The Best Private Eye In Texas
Electronic bugs, infra-red film, gigolos, and 38's aren't all a private detective needs—but they help.
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The Federal Building in downtown Houston is without question one of the most aesthetically scandalous monsters ever thrust upon an American city. Gaunt, rectilinear and prisonlike, irredeemably ugly, it has drawn the wrath of architects and critics ever since it was built. Inside, though, off in the southeast corner of the ninth floor, is its one saving grace. The Federal Grand Jury Room, staging area for investigation and inquisition, hotbed of private interest and public curiosity, sits a narrow lonely corridor away from, of all possible neighbors, the Press Room.
It is possible to secret a miniature transmitter in the Grand Jury Room and then sit twenty-odd feet away in the Press Room, miniature receiver and tape recorder hidden in a desk drawer, an earphone wire run up a shirtsleeve, and innocently bang away on a typewriter while recording all that privileged testimony. It is of course marginally risky: The transmitter can be detected when the U.S. Marshalls make their usual sweeps to debug the Grand Jury Room, but they never sweep when the jury is in session.
Most of those millions of folks who hunker down at the nearest TV set to catch Mission: Impossible reruns every week are probably happily unaware of the fact that their TV heroes would get five years in the slammer if they got caught using all those gadgets of theirs in real life. Private detectives think about that a lot.
Back in 1968 Congress passed a bulky, typically ambiguous thing called Public Law 90-351, elsewise known as the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. 'Ominous" it was called by civil liberties groups who bemoaned all those little privacies that appeared about to slip down the drain. They were pooh-poohed as alarmists and, amidst deafening crescendos of law'n'-ordah rhetoric, Congress passed the bill in a blaze of unanimity. After all, what politician in his right mind would be caught voting against Safe Streets in an election year?
Buried somewhere in the middle of the 42 pages of single-spaced, tiny agate type (and bearing, one must assume, at least some minimal kinship to Safe Streets) of P.L. 90-351 are all of the Federal laws governing wiretaps, bugs, electronic surveillance and all the gadgetry of nosiness that Mission: Impossible fans get off to. If you read it real close, it says it's illegal. Sort of. Well, maybe, it just depends.…That's the way Federal laws are written, so that you can't really be sure just what it is they do say.
At any rate, and even if you choose to believe the ridiculously low numbers of legal wiretaps the Justice Department tell us about, buggery is big business. The key test of legality, it appears, is whether any of the people being bugged, tapped, etc., know about it. If there are 20 people at a conference table and one of them knows about the transmitter in the flower pot, then it's OK. If you want to tap your own telephone, or all the ones in your offices (a la Dudley Bell), that's fine, too. It's a lot more complicated than that, and like any good law it's shot through with loop-holes, but that's about what it boils down to.
What this all means is that it's incredibly easy to get all those trickly little doodads you see 'em using on TV all the time. There are places all over the country that will send you, C.O.D. for the most part, anything you can pay for, no questions asked. Miles Laboratories in New York has a whole catalog just of "telephone monitoring devices." Sanyu Electronics over in Tokyo gaudily asks "Do You Want To Be Mr. CIA Man?" in their advertisements and take mail orders for a vast array of snooping equipment. You can buy infra-red attachments to cameras and binoculars, some of them modeled after U.S. Army equipment, snorkel microphones, microphones, souped-up pre-amplified miniature microphones, listening devices of mind-fogging sophistication. You can, you really can. Anybody can!
The assumption that allows them to be so easily peddled, of course, is that you're going to use them legally. Heh, heh, Catch 22. 'Course who's to know, right? People in the mail order business are a pretty trusting lot.
"It'd be perfectly all right if they caught you with this thing, see?" says Bell, "but they'd probably bust me with it." The "it" that he's holding up is a pen. What's this? No, it's not really a pen,…it's…well, waddaya know, it's a radio receiver. And a special one at that, powerfully boosted and set to pick up signals in the 125-140 megacycle range. That's the bandwidth reserved for airplanes.
"You can sit out at the airport and listen to everything they say up there." Groovy, right? There are, in addition, a wealth of other audio possibilities. One can set the tiniest of transmitters at about 130 megacycles, plant it in somebody's car or office and sit around peaceably with your pen in your ear listening to what they have to say. Unless you're in the middle of an airport, there's not a chance of anything interfering with your signal. But that would be an illegal use of the device. Which doesn't mean you can't have it, they're just gonna assume that you dig listening to airplanes. But if Dudley Bell has one, they're going to figure he's doing something nasty with it and they'll probably arrest him.
