Night after night, Severance and his assistants, Russell and Parsells, toiled at the files in such dim light as they dared to employ: the faint radiance of three flashlights held downward lest the night watchman should be drawn to them by any glow in the windows.
The watchman who patrolled the grounds at regular intervals was named Henry Kohler.
Ray Schindler is a sort of night watchman, too; and he patrols his battle lines incessantly. And so one night, as luck would have it, he went with Severance, Russell and Parsells to see how well they were getting along.
The four were squatting on the floor winnowing the files in little patches of light, and finding especially interesting material in a batch of letters. Abruptly they were half blinded by a big flashlight in their faces, and stunned by a thunderous voice that roared:
“What goes on here? Get up!”
Perhaps it was Charlie Severance who stammered the embarrassing introduction:
“Mr. K-K-Kohler, this is M-M-Mr. Schind-l-l-ler. Mr. Schindler this is Mr. Kohler, the night watchman!”
Anyway, Ray said something to this effect:
“Mr. Kohler, you and I and all of us are employed by the M & P Railway. You are a kind of detective, and so are we. We were sent here by the Rollins people, who really own the railroad. You and we are all in this together.”
“Baloney!” said Mr. Kohler.
Ray made a more personal approach:
“Now look here, Kohler, I suppose you’re a married man with a family. If you are, you’d better realize that your real boss is Arthur J. Rollins, who controls most of the stock. It’s not controlled by the officials he hires to hire you.”
The name of Rollins elicited a grunt of recognition if not of awe from Kohler, and Ray went on:
“I have a letter from Arthur J. Rollins himself giving me full authority to do what I’m doing now or was doing till you homed in. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you the letter. It’s right here in my left-hand pocket.
“You’re a brave and conscientious man and you know your job,” Ray went on. “If you do as I say, I’ll see that you get a raise in pay, and I’ll speak to Mr. Rollins personally about how brave and alert you’ve been. A word from me will go a long way with Mr. Rollins. If you don’t believe it, a look at his letter will open your eyes.”
Cautiously Kohler circled Ray, keeping his eyes on the other three men. He took the letter from Ray’s pocket, backed off, got behind a desk, opened it and read it with half an eye and half a belief.
“How would I know it isn’t a forgery?” said Kohler. “Why didn’t your Mr. Rollins give you a letter to me?”
In growing desperation Ray thought up a new way out:
“Look, Kohler, you can easily learn if we’re on the level. You can call Mr. Rollins on the telephone. I can give you his number.”
“That’s an idea. There’s a phone right here on the desk.”
Rollins did not relish being pulled out of bed at that ungodly hour, but when Ray explained to him the purpose of the call, he readily reassured Kohler, which seemed to please him very much. His full cooperation was obtained from that time on, making Ray’s job much easier.
When at long last everything was in readiness and the documentation complete, the guilty officials were called together and confronted with the proof that their long reign of corruption was over.
It seemed undesirable in many ways to expose the railway’s finances to the public eye by bringing the dozen prominent bloodsuckers to trial. They were permitted to resign and were glad of the privilege. The only announcement was that a general reorganization had been made.
When Ray wound up his work for the Rollins Syndicate, he was able to turn over to the company sixteen miles of excellent and solidly ballasted railroad. The firm of Swinnerton and Reed came to an end, with an equal division of their profits. Reed’s share was $77,000, which he tinned over to the Rollins Syndicate, which had backed him. The whole investigation had cost the Rollins Syndicate $52,000 and their net profit was about $25,000 in addition to a well-built spur of track and a thorough housecleaning.
It was high time that the purge was made; for the company had already been robbed of more than two million dollars, of which the high-handed marauders made restitution of less than one million. But had it not been for that sharp-scented accountant and the labors of Schindler, the company would not have had that and might still be staggering along, bleeding slowly to death. Corporations may not have souls, but they have systems whose health is vitally important to the public and to countless needy stockholders.
18.
VANISHED WEALTH
One of the greatest mistakes that can be made—and the wisest people seem to be the most apt to make it—is to look for a certain logic in human conduct, to expect criminals to act according to a certain criminal logic; to expect some sort of reasonableness in human nature.
Why people do what they do is an everlasting mystery; and in no field more baffling than where the problem is, Why do people do what they do with money?—and for money?
Here is a true story in which the principal character was saved from a life of crime by stealing ten thousand dollars at the first try and without being even suspected. The story also includes the fantastic paradox of a bank teller who was spending far more than he earned—and on an actress of all people. And yet he was honest!
It is a short story that never got any publicity.
One day Ray was called over to a small city in New Jersey. A Bank President told him that ten thousand dollars had suddenly disappeared. It might have evaporated so far as any explanation was available; but it was in bills, and paper is not volatile, except metaphorically.
The wealth in question was part of the bank’s reserve. It was in one of twenty or more canvas bags each containing ten thousand dollars in bills, and so labelled. These bags were piled up in the vault.
