XIV

THE LOST MILLIONAIRE

Some time before three o’clock on the afternoon of December 2, 1919, Ambrose Joseph Small deposited in the Dominion Bank, of Toronto, a check for one million dollars. At seven fifteen o’clock that evening the lean, swart, saturnine master of Canadian playhouses bought his habitual newspapers from the familiar boy under the lamps of Adelaide Street, before his own Grand Theater, turned on his heel, and strode off into the night, to return no more.

In the intervening years men have ferreted in all corners of the world for the missing rich man; rewards up to fifty thousand dollars have been offered for his return, or the discovery of his body; reports of his presence have chased detectives into distant latitudes, and the alarm for him has been spread to all the trails and tides without result. By official action of the Canadian courts, Amby Small, as he was known, is dead, and his fortune has been distributed to his heirs. To the romantic speculation he must still exist, however. And whatever the fact, his case presents one of the strangest stories of mysterious absenteeism to be found upon the books.

Men disappear every day. The police records of any great city and of many smaller places bear almost interminable lists of fellows who have suddenly and curiously dropped out of their grooves and placements. Some are washed up as dead bodies—the slain and self-slain. Some return after long wanderings, to make needless excuses to their friends and families. And others pass from their regular haunts into new fields. These latter are usually poor and fameless gentry, weary of life’s routine.

Ambrose Small, however, was a person of different kidney. He was rich, for one thing. Thirty-five years earlier, Sir Henry Irving, on one of his tours to Canada had found the youthful Small taking tickets in a Toronto theater. Attracted by some unusual quality in the youngster, Irving shrewdly advised him to quit the study of law and devote himself to the theatrical business. Following this counsel, Small had risen slowly and surely until he controlled theaters in all parts of the Dominion and was rated at several millions. On the afternoon before his disappearance he had consummated a deal with the Trans-Canada Theaters, Limited, by which he was to receive nearly two millions in money and a share of the profits, in return for his theatrical holdings. The million-dollar check he deposited had been the first payment.

Again, Small was a familiar figure throughout Canada and almost as well acquainted in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities of the United States. Figuratively, at least, everybody knew him—thousands of actors, traveling press agents, managers, real estate men, promoters, newspaper folk, advance agents; indeed, all the Wandering Jews and Gentiles of the profession of make-believe, with which he had been connected so long and profitably. With such a list of acquaintances, whose rovings took them to the ends of the earth, how almost impossible it seemed for Small to drop completely out of sight.

Finally, Amby Small was a man with a wife and most deeply interested relatives. Entirely aside from the questions of inheritance and the division of his estate, which netted about two millions, as was determined later on, Mrs. Small would certainly want to know whether she was a wife or widow, and the magnate’s sisters would certainly suspect everything and everybody, leaving nothing undone that would bring the man back to his home, or punish those who might have been responsible for any evil termination of his life.

Thus the Small case presents very different factors from those governing the ordinary disappearance case. It is full of the elements which make for mystery and bafflement, and it may be set down at once as an enigma of the most arresting and irritating type, upon whose darknesses not the slightest light has ever been shed.

So far as can be learned, Small had no enemies and felt no apprehensions. He was totally immersed for some months before his disappearance in the negotiations for the sale of his interests to the Trans-Canada Company, and apparently he devoted all his energies to this project. He had anticipated a favorable conclusion for some time and looked upon the signing of the agreements and writing of the check on December 2 as nothing more than a formality.

Late in the morning of the day in question, Small met his attorney and the representatives of the Trans-Canada Company in his offices, and the formalities were concluded. Some time after noon he deposited the check in the Dominion Bank and then took Mrs. Small to luncheon. Afterward he visited a Catholic children’s institution with her and left her at about three o’clock to return to his desk in the Grand Theater, where he had sat for many years, spinning his plans and piling up his fortune.

