“Why not?”
Caddo coughed deprecatingly. “Occasionally one finds it necessary, almost imperative, in fact, to do considerable detail work in order to be certain that there will be an ample supply of stories carrying out the general theme of the magazine.”
“You mean you write them yourself?” Mason asked.
“Arthur Ansell Ashland is a house name,” Caddo admitted modestly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The magazine owns the name. We can publish anything we want to under the name of that author, using that by-line as a tag.”
“Who wrote this story?”
Caddo’s big teeth showed in a grin. “I did,” he said, and once more started nodding a steady rhythm of affirmation.
“And how about this next one, by George Cartright Dawson?”
The nodding continued without the slightest change in tempo.
“You mean you wrote that one too?”
“That’s right, Mr. Mason.”
Mason watched the light glinting from the high forehead as the herd continued to nod.
“And the next story?” he asked.
There was no slightest change in the tempo of the nodding.
“For the love of Mike,” Mason said, “do you write the whole magazine?”
“Usually. Sometimes I find a story I can buy at my regular space rates of one-quarter of a cent a word.”
“All right,” Mason said crisply. “What are your troubles?”
“My troubles!” Caddo exclaimed. “I have them by the thousand! I... Oh, you mean why did I come to see you?”
“That’s right.”
Caddo opened the magazine which Della Street had placed on Mason’s desk. With a practised hand, he thumbed the pages and stopped at Ad 96. “Here we have it in a nutshell,” he said.
He passed the ad across to Mason.
Mason read:
I am a girl of twenty-three, with good face and figure. I am the type the wolves all say should be in Hollywood, although Hollywood doesn’t seem to think so. I am an heiress with a comfortable fortune coming to me. I am tired of the people who know who I am and are quite obviously making love to me for my money. I would like very much to form a new circle of acquaintances. Will some personable young man between the ages of 23 and 40 write to tell me he knows how I feel? Also, when you write, tell me something about your background. Enclose a picture if possible. Communicate with me at Box 96, care of this magazine.
Mason frowned.
“What’s the matter?” Caddo asked.
“Quite obviously this is a fake,” Mason said acidly. “No intelligent heiress would even read your magazine. A good-looking heiress would be far too busy and far too intelligent to waste her time reading such tripe, let alone sending in an advertisement for you to publish. This is the cheapest type of exploitation.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Caddo said.
"You should be.”
“I mean I’m sorry that you can’t understand.”
“I think I do understand. I would say that this ad was the result of a collaboration by Arthur Ansell Ashland and George Cartright Dawson.”
“No! No! No, Mr. Mason! Please don’t,” Caddo said, holding an uplifted hand with the palm toward Mason, as though he were a traffic cop restraining an impatient pedestrian.
"You mean you didn’t write that yourself?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Then you had someone do it,” Mason charged.
"But Mr. Mason, really I didn’t. That’s what I came to see you about.”
“All right, tell me about it.”
The lawyer’s cynical eyes, boring into his, caused Caddo to shift uneasily. “I wish you would believe me, Mr. Mason.”
“Give me the facts.”
“In this business, you understand, as in any other business, once a person blazes a trail there are others who will follow it — in other words, I have imitators, and these imitators are my bitter rivals.”
“Go ahead.”
“One of these imitators has complained to the authorities that I am boosting the circulation of my magazine by resorting to false advertising.”
“What do the authorities say?”
“They’ve advised me either to withdraw this issue from circulation or prove to them that the ad is genuine. And I can’t do either.”
“Why not?”
“In the first place, this is not really a magazine, in the usual sense of the word. It’s sort of a pamphlet. We print a large number and keep them in circulation until they’re sold out or until the freshness has so worn off that our advertising returns cease. To call in all the magazines and print others would be out of the question. Oh, I suppose it could be done, but it would be expensive and annoying and would necessitate a lot of work.”
“If the ad is genuine, why can’t you prove it’s genuine?”
Caddo stroked his big jaw with long, powerful fingers. “Now there’s the rub,” he said.
“Meaning no pun, I take it,” Mason observed with a swift glance at Della Street.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“Well,” Caddo said, still rubbing his chin, “perhaps I’d better explain to you a little something about how we work, Mr. Mason.”
“Go ahead.”
“The only way a reader can communicate with one of the persons who has seen fit to insert an ad in my magazine is by purchasing a copy of the magazine at twenty-five cents, writing a message on the back page, and seeing that that page reaches the office of the magazine, properly addressed to the box with which he wishes to communicate. We then take the responsibility of seeing that the message is placed in the proper box. That’s all. If the message is sent to us through the mails it’s done by the subscriber at his own risk. In fact, we suggest that it be delivered personally, but if a subscriber lives out of town, of course, he usually has to mail his message.”
“Go ahead.”
“Now, a person who wants a pen-pal will be quite apt to communicate with several different advertisers. In other words, a person will often write ten or fifteen letters.”
“All at the expense of buying a magazine for each letter at twenty-five cents a copy?”
“That’s right.”
“And then what?”
“He will probably receive an answer to every letter he writes.”
“So that he then ceases to be lonely and therefore ceases to be a customer.”
Caddo smiled. “It hardly works out that way.”
“No?”
“No. A person who is truly lonely,” Caddo said, “is very apt to be so because of some facet of his own character, not because of his environment. In other words, Mr. Mason, you take a mixer, a person who is going to be popular, and put him down in a strange city where he doesn’t know a soul, and within a couple of weeks he’ll have quite a circle of friends. Of course, with a woman it’s a little more difficult, but they always manage some way. Now, the people who use my columns are, for the most part, mature people, who have something within themselves that keeps them from mixing, from making friends. A normal girl is married by the time she’s thirty. One who passes that age, still unmarried, and not from choice, is quite apt to have a personality that will doom her to a solitary life. In other words, she has erected a barrier between herself and her emotions, between herself and the world, yet she’s yearning to have someone smash that barrier. She herself lacks the power to remove it.
“Anyhow, without going into a lot of details about the psychology of lonely people — and I can assure you, Mr. Mason, I’ve made quite a study of that psychology — the fact remains that my customers are, as nearly as I can tell, more or less steady. For instance, we’ll take the case of a hypothetical Miss X. Miss X is perhaps a spinster of forty-two or forty-three. She is wistful, lonely and essentially romantic. There are, however, certain mental inhibitions which keep her from letting herself go, so that only in the privacy of her own mind does she have these romantically gregarious thoughts.