IT WAS A PLEASANT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, TWO DAYS after Vicki’s hair-raising experience with Steve Miller’s airplane. Vicki, Mr. Curtin, Nina, Louise, John Quayle, and Joey Watson were sitting on the Curtins’ broad patio sipping cool fruit drinks and relaxing. A gentle breeze blew through the flowers and trees that surrounded the big brick house, and Vicki could feel its gentle fingers patting her on the cheek.
“So if it hadn’t been for this young lady,” John Quayle was saying as he raised his glass and made a toast to Vicki, “I’m afraid all of us would still be in the dark about the theft of the gold coins, and the thieves would be well on their way to parts unknown. But now, thanks to her, all of the gang except Amos Tytell are safely behind bars. Since the old man was an unwilling accomplice, we released him, and, for the first time since he came South, he’s enjoying himself170 here in Tampa waiting to be the key witness at the trial.”
“The newspapers,” Mr. Curtin said, “didn’t tell all the details of the story, not enough anyway to satisfy those of us who had a part in it. Frankly, Mr. Quayle, that’s why I invited you here today. Are you at liberty to give it all to us? I suddenly found myself caught up in the middle of it—first when our committee opened the crate of scrap metal, and second when I bought that gold ship in Havana—but frankly I’m still at sea.”
Mr. Quayle took a long sip of his drink. “It might be well,” he said, “if I started at the beginning.” He paused for a second to marshal the thoughts in his mind, and then went on.
“It all started out with Eaton-Smith. He had, as we finally found out, a pretty shady career behind him. He had never been arrested, though, and that’s why it took our people so long to track down his past. He had become friendly with a certain Max Schmidt in New York. Max didn’t have a record either, but Eaton-Smith discovered that he wasn’t above making a dishonest dollar if he thought he could get away with it. Max was a man-of-all-work at the Numismatic Museum, and when Eaton-Smith learned that your committee, Mr. Curtin, had requested that the antique coin exhibit be sent to Tampa, the two of them went to work on an elaborate scheme to steal them.
171 “First he contacted Raymond Duke who had, he knew, a business in Havana under the name of Ramon Garcia and who also was not reluctant to steal several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold. Through Duke he got in touch with Van Lasher.”
“But I thought you said Van was an old Federal Airlines employee with a good record,” Vicki interrupted.
“He had been for the past eight years, Vicki, and that’s what almost fooled us. After you reported that skull-and-crossbones warning, we started digging a little deeper into the background of all employees at the airport here. And we found out that he had served a prison term in Texas ten years ago for larceny. When he got out of prison, he changed his name and went to work for Federal Airlines. So far as we can tell, he had kept his record clean ever since. But Duke, who had been involved in a deal with Lasher some years ago, approached him on the gold coin job. And again, the prospect of all that easy money was too much for him.”
He took another sip of his lemonade.
“It is this kind of case that is always toughest to break. Where you are dealing with people who are known criminals, you automatically suspect them when a crime is committed. But all of these men had an outward cloak of respectability that acted as protective coloration.”
“But Mr. Tytell?” Vicki began, unable to control172 her curiosity about the old man who had so aroused her sympathy.
“I’m coming to him,” Quayle continued. “He had been an expert jeweler and goldsmith as I told you the other day, Vicki, and Eaton-Smith ran into him in New York. When this gold coin business came up, the old man immediately came to Eaton-Smith’s mind. Eaton-Smith went to him and told him that he had a good job for him in Tampa. The old man was so grateful that he didn’t say he hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. That’s why he was practically starved when you saw him on the plane.
“Eaton-Smith picked him up in a taxi on the morning of—let’s see—Thursday the sixth. On the way to the airport, Tytell made certain inquiries about the job and Eaton-Smith evaded them. Then, when Eaton-Smith told him that the two were going to travel on the plane as if they didn’t know each other, the old man began to get suspicious. Being old and sick and hungry and nervous, he began talking to you, Vicki, after he was on the plane. Eaton-Smith noticed this, moved over into the empty seat beside him, and told him in no uncertain terms to keep his mouth shut. Then Tytell knew for sure that something was wrong and he became badly frightened. That’s when he left what he hoped you would discover as a message in the form of the folded travel folder. The Granada Restaurant thing was an accident. He was trying to tell173 you that he would be in Ybor City, where he knew that Eaton-Smith lived.”
