“Where did you get this little piece of paper?”
“It was handed to me by a fat woman who peered at me from behind a shattered glass door—”
“Judy, you didn’t—”
“I did,” she confessed. “I found his name on the back of the church calendar, and Pauline told me where he lived. He was gone, of course. The people in the church don’t know their building fund money went with him, do they?”
“They do now,” Peter said, handing her the paper he had been reading when she came in. An item on the second page told only part of the story.
Boy Held in Shooting of FBI Agent Pleads Guilty in Kidnap Plot, the headlines ran. Underneath it told how Frederick H. Christie, sixteen, of New York, arrested for the shooting of an FBI agent, pleaded guilty but refused to give any information that would lead to the apprehension of Clarence Lawson, who was wanted in a dozen states for extortion and robbery.
“Won’t the box number I gave you lead to his apprehension?” asked Judy when she had finished reading the newspaper account.
“We can have the box watched. Maybe we can nab him when he comes for his mail. I’ll be out of here in a day or two. Then we can really go to work on it. In the meantime perhaps we can uncover a few more facts. The so-called plot never got beyond the talking stage, the boy said. We may have scared them off. Since it didn’t happen I guess I’m at liberty to tell you about it,” Peter continued. “I think Lawson planned to bring the victim to his home and then changed his mind. We heard him say, ‘We’ll hold the actress until her husband comes across with a donation.’ That’s the way Lawson operates. His charities are all legitimate. People are asked to make donations on the theory that they may be helped because they have been helpers. Someone is missing. A donation is made, and the missing person promptly returns. It’s one of the slickest ransom schemes anybody has yet devised. Somehow they work it so that the victim is never held against his will. Some worried relative donates money to a worthy cause. No law is broken until the money disappears. By then Lawson or one of his business partners is off for parts unknown. We would have nabbed him this time if bedlam hadn’t broken loose in the street outside his house. It was staged to look like a rumble between two rival street gangs in which we were just accidentally involved.”
“Oh, Peter!” exclaimed Judy. “Nobody will believe that.”
“People do believe some surprising things. I’m no prophet,” he said grimly, “but I predict the boys will get long sentences and Lawson will go scot free. It’s happened that way before. He’s one of the slickest criminals in the United States. I don’t know who this actress was or how they planned to make her disappear, but they were counting on the fact that her husband would be worried.”