by Ellery Queen
“What’s that?”
“Wherever Lou went, he picked up his strongbox first.”
“What strongbox?”
“A big metal one. He had some diamonds in it—what he called his ‘hard wealth,’ something he could use for currency in case the country got blown up by atom bombs, or he had to skip in a hurry. But more important than that, the box contains his personal ledger. I opened that ledger once, and he socked me—smack in the face. At the time I didn’t realize what the notations meant. I do now. This ledger shows exactly what he did with the money he stole from your stockholders.”
“What did you see when you opened it?”
“He’d trace the sale of some property or stock from your company—up to the holding company on top of all the other holding companies he owned. And then he’d show where the money went after he drew it out of the last holding company.”
“Do you remember,” Bennett asked, “where the money did go?”
She laughed. “Lou fooled me there. He used code names, I guess. According to the book, all the money he stole went to Napoleon.”
“Napoleon?”
“Not ‘Napoleon,’ exactly. He’d list these sums, then some names of companies and people I never heard of, and finally the code name for where the money was hidden away. And usually the code name would be ‘Bonaparte.’ Just that one word. He had an awful lot of money in ‘Bonaparte’!”
“Where did Orloff keep his strongbox?”
“He moved it around, but always to cities where one of his companies had an office. The last time I remember, Mr. Bennett, he had it hidden somewhere in Kansas City, Missouri. That was maybe two months before he left New York. If that strongbox was still in Kansas City, he went there before he went anywhere else. You can make book on that.”
Bennett stepped into a telephone booth on a Kansas City downtown street. He asked the long-distance operator to connect him with the number of a booth in a hotel in Richmond, Virginia.
Michael Dane James answered. “Ted?”
“Yes, Mickey.”
“I hope you’ve uncovered something, because I haven’t got much. Vann came to Richmond from Worcester, to see his mother. He told her he was going abroad for a while. She remembers he had tickets for New Orleans, and that once he telephoned a woman in New Orleans collect. I’d imagine that woman was Orloff’s secretary, Irene Conover, who turned up in Rio with Vann. New Orleans must have been where they met.”
“Well, I’m on a hot trail here,” Bennett reported. “Orloff made an appearance at his Kansas City office the day after he left New York. He had the strongbox under his arm. It was after the building closed, and the watchman had to unlock the door to let him in. The watchman remembers that Orloff went up to his office for a while and then came back down. Orloff was picked up by a man driving a 1960 Chevrolet sedan. Orloff got into the sedan with his strongbox and the two men drove away.”
“Anything else?”
“Plenty. The superintendent let me into Orloff’s office—it cost a ten-spot. Orloff’s furnishings are still there, although they’ll be sold soon for nonpayment of rent. I found Orloff’s classified telephone book open to the private detective section. He’d checked a little agency just a few blocks from his own office. So I walked over to the agency—and found that it’s gone out of business.”
“Why?”
“Because the private detective who ran it—a guy named Prentiss—is dead. He was killed in an automobile wreck. His car went off the road somewhere in Arkansas and landed in a ditch. The accident happened the same night Orloff showed up with his strongbox. And Prentiss was driving a 1960 Chevrolet sedan.”
“Sounds to me,” James said, “as though Orloff and Prentiss left Kansas City together. With Prentiss hired, perhaps, as a bodyguard, since Orloff had his precious strongox.”
“I talked to the detective’s widow,” Bennett went on. “Prentiss had done some work for Orloff in the past—industrial spying, a few years ago. The widow said she didn’t know where Prentiss was going the night he was killed in Arkansas. All she knows is, her husband called from his office, said an important job had come up, and he’d be out of town a day or so. The next word she had of Prentiss was a telephone call from a sheriff in Arkansas, telling her that her husband had been found dead in this wrecked car.”
“Anyone else in the car with Prentiss?”
“Nobody was found in the car with him. The widow and the sheriff assumed Prentiss was traveling alone, on his way to a job.”
