them, sat a white man and a white woman. They had been talking in low
tones, but I could catch whole sentences now and then, for they seemed
to be making no extraordinary effort at concealment.
"He was framing a sucker to get away with a whole front," I heard the
man say, "or with a poke or a souper, but instead he got dropped by a
flatty and was canned for a sleep."
"Two dips--pickpockets," whispered Craig. "Someone was trying to take
everything a victim had, or at least his pocketbook or watch, but
instead he was arrested by a detective and locked up over night."
"Good work," I laughed. "You are 'some' translator."
I looked at our neighbours with a certain amount of respect. Were they
framing up something themselves? At any rate I felt that I would rather
see them here and know what they were than to be jostled by them in a
street car. The sleek proprietor kept a careful eye on them and I knew
that a sort of unwritten law would prevent them from trying on anything
that would endanger their welcome in a joint none too savoury already.
Nevertheless I was quite interested in the bits of pickpocket argot
that floated across to us, expressions like "crossing the mit,"
"nipping a slang," a "mouthpiece," "making a holler" and innumerable
other choice bits as unintelligible to me as "Beowulf."
After a few minutes the woman got up and went out, leaving the man
still sitting at the table. Of course it was none of my business what
they were doing, I suppose, but I could not help being interested.
That diversion being ended, I joined Kennedy in his scrutiny of Harris
and his choice friend. Of course at our distance it was absolutely
impossible to gain any idea of what they were talking about, and indeed
our chief concern was not to attract any attention. Whatever it was,
they were very earnest about it and paid no attention to us.
The dancing had ceased and the two "artists" were entertaining the
select audience with some choice bits of ragtime. We could see Ike the
Dropper and Dr. Harris still talking.
Suddenly Kennedy nudged me. I looked up in time to see Dr. Harris reach
into his inside breast pocket again and quietly slip out a package much
like that which we had already seen him hand to Marie at the Futurist.
Ike took it, looked at it a moment with some satisfaction, then stuffed
it down carefully into the right-hand outside pocket of his coat.
"I wonder what that is that Harris seems to be passing out to them?"
mused Craig.
"Drugs, perhaps," I ventured offhand.
"Maybe. I'd like to know for certain."
Just then Harris and Ike rose and walked down on the other side of the
place toward the door. Kennedy turned his head so that even if they
should look in our direction they would not see his face. I did the
same. Fortunately neither seemed interested in the other occupants.
Harris having evidently fulfilled his mission, whether of delivering
the package or receiving news which Ike seemed to be pouring into his
ear, had but one thought, to escape from a place which was evidently
distasteful to him. At the door they paused for a moment and spoke with
the proprietor. He nodded reassuringly once or twice to Dr. Harris,
much to the relief, I thought, of that gentleman.
Kennedy was chafing under the restraint which kept him in the
background and prevented any of his wizardry of mechanical
eavesdropping. I fancied that his roving eye was considering various
means of utilizing his seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity if occasion
should arise.
At last Harris managed to shake hands good-bye and disappeared up the
steps to the sidewalk still followed by Ike.
Kennedy leaned over and looked the "dip" sitting alone back of us
squarely in the face.
"Would you like to make twenty-five dollars--just like that?" he asked
with a quick gesture that accorded very well with the slang.
The man looked at him very suspiciously, as if considering what kind of
new game this was.
"That was your gun moll who just went out, wasn't it?" pursued Kennedy
with assurance.
"Aw, come off. Whatyer givin' us?" responded the man half angrily.
"Don't stall. I know. I'm not one of the bulls, either. It's just a
plain proposition. Will you or won't you take twenty-five of easy
money?"
Kennedy's manner seemed to mystify him. For a moment he looked us over,
then seemed to decide that we were all right.
"How?" he asked in a harsh but not wholly ungracious whisper. "I'll tip
yer off if the boss is lookin'. He don't like no frame-ups in here."
"You saw Ike the Dropper go out with that man?"
"The guy with the glasses?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"The guy with the glasses gave Ike a little package which Ike put into
the right-hand outside pocket of his coat. Now it's worth twenty-five
beans to me to get that package--get me?"