One of the occupational hazards of being a private eye is that they skip pretty quickly along that fuzzy, faded line between what's legal and what gets you two-to-ten. Dudley Bell's been arrested more than a couple of times, generally on marginal kinds of things (e.g., concealed weapon), chance missteps while dancing on that line. He's never been convicted of anything. As one Courthouse hanger-on charitably put it: "Well, sometimes doctors or lawyers will break the law to help out a client or a patient—hell, even the police break the law sometimes to solve a case—and I guess Dudley probably does the same thing once in a while."
Bell, needless to say, staunchly protests any implication that he is not morally pure and legally chaste. He does, though, admit that while business overall is up, his various "problems" have cost him a couple of clients, mostly large insurance companies that worry over corporate images and such. "Hell, one of the biggest cases I ever worked was an insurance case—saved Fireman's Fund a quarter million dollars on a fraudulent claim—and now they won't even talk to me. Now, I don't think that's fair. It just doesn't make any sense for me to have done any of those things they say I did. Why should I jeopardize my license and a business I've spent my life building up by using illegal equipment?" A week after his last "problem," he was elected vice-president of the Texas Association of Licensed Investigators and named to their ethics committee.
Most private investigators have better sense than to muck around with murder cases, preferring to leave that to the police. TV detectives are the only ones that do public service jobs. Every now-and-then, though, Dudley Bell will perceive a situation where certain factors favor his involvement. Money usually plays a big role here, like the $5,000 reward posted by Tom Tirado's son. Other incentives take the form of big retainers preferred by insurance companies or vengeful relatives anxious to turn up information that the police for one reason or another have failed to nose out.
Cases like that turn up more frequently than one might think. Houston's police having demonstrated a remarkable aversion to solving big society killings. Usually if some VIP gets himself knocked off there's a pretty solid chance of there being another VIP at the other end, and things start getting complicated about that point. Like all big-city agencies, Houston's police force is highly politicized, and over-zealous pursuit of the rich and powerful is not considered good form by ambitious patrolmen. Far easier to treat River Oaks killings as a kind of aristocratic guerilla fighting, Houston's answer to The Wars of the Roses.
This hands-off approach naturally creates a profitable vacuum into which Dudley Bell has no qualms about injecting himself. Almost without fail, all of Houston's headline-grabbing big-name killings end up in his office attended by the promise of fate fees. He is currently working a case that would invariable head up anyone's list of 1972's Top Ten Mystery Deaths.
Just as one of Houston's typically colorless dawns was about to belly up on America's 196th Birthday, Mrs. Faye Bell Hurley found herself leaving her husband's eighth floor Memorial Drive apartment. She departed via the balcony. Her husband allowed as how it was too bad but, well, we did everything we could, y'know, tried to catch her an' all.…/p>
Although she was some 40 years younger than her husband, Faye Bell had not been what you might normally call a child bride. As Houston's daily press cheerfully pointed out, Mrs. Hurley owned a pretty colorful reputation and a police record for lewd dancing and narcotics possession. Her husband, on the other hand, J. Collier Hurley, is a wealthy oilman, a famous River Oaks antique collector, and what's generally known around town as an Important Dude. Leaping to their duty, Houston's finest investigated for about half an hour and shut the case. It never occurred to anyone in the Homicide Division to either 1) visit the scene, or 2) take a statement from Mr. Hurley. Too bad, too bad, shameful thing…They pronounced it suicide. A bunch of strip-tease dancers held a benefit to pay Faye Bell's funeral expenses.
There are, as you might guess, some folks around Houston who are a little skeptical about that suicide ruling. One of those is Mrs. Louise Carey, Faye Bell's mom, who has quietly filed suit against J. Collier, charging that he assaulted Faye Bell "willfully, maliciously and with force and violence" caused her to fall off the balcony. She is suing for a fat lot of money and has Dudley Bell working the case.
(Parenthetical relapse: While it may seem incongruous that civil actions should be filed in cases where no criminal charges have been brought, don't worry over it. Lawyers like to play those games.)
It is not only murder that finds Dudley Bell skulking around in Houston's prestige neighborhoods. Wealthy husbands and wealthy wives have the same propensities for dalliance as do their less fortunate counterparts, but they possess as well the resources (read: cash) to invest their jealousy with awesome powers of retribution. Dudley has, indeed, found jealousy to be an amazingly profitable emotion.
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