“No,” Quayle corrected her. “It’s a good thing that you have all the instincts and the quick mind of a good detective, Vicki. You were smart enough to put all the odds and ends of evidence together and come up with the right answer. Not everyone has that talent.”
“Me, for instance.” Mr. Curtin laughed. “I saw the same things Vicki did, and they didn’t mean a thing to me.”
“Now there was nothing in the world to connect Raymond Duke and Eaton-Smith in any way with that gold shipment except Van Lasher. And that’s where you come in, Joey.”
“You mean that offer of a job that Duke made me?”
“That’s right. The three of them could never afford to be seen together. They were even afraid to use the telephone, lest a message somehow be intercepted when Van was out of the warehouse. But obviously they had to keep in touch. Since you were always around the warehouse with Van, the idea was to use you as a messenger boy. They figured you needed the money badly enough to do as you were told, and that you would believe any cock-and-bull story Van cooked up to explain the need for secrecy. Of course, if everything went right, there was no reason for you or anyone else to connect either of them with the missing gold. But you turned them down, and they were afraid to approach anyone else. So Van used the cover of the torchlight parade in Ybor City, where almost everyone was in costume and most people were masked, to meet with his confederates. That’s why he ran away when he recognized you, Vicki, and lost himself in the crowd. And that’s why Duke went after you, to hold you up by some pretext or another until Van could get away. Van sending you that threatening note was another dumb play. He thought it might frighten you into keeping quiet.”
“That proves he doesn’t know Vicki very well,” Mr. Curtin said.
“And again you used your detective’s intuition when you saw Van walking across the airfield toward Olsen’s plane, and recognized him as the pirate. If you hadn’t followed him, Olsen would have got his clearance papers and taken Van to Cuba as a matter of course.”
“But why was Van running away in such a hurry?”
“Well, up to that morning everything had gone according to plan. Eaton-Smith and Duke, having shipped all the gold to Cuba, went there themselves and took the old man with them for safekeeping. They planned to stay there, under cover, until they could make arrangements to dispose of the gold, possibly in South America. Then they would simply ditch the old man and fade away. Van was completely in the clear up to that point, so the plan was for him to stay here working at his job until everything had blown over. Then he was to join them.
“However, Van was pretty leery of you, Vicki. It was obvious to all three that you were doing a lot of poking around where you had no business to be. Van saw me meet you at the plane Friday morning and take you to my office. Since he knew the plane was inbound from Havana, he began to smell a rat. He followed us upstairs, saw that my secretary was away from her desk, and took a quick peek through the keyhole.”