"I gotyer. Slip me a five now and the other twenty if I get it."
Kennedy appeared to consider.
"I'm on the level," pursued the dip. "Me and the goil is in hard luck
with a mouthpiece who wants fifty bucks to beat the case for one of the
best tools we ever had in our mob that they got right to-day."
"From that I take it that one of your pals needs fifty dollars for a
lawyer to get him out of jail. Well, I'll take a chance. Bring the
package to me at--well, the Prince Henry cafe. I'll be there at seven
o'clock."
The pickpocket nodded, slid from his place and sidled out of the joint
without attracting any attention.
"What's the lay?" I asked.
"Oh, I just want that package, that's all. Come on, Walter. We might as
well go before any of these yellow girls speak to us and frame up
something on us."
The proprietor bowed as much as to say, "Come again and bring your
friends."
XI
THE TYPEWRITER CLUE
Ike was nowhere to be seen when we reached the street, but down the
block we caught sight of Dr. Harris on the next corner. Kennedy
hastened our pace until we were safely in his wake, then managed to
keep just a few paces behind him.
Instead of turning into the street where the Futurist was, Harris kept
on up Broadway. It was easy enough to follow him in the crowd now
without being perceived.
He turned into the street where the Little Montmartre was preparing for
a long evening of entertainment. We turned, and to cover ourselves got
into a conversation with a hack driver who seemed suddenly to have
sprung from nowhere with the cryptic whisper, "Drive you to the Ladies'
Club, gents?"
Out of the tail of his eye Kennedy watched Harris. Instead of turning
into the Montmartre and his office, he went past to a high-stooped
brownstone house, two doors away, climbed the steps and entered.
We sauntered down the street and looked quickly at the house. A brass
sign on the wall beside the door read, "Mme. Margot's Beauty Shop."
"I see," commented Kennedy. "You know women of the type who frequent
the Futurist and the Montmartre are always running to the hairdressing
and manicure parlours. They make themselves 'beautiful' under the
expert care of the various specialists and beauty doctors. Then, too,
they keep in touch that way with what is going on in the demi-monde.
That is their club, so to speak. It is part of the beauty shop's trade
to impart such information--at least of a beauty shop in this
neighbourhood."
I regarded the place curiously.
"Come, Walter, don't stare," nudged Kennedy. "Let's take a turn down to
the Prince Henry and wait. We can get a bite to eat, too."
I had hardly expected that the pickpocket would play fair, but
evidently the lure of the remaining twenty dollars was too strong. We
had scarcely finished our dinner when he came in.
"Here it is," he whispered. "The house man here at the Prince Henry
knows me. Slip me the twenty."
Kennedy leisurely tore the wrappings from the packet.
"I suppose you have already looked at this first and found that it
isn't worth anything to you compared to twenty dollars. Anyhow, you
kept your word. Hello--what is it?"
He had disclosed several small packets. Inside each, sealed, was a
peculiar glistening whitish powder.
"H'm," mused Kennedy, "another job for the chemist. Here's the
bankroll."
"Thanks," grinned the dip as he disappeared through the revolving door.
We had returned to the laboratory that night where Kennedy was
preparing to experiment on the white powder which he had secured in the
packet that came from Dr. Harris. The door opened and Clare Kendall
entered.
"I've been calling you up all over town," she said, "and couldn't find
you. I have something that will interest you, I think. You said you
wanted something written by Dr. Harris. Well, there it is."
She laid a sheet of typewriting on the laboratory table.
"How did you get it?" asked Kennedy in eager approbation.
"When I left you at the Futurist Tea Room to follow that woman Marie in
the cab, I had a good deal of trouble. I guess people thought I was
crazy, the way I was ordering that driver about, but he was so stupid
and he would get tangled up in the traffic on Fifth Avenue. Still, I
managed to hang on, principally because I had a notion already that she
was going to the Montmartre. Sure enough, she turned down that block,
but she didn't go into the hotel after all. She stopped and went into a
place two doors down--Mme. Margot's Beauty Parlour."
