She turned back toward the sofa. “He’s confessed to killin’ Mrs. Clarkson last year. I always said he was a rascal.”
George Drayton smiled. He had solved the Clarkson case. And he had done it without moving from his bench in Knightswood Square.
...Just like Inspector Maigret.
James M. Ullman
Operation Bonaparte
Another adventure of the two industrial investigators, Michael Dane James and Ted Bennett — this time, a “classic” case of an embezzling and absconding financier, hiding out in Rio with $8,000,000 of the stockholders’ money...
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 not 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,” Powell 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 part 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.”