Counterfeit Wife (10 page)

“The voice then told him that he had a rich brother-in-law in New York. ‘Midnight tomorrow is the limit if you ever want to see your girl alive again.’ The man hung up.

“Well, of course Deland and his wife had already thought of appealing to her brother, Emory Hale. Seems he’d helped them financially before, and is fixed so he might have that kind of money on tap.

“About midnight they phoned Hale in New York and laid their need before him. He argued at first that they should call in the F.B.I., but they were too frightened and made him promise not to. At least that’s what Hale said. He knew it was the right thing to do, but he loved Kathleen so much he was afraid to upset the negotiations. He promised to raise the money the next day and fly down with it at once.

“Neither of the Delands slept that night. They called Dawson and told him what was up, begged him to keep his mouth shut and follow instructions. Dawson agreed.

“They had a wire from Emory Hale the next day saying he would arrive with the cash at eight o’clock. They phoned Dawson so he could pass the word along.

“Dawson called by phone at five o’clock. He had received his instructions from the kidnaper. The money was to be wrapped in a paper package and be waiting at the Deland house at eight o’clock, while he waited at his house. They had previously specified that the money should be in old hundred-dollar bills, and that’s the way Emory Hale brought it from New York by plane. He came straight to the house and they wrapped it in a paper package, five bundles of bills, each bundle containing a hundred hundred-dollar bills.” Rourke paused, looking at Shayne gravely.

Shayne laughed shortly and lit a cigarette. “Finish talking before you start asking questions.”

“There isn’t much more to tell. About ten-thirty the phone rang. Deland answered it. He was told to leave the house alone and drive in his car by a certain route to the County Causeway and meet Dawson there. Dawson was to take the money, drive to Miami, turn north on Biscayne Boulevard, and keep driving north on the highway at about thirty miles an hour until he was accosted. He was warned that they’d all be watched every second after he left the house and if anything went wrong, the girl would be killed.

“Deland left the house in his car with the ransom money as directed and turned it over to Dawson, then came back home. The three of them waited until midnight for the girl to be returned to them. At midnight, Emory Hale blew up and demanded that they call the police. You can’t blame him. It was his money.”

“No word from Dawson?” Shayne asked softly.

“He had vanished into thin air. As soon as he got the gist of the story, Painter alerted every cop on both sides of the bay and up the coast! He called the local office of the F.B.I., and they’re sending experts down. I was still at the house with Painter at about two o’clock when we got the flash that the girl’s body had been found—asphyxiated—inside the locked luggage trunk of a gray sedan that had overturned just off Thirty-sixth Street an hour previously.”

Shayne expelled a long breath and relaxed. “Now we come to the part that’s supposed to tie me into it.”

Rourke nodded. “The best we could piece out the story, it happened this way. The sedan was traveling east on Thirty-sixth like a bat out of hell and tried to make a turn on Fourteenth Avenue. It struck a concrete bridge abutment and turned over, landing on its side. There’s some reason for believing the sedan was trying to escape from a pursuing car, but that isn’t positive. A crowd gathered at once and pulled out the driver—a big blonde. A man was riding with her and he climbed out unaided. Several people saw him in the light of headlights, and said he had blood streaming down his face. We got several conflicting descriptions, the way you always do, from excited witnesses. They all thought he was tall, and two or three said he had red hair.

“Nobody paid much attention to him in the excitement. Mostly, they were crowding around the unconscious woman, and the passenger slipped away. Chick Farrel happened to be one of those attracted to the wreck, and he told some of the cops he thought he recognized you, but he couldn’t be sure.

“They didn’t think much about it at the time. The woman was named Gerta Ross. She came to after a little and asked them to take her home. A cop wanted to take her to a hospital, but she refused. Said she was a nurse and knew how to take care of herself. So the cop drove her home—to a big place out on West Fifty-fourth. He let her out in front and she went up the walk to the front door by herself.

