“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 tell 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—they 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 the 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.”