The Ear in the Wall

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THE EAR IN THE WALL

BY

ARTHUR B. REEVE

FRONTISPIECE BY WILL FOSTER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I THE VANISHER

II THE BLACK BOOK

III THE SAFE ROBBERY

IV THE ANONYMOUS LETTER

V THE SUFFRAGETTE SECRETARY

VI THE WOMAN DETECTIVE

VII THE GANG LEADER

VIII THE SHYSTER LAWYER

IX THE JURY FIXER

X THE AFTERNOON DANCE

XI THE TYPEWRITER CLUE

XII THE "PORTRAIT PARLE"

XIII THE CONVICTION

XIV THE BEAUTY PARLOUR

XV THE PHANTOM CIRCUIT

XVI THE SANITARIUM

XVII THE SOCIETY SCANDAL

XVIII THE WALL STREET WOLF

XIX THE ESCAPE

XX THE METRIC PHOTOGRAPH

XXI THE MORGUE

XXII THE CANARD

XXIII THE CONFESSION

XXIV THE DEBACLE OF DORGAN

XXV THE BLOOD CRYSTALS

XXVI THE WHITE SLAVE

XXVII THE ELECTION NIGHT

I

THE VANISHER

"Hello, Jameson, is Kennedy in?"

I glanced up from the evening papers to encounter the square-
jawed, alert face of District Attorney Carton in the doorway of
our apartment.

"How do you do, Judge?" I exclaimed. "No, but I expect him any
second now. Won't you sit down?"

The District Attorney dropped, rather wearily I thought, into a
chair and looked at his watch.

I had made Carton's acquaintance some years before as a cub
reporter on the Star while he was a judge of an inferior court.
Our acquaintance had grown through several political campaigns in
which I had had assignments that brought me into contact with him.
More recently some special writing had led me across his trail
again in telling the story of his clean-up of graft in the city.
At present his weariness was easily accounted for. He was in the
midst of the fight of his life for re-election against the so-
called "System," headed by Boss Dorgan, in which he had gone far
in exposing evils that ranged all the way from vice and the drug
traffic to bald election frauds.

"I expect a Mrs. Blackwell here in a few minutes," he remarked,
glancing again at his watch. His eye caught the headline of the
news story I had been reading and he added quickly, "What do the
boys on the Star think of that Blackwell case, anyhow?"

It was, I may say, a case deeply shrouded in mystery--the
disappearance without warning of a beautiful young girl, Betty
Blackwell, barely eighteen. Her family, the police, and now the
District Attorney had sought to solve it in vain. Some had thought
it a kidnaping, others a suicide, and others had even hinted at
murder. All sorts of theories had been advanced without in the
least changing the original dominant note of mystery. Photographs
of the young woman had been published broadcast, I knew, without
eliciting a word in reply. Young men whom she had known and girls
with whom she had been intimate had been questioned without so
much as a clue being obtained. Reports that she had been seen had
come in from all over the country, as they always do in such
cases. All had been investigated and had turned out to be based on
nothing more than imagination. The mystery remained unsolved.

"Well," I replied, "of course there's a lot of talk now in the
papers about aphasia and amnesia and all that stuff. But, you
know, we reporters are a sceptical lot. We have to be shown. I
can't say we put much faith in THAT."

"But what is your explanation? You fellows always have an opinion.
Sometimes I think the newspapermen are our best detectives."

"I can't say that we have any opinion in this case--yet," I
returned frankly. "When a girl just simply disappears on Fifth
Avenue and there isn't even the hint of a clue as to any place she
went or how, well--oh, there's Kennedy now. Put it up to him."

"We were just talking of that Betty Blackwell disappearance case,"
resumed Carton, when the greetings were over. "What do you think
of it?"

"Think of it?" repeated Kennedy promptly with a keen glance at the
District Attorney; "why, Judge, I think of it the same as you
evidently do. If you didn't think it was a case that was in some
way connected with your vice and graft investigation, you wouldn't
be here. And if I didn't feel that it promised surprising results,
aside from the interest I always have naturally in solving such
mysteries, I wouldn't be ready to take up the offer which you came
here to make."

"You're a wizard, Kennedy," laughed Carton, though it was easily
seen that he was both pleased and relieved to think that he had
enlisted Craig's services so easily.

