Ronald had a harder time getting the Spaniard back to his suite than he had getting her out. It took him two hours and she had not been idle with the cocktails.
But at last she returned and the dictograph began to chatter and scratch in the next room while the jumping needle wrote her down for a better blackmailer than Ray had hoped.
She had been rebuffed by both the airman and his friend Ronald. So she said she was going to insist on double indemnity—$10,000 and not a cent less. Furthermore, she would telephone the airman to that effect the first thing in the morning, and furthermost she would also call his mother and father and tell them what a canine their son was.
At this point, Ronald was in a state of complete collapse. As a result of his kind intervention his friend was going to have to pay twice as much as he would have paid without Ronald’s help, and was not even to buy secrecy with it.
Suddenly Ray Schindler descended upon the impossible scene. Ronald was as surprised as Carmencita when Ray unlocked the door to the extra bedroom, walked in and told Ronald to go on home and let someone else take over from there.
When Ronald had gone, Ray sat down and told Carmencita that he knew her employer very well. He told her his name. Then he told her who her people were, from just where in Spain they had moved to just where in Cuba before they came to just where in New York. He said they were fine people and called them by their first names and said that it would break their hearts to learn just what their beloved and trusted daughter had been doing and was trying to do.
As if that were not enough, he led her into the next room and played over the record he had made of her recent conversation. One can imagine how her scenes of amorous folly and drunken threats must have sounded to that poor little thwarted girl. She had threatened to expose her ex-lover to the world. Now she was exposed to herself.
“I can take up this telephone and call the District Attorney. He is a close friend of mine and won’t object to my calling him at his house, especially when I say, ‘I’d like to call on you and present to you a pretty little blackmailer and let you hear a fine recording of how she works. I also have three witnesses to confirm the discs!’ If you prefer the publicity, you can go to the District Attorney yourself, and he will give you all the publicity you want.”
When she recoiled from this offer, he said:
“The man you wanted to ruin was generous with you for a long while. Then he got over his infatuation, and tried to forget it. If you want to call the whole affair just one of those things that happen, and forget it, why, we’re willing to forget it, too.”
At this point, the word “forget” sounded like about the prettiest word she had ever heard in English. She had tried to sell her silence for much gold. And now she could get Ray Schindler’s silence and the silence of those terrible records for nothing. Silence is a sweet word, too.
She looked on Ray Schindler now as if he were her rescuer. She gave him her promise and kept it. And he kept the records.
There was another much less familiar family complication in which the dictograph was called in to do its uncanny work. It involved as unusual a situation as ever came into the Schindler office.
There was a brilliant young lawyer who had a beautiful young wife, the daughter of wealthy parents. Their honeymoon was followed by an occasional tiff. After one bitter quarrel, he was stricken by a very bad cold, for which he took a certain medicine every day. One day the usual tablespoonful of it tasted so peculiar that he declared he had been poisoned.
He not only fled from his home, but he notified his wife’s parents that their daughter was a Medea or a Borgia, or both. The wife went back to her home in such a state of natural excitement that her mother took her to Florida for her nerves.
The excited husband called in Schindler and asked him to find out the truth about the wife. Manifestly, Ray could not go to her and say simply: “You tried to poison your husband. True or false?”
To get the answer to such a question was not a matter for a man detective. By the time he got to know her well enough to extract such a secret from her, a love-affair would probably be on the fire. And, while Ray sends his operatives to solitary confinement in penitentiaries if necessary, or leaves them standing outside hotels all night in blizzards up to their knees, he does not like to subject them to love affairs especially with ladies suspected of looking on the bottle when it has a skull and crossbones on it.
So he chose a woman operative, a pretty and cultivated young woman who could hold her own in the opulent atmosphere of a Florida hotel. For convenience’ sake we might call the wife Helen and the detective Sybil.
Following Ray’s principle that the suspected criminal must make the first approach to the detective and not the other way, Sybil went to Florida and threw herself with careful carelessness across the path of Helen for a long while before Helen took the bait and spoke the first word.
Sybil was magnetic, witty, sympathetic, and a good talker. Once begun, the acquaintanceship soon ripened into a warm friendship. Helen grew so fond of Sybil that she and her mother grew jealous enough to eat at a different table in the hotel dining room. Cocktails and meals together became a ritual with the two young women. There were long confidential talks in Helen’s own room. Sybil was doing the work of a roper, or a roperess, and finally Helen said to her:
“I’m really down here because I am going to have a baby. My mother is staying with me till it’s born,”
Sybil commented pleasantly: “I suppose your husband is too busy to join you until the last few weeks. Or will you go back home?”
“I don’t dare to,” said Helen. “He insists that I tried to poison him.”
Naturally Sybil did not exclaim:
“Did you?”
She expressed a proper horror of the ways of jealous men, and the friendship went on. One of the chief difficulties of Sybil’s job, beside the endless task of listening to Helen’s chatter, was that Helen took to drinking more and more heavily and Sybil had to drink with her.
