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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They come into the bedroom. Nervousness, what if she sees that jury-rigged hole in the wall? She sees nothing. She is, in point of fact, rather single-minded at the moment. They undress, smoke a joint. She likes to do it in the dark, she says, but Robert convinces her to leave one of the lights on. Dudley gives them a while to get cranked up, listening on the earphones, timing himself. Nervously, gulping Dr. Pepper, tapes over a flashlight and turns it on, a soft yellow glow illuminating just enough to adjust the tape recorder. Time to open the slot and start taking pictures, adrenaline pumping, breathing fast, mouth dry, Jesus, what've she sees me when I move the cover?
Not a chance. She is, as they say, otherwise occupied, and her perceptive powers are not at their peak. Under normal circumstances, a camera loaded with super-fast, 1000 ASA film and fitted with a telephoto lens could take pictures right through an air-conditioner grating or a gauze curtain, and would be so mounted, but Katherine's impatience has prompted a makeshift operation; that same impatience, though, makes her oblivious to peep-holes full of cameras.
Dudley is now taking pictures like mad, spelling the TV and movie cameras with three still cameras all fitted with different lenses, wide-angle, telephoto, zoom, changing film constantly, sliding new cassettes into the movie camera, all in utter darkness and much-practiced silence. He starts to relax now. Robert is tying her in knots, maneuvering into interesting photographic angles, looking up once in a while to smile at the peephole, waving one time, flashing the V-sign for peace or victory or whatever it stands for now, working his way through the Kama Sutra. Dudley smiles, laughs a little to himself.
Robert and Katherine break for another joint, Dudley shuts the slot; they turn again to their business, Dudley turns again to his, opening the slot and clacking away. Robert is going on six now, Katherine so far gone on sex and dope that anything beyond arm's reach is outside her consciousness. Dudley is confident. He opens the bathroom door, dances quickly past the open bedroom door to go outside and try different camera angles through the windows. Coming back he stops brazenly in the bedroom door to crank off a few more.
Robert is still going strong, three hours now, still earning his pay. Dudley uncorks a Dr. Pepper and sips placidly, ambles into the living room to put on some more records, trading James Taylor for Bob Dylan. "He ought have about one more good one left in him," he says, thereby underestimating his employee by about 40 percent. It's creeping up on 5 a.m. now, boredom settling in, Robert aiming for a world record or something, Katherine wheezing badly, straining the capacities even of nymphomania. Dudley puts on some more records. Once, she hears the loud phhh-that of the Nikon shutter and starts, but Robert pulls her back down (the Nikon was pressed into service only in the flush of confidence and because of a special lens attachment; the standard surveillance camera is the silent Leica). Finally, with false dawn, nearing an end, Dudley's in the kitchen, raiding the icebox, Robert and Katherine finally going to sleep. Pack up the equipment, put the film together to be processed, hide more stuff, clean up the bathroom. Split.
A week later Katherine is in domestic relations court for her show cause hearing, lawyer in tow, expecting to get the house, their son, and $100,000 to boot. All the parties and their attorneys are sent to a conference room. Dudley, pleasantly nodding to everyone, carrying two large briefcases. There follows a multi-media presentation the likes of which would make Andy Warhol proud, color & black-and-white, slides, stills, TV and movies, synchronized sound, two tapes, even James Taylor strumming languid guitar on the sound-track. The impact is fierce. Devastating. She will sign anything in front of her, wanting only to get out of there, away from those slides, movies, tapes, anything: custody, settlement, property, alimony. And it's all perfectly legal.
"We don't like to take domestic cases," says Bell. "They're usually pretty dirty and you always end up makin' some real enemies. We only do 'em when the money's real good.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with running around some if you're getting divorced, y'know. But most men have got a little pride and if you've got a picture of 'em with some old girl, well, they'll settle a lot quicker."
Divorce cases are the kind you don't see many of on the tube. Can you see Buddy Ebsen hiding in a bathroom with a movie camera? But that's how most private investigators make a living. Not counting the one's working for big law firms or insurance companies, there are about 1,000 licensed private detectives in Texas and, just as a lot of lawyers that you don't see make a living chasing ambulances and filing divorces, most private eyes subsist by snooping on spouses.
Few of them would ever get near cases as sophisticated as those Bell works—insurance fraud, patent theft, stock manipulations. Murder. He does, though, pull off an occasional case of the TV Good Guy genre.
