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.”
“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 weekends and retirement...”