Ray’s second operative completed his vigil without being approached and the borrowed watchers did not see any suspicious person in the neighborhood. The next day a third telephone call to Harker said that the man he had sent was all right, but that any meetings with him must be held outside the city at a place to be named the next day. Furthermore Harker’s representative must have ten thousand dollars with him when he reached the spot to be designated later.
Ray advised Harker to tell the man when he called up next to go to hell. But Harker was afraid the blackmailers might go to his poor mother and wreck her health. The next morning Harker tried to be a little cold to the voice; but he broke when it threatened to go to his mother. He was told to send the second man to Buffalo on a certain train. This man was to go to a certain hotel, taking ten thousand dollars in an envelope. He was to register under a certain name and hand the envelope to the cashier to put in the hotel safe. He was then to go to his room and wait for further word.
Instead of ten thousand dollars Ray put two fifty dollar bilk on top of a bundle of stage money, and sent his operative to Buffalo. He also telephoned to an associated agency in Buffalo to keep Ray’s operative under secret observation without letting the operative know.
Reading a condensed record like this gives hardly a hint of the long, long hours of delay, the long journeys, the agonies of suspense, the endless repetitions of failure and deferment. It was Ray’s belief that Buffalo had been chosen as the meeting-place because, once the money was seized, the blackmailers could could dash over to Canada.
Arrived in Buffalo, the operative tried in vain to do a bit of scouting. All day and all night he waited in his room and nothing happened. The next morning he was told by telephone to take the 10:15 train to Niagara Falls, sit on the left side of the last car near the end and have the money with him. He was also told that if nobody spoke to him, he was to take the 3:21 train back to Buffalo, return to his room, and wait. Wait!
The moment the voice ended, the operative called the operator and asked her if she could trace the call. She said she could not; but she had heard two other voices speaking as if the man who had been talking to Ray’s operative had spoken from a telephone booth with two other men at his elbow. She had heard one of them say, “I’ve got a nice comer-room with a shower at three-fifty a day.”
This is a striking example of the way real detectives work and what use they make of little things. Ray’s operative telephoned to him in New York and reported all this. Then Ray telephoned his Buffalo associate and asked that a swarm of operatives visit every Buffalo hotel that might have shower-baths and find if anybody had taken a room at about the hour and moment of the telephone call.
In two hours Ray was told that three men had registered at three hotels at just that hour. Two of them were plainly innocent of connection with the blackmailing game, and they were innocent of the fact that they were closely shadowed for the next twenty-four hours. The third man was Ray’s man —at least one of them.
The operative went to Niagara Falls as directed and gained nothing from his visit but a view of some well-known scenery. He did not even know that he was being shadowed at Ray’s instructions. But the blackmailers were aware of it and when he returned to Buffalo, the voice on the telephone reproached him for having two “flatfeet” following him.
The operative in his ignorance denied this so violently and convincingly that the voice was convinced, and told him to go to Niagara again on the same train the next day. The weary detective made the dreary trip, spent the dismal hours alone, and took the dismal train back. While he was sitting in the rear car near the end cm the left side, a voice poured down across his shoulder:
“Tell Schindler he’s wasting his time. Were getting sick of all this gumshoe business. But give a look!”
He held out a photograph of Harker naked from the waist up and embracing a naked girl. The voice went on:
“We’ve got the negative of this and a bundle of hot letters. You can have ’em all for that ten grand you got in the hotel safe. Go get it and well make a new date in Canada. Make sure the money isn’t marked.”
Even a hasty glance at the photograph showed the operative that it was a crudely doctored picture, with Harker’s head cut out of another photograph, pasted on, then rephotographed. Also the operative took a long look at the man with the voice and decided that he was the man who had bought fruit in Santa Clara. But the man got off at a way station. He did not notice that two Buffalo operatives got off with him.
They did not seize him because Ray wanted to reach the big boy higher up and put an end to the endless demands.
After another night and half a day of solitary confinement in his hotel room Ray’s operative was instructed by telephone to take the same train next morning but go on across the river into Canada, and be at the railroad station at one.
On the same train with him was the blackmailer who had talked to him the day before. This time he told Ray’s man to take a room in a certain hotel and wait there with the money in his pocket, till the blackmailer called on him. He would come directly to the room and knock once. He promised to deliver the photograph and the letters and take the ten grand.
This plan was communicated to the Buffalo shadows and Ray’s operative was instructed to flash his telephone the moment he heard a knock on his door, and flash it again when the visitor left.
To make brief what took hours, the blackmailer knocked, and looked carefully everywhere, not neglecting the shower curtain in the bathroom. Then he handed over the pretended photograph of Harker with the letters and accepted in exchange the pretended ten thousand dollars.
As he left the elevator on the first floor, the Buffalo operatives in ambush grabbed him, and searched him thoroughly. But they could not find the envelope full of stage money. He had dropped it down the mail chute, addressed to his partners, who must have been pained when they got it.
When the news was telephoned to Ray, he told them to turn the man loose. Ray was not collecting small fry.
