Now he had not only to provide roomers for every empty room, but his technicians and his shadow men as well. He managed the feat with such speed and thoroughness that when the political boss swung into his own hotel, the manager greeted him with the joyous news of the big batch of bakery men that had just rolled in and filled every vacancy.
“Hell!” said the boss, “I’m giving a party myself for some friends. I’ve got to have a room.”
But there was no room for the boss in his hotel! Strangely, at this critical turn, three men who had been loitering about pushed up to the desk to say that they had been called away on an emergency. Now the room-clerk could offer the boss his choice of the three rooms providentially vacated.
The clerk did not tell his boss what he did not know: that the detectives had installed dictographs not only in all three of those rooms but had saved the adjoining rooms for their recorders; so that it would not matter which one of the rooms the Boss selected.
A fiction writer would hardlv dare to throw in such obstacles even if he could think of them. A detective has to think of them all the time. Or stop detecting.
By pre-arrangement, Reed was late in arriving. He was lavish in apologies. Fortunately there was room for him in one of the three rooms so luckily vacated. From here on the play went on just as it had been rehearsed, only in an Atlantic City theater instead of one in Trenton.
The dialogue had been written down for the benefit of the dictograph and any judge or jury who might later be trying the case.
As each supervisor stole into Reed’s room, he would look about to make sure that there were no spectators to witness his degradation. Reed would welcome him by name, assure him that he was unwatched and that only he and Reed were together. Then Reed would say how happy he was to pay So-and-So so much—$5,000 or whatever it was—for his services in amending the charter to permit the Board Walk Deal. He would ask the man to repeat his words to make sure there was no misunderstanding.
Then he would count out the bills aloud, and ask his visitor to count them aloud to make sure.
Finally Reed would express a hope that he could make many more such deals with his dear friend So-and-So. And So-and-So, of course, would say that he hoped so, too.
Then a cordial good night was spoken; and the next reptile would enter and go through the same dialogue.
Ray, of course, dared not trust those crooks out of sight with all that money. Each of them was tailed to his first stopping-place and where else he went. This individual surveillance was kept up until the last man was paid off. Then the operatives seized each man with the guilty money still on him. The marked money and the dictograph testimony would do the rest in court.
There were only two slip-ups. One man went straight home; and, by the time the arresters had arrived, had so completely hidden the money that it never was recaptured.
One cheap supervisor, whose selling price was only $2,000, had a momentary aberration into honesty or something like it. The operative tailing him was increasingly horrified by the fact that the fellow would not even sit down for a moment. He stopped at the first store he came to; and, while his shadow watched outside, paid a debt there. He moved on to another store, where he peeled more off his roll. The shadowman could not hear what story the supervisor told as to his sudden wealth, but he must have looked like Santa Claus to his creditors. And he must have owed at least $2,000; for he went up one side of the street, then down the other, stopping at every few doors and shedding folding money in each of the shops till he was stripped and strapped. He went home empty of pocket but doubtless full of pride in his re-established credit, while it lasted.
On that busy night, the detectives recovered 70 per cent of the money doled out. In due time the trials were held. Of the eleven men arrested, seven were convicted—an almost unheard-of percentage in the game of justice as practiced in our dear country.
The boss himself was one of the seven and he served almost three years in the penitentiary before he was pardoned. But his loving constituents, just to show that they had a sense of humor if not of political honor, later elected him to a higher office.
There was one telling result of this wholesale assault on grafters. There was a somewhat similar netting of a number of Ohio legislators who had accepted bribes within earshot of a dictograph. The fruit of these devastations by dictograph was that many state legislatures hastily passed laws making such use of the dictograph illegal! Later laws made its use illegal by anybody but District Attorneys and public officers.
But this was not till after Ray had used the little tattletale on no less a personage than the Governor of one of the Southern states. This Governor made a little side-money by selling pardons to criminals. He had a go-between who acted as salesman for his clemency. This drummer, never dreaming that he was being dictographed, quite frankly and flatly offered one of the Governor’s pardons for sale to the highest bidder.
The exposure created a great stir, and the Governor lost prestige for a while. But the public memory is short-lived and public resentment brief when clever politicians manipulate the atmosphere. So the Governor’s malfeasance was forgiven and he was soon kicked upstairs into the U. S. Senate, where he remained a long, long time.
Gradually the successes of the dictograph added to its difficulties. In Los Angeles there was a candidate for office whose public record was better than his private conduct. He complained to Ray that he was being blackmailed because of a little affair with a little blonde. At Ray’s suggestion, he arranged a conversation with the blackmailer in a hotel room, which Ray had wired for sound. To Ray’s dismay the blackmailer looked the room over before coming down to business. Inside the folds of a steam radiator he found a dictograph, and uprooted and destroyed it while shouting his opinion of the vile villains who had installed it. But the undiscourageable Schindler worked on him otherwise, and the blackmailer finally reduced his silence-price from $10,000 to $10.