"Not much of a wizard. In the first place, I know the fight you're
making. Also, I know that you wouldn't go to the police in the
present state of armed truce between your office and Headquarters.
You want someone outside. Well, I'm more than willing to be that
person. The whole thing, in its larger aspects, interests me.
Betty Blackwell in particular, arouses my sympathies. That's all."

"Exactly, Kennedy. This fight I'm in is going to be the fight of
my life. Just now, in addition to everything else, people are
looking to me to find Betty Blackwell. Her mother was in to see me
today; there isn't much that she could add to what has already
been said. Betty was a most attractive girl. The family is an
excellent one, but in reduced circumstances. She had been used to
a great deal as a child, but now, since the death of her father,
she has had to go to work--and you know what that means to a girl
like that."

Carton laid down a new photograph which the newspapers had not
printed yet. Betty Blackwell was slender, petite, chic. Her dark
hair was carefully groomed, and there was an air with which she
wore her clothes and carried herself, even in a portrait, which
showed that she was no ordinary girl.

Her soft brown eyes had that magnetic look which is dangerous to
their owner if she does not know how to control it, eyes that
arrested one's gaze, invited notice. Even the lens must have felt
the spell. It had caught, also, the soft richness of the skin of
her oval face and full throat and neck. Indeed one could not help
remarking that she was really the girl to grace a fortune. Only a
turn of the hand of that fickle goddess had prevented her from
doing so.

I had picked up one of the evening papers and was looking at the
newspaper half-tone which more than failed to do justice to her.
Just then my eye happened on an item which I had been about to
discuss with Carton when Kennedy entered.

"As a scientist, does the amnesia theory appeal to you, Craig?" I
asked. "Now, here is an explanation by one of the special writers,
headed, 'Personalities Lost Through Amnesia.' Listen."

The article was brief:

Mysterious disappearances, such as that of Betty Blackwell, have
alarmed the public and baffled the police before this--
disappearances that have in their suddenness, apparent lack of
purpose, and inexplicability much in common with her case. Leaving
out of account the class of disappearances for their own
convenience--embezzlers, blackmailers, and so forth--there is
still a large number of recorded cases where the subjects have
dropped out of sight without apparent cause or reason and have
left behind them untarnished reputations and solvent back
accounts. Of these, a small percentage are found to have met with
violence; others have been victims of suicidal mania, and sooner
or later a clue has come to light which has established the fact.
The dead are often easier to find than the living.

Of the remaining small proportion, there are on record, however, a
number of carefully authenticated cases where the subject has been
the victim of a sudden and complete loss of memory.

This dislocation of memory is a variety of aphasia known as
amnesia, and when the memory is recurrently lost and restored, we
have alternating personality. The Society for Psychical Research
and many eminent psychologists, among them the late William James,
Dr. Weir Mitchell, Dr. Hodgson of Boston, and Dr. A. E. Osborn of
San Francisco, have reported many cases of alternating
personality.

Studious efforts are being made to understand and to explain the
strange type of mental phenomena exhibited in these cases, but as
yet no one has given a clear and comprehensive explanation of
them. Such cases are by no means always connected with
disappearances, and exhaustive studies have been made of types of
alternating personality that have from first to last been
carefully watched by scientists of the first rank.

The variety known as the ambulatory type, where the patient
suddenly loses all knowledge of his own identity and of the past
and takes himself off, leaving no trace or clue, is the variety
which the present case of Miss Blackwell seems to suggest.

There followed a number of most interesting cases and an elaborate
argument by the writer to show that Betty Blackwell was a victim
of this psychological aberration, that she was, in other words, "a
vanisher."

I laid down the paper with a questioning look at Kennedy.

"As a scientist," he replied deliberately, "the theory, of course,
does appeal to me, especially in the ingenious way in which that
writer applied it. However, as a detective"--he shook his head
slowly--"I must deal with facts--not speculations. It leaves much
to be explained, to say the least,"

Just then the door buzzer sounded and Carton himself sprang to
answer it.

"That's Mrs. Blackwell now--her mother. I told her that I was
going to take the case to you, Kennedy, and took the liberty of
asking her to come up here to meet you. Good-afternoon, Mrs.
Blackwell. Let me introduce Professor Kennedy and Mr. Jameson, of
whom I spoke to you."

She bowed and murmured a tremulous greeting. Kennedy placed a
chair for her and she thanked him.

Mrs. Blackwell was a slender little woman in black, well past
middle age. Her face and dress spoke of years of economy, even of
privation, but her manner was plainly that of a woman of gentle
breeding and former luxury. She was precisely of the type of
decayed gentlewoman that one meets often in the city, especially
at some of the middle-class boarding-houses.

