Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

Detectives from Headquarters

And now I am to tell of the strange dramatic episode that didn’t get into the newspapers, that is for the first time here told in print.

Police Chief Roger O’Mara was persona non grata in that office or any other post to Euge O’Neal, editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch.

O’Neal was pacing his sanctum dictating to his young secretary a fierce philippic against the Pittsburgh police department and O’Mara especially, because of the failure to run down the barbarous plunderers of the Green farmhouse.

He was accusing the department and its chief of stupidity, laxity, carelessness, slovenliness of method, misdirection and all around incompetence.

“Lord, Mr. O’Neal,” commented the secretary, “you are fairly taking the hide off O’Mara!”

“Well, by heavens,” replied the editor to the young man, “they should have the hide taken off them. Those damn fiends — especially that little devil who thought of putting a red-hot poker to the bare flesh of that old woman — are at large in this town. There’s no doubt of it. And this dumb department can’t lay their hands on them! It’s absurd. An intelligent roundup would be bound to do it.”

“I guess they are a bunch of flatheads all right,” said the secretary in smiling agreement.

“Worse than that,” commented O’Neal. “Well, now let’s see... er... what was that last sentence?”

“Why,” answered the secretary, “it was—”

He got no further.

Two stalwart men, entirely unannounced, made their appearance in the doorway of the editor’s office. As they entered, one in a calm, casual way drew a pistol. As he did so he said:

“We are detectives from headquarters, Mr. O’Neal.”

The editor stared at man and pistol, and his face flushed.

“If that big, stuff shirt O’Mara has sent you up here to intimidate me, to keep me from giving him another blast, you can go back and—”

“We’re not here for anything like that,” protested the officer, but as he spoke he and his colleague advanced further into the room.

“Going to arrest me for criminal libel at pistol point?” sneered O’Neal. “You’d best be about your business of grabbing those crooks who tortured old Mrs. Green.”

“That,” said the second man, “is exactly what we’ve come here to do.”

Morris Confesses

And he suddenly plunged forward and gripped the little secretary by the throat while he called to his comrade:

“Frisk the dirty little rat, Jim, and see if he’s got a gun on him!”

“What the devil has young Morris done to make you handle him like that?” demanded O’Neal.

“Young Morris,” said the first man, “Jim,” after he thoroughly rifled the pinioned secretary’s pockets and found no weapon, “is the heartless young devil who burned Mrs. Green’s feet!”

At first O’Neal roared that he didn’t believe it. He saw in the episode a put up job by O’Mara to annoy him and make him look ridiculous. And he threatened to bring down every law of reprisal in the land on the head of the police chief of Pittsburgh.

But when the detectives ripped from an inside pocket of Charley Morris one of the five hundred-dollar bonds stolen from the Green home and then and there in sight and hearing of O’Neal began shaking a complete confession out of the white, whimpering and trembling secretary, the editor did the only thing left for him to do — he flopped back into his big, revolving chair and watched and listened in dum-founded silence.

“We got the first of the gang three days ago, Mr. O’Neal,” volunteered one of the detectives as he and his colleagues were about to depart with the handcuffed, sobbing Morris between them.

Jimmy, the Bar Fly

“We had to keep it quiet till we made him come through with the names of the others. We’ve got all five bagged, counting this dog here now. There’s only a woman left to take up, and we know where she is and she can’t get away from us.”

O’Neal stared at the slightly built, curly-haired, pale-eyed young Morris.

“And you,” the astonished man said, “you little bowing and scraping, soft-voiced, mincing creature, you were the fiend that put the hot iron to that old woman’s bare flesh? I can’t — by God, I can’t make it out!”

“This fellow was the leader of the outfit,” said the detectives. “The woman and him schemed out the whole job.”

The first clew to the farmhouse torturers came out of a Pittsburgh saloon. A sharp-witted bartender passed it to a precinct detective and started the machinery that was to bag the entire outfit of crooks.

It may be said here that they were all amateurs. None had ever come into the hands of the police before. All the men in the execution of the plot, excepting young Morris, were perennially hard-up alcoholics, men who earned a dollar here and there, borrowed one elsewhere, somehow scraped up the prices for drinks.