That part of the plan worked perfectly. Monk and Larry Coster pulled up in a cab right on time. They had another man with them, but it wasn’t Leon Schell. Monk was carrying a slightly oversized attache case, of dark brown leather. They hurried down the subway steps and waited for me on the halfway landing, out of sight of the street. Monk handed me the attache case and told me to follow Pete, the third man, wherever he went, and not to talk to any of the three of them for any reason. We separated, and I tagged along after Pete. It was easy to figure out what his part was. He was the steerer for the fence. If anything did go wrong they knew he couldn’t tell the cops anything because he really didn’t know what it was all about; and he would save the fence from any embarrassment of publicly meeting with known jewel thieves. My part was supposed to be the hot seat — if the cops grabbed me they’d just throw me on the griddle and keep turning me over until I was one well done hamburger.
We rode downtown on the subway and I saw three of my men in the same car — it was pretty crowded, even at that time of day. When we got off at Radio City I knew they were heading for the jewelry center in the city, and flashed signals for them to grab Pete and get him out of the way and to scare off Monk and Larry Coster. When I got upstairs and saw I was clear of them I hailed a cab and had him run me over to Grand Central Station. We had only gone a block when a detective cruiser fell in right behind the cab as an escort — the cops must have been using walkie-talkie radios. When I got to the station they piled out of their car and fell in place around me as I headed for the elevator to ride up to the floor our special office was on. Insurance companies maintain special security offices at all railroad stations and airline terminals for the use of jewelry salesmen and carriers. If they ever need to leave any valuables in a safe place overnight or longer the facilities are always available to them. The one in Grand Central is rather large — three big rooms with four armed guards always in attendance. Ten minutes after I get there the place was swarming with people. The president of our insurance company, along with his top brass, more than a dozen detectives, from Assistant Chief Inspector O’Leary down through Inspectors, Captains, and Lieutenants, a couple of Assistant District Attorneys, and some of my own men.
We were naturally anxious to see what we had in the attache case and tried to open it in a hurry, but that didn’t prove easy. Under the brown leather the entire case was made of a high grade steel. The two locks at either end looked ordinary enough but they were far from ordinary. I’m no lock expert, but I’d never seen finer ones in my life. One of the detectives knew a locksmith with a shop nearby, on Third Avenue. He went out and brought him back in fifteen minutes. That guy tried the locks for a half hour before he finally threw down his tools in disgust.
“I never seen nothin’ that tough to open,” he said. “The only thing I can do is use diamond pointed drills on them.”
When he started on the locks an idea started to form in my mind — I thought I might be able to use these locks somehow to help snare Leon Schell. The idea wasn’t clear yet, but I didn’t want the locks damaged.
“No,” I told him. “Is there anyone you know who’s a specialist at something like this. Someone who could get them open without damaging them?”
He did know of a specialist, probably the top man in the whole field. According to him this man could open locked chests and vaults even in sunken ships. His place of business was up in Harlem, so Inspector O’Leary called the Harlem Precinct and told them to pick this man up and run him down to us in a radio car. While we waited you could feel the tension building up in the room.
“I’m an old Navy man myself,” Inspector O’Leary announced. “Just get me a bigger hammer and I’ll open the damn thing up.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Inspector O’Leary is a big, brawny Irishman. I don’t know how old he is, but his hair is jet black, despite the wrinkles in his face. His manner is pleasant, but gruff. His eyes are truly remarkable, they’re sky blue but as hard and penetrating as chipped steel. He could look right through you. He had the reputation of being a good friend but a terrible man to cross, and I think that this reputation was deserved, because I noticed that all his subordinates, even the men only a rank under him, gave him a lot of respect.
He asked me why I insisted on not damaging the locks or the case, so I told him how I thought I could use the case to wrap up Leon Schell — if I could get to him. His eyes got a little twinkle in them, they looked almost human, and he nodded his approval.
“It will be dangerous, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “But you’ve done wonders on this case so far. If the stuff is in that bag I’ll say go ahead if you’re sure you know what you’re doing.”
The master locksmith came in then, and he was really a character. He was over sixty with a shiny bald head fringed with gray tuft, and a happy, absolutely beaming smile. Right then he was the only happy guy in the room. I told him what we wanted and he went to work like a surgeon performing a delicate brain operation. While he worked over the locks he sang almost continually — German lieder, Italian and French arias, American and Argentine cowboy songs, anything and everything. In between he told us about Bach and Mozart and Wagner while we were biting our nails. He got the first one open in about forty minutes, then started on the other one.
“Now it will be quicker,” he said. “I think I know who made this case — there is only one man I know of and he died five years ago. He was a true craftsman, a shopkeeper in Dusseldorf, Germany. Nobody else could make work like this.”
I wondered how I could tie that to Leon Schell, probably with a little digging it wouldn’t be too hard. But it wasn’t enough.
When he finally got the other lock open and threw back the lid of the case I breathed a long sigh of relief. It was almost all there, dazzling in its massed brilliance. By then several officials of the jewelry firm that was robbed were there. They had a check list and started taking an inventory of what we had. Except for a few watches and some smaller stones we had the whole thing.
The locksmith was beaming more than ever and all ready to break into a song, so I told him what I wanted him to do in a hurry, and he went back to work. I had sent out for some fake jewelry to a firm which specialized in stuff like that and they had sent quite a bit of it down to us. When the attache case was ready I started packing it with the false glassware. This stuff wasn’t junk though, it was so good only an expert would be able to spot it as phoney — an expert like Leon Schell. To make it look as good as I could I asked for and got the diamond studded watches back from the jewelry firm officials and put them back in the case the way they were. Then the locksmith carefully closed the case and locked both of the locks again. I was all ready to start what I had to do. I told my men to get back to our office and wait there, then started out with the attache case in my right hand. Hardly anyone noticed me, but I did see Inspector O’Leary watching me with those cold blue eyes. He only nodded to me.
I went down in the elevator to the main floor, walked through the terminal until I came to a row of public lockers, slid a dime in the slot and put the attache case in and closed and locked the door, just as I told Monk a few hours later. Only I didn’t mail myself the key, that was still in my pocket. I only needed one more thing. I cabbed down to Radio Row on Cortland Street to see a friend of mine who ran an electronics parts store and asked him if he could rig up one of the new miniature recording machines with the tape in a cartridge so that I could conceal it on my body. He thought he could and promised to have it ready in a couple of hours.