Deeply as the disappearance of her daughter had affected her, Mrs.
Blackwell was facing it bravely. That was her nature. One could
imagine that only when Betty was actually found would this plucky
little woman collapse. Instinctively, one felt that she claimed
his assistance in the unequal fight she was waging against the
complexities of modern life for which she had been so ill
prepared.

"I do hope you will be able to find my daughter," she began,
controlling her voice with an effort. "Mr. Carton has been so
kind, more than kind, I am sure, in getting your aid. The police
seem to be able to do nothing. They make out reports, put me off,
tell me they are making progress--but they don't find Betty."

There was a tragic pathos in the way she said it.

"Betty was such a good girl, too," she went on, her emotions
rising. "Oh, I was so proud of her when she got her position down
in Wall Street, with the broker, Mr. Langhorne."

"Tell Mr. Kennedy just what you told me of her disappearance," put
in Carton.

Again Mrs. Blackwell controlled her feelings. "I don't know much
about it," she faltered, "but last Saturday, when she left the
office early, she said she was going to do some shopping on Fifth
Avenue. I know she went there, did shop a bit, then walked on the
Avenue several blocks. But after that there is no trace of her."

"You have heard nothing, have no idea where she might have gone--
even for a time?" queried Kennedy.

He asked it with a keen look at the face of Mrs. Blackwell. I
recalled one case where a girl had disappeared in which Kennedy
had always asserted that if the family had been perfectly frank at
the start much more might have been accomplished in unravelling
the mystery.

There was evident sincerity in Mrs. Blackwell as she replied
quickly, "Absolutely none. Another girl from the office was with
her part of the time, then left her to take the subway. We don't
live far uptown. It wouldn't have taken Betty long to get home,
even if she had walked, after that, through a crowded street,
too."

"Of course, she may have met a friend, may have gone somewhere
with the friend," put in Kennedy, as if trying out the remark to
see what effect it might have.

"Where could she go?" asked Mrs. Blackwell in naive surprise,
looking at him with a counterpart of the eyes we had seen in the
picture. "I hope you don't think that Betty---"

The little widow was on the verge of tears again at the mere hint
that her daughter might have had friends that were not all,
perhaps, that they should be.

Carton came to the rescue. "Miss Blackwell," he interposed, "was a
very attractive girl, very. She had hosts of admirers, as every
attractive girl must have. Most of them, all of them, as far as
Mrs. Blackwell knows and I have been able to find out, were young
men at the office where she worked, or friends of that sort--not
the ordinary clerk, but of the rising, younger, self-made
generation. Still, they don't seem to have interested her
particularly as far as I have been able to discover. She merely
liked them. There is absolutely nothing known to point to the fact
that she was any different from thousands of girls in that
respect. She was vivacious, full of fun and life, a girl any
fellow would have been more than proud to take to a dance. She was
ambitious, I suppose, but nothing more."

"Betty was not a bad girl," asserted Mrs. Blackwell vehemently.
"She was a good girl. I don't believe there was much, in fact
anything important, on which she did not make me her confidante.
Yes, she was ambitious. So am I. I have always hoped that Betty
would bring our family--her younger sister--back to the station
where we were before the panic wiped out our fortune and killed my
husband. That is all."

"Yes," added Carton, "nothing at all is known that would make one
think that she was what young men call a 'good fellow' with them."

Kennedy looked up, but said nothing. I thought I could read the
unspoken word on his lips, as he glanced from Carton to Mrs.
Blackwell, "known."

She had risen and was facing us.

"Is there no one in all this great city," appealed the distracted
little woman with outstretched arms, "who can find my daughter? Is
it possible that a girl can disappear in broad daylight in the
streets and never be heard of again? Oh, won't you find her? Tell
me she is safe--that she is still the little girl I---"

Her voice failed and she was crying softly in her lace
handkerchief. It was touching and I saw that Kennedy was deeply
moved, although at once to his practical mind the thought must
have occurred that nothing was to be gained by further questions
of Mrs. Blackwell.

"Believe me, Mrs. Blackwell," he said in a low tone, taking her
hand, "I will do all that is in my power to find her."

"Thank you," murmured the mother, overcome.

A moment later, however, she had recovered her composure to some
degree and rose to go. There was a flattering look of relief on
her face which in itself must have been ample reward to Craig, a
retainer worth more to him in a case like this than money.