“Well,” James said, “it’s almost sure that Prentiss had a passenger when he left Kansas City—namely, Lou Orloff. You’d better drive to Arkansas and look into the accident further. I’m going to New Orleans, to see if I can discover what happened to Vann after he arrived there.”
James hesitated. “We seem,” he added, “to be headed more or less in the same direction. Maybe in a day or so we’ll both wind up in the same place.”
Bennett turned off the highway at the foot of the hill. His rented car bumped up a dirt road a hundred yards or so to a frame house.
He braked and cut the engine.
In a wooded area to his rights, a man who had been digging a hole stopped, jammed a shovel into the ground, and started wearily toward Bennett.
Bennett climbed from the car and walked toward the man who was heavy-set and in his forties. The man paused to mop his brow as Bennett neared.
“Howdy,” Bennett said. “I’m from an insurance company, I’m investigating an accident that happened in front of your property last month.”
Ruefully the man smiled. “I heard about that. Sorry, but I probably can’t help you much. My name’s Gordon, and I took possession of this place only two days ago. I just bought the property.”
“What happened to the former owner?”
“He’s an old farmer, Ira Wilson. He moved to Florida, he didn’t exactly say where.” Gordon dug into a shirt pocket and pulled out a cigar. He bent and lit it. “I’m from Fort Smith, y’see. Always wanted a country place of my own. For vacations and week-ends and retirement…”
“Sure. You mind if I see where they found the car?”
“Not at all.”
Bennett and Gordon trudged through the woods.
“It’s kind of a long time since the accident happened,” Gordon observed. “How come you’re lookin’ into it now?”
“It’s a life insurance policy,” Bennett explained glibly. “The claim was filed just last week. I haven’t talked to the sheriff yet, but I got the accident report from a deputy in his office. Apparently, the accident happened up ahead there, where the road curves.”
“That’s right. It’s easy to find the exact spot, because the car knocked down a tree.”
Bennett viewed the fallen tree, which lay at the foot of a steep incline. He took a camera from his pocket.
This is a lonely spot,” Bennett said. Now I understand what they meant on that accident report—that the exact time of the accident was unknown. A wreck could lie here for hours, especially at nighty without anyone seeing it from the road.”
“That’s true,” Gordon said. “There’s very little traffic. And now that you mention it, a car’s headlights wouldn’t sweep down that far.”
Bennett took some pictures.
“Well,” he said, returning the camera to his pocket and pulling out a notebook, “it does look ordinary enough. That is a steep curve.” He began writing.
“They tell me,” Gordon said, “there’s an accident here at least two or three times a year.”
“The deputy said that too. Thanks for showing me around.”
Gordon accompanied Bennett back to his car. Bennett waved, drove back to the road, and returned to the Arkansas county seat where the sheriff had his office.
The sheriff was in this time. A stony-faced, alert young man, he said, “I understand you been looking into that fatal accident down by the Wilson place.”
“The Gordon place, you mean.”
“
That’s right,” the sheriff smiled. “Old Ira Wilson sold out and left for Florida or somewhere. He never did tell anyone exactly where. He must have inherited a fair pile of money, though. Four weeks ago, just before he sold his place to Gordon, Ira bought himself a new Cadillac. With cash.”
“Who in his family died?”
“Some old aunt, Ira said. He’d never mentioned her before. But I guess she musta been loaded. About this accident. You think there’s something wrong?”
“You never can tell. After all, Prentiss was a private detective.”
“I know. The thought occurred to us, too. But there didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary. The steering wheel went right through the man when the car hit the tree. It’s a bad curve, and it’d been raining. It makes the pavement there a lot slicker than a city man like Prentiss might think. I checked that wreck real close, and so did the state troopers. The only thing we didn’t understand was—there was a hubcap missing.”
“A hubcap?”
“Off the rear wheel. Couldn’t find it anywhere. But most likely, it fell off before the accident and Pentiss never had another one put on.”
“This Ira Wilson, who owned the land where the car crashed. Was he home the night of the accident?”
