THE DAILY NEWS,
FRIDAY, FEB. 17, 1928, P. 7.
MAG PUTS CRIME SCRIBE ON TRAIL OF MISSING HOOSIER
Yesterday afternoon, Jehoshaphat (“Joe”) Harris, editor-in-chief of the embattled “Bandbox,” announced the assignment of novelist-cum-crime-reporter Max Stanwick to investigate the disappearance of John Shepard, an Indiana subscriber not seen since the night of January 18th, when he appeared as a guest of the magazine at a party in publisher Hiram Oldcastle’s Park Avenue penthouse.
“Shep was like some Horatio Alger kid and Frank Merriwell all rolled into one,” said Harris, fighting back emotion in his midtown office (see NEWS foto, facing page). “We thought—did I say that?—we think the world of him, and are sure he’s destined for great things once he’s back among us.” Harris insisted that if he had known about the young man’s disappearance sooner, he would have cancelled his recent trip to the British Isles.
“In an age of fair-weather friends and high-speed trends,” the editor-in-chief declared, “our subscribers are loyal to us, and we’re loyal to them.” Recent circulation and ad figures—see the NEWS’ Business Page—cast some doubt on the fidelity of “Bandbox” ’s readers and advertisers, but Harris was having none of it when confronted with the numbers. He would say only that the deployment of Stanwick’s imagination and investigative skills would lead to the safe return of young Shepard, who had apparently been in the middle of a spontaneous trip to New York.
Asked to comment on the Hoosier’s disappearance, Captain Patrick Boylan, speaking for the police commissioner, told the NEWS: “Yes, we got a report only the other day about this young fellow of no fixed address who left a suitcase and an unpaid bill at one of the city’s YMCAs—the sort of thing that happens a dozen times a week. We’ve been told that a trunk was sent from Greencastle, Indiana, to New York a few days before Mr. Shepard went missing, but so far nothing has turned up.”
Boylan speculated that the young man “may have taken off from the city just as impulsively as he came here,” and suggested, if that was the case, that he “call his mother.”
As for Joe Harris, the captain said, “If he really wants to help our Missing Persons squad, he’ll assist them in finding Mr. Waldo Lindstrom.”
Lindstrom, the magazine’s most popular cover subject, has reportedly jumped bail after a recent arrest for possession of narcotics. Giovanni Roma, proprietor of the Malocchio restaurant and a crony of Harris’, allegedly sold him the dope. Other “Bandbox” staff and associates have recently been nabbed for plagiarism and a drunken assault on the nation’s Chief Magistrate.
One observer of the magazine industry expressed surprise that in the midst of such troubles, Harris would let himself be distracted by “some woe on the Wabash.”
Reading the story behind his desk at 8:00 A.M., Harris scowled, annoyed that the circulation figures and Boylan’s skeptical quotes had been thrown in. Stanwick was, in fact, pursuing Lindstrom, if only in connection with Shep, and he was also looking for the trunk the cops had been unable to find. Max had pledged not to show his face in the office until he’d located both “the fled flit and the vamoosed valise.”
Harris turned the page with an angry snap. He made breakneck progress through the rest of the paper, pausing only to read, in its entirety, a small obituary of Siegfried von Erhard—run as a professional courtesy of the newspaper fraternity. The small type took note of Siegfried’s birth in Dusseldorf; his peacetime service in the Kaiser’s army; and his unsuccessful butter-and-egg business, which had collapsed just before his proud emigration to this country in 1914. The notice declared that the vendor’s death had come from a coronary suffered only a block from his home in Kips Bay. His spouse, Hannelore, was his only survivor.
Well, thought Harris, that fishwife frau had driven the poor guy to an early grave.
Actually, thirteen floors below, Siegfried had just, in a manner of speaking, returned to work. Having kept the newsstand shut for two days, Hannelore was opening its scissor-gate and removing the counter displays of pipe cleaners and Life Savers in order to make room, beside the cash register, for her husband’s ashes. She turned the urn so its Iron Cross wouldn’t face customers, and then she sighed. Life had to go on. She had been thinking this same thought half an hour ago, while soaking her Post Toasties in the last of the milk Siegfried had gone out for Tuesday night. Right now she was rereading his obituary, though keeping one eye on the stenographer thumbing through an unpurchased copy of Harper’s Bazaar.
“This is a newsstand, not a ‘view stand’!” cried Hannelore, already back in form.
