***The Long Cold Trail- Nat Cutler, Private Detective -With Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man In Mind  

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Nat Cutler, the old-time private from our town, North Adamsville, who died a few years back, maybe 2007 or 2008 down in his late wife’s family estate on Martha’s Vineyard, had by all accounts never been much of a detective, never made the grade before he met and married Nan Cutler (nee Turner) and her dough (that dough from Turner Textiles, now dissolved into Packard Industries, the ones that used to make all the towels and bedding). By the way nobody, nobody that I recall but I only knew him when he was older so maybe there was something to the story, called Nat Nathaniel since his mother had called him that in the singsong swamp Yankee manner that she had and the kids, the Irish blarney kids, in the old North Adamsville neighborhood used to taunt him mercilessly about that mimicking her voice. So Nat is all he would answer to as he made clear to Nan from the start and who had respected his wishes except when she wanted to taunt him for some reason, taunt him for some mother-bent reason, for a while shortly after they were married but she gave it up after while once he put the freeze on about it. That early marriage time, the time I am talking about, the time of the time of the locally famous Winot case, the time before my time in the old neighborhood was way back in the 1940s when because of her dough, her family’s dough really, Nat, strictly from hunger like those blarney Irish kids in the neighborhood would hold his rage in when she got her taunting habits on.      

So Nat had that hard fact name painted neatly in big black letters, Nat Cutler, Private Detective, on the front door of the first office he opened over on the fifth floor of the old Squires Building in downtown North Adamsville (the downtown strangely called going “up the Downs’ since time immemorial although nobody, nobody alive anyway knew where the expression came from but all we locals used it, still do from what I heard when I talk to somebody from the old neighborhood or they come out to see me). Nat had it painted as some expense to himself just like that after he decided that being a gumshoe, decided that he wanted to take on other people’s troubles for a living was what he was built to do.

Some old-timers who knew him before he was a gentleman detective after he married Nan’s money, knew him before he was nothing but a scruffy guy out of the Army with no trade at hand and no prospects either say he came to that sleuthing decision by default. He had gone into the Army just out of high school during World War II when the military was eating up men and material at a prestigious rate and it was either join or be drafted and that decision had weighted heavily on his head before he headed to the recruiting station. He had not distinguished himself as a grunt, a profession not easily transferable to civilian life in any case. Had tried to get on the regular police force in town after the war but they were selecting from among the plethora of ex-MPs at the time. Tried the granite quarries that originally made the town famous long ago in the founders’ time. Tried factory work, work as a second shift short order cook, dishwasher, and about six other jobs without much success or with no prospects. If there was one thing Nat had going for him was his keen sense of looking out for prospects. So maybe those old-timers were right, maybe not.

That Squires Building where Nat’s first office was located by the way had already long before seen better days in the late 1950s when I first when there with my mother in order for her to hock something so we could eat in one of the pawnshops that helped fill the floors above ground level hash house restaurant so I think that back in the 1940s, after the war, when Nat opened up for business it probably wasn’t much better. But thinking about it now about a half century later guys starting out in Nat’s kind of work, or repo men, pawnbrokers, failed dentists, gypsy fortune-tellers, slick insurance salesmen, quack chiropractors with their stones and broken bones were just the kind of people who needed the Squire Building to ply their trades. Cheap rent, “no front” places where the landlord didn’t do anything to keep the place up beyond the loose building code basics but also didn’t hassle you until you got a few months behind in the rent.  Yeah, that “no front” part was right, Jesus, I remember those pawnshops smelling of anxious sweat from people desperate for a few bucks to try to turn  their family fortunes around like my late mother. I remember all the offices looked the same, glass-fronted doors with the scrolled name of the business in big black letters (Nat’s like I said done in nice italics) so no one would mistake say a private eye place for the gypsy fortune-teller. All had front foyers, waiting rooms I guess you would call them with two or three seen-better-days chairs and an end table with what always seemed like last year’s magazines displayed on it, although probably not too many people when they entered these offices wound up waiting all that long for whatever service was being plied. Remembered a few of the offices with their old beat up desks, bent hat racks, and tinny file cabinets which always had a layer of dust on top that seemed to have settled in for good. Remember too smells, that PineSol smell from quickly and sloppily mopped hallway floors, the smell of some powerful disinfectant in the bathrooms like maybe the local winos and junkies had made a habit of using the facilities and some forlorn janitor had tried to eliminate that stink with whatever he could find, and the smell of cheap cigars, cigars reflecting that the smoker saw himself as a man of substance, a man who could smoke cigars, cheap or not, whether he could pay the office rent or not.

