I moved across the room then and sat beside Mrs. Deland. For a long time neither of us spoke. What could I say? What words of mine could assuage the mother’s grief-
The waiter brought Shayne’s breakfast, and he stopped reading the sob story. Following instructions at the end of the article, he turned to page six for more pictures.
There was one of Dawson, Deland’s partner in the plumbing business and go-between in the ransom pay-off. There was an inset showing a faded photograph of Gerta Ross as she had looked a decade or more ago above a caption: Find This Woman. And a diagram showing the spot on the highway northward from Miami where Dawson claimed he had been set upon by armed thugs and forced to give them the ransom money.
Shayne ate his scrambled eggs and bacon and drank three cups of coffee while he carefully read Dawson’s account of his adventures as given to the police at an early hour that morning. It was ingeniously simple and straightforward, and had the ring of truth.
Following instructions (said Dawson) he drove across the causeway after receiving the packet of money from Deland and turned north on Biscayne Boulevard at a moderate pace. He naturally presumed he was being trailed every foot of the way, and he did nothing to arouse suspicion in the minds of the kidnapers or to upset the plan for Kathleen Deland’s exchange for the ransom money.
After passing 79th Street, there was less traffic and he noticed that he was being followed at a distance of about five hundred feet by another car. He was confident then that the contact had been established and that the kidnapers would approach him as soon as they thought it safe to do so.
Fearing to do anything not in strict accordance with instructions, Dawson said he drove on northward at the same steady pace mile after mile, past the Hollywood traffic circle and onto the nearly deserted stretch of highway south of Fort Lauderdale.
The pursuing car came abreast of him suddenly, honked as it passed, and turned in front of him onto a dark side road. Happy in his belief that he was soon to have his partner’s daughter safe in his own car, Dawson followed the other car a quarter of a mile down the side road and stopped behind it
Three men got out of the car and approached him in the dark. All were armed, and one of them demanded the cash.
“I told them it was in the front seat of my car,” Dawson related, “and asked them where the girl was. One of the men laughed and hit me on the head with some heavy object. I presume it was the butt of his gun, though the unexpected blow knocked me unconscious, and I really don’t know what I was hit with.”
He remained unconscious for a couple of hours, Dawson said, and when he finally came to, his car was still there, but the other car, the men, and the money were gone.
The story was simple and had the virtue of strict plausibility. If he didn’t know the truth, Shayne reflected grimly, he himself would be inclined to believe Dawson. It was just the sort of thing kidnapers might be expected to do. The newspaper account added that Dawson was in the hospital receiving treatment for shock and his head injury, prostrated with grief that his mission had turned out so badly.
Shayne’s name was not mentioned in any of the stories. Reference was made to a male passenger in the wrecked kidnap car, and it was hinted that this person had been tentatively identified by a bystander before escaping in the excitement, but Painter had gone no further than that.
Shayne searched for a story on the affair at the Fun Club and the murder of Slocum in Shayne’s apartment, but found nothing.
On another page he did find a brief account of the fire on West 38th Street. He read it with interest while he drank a final cup of coffee. The two-story frame building had been a mass of flame by the time the fire apparatus arrived, and they had confined their efforts to keeping the fire from spreading. A Negro, as yet unidentified, had been found in the basement with injuries which were attributed to the fire, and there was evidence (said the story) that other inhabitants of the dwelling had escaped before the fire gained headway.
The house was rented by a Mr. Greerson who was something of a man of mystery, according to his neighbors, but who was presumed to have operated an automobile repair business in the basement garage. Mr. Greerson had not appeared to make a statement at the time the paper went to press.
Shayne left the paper on the table and went out. It wasn’t yet time for the banks to open, so he stopped at the first men’s store he came to on Flagler Street. They had no suits in stock that would fit him, but he found a pair of gray slacks, a tan shirt, and underwear to replace the ill-fitting garments he had borrowed from the dead man. He changed in a back room, ordered the clothing he had removed to be sent to his apartment, and continued up the street to a shoe store where he was lucky enough to find a pair of shoes that fitted him. He gave the clerk his address and asked that the discarded shoes be delivered.
He came out of the store and went west on Flagler to the First National Bank. It had just opened and there were a few customers in the lobby. Shayne chose a teller who did not know him and offered the two hundred-dollar bills he had held out from the ransom money, shoving them across the counter and saying, “I’d like twenties and tens and fives.”
The teller was young and blonde and obliging. He smoothed the bills out, looked at first one and then the other, pushed them aside and began to count out two hundred dollars in smaller bills.
Shayne gave a start, as though he suddenly remembered something important. He said, apologetically, “I’m sorry, but I’ve changed my mind. Would you let me have those bills back?”
The teller stopped counting and looked through the bars with a frown. “You don’t want the bills changed?”
Shayne said again, “I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind.”
The teller looked down at the sheaf of smaller bills he had been counting, studied Shayne suspiciously, then picked up the money he had counted. Slowly and carefully he counted it again, then handed Shayne the two large bills with a disapproving look.
Thanking him cheerfully, Shayne went back to a series of railed enclosures in the rear. He unlatched a wooden gate and went through it to a desk and said, “Hello, Marsten,” to the big florid-faced man sitting there.
Marsten looked up and said, “Morning, Shayne.” He pushed some papers aside and leaned back in his chair. “What can I do for you?”
Marsten was a former Treasury employee, one of the foremost experts on counterfeit money in the country. Shayne sat down and flipped the bills in front of him. “One of the tellers just offered me two hundred in small bills for those.”
Marsten picked up the bills and studied them thoughtfully. He turned them over in his hands, frowning, crinkling them and smoothing them out, testing the fabric of the paper.
After a time he sighed. “I’ve been expecting some of these to show up in Miami, but it’s a little early in the season.”
Shayne leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Counterfeit?”
“Absolutely. They’ve plagued us several years. They’re so nearly perfect they’ll get by anyone but an expert.”
“How do you know they’re counterfeit?”
Marsten smiled briefly at the detective. “Feel, mostly. Intuition. Call it what you will. The plates are perfect. The paper is so nearly perfect that extensive tests are required to prove it isn’t genuine. But these bills haven’t been in circulation, Mike. They’ve been rockered.”
“Rockered?”
“And a good job of it. But they’re not quite limp enough. Feel one.” He passed one of the bills to Shayne.
“It hasn’t passed through hundreds of sweaty hands, yet it has the appearance of having done so. Compare it with a genuine bill. The crispness has been rockered out of it, but no counterfeiter has yet invented a mechanical device that will produce exactly the same effect as that achieved by constant handling. Every smart counterfeiter uses some sort of device to dirty and rumple a newly printed bill. Those devices are called ‘rockers.’ They wad bills up, dampen them, roll them out smooth. Some of them use chemicals, to fade and soil a bill. The gang that puts this stuff out does one of the best jobs I’ve ever seen. That’s why one of our tellers would have accepted it.”