Preceded by Mukluk on his pink leash, Betty Divine entered the Graybar lobby. She was earlier than usual. Thanks to Joe, her sleep patterns were all off. During his nights at the Warwick, he got up half a dozen times to pace; and when he stayed home in Murray Hill, he’d call her after midnight or before five to rehash his anxieties about Hi and Jimmy. This morning, never expecting Hannelore to have reopened, Betty had bought her paper at the corner. Startled by the retracted scissor-gate, she approached the newsstand to pay her respects: “Mrs. von Erhard! Shouldn’t you be giving yourself a little more time?”
“Thank you, Miss Divine,” said Hannelore, bowing her head to a depth befitting conversation with an editor-in-chief. “But Siegfried would have wanted me back to normal as soon as possible.”
Betty missed two or three words of this, but heard Mrs. von Erhard tap her wedding ring, with a sort of prideful affection, against a glazed urn that looked quite a bit like a beer stein. After a moment Betty understood that Siegfried now resided within it.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.
“Few have been so kind as you,” replied Hannelore.
“And I’m sorry to hear that,” said Betty, who wondered how Mrs. von Erhard expected the pity normally due a widow when for years she’d been tearing into potential mourners, like that poor girl eyeing the Bazaar.
“That nice Mr. Montgomery,” said Hannelore. “From your gentleman friend’s magazine? He has been an exception.”
“Oh,” said Betty. “Then he’s back.”
“No, still at home under the weather. But so kind as to send a telegram to my apartment when he heard the news.”
“He’s very thoughtful,” declared Betty. She was running out of things to say, but Mrs. von Erhard more than kept up her end with some chatter about Siegfried.
“There was nothing old-fashioned about Mr. von Erhard, you know. Back in Dusseldorf he was the first one to put air tires onto his bicycle, and over here he saw to it that we were the earliest in our building to have a radio. So, you understand, I couldn’t have him moldering under the weeds up in Woodlawn. It didn’t seem twentieth-century. Whereas the Rose Hill Mortuary and Crematorium are right up-to-date.”
Betty was losing the auditory thread, since Hannelore was not only talking fast and with her accent, but addressing some of her remarks to what was left of Siegfried himself. Launching into a description of her husband’s fiery, up-to-date Dämmerung, the news vendor remarked to Betty, and reminded Siegfried, that “Mr. von Erhard’s remains were untouched by human hands. While the soul ascended to heaven, the ashes proceeded straight from the furnace to the urn. Via a stainless-steel spout,” she explained. “The ‘Felicity Shunt,’ the Rose Hill man told me it’s called.”
With Mrs. von Erhard tapping the urn again, Betty had missed nearly all of the last few sentences, and misunderstood her to say “publicity stunt.”
“Yes,” said Hannelore, no longer tapping, and looking straight at Betty now. “How Siegfried got here has been written up in the newspapers.” She meant a recent article on Rose Hill’s modern methods, but having heard “publicity stunt” and then, more clearly, this last business about a write-up, Betty concluded that Hannelore had been trying to draw attention to the newsstand by means of a feature about Siegfried’s new dwelling place here on the counter. She recoiled, and pretended that Mukluk was tugging on his leash. “I should be getting upstairs. My sincerest sympathies, Mrs. von Erhard. I hope that Siegfried will be happy here.”
“Danke,” said Hannelore, back in her forelock-tugging mode.
Betty and Mukluk walked off to the elevator bank—followed closely by Chip Brzezinski, who did a fast skulk past the newsstand to avoid the Widow von Erhard’s notice. He entered the elevator, returned Betty’s smile, and took a position at the rear of the car. Mukluk, always overexcited to be on board, yapped so loudly that Chip imagined trying to squeeze the thing into the shaft once someone got on at another level and created a gap in the flooring.
As they ascended, Chip looked over Betty’s shoulder at her Daily News, which she had open to the story of Bandbox’s search for John Shepard. Though he could see only the back of her head, Chip assumed she was concentrating on the article, especially Joe Harris’s quotes, whereas in fact she was looking over the top of the paper, toward nothing but the metal gate of the car, and continuing to marvel, distastefully, over Mrs. von Erhard’s conversation.
“A publicity stunt!” she muttered, louder than her poor hearing let her realize.
The elevator operator just smiled, but Chip—hearing the remark, and seeing the back of Betty’s head shake from side to side while she seemed to be reading about Harris’s hunt for that awful hick kid—was prompted to remember Max Stanwick’s recent remark to Spilkes: I invented Mrs. Shepard. Trying to suppress his excitement, he managed to put two and two together and come up with three grand—the salary he’d be able to command from Cutaway once he told Jimmy Gordon this whole “search” was a big con designed to increase the circulation of his dying rival.