So the Squires Building was built for a guy like Nat Cutler to ply his trade, a guy who never made much of a detective then, had never made the grade. Had never been my idea of a shamus, a guy tilting after windmills, a guy with a finely-honed code of honor that he applied as best he could through thin and thin, a guy like Philip Marlowe who I watched at the movies a couple of times when I got older and they were having black and white film retrospectives over in Harvard Square and Bogie was the king hell king of the Marlowes. Yeah, Marlowe, intrepidly and doggedly trying to take down some punk bad guy, some gangster, a guy who had the hook, was working his angles on a Mayfair swell’s daughters out on the coast, out in Los Angeles before it got too big and crowded and nobody cared anymore about some old-fashioned sacred code of honor. Marlowe taking it on the chin, ready to take a slug if necessary for the good of the cause, just so that swell, that old guy who represented something in Marlowe’s sense of the world   could sleep the sleep of the just before he slipped beyond this world.

Or maybe a private eye like Sam Spade who they showed in that same retrospective, I guess it was a Bogie retrospective now that I think about the matter, who had an office in some San Francisco low-rent district just like Nat (I remember commenting to my date later over drink that Sam’s office, except he had a partner although not for long, looked like the offices over in the Squires Building) but who battled the demons anyway, battled the demons and some femme fatale who had, or thought she had, her hooks into him. Had him looking both ways at once. Here’s the beauty of Sam though he said, in the end, he had to send the dame over, maybe put her pretty little neck in a noose for all the murder and mayhem she caused over some damn bird, some stuff of dreams idea that went awry when her wanting habits got too big for  her eyes. And the best part of his reasoning was that he had to do it for professional reasons, to protect the shamus brotherhood, since that fetching dame had iced his partner. And like the guy or not you had to do something about that. Beautiful. 

Hell, even a jokey gumshoe like that dainty Nick Charles (back in the neighborhood we would call a guy like Nick “light on his feet,” wife or no wife as a front but now that we know better we would say he was gay) who landed into dough, his Nora’s dough (from lumber out West). Nick, who had come from cheap street, come out of the Five Points projects, come from the back alleys had turned himself into a gentleman detective with all the trimmings when he landed Nora and she made him what he was when he cracked that famous Thin Man case and he lived off of that reputation for a long time. Somebody told me once, somebody from the old neighborhood who knew Nat when he was from jump street “up the Downs” that Nat, Nat before he met and married Nan and her dough watched every Nick and Nora Charles (and Asta too) Thin Man film Hollywood put out over at the Strand theater, more than once. And that person thought that those viewings were important to Nat’s development as a detective, or at least how to sniff out a dame with dough in order to get onto easy street. Always keeping the prospects in front of him. I don’t know if watching fictional characters on film can serve as some kind of “self-help” course of study in becoming a detective or a gold digger, but as I will tell you below I think that guy might have been on to a little of what Nat was about, just a little.       

Down on “cheap street” though, just like any detective working the back alleys looking for work in a small town where not much goes on, nothing the real police can’t handle, Nat took what he could get in order to keep that lenient but not forever patient landlord from the door when he got a few months behind in the office rent. Maybe taking a couple of odd cases, missing person cases, usually some woe-begotten missing husband who took off with the dough or some dame for parts unknown, or both, and not a husband looking for some wayward wife, for short money. Short money in those days being about twenty-dollars a day and expenses and usually the bitch came over the expenses. You know why did you spend six dollars to fill up the tank of the car with gas (yeah, it has been a while since Nat roamed the streets looking for some stiff in his old second-hand Hudson), or why did you have to slip the Motor Vehicle girl five for that license number, or some hotel dick, private too, usually an ex-cop though, a ten to get access to some love-nest room on the 12^th floor when they guy was shacked up with some paramour, stuff like that. Strictly coffee and crullers stuff, not the stuff of detective novels or big black and white screen Sir Galahad-type adventures.

