The Complete Detective

by Rupert Hughes

  The next morning Ray had word from his office that the letters were written on a typewriter that was at that time too new to be widely distributed. Indeed, Ray was lucky enough to learn from the manufacturers the name of everyone in that town who owned one. Meanwhile Ray had interviewed numbers of the citizens, and found nobody that had ever seen a car of the kind the girl described, driven by a swarthy chauffeur with a passionate Spaniard in the back seat.

  So Ray sent word to the girl asking her to meet him at the District Attorney’s office. There he had her describe the man again. He asked if the man were strikingly handsome. He was. Did he have a scar on his face as many Spaniards do? He did. Was it on his cheek? Yes, it was. On his left cheek? That was right. Did he have a mole? Yes, he did. Then Ray stopped asking her and told her.

  “You’re just a little faker.”

  This stung her to the quick, and before Ray could put up his guard she slapped him in the face. Ray told her that he could have her arrested for assault, but that the county authorities could do still worse by her. For three days the tax-payers’ money had been squandered on sending fifty or more cars all over the State in wild-goose chases after an imaginary Spaniard while her brother was on the loose with a rifle and apt to snap it at any Spanish-looking man he met.

  The next day, one of Ray’s men brought in the guilty typewriter. It belonged to a schoolteacher, who had let the girl use it when she wanted to.

  Confronted with the instrument itself, the girl looked at it in consternation. As she faltered for words, her father and brother stormed into the District Attorney’s office and demanded that Ray be driven out of town for bringing his “New York third-degree methods” to that peaceful town for the persecution of an innocent girl.

  But the innocent girl told her father not to make a fool of himself and ordered him and her brother out of the office. She wanted to have a word with Ray alone.

  In a moment Ray was alone with her. She told him her pathetic little story. Her boy friend, Harry, was in no hurry to marry. He loved her and all that; but he was afraid of poverty and he was not exactly romantic. So she had invented somebody who was.

  To American girls all Spanish men are romantic. The Spanish girls think the same thing about American men. The girl had composed the letters and sent them to a girl friend in New York to mail to her so that they would have a New York postmark. The girl friend worked for the telephone company.

  The first two letters from the Spanish duke did not impress Harry, and the impatient girl had been driven to writing more and more passionate avowals till finally she had been pushed to the climax of the imaginary kidnapping.

  When she had made this confession of her pitiful little stab at authorship, the police were called in from the highways and it would have been possible for a dark Spaniard in a big car to drive through that town without being lynched.

  So Ray bowed out quietly and made no further report. It would be pleasant to say that Harry was so flattered by the girl’s eagerness that he married her at once. But, in a way, it is pleasanter to report that she escaped from that human adding-machine.

  He is still selling some people’s love-songs to other people. But the girl left town and her girl friend got her a job with the telephone company. Now she can listen all day to other people’s woes and love-chatter.

  She wrote Ray a beautiful letter thanking him for giving her a right start in life. She was the only one who ever struck him, but not the only one who expressed deep gratitude for what he had done.

  16.

  PAINTINGS VANISH, JEWELS REAPPEAR

  Unlike many private detectives, especially in fiction, Ray Schindler has great respect for the police, and works in complete harmony with them. But, as many of the stories told here have already shown, there constantly arise desperate situations where the police are too busy with other cases, or too few in number, or too limited in time and expense-money to follow through investigations that require the cooperation of large numbers of experts, long periods of time, vast distances of travel, and often the almost endless study of innumerable records.

  There are other reasons which Ray has outlined in his story of one of his most baffling cases. He writes:

  “I have frequently been asked: ’Why does a private investigating agency often succeed where the police fail?’ The answer is simple, and in no way compromises the worth, integrity or ability of the average policeman. A cop doesn’t have to produce results. All he has to do is to avoid mistakes. He can go on for years, rise from pounding a beat to detective sergeant and higher. So long as he doesn’t trip over something, or stick his neck out, or talk back when strategy counsels a tight pair of lips, he eventually retires honorably and settles down to his little garden patch in the suburbs. A private detective must get results. They are his stock in trade, the goods on his shelves, the dressing in his window. Let him stop getting results and he stops getting cases. It doesn’t mean that the private investigator is necessarily any more alert or intelligent than the public investigator. It is simply an affair of bread and butter.”

  The case that inspired these comments concerned the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences. One of its prizes was a small watercolor drawing made by one of the greatest of American artists, John Singer Sargent. His painting was a study of Benvenuto Cellini’s famous bronze, Perseus with the head of Medusa.

  The painting had hung for years on the Museum walls and had been seen by countless thousands. Suddenly the frame yawned vacant. The painting had been neatly slashed out. Ray was called in and set to work with absolutely no clue to start on. He began with his usual study of the landscape and investigation of all the inhabitants.

  In reading of such a case one must imagine the drudgery and the trudgery, the questions asked of innumerable people, all getting nowhere, all the tasks necessary to eliminating everybody but the guilty one. For the sake of brevity and anonymity the names are given here merely as letters. The most striking thing about this appalling report is that none of these persons had anything whatever to do with the purloining of that painting.

