Erle Gardner - The Case of the Baited Hook

Mason flashed a swift glance of amusement at Della Street. “Do you then associate respectability with mediocrity?”

“Not always,” she said. “I haven’t any quarrel with respectability. I just hate the labels, that’s all.”

“Did you want to consult me about your daughter?”

“No. She married a banker in Des Moines — a stuffed shirt, if you ask me. She’s a pillar of respectability, and hates her names as badly as I hated mine. None of her friends even know about the Circe part of her name.”

Mason smiled. “What was the matter you wanted to discuss?”

She said, “It goes back to 1918 shortly before the Armistice.”

“What happened?”

“I was a passenger on a British boat sailing for South Africa. On the ship were two Russian refugees — traveling incognito, of course. They had been high officials under the old regime — that is, he had. It had taken them years to escape from that awful nightmare of Bolshevism, and their little daughter had been left behind.”

Mason nodded and offered Mrs. Tump a cigarette. “Not right now,” she said. “Later on, I’ll join you. Now I want to get this off my chest.”

Mason lit a cigarette and glanced across to where Della Street was holding a pencil poised over her notebook ready to take skeleton notes on the conversation.

“The boat was torpedoed by a submarine without warning,” Mrs. Tump said. “It was a horrible experience. I can see it yet whenever I close my eyes. It was night, and a heavy sea was running. The boat had a bad list almost as soon as she was struck. A lot of the lifeboats capsized. There were people in the water, only you couldn’t see them — just arms and clawing hands coming up out of the dark waves to clutch at the slippery steel sides of the boat. Then the waves swept them away. You could hear screams — so many of them, it sounded just like one big scream.”

Mason’s eyes were sympathetic.

“This couple I was telling you about,” Mrs. Tump went on, “—I’m just going to hit the high spots, Mr. Mason — they told me their history. The woman was psychic if you want to call it that, or just plain frightened and worried if you want to figure it that way. She felt certain the boat would be torpedoed. The man kept trying to kid her out of it… laughing at her, making a joke of it. The night before the ship sank the woman came to my cabin. She’d had a horrible dream. A vision, she called it. She wanted me to promise that if anything happened to her and I lived through it, that I’d go to Russia, find the daughter, and work out some way of getting her out of the country.”

Mason’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

“She gave me some jewels. She didn’t have much money, but lots of jewelry. She said that if the boat reached port safely, I could give the jewelry back to her. Her husband wasn’t to know anything about it.”

“And she was drowned?” Mason asked.

“Yes. They were both in the first boat which went over. I saw it capsize with my own eyes. Then a big wave came up and smashed the second lifeboat against the side of the ship. However, Mr. Mason, all this is just preliminary. I’ll only sketch what happened. I was saved. I went to Russia, located the child, and brought her out. It doesn’t matter how. She was a wonderful girl with the blood of royalty in her veins. I wanted my own daughter to adopt her. My daughter was just getting married at the time. Her husband wouldn’t listen to it. So I… I’m afraid I did something which was unpardonable, Mr. Mason.”

“What?” he asked.

“I wasn’t where I could keep her myself — that is, I thought I wasn’t. I put her in a home.”

“What home?” Mason asked.

“The Hidden Home Welfare Society.”

“Where was that?” Mason inquired.

“In a little town in Louisiana. They made a specialty of caring for children whose parents couldn’t keep them.”

She paused for a moment as though trying to get the facts straight in her mind.

“Go ahead,” Mason said.

She said, “I have to tell you a little something about that home, Mr. Mason, things I didn’t know at the time but found out afterwards. It was a baby brokerage home.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She said, “There’s always been a great demand for children to adopt. Childless couples are always on the lookout. Well, this home didn’t care how it got its children. I found out afterwards that most of the women who were employed on the premises were expectant mothers. They’d have children and leave. Some of them would arrange to pay for the child’s care and maintenance, and some of them couldn’t.”

“You, of course, made arrangements for the care of this child?”

“Oh, yes. I sent them regular monthly remittances. I have my old cancelled checks to prove it. Thank God I kept them.”

“And the child?” Mason asked.

“A year later,” she said, “when my own affairs were in order, I went to the home to get her out. And what do you think I found?”

“That she wasn’t there?” Mason asked.

“Exactly. They’d sold that baby for a thousand dollars. Think of it, Mr. Mason! Sold her just as you’d sell a horse or a dog or a used automobile.”

“What was their explanation?”

“Oh, they were frightfully sorry. They claimed it had been a mistake. At first they said I hadn’t paid them a cent. And then I confronted them with the cancelled checks — and they tried every means on earth to get those checks from me. I made a lot of trouble. The district attorney took it up, and The Hidden Home Welfare Society simply dissolved and vanished into nothing. I learned later what those places do. Whenever there’s trouble, they simply move to some other state, give themselves another name, and begin all over again.”

“But surely,” Mason said, “their records would show what became of this child.”

“They did, but the Home wouldn’t admit it. They lied about those records. I should have hired a lawyer and gone right into court, but in place of that I started making complaints to the authorities, and I suppose they were dilatory. You know how public officials can be at times. The district attorney was taking his vacation, and he stalled me along. I went back to New York and waited to hear from him. He wrote me a letter and seemed very pleased with himself. He said that thanks to my efforts, The Hidden Home Welfare Society had been put out of existence, that there had been previous complaints, and that I was to be congratulated on having saved my checks and all that sort of stuff.

“I went right back down to Louisiana and told him that wasn’t what I wanted, that I wanted the child. He said I’d have to engage private counsel, that his office was concerned with the broader aspects of the case. Think of it! The ‘broader aspects of the case.’ I could have choked him.”

Rage glittered in her cold gray eyes.

“You employed private counsel?” Mason asked.

“I did. That’s where I made my next mistake. It was too late for lawyers then. I should have employed good detectives. The lawyers took my money and puttered around. They said that the home had destroyed all of its records, fearing criminal prosecution, that it had scattered — as they said — to the four winds… Four winds nothing! They’d simply moved to Colorado and started all over again under another name. That was something else I didn’t know.”

“How did you finally get the information?” Mason asked.

“By persistence and a little luck,” she said. “One of the men, who had been in their bookkeeping department had, of course, remembered the entire transaction because of the commotion I’d raised, finally got in touch with lawyers who in turn got in touch with me… They wanted to sell the information of course.”