Stranger Than Truth Read online

  None of the vaults in New York had a box registered in the name of Warren G. Wilson. And in those sacred cells where gold and bonds and cash are locked away, no record, no clerk, no guard recalled a customer of Wilson’s description who unlocked his box on the second day of each month. The Department of Internal Revenue had no files on Warren G. Wilson.

  In their search for a death clue Riordan’s men investigated every known facet of Wilson’s life. His barber, his tailor, his friends among the collectors of first editions were questioned. No one had known him very long and none was aware of his origin. Some remembered his allusions to Arizona, New Mexico, the desert; and the police discovered, too, that he had once worked in Chicago.

  In a corner at the bottom of the bookshelves Riordan found the strange clue. Not a death clue so much as evidence of the strange birth of Warren G. Wilson. For he had not been born at all; he had been conceived more than twenty years earlier over a bootleg Martini in a Chicago speakeasy.

  The birth clue that Riordan found on the bottom bookshelf was a series of loose-leaf pamphlets in an imitation-leather binder that bore the title:

  BUSINESS DYNAMICS

  A Success Course in Salesmanship,

  Merchandising and Finance

  by

  WARREN G. WILSON

  This was the pretentious title of a correspondence course of thirty lessons sent out in envelopes labeled, From the Private Office of Warren G. Wilson. Warren G. Wilson was President of the Warren G. Wilson Foundation, Chicago, 111. The course cost seventy-five dollars and students paid at the rate of five dollars for two lessons a month.

  The thirty lessons covered a wide range of subjects, varying from such abstruse material as Dynamics of Business to such practical advice as Personal Appearance: A Business Asset. In the writing of these lessons Mr. Wilson had shown himself a man whose knowledge of human nature was derived, not from experience alone, but from the works of Locke, Mill, Henry George, William James, Pelman of Pelmanism, Emile Coué, Horatio Alger, Jr., Sigmund Freud and the author of Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.

  Most interesting to the police were those pages of reminiscence wherein Warren G. Wilson’s advice to students was rich with nuggets of wisdom culled from conversations with the great tycoons. Surely among the bankers and financiers of whom he had written with such intimacy there would be one who could recall Warren G. Wilson and furnish a clue to his early life. But all of Wilson’s magnates were dead long before the year of his copyright.

  Who was Wilson? The name had an irritatingly familiar sound. Even Captain Riordan, when he first took over the case, remarked that he seemed to recognize it. In his effort to discover what had happened to Wilson in the years between the copyright and the murder, Riordan sent men to a place which must have seemed alien to detectives, the Public Library. There, in magazines published in 1920 and 1921, were advertisements of the Success Course. In all of the ads the fame of Warren G. Wilson, businessman and financier, was so taken for granted that anyone unfamiliar with the name would have been ashamed of his ignorance.

  From these advertisements in popular-science and mechanics magazines, health and success magazines and monthly journals dedicated to self-education, the trail led back to Chicago.

  In the ’20s Chicago was not only the world’s capital of bootlegging and gangsterism; it was the hub of the mail-order business, the Athens of the correspondence course, the seat of education guided by sages learned in the art of ballyhoo and in the science of installment collection. For five dollars down and five a month they offered instruction in everything from ballet dancing to psychic healing. These were not counted as rackets; they were legal business institutions and the U.S. mails were their sales routes.

  Every advertisement carried a guarantee. You learned what the master taught or your money was refunded. Warren G. Wilson did not guarantee success; he promised that if you had not “increased your earnings nor advanced your position within six months after completion of the course” every cent would be paid back to you. This was a common trick among the correspondence schools. Few suckers asked for refunds; fewer completed their courses. The lessons were sanctioned by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Better Business Bureaus, and allowed to be distributed through the mails because they actually contained certain concrete details. In addition to instruction on the quick, easy way to success, Wilson’s course included penmanship, double-entry bookkeeping, typing, elementary shorthand, insurance tables, tariff regulations, compound interest and stock-exchange rates.