  B-2 reports:

  Talked with museum executives A and B; then C, curator fourth floor, and D, chief attendant, fourth floor, were called in. Secured all information they had regarding theft, then looked over the ground in company with C and D.

  D, chief attendant, personally dusts all pictures on fourth floor on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. On Saturday, May 9th, he dusted the Sargent about 9:30 a.m. He had a bulletin-board frame to put up nearby, and this took him till 10 a.m., which is the last time he saw the picture. He and an assistant then worked on the hanging of a large picture the rest of the morning. When D started for lunch at 1 p.m. he happened to glance at the wall and missed the Sargent. As the museum has been having a great deal of copying and photographing done lately he assumed the Sargent had been removed from its frame for this purpose. About 3 p.m. he began to grow suspicious owing to the long interval of time elapsed and reported the matter to Director A and Suprintendent B.

  Art students from the XYZ Institute under Instructor E visited the gallery in a body Thursday and Friday.

  On Saturday there were 1380 visitors to the museum, all having access to the picture. C states he noticed quite a few Italians in this particular gallery.

  There is an artist, F (address given), who has been making copies for C, but no one noticed him about Saturday.

  The attendants on this floor are D, ten years with museum; G, seven years; H, ten years; I, six years. (All addresses given.) Museum officials say all are beyond suspicion.

  J, with museum three years, was formerly attendant on fourth floor, but was transferred to the first. The curator on the first floor, according to Superintendent B, is a little hard on attendants. This curator has been away some time. J, fearful of having trouble when the curator returns next week, has been appealing to both his immediate chief and to Superintendent B to be transferred to the top floor again. His request was refused. J was formerly an attendan
t at the PQR Museum in New York. He left there under peculiar circumstances, but I was unable today to see Superintendent K of that institution to get the details.

  The artist, F, was not to be found at his home when I called there at 4:30 p.m. and again at 8 p.m.

  Spent the rest of the evening up to 10:30 trying to get in touch with Attendants G and H, but without success.

  As a routine matter and to warn possible purchasers, photographs previously taken of the missing watercolor were reproduced in great numbers and sent to art dealers, art auction-houses, antique shops, and the better second-hand stores. Still there was no hint as to the thief.

  The baffled detectives finally threw themselves on the mercy of the criminal himself and appealed to him through the press. They published an advertisement in all the newspapers including the Italian, because the Curator thought he felt the presence of a fine Italian hand in the deed. The advertisement was an abject admission of failure, and promised in return for the return of the picture: “No questions asked.”

  No questions were asked, and no answer was given. The theft promised to rival in a minor way the famous mystery of the Mona Lisa stolen from the Louvre.

  Suddenly with a loud crash an accident intervened, a fatal accident. Perhaps all mysteries are solved by accidents at some point of the procedure. But this accident was a real one. It solved the riddle by posing a new one.

  A huge room on the ground floor had been closed to the public for a thorough cleaning. It contained hundreds of glass cases filled with natural history exhibits of all sorts, stuffed animals, birds, and, among a myriad of other things, a collection of gold nuggets that had been loaned to the museum.

  One of the cleaners mounted a tall stepladder to spray a pair of golden eagles in a lofty nest. He carried a hose attached to an ammonia tank. The tank exploded, shattering many of the exhibits, and injuring three of the cleaners, one of them fatally.

  The whole museum staff ran to the room to extinguish the flames. Police, firemen, and ambulance men joined them. But the public was carefully excluded.

  In the final restoration of things to their places, it was found that the broken glass case containing the gold nuggets no longer contained all of them. There was only the mark of a thief’s hand in the dust to show how he had hastily swept up a clutch of nuggets. No fingerprint was visible. He had doubtless stuffed his loot in his pockets unnoticed in the excitement of the fire.

  Ray Schindler was sent for again. He saw no reason to cast suspicion on the policemen or the firemen. He felt sure that some member of the staff had been unable to resist the lure of the gold spread before him for the mere taking. Ray went on the assumption that the nugget-theft was just as plainly an inside job as the theft of the painting had been the work of some one among the multitudes of outsiders who had filed past it. While his staff was still combing the general population for the Sargent watercolor, Ray took upon himself the combing of the staff.

  He secured the consent of the officials to a general psychological test to be conducted in installments, group by group, neglecting nobody: attendants, guards, elevator and repair men, engineers, typists, and doormen.

  This was back in the days just before World War I broke out in Europe; and fingerprinting was still a new fashion, looked upon as something of a mystery by the general public. Ray announced a series of lectures on the art. The whole force was invited, and expected, to attend.