"I'm going back to my office," remarked Carton. "If I learn
anything, I shall let you know."

The District Attorney went out with Mrs. Blackwell. Busy as he
was, he had time to turn aside to help this bereaved woman, and I
admired him for it.

"Do you think it is one of those cases like some that Carton has
uncovered on the East Side and among girls newly arrived in the
city?" I asked Craig when the door was shut.

"Can't say," he returned, in an abstracted study.

"It's awful if it is," I pursued. "And if it is, I suppose all
that will result from it will be a momentary thrill of the
newspaper-readers, and then they will fall back on the old saying
that after all it is only a result of human nature that such
things happen--they always have happened and always will--that old
line of talk."

"That sort of thing is NOT a result of human nature," returned
Kennedy earnestly. "It's a System. I mean to say that if it should
turn out to be connected with the vice investigations of Carton,
and not a case of aphasia, such a disappearance you would find to
be due to the persistent, cunning, and unprincipled exploitation
of young girls.

"No, Walter, it is not that women are weak or that men are
inherently vicious. That doesn't account for a case like this.
Then, too, some mawkish people to-day are fond of putting the
whole evil on low wages as a cause. It isn't that--alone. It isn't
even lack of education or of moral training. Human nature is not
so bad in the mass as some good people think. No, don't you, as a
reporter, see it? It is big business, in its way, that Carton is
fighting--big business in the commercialized ruin of girls, such,
perhaps, as Betty Blackwell--a vicious system that enmeshes even
those who are its tools. I'm glad if I can have a chance to help
smash it.

"Now, I'll tell you what I want you to do, just so that we can
start this thing with a clear understanding of what it amounts to.
I want you to look up just what the situation is. I know there is
an army of 'vanishers' in New York. I want to know something about
them in the mass. Can't you dig up something from your Star
connections?"

Kennedy had some matters concerning other cases to clear up before
he felt free to devote his whole time to this. As there was
nothing we could do immediately, I spent some time getting at the
facts he wanted. Indeed, it did not take me long to discover that
the disappearance of Betty Blackwell, in spite of the prominence
it had been given, was by no means an isolated case. I found that
the Star alone had chronicled scores of such disappearances during
the past few months, cases of girls who had simply been swallowed
up in the big city. They were the daughters of neither the rich
nor of the poor, most of them, but girls rather in ordinary
circumstances.

Even the police records showed upward of a thousand missing young
girls, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-one years and I knew
that the police lists scarcely approximated the total number of
missing persons in the great city, especially in those cases where
a hesitancy on the part of parents and relatives often concealed
the loss from public records.

I came away with the impression that there were literally hundreds
of cases every bit as baffling as that of Betty Blackwell, of
young girls who had left absolutely no trace behind, who had made
no preparations for departure and of whom few had been heard from
since they disappeared. Many from homes of refinement and even
high financial standing had disappeared, leaving no clues behind.
It was not alone the daughters of the poor that were affected--it
was all society.

Many reasons, I found, had been assigned for the disappearances. I
knew that there must be many causes at work, that no one cause
could be responsible for all or perhaps a majority of the cases.
There were suicides and murders and elopements, family troubles,
poverty, desire for freedom and adventure; innumerable complex
causes, even down to kidnapping.

The question was, however, which of these causes had been in
operation in the case of Betty Blackwell? Where had she gone?
Where had this whole army of vanishers disappeared? Were these
disappearances merely accidents--or was there an epidemic of
amnesia? I could bring myself to no such conclusions, but was
forced to answer my own queries in lieu of an answer from Kennedy,
by propounding another. Was there an organized band?

And, after I had tried to reason it all out, I still found myself
back at the original question, as I rejoined Kennedy at the
laboratory, "Where had they all--where had Betty Blackwell gone?"

II

THE BLACK BOOK

I had scarcely finished pouring out my suspicions to Kennedy when
the telephone rang.

It was Carton on the wire, in a state of unsuppressed excitement.
Kennedy answered the call himself, but the conversation was brief
and, to me, unenlightening, until he hung up the receiver.

"Dorgan--the Boss," he exclaimed, "has just found a detectaphone
in his private dining-room at Gastron's."

At once I saw the importance of the news and for the moment it
obscured even the case of Betty Blackwell.