  Research into its history proved that the Warren G. Wilson Foundation which had guaranteed success to its students was itself a financial failure. The first advertisements had appeared in 1920 and in 1922 its offices were closed.

  Through records in the files of the magazines in which Wilson’s course had been advertised, Captain Riordan discovered the name of the agency which had placed these ads. It had been a one-man company and its owner, now vice-president of a respectable New York agency, told Riordan all he knew about the Wilson business but asked, for the sake of his reputation, that his name be kept out of the story.

  This man, the reputable but nameless advertising agent, remembered the conception and assisted at the birth of Warren G. Wilson. The name was chosen deliberately. In 1920 many Americans believed that Woodrow Wilson was one of the great martyred Presidents, while others thought he had run the country onto the rocks and that it would be saved by Warren G. Harding. The author of the lessons, owner of the business, so-called president of the Foundation, was a Mid-Western youth named Homer Peck.

  Peck had been an advertising copywriter. He had been brilliant at it, made a great success, and older advertising men had prophesied a wealthy future for him. But Peck had demanded more than prophecies and promises. When his employers refused to raise his salary he quit his job and went into business for himself. Over cocktails served in teacups Peck had outlined the idea for his correspondence course to his friend, the advertising man. Neither considered the business shabby. Both had majored in the subject of mail-order education by writing ads for schools of signal engineering, scientific farming, sign painting and photoplay writing.

  Of Peck’s personal life the advertising man knew little. Peck had lived in a cheap apartment on the near North Side in the Bohemian arty neighborhood bordering Chicago’s so-called Gold Coast, had written short stories which no one would publish, and had an affair with his stenographer, a slim, radiant young girl who wrote poetry. The advertising man had admired Peck’s ingenuity, considered him a cockeyed genius and expected him to make a fortune. He was surprised, he said, when Peck decided suddenly to give up the one-room office pretentiously called The Warren G. Wilson Foundation of Business Dynamics. With a little effort and a few thousand additional dollars, the advertising man believed, the Warren G. Wilson Foundation might have flourished.

  But Peck, as the advertising man remarked, was too much of a genius to care about making money. He enjoyed his ideas too much ever to achieve solid business success. On the day he closed his office he had lunched with the advertising man. Failure had not depressed Peck. His mood had been optimistic. Raising the teacup that held his Martini, Peck had proposed a toast to his next venture, which, he promised, would make that ex-giant of finance, Warren G. Wilson, look like a worm under the sidewalks of Wall Street.

  The promise was never fulfilled. The advertising man never drank another cocktail with Homer Peck, and but for the settling of accounts heard nothing of Warren G. Wilson until he read of the murder.

  This is all the New York police have learned about Homer Peck. A Chicago bank account closed in November, 1922, advertisements in old magazines, an advertising agent’s recollections of a client’s failure—nothing more. The loft building in which Peck had his office has been torn down and a skyscraper erected in its place. The speakeasies where Peck and his friend held their conferences are gone, too. Even the blatantly wicked Chicago of their day, the taxi wars, bootlegger battles,
get-rich-quick schemes, the blue-sky mail-order courses are memories of an era that goes down in history as preface to the Great Depression. And only a corpse with a bullet wound in his back brings back memories of the great jazz era.

  Whose was the body? What strange and secret events led to the death of the man who was never born? What became of Homer Peck whose agile but none-too-scrupulous mind created the fabulous Warren G. Wilson? And where into this pattern of mystery does the girl fit, the girl who is neither blonde nor brunette and who rode to the thirtieth floor on the night Wilson died? These are the questions to which the police seek answers. These are the only known facts about a murder committed last May and still unsolved.

  The case is not closed. Captain Riordan is determined to solve the mystery. Somewhere out of the dark shadows of the past, there will emerge one bright truth to shed its light upon the mystery of Wilson’s death and to reveal the identity of the man who concealed his failure behind the name of a correspondence-school professor who never existed.