One time Nat, sitting in the now long-gone Red Feather where every guy in the old neighborhood drank his few (no ladies allowed in those days except when accompanied by a guy), told my uncle, Fred Jackman, about one of his cases to show what he was up against starting out, starting out with plenty of other guys trying the same hustle when there wasn’t enough work to go around and a guy like Nat was desperate not to go back to washing dishes or something. My uncle, a regular cop used to laugh at Nat in those days for being such a snook (his word) for taking on other people’s troubles for no dough and worse, no pension. A woman, Audrey I think he said her first name was, no last name was looking for her husband. Nat told my uncle he had some ethical duty not to give last names. My uncle laughed at that one too since he knew exactly who the Audrey was once Nat described the situation having been called to her residence a few times for on some abusive husband matters. Go figure. So Audrey was looking for her husband, Stan, who had run off with the family bank account (substantial by the standards of the day, the 1940s day, since he ran a barber shop and every guy needed a haircut and shave if he had two quarters to rub together even during the Depression and World War II) and she wanted him back under any circumstances. The husband, as Nat found out when Audrey told him that Stan hung out at Jimmy’s Grille to do his drinking, had run away with some young ravishing blonde, some tramp he met over at some tavern around the docks in East Adamsville as Nat found out after checking out the Jimmy’s lead.   Audrey still wanted him back, where would she go, what would she do without him, what had happened in the time since they were young and so in love Nat said she told him plaintively. He never found Stan  once the young blonde lead proved to run into dead end in Jersey City (the blonde turned out to be married, very married to a bruiser of a husband, who threatened to kill Stan when they showed up at his door after all the money ran out).  But Audrey never paid him either except a little something in trade which given her talents in the bedroom were more memorable than the money would have been (and also made him wonder why unless that blonde was dynamite or maybe just because she was young he had left home at all). Nat had had a hard time breaking it off once Audrey wanted him to live with her and while she was good under the satin sheets he could see that she was strictly from cheap street. Yeah, that and so much for what would she do without Stan when she saw Nat as a meal ticket. Women.

I don’t remember where I heard this Nat story although I know it was not from my uncle but another time when Nat was out on the coast.  Bill Marlowe, the low profile private investigator brother of the famous detective, who worked for International Operatives, the big detective agency out there, was heading out of town put him onto something, a routine matter according to the in-take file but some quick dough. (Bill heading out of his slumming mean streets of Los Angeles which he knew like the back of his hand as some guy mentioned who later wrote about his brother.). Bill and Nat had known each other in the Army during the war, were demobilized together, spent a crazy week in New York City after that lapping up booze and women, and after settling down a little had both taken a couple of private investigation correspondence courses together (you know those schools that are listed on matchbook covers, or used to be) on the GI Bill and when Bill drifted west they kept in touch. One day an old guy, John Wise, an old-time LA hotshot who made millions when the LaBrea pits came cruising in with we-will-take-all-you-have oil just as formerly hungry, war-weary America fell in heads-over-heels love with the automobile, sent his lawyer into Bill’s  agency to grab their services on a missing husband case. Big money or no the old guy whose daughter’s husband was the missing party wanted the hush put on the case, didn’t want any serious digging around either so that the other Mayfair swells wouldn’t get wind of the possible scandal and snicker when the old man and entourage arrived at the Saturday night country club dance. The agency did not take the case since they did not want their hands tied by the old man’s restrictions. Still the old man wanted something done and the lawyer offered the job to Bill on a free-lance basis. He declined since he had another case, the Whelan kidnap case as it turned out up in Frisco, case that made his career.    

So Bill put Nat on to the missing husband case. The story was that this rough-hewn guy, Buzz Williams (aren’t all those La-La Land he-men named Buzz or something like that), a guy who had been around the block, a guy who was looking for the main chance if there were not too many onerous conditions attached, was “connected,” not mob connected but connected all over Hollywood had married the old man’s high society dame of a daughter, Laura, when she was wearing “Hollywood-connected” guys wanting habits that week. Well, this Laura proved to be too high maintenance for Buzz, wouldn’t let him her play toy out of her sight, forced him to the foolish country club circuit and the Malibu social circuit, worse, would not let him have his girlfriends, booze and horses, and he took a powder. Nat wore out plenty of shoe leather and tanks of gasoline running down going nowhere leads. (In this case it was the butler, who took care of the old man’s household budget where Nat’s pay was coming from, who kicked about the gas, and who wouldn’t pay for the ten buck to pay off the Hollywood lot guard to get into one studio. See Nat didn’t know, was clueless that out on the coast you had to take care of the butler with a weekly ten to avoid those hassles. Well, live and learn.)

