“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.”