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.
ON ONE OF THOSE DANK, sweaty, angry evenings that Southern cities seem to incubate in early Spring—April 25, to be exact, 1970—Willie Pierce and two friends were on the streets, looking for action. Tough kids, city-smart. Tom Tirado was parked on a haphazardly lit Houston street, preparing to go home after a late stay in his office. Quite wealthy, elderly, suburban-naive. Willie Pierce shot him twice in the head with a .25 caliber pistol.
Existential murder it ought to be called, violence sprung full-blown from a twisted age, an accidental intersection of weapons and weather, culprits and cultures. They are a homicide detective's nightmare, lacking all of those rational reference points, motives, modus operandi, telltale signs of premeditated action and post-facto fear through which TV cops can induct and deduct their way to fit resolution of TV murders. Lt. Jim Gunn, who has to work for the Houston Police Department instead of NBC, was (as they say on the tube) baffled.
A week later, May 2nd—8:45 p.m., according to police files—Gunn got a call from Dudley Bell, a Houston private investigator. Bell said he was going to enter the case if Gunn didn't mind, Gunn responded that that was fine: "We need all the help we can get." Bell checked periodically with Gunn after that, apprising him only of a lack of progress. Then, on May 20th, Bell called Gunn and asked to meet him at a small apartment project where Bell introduced Gunn to Norris Victoria, one of the three youths. Then, according to Gunn's police report, "acting on information provided by Mr. Bell I sent detectives to the home of Norman Gladney and he was requested to come to the Homicide Division." Gladney and Victoria both confessed to what had been their roles in a fumbled stick-up, fingered Willie Pierce as the man who pulled the trigger.
"Based on the information provided by Norris Victoria," the file continues, "a warrant for murder was sworn out against Willie Pierce. I requested Detectives Adams and Gibson to attempt to arrest him at a location provided me by Mr. Dudley Bell. He was at that location and was arrested."
"Hell, I've never been anything but a private investigator. I started out in high school. I'd read all those books, y'know, private eye novels and stuff, and I got started in just by going 'shopping.' That's where you go around checking on sales clerks to make sure they're not cheatin' on the stores, ringin' stuff up wrong and all.
"Then while I was going to school [University of Houston, '58, business administration] I was doin' a lot of part-time work for other investigators. After I graduated I just went into it full-time on my own and been doin' it ever since."
The office appears on the surface to resemble that of any other white collar professional: phoney walnut paneling, color-coordinated rugs and wallpaper, a little sliding glass window separating the receptionist from the waiting room. The waiting room offers a stack of somewhat offbeat magazines—Security World, Popular Electronics, Bulletin of the International Association of Private Investigators—and the usual assortment of personal momentoes: a note from Diana Hobby expressing thanks for help in Bill's campaign; an autographed picture ("to the super-sleuth") from his uncle, Joe Tonahill, together with Melvin Belli and their client, Jack Ruby; a letter from Congressman Bob Casey regarding Hell's investigation of the Apollo 204 fire for Gus Grissom's widow; a few examples of Dudley Bell's private collection of elephants, numbering some 200 in all, stuffed, molded, carved, etched, painted.
Inside, in his private office, Bell pulls back the curtain to show visitors the dangling microphone cord. See, he laughs, we took the mike out so you've got nothing to worry about. Whew, sighs the visitor, relaxing, prepared to be less guarded in conversation. No one points out the tiny hole in the acoustically-tiled ceiling, through which protrudes a miniature microphone. Bell does not open his desk drawer to reveal the tape recorders, running almost always, some connected to the seven different telephones in his offices. There is no mention of the microphone just beyond the door in the elevator landing; "You'd be surprised what people will say right after they leave your office and think you can't hear them. And then there's people who come up here who want to talk to me outside of my office, like trying to bribe me or something, and this way I can record those conversations." When you're not looking, he or an assistant snaps your picture with a subminiature camera.
