“Nina,” Vicki began, “I want you and Louise to promise me—cross your heart and hope to die—that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone. If you do, all of us may be in terrible danger.”
Nina’s mouth popped open and she stared first at Louise and then back to Vicki.
“Nina talks a lot.” Mr. Curtin smiled. “That’s her nature. But she can keep quiet when she has to. Isn’t that right, honey?”
Both Nina and Louise nodded in silent, open-mouthed agreement.
“All right,” Vicki said. “I’ll start at the beginning.”
She told her story in detail, from the time she had first noticed the sick old man on the plane straight through to her adventures on the night of the torchlight parade and the mysterious disappearance of old Mr. Tytell at the airport. She explained about her relationship with Joey Watson and her reports to John Quayle.
She took the newspaper clipping from her handbag.
“Then I saw that gold coin this afternoon in the jeweler’s shop. It was this one right here.” She gave the paper to Mr. Curtin.
“Then the jeweler’s description of Ramon Garcia—remember, he called him El Duque?—couldn’t have been that of anyone but Raymond Duke. And then I remembered the little Gasparilla ship the man tried to sell us by saying it was solid gold. And all of a sudden all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It was you, Mr. Curtin, who suggested that the thieves didn’t want the gold coins themselves because they’d be too hard to dispose of, but the gold they contained. If the gold figure the man offered us in the Thieves’ Market today had been anything but a copy of the Ybor City souvenirs, I probably never would have suspected anything. But since it was, I knew there must be some connection with Tampa.”
Mr. Curtin laughed. “The way you wormed that description of Ramon Garcia out of the man in the jewelry shop would have done credit to Sherlock Holmes.”