May 25 Tuesday — Sam recorded going to New York to check with a secretary of the late H.H, Rogers, Miss A. Watson, who had been put in charge of looking into the financial records to see if the Ashcrofts had committed theft.
About the 25th of May Paine & I went down to New York. Stanchfield wanted the examination of checks & vouchers transferred to a man-a public & responsible account, incorruptible by injured-servant tears & maudun sentimentality. So Paine & I went to the Standard Oil, & I delivered my message to Miss Watson in one of the private offices. She was very frosty; whereby I knew Miss Lyon had been crying down the back of her neck & saying damaging things about me; & that Miss Watson was further incensed against me because those deadly figures had damaged the Ashcrofts in her estimation, & she had failed to find any want to undamage them.
She was just a little inconsistent. In the beginning she remarked, gloomily, that the examination had cost her ten days of exhausting & frightful labor; whereas toward the end of her talk she remarked that the labor had been very light, because the vouchers & checks tallied so well that it was but little trouble to check them up. “Check them up.” ‘That was her expression. She used it again, a month later, when she sent her bill [MTP:L-A MS XVI].
Sam continued the day’s events on a later page, section XVII:
Leaving the Standard Oil, Paine & I went chatting along uptown in the Subway, & got out at Astor Place. The talk was to this effect: since Miss Lyon had made so free with my check-book in rehabilitating her house, perhaps we might find other instances of this license besides those exposed by Mr. Lounsbury if we should inaugurate a hunt. Paine believed we could discover cases of “graft,” at any rate. He mentioned one which had the look of a certainty: he was with Miss Lyon one day at Boiajin’s (the Armenian rug-dealer) when she bought a ninety-dollar rug, & borrowed half of the money from Paine & said she would send the other half to the dealer by check. I will anticipate by remarking that the investigation-discloses revealed the fact, a few weeks later, that she had kept her word: she had paid the $45 with my check.
Then there was the Strohmeyer case. Miss Lyon had employed Strohmeyer to refit & re-upholster a couple of car-loads of furniture for us, & she said he was so grateful for her custom that he had rebuilt & perfected a large old mahogany table for her for nothing, & had told her he would have charged anyone else $65 for this work. We went to Strohmeyer & asked him if he had repaired the table, & he—innocent man!—suspecting nothing, told us all about it. He said it was a very find old table, but just a ruin when it came to him. It was as good as new when he was done with it. He produced his work-shop’s itemised bill—half a page of details—whereby it appeared that he had paid his workmen $33 for the work, & that he had charged Miss Lyon only $10. At the bottom of the bill the $10 was acknowledged. About this time he began to grow suspicious & a little nervous, & said no, he wouldn’t have charged a stranger $65, but probably only $45. This didn’t mend the matter much, since it was a confession that he had given Miss Lyon $33 worth of work for $10—a very plain case of graft. Paine remarked privately that it had been perfectly natural & characteristic in Miss Lyon to lie about the matter & boast of getting the work for nothing when she had really paid ten dollars for it. He said she couldn’t tell the truth in any circumstances whatsoever—she had never learned how.
Strohmeyer caught the sinister drift of our inquiries, & he was a good deal embarrassed, & said perhaps he had charged Miss Lyon the full rate—yes, undoubtedly! The ledger would show. The ledger was brought. Unhappily it confirmed the $10, But also unhappily, it didn’t stop there. There were several entries, & I asked leave to examine them. It couldn’t be gracefully excused. There was a bedstead & a mattrasses—for whom? Miss Lyon’s mother. It went to Summerfield [Lobster Pot] (Pure waste of stolen money; our attic was well stocked with bedsteads & mattrasses in perfect condition—there was no occasion for Miss Lyon to buy such things.) And there was a seventy-dollar chair. My, but that was sumptuous! Whose palace was it for? Miss Lyon’s. The several items in the ledger-account, bunched together, aggregated $115. At that time Miss Lyon had not been invited to borrow money of me. Evidently she was a capable provider for herself, when unwatched.
Next, Paine & I thought we would look into Miss Lyon’s habit of delaying the payment of bills—if she really had that lazy & vicious habit. By letter we had already asked two or three of the big department-stores to go back over their books a year or two years, & tell me the dates when bills were mailed, & the dates when they were paid. Two or three had responded in the early days of the month (May.)
I had previously come across one such bill. It arrived when Miss Lyon had been gone about a week. It was 3 months old, & had a wail in it [MTP: L-A MS XVII]. Notes: Sam then inserted a bill for $13.95 for “Fit Mdse” from B. Altman & Co, first sent Feb, 1, and not paid till May 3.; also a schedule of bills dated May 5 of bills: when sent and when paid, from Dec. 1907 to Jan. 24, 1909; also a long list of bills from Wanamaker’s Department Store from Feb. 1, 1906 to Feb. 1, 1909; also a statement from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NYC; These served to show Lyon’s slow pay of bills.