In Westchester County there was a political crook who was wise to the wiles of dictographers and telephone-tappers. Painful experiences had taught him that it was perilous to talk turkey inside any four walls lest four other walls should gather him in.
When the District Attorney of the County, Lee Parsons Davis, later a Justice of the State Supreme Court, put his problem before Ray, and told of the allergy of that boss to any enclosure, Ray managed to get around the man’s claustrophobia.
One of Ray’s “ropers” opened a deal with the boss to permit the operation of roulette wheels for a fair price. Since the boss would not discuss the matter in a room, he proposed a little automobile ride. Ray had learned that the boss liked a certain obscure spot on a little frequented road where he could observe any approach. The roper agreed and rode out to the spot with the boss after dark.
In the meanwhile, Ray had managed to install a microphone in the boss’s own car. But at that time a ground wire connection was necessary, so Ray found a deserted farmhouse half a mile away and ran that length of wire to a pile of dead leaves right close to the spot where the boss always parked his car.
When the boss stopped there, and said to the supposed gambler:
“Now we can talk business.” The roper said:
“First, you’ll have to excuse me for a moment.”
He gave a familiar reason for leaving automobiles at night and stepped out into the dark. There he hastily connected a wire from the dictograph in the boss’s car to the wire waiting for him in the clump of dead leaves. Then he returned to the car and told the boss that he was ready to talk business.
They talked business and after much debate, a price was settled upon for which the boss agreed to let the forbidden roulette wheels whirl and protect them from the law.
When the boss went to trial he was dazed to hear his very words as he uttered them in the supposed seclusion of his car. As he was led away to jail, he growled:
“Next time I talk business with a guy, we’ll go up in a balloon.”
Today the dictograph is mar
vellously advanced in its techniques, thanks to electronic developments. But even in its crudest days it served as a noble weapon against the sly and secret conspiracies of those enemies of the people whom somehow the people are always boosting into positions of power.
12.
THE DICTOGRAPH AS A PRIVATE EAVESDROPPER
For many years Ray Schindler had the exclusive distribution rights to the dictograph. But that was in the early period of its evolution. Still, it did good work in catching public servants engaged in private betrayal of the public interests. It also served as a long-distance ear listening in on extremely personal misdoings, often of a most intimate nature, when the presence of a third person would have been a crowd indeed. Like other devices in which electricity is involved, the dictograph has been growing smaller and smaller as it has grown more and more powerful and more and more far-hearing.
On one occasion when Ray had to hear through a wall and could find no way to install a dictaphone, he had recourse to the simple but novel method of hiring the adjoining room and shaving the plaster so thin that it was hardly thicker than wall-paper.
But nowadays, thanks to radionics, it is possible to install a dictograph without preliminary access. One of Ray’s intended victims insisted on holding an interview in his own office because he was microphone-shy. Ray’s operative entered carrying a brief-case and set it on the floor. How could the victim have suspected that the brief-case contained a transmitter so ingenious and so stealthy that everything the man said was tuned in by wireless to an automobile in the street below? Inside that parked car were other operatives who heard every word as plainly as if they had sat in the man’s office at his very elbow.
On another occasion, the apparently insoluble problem was to record the conversations of two men who met in a private house where there was no chance to install a dictograph, and no operative could gain access, even with a briefcase. Even this did not stop Ray.
One day after the two men had gone out, leaving only a servant, an expressman brought to the door a box that had suffered such rough handling as to half-obliterate the name and address. The name of the sender was quite indecipherable. The servant, of course, accepted the package.
When his two employers returned, they opened the box, and found inside a lamp with a lamp shade so beautiful that they set it up in the drawing-room and plugged it in the socket. It gave a charming light and they were content to await the letter of explanation that would undoubtedly come along soon.
There is something about the gentle radiance of a prettily shaded lamp that is conducive to conversation, and the two men went on with their plotting and their exchange of secrets. It never occurred to them to examine the lamp’s insides.
Had they done that they might have learned that it contained a dictograph potent enough to repeat everything it overheard in an ethereal whisper that a short wave receiving instrument two blocks away amplified loudly enough for a recording machine to take it down.
The distant operatives in the car could see the distant house, and when the victims of this uncanny magic went out, the power was simply shut off till they returned. In two weeks this lamp accomplished its purpose and secured the desired testimony. Without human intervention it transmitted every word uttered by two men who were absolutely alone and seemingly remote from the human ear. In this case, the automobile was two hundred yards away. If there are no distracting noises such dictography can work at the distance of a mile.
What effect the various forms of dictography may have on the morals of the future, when people realize that they can never be absolutely sure that they are really alone, and are aware that the very lamps they put out may be putting out reports of their whispers to far-away detectives—that would take a bit of prophesying.
But the detectives and other instruments of law-enforcement are not in the business of keeping people virtuous in advance. Their job is to overtake the wicked after they have been wicked, or to prevent them from carrying out their conspiracies against others before it is too late.