On a certain morning when the Cashier went in to take out the day’s supply of change and bills, he gasped to observe a gap in the row of money bags. When Ray Schindler arrived he was told that only the President, the Cashier, and the Paying Teller had access to the vault. Each averred that when the vault was closed the night before the row had been complete.
The bank was an isolated building, two stories high in the front, and three stories high in the rear. In the lowest of the three floors lived the Janitress, a widow with a seventeen-year-old son.
The President told Ray that he wanted above all things to avoid publicity, and promised full cooperation. Ray brought in two of his men and they searched the building from top to bottom against the chance that the thief, having removed the bag from the vault, had concealed it elsewhere till he could find a safe occasion for carrying it off. There was not a trace of it.
Ray questioned all the employees thoroughly and felt that two of them might well be kept under observation: the Paying Teller, and the Bookkeeper. The Bookkeeper was shifty-eyed and sharp of speech, unpopular and crusty to his fellow employees, subservient to the President. The man who tailed him found him a tame and most monotonous person. His only recreation seemed to be endless games of Kelly pool in a highly respectable billiard parlor.
The Paying Teller was in full contrast, the son of well-to-do parents, a college graduate, a bachelor and a bon vivant. On the third day he dragged his “tail” to New York, where he went to a hotel and spent an hour in an upper room, whence he emerged with a very handsome young woman who proved to be a successful Actress.
In those Prohibition days, speakeasies were illegal, and this couple visited one for cocktails, then dined at an expensive restaurant, after which the Paying Teller escorted his companion to a stage door; left her there, went to the box office, saw the performance, returned to the stage door and took the actress out to supper.
The tailer had the dubious pleasure of watching this performance repeated two or three times a week; but he was unable to get close enough to see if any of the vanished bills were used.
It was
, however, easy to compute that each of these outings cost the Paying Teller many dollars. At the rate of three dinners a week for a month, he was spending—and on the Actress!—about $240 a month out of a monthly salary of $175.
One Sunday he rented a handsome automobile and took his charmer for a long drive up into Westchester County. He ended the day with a banquet including champagne.
The champagne induced Ray to report to the Bank President the costly goings-on of his Paying Teller. But the President hated to take any positive steps, and the Paying Teller’s outings continued.
On one occasion, while Ray was in the Bank President’s office, he noted that the Janitress was inside the vault mopping it up. Her access to all that treasure was news to Ray, and he suggested that she be questioned. The President protested. The Paying Teller was so plainly the culprit. Ray insisted. He called on the Janitress in her basement quarters, and questioned her as to any hearsay or gossip that might have come her way.
She told him that most people disliked the Bookkeeper, especially her boy, who had said he wouldn’t trust the man an inch. When Ray asked how the boy came to know the Bookkeeper, the janitress said that her son often carried the heavy buckets for his mother’s scrubbery.
When Ray asked where he might see the boy, he was referred to a school. Ray called on the lad, there, and found him in a state of nerves. But when Ray asked him if he had ever been in the bank vault, instead of showing any of the usual signs of guilt, he went into a rapture of relief, and blurted out the fact that he had taken the ten thousand dollars, and was overjoyed to get the confession off his chest.
On the afternoon of the robbery, he had gone to the vault to replace a bucket of dirty water with a clean one. He noted the long row of money bags. He was no psychiatrist and could not even imagine why or whence the impulse had come to him; but he had been mystically impelled to dump one of the bags into the bucket of dirty water. He had not read the label, but had supposed that the contents were pennies, nickels or small bills.
He carried his loot to the basement, and studied it. He nearly fainted when he saw that he was the terrified possessor of ten thousand dollars. He had no ambition to be a pirate, and he was petrified with fright by the astounding success of his first thievery.
The thought of carrying the money back upstairs and returning with a confession was too appalling for his immature brain to conceive. He stuffed the bag in a closet and took a bucket of clean water upstairs without saying a word to his mother or anybody else.
That night, while his mother was away, he dug a hole in the back yard and buried the money—all but one hundred dollars which he was unable to resist lifting. He went to another bank and changed the bills into small paper without exciting suspicion; for no one in town outside the bank employees had yet heard of the loss.
He tucked ninety-eight dollars into the pages of a book in his room at school and kept two dollars for a spree. The investigation had been going on for three weeks by this time and he had still hardly broken into that two dollar treasure trove.
Ray Schindler is convinced that if the stolen sack had been filled with pennies, the boy might have been encouraged by his easy wealth to devote his life to thievery. But too much success is as discouraging to some souls as too little. This boy, aghast on the brink of crime, fell back from the abyss and hailed the detective as a savior.
He went with Ray to his mother’s back yard and the two of them unearthed the vanished fortune. Then they restored to the bank president his ten thousand dollars minus the boy’s three weeks of high living, which had aggregated about forty-six cents.
There still remained the mystery of the Paying Teller’s access to all the money he was wasting on wine and woman. Instead of tailing him farther, the President resolved to confront him with the evidences of his spendthrift ways. He called the Paying Teller into his office and turned him over to Ray Schindler, who startled the man by giving him an exact account of his doings on his excursions for the last three weeks. The Paying Teller was dumbfounded at first, then he began to smile:
“My God, what a case I was building up against myself!”