Dorgan was the political boss of the city at that time, apparently
entrenched, with an organization that seemed impregnable. I knew
him as a big, bullnecked fellow, taciturn to the point of
surliness, owing his influence to his ability to "deliver the
goods" in the shape of graft of all sorts, the archenemy of
Carton, a type of politician who now is rapidly passing.

"Carton wants to see us immediately at his office," added Craig,
jamming his hat on his head. "Come on."

Without waiting for further comment or answer from me, Kennedy,
caught by the infectious excitement of Carton's message, dashed
from our apartment and a few minutes later we were whirling
downtown on the subway.

"You know, I suppose," he whispered rather hoarsely above the
rumble and roar of the train, but so as not to be overheard, "that
Dorgan always has kept a suite of rooms at Gastron's, on Fifth
Avenue, for dinners and conferences."

I nodded. Some of the things that must have gone on in the secret
suite in the fashionable restaurant I knew would make interesting
reading, if the walls had ears.

"Apparently he must have found out about the eavesdropping in time
and nipped it," pursued Kennedy.

"What do you mean?" I asked, for I had not been able to gather
much from the one-sided conversation over the telephone, and the
lightning change from the case of Betty Blackwell to this had left
me somewhat bewildered. "What has he done?"

"Smashed the transmitter of the machine," replied Kennedy tersely.
"Cut the wires."

"Where did it lead?" I asked. "How do you know?"

Kennedy shook his head. Either he did not know, yet, or he felt
that the subway was no place in which to continue the conversation
beyond the mere skeleton that he had given me.

We finished the ride in comparative silence and hurried into
Carton's office down in the Criminal Courts Building.

Carton greeted us cordially, with an air of intense relief, as if
he were glad to have been able to turn to Kennedy in the growing
perplexities that beset him.

What surprised me most, however, was that, seated beside his desk,
in an easy chair, was a striking looking woman, not exactly young,
but of an age that is perhaps more interesting than youth,
certainly more sophisticated. She, too, I noticed, had a tense,
excited expression on her face. As Kennedy and I entered she had
looked us over searchingly.

"Let me present Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Jameson, Mrs. Ogleby," said
Carton quickly. "Both of them know as much about how experts use
those little mechanical eavesdroppers as anyone--except the
inventor."

We bowed and waited for an explanation.

"You understand," continued Carton slowly to us in a tone that
enjoined secrecy, "Mrs. Ogleby, who is a friend of Mr. Murtha,
Dorgan's right-hand man, naturally is alarmed and doesn't want her
name to appear in this thing."

"Oh--it is terrible--terrible," Mrs. Ogleby chimed in in great
agitation. "I don't care about anything else. But, my reputation--
it will be ruined if they connect my name with the case. As soon
as I heard of it--I thought of you, Mr. Carton. I came here
immediately. There must be some way in which you can protect me--
some way that you can get along without using--"

"But, my dear Mrs. Ogleby," interrupted the District Attorney, "I
have told you half a dozen times, I think, that I didn't put the
detectaphone in--"

"Yes, but you will get the record," she persisted excitedly.
"Can't you do something?" she pleaded.

I fancied that she said it with the air of one who almost had some
right in the matter.

"Mrs. Ogleby," reiterated Carton earnestly, "I will do all I can--
on my word of honour--to protect your name, but--"

He paused and looked at us helplessly.

"What was it that was overheard?" asked Craig point-blank,
watching Mrs. Ogleby's face carefully.

"Why," she replied nervously, "there was a big dinner last night
which Mr. Dorgan gave at Gastron's. Mr. Murtha took me and--oh--
there were lots of others--" She stopped suddenly.

"Yes," prompted Kennedy. "Who else was there?"

She was on her guard, however. Evidently she had come to Carton
for one purpose and that was solely to protect herself against the
scandal which she thought might attach to having been present at
one of the rather notorious little affairs of the Boss.

"Really," she answered, colouring slightly, "I can't tell you. I
mustn't say a word about who was there--or anything about it. Good
heavens--it is bad enough as it is--to think that my name may be
dragged into politics and all sorts of false stories set in motion
about me. You must protect me, Mr. Carton, you must."

"How did you find out about the detectaphone being there?" asked
Kennedy.

"Why," she replied evasively, "I thought it was just an ordinary
little social dinner. That's what Mr. Murtha told me it was. I
didn't think anyone outside was interested in it or in who was
there or what went on. But, this morning, a--a friend--called me
up and told me--something that made me think others besides those
invited knew of it, knew too much."

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