TAKE one millionaire fifty times over; his wife, a former member of the Follies; an Italian baritone; and plenty of bitterness. Mix them up in the divorce courts at a time when news is so scarce that even such prosaic stories as the establishment of a Federal Bureau for the Investigation of Fraudulent Mining Stocks is being featured on the front page, and you get some highly sensational reading, particularly when photographs galore are used.
The millionaire in the case was Reggie van Twillingham. He was forty years of age, handsome and aristocratic. He lived on fashionable Astor Street, Chicago.
The lady in the case was Dolly van Twillingham. She was golden-haired and twenty-three. She too lived on Astor Street, in the van Twillingham mansion.
The Italian baritone was Leon Spanginelli. He had limpid brown eyes, black hair which he combed back from his forehead, and a jet-black mustache with waxed ends.
Reggie van Twillingham’s charges were sensational enough, Heaven knows, but the counter-charges of Dolly van Twillingham against her spouse were even more so.
Reggie charged Dolly with holding rendezvous at various times with the fascinating Spanginelli, and furthermore incorporated in his bill of divorce copies of various alleged business letters from firms dealing in such things as vacuum cleaners, fourteen-tube radios, Rolls-Royces, fur coats and other articles of interest only to the lady of the house. He charged, in fact, that these letterheads had been secured through devious means by the fascinating Spanginelli, and that the apparently harmless and businesslike communications typed beneath them were nothing more than code messages in which, when the typewritten letters comprising the prosaic words “Dear Madam,” or “Dear Mrs. van Twillingham,” were meticulously spaced out from each other upon the machine, always conveyed the important tidings “Be ready to see me at the usual place, the usual hour”; and in which, when the typewritten letters comprising the equally prosaic signatures, “American Vacuum Cleaner Co.,” “Television Electric Company,” “Maskowski and Company, Furriers,” so on and et cetera, were likewise meticulously spaced out from each other, invariably meant, “I cannot be at the appointed place. Watch for next communication.”
Dolly’s lawyers, however, made even more sensational charges against Reggie than that of receiving code messages through spaced-out typewritten words in letters from attractive members of the opposite sex. On top of charging that Reggie was possessed of incipient paranoiacal delusions, their specific citation was that he had rigged up in his library, on the pretext of catching a burglar, a most fiendish apparatus. This apparatus consisted of a sawed-off shotgun, affixed by wire to one of the upper corners of the tall mahogany bookcase, and pointing directly at the front of the safe. This sawed-off shotgun, with hammer cocked, was intended to be discharged by the springing together of the jaws of a small opened steel fox-trap screwed to its wooden stock, and wired to its trigger, which trap in turn was to be sprung by the impingement of any human foot against any of several threads stretched tightly across the room, a few inches from the floor. The fiendish nature of the device was effectively demonstrated by the manner in which it shot the boudoir cap neatly off of Dolly’s curl-papered head when she went downstairs in the night to get from the family safe her valuable bottle of imported French wrinkle-eradicator. In fact, Dolly’s lawyers claimed that Reggie van Twillingham’s alleged “man-trap” was nothing else but a diabolic device to rid himself of Dolly.
Thus, from the badly scrambled affairs of the van Twillingham’s, Reggie and Dolly, arose a new term in yellow journalism, namely — “Man-Trap” — signifying a device which should mean hasty extermination to any enterprising cracksman who might endeavor to repeat the twice successful operation of cracking Reggie van Twillingham’s library safe.
All of which would appear to have little or no connection with Clifford Carson whom we last left journeying to the offices of his attorney, Ramsey Gordon, nor with his problem involving a man who once wore on his prison jacket the number 9317, much less any connection with one Mr. J. Jennings who, by pawning in Chinatown his Ring of the Seven-and-Seventy Sons for twice as much as any white man in the world would loan him on it, was inaugurating a truly efficient search about Chicago’s highways and byways for an Indian tiger-snake.
But life is much like the plot of a novel, and so we shall see what we shall see!