Meanwhile the man who had taken a room with a shower for $3.50 a day had been traced, and his room so carefully ransacked that a blotter was discovered on which had been left a backward print of the letters “P -ksk- 1. N.Y.” and the name “Jephson.”
It was “elementary, my dear Watson” to look up a Peeks-kill directory and learn that there was only one Jephson in Peekskill. Ray sent an operative there. Ingeniously he secured from the telegraph office a transcript of the telegram sent to Jephson. It was from “Joe” and reported that he was “in luck and would put over the deal the next day.”
To the Peekskill operative was assigned the wearisome job of keeping watch on the big Jephson estate. He called in his wife, who was a landscape painter, to help him, by pretending to paint, while he watched. The operative followed Jephson’s car wherever it went. One day it sped all the way to New York. There it stopped at the very nightclub where Harker had met Elaine. A man and a woman got out and entered the club. They were strangers to the operative. He telephoned Ray.
This was a chance for Ray to try out his latest invention— a camera hidden in the spotlight of his car and worked from the inside. Ray drove to the nightclub and secured a parking place next to the entrance by tipping a taxidriver to drive on. The Peekskill operative joined Ray and they sat there for a whole hour before the operative said, “There they are!”
Ray snapped the picture. The woman was Elaine Adams. He guessed that the man was the Santa Clara fruit buyer who had bought the watch for Elaine Adams and put on it the initials E.A.B.
The photograph was airmailed to Santa Clara and many people thoroughly identified the man as the fruit buyer Jonnas. Furthermore, Harker identified him as the man who threatened him on that far-off ride in Central Park. He was also identified as the man who had handled the Buffalo meeting.
Now the nightclub was put under observation and it was learned that Jonnas and Elaine often held long talks there with the owner, “Mike Mura.”
After all these maddening delays and false starts and dud finishes Ray was at last drawing near the higher-ups.
And now he found that the much advertised and highly necessary “camera-eye” and elephant memory of the detective were getting to work. The picture of Jonnas reminded him of a number of photographs shown to him once by a Federal agent. All of the subjects were, of course, criminals wanted by the government for one crime or another. On investigation Ray found that his memory was good. “Jonnas” was indeed wanted by the Federal police, but not under that name.
Still the search went on. Elaine had moved to a new hotel and registered as Elaine Bartz. And that explained the E.A.B.—Elaine Adams Bartz.
And now entered a new mind. Ray’s father was then above seventy-five but keen for research. The name “Bartz” was rare and he went to the Public Library to find what there was to be found in genealogical and other books. He learned that a number of Bartzes had settled in central Wisconsin. A study of directories and telephone books showed just where.
So Father Schindler took an airplane to Wisconsin. There he hired a car and a young driver who knew everybody. At last Father Schindler found Elaine’s own uncle. He identified her photograph and said he had not heard from Elaine for some months; but she had asked that her mail be sent in care of C. K. Vining, whose address was Baltimore.
By this time the average person would have been ready to throw Mr. Harker and his fortune to the wolves. But Ray was still as eager on the scent as an eager bloodhound who has nothing else to do but pursue. He decided to take an active part when he saw how pretty Elaine was and he waited for her in the lobby of her hotel till she came out, then invited himself to join her for a stroll.
He introduced himself as a friend of Hamilton Harker’s. This chilled her. He gave her messages from her uncle and aunt in Wisconsin. This uncanny news alarmed her. She asked what they knew about her. Ray said that they didn’t know about the blackmailers she was working for. Neither did Mr. Vining.
This almost flattened her. Ray took her to the Waldorf for a talk. There he told her that he had plenty of information “on” her but nothing “against” her. He said he doubted that she realized how, through her aid, her friends had scared forty thousand dollars out of Hamilton Harker because of his illicit relations with her.
This horrified her. It was easy for Ray to learn the name of the unknown third man: Joe Bell known as “Ding Dong.” Ray told her that he was going to telephone C. J. Vining, but not to harm her. In fact Ray promised to protect her and set her right with Vining.
He called Vining, told him that Elaine was in trouble and needed him. Vining reached Ray’s office by the first train and began the conversation by saying that he had a permit to carry a revolver, and carried one. He was there to protect Elaine.
“I’ve never carried a revolver in my life,” said Ray, “and I never lost a man for lack of one. Tonight I’m giving a party and I want you there—but not with a gun.”
So Vining turned over his pearl-handled .22 to Ray.
Before the party, Ray had a caller, a Federal agent, Sam Pelling. Ray was glad to see him and Pelling joined the party at Mike Mura’s nightclub. Mike was seated at a table with two of the blackmailers, Jonnas and Ding Dong Bell. Ray went over to the table with Harker and asked him to tell Mura how much blackmail he had paid. Harker said, “Forty thousand dollars.” Mura said that that was a he—a divinely condemned lie.
Ray showed him the withdrawal slips from Harker’s bank account. Mura invited them all into his private office. The first thing he did there was to slug Bell on the jaw and snarl:
“You so and so, you gave me only five thousand.”
