“No,” Quayle said thoughtfully, “I’m not sure that we do. When Lasher returned with the coffee, he turned on the lights and the two of them looked around. What the prowler had dropped was a flashlight. From the name inked on a piece of adhesive wrapped around the handle, Lasher recognized it as belonging to a young fellow who worked in the warehouse day crew, a lad named Joey Watson.”
Vicki drew in her breath sharply, then quickly covered up her inadvertent expression of surprise by putting her fingers to her lips and coughing lightly. She looked quickly at Cathy and Captain March, remembering that she had casually mentioned Joey’s name to them the other day. But both the pilot and the stewardess seemed to have forgotten all about it.
Mr. Quayle continued. “When the crate was opened at the Royal Palms Hall about nine this morning and the theft discovered, the police immediately called me in on the case, since the interstate aspect of the affair put it under Federal jurisdiction. I immediately began questioning the ground crew and warehouse personnel. Young Watson was at work as usual and I questioned him along with the others. He admitted that the flashlight belongs to him; said he kept it in his locker in the warehouse. But he denied being around the airport at all after he knocked off work for the day. He claimed that he and a pal of his had gone to a movie last evening and then straight home to their boardinghouse. One of my men is checking his story as a matter of routine.”
Captain March was asking another question, but Vicki’s thoughts had gone off in a dizzying cycle of speculation. The flashlight that the prowler had dropped last night was Joey’s! Only yesterday afternoon a foreign-looking stranger had offered Joey a large sum of money to do some kind of “work,” the nature of which he had taken pains to keep obscure! On leaving Joey, the stranger had directed his taxi to the Granada Restaurant in Ybor City! On the plane, old Mr. Tytell had tried to call her attention to the same restaurant—or had he? Could there possibly be any connection between the seemingly unrelated events? Should she reveal these half-formed thoughts—that didn’t seem to make any sense even to her—to Mr. Quayle? He hadn’t been too impressed when she had told him about Mr. Tytell’s queer behavior on the plane. No, she decided. Joey was already under a cloud of suspicion. No use involving him any deeper. She’d have a talk with Joey first.
Her mind came back to the discussion that was going on.
“... and so,” Mr. Quayle was saying, “for the moment we’re at a dead end. The crate that was delivered to the exhibition hall was identical with the one shipped from the museum. If it had been opened and metal scrap substituted for the gold coins, it was the cleverest job I’ve ever seen.”
Vicki remembered Mr. Curtin saying the same thing.
“Maybe the coins were taken out of the crate in the museum in New York before the crate was shipped,” Johnny Baker ventured.
“That’s the baffling thing,” Mr. Quayle said. He shook his head, and his brows wrinkled in puzzlement. “The curator of the museum personally checked on the contents and stood by while the crate was closed and sealed just a few minutes before it was given to the crew of an armored truck for delivery to Idlewild.”
“Well,” Captain March concluded, “all I can say is that you’ve got the darnedest mystery on your hands that I ever came across.”