He is still afraid that his friend might turn him in to the police. We’ve made Neimeister too respectable.”
As Walter tells it, Ray broke off there and dashed up to Yonkers, whence he returned smiling:
“It’s all arranged. Neimeister is going to commit a murder.”
“A murder?” Walter gasped.
“A murder,” said Ray. “Once he has done that, Heideman will feel that Neimeister is in the same boat with him and would not dare tell on him. Then he’ll spill his own story. Just wait and see.”
Now Neimeister was given a new and detailed scenario to perform. Suddenly he grew restless, expressed a need of fresh air and proposed that they hire a horse and buggy and go for a ride in the country. Heideman was all for it. They were soon enjoying the snow-white hills and the keen February air.
Eventually, on a lonely road, they overtook a roughly clad Italian workman who stopped them to ask for a light. Neimeister tossed him a box of matches. The man stood between the side wheels while he lighted his cigarette. The horse shied suddenly and the man yelled:
“My foot! You’ve run over my foot.”
To a stream of profanity he added violence. He picked up a stone and hurled it.
In a rage Neimeister handed the reins to Heideman and jumped to the ground. The Italian ran back, then tinned with his fists clenched. After a few blows were exchanged, the Italian drew a knife. Neimeister whipped out a pistol and fired twice. The workman toppled over in the snow and as his coat fell back, a big red stain showed on his shirt.
The panic-stricken Neimeister ran back to the buggy, seized the reins, whirled the horse about and drove back to Yonkers at top speed. Frank Heideman expressed his regret and horror, while Neimeister congratulated himself that there had been no witnesses of the scene except his friend.
But that very evening a newsboy was crying an extra of the Yonkers Herald in front of their house and, when Neimeister bought it, he showed Heideman the headlines:
“ATROCIOUS MURDER DISCOVERED ON MIDLAND AVENUE
Bloody Body of Italian found by Wilfred Smithson—
Police on Trail
Good Description of Stranger seen in Immediate Neighborhood has been Secured.”
This threw Neimeister into a storm of terror. He cried, “I’m getting out of here this minute.” Heideman would not desert him, and they got away to Philadelphia.
Heideman never dreamed that the Italian had risen from the dead as soon as his murderer fled, or that the Yonkers Herald had obligingly contributed one single copy of the front page story. But still Heideman could not be lured into any confession despite Neimeister’s remorse and terror.
It was now March, and Marie Smith had been unavenged for four months. Furthermore, Ray was warned by Sheriff Hetrick and Banker Miller that their money was running as short as the time. They could grant Ray only three more weeks.
It was plainly necessary to speed up Heideman’s unburdening of his soul. Ray’s inventive mind sketched out another act. This must have an audience.
Leaving to the imagination the countless details, the planning, and the coordination of scenes, this is the way it worked out.
First, Ray went to Asbury Park with his brother and met by appointment the Banker and the Sheriff, this time in the office of the hostile Prosecutor. When Mr. Applegate learned that for three months all this action had been going on behind his back, he was furious. He was completely convinced that Williams was guilty and he ridiculed the story of the howling dog, the horror movie, the fake murder. He accused Ray of fooling Miller and Hetrick for the sake of the big money he was making out of them. He offered to put Ray under arrest then and there as Schindler the Swindler. When Miller and Hetrick would not prefer charges, he ordered them all out of his office. Worse yet, he absolutely refused to go to Atlantic City, where Ray promised to bring Heideman to the confession point in a hotel room fitted with a dictograph connected with an adjoining room.
But Ray was not whipped yet. He said:
“If Applegate won’t come to the confession, we’ll bring the confession to Applegate.”
In the meanwhile Neimeister was persuading Heideman to go to Atlantic City where, he said, they would not be noticed in the off-season. Ray was now adding the North German Lloyd Steamship Company to his production. On their
letter head he had a letter written saying that Neimeister’s check had been received and a stateroom reserved for him on the Kronprinzessin Cecile. This was conveyed to Neimeister in a gaudy envelope.
By now Heideman’s money was low and he was urging Neimeister to collect his inheritance and go to California, where they could set up a florist’s business. Neimeister said he thought it an excellent idea, and agreed to it. But he left the hotel room to buy some cigarettes, and left the envelope conspicuously sticking half out of his coat pocket.
And now the audience and the ensemble were assembled, wondering if the climax would be a triumph or a fiasco. In the next room were Walter Schindler, a number of operatives, and a stenographer.
The dictograph brought them the sound of Heideman’s chair as he pushed it back and rose to see what the envelope in Neimeister’s coat pocket might mean. There was a smothered curse. Then silence. Neimeister came back. Heideman denounced him for a false friend, pretending to be ready to go to California even while he had his ticket for Germany in his pocket.
Neimeister confessed his deception but said he was fleeing from this country for fear of the discovery of his crime. Heideman had been a witness but, in spite of his promise of secrecy, Neimeister said he would not trust even such a friend as Heideman not to turn him over to the police.
There was a silence almost unbearable in the next room. It must have been torture to Neimeister, whose histrionic skill had now reached the breaking-point of his three months’ ordeal.
Suddenly the dam broke in Frank Heideman’s soul. He cried out:
“Karl, I am a murderer, too. I killed that little girl in Asbury Park. Now you can see why I could never dare give you up to the police.”
The Complete Detective Page 12