There seems to be not the slightest question that Small went directly to his office and spent the remainder of the afternoon there. Not only his secretary, John Doughty, who had been Small’s confidential man for nineteen years, and later played a dramatic and mysterious part in the disappearance drama, but several other employees of the Grand Theater saw their retiring master at his usual post that afternoon. Small not only talked with these workers, but he called business associates on the telephone and made at least two appointments for the following day. He also was in conference with his solicitor as late as five o’clock.

According to Doughty, his employer left the Grand Theater at about five thirty o’clock and this time of departure coincided perfectly with what is known of Small’s engagements. He had promised his wife to be at home for dinner at six thirty o’clock.

There is also confirmation at this point. For years Small had been in the habit of dropping into Lamb’s Hotel, next door to his theater, before going home in the evening. He was intimately acquainted there, often met his friends in the hotel lobby or bar, and generally chatted a few minutes before leaving for his residence. The proprietor of the hotel came forward after Small’s disappearance and recalled that he had seen the theater man in his hotel a little after five thirty o’clock. He was also under the impression that Small had stayed for some time, but he could not be sure.

~~ AMBROSE J. SMALL ~~

The next and final point of time that can be fixed is seven fifteen o’clock. At that time Small approached the newsboy in Adelaide Street, who knew the magnate well, and bought his usual evening papers. The boy believed that Small had come from the theater, but was not sure he had not stepped out of the hotel adjoining. Small said nothing but the usual things, seemed in no way different from his ordinary mood, and tarried only long enough to glance at the headlines under the arc lamps.

Probably there is something significant about the fact that Small did not leave the vicinity of his office until seven fifteen o’clock, when he was due at home by half past six. What happened to him after he had left his theater in plenty of time to keep the appointment with his wife? That something turned up to change his plan is obvious. Whether he merely encountered some one and talked longer than he realized, or whether something arrested him that had a definite bearing on his disappearance is not to be said; but the latter seems to be the reasonable assumption. Small was not the kind of man lightly to neglect his agreements, particularly those of a domestic kind.

Mrs. Small, waiting at home, did not get excited when her husband failed to appear at the fixed time. She knew he had been going through a busy day, and she reasoned that probably something pressing had come up to detain him. At half past seven, however, she got impatient and telephoned his office, getting no response. She waited two hours longer before she telephoned to the home of John Doughty’s sister. She found her husband’s secretary there and was assured that Doughty had been there all evening, which seems to have been the fact. Doughty said his employer had left the theater at five thirty o’clock, and that he knew no more. He could not explain Small’s absence from home, but took the matter lightly. No doubt Small would be along when he got ready.

At midnight Mrs. Small sent telegrams to Small’s various theaters in eastern Canada, asking for her husband. In the course of the next twenty-four hours she got responses from all of them. No one had seen Small or knew anything about his movements.

Now there followed two weeks of silence and waiting. Mrs. Small did not go to the police; neither did she employ private detectives until later. For two weeks she evidently waited, believing that her husband had gone off on a trip, and that he would return soon. Those of his intimates in Toronto who could not be kept out of the secret of his absence took the same attitude. It was explained later that there was nothing unprecedented about Small’s having simply gone off on a jaunt for some days or even several weeks. He was a moody and self-centered individual. He had gone off before in this way and come back when he got ready. He might have gone to New York suddenly on some business. Probably he had not been alone. Mrs. Small evidently shared this view, and her reasons for so doing developed a good deal later. In fact, she refused for months to believe that anything had befallen her husband, and it was only when there was no remaining alternative that she changed her position.

Finally, a little more than two weeks after Small’s disappearance, his wife and attorneys went to the Dominion police and laid the case before them. Even then the quest was undertaken in a cautious and skeptical way. This attitude was natural. The police could find not the least hint of any attack on Small. The idea that such a man had been kidnapped seemed preposterous. Besides, what could have been the object? There had been no demand for his ransom. No doubt Small had gone away for reasons sufficient unto himself. Probably his wife understood these impulsions better than she would say. There were rumors of infelicity in the Small home, and these proved later to be well grounded. The police simply felt that they would not be made ridiculous. Neither did they want to stir up a sensation, only to have Small return and spill his wrath upon their innocent heads.