Here is where Nat got waylaid. Every time he had a lead of Buzz’s whereabouts he was frozen out. Sure, half of Hollywood knew where he was, shacked up in Venice Beach with, Clara, Laura’s younger sister who had had a very sympathetic ear one night when Buzz was complaining about how Laura hemmed him in. Had been more than glad to spite older sister Laura who had hemmed her in, would not take her to the casinos and cabarets so she could be seen. Had liked that Buzz had given her some dope (some “snow” Nat said) to loosen things up. Had liked that he was trophy good-looking too to add to her collection. But most of all she went down on him because she was nineteen and crazy to be a Hollywood starlet and not the heiress to some funky old oil fortune. But here is where being connected really counted, the Hollywood tribe gathered around one of its own, put their own big hush on the matter. Nat couldn’t even get up the driveways, couldn’t get passed the estate guards, worse, and could not get to the maids and chauffeurs, usually a good source for greased palm information, who were tight-lipped, gave Nat zip, nada.     

Nat never found Buzz either (one of the old-timers around town who knew Nat in his dishwasher days told me once that Nat’s track record for missing persons was about zero for something), never found the dame, that high strung daughter, Clara, who left Buzz after she was done with Hollywood hunk collecting. She had changed her name to Clarissa Wills in order to pursue that starlet career that Buzz had opened for her with his introduction. Laura, didn’t care anyway since she subsequently was running around with Eddie Mars the high roller gangster casino owner who ran most of the rackets on the West Coast, or had his fingers in them, when “connected” gangsters became her obsession of the week.

Here is where Nat did turn up gold though. The old man, old man Wise, who had foot the detective bill without a murmur took a shine to Nat, liked Nat’s sucking up to him, brown-nosing him, talking about the detective business and its endless stories (almost all made up except parts of the Audrey-Stan missing person’s case with not a word about not finding Stan although plenty about those satin sheets) while drinking the old man’s high-shelf scotch and hired him on as a companion.  (Although Nat never did get his full pay for services rendered on the missing person case due to the maneuvering of the butler). But a year or so later the old man died leaving all his dough to that high-roller daughter Laura who eventually got around to divorcing the missing Buzz, or got an annulment when he never showed up again, nor did Clara who went on to a minor career in the film industry, married Eddie and so that old money and new money mixed like oil and water. Made a poor mix at least for poor Eddie who was found face down in some LA arroyo after some screwed up drug deal went wrong in Mexico. Eddie took the “hit” and the black widow spider Laura grabbed everything. Landed on her feet and never looked back.     

When there wasn’t that ill-fated missing persons work to do which he liked most Nat would lower himself (that is how he put it to my uncle one night) and maybe do some bedroom snooping when times were tough although like every private eye, shamus, gumshoe or whatever you call a guy who works for chump change and expenses to take on other people’s troubles and bumps and bruises too Nat shied away from such work thinking like some raw kid reading a pulp detective novel that such work was beneath him. In those days, although it seems silly now, now that there is no-fault divorce in lots of places and the selling of compromising photos for blackmail or a for profit angle showing the doings of the love couple wouldn’t faze anybody who had been on the Internet sex sites, snooping around bedrooms then was to get grounds for a divorce, to set up a proof positive for an open and shut adultery case and maybe a quick settlement out of court, usually between a wife and the philandering husband. At least that is what Nat saw as the motive when he would get the frantic call to do the dirty work. The stealthy sneaking up back stairs courtesy of some house shadow private dick whom he would give ten bucks to in order to clear the path for him to take photos undisturbed. One time, Jesus, at some motel, hotel, no-tell place the house dick wanted some photographs, probably to keep in his office for viewing after- hours Nat thought when he got that request. And of course the ten bucks. Who knows maybe the guy wanted to sell in the smutty back street markets in those days when grainy black and whites were all you could get.   