“Well, that’s a funny thing,” the sheriff said. “We thought he’d be home. A state trooper spotted that wreck in the woods right after dawn. We went to Ira’s house to learn if he’d heard anything. We didn’t really expect he did—there was a lot of thunder that night, and Ira don’t hear too good, and besides, his house is a fair distance from the accident scene. But Ira wasn’t there. His pickup truck was missing too. That worried us, because he hadn’t told anyone he was going on a trip. We figured maybe he went off the road somewhere in that storm, too, and we put out a message on him. But he called in about noon, long-distance from a motel in Louisiana. He said he’d heard about the accident on the radio, and he just wanted us to know he was all right. He’d gone to Bonaparte on business, y’see.”
“Bonaparte?”
“Yeah. Bonaparte, Louisiana. About two hundred miles from here. You keep going south on the road where Prentiss got killed, and you’ll wind up right in Bonaparte.”
Bennett stood before a public telephone in a Bonaparte drug store. He opened the Bonaparte telephone book to the classified pages and thumbed to the “motel” listings.
He started down the list alphabetically. He called each motel, identified himself as an insurance investigator, and asked if an Ira Wilson had registered on April 15 or 16.
At the ninth motel he received an affirmative answer. Bennett told the owner he’d be right over, hung up, went out to his car, and drove to the motel.
“Sure, I recall the man,” the owner declared. “You say he filed a claim with your company six months ago? Reporting he’s totally disabled?”
“That’s right. Said he couldn’t even walk without help.”
“Well, the Ira Wilson who stopped here was an old guy all right, but he wasn’t disabled. If it’s the same man, he drove in here by himself in a pickup truck with Arkansas plates. I recall because it was such an odd hour—six in the morning—and he seemed a strange customer for a motel like ours, anyway. But he had plenty of cash. He peeled a twenty from a real big roll.”
“You got any idea where he was coming from? I’d like to find some other people who saw him walking around under his own power.”
“I’ll tell you about that. I was outside, picking up the morning newspapers, when he came along. I looked in his cab and saw blood on the seat, on the passenger side. I asked him what had happened and he got real sore. He said he’d just driven a friend who was sick up to the sanitarium. Well, I let him have a room. I was suspicious, though, so I called the sanitarium. But they said it was all right, that he had delivered a very sick friend there.”
“What sanitarium is that?” Bennett asked.
“It’s right up the road. The E. G. Bailey Sanitarium.”
“Is Bailey a doctor?”
The motel owner laughed. “No, not E.G. He’s got a doctor to run it, but E.G., he just put up the money. He puts up the money for a lot of things in Bonaparte, mister. He’s just about the richest man around here.”
“What’s his main business?”
“E.G.,” the motel man said, “is president of the bank.”
“Well, thanks,” Bennett said. “You’ve been a big help.”
Bennett returned to his car and drove to downtown Bonaparte. He parked in front of E. G. Bailey’s bank, which occupied a four-story building in the heart of town.
Bennett stepped from the car. He dropped a nickel into the parking meter and started toward the bank entrance. But when he was ten yards from the door, a man stuck his head from another parked car and yelled, “Hey, Ted.”
Bennett turned. Gazing at him from behind the wheel of the car was Michael Dane James.
“I figured you’d get here sooner or later,” James went on. “Let’s take a ride. I know a place where they’ll serve you a plate of soft-shelled crab for a dollar. And beer is only twenty cents a bottle.”
James backed the car from the curb and steered up Bonaparte’s Main Street.
“How,” Bennett asked gloomily, “did you get here?”
“You’re an ingenious fellow,” James conceded. “But you have no monopoly on ingenuity. Why do you think you’re working for me, and not the other way around?”
“I never figured that out.”