The President in an agony of affectionate anxiety pleaded:
“But where did you get all the money?”
Here again the solution of a great mystery was one that no self-respecting or reader-respected author would stoop to using. The Paying Teller’s explanation was disgustingly simple:
“My father’s only sister died and left me about three thousand dollars in cash. Just before the money was paid over to me, I met this actress, fell in love with her and became engaged to her. When I came into that money, I felt that I could afford to spend a little on my courtship, especially as my fiancee is making good money, too, since she is playing in a success. The date of our marriage depends somewhat on the length of the run of the play.”
Could anything be more disappointing? It is disgracefully respectable. When ten thousand dollars vanish in a mist, and a Paying Teller is discovered to be squandering money on an Actress, everybody concerned has a right to expect something better than the fact that a scrublady’s son carried it away in a pail of dirty water but was afraid to spend it; and that the Paying Teller, instead of embezzling the money, inherited it from a doting aunt and spent it on his fiancée.
This case has value chiefly as an example of the unexpectedness that a detective can expect, and the importance of questioning everybody, and everything.
19.
A RAID ON FAIRYLAND
Things that were once more practiced than preached against are now more spoken of than practiced. The once-unmentionable is now a favorite topic of conversation and publication.
A century ago even trousers were called “unmentionables.” If the legs inside them had to be alluded to, they were rendered a little less shocking by being called “limbs” or “nether members.”
People suffered and perished in multitudes from certain diseases that were never alluded to in polite circles, however prevalent there. Now, the awful words are printed everywhere; heard from pulpits and discussed gravely and without snickers by nice adolescents.
There is another ancient curse that is now quite frankly discussed. Whether it is a vice or a disease, or both, homosexuality has always been one of the concomitants of civilization as well as of barbarism. It is denounced in the Bible. It was a raging plague during the Holy Crusades. It is mentioned in the court records of the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachusetts. It is found in the court martial reports of our Revolutionary forefathers and in the army and navy files ever since.
Of late it has found wide treatment in literature. Proust and Gide have given it the highest stylistic treatment, and so have a number of English and American novelists. It pops up on the stage, usually but not always as a signal for laughter. The cult of Oscar Wilde gave it perhaps its first flare of general publicity, and his own cruel fate, along with his undeniable ability, gave it such a tragic aura that in certain circles it is taken as almost a sign and a proof of genius, rather than degeneracy.
From ancient Grecian days on down, it has been a most useful weapon of blackmail. Many a man would carry his head almost proudly after being compromised by a woman, but would commit suicide to escape exposure if involved with a man. And that form of blackmail is, of course, the easiest possible trap to set and spring for the innocent as well as the guilty.
But, however it may be regarded, it is “a condition not a theory,” and a source of incessant problems. Americans touring the lower levels of Paris society often visit gathering places, largely supported by tourist curiosity, where homosexuals convene. They could easily be found in America and at times have been quite openly permitted.
Such assemblies are naturally avoided by normal men; and, now and then, some place of popular resort has been ruined for normal patronage by an invasion of abnormal congregations.
This fact brought Ray Schindler his most peculiar commission; and he had to solve it in an extra-legal way. He could
not follow his usual procedure of finding out who committed what crime. And homosexual practice, in spite of the protests of many psychiatrists, is legally a crime in most states. But merely being, or seeming to be, a homosexual is not a crime. And that was what made Ray Schindler’s problem a problem indeed.
The time was during World War II, just before women invaded the saloons with such a vengeance. The foot on the bar-rail is now likely to have a high heel for a better grip; and the rear ends perched on the high stools are more apt to be female than male.
World War II brought about another strange phenomenon. The army and navy had long refused enlistment to men of known homosexuality; but when World War II set the draftboards to sifting the whole population in order to secure twelve million recruits, the number of those rejected for questionable traits was great enough to turn out an army of respectable size if not of respectable quality.
Like other sects, the homosexuals enjoy congenial companionship and are apt to congregate. And so it was that the famous barroom at the—let us call it the Hotel Taverne was gradually taken over by an elfin host to such an extent that the heterosexual males were crowded out and became conspicuous by their absence. Mere presence in that bar was damaging to one’s reputation.
Pretty boys and older men thronged the place, and the bar was losing money as well as prestige. The police could not be called in; for none of the curious customers misbehaved himself in public.
In desperation, the proprietor called in Ray Schindler and told his sad story. He was watching his income dwindle; and his hotel was acquiring a name that would soon drive away all but the most depraved. He begged Ray to cleanse the place, but he had to move with extreme caution since he had no legal weapon to invoke, and a misstep might involve the hotel in ruinous publicity and libel suits.
The crowded hour was between five and six, when the brokers, bankers, lawyers, and merchants had stopped in on the way home for cocktails and highballs.
The Complete Detective Page 26