It was not the blow so much as Bell’s weak heart that toppled him over on a couch. Then the Federal agent Pelling took over. In a few crisp words he reminded Bell of a series of gross real estate swindles for which the government had long been hunting him. Also, Jonnas bore a striking resemblance to a man “Jennings” whom the government was pining for. He handcuffed the twain and led them away. Elaine hurled after Jonnas the initialled watch he had given to her. It missed him.
What thousands of miles of travel it had cost Ray and his people! What numberless hours of searching and enduring the most maddening boredoms, waiting for someone who never arrived, or telephoned to say tomorrow—and tomorrow —and tomorrow!
I have not tried to dress this history up as a mystery story. It has seemed more important as a comprehensive example of the art—the multifold arts of the detective hunting through the dark for men whose ways are dark.
And the end of the long, long trail was that Ray chased his men into the arms of the Government, which gave them five to ten years each in Federal prison on charges that did not mention Hamilton Harker.
And that was just what Harker wanted—silence and oblivion for his harmless but costly philandering with the fair Elaine.
This history is also a proof of the need for private detectives. Harker was innocent, of course; yet three criminals had terrorized him out of the sizable fortune of forty thousand dollars and were on their way to wreck his life. It took dozens of private detectives and months of hard work to save him from ruin.
Imagine what would have happened if he had gone to the police. They could not and would not have given him any protection at all. Ray Schindler has said of his own art:
“Right at this moment there are countless blackmail plots in the making throughout the world. And blackmail will continue to be one of the safest and most lucrative ‘professions’ of the vultures who prey on the rich, because just so long as men and women become wealthy and prominent, they will be the unwilling but submissive victims to this vicious racket.”
Incidentally, the story is not entirely devoid of love-interest. One result of the affair was to drive Elaine and her Lancelot, Mr. Vining, into each other’s arms, where they lived happily ever after. Or did they? Anyway, they have not called on Ray Schindler. At least, not yet.
9.
A FEW HORS D’OEUVRE
As a tribute to French culinary skill, our bills of fare are full of French words. Instead of crudely speaking of “side-dishes” we make them sound smart and taste better—and cost more—by calling them hors d’oeuvre. Few of us can pronounce the term so that a Frenchman would know what we meant; but, in this case, it is permissible to point.
Literally, the term means “out of work.” It is applicable to this chapter because it will serve as a much-needed relief from the heavy dishes of murder, blackmail, and other crimes that make up the bulk of this book.
For a few pages let us trifle with some of the lighter phases of Ray Schindler’s manifold tasks. They concern people who make a business of being out of work. They like it; but their leisure keeps the insurance companies working overtime and causes Ray’s operatives to lose a lot of sleep.
As far back as the old Roman days, and doubtless farther back, it was well realized that when you put a guard over somebody or something, your troubles are only half over. The next problem is,
“Who will guard the guards?”
So it is with insurance. You can buy insurance against almost anything nowadays. The next problem is:
“Who will insure the insurers?”
A great part of the liabilities and expenses of insurance companies consists of the attempt, often vain, to keep swindlers from looting the funds so that there will be nothing left to pay the honest claimants. Thieves take out policies against theft. Firebugs take out policies on buildings, then set them on fire. Swindlers take out accident policies, then manufacture accidents. Even people of honest intent and careless performance take out huge policies to protect their jewels from theft, then mislay them, take affidavits that they could not have been mislaid, and demand the full value of the gems, or even more.
The story has already been told of how Ray Schindler, acting for an insurance company, followed a womans pet monkey and disclosed that he had been stealing her diamonds one by one and hiding them in a big ja
r.
A large part of Ray’s business, and that of other private detectives, is the business of keeping people from swindling insurance companies, and their policyholders, for whose follies and misfortunes the insurance companies are pledged to pay whatever amount the policy may stipulate.
Once a fraud or a crime is successfully committed, the perpetrator is apt to take it up as a business. Bilking insurance companies has long been a thriving industry, and the protective work of the private detective is a vitally important form of crime-prevention. Life insurance is one form of bequeathing money, and the beneficiary is often left in the dark as to his or her expectations. Often the insurance companies are instructed not to let the beneficiaries know what is waiting them until they learn it after the funeral of their benefactor.
On many occasions there are beneficiaries whom the insurance companies cannot trace at first. A letter to the latest address may be returned to the company. Certain insurance company employees have access to the lists of such people and are instructed to make every effort to find them and inform them of their unsuspected fortunes.
Realizing the large sums thus awaiting distribution, a certain crooked lawyer conceived a scheme for digging his fingers into all that idle money. He took into partnership two bribable accountants who gave him lists of such names. The lawyer bestirred himself to trace the ignorant beneficiaries until he found them. Needless to say he did not tell them of the money awaiting their mere demand.
He slyly visited them and, with a know-it-all air excited them with vague and mysterious references to large sums which he could secure for them by certain devices that only a clever lawyer could manipulate. He did not ask for any advance payment. No money, no fee. All he wanted was a little contract to pay him half of whatever was received.
Almost anybody would agree to divide the profits with a man who knew the way to the end of the rainbow, so this lawyer piled up contracts with beneficiaries and collected large sums where the policyholders had died and the beneficiaries were unaware of the money waiting the discovery of their correct address.
The Complete Detective Page 16