Mrs. Beverly Magruder was deserted by her husband while she was in the hospital three years ago; he took their savings, their possessions, and their daughter Sharon. When she later won an uncontested divorce, the question of child custody was left in ephemeral legal limbo: Texas law makes no provision for the settlement of custody unless the child is in the state.
After remarriage to a man who brought to the match a rare empathy for the burdens of motherhood, Beverly re-embarked on a quest for her missing daughter. First stop was Dudley Bell. Bell spent, off and on, several months tracing the tortuous path of her ex-husband and Sharon from Houston, twice across the country to San Diego and thence to Atlanta. After several misfires Beverly and Dudley flew to Atlanta. Fearful that another disappointment would spark a breakdown, no one told her where she was going or why; she just went.
After incredible cloak-and-dagger nights and days, Beverly walked up to a parked car where her daughter, unseen for two years, waited while her ex-husband was shopping. "Sharon, mommy's come to take you home." She came, simply, amidst tears and bright eyes. Bell had a private plane waiting and a judge at a Houston airport to grant temporary custody. He still goes to dinner at the Magruders', about once a month, and Sharon calls him "Yogi Bear" and sits in his lap.
"I'll just never believe a bad word about Dudley BelI," says Mrs. Magruder. "For six months he was the only hope I had in the world. He was all I had to lean on and he was always there when we needed him. He's so sweet and personable—there's a whole side to him that most people never see."
Political Interlude
Setting: Houston, in the dark back alleyways of Power.
Characters: Ian, a young woman, sign of Capicorn, not overly attractive but exuding an intriguing sensual pulse, a volunteer political worker for the moment, normally employed in more earthy professions; and a youthful political candidate, handsome and aquiline, possessed of all the modern political attributes: witty, articulate, intelligent, a polished veneer of poise and class cloaking everything but the thin edge of awkwardness where his ambition abuts his immaturity.
Scene: Campaign headquarters.
Action: Ian goes to work as a headquarters volunteer, meets the candidate. On the second day they go to lunch. On the next they go to her apartment where a third, unseen, character is in the closet, with a peephole. Hmmmh….
Dialogue: Minimal, improvised. Small talk, sexual noises.
Epilogue: Various photographs end up in the office of an editor of one of Houston's daily newspapers. Being a family paper, the editor declines to print them, rather inviting several "prominent citizens" to various private showings. The Selling of the Candidate.
Coda: Dudley Bell's politics are essentially mercenary. The job in question was taken for cash, like an the others. "I been sorry ever since. That was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made. It's done nothing but cause me trouble and cost me a fortune in lost business." He figures as well that it's cost him a couple of indictments: "That's what's causing me these legal problems. [-----] has got supporters in the police department who're hot to get me."
Bell has only done one other even semi-political case: A friend of his was campaigning against the police commissioner in a little suburban township. Bell dug back into the hapless incumbent's closet and found that the poor bugger had flunked out of A&M in his freshman year. He got a copy of the official transcript, had it printed up as a placemat, and passed out 5,000 of them. He's surprised that he doesn't get more calls from politicians.
His observations on the Watergate Caper: "Those guys were so dumb, I mean really amateur. If I had the kind of money they had, and access to the kinds of equipment they had, I hate to think about what I could've done. And then they got caught, for taping over a door lock. That's really bush league."
More so than most professionals, the work of private investigators takes place in that nasty nether world that most of us don't even know is out there. Continued expeditions into that criminal dimension serve naturally to harden a man, to exact their toll from his sensibilities in the same manner as continued skin-diving will do it to his lungs. Bell sees himself as a professional among the best in his profession, and the standards he abides by are professional ones: A job is good or bad only insofar as it is done cleanly, quickly, and legally, and more subjective moral scruples rarely enter the picture.
He will, on occasion, do a turn in behalf of his fellow man. He's done cases for free when he's felt like it, once took a turkey in payment for two weeks work tracing the disappeared daughter of a rural couple. For a client in Oklahoma he recently traced down 29 million barrels of available crude oil, and sees that as a blow for consumers.
Sixteen years ago a famous Western actor came through town to star at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. He left, no doubt inadvertently, something behind, and Dudley Bell was discreetly hired to verify the consequences. For 15 years now, he's continued to drive by the house, unpaid but concerned, where the movie star's daughter is growing up.
Like all the rest of us, he's just trying to make it.
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