Nat told me, told me when I came of age, came of age to do work on some stories about the old-timers in town and what they did after the war, and how they made out, when he had pretty much retired from even being a gentlemen detective, that sure there were funny moments, moments when he snapped a few photos of the unlucky pair in the raw. Maybe she was going down on him or he was wearing a mask and doing some whipsaw action on her ass. You never know what turns a guy or gal on, all you know is whatever they want they are not getting at home and hence the call.  Sometimes, and you would think that this not have been in the late 1940s but would have been in the 1960s when I was growing up when all things of India like sitars and Shiva were cool but Nat said he observed odd-ball positions (his term) back then, he would see him or her doing something out of the Kama Sutra but certainly not acknowledged as right conduct in missionary position and nothing else American times. At least that was the spiel for public consumption back in the red scare Cold War night but now know that every form of human body intercourse had been practiced and widely so. 

A couple of times Nat said he got lucky and turned up some dame who did not want to be turned up, usually married to some dough, maybe some prominent family young daughter, one time a hooker, a street hooker who was on probation on a drug-related charge and could not take the time if her name cropped up in some divorce proceedings, gave him her favors for the negatives. Mainly it was following unsuspecting couples, from dinner or a barroom, something like that, a couple just trying to create some love-nest, have a few private minutes together without troubling to safeguard against some snoop, some low-life snoop as he was called more than once. He never told Nan that part of the business and she probably would not have believed him anyway since her image of a detective, and of her trophy detective, was also formed from wind-mill chasing P.I. books and get-the-bad guys-movies.

Here is a funny thing though, according to Nat. Usually everybody thinks that every serious criminal case, you know, murder, armed robbery, kidnappings automatically get solved, or not solved, by the public service coppers, the guys in blue. But more than a couple of times he fell into a couple of cases that his pal, his friend from boyhood days, his old corner boy days. Lieutenant Pete Murphy (who in the old neighborhood before they became fast friends used to taunt him with that Nathaniel business just like all the other heathen Irish kids), would throw his way when the regular police, what Pete when he wanted to badger Nat called the “real cops” were ready to throw the thing into the cold files but some victim or survivor wanted some “justice” and had some dough and time to give to further efforts. That was how Nat had met Nan, Nancy Turner, his wife after she had asked for help from Detective Pete Murphy to find somebody who could work on the case they, the Clintonville Police, in the town just over the line from North Adamsville,  were about to close. A case involving some stolen family jewels, diamonds, emeralds and such that today would be in a vault sealed with seven seals  but back then in small town America just left around, that had been heisted from the high-rise apartment when she was living. The jewels never turned up on the market, no ransom was ever asked and after a while, after some regular police effort to accommodate a daughter of a big wheel father, Charles Turner, in the textile industries that employed many Clintonville and Adamsville fathers, the leads dried up. The police assumed that the merchandise had been cut up and sold as smaller pieces or some private collector purchased the stuff at a discount and that person was keeping the goods in that recommended vault sealed with seven seals.

Enter Nat at twenty-five a day and expenses who figured to work the case for a month or two to get him even with room rent and to keep the landlord of the office space he was occupying in the Squires Building away from his door and then call it quits, tell Nan the thing was dead, very dead. He figured that he could razzle-dazzle her with a few visits to pawnshops (some right down the hall in his building and which I startled him with when I could name a couple of them) as if the thieves were going to go beggar thy hand to some cut-rate place like that (unless, like in the big cities, the pawnbroker was also hustling as a “fence”). Nat figured to make sure he got some expense money time as well by grabbing some slender leads linked to New York City (a natural place to unload jewelry and other items), maybe Miami. In any case no heavy lifting and maybe some fun along the way. What the hell most cold cases once they hit that locale never get solved so he was not going to sweat a little padding the account.   

 

As things worked out Nat and Nan got along pretty well, wound up talking to each other every day, not always about the case, seemed to have a few things in common like that love of old-time black and white films, especially romantic comedies and hard-boil detective films which is what Nan came to think about Nat as, a hard-boiled detective ready to chase windmills like Bogie or Nick and Nora Charles. So one night, after a few drinks, and a few Nat detective stories (all made up except part of that Buzz Williams case, the part about the Hollywood connections to show that he was not some small time rube, that he mixed with high society as well as low) they tumbled a couple of her satin sheets, did that often enough so that they were married after a couple of months. He never found the jewelry, truthfully never did much looking once he saw he had a sway over Nan, but he hit pay- dirt so what the hell. Funny even though Nat never came close to finding the stolen jewels Nan did not bat an eyelash over the fact and, get this,      she though he was the world’s greatest detective, thought he could solve anything.