  * * *

  That was the Wilson story, just one in a long series of Unsolved Mysteries. Perhaps, in fighting to get it into the February issue, I was stupid. Perhaps subtleties escaped me. I had no idea then that I was suspected of knowing more than I had written into the manuscript. As I followed E. E. Munn along the corridor to Noble Barclay’s office, I honestly thought I was defending my rights as an editor.

  We had to wait a while in the reception room before Mr. Barclay would see us. His secretary, Grace Eccles, bestowed upon us the smile reserved for those privileged to enter the private office.

  “He’ll be just a minute,” she said. “The Senator’s on the wire.”

  She popped back into the glass-enclosed den that guarded Barclay’s privacy. We were left with the strangers in the reception room. There was an air about the place, a sense of feudal grandeur. On the oak-paneled walls hung pictures of Noble Barclay and his family. Laid out on the big oak refectory table were current issues of the five magazines, Truth, Truth and Health, Truth and Love, Truth and Crime, and Truth and Beauty. On a velvet-covered table lay a single copy of My Life Is Truth. Beside the handsome portrait on the dust jacket was the information that this was Copy No. 6,182,454 of Noble Barclay’s immortal work. Bookshelves contained each of the seventy-six editions in sixteen languages, including Japanese.

  Oblivious to the strangers’ uneasy stares, Munn stood before the great window, his head thrown back as though he were praying secretly or exulting. I wondered whether he rejoiced because he had me in a spot, or whether he was merely rehearsing for our scene with the boss.

  The strangers crouched humbly on the carved Italian bench at the dark end of the room. There were five of them, shabby and self-conscious; a middle-aged woman with a furtive sniveling boy of ten or twelve; an elderly couple who sat as if they were paying for space on the uncomfortable bench; and a hunchback who offered his abject grin as appeasement for his ugliness. These were true believers who would sit all day on the hard benches to catch a glimpse of Noble Barclay.

  “Ready now,” cooed Miss Eccles.

  She pressed a button, the latch of Barclay’s door was released, and the strangers stared enviously as we were admitted to the holy place.

  Barclay stood at the window looking down upon the rainy street. His back was toward the door. We walked to the center of the long office, but a thick carpet muffled our footsteps. I cleared my throat. Munn frowned and shook his head, but it was too late. Barclay’s meditations had been interrupted. He turned.

  “How are you, Ed?” he said to Munn. And to me, extending his hand, “Glad to see you, boy. Sit down. What can I do for you?”

  He was big and affable. Under a mane of sleek white hair his features were tanned and strong. His tweeds were bulky, but he was built for sturdy fabrics. The heavy wool did not hide the strength of his shoulders.

  “It’s about the Wilson story, isn’t it?” he asked, looking straight into my face.

  Munn had pretended not to know why I burst into his office. Barclay used the frank approach. “I thought this stormy petrel would beat his wings against my window.”

  “You know about it, Mr. Barclay?”

  “I’ve read the story. A great yarn, boy. Ask Ed what I said about you last night.” His glance demanded response and Munn bared his teeth in a phony smile. “I wanted to talk to you myself, but I came into the office late this morning. Mrs. Barclay and the twins just got back from the Coast and I had to meet the train.”

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Barclay, if you liked the story…”

  “Liked it? That story was great. Great writing. Guts and punch. And I liked the way you went after the stuff yourself. You weren’t content just to rewrite the printed stuff; you had to find out how the wheels turned. That’s the spirit we appreciate, lad.”

  “Let’s get down to facts,” I said. “You think it’s a good story, but Mr. Munn says we can’t run it. He sent you a memo. Have you read it? Do you agree?”

  “Hold on,” laughed Barclay. “Munn and I talked this over last night before he dictated that memo. I’d have used simpler language myself, but Ed can’t get over that course he took in Business English.”

