Counterfeit Wife (14 page)

The picture of the uncle interested him more than the others. Emory Hale had a square jaw and a tight mouth and eyes that looked cold and remorseless. The story described him as “A wealthy New York sportsman and financier” and quoted his offer of a $10,000 reward for the person or persons responsible for his beloved niece’s death. It gave a dramatic account of Hale’s hasty airplane flight south with the ransom money to meet the kidnaper’s demands, and painted a pathetic picture of his personal grief and outraged anger over the outcome of his rescue flight.

Rourke’s story covered the front page. Shayne was glad to note that the copy smacked of the old vigorous reporter he’d known for years, and not in the least like the sob story he had told Shayne.

On an inside page, however, a woman reporter described the scene in these words:

There was silence in the little house as Chief Peter Painter turned from the telephone and announced, “I am sorry to inform you that your daughter is dead.” The silence continued, thick and heavy-laden with disbelieving grief while the Miami Beach chief of detectives tersely explained the circumstances under which Kathleen Deland’s body had been discovered.

The tears of the stricken mother coursed down her cheeks and dropped upon the bosom of her simple dress. The hands of the anguished father lay still in his lap while his cavernous eyes were lifted to the framed photograph of his daughter above the mantel.

Mr. Emory Hale’s visage was like that of a statue carved from granite. There was no outward change of expression, yet with such a show of inward suffering and despair that the look upon his face will remain stamped indelibly upon my memory. He sat there, erect in his chair, one hand placed firmly on each knee, leaning forward slightly from the waist, his gaze fixed on Chief Painter’s face.

It was Mr. Hale who broke the silence first—the devoted uncle who had responded so swiftly and without question to his sister’s plea for help across the miles separating them; who had moved heaven and earth to obtain the required ransom money from his New York bank and fly south with it to meet the deadline set by the kidnapers.

Mr. Hale spoke flatly and without emotion, with a machine-like precision that conveyed an impression of dynamic force beneath the surface: “Have they found Dawson yet?”

Chief Painter replied, “Dawson seems to have disappeared into thin air, Mr. Hale. Along with your fifty thousand dollars.”

Mr. Hale made a brief and savage gesture to indicate that the loss of the ransom money meant nothing to him now. “And the man responsible for Kathleen’s death?”

“There have been no arrests as yet,” the detective chief admitted sadly. “However, the owner of the death car is known and I assure you that everything humanly possible is being done to apprehend the kidnapers.”

Emory Hale stood up to his full height. He thrust both hands in his pockets and strode from the room without another word.

Mr. Deland got up and said in a dead and hopeless voice, “I wonder where Emory is going. I wonder if I ought to—”

Mrs. Deland spoke the first words she had uttered since hearing the agonizing truth of her child’s death. She said simply, “Go after him, Arthur, before he does something desperate. You know he loved Kathleen as though she were his own.”

Arthur Deland nodded mutely and left the room, pausing only to lay a rough hand gently upon his wife’s bowed head.

I moved across the room then and sat beside Mrs. Deland. For a long time neither of us spoke. What could I say? What words of mine could assuage the mother’s grief—

The waiter brought Shayne’s breakfast, and he stopped reading the sob story. Following instructions at the end of the article, he turned to page six for more pictures.

There was one of Dawson, Deland’s partner in the plumbing business and go-between in the ransom pay-off. There was an inset showing a faded photograph of Gerta Ross as she had looked a decade or more ago above a caption:
Find This Woman.
And a diagram showing the spot on the highway northward from Miami where Dawson claimed he had been set upon by armed thugs and forced to give them the ransom money.

Shayne ate his scrambled eggs and bacon and drank three cups of coffee while he carefully read Dawson’s account of his adventures as given to the police at an early hour that morning. It was ingeniously simple and straightforward, and had the ring of truth.

Following instructions (said Dawson) he drove across the causeway after receiving the packet of money from Deland and turned north on Biscayne Boulevard at a moderate pace. He naturally presumed he was being trailed every foot of the way, and he did nothing to arouse suspicion in the minds of the kidnapers or to upset the plan for Kathleen Deland’s exchange for the ransom money.