Finally Ray sent down a handsome operative to pass himself off as Sybil’s suitor. As soon as Helen laid eyes on him she went for him. He had almost as hard a time keeping out of her clutches as Ronald had had with that Spanish girl.
Sybil had both to protect him and to avoid quarrelling with Helen over him. But Helen’s bibulosity loosened her tongue so that she began to babble more and more about that husband of hers and his terrible accusations against her.
When this was reported to Ray he flew down to join his two operatives, not as a chaperon but as a dictographer. It was not difficult to plant a microphone in the operative’s room, but it was a wearisome business listening to Helen’s incoherent and unending prattle. And the recording machine had to be kept going because her mind kept shifting from subject to subject, and there was no telling when she would blurt out some incriminating word.
Ray had brought with him no less than fifty discs—enough to record several sessions of the United Nations, but they used forty of them without more than a tantalizing hint or two.
The three members of the Schindler force were about ready to resign, but the husband had engaged them and Ray hates to give up anything till he reaches the goal.
Helen’s husband still loved her but still suspected her. He was afraid either to return to her or to give her up without positive proof one way or the other. Ray himself could not make up his own mind on the evidence thus far turned up at such cost of time and trouble.
When he had only ten discs left he instructed Sybil to worm the truth out of Helen by any means possible. So he and the male operative sat in their room and watched the last discs whirl while they recorded warily Sybil’s leading questions and Helen’s evasive answers and her rattlepate chatter. For four hours that curious conversation reeled on, Sybil bringing Helen back and back and back to the poison topic without success.
When the last of the records was filled with prattle, and the question still unsolved, Ray and the operative took to their pencil
s and notebooks and tried to record the talk. The long hurricane of language came to an end with Helen still vague and the three detectives exhausted. They went back to New York to recuperate from Florida.
When they played their records back to their client, he complained that he had paid big money to get records of the chatter of one of Ray’s girls. But suddenly Helen decided to brave her husband’s wrath and return to New York. Her husband took her back; she made him a proud father, and up to yet there has been no further report of poison in that family.
As for Ray, he can give only a Scotch verdict: “Not guilty, but don’t do it again.” He has a feeling that the wife’s real intention was to give her husband a sedative that would calm his too-amorous nature—a sort of love-potion in reverse. The husband detected the strange taste and jumped to the conclusion that his wife wanted to kill him, when she merely wished to restrain him from loving her not wisely but too well.
Lest any woman who may be reading this intensely domestic story might grow envious of the girl called Sybil because she led the exciting life of a female detective, it may be well to append here another of Sybil’s jobs. For a long and suspenseful while she was held prisoner in a sanitarium on a diet consisting largely of milk, orange juice and cod liver oil. This also was a love story of a most unhackneyed sort.
The Schindler office has close association with many other firms of detectives for mutual assistance. In New Orleans is Forrest Pendleton who was once the F.B.I. Special Agent in Charge there. One day he telephoned the Schindler bureau and dumped a task into its lap.
The famous play “Camille” concerns a young man who fell in love with a girl who was in the last stages of consumption. In this instance it was a girl who was in love with a young man in a tuberculosis sanitarium.
Her parents were Mexicans of wealth and had sent their nineteen-year-old daughter to New York for treatment. She had been placed in a hospital in the northern part of the State. Before long her letters home began to refer to a young man undergoing the same treatment. Her letters grew more and more fervent with her consuming passion for the young man and her dreams of marriage with him. The family grew alarmed and asked Pendleton to find out all he could about the affair and put an end to it. Pendleton passed the buck to Ray.
The operative Sybil was assigned to the pleasant task of pretending to be a tuberculous patient. Ray had a doctor who was friendly enough to arrange the formalities for having Sybil admitted for treatment. Sybil is a beautiful young woman of slender form but she looked as pale and wan as she could when she arrived on the train and was met by the hospital bus. At the sanitarium she was hurried to a room, and put to bed.
One of the cardinal principles of the place was to give the patients as much rest as possible. Sybil was nearly rested to death. It was almost impossible to get out of her room, and when she was caught outside she was marched back and restored to bed. Every few hours she was heavily dosed with medicines, mainly cod liver oil.
The nurses paid no attention to Sybil’s abounding health; they took the word of the doctor who had sent her there that she was in a desperate plight.
Sybil was kept in the sunlight all day long and the medicine was forced down her throat. Only twice a day was she allowed to leave the cell of her room. Then she was assisted to a porch-chair and allowed to look at the sunlight.
From enforced inanition and helpless rage she began to lose weight so rapidly that the doctors looked forward to her hopefully as ripe meat for a complex and expensive operation. Every time she lifted her head it was pushed back on the pillow or filled with cod liver oil. If perchance she escaped from her cell in her bathrobe she was gently but firmly reincarcerated by the watchful nurses. Even when she was permitted to sit in a rocking chair for half an hour, the other inmates were warned not to talk to her much because she was too weak to be bothered. The worst of it was that Sybil was not permitted to get to a telephone where she could send in either her resignation or a call for help.