"Hell, we've got people coming in here all the time masquerading as clients. They could be working for other investigators, trying to find out how we work, or federal agents trying to catch us doing something illegal." He points down the street, two blocks away, where the telephone repairman sits high up on a pole, playing with wires and circuits in a switchbox. "Now that switchbox down there handles all the telephones on this block. That fella is probably workin' for the DPS or some state law enforcement agency and is tappin' my phone. Happens all the time. Federal agents don't ever have to screw with that sort of thing, they just go down to the central exchange and tap in there. Ninety percent of the security people for the phone company used to be FBI agents, and you tell me they ain't helpin' their old friends out when they want to tap somethin'."
Room 6623 of Houston's Federal Building is labeled on elevator maps as the Communications Room and is surrounded by unmapped corridors belonging to the FBI, IRS, U.S. Marshalls, various arms of the Federal Government's effort to find out what's going down in America. It is one of the largest rooms in the building and houses a complex wall of electronic equipment, machines that jump to life when certain Houston phones are picked up, stamp the time of the call on a little card, kick back to trace the number of the other party, recording it all. "They'll probably deny it if you print it, but I've got a friend who used to work for Motorola who installed all that stuff, and he'll tell you."
Bell's prime assistant, his answer to Dr. Watson, goes by the name of Casey. He is boyish-looking, thin-boned with whispy blonde hair, has the appearance of an anemic Michael Caine. He also has a master's degree in criminology, a black belt in karate, facility with four languages and a pilot's license, was a weapons specialist in Army Special Forces and a special agent for the Organized Crime Division of the IRS. [Brief note on what that last means: IRS special agents float somewhere in the upper reaches of the law enforcement universe, possessed of a conviction record roughly twice that of their FBI counterparts. They are the inheritors of the underworld wisdom, attributed to Meyer Lansky: "If the cops get after you, you can generally forget about it; if the FBI gets on you, a good lawyer can usually take care of it; but if the IRS is onto you, you'd better be careful."] Casey's addendum on Federal wiretaps: "Nixon came out last year, y'remember, and said there were only 50 wiretaps in the country? Hell, when I was an agent in Miami, we had 50 on one block."
The Federal Government maintains a telephone number that their agents can always call to see if the phone they are speaking on is tapped; if the number dialed results in a busy signal, then the phone is bugged. The number is changed monthly—more often if necessary—and when an old number is called, a recording tells the caller that the number dialed has never been operative. The number for March was (202) 530-9944.
Dudley Bell is the best-known, probably the best, private eye in Texas, among the best in the country. He handles cases ranging all the way from missing persons ("not too many, they usually aren't worth the trouble") to industrial espionage and murder. He tails young executives for companies pondering promotions, curious about what prospective corporate officers do in their free hours, and follows spouses for husbands and wives pondering divorces, wondering the same thing. He has worked cases all over the world but, he figures, about three-quarters of all he has taken have been in Houston.
He looks rather like one expects private eyes to look: well over 6 feet and big, with forbidding dark eyebrows and a protruding, mean-looking lower lip. Some of his friends call him "Mannix" but his ambling, loosely-jointed walk and up-swept Bob Hope-style nose destroy attempts to fit him into the tough, TV-cast mould of the detective. His father was a golf pro at a Houston country club and he grew up adept at the sports of the country club middle-class: golf and swimming. He still holds the city 9th grade records for the 100 and 200 meter freestyle, won a gold medal in the 1952 Junior Olympics. He spent most of his Army hitch in the 101st Airborne Division as Gen. Westmoreland's golf partner.
"I guess we're about the biggest investigative and security outfit in the state," he says, sinking back into the office chair, propping alligator shoes on the desk. "We've got about $25,000 just in debugging equipment. We get a lot of that, companies hiring us to check out their offices to make sure other companies aren't spying on 'em." The suit is Standard Business Look, $200 Sakowitz double-knit, but the shirt is custom-tailored and monogrammed. The workmanship is not apparent in fancy patterns, or noticeably good fit but, rather, is revealed—or unrevealed, actually—by the hidden interior pockets and invisible buttonholes, receptacles for wires, microphones, miniature cameras, an electric haberdashery that would tax the combined wisdom of Edison and Brooks Bros.
Like most other modern enterprises, private detectives have bent technology to the furtherance of their craft, and most have taken to studying electronics with the energy once invested in, say, marksmanship; Bell, for example, is an accomplished amateur electrician who designs much of his own equipment.
A brief digression into the Architecture of Eavesdropping.
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