“Well, I’ll be, Jake’s an artist.”
Jake beamed.
“Could I see that?” asked Bell, picking it up and studying it by the light of the window. “Yes, I believe that’s what he looks like. You’re a real artist, Jake.”
Jake flushed with embarrassment. “Naw, not really. I just started out in the design shop, before I started selling. You really think it’s good?”
“Sure do. Mind if I keep it?”
“You ought to pay for it,” laughed the man from Chicago. “It’s a piece of artwork.”
“You’re right,” said Isaac Bell, reaching for his wallet. “How much?”
“No, no, no.” said Jake. “Go on, you take it.”
“O.K. But when I need a new auto, I’ll know who to come to.”
“Just don’t show it to Fritz,” the cereal man laughed.
“It don’t matter he looks like that,” said Jake. “Fritz’s got that smile, and folks just buy anything he sells.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the man from Gillette.
“What do you mean?” asked Bell.
“Eh, you’re
always going on about that,” the cereal sales rep protested. “Fritz is a valuable man.”
“About what?” asked Bell.
“Those shops his firm supplies. I just don’t see them selling that many pianos or sheets of music, for that matter. It’s not a well-run business. From what I’ve seen.”
“They’ve got a fancy-looking shop in Los Angeles,” said Bell.
“Well, you just try buying a piano, you’ll find a waiting list as long as your arm.”
“Or Fritz’s arm,” Jake said, and the table roared.
“Where’s Fritz now?” asked Bell.
“Hope he’s not at the next table listening to this,” said Jake, and the others looked around uncomfortably.
“I’m trying to remember when I saw him,” Bell persisted. “Must have been two weeks, maybe more. Time flies. Anyone seen him lately?”
“I thought in Chicago, he said he was going to Los
Angeles.”
Isaac Bell took Jake’s drawing of Fritz Wunderlich to the Denver Post Building and paid a newspaper sketch artist to make him copies. He took them to the train stations. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had warm relations with the express companies, as the detectives often cadged rides on express cars, whose messengers were glad of another dependable gun. By noon the copies were headed around the continent, courtesy of Adams Express, American Express, and Wells Fargo, to the field offices covering German consulates in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s mansion in Los Angeles.
* * *
In Jersey City, New Jersey, a short, round Van Dorn apprentice from the New York field office named Nelson Mills found himself wishing he had broken the agency rule that forbade apprentice detectives to carry guns. The baby-faced Mills had just finished his first “solo” assignment, an investigation of the Leipzig Organ & Piano shop in the Heights neighborhood. Scanning his notes as he hurried to catch the Hudson Tube back to Manhattan, he composed in his mind the first sentence of his report—“A yearlong waiting list for pianos, no organs, and sheet music from 1905, conspire to indicate that the Leipzig Organ and Piano Company is a false front for a nefarious business as yet unidentified.”
Suddenly he remembered that Detective Harry Warren had advised him that using one word instead of three was the best way to get the bosses to read his reports. Mills drew mental Xs through “conspired to indicate,” to be replaced with “suggest,” and was debating deleting “nefarious” when he bumped into a big fellow on the sidewalk.
“Excuse me. Sorry.”