“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 Ted 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 send, “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.”