After passing 79th Street, there was less traffic and he noticed that he was being followed at a distance of about five hundred feet by another car. He was confident then that the contact had been established and that the kidnapers would approach him as soon as they thought it safe to do so.

Fearing to do anything not in strict accordance with instructions, Dawson said he drove on northward at the same steady pace mile after mile, past the Hollywood traffic circle and onto the nearly deserted stretch of highway south of Fort Lauderdale.

The pursuing car came abreast of him suddenly, honked as it passed, and turned in front of him onto a dark side road. Happy in his belief that he was soon to have his partner’s daughter safe in his own car, Dawson followed the other car a quarter of a mile down the side road and stopped behind it

Three men got out of the car and approached him in the dark. All were armed, and one of them demanded the cash.

“I told them it was in the front seat of my car,” Dawson related, “and asked them where the girl was. One of the men laughed and hit me on the head with some heavy object. I presume it was the butt of his gun, though the unexpected blow knocked me unconscious, and I really don’t know what I was hit with.”

He remained unconscious for a couple of hours, Dawson said, and when he finally came to, his car was still there, but the other car, the men, and the money were gone.

The story was simple and had the virtue of strict plausibility. If he didn’t know the truth, Shayne reflected grimly, he himself would be inclined to believe Dawson. It was just the sort of thing kidnapers might be expected to do. The newspaper account added that Dawson was in the hospital receiving treatment for shock and his head injury, prostrated with grief that his mission had turned out so badly.

Shayne’s name was not mentioned in any of the stories. Reference was made to a male passenger in the wrecked kidnap car, and it was hinted that this person had been tentatively identified by a bystander before escaping in the excitement, but Painter had gone no further than that.

Shayne searched for a story on the affair at the Fun Club and the murder of Slocum in Shayne’s apartment, but found nothing.

On another page he did find a brief account of the fire on West 38th Street. He read it with interest while he drank a final cup of coffee. The two-story frame building had been a mass of flame by the time the fire apparatus arrived, and they had confined their efforts to keeping the fire from spreading. A Negro, as yet unidentified, had been found in the basement with injuries which were attributed to the fire, and there was evidence (said the story) that other inhabitants of the dwelling had escaped before the fire gained headway.

The house was rented by a Mr. Greerson who was something of a man of mystery, according to his neighbors, but who was presumed to have operated an automobile repair business in the basement garage. Mr. Greerson had not appeared to make a statement at the time the paper went to press.

Shayne left the paper on the table and went out. It wasn’t yet time for the banks to open, so he stopped at the first men’s store he came to on Flagler Street. They had no suits in stock that would fit him, but he found a pair of gray slacks, a tan shirt, and underwear to replace the ill-fitting garments he had borrowed from the dead man. He changed in a back room, ordered the clothing he had removed to be sent to his apartment, and continued up the street to a shoe store where he was lucky enough to find a pair of shoes that fitted him. He gave the clerk his address and asked that the discarded shoes be delivered.

He came out of the store and went west on Flagler to the First National Bank. It had just opened and there were a few customers in the lobby. Shayne chose a teller who did not know him and offered the two hundred-dollar bills he had held out from the ransom money, shoving them across the counter and saying, “I’d like twenties and tens and fives.”

The teller was young and blonde and obliging. He smoothed the bills out, looked at first one and then the other, pushed them aside and began to count out two hundred dollars in smaller bills.

Shayne gave a start, as though he suddenly remembered something important. He said, apologetically, “I’m sorry, but I’ve changed my mind. Would you let me have those bills back?”

The teller stopped counting and looked through the bars with a frown. “You don’t want the bills changed?”

Shayne said again, “I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind.”

The teller looked down at the sheaf of smaller bills he had been counting, studied Shayne suspiciously, then picked up the money he had counted. Slowly and carefully he counted it again, then handed Shayne the two large bills with a disapproving look.