“In the meantime,” Rourke continued slowly, “the police wrecker came out to pick up the sedan. While they were getting ready to tow it in, one of the cops noticed a golden curl sticking out from under the lid of the luggage compartment. He lifted the lid and found Kathleen Deland’s body crammed inside. The girl was gagged and tightly bound, and she’d been doped to keep her quiet. The locking mechanism showed she’d been locked in, but the wrench the car received in turning over caused the catch to slip and the lid to open. Otherwise, they might not have found the body for days.” He ended angrily.

Shayne looked at him for a long moment. Then he asked quietly, “Can you tell me how long Kathleen had been dead?”

“Not more than an hour, Mike. About midnight. They had provided her with plenty of air,” he went on bitterly, “by boring three half-inch holes in the bottom of the luggage compartment. But the kid didn’t have a chance. The holes were right over the exhaust pipe—by accident or design—and the exhaust pipe had a big hole in it just beneath the air holes. She had been breathing carbon monoxide as she lay there bound and gagged. At least,” he ended sorrowfully, “she couldn’t have suffered too much.”

“What happened to the woman who was driving?”

Rourke looked longingly at the bottle of cognac, now no more than a quarter full, then propped his bony elbows on his knees and said, “She was gone by the time the cops went looking for her. It seems she ran a sort of private nursing home, an ideal place to keep a kidnaped child. As nearly as has been learned, she hasn’t had any patients for the past few days. No one knows enough about former patients to get a line on her.”

Shayne said absently, “Fifty grand in C-notes.”

“That’s right. Done up in five bundles of ten grand each. Mind if I take a look in that suitcase, Mike?”

“It’s in the bathroom,” said Shayne indifferently.

Rourke went into the bathroom and brought out the suitcase. He set it on the floor and opened it, lifted the top half and looked inside, then turned it over to dump the contents on the floor.

The five bundles of bills, held together by wide rubber bands, tumbled out. Rourke picked one of them up and moved back to sit on the couch. Shayne smoked a cigarette and watched him while he carefully counted the bills.

“I make it a hundred,” he said, looking at Shayne.

“Uh-huh?”

Rourke tossed the bundle back with the others. “Five times a hundred makes five hundred. Fifty thousand bucks in all.”

“I think you’ll find a few missing,” Shayne offered casually, “if you want to bother to count all the bundles.”

“Do you mind telling me where you got them?”

“I wish you’d tell me one thing before we get started on that angle. Was the ransom money marked?”

“No. Emory Hale swears it wasn’t. And Deland says he looked it over, too, before giving it to Dawson to make sure it wasn’t marked in any way to make the kidnapers suspicious and queer the pay-off.”

Shayne was sitting erect now, listening intently.

“Painter gave Hale hell about that,” Rourke went on. “He told him it was completely dumb not to have at least taken the serial numbers of the money to be used in a kidnap pay-off, and, under pressure, Hale admitted he did have the numbers. He gave Painter a typed list he said the bank had given him.”

“Were the bills in sequence?” Shayne asked sharply.

“No. They were all mixed up. I looked over the list with Painter. Hale explained that he had demanded bills that had been in circulation for some time.”

“What time was it when Painter got this list?”

“About twelve-thirty.”

Shayne shook his head and muttered, “I don’t see how in hell Bates could have had a list of the numbers not more than fifteen minutes later. Bates and Irvin. Or how they could have picked any one bill out of a jumbled list except by accident.”

“What are you mumbling about?”

“We’ll come to that later. Describe Deland’s partner to me. The pay-off guy.”

“Dawson? I didn’t see him, but Deland described him to Painter. A neat dresser, in his mid-forties, and a little on the stout side with a puffy, pallid face. Seems he ran the office end of the plumbing business, mostly.”

Shayne nodded decisively. His steel-gray eyes were very bright. “Dawson gave me that money, Tim. About two minutes before midnight.”

“Dawson! Good God, Mike! Were you really mixed up in that kidnaping?” Rourke’s voice was shaking and his tone incredulous and horrified.

“By accident,” Shayne told him. “Sit back and take a drink while I tell you all about it. And I swear to God I’ll wring your scrawny neck if you don’t believe every word I tell you.”

BLOOD MONEY