"Just where we finally saw Harris go," exclaimed Kennedy. "I beg your
pardon for interrupting."
"Of course I couldn't go in right after her, so I drove around the
corner. Then it occurred to me that it would be a good time to stop in
to see Dr. Harris--when he was out. You know my experience with the
fakers has made me pretty good at faking up ailments. Then, too, I knew
that it would be easy when he was not there. I said I was an old
patient and had an appointment and that I'd wait, although I knew those
were not his regular office hours. He has an alleged trained nurse
there all the time. She let me into his waiting-room on the second
floor in front--you remember the private dining-rooms are in back. I
waited in momentary fear that he WOULD come back. You see, I had a
scheme of my own. Well, I waited until at last the nurse had to leave
the office for a short time.
"That was my chance. I tiptoed over to his desk in the next room. On it
were a lot of letters. I looked over them but could find nothing that
seemed to be of interest. They were all letters from other people. But
they showed that he must have quite an extensive practice, and that he
is not over-scrupulous. I didn't want to take anything that would
excite suspicion unless I had to. Just then I heard someone coming down
the corridor from the elevator. I had just time to get back to a chair
in the waiting-room when the door opened and there was that Titian from
the office, you remember. She saw me without recognizing me, went in
and laid some papers on his desk. As soon as she was gone, I went in
again and looked them over. Here was one that she had copied for him."
Kennedy had been carefully scrutinizing the sheet of paper as she told
how she obtained it.
"It couldn't be better as far as our purposes are concerned," he
congratulated. "It seems to consist of some notes he had made and
wished to preserve about drugs."
I leaned over and read:
VERONAL.--Diethylmalonyl or diethylbarbituric acid. A hypnotic used
extensively. White, crystalline, odourless, slightly bitter. Best in
ten to fifteen grain cachets. Does not affect circulatory or
respiratory systems or temperature. Toxicity low: 135 gr. taken with no
serious result. Unreasonable use for insomnia, however, may lead to
death.
HEROIN.--Constant use of heroin has been known to lead to--
I looked inquiringly at Kennedy.
"Just some fragmentary notes which he had evidently been making. Rather
interesting in themselves as showing perhaps something of his practice,
but not necessarily incriminating."
While we were discussing the contents of the notes, Kennedy had laid
over the typewritten sheet the rules and graduated strip of glass which
he had used in examining the strange letter signed "An Outcast."
A moment later he pulled the letter itself from a drawer and laid the
two pieces of writing side by side, comparing them, going from one to
the other successively.
"People generally, who have not investigated the subject," he remarked
as he worked, "hold the opinion that the typewriter has no
individuality. Fortunately that is not true. The typewriting machine
does not always afford an effective protection to the criminal. On the
contrary, the typewriting may be a direct means of tracing a document
to its source and showing it to be what it really is. This is
especially true of typewritten anonymous letters. Without careful
investigation it is impossible to say what can be determined from the
examination of any particular piece of typewriting, but typewriting can
often be positively identified as being the work of a certain
particular typewriting machine and even the date of writing can
sometimes be found out."
He had been carefully counting something under the lens of a pocket
glass. "Even the number of threads to the inch in the ribbon, as shown
in the type impression, plainly seen and accurately measured by the
microscope or in an enlarged photograph, may show something about the
identity of a disputed writing."
He was pointing to a letter "r." Under the glass I noticed that there
was a break in the little curl at the top.
"Now if you find such a break in the same letter in another piece of
typewriting, what would you think?"
"That they were from the same machine," I replied.
"Not so fast," he cautioned. "True, it might raise a presumption that
it was from the same machine. But the laws of chance would be against
your enthusiasm, Walter."
"Of course," I admitted on second thought.
"It's just like the finger-print theory. There must be a sort of
summation of individual characteristics. Now here's a broken 'l' and
there is an 'a' that is twisted. Now, if the same defects are found in
another piece of writing, that makes the presumption all the stronger,
and when you have massed together a number of such characteristics it
raises the presumption to a mathematical certainty, does it not?"
