The Trail Is Taken Up
It was now Wednesday, February 21, and all the careful detail work began to come together.
It was this day that Detective Watson found the crew of Train No. 13, on the New York Central, which had taken Kinsman, Annie and Splaine aboard at Peekskill the afternoon of the robbery after they had ridden out of New York in a taxicab to avoid possible police surveillance at the railroad stations. Commissioner Dougherty dispatched Watson to Peekskill and Albany with thorough instructions. His motto in working out a case is, “Supervision is half the battle.”
“When you get to Albany,” he said, “go to that big hat store on Broadway near the station. I’ll bet that’s where Annie’s new hat was bought—they sell the best millinery in the country outside of New York.”
Nothing important was learned at Peekskill, but at Albany, sure enough, Detective Watson found the saleswoman right in “that big hat store” who had sold the new hat, and secured Annie’s discarded headgear. The new hat had cost twenty-five dollars. The old one looked as though it might have cost ninety-five cents—a “Division Street Special.” Its black velvet was of the cheapest grade, the famous little red roses proved to be, on close inspection, nothing more than little loops of pink cotton cloth, and the general state of the hat indicated that it was about time Annie had a new one. This interesting “bonnet,” however, seemed just then more handsome than any costly article of millinery ever smuggled over from Paris. It was immediately sent to New York by express, with a copy of the sales slip covering the purchase. The saleswoman was able to add one or two details of description, and remembered how, after the woman had selected a hat, the two men had joked about who was to pay for it.
“She’s your girl,” said Splaine, and so Kinsman had paid the bill with five five-dollar bills.
Nothing could be learned as to the direction in which the two men meant to travel. Detective Watson now began a search among train crews running out of Albany, and Commissioner Dougherty, in New York, got the Albany ticket-sellers by long-distance telephone. His knowledge of how railroad tickets are sold, accounted for, taken up, cancelled and checked by the auditing department made it possible to sift matters down to the strongest kind of probability. After considerable telephoning, aided by Detective Watson on the spot, it was determined that Kinsman and Splaine had been the purchasers of two consecutively numbered tickets for Chicago sold together on Friday morning, twenty-four hours after the robbery, and that they had gone west on Train No. 3, leaving Albany at 12:10 p. m. Their tickets were available for that train, and the conclusion was strengthened by calculating Annie’s movements. For it was found that she had come back to New York the same day, between four and five in the afternoon. She had kept out of sight until she appeared at Myrtle Horn’s lodging and was reported by Matron Goodwin and “Plant 21” on Tuesday. But she must have taken a train from Albany about the time that the men were starting for Chicago, reaching New York at 3:45 p. m.
Commissioner Dougherty felt that the chances of finding his men in Chicago were so good that, without wasting time in an investigation of the crew of Train No. 3, he put Detectives Daly and Clare aboard a Chicago train that same night. Kinsman and Splaine would both find congenial company among the pugilists in Chicago.
These detectives were given names to conceal their identity, and ordered to report under the code term of “Orange Growers” to eliminate all flavor of police business. They received detailed instructions about where to go and what to do. Again the Commissioner covered the trail when it led out of New York by sending capable assistants, instead of merely wiring the police in other cities. Before the “Orange Growers” departed, the “boss” gave them a little talk about expenses.
The detective attached to a municipal police force is very often hampered by fear of making unusual expenditures. Accounting routine is strict. Telegrams are often limited to the minimum of ten words where a hundred are needed to send a working description or report. The long-distance telephone is used as a luxury, and in many instances where the plain-clothes man can get valuable information through an informant he pays the shot out of his own pocket because there is no other way of paying it, and trusts to the chance that this private investment out of his salary will help him “break” a knotty case.