CHAPTER II
MANAGER GROST called in a trusty newspaper reporter who favoured the Agency on occasion, and who was in turn favoured when a good story broke that was safe to print. This reporter was Charles Urleigh, a slim, tall, blue-eyed bundle of nerve and nerves. He was a free lance, with a string of papers that reached from Nashville and Knoxville to Chicago and St. Louis and New York—trade journals and occasional articles in noted weekly semi-newspapers supplying him with his pocket money, and helped him meet the demands of his brokers when wheat broke or certain favourite industrials had a "temporary relapse."
To Urleigh, Grost made a clean breast of the whole affair. The Agency was stumped. It did not know which way to turn. There was a certain tone to the double diamond robbery which had no ear marks familiar to the Agency's archives. They could not recall a single gem salesman specialist who would go to a salesman's private customer and sell him a line of the stolen diamonds and thus—perhaps—obtain information as to where the old fellow hid his hoard of gems.
"That's just what happened, though," Grost told Urleigh. "They pulled a double play that time, and look what they got! Two hundred thousand—and they've made a clean getaway with it! Poor Goles—he's a deader now. Yet there's just one chance about him: If he survived the rap they gave him on the head, he may be somewhere around, though he's not in any hospital here or down in Warsaw. I believe he's in the Ohio, but if he is, I've an uncommonly strong hankering to see the corpse."
"That's a real story!" Urleigh smiled. "It's all mine?
"Yes, sir. Don't spring it here, though. Make the headline Warsaw, or Louisville, or Columbus, so that you don't mix us up in it. The police are working, you know; it'll be plumb amusing to me to hear their voices over the telephone asking me how long they've been working, when our local reporters have brought them the news from Chicago and Pittsburgh that Obert Goles disappeared between Cincinnati and Warsaw with a hundred thousand in diamonds, and that Warsaw's mysterious Mr. Wrest was held up and tortured and forced to give over another hundred thousand. Oh, I'm waiting for that!"
The two laughed. Sheriffs, chiefs of police, and U. S. Secret Service workers often read the newspapers to find out what they were doing, now that Urleigh was working with Manager Grost of the National Agency.
"I think I'll just marshal several stories," Urleigh smiled. "I'll mention despatches from Pittsburgh, Louisville, Columbus, Marietta—I always like to run Marietta into a live story, because they run to literature in that town, with more book stores than any other town down the Ohio—and I'll run my big story from Warsaw. I've been down there a few times, and I know the lay of the land. What's the town marshal's name, now? I'm going to have him very close mouthed on the subject and also the Sheriff of Gallatin County———"
Grost laughed aloud.
"That's just what I want you to do—have everyone busy! That'll worry the thieves, and they'll be watching the local authorities and the hooks in sheriffs' offices and police headquarters which carry the rewards offered for bad men. We're not to figure in it at all. Not a word about the National Agency. We're asleep, and our snores are deep. Possibly I may find it necessary to deny that we know anything whatever about the matter. Just to give it all to you—not for publication—we had a man after Goles; our man trailed him right up to the Fresco Restaurant door, and then dropped out of the case on orders. From that moment, noon, Goles has not been seen by any one who knew him. Volcon, who trailed him, says he was the most difficult man he ever saw to keep in sight—he would have made a perfect shadow, he made so little impression on any one. Why, jewellers here who knew him well could not give us the colour of his eyes, his height, weight, kind of clothes he wore, or a single detail of his appearance. We tried that, just to satisfy ourselves that Volcon was right."
"No picture of him?"
"Not a picture. They ransacked his apartment in New York, and found a lot of queer junk about gems and jewellery but not so much as a silhouette of him."
"Well, much obliged, Grost! See you later—I want to get this written in six different ways, fifteen hundred words per each way, between now and 10 o'clock to-night. So long!"
Thus the mighty engine of publicity—general publicity—was set in motion in the case of the Goles mystery and the Wrest robbery. Urleigh did his work well, at from five to nine dollars a column, and from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. Having the story well distributed as a news sensation, he followed it up with second-day stories, and the theories of rather surprised and wondering sheriffs and police and detective chiefs, who obtained their first information from Urleigh's own tales.
Then Urleigh wrote Sunday specials, which retold the first-day stories and mentioned previous jewel thefts, giving numerous details of what may have happened to the two lots of gems, speculation as to what may have become of the missing Obert Goles, with details of the debate among county and city authorities as to whether or not Goles's disappearance was connected with the Wrest robbery.
Now Charles Urleigh, being a free lance, had very many questionable acquaintances among his friends in public, financial, political, up-the-bank and down-the-river acquaintances. He knew the boss pig sticker in town, for example, and a hundred moored and tripping shanty-boaters on the river. He was a frequent visitor in the little back office of a certain liquor emporium where the upper met the lower world on terms something like equal. Now he sought his most questionable friends, one after another, and listened with acute ears to their suggestions.