I nodded and he went on. "The faces of many letters inevitably become
broken, worn, or battered. Not only does that tend to identify a
particular machine, but it is sometimes possible, if you have certain
admitted standard specimens of writing covering a long period, to tell
just when a disputed writing was made. There are two steps in such an
inquiry, the first the determination of the fact that a document was
written on a certain particular kind of machine and the second that it
was written on a certain individual machine of that make. I have here
specimens of the writing of all the leading machines. It is easy to
pick out the make used, say in the 'Outcast' letter. Moreover, as I
said when I first saw that letter, it is in the regular pica type. So
are they all, but as ninety-five per cent, use the pica style that in
itself proved nothing."
"What is that bit of ruled glass?" asked Clare, bending over the
letters in deep interest.
"In ordinary typewriting," replied Craig, "each letter occupies an
imaginary square, ten to the inch horizontally and six to the inch
vertically. Typewriting letters are in line both ways. This ruled glass
plate is an alinement test plate for detecting defects in alinement. I
have also here another glass plate in which the lines diverge each at a
very slightly different angle--a typewriting protractor for measuring
the slant of divergence of various letters that have become twisted, so
to speak.
"When it is in perfect alinement the letter occupies the middle of each
square and when out of alinement it may be in any of the four corners,
or either side of the middle position or at the top or bottom above or
below the middle. That, you see, makes nine positions in all--or eight
possible divergences from normal in this particular alone."
Clare had been using the protractor herself, quickly familiarizing
herself with it.
"Another possible divergence," went on Kennedy, "is the perpendicular
position of the letter in relation to the line. That is of great value
in individualizing a machine. It is very seldom that machines, even
when they are new, are perfect in this particular. It does not seem
much until you magnify it. Then anyone can see it, and it is a
characteristic that is fixed, continuous, and not much changed by
variations in speed or methods of writing.
"Here's another thing. Typewriter faces are not flat like printing
type, but are concaved to conform to the curve of the printing surface
of the roller. When they are properly adjusted all portions should
print uniformly. But when they are slightly out of position in any
direction the two curved surfaces of type and roller are not exactly
parallel and therefore don't come together with uniform pressure. The
result is a difference in intensity in different parts of the
impression."
It was fascinating to see Craig at work over such minute points which
we had never suspected in so common a thing as ordinary typewriting.
"Then you can identify these letters positively?" asked Clare.
"Positively," answered Craig. "If two machines of the same make were
perfect to begin with and in perfect condition--which is never found to
be the case when they are critically examined--the work from one would
be theoretically indistinguishable from that of another until actual
use had affected them differently. The work of any number of machines
begins inevitably to diverge as soon as they are used. Since there are
thousands of possible particulars in which differences may develop, it
very soon becomes possible to identify positively the work of a
particular typewriting machine."
"How about the operator?" I asked curiously.
"Different habits of touch, spacing, speed, arrangement, and
punctuation all may also tend to show that a particular piece of
writing was or was not done by one operator. In other words,
typewriting individuality in many cases is of the most positive and
convincing character and reaches a degree of certainty which may almost
be described as absolute proof. The identification of a typewritten
document in many cases is exactly parallel to the identification of an
individual who precisely answers a general description as to features,
complexion, size, and in addition matches a long detailed list of
scars, birthmarks, deformities, and individual peculiarities."
Together we three began an exhaustive examination of the letters, and
as Kennedy called off the various characteristics of each type on the
standard keyboard we checked them up. It did not take long to convince
us, nor would it have failed to convince the most sceptical, that both
had come from the same source and the same writer.
"You see," concluded Kennedy triumphantly, "we have advanced a long
step nearer the solution of at least one of the problems of this case."
Miss Kendall had evidently been thinking quickly and turning the matter
over in her mind.
"But," she spoke up quickly, "even that does not point to the same
person as the author--not the writer, but the author--of the three
pieces of writing."