But the days spun out, and still there was no news of the missing man. Many began to turn from their original attitude of knowing skepticism. Other rumors began to fly about. Gradually the conviction gained ground that something sinister had befallen the master of theaters. Could it not be possible that Small had been entrapped in some blackmailing plot and perhaps killed when he resisted? It seemed almost incredible, but such things did happen. How about his finances? Was his money intact in the bank? Had he drawn any checks against his account? It was soon discovered that no funds had been withdrawn either on December 2 or subsequently, and it seemed likely that Small had only a few dollars in his pockets when he vanished, unless, as was suggested, he kept a secret cache of ready money.

Attention was now directed toward every one who had been close to the theater owner. One of the most obvious marks for this kind of inquiry was John Doughty, the veteran secretary. Doughty had, as already remarked, been Small’s right-hand man for nearly two decades. He knew his employer’s secrets, was close to all his business affairs, and was even known to have been Small’s companion on occasional drinking bouts. At the same time Small had treated Doughty in a niggardly way as regards pay. The secretary had been receiving forty-five dollars a week for years, never more. At the same time, probably through other bits of income which his position brought him, Doughty had saved some money, bought property in Toronto, and established himself with a small competence.

That Small regarded this faithful servant kindly and was careful to provide for him, is shown by the fact that Small had got Doughty a new and better place as manager of one of the Small theaters in Montreal, which had been taken over by the syndicate. In his new job Doughty received seventy-five dollars a week. He had left to assume his new duties a day or two after the consolidation of the interests, which is to say a day or two after Small vanished.

Doughty had, of course, been questioned, but it seemed obvious that this time he knew nothing of his old employer’s movements. He had accordingly stayed on in Montreal, attending to his new duties and paying very little attention to Small’s absence. Less than three weeks after Small had gone, and one week after the case had been taken to the police, however, new attention began to be paid to Doughty, and there were some unpleasant whisperings.

On Monday morning, December 23, just three weeks after Small had walked off into the void, came the dramatic break. Doughty, as was his habit, left Montreal the preceding Saturday evening to spend Sunday in Toronto with his relatives and friends. On Monday morning, instead of appearing at his desk, he telephoned from Toronto that he was ill and might not be at work for some days. His employers took him at his word and paid no further attention until, three days having elapsed, they telephoned to the home of Doughty’s sister. She had not seen him since Monday. The man was gone!

If the Small disappearance case had heretofore been considered a somewhat dubious jest, it now became a genuine sensation. For the first time the Canadian and American newspapers began to treat the matter under scare headlines, and now at last the Dominion police began to move with force and alacrity.

An investigation of the safe-deposit vaults, where Small was now said to have kept a large total of securities, showed that Doughty had visited this place twice on December 2, the day of Small’s disappearance, and he had on each occasion either put in, or taken away, some bonds. A hasty count of the securities was said to have revealed a shortage of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Even this discovery did not change the minds of the skeptics, in whose ranks the missing magnate’s wife still remained. It was now believed that Doughty had received a secret summons from Small, and that he had taken the bonds, which had previously been put aside, at Small’s instruction, and gone to join his chief in some hidden retreat. A good part of Toronto believed that Small had gone on a protracted “party,” or that he had seized the opportunity offered by the closing out of his business to quit a wife with whom he had long been in disagreement.

When neither Small nor Doughty reappeared, opinion gradually veered about to the opposite side. After all, it was possible that Small had not gone away voluntarily, that he was the victim of some criminal conspiracy, and that Doughty had fled when he felt suspicion turning its face toward him. The absence of the supposed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in bonds provided sufficient motivation to fit almost any criminal hypothesis.

