After much thought, Ray recruited a number of his friends, all of them of robust build and led his little troop into the contaminated resort shortly after five, and they elbowed their way to the bar with an unmannerly roughness that the very gentle gentlemen found annoyingly rude.
Sprawling over the bar and monopolozing it, Ray’s friends talked to one another in tones as loud as their manners were uncouth. Ray shouted down to a friend as the farthest end of the long bar:
“Hey, Bill, did you notice what a lot of pansies there are around here? You can smell ’em a mile. They’re giving this place a bad name. But don’t you quit coming here. In a week or two it will be the fairies who’ll be giving this place the go-by. I’m going to chase ’em out of here for keeps.”
“A damned good idea!” his friend howled back. “This place is lousy with ’em. They’re smelling it up till a he-man can’t breathe.”
After half an hour of such stentorian warning, Ray and his gang bustled out. But the warning was wasted; or rather, it brought the boys out in a determined effort to defend their stronghold.
A week later, Ray arrived well ahead of the five o’clock rush. Now he had with him only three of his operatives. But they set up an elaborate fingerprinting apparatus on a table at one end of the room.
This time Ray said nothing, made neither threats nor promises. He just sat quietly at the table. But there was consternation among the flowery customers when they noticed that, as each of them finished a drink, the barkeeper took the glass to the end of the bar and handed it over to one of Ray’s three men.
What was still more startling was the way the barkeeper handled the glasses. In every case, instead of taking one up in the usual way, the barkeeper put his first and second fingers inside and spread them so that they lifted the glass from the inside without touching the outside. Ray’s helper repeated the performance; and set the glass on Ray’s table. Then Ray carefully dusted the spot where the drinker’s fingers had clasped the glass. He then laid on the dusted spot a piece of tape and removed it, plainly lifting the fingerprint. This he numbered carefully.
Now there was a tempest among the pansies. Some of them dropped their glasses and backed away from the bar. The girl in the hat-check room reported that she had seen at least three young men make a hasty exit with their glasses in their hands. They took them out in the street and broke them in the gutter.
Finally, after a hurried and almost hysterical conference, an elderly man of very dainty attire and sirupy voice approached Ray and said:
“I am a lawyer and I wish to warn you that you have no legal right whatever to take the fingerprints of my clients.”
To this Ray replied:
“I am not asking your clients to give me their fingerprints, but after they have left them I have a perfect right to examine them. The police have given me a number of fingerprints of crooks they are looking for. These crooks happen to be known to be fags, and I don’t know any better place to look for fag fingerprints than in this barroom which you and your clients have taken over. I will continue to take fingerprints from the glasses as fast as the customers leave them. Try to stop me!”
The lah-de-dah lawyer did not try to stop him. There was a general exodus from the barroom, and trade fell.
But, a week later, the place was still haunted by too many fragrant customers. Now the fingerprinting apparatus was missing, but a more fearsome engine was erected. At one end of the long bar was a big camera on a tripod so tall that the photographer stood on a table.
And now, whenever a little knot of boy-friends gathered at the bar with their boy-friends, Ray Schindler would edge up close to the group and wave to the cameraman, who would promptly flash a big light-bulb and ostentatiously take a photograph.
After a few of these explosions, the same indignant lawyer demanded what new deviltry Ray was up to, and how dared he photograph people without their permission? With a maddening grin, Ray answered:
“1’m not having their pictures taken, but I love to have my own pictures taken in a swell place like this. I want them for souvenirs. If other people happen to be in them, that’s not my fault, is it?”
Immediately there was manifested a most unflattering unwillingness to be caught in Ray’s vicinity. A quiet panic soon practically emptied the room. One of the exquisites called at Ray’s office and made an effort to purchase the negative in which he thought he appeared. When Ray insisted on name and address he walked out.
That was his last battle in that barroom, for the place was abandoned by the violets. Still, like swarming bees, they found other lighting places, and Ray had further appeals for help in evicting such peculiar people.
There was one quaint after-effect of this strange eviction and recapture. Ray spread the warning to the owners of various cocktail bars in the neighborhood to beware of letting such people settle down in numbers and to deal drastically with the first-comers. In one of these places, Ray met a friend for a conference. When they moved up to the bar and ordered drinks, the barkeeper said:
“I’m sorry, Mr. Schindler, I can’t serve you.”
“And why not?” Ray demanded indignantly. He had only himself to blame for the answer:
“We are not allowed to serve drinks to two gentlemen unless they have a lady with them.”
That is a rather startling evidence of the profound change that recent years have made in American mores. Before Prohibition a woman in a barroom would have excited stares of horror, and nobody would have called her a “lady.” Now in self-protection from a certain type of “gentleman,” couples of men were refused service unless they were chaperoned by a lady!
To the Schindler bureau many cases have come in which perverted persons are concerned. Though they excite extreme pity or disgust, they must be handled with a combination of extreme delicacy and extreme brutality.