Yet in spite of all the vigilance of the guards, Sybil managed somehow to have a few words with the Mexican girl she had been sent to study and to save. She also succeeded in having an occasional brief conversation with the young man. Here were surprises indeed; the sorts of things that can only be learned at first hand.
The youth whom the girl had written home about as if he were Galahad and Lochinvar and Valentino packed into one handsome frame, was the son of very poor people who had been able to give him very little education. He was in an apparently hopeless condition and actually hardly able to lift his head. Sybil felt that he was too weak even to feel any real love for the Mexican girl and was helpless to resist her almost violent sympathy.
The girl had either mistaken her pity for the love that is akin to it, or had been amusing herself by dressing it up as a wild romance in the letters she wrote home to excite and torment her family.
Meanwhile Sybil might have been hauled off for investigation by way of the scalpel had not the Schindler office begun to worry and made an investigation through the doctor who had kindly furnished the commitment papers. Ray learned in time to remove the “patient” from the baleful clutches of the surgeons, and Sybil came forth like a convict saved from execution by a last-minute reprieve.
She made a report of the facts about the Mexican girl’s love affair. It was relayed to Forrest Pendleton, who relayed it to the parents in Mexico. They yanked their daughter out of that sanitarium and put her in another, where, they hoped, her sympathy and her imagination would be less exposed to overwork. The young man doubtless heaved a sigh of relief at her departure. It could not have been much fun for any young man to lie still in a state of almost complete weakness while a young woman hovers over him and belabors him with a devotion he can neither respond to nor escape. Sybil saved him as well as the girl. But at what cost to herself! One thing is certain; the operative’s lot is not a happy one.
Our next case tells of a male operative’s experience that makes even Sybil’s seem easy and brief.
13.
CRIME AGAINST CRIME
I have tried to keep emphasizing the fact that the real detective’s life is not all beer and skittles; not all a matter of microscoping a few fingerprints and tracing a few footprints through fascinating scenes of mystery and red horror to a triumphant conclusion. I have tried to neglect none of the elements of drudgery, monotony, blind alleys, icy nights of doing nothing but try to keep awake standing up, futile pursuits and maddening delays.
And yet, in spite of me, enough of the romance and excitement of the chase and the high art and imagination of Ray’s achievements may have got past me, to tempt the reader to go and do likewise. There is abundant need of good detectives, heaven knows, and more than enough work for them to do; but people should go into this business with their eyes open to its hardships.
Ray assigned one woman to a long confinement in a madhouse for several months. One of his male operatives had to endure solitary confinement in a jail cell for thirty days and nights. Even Ray could not save him from it. No wonder he sued Ray for damages. The wonder is that he did not collect any.
This case dates back many years; but crime repeats itself so unceasingly that the same thing might happen tomorrow. Just such conditions are being fought today.
The scene is a penitentiary, one of those big cages where the crowded inmates are supposed to be denied all liberty; but they invariably manage to find freedom enough for a vast amount of mischievous industry.
The time is just before Woodrow Wilson became president. It is in the days when he was Governor Wilson of New Jersey. While he was using the gubernatorial office as a prep school for the presidency, he had an Attorney General who was also named Wilson—George H. Wilson. This Wilson was honest and ambitious enough to try to do something about the ancient scandal of the sale of special privileges to well-heeled convicts.
One of the supposed penalties of punishment for crime is a denial of the joys of wine, women, and drugs. A few energetic souls mana
ge to secure all three by the connivance of criminal outsiders or inside officers and guards who like to turn a dishonest dollar.
The situation in a certain New Jersey State Prison had grown intolerable. Attorney General Wilson mentioned it to Justice William P. Voorhees of the State Supreme Court. Judge Voorhees was one among the multitude who know Ray; and he fell back on the bromide: “Call in Schindler.”
When Ray was told of the problem, his solution was simple: to plant two of his men in the prison. How to get them in? Let them stage a crime, be caught and condemned to a long sentence.
Judge Voorhees consented to connive and, since he was sitting in Camden at the time, Ray proposed to have the crime committed in that county. The Attorney General felt that he had better get the approval of the Governor first.
So Wilson took Schindler to Wilson. Ray was profoundly impressed by the man with such a future. But all that he remembers of the Governor’s office is that he saw there the largest, most ornate and commodious spittoon he ever saw anywhere. It was of pink-flowered white porcelain, and confirmed the tradition that, while Woodrow Wilson never smoked, he was not unlike little Georgie Reed in that he chewed the nasty weed. But he gave Ray’s plan his prompt and complete approval.
Ray gathered eight or nine of his available men in his office, outlined his scheme and called for volunteers. He offered the consolation of triple pay with a bonus of $500 in case of success. The response was so enthusiastic that Ray explained:
“Were not going to take the place by storm, you know. And I can use only two of you.”
He noted before him a man so small that he might almost have walked between the legs of the others to reach the first line. He was an Englishman, and Ray asked him why he was so keen to go to jail. Burchard replied:
“I’m getting married as soon as I can raise the price, and I’d spend a month in a swimming pool of ice-water for that triple pay.”
The Complete Detective Page 21