Speaking of diamond robberies, Urleigh's friends were reminded of many other strange things which had happened and which had never been fully explained. Suppose Goles had disappeared—was that so unusual? It was astonishing how many people knew of men, women, and girls who had suddenly vanished from sight without leaving a trace behind them—not even a reason for their going. Lost diamonds, it was suggested, were more interesting than lost people merely because there were so few diamonds lost compared to the number of lost people.
Urleigh picked up a list of more than thirty people who had dropped out of sight within a year in that locality. A little inquiry revealed the fact that the list was far from complete—there were people right in his own circle, for example, who had packed up their duds and vanished from their boarding houses and left no trace behind them. Whole families changed their address from Known to Unknown. Even the post office delivery department received a steady stream of mail which they were obliged to turn back to the senders, or to the Dead Letter Office undelivered.
Thus the diamond robbery led to forty or fifty columns of stories suggested by the missing Goles and the double raid on precious gems. It was, from Urleigh's standpoint, a very satisfactory news story to begin with, and he recalled none that had given him a better income. It led to his reassorting the one hundred thousand clippings which were a chief part of his capital and indexing the six hundred box-drawers in which he stored them for ready reference. This same collection was very embarrassing to sundry people, for Urleigh was enabled to recall episodes in their lives which few remembered.
Literally hundreds of stories led down to the bank of the Ohio and there trails vanished—girls, women, children, and men were last seen going down Main, or John, or Cutter, or Woodburn, or State, or some other street or avenue "toward the river." It was this little phrase recurring so often that led Urleigh to write the news special headed "Toward the River" which attracted so much attention in newspaper circles a few weeks after Goles vanished.
Manager Grost told Urleigh that he had found no trace of Goles anywhere; neither had the diamonds nor rubies been recognized in any of the legitimate marts—but that meant nothing. The Diamond Trade had its Under World, through which wandered gems as precious and perhaps a thousand times more interesting than anything one could learn about the legitimate traffic of the surface trade, which by comparison is prosy and uneventful. The $200,000 worth of diamonds had sunk into this Under World, leaving hardly a trace.
"If you see a hundred thousand worth of diamonds above aboard and in the open," Grost explained, "there's a lost million somewhere!"
That exaggerated a condition, but sometimes it does seem as though gems drop from sight faster than any other form of wealth—and it is a fact that the Treasures of Solomon, of Inde, of the Spanish Main, of Rome, Carthage, Constantine—of countless kings and even nations, have vanished, leaving no trace, plowed under by Time.
"Then the chances are you'll never find those gems?" Urleigh asked,
"Looks like!" Grost admitted. "I tell you, there's something pretty bad in that double robbery. You just don't know whom to suspect, or which way to turn!"
Other stories, other things gradually crowded the Goles diamond case into the background. It seemed as though no new phase could enter into the matter now; but an astonishing word reached Manager Grost in the routine mail one morning. From the New York office arrived a letter relating to Case J-1416—the Goles case.
"There're those diamonds!"
Immediately he turned and left the store, every one too astonished to stop him. He was very seedy, clothes badly worn, hat a dirty gray. Face very haggard and unshaven.
When the diamonds were examined, they were found to exceed in value those with which he disappeared, but only a few of them were the same as those in the selection which he carried away. No rubies in this lot.
Please reopen the case energetically; these stones seem to be the ones stolen from Judge C. Wrest, your local case, J-1416a. Ofsten & Groner are examining records to make certain that they are gems from Wrest collection.
"Now that just beats Hades!" Grost exclaimed to himself. "What's the reason?"
A messenger arrived from the telegraph office, and this confirmed the suggestion in the order regarding cases J-1416 and J-1416a.
"Records show that gems are identical with sales to Wrest," the code resolved the message.
Grost brought out the records in the two cases. With these records were hundreds of clippings from newspapers, including the Urleigh articles which were authoritative and accurate; the records were the reports of the detectives who had been assigned to the cases, and tips which had been received by anonymous letters and reward seekers.
He went over them all. He saw, of course, new angles of the subject now—many things might have happened which no one had dreamed happened. What could that seedy man, Goles, bringing in those Wrest diamonds and then taking his departure, tell? What was it that troubled his conscience or stirred his mind?
Grost was an able student of psychology, and he had made his success in detective work, doping out the minds of criminals and of subjects of his inquiry. Here was a subject worthy of his best practical study. He could see a dozen different things that might have happened, perhaps the most obvious one being the supposition that Goles had stolen away with his case of gems, and then become troubled by his conscience.
"But why didn't he bring back those gems he absconded with?" Grost asked himself. "Why and how did he fall upon the Wrest diamonds?"
Then again:
"Where are the Ofsten & Groner diamonds and rubies?" Grost asked again, without any reasonable reply.
As this report had been sent, in substance, to all the branches of the National Agency, Grost had no compunctions about calling in Urleigh and telling him the latest development in cases J-1416 and J-1416a.
"Only don't head it from this town," he grinned. "You might date-line it at Pittsburgh. That'd suit me very well. They've been laying talks up there onto me from time to time!"
"Pittsburgh it is, then!" Urleigh grinned.