Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

James M. Ullman Operation Bonaparte

Ted Bennett nodded to the receptionist, deposited a two-suiter in a corner, and strode unannounced into the office of Michael Dane James, business and industrial espionage consultant.

James, a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man of medium height, looked up with a scowl. He settled his horn-rimmed glasses on his pug nose and demanded, “What are you doing back in New York? You’re supposed to be on assignment in Rio, finding out where Lou Orloff is hiding the eight million he stole.”

“I left hurriedly,” Bennett explained. He pulled up a chair and lit a cigarette. “Anyhow, I didn’t see much point in sticking around.”

“You didn’t? Well, I do. That stockholders’ committee is paying us good money to investigate Orloff’s finances.” James rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair and sighed. “Not that the information will help them much. Once a thief like Orloff gets himself and his loot out of the country, the cause is lost. Those poor investors who paid thirty dollars a share for Orloff’s stock in its heyday will be lucky to get one cent on a dollar. But Sam Powell, the attorney for the committee, is a good friend of mine. What little help we can give him, I want to give him.”

Bennett, a tall, lean man in his late thirties, said positively, “Mickey, I spent two weeks nosing around in Rio. And believe me, we won’t learn anything more about Orloff’s finances down there than we know now.”

“Sure we will, Ted. He’s living in a lavish villa, keeping to himself and making only rare public appearances, just as he did in the States — before his corporate house of cards started tumbling, before the stockholders learned he was looting their company like a bank robber going through a vault, exchanging the company’s assets for stock in a pyramid of worthless holding companies under his control, and then selling the assets and stashing the money nobody-knows-where. But a man like Orloff — he won’t allow those stolen millions to lie idle. He’s probably putting it all into South American real estate, or making a down payment on a fleet of tankers.”

Bennett shook his head. “Orloff is not doing any of those things. His tangible assets in Brazil consist of one villa and one Mercedes-Benz automobile. Less than a hundred thousand dollars in value at the very most.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because,” Bennett said, gazing blandly at the ceiling, “the man who has been dodging reporters and living in luxury in Rio for the last five weeks — that man is nor Lou Orloff...”

Thoughtfully Sam Powell chewed on a cigar. A large, bearish man, he peered out of his Manhattan penthouse window. Then he turned back to James and Bennett.

“Well,” he drawled, “that is a poser.”

“It sure is,” James agreed. “While everyone snooped around the mystery man living in conspicuous seclusion in Rio, the real Orloff had five weeks to bury himself in some other part of the world.”

“He’s taking quite a risk,” Powell said. “The impersonation was sure to be discovered sooner or later. And that imposter might talk.”

“I don’t think,” Bennett interrupted, “the imposter knows Orloff s true whereabouts any more than we do. The false Orloff gets two thousand dollars deposited to his account in a Rio bank on the first of every month. The money is sent from a numbered account in a Swiss bank. That’s his living allowance — and two thousand a month can go a long, long way in Brazil, especially when you’re occupying a villa that’s already paid for.”

“How did you find him out?” Powell asked.

”I began to suspect,” Bennett said, “when, despite all the checks I made, I couldn’t find that he owned anything of value in Brazil except the house and the car. Supposedly, he’d stolen eight million dollars from your company. Where was it? Moreover, he made no apparent attempt to communicate, by mail, telephone, or any other means, with anyone in any other part of the world. And unlike the real Orloff, who spent most of his time cooking up new swindles, this Orloff seemed mostly concerned with sitting around his swimming pool and drinking rum. He’s accompanied by the real Orloff s secretary, incidentally, a Miss Irene Conover, a stony-faced old girl who turned up with him in Rio and no doubt keeps cluing him in on how the real Orloff behaved.”

“Ted,” James put in, “bribed a servant to steal a glass from the supposed Orloff. He took the fingerprints from the glass and compared them with the real Orloff’s. They didn’t match.”

“If that man isn’t Orloff,” Powell speculated, “then who is he?”

“We already know that,” James replied. “Before coming to see you, we ran the false Orloff’s prints through the machinery we employ in industrial security investigations. The false Orloff s prints were on file because he’d been in the Army. His name is Herb Vann. Vann was a second-rate actor before the war. After the war he tried to make a go of it as a master of ceremonies in night clubs. He stuck with that for twelve years, without any significant success, and finally quit. He became a traveling salesman, based in Worcester, Massachusetts, handling a line of men’s wear. A little more than five weeks ago — a few days after the real Orloff disappeared from New York — Vann disappeared from New England. He’d quit his job and told his employers and friends he was moving to the West Coast.”

“He maintained his bank account, though,” Bennett said. “Only now it’s a lot heftier than it ever was before. The day he dropped out of sight, he added twenty thousand dollars to the few hundred then in the account.”

