“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.
“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?”