As this attitude became general, Toronto came to examine the relationship between Small and Doughty. It was recalled that the secretary had, on more than one occasion when he was in his cups, spoken bitterly of Small’s exaggerated wealth and his cold niggardliness. Doughty had also uttered various radical sentiments, and it was even said that he had once spoken of the possibility of kidnapping Small for ransom; though the man who reported this conversation admitted Doughty had seemed to be joking. The conclusion reached by the police was not clear. Doughty, they found, had been faithful, devoted, and long-suffering. They had to conclude that he was careful and substantial, and they could not discover that he had ever had the slightest connection with the underworld or with suspect characters. At the same time they decided that the man was unstable, emotional, imaginative, and probably not hard to mislead. In short, they came to the definite suspicion that Doughty had figured as the tool of conspirators, in the disappearance of Small. They soon brought Mrs. Small around to this view. Now the hunt began.

A reward of five hundred dollars, which had been perfunctorily offered as payment for information concerning Small’s whereabouts, was withdrawn, and three new rewards were offered by the wife—fifty thousand dollars for the discovery and return of Small; fifteen thousand dollars for his identified body, and five thousand dollars for the capture of Doughty.

The Toronto chief constable immediately assigned a squad of detectives to the case, and Mrs. Small employed a firm of Canadian private detectives to pursue a line of investigation which she outlined. Later on she employed four more widely known investigating firms in the United States to continue the quest. Small’s sisters also summoned American officers to carry out their special inquiries. Thus there were no fewer than seven distinct bodies of police working at the mystery.

Circulars containing pictures of Small and Doughty, with their descriptions, and announcement of the rewards, were circulated throughout Canada and the United States; then from Scotland Yard they were sent to all the police offices in the British Empire, and, finally, from the American, Canadian, and British capitals to every known postmaster and police head on earth. More than half a million copies of the circulars were printed, it is said, and translations into more than twenty languages were distributed. I am told by eminent police authorities that this campaign, supported as it was by advertisements and news items in the press of almost every nation, some of them containing pictures of the missing millionaire, has never been approached in any other absent person case. Mrs. Small and her advisers set out to satisfy themselves that news of the disappearance and the rewards should reach to the most remote places, and they spent a small fortune for printing bills and postage. Even the quest for the lost Archduke John Salvator, to which the Pope contributed a special letter addressed to all priests, missionaries and other representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in every part of the world, seems to have been less far-reaching.

Rumors concerning Small and Doughty began to come in soon after the first alarms. Small and Doughty were reported seen in Paris, on the Italian Riviera, at the Lido, in Florida, in Hawaii, in London, at Calcutta, aboard a boat on the way to India, in Honduras, at Zanzibar, and where not? A skeleton was found in a ravine not far from Toronto, and for a time the fate of Small was believed to be understood. But physicians and anatomists soon determined that the bones could not have been those of the theatrical man for a variety of conclusive reasons. So the hunt began again.

Gradually, as time went on, as expense mounted, and results failed to show themselves, the private detective firms were dismissed, one after the other, and the task of running down rumors in this clewless case was left to the Toronto police. The usual sums of money and of time were wasted in following blind leads. The usual failures and absurdities were recorded. One Canadian officer, however, Detective Austin R. Mitchell, began to develop a theory of the case and was allowed to follow his ideas logically toward their conclusion. Working in silence, when the public had long come to believe that the search had been abandoned as bootless, Mitchell plugged away, month after month, without definite accomplishment. He was not able to get more than an occasional scrap of information which seemed to bear out his theory of the case. He made scores of trips, hundreds of investigations. They were all inconclusive. Nevertheless, the Toronto authorities permitted him to go on with his work, and he is probably still occupied at times with the Small mystery.

Detective Mitchell was actively following his course toward the end of November, 1920, eleven months after the flight of Doughty, when a telegram arrived at police headquarters in Toronto from Edward Fortune, a constable of Oregon City, Oregon, a small town far out near the Pacific. Once more the weary detective took a train West, arriving in Oregon City on the evening of November 22.