“Vann,” James said, “did meet the real Orloff several times. We learned that from a talk with Vann’s former booking agent. Vann bore such a decided physical resemblance to Orloff that a number of Orloff’s acquaintances, who caught Vann’s act, brought the actor to Orloff’s attention. Orloff went to see Vann’s act and was so impressed with the resemblance that once or twice he hired Vann to perform at parties, imitating Orloff himself. Orloff got a big kick out of it.”

“It seems,” Howell mused, “we have a problem. We three know that Lou Orloff, who is under a number of State and Federal indictments for fraud, and who stole eight million dollars from the stockholders I represent, is not hiding in South America, as the rest of the world believes. If we transmit this knowledge to the authorities, the deception will be exposed, as it should be. But if we do that, the real Orloff, wherever he is, will be doubly on his guard. If he — and any pan of our eight million dollars — is still in the United States, he might move the money out of the country immediately. What little chance we’d have of recovering any of the money would be lost.”

James glanced at Bennett. Then he said, “Give us a chance to crack this one, Sam. Let Orloff go on thinking for another few weeks that the impersonation is still undetected. We’d like nothing better than to nail a thief of Orloff’s proportions.”

“But where on earth,” Powell asked, “would you start looking for Orloff? Because by now, he could be anywhere on earth.”

“Right here in New York,” James said, “where the real Orloff was last known to be. That’s one place we’ll begin. Another is Worcester, Massachusetts, where the actor now playing the role of Orloff was last heard of under his own name.”

“All right,” Powell said slowly. “If you think there’s a chance...”

“There’s a chance,” James replied. “I’ll go to Worcester, and start tracking Herb Vann. And Ted will start dogging Orloff. I’d do that myself — only one of the people to be checked is Orloff s ex-mistress. And since Tod is a bachelor and I have a wife and family out in Scarsdale, I think Ted should get that assignment.”

Patricia Doyle added a jigger of vermouth to the pitcher and stirred. She filled two cocktail glasses and handed one to Bennett.

“Cheers,” she said. She sipped and walked to a chair and sat down. Dark-haired and still under thirty, she wore a decorous blue afternoon dress.

“This stockholder’s committee you’re working for,” she said. “Do you really think you can recover any of the money Lou stole?”

“Right now,” Bennett conceded, “the prospects don’t look good.”

“I don’t imagine they do. Lou was a very thorough man. When I look back. I can see now that he was planning this all along. He bought the villa in Rio, you know, more than a year ago. I was with him. He asked me not to mention the purchase to anyone. He said the stockholders might get the wrong idea. Actually, he was afraid they’d get the right idea.”

“Miss Doyle,” Bennett said, “we’d appreciate your cooperation...”

The woman chuckled. “It’s a pleasure, Mr. Bennett. Between you and me, the last few months I was just someone Lou dragged around with him, as a sort of decoration. Frankly, I wanted to leave him a long time ago, but he wouldn’t let me. Oh, I’m a big girl, and when Lou persuaded me to become what the newspapers call his ‘companion.’ I went into the deal with my eyes wide open. I thought: ‘Here’s a high-powered businessman, and if you play your cards right, maybe you can persuade him to marry you.’ Well, I soon found out how wrong that notion was. First, Lou Orloff wasn’t marrying anyone, and second, I learned he wasn’t a high-powered businessman. He was a high-powered crook. After just three months with him I concluded he’d wind up either an exile, which he is now, or a convict. It was inevitable.”

She sipped again at her martini.

“I stuck with him,” she went on, “because he solved a lot of my problems — like paying the rent and buying the groceries. He wasn’t lavish.

“Actually, he was stingy. But he had to buy me furs and jewelry because it was part of his act — the wealthy, confident, man-of-the-world. He wasn’t really confident, though. He was always scared someone was going to rob him. He figured everyone was as big a crook as he was. He didn’t trust anyone, not even me. I remember once, we were driving through a desert in Arizona and something went wrong with the car. Lou was furious. Not because we were stuck alone out there in the desert, with the temperature more than a hundred and snakes crawling over the highway, but because he was sure, absolutely sure, that when a trooper found us and radioed for a tow truck, the operator of the tow truck was going to pad the bill.”

She put her glass down and lit a cigarette.

“It’s hard to explain. I hated him because he was cruel, a cheat, and so suspicious of others that he belonged in a mental hospital. But on the other hand — well, I’ve got to admit it, I had to admire him. He started with nothing — not a thin dime. He spent his early years as a roustabout in the Louisiana and Texas oil fields. He was a huge man, very tough and very strong. He worked out every morning with bar bells. And physically, he was fearless. He earned a lot of medals during the war, you know — I saw the bullet scars. He was a raider out in the Pacific islands, operating behind the enemy lines. And one time he got shot full of bullets, stood up, and killed eleven Japanese with an automatic rifle. They gave him a Silver Star for that.”

“The reason I’m here,” Bennett said, “is to see if we can trace Orloff’s exact movements between New York and Rio. So we can get some sort of lead to the eight million dollars...”

Patricia Doyle shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. His secretary, Irene Conover, handled those details. And Lou never trusted her much, either.” She paused. “I can guarantee you one thing, though.”