Of course Nat in his bedtime satin sheets moments would regal her with some steamy tales that he mainly made up, or embellished like the Buzz case where he practically saved Old Man Wise from being taken by some con artists and gangsters whereas all he did was drink the old man’s scotch, with water chaser, and smoke his high-grade Cuban cigars for about a year. To hear him tell the tale he was the one who should have actually got the credit for getting Eddie Mars off the streets of Los Angeles not some contract “hit-man.” And those tales were only the half of it because then he would embellish all the various ways that he helped the detection business by introducing this or that technique, all baloney if any real private eye, or even close reader of detective novels heard him spin his words. But Nan, gullible Nan, or maybe just a rich girl looking for a different kind of guy than she was used to at the country club brightened every time he told his stories.

Although she knew Nat was from hunger Nan also was so enthralled by his talk that after she saw his office at the Squires Building she insisted that he move to better quarters so he moved over to the Acme Bank Building where all the offices looked like they do on the silver screen, plush carpet, big sky view windows, nice mahogany desk, wooden file cabinets, and in the foyer, Nat’s very own secretary to do his typing and other office chores.  Oh yeah and a small side desk for Nan. See she had the bug, had seen too many Nick and Nora Charles films and fancied that she would act as Nat’s assistant on the big cases that were sure to come his way now that he had some “front.”  Nat squirmed a little on that proposition, although since she seldom showed up at the office after the first couple of weeks he considered himself smart to have ridden out his objections to her office presence in silent. And they went along nicely for a while until the Winot case hit their doorstep. But that office arrangement, her high society connections, was why when a close friend of her family’s, of her late father in particular, Old Man  man Winot, Wilfred Thomas Winot in the social register, went missing, Winot of Winot Industries the mad monk inventor who made all the airplanes, or the parts for them, and a guy who should not be missing what with all his responsibilities and all the people depending on him she badgered Nat into trying to find him, with her as his assistant.           

Of course these high society missing persons case are known to be done discretely and you never hear much about them until, and unless, there is murder wrapped around them and then it is kept under wraps as much as possible once the commissioner, or mayor, or, Christ, one time when the Governor pulled the hammer down, put the lid on the Cramer case (see you never heard of it, admit it). Big money is involved, especially for a guy like Winot who had a slew of stockholders who would get very nervous over trifles and who would have gotten very nervous if say the old man had run off with his secretary like he had done about ten years before on his last missing person run. And they most certainly would get nervous if the old man was found in a ditch somewhere, the victim of foul play, with those same nervous stockholders wondering out loud how management could have been so lax as to let a brilliant inventor and good- will company asset go off by himself and get killed by fair means or foul.

So to head off a police “missing person” report and the attendant publicity Amy Winot (Vassar Class of ’44, like Nan),Winot’s oldest daughter, called up her old college roommate when she found out that Nan had married a private detective and wanted to have him work on the case on the quiet before the police “balled it all up” (Amy’s  term).

Here is another funny thing about the ways of high society and how they are pack animals just like the lowly folk, once the local Clintonville high society got wind that Nan had married a common peeper, a shamus (although they probably did not know the meaning of such a term and so probably spouted “private investigator” as is their way) there were gales of laughter at every high tea and cotillion for weeks afterward. Now when the Old Money tribe needed to keep the hush on, keep one of their own from the public glare, poor shabby Nat was to be treated like a high-class hired hand (somewhere below butler but above scullery maid in the social pecking order). Fortunately Nat did not take umbrage at such slights since he knew the goldmine he had landed in and was not going to give that up for a few old horse snickers. He had worked hard to get to brighter prospects and that meant a lot, plenty to a po’ boy.