Constable Fortune met the Canadian officer at the train and told him his story. He had seen one of the circulars a few months earlier and had carried the images of Small and Doughty in his mind. One day he had observed a strange laborer working in a local paper mill, and he had been struck by his likeness to Doughty. The man had been there for some time and risen from the meanest work to the position of foreman in one of the shops. Fortune dared not approach the suspect even indirectly, and he failed on various occasions to get a view of the worker without his hat on. Because the picture on the circular showed Doughty bare-headed, the constable had been forced to wait until the suspected man inadvertently removed his hat. Then Fortune had sent his telegram.

Detective Mitchell listened patiently and dubiously. He had made a hundred trips of the same sort, he said. Probably there was another mistake. But Constable Fortune seemed certain of his game, and he was right.

Shortly after dusk the local officer led the detective to a modest house, where some of the mill workers boarded. They entered, and Mitchell was immediately confronted with Doughty, whom he had known intimately in Toronto.

“Jack!” said the officer, almost as much surprised as the fugitive. “How could you do it?”

In this undramatic fashion one part of the great quest came to an end.

Doughty submitted quietly to arrest and gave the officer a voluntary statement. He admitted without reservation that he had taken Canadian Victory bonds to a total of one hundred and five thousand dollars from Small’s vault, but insisted that this had been done after the millionaire had disappeared. He denied absolutely and firmly any knowledge of Small’s whereabouts; pleaded that he had never had any knowledge of or part in a kidnapping plot, and he insisted that he had not seen Small nor heard from him since half past five on the evening of the disappearance. To this account he adhered doggedly and unswervingly. Doughty was returned to Toronto on November 29, and the next day he retrieved the stolen bonds from the attic of his sister’s house, where he had made his home with his two small sons, since the death of his wife several years before.

In April of the following year Doughty was brought to trial on a charge of having stolen the bonds, a second indictment for complicity in the kidnapping remaining for future disposal. The trial was a formal and, in some ways, a peculiar affair. All mention of kidnapping and all hints which might have indicated the direction of Doughty’s ideas on the central mystery were rigorously avoided. Only one new fact and one correction of accepted statements came out. It was revealed that Small had given his wife a hundred thousand dollars in bonds to be used for charitable purposes on the day before his disappearance. This fact had not been hinted before, and some interpreted the testimony as a concealed way of stating the fact that Small had made some kind of settlement with his wife on the first of December.

Doughty in his testimony corrected the statement that he had taken the bonds after Small’s disappearance. He testified that he had been sent to the vault on the second of December, and that he had then extracted the hundred and five thousand dollars’ worth of bonds. He had not, he swore, intended to steal them, and he had no notion that Small would disappear. He explained his act by saying that Small had long promised him some reward for his many years of service, and had repeatedly stated that he would arrange the matter when the deal with the Trans-Canada Company had been concluded. Knowing that the papers had been signed that morning, and the million-dollar check turned over, Doughty had planned to go to his chief with the bonds in his hands and suggest that these might serve as a fitting reward for his contribution to the success of the Small enterprises. He later saw the folly of this action and fled.

The prosecution naturally attacked this story on the ground that it was incredible, but nothing was brought out to show what opposing theory might fit the facts. Doughty was convicted of larceny and sentenced to serve six years in prison. The kidnapping charge was never brought to trial. Instead, the police let it be known that they believed Doughty had not played any part in the “actual murder” of Amby Small, and that he had revealed all he knew. Incidentally, it was admitted that the police believed Small to be dead. That was the only point on which any information was given, and even here not the first detail was supplied. Obviously the hunt for nameless persons suspected of having kidnapped and killed Small was in progress, and the officials were being careful to reveal nothing of their information or intentions.

Doughty took an appeal from the verdict against him, but abandoned the fight later in the spring of 1921, and was sent to prison. Here the unravelling of the Small mystery came to an abrupt end. A year passed, then two years. Still nothing more developed. Doughty was in prison, the police were silent and seemed inactive. Perhaps they had abandoned the hunt. Possibly they knew what had befallen the theater owner and were refraining from making revelations for reasons of public policy. Perhaps, as was hinted in the newspapers, there were persons of influence involved in the mess, persons powerful enough to hush the officials.