In one instance, a rich man appealed to Ray to save him from being bankrupted by a wife who was squandering fortunes on re-decorating and re-re-decorating his house, to the enrichment of a certain interior decorator, whom the husband suspected of being her paramour. Ray’s investigations disclosed the existence of a really indescribable triangle composed of the wife, and two mutually devoted decorators. Ray had to rescue the husband from this inescapable trio by collecting evidence against the two men that drove them away without spreading the noisome mess before the public nostrils.
Another almost more sickening situation concerned a woman of enormous wealth who had been duped into marrying a handsome young fortune-hunter. After they were sealed in holy matrimony, she discovered to her horror that her husband was a homosexual and was keeping a mister. Nauseating as such a situation may be even to mention, imagine what it must mean to a young wife? Ray has had at least a dozen such cases brought to him by wives who cannot bear the thought of publicizing their degrading plight.
In the state of New York a divorce can be secured only by proof of adultery. But a husband whose infidelity involves another man is not breaking the Seventh Commandment—or the Sixth as the Catholics number it. The law gives absolutely no release to the pitiable wife. Nor does it give release to a husband when, as not infrequently happens, his wife proves to be one of that accursed cult.
Many nice people will feel that such situations should not be even mentioned, but the monumental researches made by Havelock Ellis, Professor Alfred C. Kinsey and others have proved that they are far more horribly numerous than the average mind imagines. Even one such case is a multitude too many.
20.
GRAND (SOAP) OPERA
Politicians and others who make a big business out of their enmity to big business always pretend to believe, or really do believe, that all big-businessmen stick together and form monopolies or trusts to destroy little-businessmen and maintain their own immunity to failure.
As a matter of fact, big-businessmen cut one another’s business throats with the keenest pleasure and most fatal rivalry.
One of Ray Schindler’s most spectacular cases
took him into the lofty jungle where the biggest and fiercest moguls fought one another to the death.
The giant corporation that called Ray to come in and save it from other giants was one of the chief manufacturers of soap. It had developed a special kind of cleanser and deodorizer and had given each cake a special kind of shape, weight, color, smell, look and label. Huge advertising had made its name a sort of household word.
It had developed such a vast sale for the soap that its rivals decided to get on and ride. Several of them put out a soap with a name resembling the original and with every ingredient the same. The copyists could sell their soap much lower since they did not spend a penny on publicity. They let the innovator do all the advertising, and arranged with department stores and other retailers to display their soaps alongside, and price-mark them a few cents below. The housewives and other soap-seekers, seeing how close was the similarity, naturally bought the cheaper cakes.
The firm that originated the commodity naturally suffered anguishes as the profits vanished and their own advertising enriched their rivals. Yet when the originator asked lawyers to sue for damages and get out injunctions and drive the imitators out of business, the lawyers said, “No soap!” There was no law to give the originator a monopoly of a certain composition, color, scent, or form.
With soap, as with songs, sonnets, novels, dramas, or other manufactured articles, a close resemblance is not forbidden, unless there is a direct and evident “colorable imitation” and a definitely proved effort to profit by the creations of someone else.
For instance, there was the famous Baker’s Chocolate. For generations it had sold its wares under a certain trade mark. Numberless other people sold chocolate without interference. But along came a man named Baker, who decided to get rich quick by putting out a chocolate with his name on it. “Oh, no!” said the court, and forbade Mr. Baker to make and vend a Baker’s Chocolate, since he was trading on the prestige built up by another commodity of the same name.
And so it was with this particular soap. Big lawyers said that the originators could sue the imitators only if they could prove a direct intent, an exact duplication, or a conspiracy to make profits out of the success of the original. The lawyers also pointed out that proving such a conspiracy was practically impossible.
It certainly looked so. How would you yourself set about getting inside the minds and secret conferences of the directors of an immense manufacturing company to find positive evidence convincing to a court that there had been a dark plot afoot?
It will save labor and dissipate fog to state outright that this story concerns the Lever Brothers and their pet baby, Lifebuoy Soap—the soap that made “B.O.” famous as an expression, and made the populace B.O.-conscious after centuries of personal indifference to the twitchings of other people’s nostrils.
Lever Brothers felt a natural distaste for continuing to spread the gospel of smellessness at tremendous cost in order to build up the business of commercial rivals. So they cut their advertising appropriations for that special soap to a minimum.
This brought a wail from the firm that handled their advertisements, Ruthrauff and Ryan. They called on their lawyer to prevent this loss, and he thought that a conspiracy might be provable, provided Ray Schindler could be engaged to ferret it out of the guilty minds of the manufacturers feeding on the Lever Brothers’ profits.
As Ray thought it over, he realized the practical impossibility of breaking into the brains of the rivals and dragging out their secrets. They must be induced to deliver their own damnations. But how was he to get hard-headed men to confess their sins on paper?
In the radio world, serials are often called “soap operas”; and this fact may have suggested to Ray an idea for a radio show as a bait. He did not propose to build up a rival soap-factory as he had once built a railroad or a boardwalk, opened a bank, or a second-hand bookstore, or some other institution. But he did develop an imaginary radio show that would offer cakes of soap as prizes, and give them in such numbers that he would need half a million cakes to start with; and more anon.