“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 this 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 196 °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 196 °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 strongbox.”

“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 right, 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 weekends 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 night, 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 Prentiss 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, anyhow. 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.”

“Poor Lou Orloff, you mean,” Powell replied. “He spent a lifetime building up his house of cards. And then...”

“Then,” Bennett said, “he wound up in a pauper’s grave in Bonaparte, Louisiana, as John Doe.”

The three men strolled down the hall and into an empty courtroom.

They sat down. The hearing into Orloff s affairs would reconvene in half an hour.

“Orloff’s death,” James said, “was the direct result of his own greed and suspicion. Orloff was injured in that crash, but he was a strong and fearless man. He’d absorbed a number of bullets, once, and survived to win a medal. So he put the safety of his strongbox first, and his own welfare second. When he crawled out of that wrecked car and saw that Prentiss was dead, Orloff decided to hide his strongbox then and there. He wasn’t about to let any stranger he might meet in the next few hours know about that strongbox — especially policemen who might turn up at any time to investigate the accident. And even if he persuaded someone, as he ultimately persuaded Ira Wilson, to drive him to the sanitarium in Bonaparte, he feared he might become unconscious during the ride, and the strongbox might be stolen. He was also afraid of being hospitalized in that sanitarium, perhaps anesthetized for hours or days at a time, with the strongbox lying around for anyone to pick up.”

“As I understand it,” Powell said, “Orloff pried a hubcap off the rear wheel of the wrecked car and used that as a digging tool to bury the strongbox on the Wilson farm.”

“That’s right,” Bennett said. “Then, the strongbox taken care of, he finally gave some consideration to himself. He stumbled to Wilson’s house and bribed Wilson to drive him to Bonaparte, to the sanitarium, where he knew Bailey could arrange to keep his admittance a secret, since Bailey owned the place. But the delay in seeking medical attention, plus his exertions in burying his strongbox, proved fatal. According to the doctor at the sanitarium, who talked readily enough when Federal authorities questioned him, Orloff died less than twelve hours later.”

“He died,” James added, “without disclosing the spot where he’d buried the box. Orloff did tell Bailey it was somewhere on the farm, though, and ordered Bailey to buy the farm and get Wilson off the property — to forestall Wilson’s digging it up by accident. But Orloff had faith, to the end, that he’d recover from his injuries and dig up that strongbox himself.”

“So Bailey,” Bennett said, “posed as a man from Fort Smith and bought the farm. He also conceived the impersonation ‘red herring’ — the false Orloff — when the real Orloff died. He realized that unless another Orloff turned up somewhere, the authorities would start tracing Orloff’s movements from New York. They might learn about the accident in Arkansas, might start digging up the Wilson farm, too. Bailey conferred with Orloff’s secretary. Both knew about the actor, Herb Vann. Bailey paid the secretary to find Vann and arranged for him to assume Orloff’s identity in Rio for a few months. The villa in Rio had already been purchased, the secretary had Orloff’s passport so everything was set. All that was necessary was for Vann to show up in Rio, with the secretary at his elbow to guide him over the rough spots.”

“The purpose of the deception,” James said, “was to give Bailey enough time to buy the farm, get Wilson moved off, and start digging for the strongbox on his own. That’s how he was spending his time when Bennett showed up to investigate the accident he was digging. It was a job he wanted to do alone. Like Orloff, he didn’t trust anyone to help him. Because the strongbox now meant an awful lot to E. G. Bailey — as much as it had meant to Lou Orloff, when Orloff was alive. The diamonds inside were only a minor consideration. The big thing was, if Bailey could find and destroy Orloff’s ledger, he could then transfer all that money from Orloff’s dummy accounts into dummy accounts of his own, without fear that the ledger would ever turn up to trap him — a neat little gain of more than six million dollars, and no taxes. No wonder he was willing to spend a little money to maintain Vann as the false Orloff.”

“As soon as we realized Gordon and Bailey were the same man,” Bennett added, “the whole pattern became clear. Why else would Bailey buy the Wilson farm and spend his time digging alone, except to uncover that strongbox? And if Orloff had buried the box and after five weeks hadn’t returned to dig it up himself, it almost certainly meant Orloff was unable to return, that he had probably died in the sanitarium.”

Powell smiled. “It was nice of Bailey to find the box so quickly, while you two and those Federal marshals were hiding nearby. Bailey might have spent weeks poking around before he uncovered it.”

“Well,” James grinned, “we sort of induced its quick discovery, Sam. We staked out the farm that morning because we knew Bailey was going to find the box. He’d been searching with a shovel before. But when I met him back in Bonaparte, as the president of the James Sales Company, I used a little creative salesmanship on Mr. E. G. Bailey. I even made a twelve-dollar profit on the deal, Ted’s expenses going to New Orleans and back for this item notwithstanding. I sold Bailey the very thing he needed most — a portable metal detector.”