So Nat, and of course Nan, traipsed up the long driveway to the Winot Estate over in the high hills just outside Clintonville Heights (traipsed in a 1946 Rolls so don’t cry for this pair) to talk with Amy, and her mother and two sisters about the whereabouts or past practices of one Wilfred T. Winot. Once Nat scoped the family scene, the bickering between daughters and mother over every detail until mother pulled the hammer down and they were abjectly quiet, he could see where a guy, any guy and not just an old guy, or an eccentric inventor would be glad to sleep in some dusty arroyo rather than put up with the mob scene that Winot women made. Here are some facts, basic facts that Nat had to go on after going mano y mano with the family. Winot, sixty-five, white (long pedigree white not quite the Mayflower but the second or third boat over from the old country, on the short side, stoop-shouldered (although early photographs of him show a lean athletic body before the ravishes of age and ill-health, and maybe some accompanied riotous living with drink, dope, tobacco, with or without sassy young blondes took their toll), full head of silvery grey hair, blue eyes, a slight beard and no other distinguishing marks had not been seen for the previous five days (really seven by the time Nat grabbed the case since nobody in the household counted the first two days he was gone since he did that kind of thing all the time which tells more than you need to know about this dispute-ridden family). Seen, or not seen, Winot did have at various times an affinity for cigarettes (and later cigars), high-end whiskey, neat, and an occasional hit of cocaine (in the days when it was over- the- counter legal and later when the substance was not he “funded” some expeditions to sunny Mexico where it was). All of this usually in the company of some secretary or other paid Winot Industries employee. Mother Winot, Eleanor to her friends like Nan but Mrs. Winot throughout the whole case to Nat, had a very liberal view of Wilfred’s carryings-on. But see, once Nan told Nat the skinny on her, Mrs. Winot had been brought up in the Five Points section of New York City and so she was desperate not only to keep her Wilffy at any price but had in ancient times herself been the old man’s secretary and did not want her victory over the Winot money and how that was achieved to become public knowledge. Nice crowd Nat was buying into. In any case the old man was not at any of his haunts (haunts a euphemism for night clubs, casinos, his laboratory at the plant, his club, the race track, Jimmy’s tavern, the country club, or one of about five possible young blonde addresses depending on his mood, or theirs). They, Amy and her sisters they, had checked all the spots to no avail. So the search was on.                  

Of course the first place Nat looked and it took no genius, and certainly took no private detective at twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses, was in Winot’s office, his cubbyhole office at Winot Industries where the latest secretary would be holding down the fort. Winot rarely went there and preferred to spend his time at the plant in his lab inventing the next generation of absolutely necessary gizmos for the next big thing in airplanes. (Naturally from about the third day of operations back in the 1920s Winot Industries after it opened for business with that first lucrative government contract to tide them over his management team, led by Jim Saxon, his lawyer, would not let him within fifty miles of the books, or of the decision-making about what to do, or not do, with his latest gizmo.) So Nat introduced himself to Mrs. Ellis, Mrs. Ellis the thirty-something blonde, well-built, well-built for some off-hand fun from the look of her, nice legs and a sunny disposition. She, Ellen to Nat once the introductions were over although always Mrs. Cutler (with the emphasis on “cut”) to Nan, had not seen the old man, Mr. Winot, for a few weeks, had not seen any need to raise an alarm since he was very irregular in his comings and goings in the office. Nat assumed that Ellen was lying but he let that pass. As it turned out after an initial tussle with the old man once he eyed her in the office he left Ellen alone. Although the fact that she had a husband who was about six-four and two hundred and twenty pounds might have entered into the old man’s calculations. So not for the last time in the case Nat would be wrong about what was going on around the old man’s life since he wasted many precious hours and days trailing Ellen after work and tediously watch her house while she and that strong-arm hubby had dinner and listened to the radio. Fortunately Nan did not accompany him on these jaunts and therefore did not see the low-life peeper side of the business, the peeping in windows at night part.

Getting nowhere that first day with Ellen (although he pursued that nighttime trailing for a whole week and lost valuable time) he went the next morning to Jim Saxon, the old man’s lawyer, main runner of the business, and confidante at his downtown office. See Nan had an idea that Saxon had been keeping the old man in the dark about the company finances and the fact that Winot Industries had lost an important government contract to a competitor. Eleanor had told her that information about the lost contract and she had told Nan to get Nat moving in that direction. So Nat went in with guns blazing. Began to ask Saxon all kinds of questions about finances, budgets, the whole works which consumed a good part of a week as well. Nan, who had taken a household accounting course at Vassar to be ready to do home budgets when she married, was drafted by Nat to check the Winot books and what she found, erroneously found, was that the company was near bankruptcy when in reality it showed a seven million dollar profit that quarter. That erroneous information from Nan set Nat on Saxon’s trail. So for a week Nat followed Saxon to the golf course at the country club and waited for him in finish his round of golf and head home to supper, a chat with his wife and then to bed. Mister Regularity.