  The apparatus was so little understood that Ray could make it look most complex and elaborate. He took along an impressive array of machinery. He began each lecture with a perhaps pardonable bit of deception. He held up a fragment of broken glass and announced that it was a part of the nugget-case, and carried the fingerprints of the thief. To this fable he added a pious belief that the theft was the act of a moment of thoughtlessness and the thief would doubtless be glad if the nuggets had been left where they lay. For that reason, he said the officers of the museum were willing to give the thief a chance to redeem the false step of a moment by returning the nuggets. For that reason, too, Ray promised to take no further steps for twenty-four hours. If, at the end of that time, the nuggets were not restored, he would go through the entire list of employees with a relentlessness that would doom the thief to public exposure and long imprisonment.

  To make his threat-promise more convincing, he then launched into a discussion and demonstration of how infallibly fingerprints betrayed those who wore them. He picked out a little group and said:

  “Here is a plain water glass. I will turn my back while one of you just picks up this glass and sets it down again. Then I will identify that person by selecting his or her fingerprints from the complete record.”

  Nowadays this would be accepted and expected by the merest child; but, in that day, all the spectators were awestruck, and one of them was greatly amused when Ray picked out a tittering stenographer as the glass-lifter.

  Ray exonerated her of guilt, but announced that he was going to spend a week, if necessary, taking the fingerprints of every employee without exception—unless the thief took advantage of the one day’s grace and sent in the nuggets. He asked the members of each group to describe what he had shown to other employees and thus spread the gospel of repentance before it was too late. He added the ominous warning that, even if the thief tried to escape giving the fingerprints voluntarily, it would be easy to get them anyway, since anything that anyone touched would preserve and deliver to his apparatus the telltale prints. Wearing gloves would conceal the fingerprints, but it would attract all the more attention.

  The very next morning a special delivery letter with a hand-printed address was delivered to the superintendent. Inside was a bit of paper on which the culprit had cautiously printed a promise that the nuggets would be returned by mail.

  That afternoon a tobacco can arrived with every nugget enclosed, each wrapped in a piece of newspaper.

  The next mail brought a large flat package containing the long-lost Sargent watercolor of the Cellini “Perseus.”

  The lettering of the address on both parcels was plainly from the same hand. On the flat package containing the Sargent picture the sender had conscientiously printed the words “Don’t bend—handle with great care.”

  There were fingerprints on the package, but Ray had promised not to subject the staff to fingerprinting if the loot were restored. Instead, he called the employees back in groups and made a simple demand:

  “I want each of you to print, not write, at the top of the paper given you, his name and address. Next, please print these sentences as I dictate them to you.”

  Then, while his operatives were carefully watching faces, expressions and unconscious mannerisms, he read off these disarming lines:

  “Take good care of your teeth.”

  “Don’t ride on the handle-bars.”

  “Bend and you won’t break.”

  “It’s great to be healthy.”

  The lines contained, of course, every one of the words lettered on the package, but Ray felt sure that even the thief would not notice this. Yet, to clinch the matter, when all the sentences had been printed, he dictated the line:

  “Don’t bend—handle with great care.”

  When every employee had done his stint, all the examples, together with the original wrappers, and the note, were turned over to the most famous handwriting expert of the day, Albert S. Osborn.

  It was easy for Osborn to identify the guilty printer. The man was called in; and his fingerprints, when taken, proved to be identical with those on the wrapper. A search of the shabby rooms where he kept his wife and two children disclosed a bottle of ink and four different penpoints, but no wrapping paper.

  He held out for two days before he confessed his guilt, though he could not explain why he had done what he did. Can anybody ever explain just why he did what he did?

  Since the Museum had recovered what it had lost, the thief was not prosecuted but merely dropped from the roll of employees.

  Since he had
won his success by a series of bold pretenses, Ray calls this case an example of the success of psychology, a most important technique in detective cases when all other measures fail.

  In another case of purloined art, the police were called in and worked hard for months without success. Ray merely dropped in, and hazarded a guess that was instantly acted upon and proved correct. It also confirmed Ray’s theories as to subtle differences between masculine and feminine methods and motives in committing crimes.

  The ancient and wealthy family of Daniel E. Sickles lived in a big suite in the Savoy Plaza Hotel. They had an art collection noble enough to include Gainsborough’s “Black Boy” valued at $80,000. During their absence from the hotel one summer the paintings were covered with linen as usual. On their return in the Fall the coverings were removed and two masterpieces were missing, one of them, “The Black Boy.” Both canvases had been cut out of their frames.

  The police were called; and decided at once that some thief, knowing the great value of the masterpieces, had made off with them and would try to sell them for at least a part of their immense value. So the police not only exhausted every method of tracing the thief, but issued warnings to every imaginable dealer, pawnbroker, fence, or other likely purchaser in this country and abroad. And they kept looking everywhere for months.

  Since Lloyds Limited had insured the paintings, they finally called in Ray Schindler. He went to the hotel and with him was Leonarde Keeler, inventor of the lie detector. They arrived at eleven in the morning.

  Ray examined the empty frames which had never been desecrated with any other canvas; and gave the edges a careful study. Then he said:

  “These canvases were slashed by a woman. A man would have taken a sharp knife and drawn it straight down each of the sides and straight across the top and bottom. This canvas was ripped off in little trembling zigzag gashes—an inch or two at a time. A woman did it.”