Some of Ray’s experiences with the dictograph as a weapon against dishonest public servants have already been sketched. It has also been of exquisite and most intimate assistance in the strictly domestic field. Two picturesque examples will have to stand for a long list of such interventions. In both these cases, women were involved as the dictograph’s objects of inquiry, and in the second of them one of Ray’s women operatives was subjected to a long and wearing test of her nerves, her endurance and her ingenuity.
The first one concerned a man of very high standing in Washington. He was high up in the aircraft industry and he was higher up in the air over what used to be called a “light o’ love.” This light burned so fiercely that he could not put her out. She threatened to burn him up publicly even more completely than she had privately.
Sorrowful men have found that while it may be hard to get rid of a devoted wife, it is nothing to the torments and difficulties of shaking off a tenacious mistress.
This aerial tycoon had fallen very hard, temporarily, for a Spanish girl. Separation from her soon became a matter of self-preservation, the preservation of a home and family from the devastating consequences of a public scandal.
The air-official took his trouble to a friend, who promised to extricate him from the toils of the Spanish ex-charmer. As sometimes happens when one tries to remove fly-paper from another he finds himself stuck with it. This air-official told his friend of his gradual interest in the pretty Spanish girl. She was a fascinating companion when he came to New York on business for a few days or a week-end. She was only a little siren to him, but to her he was a great mind and a great soul whom she could not bear to lose.
When he brutally confessed his fatigue, her pride and her misprized love burst into fire. She would not be tossed aside like a withered flower. She threatened to expose him publicly. She had no reputation to lose. But he had. A scandal would bring him down like a flaming airplane.
The little Spaniard began to make long-distance calls to the high official’s office. They must have made delicious conversation when the stenographers and file-clerks met at the water cooler or tucked in their knees at the drug store and exchanged giggles of horrified delight over their nutritious icecream sodas. Mr. Big was as comfortable and helpless as Samson after his long hair had been Delilated.
Finally, the little Spaniard put a price on her favors and offered to accept $5,000 as liquidated damages. Her victim said that was Too, Too Much.
In his anguish and shame he turned to his friend to save him and confessed all. Let us call the friend “Ronald.” Ronald told the airman that the Spanish girl had finally resorted to pure blackmail—if “pure” is the word. His advice was to “call in Schindler.”
When Ray heard the story—a not entirely new instance of how unsmoothly the course of untrue love runs—he said that the first requisite was a record of the blackmail threat. This was a job for the dictograph.
So Ray rented a hotel-suite of parlor, two bedrooms and bath. He locked off one of the bedrooms, and there was nothing to excite suspicion in the fact that he made a recording office of that bedroom, or that in the other bedroom he hung a microphone on a tack in the back of the headboard, and in the living room fastened a microphone to the back of the couch.
Ronald moved into the suite and made it his own. Then he telephoned the Spanish girl and said he would like to talk the matter over with her. Thinking that it was a mere matter of auctioning off her silence for the best price obtainable, the girl consented to come down and discuss the subject in his suite, where they could be alone—with only two dictographs, a recording machine and two or three operatives in the offing.
The cocktails had arrived by the time she got there, and she was in a most hospitable mood. Her heart had a big empty room in it just vacated by a tenant who was going to pay up his arrears of rent. She liked the looks of Ronald as a new lodger, and wasted no time in offering him the affection that had accumulated during the airman�
��s absence.
There followed a scene of the sort that French farces used to revel in, When Ronald said:
“Let’s talk business. My friend is—”
“Let’s forget your friend,” said Carmencita. “He can wait. You’re pretty nice yourself.”
Then she plopped herself on his lap and kissed him so hard that she almost threw the recording needle off the disc in the other room. Ronald might have weathered the storm if he had not realized that his own every word was being taken down for posterity by a recording machine.
But Ronald was there to save his friend, and he could not dash for the fire-escape. The best he could think of was to say, “Excuse me, dear, but I’ve got to make a telephone call.”
He went into the next room, took up the telephone, and sat down on the bed while he dialled the first number he could think of. Carmencita sat right down beside him. She playfully wrestled with him as she took away his protective telephone.
At that moment the dictograph mysteriously went dead The little Spanish dancer had jiggled the microphone off the tack. Ray had to think fast, both to save his client and to rescue his microphones from extinction.
He rushed to the telephone in his room and called Ronald on the living room telephone. Ronald broke away long enough to answer it. When he heard Ronald’s voice, Ray murmured:
“The microphone’s off the hook and I can’t hear you.”
That must have given Ronald some relief, but he had the presence of mind to answer:
“Yes, I know, but I can’t see you now. I’m busy.”
Ray said: “You’ve got to get out of the room long enough for me to fix the machine.”
“All right, call me later,” said Ronald, and hung up.
It took Ronald twenty minutes to persuade his captress to join him in a brief trip to the hotel dining room. As soon as they left, Ray and his men restored the dictograph to its place.
The Complete Detective Page 20