Then a first break-through came in a few weeks after Nat got on the case, came in unexpectedly, from Amy Winot who told Nat that she had spoken to her father on the telephone, although she said his voice was somewhat muffled. The old man said that he had had a recent cold but that he was alright now and not to worry. He had been out in Arizona trying to see if some landing gear he had just invented would work under high atmospheric heat conditions and that he would be back in a couple of weeks. So Amy and her family gladly called off the search for her now accounted for father.           

A month passed by and the old man did not return to the East and so Nat, and Nan, were called in again. Nat, knowing that Peter Murphy would be livid if he thought Nat was working a case that was really police business, told the family that the police should be called in. They, especially Eleanor were adamant, no coppers. So Nat took the train out to Arizona to the spots where Winot had said the experimental airplane flights were to take place and was confounded by the fact that while the airport employees knew Winot by sight, knew who he was, had worked with him in the past on previous experiments that he had not been out there in a few years. Back to square one.           

Nat, when he returned east followed Ellen again, followed Saxon out to the golf links. Still nothing. At this point he felt that he had to call Pete in. Pete as expected was livid, reamed Nat out in private but was kindness itself to Mrs. Winot and the three daughters. So the public coppers spent a few weeks on what was already a very cold case before they shelved the thing into deep storage. Nothing left but about six dead-ends. Moreover Mrs. Winot did not express any great regrets as she told Peter Murphy that she intended to have Mr. Cutler pursue the case further. As for Winot Industries and those worried stockholders well as the gathering storm of the Cold War was being heralded in Europe and Marshall Plan monies began to kick in Winot Industries could not handle the amount of work heading its way. The memory of the old man although honored for his pioneering work was soon a distant memory under the press of the orders coming in. 

As for Nat, and Nan, well, the fact that he did not solve the case did nothing to tarnish his reputation among the high society set. He was welcomed in like a highly regarded servant every time somebody thought the housemaid was stealing the family silver (not the good stuff, that was in vaults sealed with seven seals, but the everyday silver) or some butler was trimming on the budget Nat got the call. And while he seldom was able to detect much he was the rage of the country club set as everybody had to just have the services of their own private detective.  

As for old man Winot, Wilfred T. Winot. Well they, we, finally discovered what happened to him in 2011 when the new owners were razing a part of the Winot mansion in order to build an extension. One of the workers found his remains after hammering in a dug out section of a concrete re-enforced cellar wall. Through the beauties of modern science, through DNA testing, the police established that the body found were Winot’s remains. They also found a photograph of Ellen Ellis and a letter proclaiming his love for her, his plans that they go away, and most ominously, ominously for him, his plans to divorce Eleanor in his pants pocket. The police speculation at the time was that the family had done him in, at least Amy and Eleanor. See although Nat (and Nan of course) was on the case for several months spinning his wheels he was eventually called off by them. More and more vehemently as time wore on and no results came in. Their dodge was that the fruitless investigation was draining the estate of needed funds. This will get us closer to the truth though, under the terms of the old man’s will Eleanor got everything if they were still married when he passed on. What Eleanor did not tell Nat and Nan when they had earlier inquired about the old man’s love interests was that there was a sixth blonde, Ellen Ellis, whom the old man was crazy about, whom he wanted to marry, and so was ready to move some small mountains to get Eleanor to agree to a divorce. But Eleanor liked her life, liked all the money, liked the idea that her daughters would be well provided for and so she nixed the idea. Nixed it the best way she knew how. She recruited Ellen and her husband (who it was speculated had done the actual deed), promised them a big cut of the fortune when Winot was officially declared deceased, and told them to act naturally when the deed was done. And it worked. Worked until 2011 anyway. Of course by then Eleanor, her brood, and the Ellises (who left no trail, no trail after Winot was declared by court order to be legally dead) were long since in the grave, or long gone somewhere parts unknown. Yeah, that late Nat Cutler had never been much of a detective, never made the grade.