But the matter of Small’s fortune was still in abeyance, and there were indications of a bitter contest between the wife and Small’s two sisters, who had apparently been hostile for years. This struggle promised to bring out further facts and perhaps to reveal to the public what the family and the officials knew or suspected.

Soon after Small had vanished, Mrs. Small had moved formally to protect his property by having a measure introduced into the Dominion Parliament declaring Small an absentee and placing herself and a bank in control of the estate. This measure was soon taken, with the result that the Small fortune, amounting to about two million dollars, net, continued to be profitably administered.

Early in 1923, after Doughty had been two years in prison, and all rumor of the kidnapping or disappearance mystery had died down, Mrs. Small appeared in court with a petition to have her husband declared dead, so that she might offer for probate an informal will made on September 6, 1903. This document was written on a single small sheet of paper and devised to Mrs. Small her husband’s entire estate, which was of modest proportions at the time the will was drawn.

The court refused to declare the missing magnate dead, saying that insufficient evidence had been presented, and that the police were apparently not satisfied. Mrs. Small next appealed her case, and the reviewing court reversed the decision and declared Small legally dead. Thereupon the widow filed the will of 1903 and was immediately attacked by Small’s sisters, who declared that they had in their possession a will made in 1917, which revoked the earlier testament and disinherited Mrs. Small. This will, if it existed, was never produced.

There followed a series of hearings. At one of these, opposing counsel began a line of cross-questioning which suggested that Mrs. Small had been guilty of a liaison with a Canadian officer who appeared in the records merely as Mr. X. The widow, rising dramatically in court, indignantly denied these imputations as well as the induced theory that her misbehavior had led to an estrangement from her husband and, perhaps, to his disappearance. The widow declared that this suspicion was diametrically opposed to the truth, and that if Small were in court he would be the first to reject it. As a matter of fact, she testified, it was Small who had been guilty. He had confessed his fault to her, promised to be done with the woman in the matter, and had been forgiven. There had been a complete reconciliation, she said, and Small had agreed that one half of the million-dollar check which he received on the day of his disappearance should be hers.

To bear out her statements in this matter, Mrs. Small soon after obtained permission of the court to file certain letters which had been found among Small’s effects after his disappearance. In this manner the secret love affair in the theater magnate’s last years came to be spread upon the books. The letters presented by the wife had all come from a certain married woman who, according to the testimony of her own writings and of others who knew of the connection, had been associated with Amby Small since 1915. It appears that Mrs. Small discovered the attachment in 1918 and forced her husband to cause his inamorata to leave Toronto. The letters, which need not be reprinted here, contained only one significant strain.

A letter, which reached Small two or three days before he disappeared, concluded thus: “Write me often, dear heart, for I just live for your letters. God bless you, dearest.”

Three weeks earlier, evidently with reference to the impending close of his big deal and his retirement from active business, the same lady wrote: “I am the most unhappy girl in the world. I want you. Can’t you suggest something after the first of December? You will be free, practically. Let’s beat it away from our troubles.”

And five days later she amended this in another note: “Some day, perhaps, if you want me, we can be together all the time. Let’s pray for that time to come, when we can have each other legitimately.”

Mrs. Small declared that she had found these letters immediately after her husband’s departure, and that they had kept her from turning the case over to the police until two weeks after the disappearance. Meantime the other woman had been summoned, interrogated by the police, and released. She had not seen Small nor had she heard from him either directly or indirectly. It was apparent that, while she had been corresponding with Small up to the very week of his last appearance, he had not gone to see her.

Finally the will contest was settled out of court, Small’s sisters receiving four hundred thousand dollars, and the widow retaining the balance.

And here the darkness closes in again. Even in the progress of the will controversy no hint was given of the official or family beliefs as to the mystery. There are only two tenable conclusions. Either there is a further skeleton to be guarded, or the police have some kind of information which promises the eventual solution of the case and the apprehension of suspected criminals. How slender this promise must be, every reader will judge for himself, remembering the years of fruitless attack on this extraordinary and complex enigma.

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