“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 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 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.