"No indeed," agreed Craig. "There is much left to be done. As a matter
of fact, there might have been one author, or there might have been
two, although all the mechanical work was done by one person. But we
are at least sure that we have localized the source of the writing. We
know that it is from the Montmartre that the letter came. We know that
it is in some way that that place and some of the people who frequent
it are connected with the disappearance of Betty Blackwell."
"In other words," supplied Clare, "we are going to get at the truth
through that Titian-haired stenographer."
"Exactly."
Clare had risen to go.
"It quite takes my breath away to think that we are really making such
progress against the impregnable Montmartre. At various times my
investigators have been piecing together little bits of information
about that place. I shall have the whole record put together to-night.
I shall let you know about it the first thing in the morning."
The door had scarcely closed when Kennedy turned quickly to me and
remarked, "That girl has something on her mind. I wonder what it is?"
XII
THE "PORTRAIT PARLE"
What it was that Clare Kendall had on her mind, appeared the following
day.
"There's something I want to try," she volunteered, evidently unable to
repress it any longer. "I have a plan--or half a plan. Don't you think
it would be just the thing, under the circumstances, to ring up
District Attorney Carton, tell him what we have accomplished and take
him into our confidence? Perhaps he can suggest something. At any rate
we have all got to work together, for there is going to be a great
fight when they find out how far we have gone."
"Bully idea," agreed Craig.
Twenty minutes later we were seated in the District Attorney's office
in the Criminal Courts Building, pouring into his sympathetic ear the
story of our progress so far.
Carton seemed to be delighted, as Kennedy proceeded to outline the
case, at the fact that he and Miss Kendall had found it possible to
co-operate. His own experience in trying to get others to work with the
District Attorney's office, particularly the police, had been quite the
reverse.
"I wish to heaven you could get the right kind of evidence against the
Montmartre gang," he sighed. "It is a gang, too--a high-class gang. In
fact--well, it must be done. That place is a blot on the city. The
police never have really tried to get anything on it. Miss Kendall
never could, could you? I admit I never have. It seems to be understood
that it is practically impossible to prove anything against it. They
openly defy us. The thing can't go on. It demoralizes all our other
work. Just one good blow at the Montmartre and we could drive every one
of these vile crooks to cover." He brought his fist down with a thud on
the desk, swung around in his chair, and emphasized his words with his
forefinger.
"And yet, I know as well as I know that you are all in this room that
graft is being paid to the police and the politicians by that place and
in fact by all those places along there. If we are to do anything with
them, that must be proved. That is the first step and I'm glad the
whole thing hinges on the Blackwell case. People always sit up and take
notice when there is something personal involved, some human interest
which even the newspapers can see. That Montmartre crowd, whoever they
are, must be made to feel the strong arm of the law. That's what I am
in this office to do. Now, Kennedy, there must be some way to catch
those crooks with the goods."
"They aren't ordinary crooks, you know," ruminated Kennedy.
"I know they are not. But you and Miss Kendall and Jameson ought to be
able to think out a scheme."
"But you see, Mr. Carton," put in Clare, "this is a brand new
situation. Your gambling and vice and graft exposures have made all of
them so wary that they won't pass a bill from their right to their left
pockets for fear it is marked."
Carton laughed.
"Well, you are a brand new combination against them. Let me see; you
want suggestions. Why don't you use the detectaphone--get our own
little Black Book?"
Kennedy shook his head.
"The detectaphone is all right, as Dorgan knows. It might work again.
But I don't think I'll take any chances. No, these grafters wouldn't
say 'Thank you' in an open boat in mid-ocean, for fear of wireless,
now. They've been educated up to a lot of things lately. No, it must be
something new. What do you know about graft up there?"
"The people who are running those places in the fifties are making
barrels of money," summarized Carton quickly. "No one ever interferes
with them, either. I know from reliable sources, too, that the police
are 'getting theirs.' But although I know it I can't prove it; I can't
even tell who is getting it. But once a week a collector for the police
calls around in that district and shakes them all down. By Jove, to-day
is the day. The trouble with it all is that they have made the thing so
underground that no one but the principals know anything about it--not
even the agents. I guess you are right about the detectaphone."
"To-day's the day, is it?" mused Craig.
"So I understand."