“Embezzlement,” she finished.
“Exactly,” he announced. “City Treasurer, or something, wasn’t he?”
“That’s right.”
“Go on,” he invited.
“He is my father,” she said simply.
Moraine’s voice showed sympathy. “Isn’t he... that is...”
“Yes. He’s in jail.”
Moraine nodded.
“His term,” she said, “has about finished.”
Moraine, smoking, waited, watching her with eyes that had trained themselves to miss no faintest flicker of facial expression.
“When he was sentenced,” Natalie Rice went on, “there was a very decided belief on the part of the district attorney’s office that he was withholding over fifty thousand dollars in cash that had been secreted somewhere. They offered to make his sentence lighter if he’d turn in that money. He told them that he couldn’t, that he didn’t know where it was.”
“Was Duncan district attorney then?” Moraine asked.
“No. It was the one before Duncan.”
“All right. Go ahead. Pardon the interruption. I was just trying to get it straight.”
“The authorities thought I knew where it was,” Natalie Rice went on. “They thought Dad had turned it over to me. The bonding company put detectives on my trail. They shadowed me night and day.”
“Did you know where it was?” Moraine asked, staring shrewdly at her.
“No, of course not. Father hadn’t embezzled anything. It was a political frame-up. He was a hold-over from one of the other administrations, and he was watching for graft on some of the paving contracts. Dixon and some of his gang decided that they wanted Dad out of the way. They couldn’t get him out of office any other way, so they hatched up that embezzlement.”
“But money was embezzled?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Who got it?”
“Dixon, I think. I’m not certain. Dixon, or some of his men.”
“How do you know?”
“I only know what Dad told me. He had his suspicions, but he could never prove anything.”
“Go ahead.”
“You talk about friends valuing social position more than friendship. You don’t know anything about it. You should have been through what I went through. I thought I was in love, and I’m willing to swear the boy I was engaged to thought he was in love with me. But he couldn’t stand the pressure — the detectives shadowing us all the time, friends snubbing me and commencing to snub him... So I watched my opportunity, gave the detectives the slip, and never went back, even for my clothes. I began all over again. I did everything. I washed dishes. I waited tables. I punched doorbells.”
“But you had a fine secretarial training,” he pointed out.
“Try and use it,” she said bitterly. “People employing secretaries want to know something about them. They want references. They want to know lots of things. Sometimes they want to have a secretary bonded.
“No one cares who you are when you’re washing dishes, and if you can make the sales by punching doorbells, the companies that go in for door-to-door canvass don’t care what your background is. I was trying to build up a background. Then, after I’d made some progress, I got in touch with an employment agency to look over secretarial positions. About that time, I heard that you were going to hire a secretary; that you were going to give a competitive examination and intelligence test. I decided that if I could qualify for that I might be able to stall along on the references.”
“Which you did,” he said.
She met his eyes steadily.
“Which I did,” she admitted.
He grinned at her. “There’s a lot to politics that the dear taxpayer doesn’t know anything about.”
“Are you,” she asked scornfully, “telling me?”
Moraine regarded the smoke from his cigarette.
“Do you think the detectives will recognize you?”
“They’re very likely to.”
“And you mentioned something about breaking down this Hartwell woman’s story?”
“I thought,” she said, “that it sounded rather farfetched. I noticed that the newspapers gave her a lot of sympathetic slush, but her story of the kidnapping sounded rather vague to me.”
“She was hysterical.”
“Not so hysterical that she forgot to be evasive.”
Moraine nodded slowly.
“I think,” he said, “that I’m going to give you a job that will take you out of the office so you won’t have to be around when the detectives come in.”
“What sort of a job?”
“Doing a little detective work yourself.”
“On what?”
“On this kidnapping business.”
“Good heavens,” she exclaimed; “aren’t you finished with that? We have an office full of work. You’ve been up all night, been in jail part of the night.”
He grinned at her.
“To tell you the truth, I never had so much fun in my life. I never realized mixing around in criminal stuff could be such a kick.”
“Someone will stick a gun in your chest and go bang, bang,” she said, laughing nervously.
“Even so, it would be a lot of fun. You know, I’m bored to death with contracts and slogans, and advertising copy and all that sort of thing. Let’s let some of the assistants run the business. I want you to find out something for me.”
Her brief excursion into the personal was definitely finished. Her face became expressionless, her voice was that of an efficient secretary.
“Yes, Mr. Moraine,” she said; “what is it you want?”
Moraine looked at her, half-smiling. Then, as she made no effort to return his smile, said, “You heard the conversation I had with Wickes. He wanted me to pay ten thousand dollars for the girl. He gave me the ten thousand dollars. I paid it. I went out in my yacht.
“They picked me up in a speed boat and took me out to a little sailing yacht. She might have been a remodeled fishing boat. It was windy in the bay last night, and it was bobbing around pretty lively. The girl was down there. She was seasick, and I mean she was seasick. I paid the money and they gave me the girl.
“Now, there was something funny about the way that money was paid. They insisted that it had to be in old twenty-dollar bills; that there couldn’t be any numbered sequence to the bills; that there couldn’t be any marks on them, and all that sort of stuff. But when I paid over the bills, the kidnapers made the most perfunctory examination of the bills. They didn’t count the money. They didn’t even take the bills out of the money belt. They just looked at it and then gave me the girl.
“Now, then, after we’d loaded the girl aboard my yacht and the speed boat was putting away, someone flung something after me. It struck me in the chest. I picked it up. It was a woman’s purse. I put it in a drawer in my cabin and proceeded to forget about it. I’d have remembered it when we were getting off the yacht if it hadn’t been for the federal men who touched off all the fireworks and took us down to jail.”
Her eyes showed her interest, but her voice was that of a perfectly trained office assistant as she said, “Yes, Mr. Moraine, I’m following you.”
“You remember that she’s been missing around two weeks. Her story is that she spent most of that time on a little yacht out on the ocean somewhere; that she was kept drugged part of the time; that she never saw the yacht itself, only the interior of the cabin where she stayed.
“Now, inside of two weeks, she’d have adjusted herself to the motion sufficiently to have had her sea legs. She wouldn’t have been seasick in the bay even when it was kicking up a nice little chop. That’s one thing to remember.
“The next thing is that after I got out of jail, I remembered the purse and decided I’d go back and take a look through it before I said anything to the federal men. I was in bad enough as it was, and if it hadn’t been for Phil Duncan, they’d probably have kept me in jail all night.