personal notes to himself: "Have Robt. grease the Ford," or "Lunch at club with Anne today." On April thirteenth, four days after his daughter's disappearance, he wrote, "The search is futile. She is gone." On the fifteenth, after an appointment with private detective Robert Lumsden, he recorded: "Lumsden will communicate with Pinkerton. Adam is all I have left." Bloodworth wrote nothing else about his daughter for the rest of the year.
Simon found three letters in the file about the disappearance. One was from the Southern Detective Agency ("Legitimate detective work of every description handled in every part of the United States. Connections all over the world"). It promised to forward Bloodworth's physical description of his daughter to the Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York and to send a complete written report on progress in a week. A very businesslike letter from Bloodworth to an advertising agency also in New York, arranged for the ad Simon had already seen in the News and Observer to be placed around the country and the world. The final letter was from Bloodworth to the detective agency, dated about three months after the disappearance, enclosing a check "in final settlement of my account."
The sparseness of the documents left Simon with more questions than he had had when he started. Where was the description of Anne sent to Pinkerton? What did it contain? Where was the detective agency's final report? How could a worldwide search for anybody in 1926 be concluded in just three months? Simon knew that nothing he had found so far would help the medical examiner positively identify the body.
Chapter Seven
"EVEN IF WE CAN IDENTIFY THE BODY, THE POLICE DEPARTMENT won't do anything officially," Julia McGloughlan said. "This case has a poor solvability factor."
The two were sitting at the local Chinese eatery decorated with tacky red chandeliers with tassels, paper place mats that told you whether you were a rabbit or a horse, and giant plastic Chinese letters stuck to the walls. It was the same stuff you saw in every other Chinese restaurant in town, and probably the world. Somewhere, Simon thought, there must be one huge warehouse that has a total monopoly on Chinese restaurant decorating supplies.
Julia was wearing a black denim skirt, a green sleeveless T-shirt, black canvas shoes, and gold hoop earrings. A vast improvement over the grey suit, Simon felt. He noted that she was eating her shrimp toast with gusto. Simon hated it when women didn't eat. Diets, if they were necessary at all, should be conducted in private, where they couldn't ruin dinner for anyone else.
"What, pray tell, is the solvability factor?" Simon asked.
"That's the degree to which we might actually have a chance to solve a case," she answered. "In modern police work, we don't spend time investigating cases that look hopeless. It's a waste of time and taxpayers' money. It sounds obvious, but it used to be that a detective was assigned to follow every case forever. So if your bicycle was stolen off your back porch in the middle of the night and no one saw anything, you could count on a detective following up. Not today. You'd be lucky to get a phone call back from the investigative division. It irritates people sometimes, because they like to think something is being done about a crime. But it's not efficient. Investigating this murder just won't make sense to our administrative people."
"So even if the body is positively identified and we think it's murder, there won't be an official investigation?"
"We'll be able to open a file. But we won't be able to use any of the department's resources to work on it. The chief's attitude is, the killer is dead. Everybody else involved is dead, too. What would be the point?"
"The point is, I want to know what happened."
“Me, too."
"What about Sergeant Gates?"
"He's probably the best investigator we've got. He'll follow the rules. But he's definitely interested, so we can probably count on his
Simon found three letters in the file about the disappearance. One was from the Southern Detective Agency ("Legitimate detective work of every description handled in every part of the United States. Connections all over the world"). It promised to forward Bloodworth's physical description of his daughter to the Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York and to send a complete written report on progress in a week. A very businesslike letter from Bloodworth to an advertising agency also in New York, arranged for the ad Simon had already seen in the News and Observer to be placed around the country and the world. The final letter was from Bloodworth to the detective agency, dated about three months after the disappearance, enclosing a check "in final settlement of my account."
The sparseness of the documents left Simon with more questions than he had had when he started. Where was the description of Anne sent to Pinkerton? What did it contain? Where was the detective agency's final report? How could a worldwide search for anybody in 1926 be concluded in just three months? Simon knew that nothing he had found so far would help the medical examiner positively identify the body.
Chapter Seven
"EVEN IF WE CAN IDENTIFY THE BODY, THE POLICE DEPARTMENT won't do anything officially," Julia McGloughlan said. "This case has a poor solvability factor."
The two were sitting at the local Chinese eatery decorated with tacky red chandeliers with tassels, paper place mats that told you whether you were a rabbit or a horse, and giant plastic Chinese letters stuck to the walls. It was the same stuff you saw in every other Chinese restaurant in town, and probably the world. Somewhere, Simon thought, there must be one huge warehouse that has a total monopoly on Chinese restaurant decorating supplies.
Julia was wearing a black denim skirt, a green sleeveless T-shirt, black canvas shoes, and gold hoop earrings. A vast improvement over the grey suit, Simon felt. He noted that she was eating her shrimp toast with gusto. Simon hated it when women didn't eat. Diets, if they were necessary at all, should be conducted in private, where they couldn't ruin dinner for anyone else.
"What, pray tell, is the solvability factor?" Simon asked.
"That's the degree to which we might actually have a chance to solve a case," she answered. "In modern police work, we don't spend time investigating cases that look hopeless. It's a waste of time and taxpayers' money. It sounds obvious, but it used to be that a detective was assigned to follow every case forever. So if your bicycle was stolen off your back porch in the middle of the night and no one saw anything, you could count on a detective following up. Not today. You'd be lucky to get a phone call back from the investigative division. It irritates people sometimes, because they like to think something is being done about a crime. But it's not efficient. Investigating this murder just won't make sense to our administrative people."
"So even if the body is positively identified and we think it's murder, there won't be an official investigation?"
"We'll be able to open a file. But we won't be able to use any of the department's resources to work on it. The chief's attitude is, the killer is dead. Everybody else involved is dead, too. What would be the point?"
"The point is, I want to know what happened."
“Me, too."
"What about Sergeant Gates?"
"He's probably the best investigator we've got. He'll follow the rules. But he's definitely interested, so we can probably count on his
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