Anthony Boucher - Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 1, 1960

Great names have lent themselves to forgery. Michelangelo at the age of twenty-one sculpted a marble Cupid which he buried in the ground. Soon after it was exhumed and sold to a collector as an antique. Many great artists of the past had pupils copy their paintings as part of their training. A particularly good job was rewarded by the master’s affixing his signature to it. Rembrandt and Corot often signed pictures on which they had painted only a few strokes. Van Dyck painted, at most, eighty canvases, but 2,000 pictures have been attributed to him. In music, as a struggling violinist, Fritz Kreisler signed other composers’ names to his violin pieces so his repertory would not be drastically limited.

The beginning of the twentieth century is notable for the Lincoln forgeries of Joseph Cosey, the stamp forgeries of Jean de Sperati, and the famous Piltdown skull fraud of a highly respected English solicitor and fossil collector, Charles Dawson.

The middle of the twentieth century is notable for a fantastic rise in check forgeries and a booming new industry — the forging of trade names.

Check forging is the fastest-growing crime in America, with the amateurs outnumbering the pros. It is a problem for supermarkets, department stores, and independent grocery stores as much as banks. One fifth of check forgers are women.

One reason for its popularity is that 90 per cent of all business transactions are carried out by check. Another is that check forgers are so enchanted by the ease with which they can buy things and acquire cash that they are hard put to reform. One check forger, thrown into jail for a clumsy forgery, whiled away several years practicing his handwriting. When he came out he was a master. Another, after serving time for forgery, turned Square John, gave lectures, and became a sheriff’s deputy. Then he ran wild and wrote $3,500 worth of bum checks.

An even more ambitious forger, who had arthritis so bad he could hardly write, stole mail from building lobbies and then altered the names of payees on checks he found in pilfered letters. He changed the name Apple and Co. on a check to Appleton R. Coxbetner. Then he took out a fishing license in that name, used it as identification, and the bank clerk cashed the check. He clipped banks for nearly $25,000 this way.

One method of cutting down on the practice is the use by depositors of checks especially treated so that, when ink eradicator touches them, they break out in a rash of Void-void-void. Another is the installation of cameras at tellers’ cages to record photographically the face of the check casher, his check, and his means of identification. If the check casher refuses to let his picture be taken, the bank has every right to refuse to honor his check.

But equally as tempting as check forgery to make a quick buck these days is the sale of cheap, inferior products bearing the counterfeit labels of well-known brands. Almost every nationally advertised trademark has suffered abuse as a result of this new racket — Leica cameras, BVD’s, Victor records, Chanel perfume, Good Humor ice cream, Revlon nail polish, Singer sewing machines, Bendix-Westinghouse air brakes, and so on.

It is estimated that half a billion dollars’ worth of bogus auto parts are sold annually, all bearing the names of respectable firms. When the parts break down or fail to work, it’s the company whose label is on the products that loses a customer and may gain a lawsuit.

At Christmastime a few years ago Chicago was flooded with 200,000 watches purporting to be Bulovas. “Bulov” was printed on the dial face and the number seventeen appeared beneath the name. The seventeen was interpreted to mean the number of jewels in the works, but each watch was sixteen short. The watches were worth three dollars and sold for twenty-six.

Naturally the manufacturers of honest merchandise who have spent years earning reputations for integrity, and millions on acquainting the public with the superiority of their products, are not too pleased when their trademark is swiped and affixed to crumbling goods. They sell fewer products because of the competition and they lose good will when customers find themselves stung with a shoddy product under a nationally known label.

Some companies have gotten injunctions against the offenders, but the profits are so huge that the culprits merely laughed at the court orders. Getting evidence against brand-name counterfeiters that will stand up in court is highly expensive, time-consuming, and difficult, entailing the hiring of an army of private investigators. In addition, state laws about the practice are extremely hazy, and there is no federal law declaring that this type of forgery is a crime, unless misrepresented goods are sold through the mails.

The Bulova Watch Company, thoroughly aroused, spent bushels of money to break up the Chicago watch-counterfeiting ring. When the trial was over, the ringleader got ten days in jail and his confederates got suspended sentences. Bad perfume comes in good bottles, untrustworthy brakes are put into autos, and people buy burned-out TV tubes. They are all counterfeit, and not much can be done about it.

It kind of makes you long for the days of good old King Canute.

They thought she was colored at first.

The patrolman who investigated the complaint didn’t expect to find a dead woman. This was the first time he’d seen a corpse, and he was somewhat shaken by the ludicrously relaxed grotesqueness of the girl lying on her back on the rug, and his hand trembled a little as he made out his report. But when he came to the blank line calling for an identification of RACE, he unhesitatingly wrote “Negro.”

The call had been taken at Headquarters by a patrolman in the central Complaint Bureau. He sat at a desk with a pad of printed forms before him, and he copied down the information, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, rolled the form and slipped it into a metal carrier, and then shot it by pneumatic tube to the radio room. A dispatcher there read the complaint form, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, studied the precinct map on the wall opposite his desk, and then dispatched car eleven of the 87th Precinct to the scene.

The girl was dead.

She may have been a pretty girl, but she was hideous in death, distorted by the expanding gases inside her skin case. She was wearing a sweater and skirt, and she was barefoot, and her skirt had pulled back when she fell to the rug. Her head was twisted at a curious angle, the short black hair cradled by the rug, her eyes open and brown in a bloated face. The patrolman felt a sudden impulse to pull the girl’s skirt down over her knees. He knew, suddenly, she would have wanted this. Death had caught her in this indecent posture, robbing her of female instinct. There were things this girl would never do again, so many things, all of which must have seemed enormously important to the girl herself. But the single universal thing was an infinitesimal detail, magnified now by death: she would never again perform the simple feminine and somehow beautiful act of pulling her skirt down over her knees.

The patrolman sighed and finished his report. The image of the dead girl remained in his mind all the way down to the squad car.

It was hot in the squadroom on that night in early August. The men working the graveyard shift had reported for duty at 6:00 P.M., and they would not go home until 8:00 the following morning. They were all detectives and perhaps privileged members of the police force, but there were many policemen — Detective Meyer Meyer among them — who maintained that a uniformed cop’s life made a hell of a lot more sense than a detective’s.

“Sure, it does,” Meyer insisted now, sitting at his desk in his shirtsleeves. “A patrolman’s schedule provides regularity and security. It gives a man a home life.”