He kept the names of the imaginary backers of this show a secret; but gave them two agents, his manager, Shelby Williams and Arthur Parsells, of Ray’s own staff. Ray provided these two ropers with a handsome suite at the Biltmore Hotel and furnished it with ten hidden dictographs.
As the first victim to be roped in, he selected a minor manufacturer in Brooklyn who was selling so much Lifebuoy-like soap that he had had to enlarge his plant. The roper approached this soaper and asked for a meeting in a Fifth Avenue bank. The soaper found the roper in conference with one of the vice-presidents of the bank. From there they went to the office of a friend of Ray’s, the famous comedian, Charles Winninger, who also managed a theatrical agency.
Charlie had expensive offices on Madison Avenue where he tried out talent for radio shows, and he was placing such well-known artists as Ethel Merman.
Ray’s manager, Shelby Williams, arranged to take the soap manufacturer to Winninger’s office, as pre-arranged, at a time when Winninger was trying out some excellent talent. The soap man sat and listened to the various performers so that Williams, who was sitting with Winninger, could decide whether or not he wanted that talent on the proposed program. Winninger put on a most effective show for the benefit of the soap man.
But the roper said he needed bigger names than those on Winninger’s list, and led his prey to his own suite in the Bilt-more for further discussion.
There the roper called in those famous partners Bourbon and Water, and Scotch and Soda. The soaper was soon fizzing with pride over the big joke he was playing on the Lever Brothers. He boasted that they had merely invented and advertised Lifebuoy, while his own perfect imitation rode in on the Lever Brothers’ backs to huge success.
The roper said at this point that his sponsor was seriously thinking of making use of the genuine Lifebuoy soap as his give-away. But the Brooklyn man pointed out how foolish that would be since he himself could make exactly the same soap and sell it to the sponsor at vastly less.
The roper said he would talk it over with his sponsor. He arranged for another session to give his victim time to seethe to a boil. At the second meeting, the roper said his sponsor was afraid the Lever Brothers might sue him for infringement. The Brooklyn man produced a letter from his own lawyer guaranteeing immunity. The roper said the sponsor was afraid the substitute soap could not be as good as the Lifebuoy. The Brooklyn man insisted that he had paid a high price to an eminent chemist to analyze the Lifebuoy ingredients, find out its formula, and copy it with such minute accuracy that no expert could tell it from a cake of Lifebuoy.
All this was duly recorded by dictograph. It was just what the doctor ordered: a detailed and complete confession of downright imitation—something the best lawyers had declared impossible to obtain.
With this man’s bids in his possession, the roper next approached many other big soap-makers and asked for competitive bids. They all fell into the trap and the dictograph faithfully took down their damning confessions.
Only one of these cheated cheaters seemed to be suspicious. He would not walk into the ropers parlor and talk. He insisted on the roper’s visiting him at his own hotel. But finally after a lengthy delay, the ropers succeeded in getting him into an apartment where a dictograph had been installed.
When the confessions of all the soap plagiarists were engraved on rolling discs they were privileged to hear their own voices rolling out their own self-exposures. Then Ray’s operatives and his roper carried their traps to other cities and caught other travellers on the Lever Brothers’ backs.
Since the wholesale piracy of the Lifebuoy methods was made possible by chemists, Ray published advertisements calling for trained men to work on health commodities and asked for their qualifications and experience in such work. Numbers of them frankly stated that they had succeeded in probing the secrets of Lifebuoy and making a synthetic duplicate of it. One chemist produced the very commission fro
m a big manufacturer who had paid him to “tear down Life-buoy” and build it up again for reproduction.
After a few months of such raids on the pirates’ dens, Lever Brothers brought many suits calling for injunctions and cease-and-desist edicts by the courts. The trials were like auditions and the courtrooms resounded with phonographic cylinders parroting the very words of the executives in their very ears.
There is a harrowing difference between the mellow sound of one’s own voice when he is burbling boastful confessions of his clever trickery over an nth highball in a private suite, and the ghastly sound of that same voice when it crackles forth the very same words in a court of justice with a judge frowning and one’s own lawyer blushing.
The United States courts issued cease-and-desist orders, and the offending soap companies got together and drew up a working agreement with Lever Brothers.
The upshot of the matter was a complete victory for Ray’s clients. Here again the vital importance of the private detective is shown in protecting properties where the police would be entirely without either jurisdiction or power.
21.
HE PLAYS SANTA CLAUS
In the theater and in the pinker pictures a banker is always an icy-eyed miser, and the flat-footed detective is a little worse than the criminals he pursues. But here is a case where a banker and a detective combined forces to act like a twin Santa Claus. It was a case where, instead of some lucky wanderer finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, a poor family stayed at home and the rainbow came to them bringing a hogshead of gold.
Once, when Ray was delving into a California crime, his brother Walter telephoned him from New York.
“Fly to Cuba at once!”
Ray’s errand was to find a lost family there and dump a pile of gold on its doorstep.
The case was brought to the Schindler office by a bank in heartless Wall Street. The bank had on hand a very sizable fortune. If it could not find an heir to receive it, the money must be turned over to the State. The bank officials felt it their duty to spare no effort or expense in search of an heir.
The Complete Detective Page 27