“But how in the world did he think Vicki could help him?” Louise asked.
“He wasn’t thinking clearly at all. Remember that he was badly frightened and desperate.”
The FBI man stopped for a moment.
“Am I keeping this straight enough for you?”
Everyone nodded silent assent, and he continued:
“Well, for weeks Eaton-Smith and Raymond Duke had been scheming to steal the coins. Max Schmidt in the museum in New York had found out that the shipment would be made by air, since the closing of the exhibit in New York and the opening of the Festival here were only a few days apart. Part of Schmidt’s work at the museum was handling packing and shipping details. Schmidt then made up an exact duplicate of the crate that the coins would be shipped in. He loaded this duplicate crate with scrap metal and shipped it in advance to Raymond Duke. When it was received, Van took it to the small inside room of the warehouse where valuables were kept overnight and covered it up with a canvas tarpaulin. Being the warehouse foreman, Van’s movements were never questioned. Of course, at this point, there was nothing for anyone to be suspicious about. So when Schmidt in New York advised Duke that the gold was coming on Federal’s Flight Seventeen—your ship, Vicki—they174 were all ready to snatch it. It was only a coincidence that Eaton-Smith and Tytell were on the same plane.
“Since he was the warehouse boss, it seemed natural for Van to offer to sit up with the private detective who had accompanied the shipment and whose main reason for coming to Tampa was to guard the coins while they were on exhibit at the Hall. Jones, of course, was glad of the company. And Van had figured out a pretty cute gimmick. He knew that the all-night guard duty in the warehouse would be a pretty dull affair, so he brought along a thermos jar of coffee which he went out at regular intervals to refill. He had also provided himself with some very mild sleeping pills. Sometime during the night he slipped one of the pills into Jones’s coffee. Since Jones had been up all day, and had had a fairly tiring plane trip too, the mild pill was just enough to put him into a sound sleep and give Van a chance to switch the crates. Schmidt had sent him a set of duplicate labels from the museum in New York. So Van soaked the original labels off each crate with a solvent solution, and put the label addressed to Duke on the crate of gold, and the label addressed to the Festival committee on the crate of junk. Since the solvent had thoroughly dried by morning, there was no way to tell that a change had been made. Then he switched the bills of lading, covered up the175 genuine crate with the canvas—and that was all there was to it.
“When it was all shipshape, he woke the detective up, and so far as Jones knew he had only slipped off for a moment into a brief nap. The bit about the prowler, Joey, was staged by Van to indicate that someone had been snooping around. It was just by chance that he used your flashlight. You had left it on top of your locker and Van happened to see it.”
“And so,” Mr. Curtin said, “the theft was accomplished by the simple device of Van Lasher switching the crates.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Quayle said, “it was as simple as that. The next morning, at the same time the fake crate was delivered to your committee, the crate containing the gold was delivered to Raymond Duke. Naturally, we checked on all deliveries made that morning, but Duke showed our man the bill of lading for a shipment of perfume, and we had no reason to doubt him.”
At that moment Mrs. Tucker interrupted with a plate of sandwiches and a fresh pitcher of lemonade. Mr. Quayle turned his attention briefly from the gold coins to the food.
“Being a bachelor,” he said to the housekeeper, “I don’t often get chicken sandwiches like these.” He helped himself to another one.
As she sipped on her lemonade Vicki couldn’t get her mind off the old man who had been the176 starting point of the whole case so far as she was concerned.
“How,” she asked, “did Duke and Eaton-Smith get Mr. Tytell to work for them after he found out what was going on?”
“By another simple method,” the FBI man replied. “They threatened to kill him if he made a false move.”
“But when I saw him in Ybor City and in the art supply store no one was with him,” Vicki said. “So he couldn’t have been completely a prisoner. Why couldn’t he have gone to the police? They’d have protected him.”
“They had one other weapon,” Mr. Quayle said. “It appears that the old man has a ............