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“I’ve got Dad’s check. I’ll buy it.”
“How about that one?” a girl cried, and they gathered around it, two of them plopping down on the bench, throwing open the key lid, and pounding out a ragtime duet.
The salesman kept saying, “Not for sale. Not for sale,” and when he had at last showed the buoyant mob out the door, he discovered that the tall golden-haired gentleman hoping to buy a piano for his niece had slipped away in the confusion.
Good riddance, he thought, and locked the door.
* * *
“Nicely done,” Isaac Bell told the Los Angeles field office apprentices and secretaries and their girlfriends and boyfriends. “You were thoroughly authentic ‘gilded youth’ on a lark. That poor salesman never knew what hit him.”
“Did you find what you were looking for, Mr. Bell?”
All eyes locked on the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s legendary chief investigator.
“With your help, I found a letter in his desk and a business card. The Leipzig Organ and Piano Company is represented by a traveling man named Fritz Wunderlich who collects his mail in Denver at the Brown Palace Hotel.”
* * *
Isaac Bell telegraphed Van Dorn field offices around the country to cover Leipzig’s other piano shops to see what they could pick up. Those large enough to maintain apprentices would instruct them to pretend to be shopping on behalf of their school or church. Agents in smaller one-and two-man outfits would shop, as Bell had, for nieces and daughters.
Bell himself boarded the flyer to Salt Lake City, changed trains a day later to the Overland Limited, arrived in Denver early the next morning, and walked the short distance up Broadway to the Brown Palace Hotel, a favorite haunt. He knocked on a door just inside the main entrance. Omar P. Armstrong, the Brown Palace’s managing partner, invited him to breakfast.
As they walked across a vast marble and cast-iron atrium lobby where tier upon tier of balconies soared to a skylight one hundred feet above the carpet, Bell asked, “Have you ever met a salesman named Fritz Wunderlich?”
“Fritz? Of course.”
Bell had journeyed to Denver expecting no less. Omar P. Armstrong knew everyone worth knowing west of the Mississippi. “Have you seen him lately?”
“He’s here every two or three weeks.”
“What’s he like?”
“Pleasant enough fellow,” Armstrong replied with a neutral smile.
Isaac Bell was fully aware that any man who managed a grand hotel had to be as observant as a whale-ship lookout and as discreet as the madam of a first-class bordello. Omar’s studiedly disinterested expression said that if Isaac Bell wished to inquire about Brown Palace guests but still be known as an innocent insurance executive, that was Bell’s business but Omar P. Armstrong wasn’t born yesterday.
“Have you known him long?”
“If you are interested in Herr Wunderlich, why not ask his friends?”
They paused in the entrance to the dining room. The Brown Palace’s guests were breakfasting at tables set with snowy linen, gleaming silver, and fine china. Omar nodded in the direction that Bell suspected he would. At a table placed in the alcove of a tall window, three well-dressed, barbershop-pinked salesmen were in animated conversation.
“If you like, I can introduce you.”
Bell grinned. “Did you ever meet a drummer who needed an introduction?”
He walked straight to the salesmen’s table. “Morning, gents. Isaac Bell. Insurance. May I join you?”
They took in his hand-tailored suit, polished boots, and confident smile.
“Sit down, brother. Sit down. Waiter! Coffee for Mr. Bell — or something a mite stronger, if you’re so inclined.”
“Coffee will be fine. Long day ahead.”
They shook hands around and introduced themselves, a rep for the Gillette Safety Razor Company, a Locomobile salesman, and a traveler in the cereal line. The Locomobile man said, “Mr. Bell, stop me if I’m wrong, but don’t you drive a Locomobile?”
“I thought I recognized you, Jake,” said Bell. “We met in Bridgeport when I was picking her up at the factory.”