“I’m here,” James said, “because the Bank of Bonaparte came to my attention in New Orleans. The actor Vann’s trail ended there. But then I searched for some trace of Orloff’s secretary, Irene Conover, who I assumed had been the woman Vann telephoned from Richmond. And sure enough, she’d arrived in New Orleans the day after Orloff disappeared from New York. Registered in a hotel under her own name, too, which indicates that this whole impersonation stunt must have been improvised. But the day after the Kansas City detective wrecked his car in Arkansas, Irene Conover vanished for twenty-four hours. She rented a car and drove off. When she came back, she gave the hotel manager a large sum of cash to be stored in the hotel safe overnight. The sum was so large that the manager noted the printing on the wrappers around the money—wrappers from the Bank of Bonaparte, Louisiana. And once I heard the magic word ‘Bonaparte,’ I got terribly interested in that bank. It would explain Orloff’s mysterious ledger. Every ‘Bonaparte’ entry would represent a deposit in a dummy account in the Bank of Bonaparte. Because where else could anyone hide millions of dollars in a small town like Bonaparte, except in a bank?”
“I suppose,” Bennett said, “you’ve already subjected E. G. Bailey, president of the bank, to the background check I was about to undertake.”
“I have,” James said. “E. G. Bailey, years ago, was a wildcatter in the Louisiana oil fields. His partner back in those days was none other than our old friend, Lou Orloff.”
“Each, I imagine, went his own way,” Bennett said, “Orloff into the intricacies of high finance, Bailey into small-town banking.”
“Correct. But Orloff was probably a secret stockholder in that bank. At any rate, he must have set up the dummy accounts there, with his old friend Bailey’s knowledge, planning later to transfer the money to South America. And that’s why Orloff was heading for Bonaparte after he left Kansas City—to complete the transfer arrangements with Bailey. After which he intended to meet his secretary in New Orleans and then skip to Rio.”
Bennett lit a cigarette.
“What else have you been up to?”
“I just opened an account in the bank—as the James Sales Company. Sales of what, I’ll leave to your imagination, just as I left it to the bank’s. But it was a highly instructive afternoon. My initial deposit was big enough to command the attention of the highest echelon in the Bank of Bonaparte. And among other things I learned that E. G. Bailey has been out of town for three days. He’s expected back later today, though, and I have an appointment to meet him at
one p.m. tomorrow. But next Monday he’s going out of town again. What happened to you?”
Bennett told James how he had followed Orloff’s—and Wilson’s—trail from Arkansas to Bonaparte.
James turned off the road and parked in front of a white frame restaurant.
“Here we are,” James said. “But before we go in—describe for me once more that man Gordon who occupied the farm in Arkansas, the one who bought it from Ira Wilson.”
Bennett did so.
“Well,” James said, “in the back seat of this car is a manila envelope containing a photograph of E. G. Bailey. And unless I miss my guess, the man you saw on that farm was not a Mr. Gordon of Fort Smith. It was E. G. Bailey, the president of the Bank of Bonaparte.”
Bennett reached back, opened the envelope, and looked carefully inside.
“You’re right,” he said slowly. “Now, that’s a funny way for a Louisiana bank president to spend his time—digging holes on a tract of bottomland in Arkansas.”
“It sure is,” James replied. He opened the door. “And it kind of brings all the pieces in this puzzle into place, too. Let’s eat. Then you’re going back to New Orleans, while I make inquiries of whatever local authorities handle vital statistics. I want you to buy me something in New Orleans. What you buy, I’m going to sell to E. G. Bailey when I see him tomorrow. It will be the one and only transaction of the James Sales Company. But it may wind up as the most important sale I ever made.
Sam Powell walked out of a hearing room in the Federal courthouse in Little Rock, Arkansas. Bennett and James were waiting in the corridor.
Powell shoved a cigar into his mouth and grinned. “It’s going to take time to unravel the details, but we just got a look at Orloff’s ledger. It shows there should be at least six million, maybe more, of that stolen money in the Bank of Bonaparte, under dummy names which Orloff and Bailey set up, and which our stockholders now stand an excellent chance of recovering. Not to mention the value of Orloff’s diamonds.”
James chuckled. “Poor old E. G. Bailey. He sure looked startled the other morning when Ted and I and those Federal marshals stepped from behind the Wilson farmhouse and caught him lugging that strongbox from the woods to his car.”