Thanking him cheerfully, Shayne went back to a series of railed enclosures in the rear. He unlatched a wooden gate and went through it to a desk and said, “Hello, Marsten,” to the big florid-faced man sitting there.

Marsten looked up and said, “Morning, Shayne.” He pushed some papers aside and leaned back in his chair. “What can I do for you?”

Marsten was a former Treasury employee, one of the foremost experts on counterfeit money in the country. Shayne sat down and flipped the bills in front of him. “One of the tellers just offered me two hundred in small bills for those.”

Marsten picked up the bills and studied them thoughtfully. He turned them over in his hands, frowning, crinkling them and smoothing them out, testing the fabric of the paper.

After a time he sighed. “I’ve been expecting some of these to show up in Miami, but it’s a little early in the season.”

Shayne leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Counterfeit?”

“Absolutely. They’ve plagued us several years. They’re so nearly perfect they’ll get by anyone but an expert.”

“How do you know they’re counterfeit?”

Marsten smiled briefly at the detective. “Feel, mostly. Intuition. Call it what you will. The plates are perfect. The paper is so nearly perfect that extensive tests are required to prove it isn’t genuine. But these bills haven’t been in circulation, Mike. They’ve been rockered.”

“Rockered?”

“And a good job of it. But they’re not quite limp enough. Feel one.” He passed one of the bills to Shayne.

“It hasn’t passed through hundreds of sweaty hands, yet it has the appearance of having done so. Compare it with a genuine bill. The crispness has been rockered out of it, but no counterfeiter has yet invented a mechanical device that will produce exactly the same effect as that achieved by constant handling. Every smart counterfeiter uses some sort of device to dirty and rumple a newly printed bill. Those devices are called ‘rockers.’ They wad bills up, dampen them, roll them out smooth. Some of them use chemicals, to fade and soil a bill. The gang that puts this stuff out does one of the best jobs I’ve ever seen. That’s why one of our tellers would have accepted it.”

“You know this stuff then?”

“Every Treasury agent in the country knows it by sight. I didn’t recognize it at once, because I was surprised to have it turn up in Miami right now. It isn’t due here for at least two months.”

Shayne took a deep breath and said, “Keep on talking.”

“These hundred-dollar bills first appeared a few years ago in New York. When the black market was at its height and big deals were being handled on a cash basis to avoid detection. New York banks were flooded with the stuff for about a month.

“Then the flow stopped abruptly. At least three hundred thousand was passed in the New York area during that period. But by the time it was recognized and all the banks were alerted, the gang folded their tents and closed up business. Not another bill turned up until after the Kentucky Derby was run that year. There was plenty of loose money and heavy betting on the Derby, and another hundred grand of the stuff was thrown into circulation there before we realized it.

“They’re devilishly smart. They waited a year before hitting Southern California with another two hundred thousand. That’s why I expected the stuff here this winter. But not until the season was well along. They’re getting careless if they’ve started passing it so early.”

Marsten paused, glancing at Shayne who was worrying his ear lobe with thumb and forefinger. “Do you mind telling me where you picked these up?”

Shayne waived the question. “Tell me how they work it to get so much out so fast.”

“They have it planned very carefully,” Marsten told him. “They select the time and the spot—a place where there’s some sort of a boom with big money rolling. They line up as many contacts as possible and place the stuff in readiness to go. Gambling houses are good bets, and bookie joints—any place that handles big money and can get rid of bills this size without too much trouble. They all let go at once, and there’s your clean-up. By the time it begins to trickle into the banks and we start tracing it, the tide dries up and the boys move on.”

Shayne nodded slowly. He reached over and picked up the other bill and fingered it, wondering how this information tied in with the ransom pay-off. “It sounds slick. You say the ordinary bank teller can’t detect the stuff?”

“We planned to be ready for them in Miami this year,” Marsten told him. “We’re printing circulars, getting press releases ready, hoping to educate the public so no one will be willing to accept a C-note without a written endorsement from the Secretary of the Treasury. If they’re jumping the gun on us, I’m glad to know it.”