  This was a sly dig. Barclay winked at me. Munn laughed mechanically.

  “I just don’t understand, Mr. Barclay.”

  “Policy,” put in Munn.

  “Hadn’t we agreed on one of the better-known murders? Dot King, the Elwell case, practically historic, you know,” Barclay said.

  “Our readers know the stories.”

  “You made that observation at the last conference, but it was ruled out, if you remember.”

  “It was my opinion that we decided to use old stories when we had nothing better. I got hold of a new story for you.”

  “I admire your initiative,” Barclay said.

  The noon bell rang. I wondered if Eleanor was going out or whether the rain would keep her in the building.

  “All I want, Mr. Barclay, is a good reason why you object to the Wilson story,” I said earnestly.

  Munn played with his cigarette case. He did not smoke in Barclay’s presence.

  Barclay cleared his throat. “I like the way you handle a story, John, but I don’t like certain angles of this one. It’s the character, the man who was murdered. People are only interested in a story when the characters are exciting.”

  “Don’t you think there’s something exciting about a man who got two thousand dollars a month without doing a lick of work for it?”

  “If we knew the source we might be interested,” Barclay answered. “Background and color, the underworld, for instance. Something colorful.”

  “An expensive bachelor apartment at the edge of Greenwich Village,” I said. “Mysterious woman dines with the man in expensive French restaurant. What’s dull about that?”

  “The man himself. Character. Character’s the basis of interest in any story. This character—what’s his name? Thompson? Thompson was dull. He did nothing with his life. No one cared whether Thompson lived or died.”

  “Wilson,” Munn said.

  “Look, Mr. Barclay,” I pleaded, “we’ve carried five different versions of the Rothstein case. Rothstein was a gambler. He cared for nothing but money. He was cruel, coarse, greedy and we knew nothing about his character. Elwell was also a gambler, he…”

  “They did something with their lives, something active, even though they were dissolute. Thompson was an idler. He spent his money on a lot of dusty old books. He had no friends, no woman loved him.”

  “There was the lady in plaid.”

  Munn coughed.

  “It’s funny,” I said. “You tell me Wilson’s an uninteresting character and yet when you talk about him—even though you seem to forget his name—you get as angry as if he were real and you had something against him.”

  Barclay laughed. “What do you think of this lad, Ed? Obstinate as Granddaddy’s mule. It’s a spirit I admire. Tenacity. I knew from the minute
I met you that you were the sort of fellow we wanted for Truth Publications.”

  “Then you’ll run the story?”

  “No.”

  “That’s that,” Munn said. The clown’s mouth curved in triumph.

  I was angry. Barclay had been flattering me, telling me I was a genius, a man of iron. For that he expected me to fawn and wag my tail and accept defeat gracefully. I wasn’t built that way. Job or no job I had to know the reason for my defeat.

  “It seems to me, Mr. Barclay, that you and Mr. Munn have some other reason for rejecting this story, something you don’t want me to know.”

  Munn dropped his cigarette case. Barclay spoke into the telephone box on his desk. “Tell the Senator I’ll be a few minutes late.” He hung up and turned toward me. Our eyes met. I waited. He said, “How long have you been working for us, Ansell?”

  “Four and a half months.”

  “Four months? And I’ve been running these magazines almost twenty years. Munn has been with me for much of that time. Do you, after three months, presume to tell me that you know more about the business than I do?”

  “Remember the war,” I said. “The people who got their countries into it always answered criticism by saying they’d been governing a long time and knew more about it than those who warned them that they were heading for disaster.”

  Munn slid forward in his chair. He was prepared to speak, but Barclay waved him to silence. Rising, the boss came over to my chair and looked down into my face with a candid unwavering glance. “You’ve been pretty frank, young man, in asking my reasons for rejecting your story. But let me ask you: Why are you so determined to run it?”