“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 nor 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,” Howell 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 pan 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.”
“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 Tod 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 said, “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.”