“What do I know about him?” Rexforth permitted himself a little, cackling laugh. “Everything, I assure you. I don’t think we understand each other, Mr. Shayne. Perhaps your secretary misunderstood me or neglected to inform you. I represent the North American Bonding Company. Manager of our branch office in Jacksonville, to be exact. Does that answer your question?”
Shayne said, “No.”
Rexforth sighed and placed the tips of five fingers precisely against the tips of his other five. “Perhaps it doesn’t,” he conceded. “I tend to forget that you entered the affair only recently and may not be fully cognizant of its past history. My company had bonded O’Keefe, of course, when he embezzled the hundred thousand dollars. We paid the loss. The full amount. I consider that case one of my failures, Mr. Shayne. One of my few failures. Now do you understand?”
Shayne said again, “No.”
“Oh, come now. Let’s not spar with each other. I am wholly and completely convinced in my own mind that Robert Long confided the entire story to you… or at least the salient points of it… when he died some four months ago.”
“Robert Long?” Shayne repeated the name slowly. It came as a complete surprise to him and he actually had to force himself to think over the past months to bring the incident into focus in his mind.
Of course! Long was the gambler who was reputed to have welshed on some large bets and incurred the anger of the Syndicate. Their enforcers had gone after the man and gunned him down in his automobile on a remote section of the Tamiami Trail, and by the merest chance Shayne had been present at the time of his death. He’d had no interest in Long himself, hadn’t known the man or even met him before that night.
Shayne, on another case entirely, had been on the trail of one of the trigger-men who went after Long, and it was quite by accident that he had come upon Long’s wrecked car that night and found the gun-shot, dying man inside the wreckage. Robert Long had continued to live for at least twenty minutes while Shayne remained alone with him by the roadside, but during that period he had been delirious and babbled only senseless nothings.
The newspapers hadn’t got or printed the full story, of course. There had been intimations that he had been Shayne’s client and the detective had tried to save his life from the gunman, which Shayne hadn’t bothered to deny publicly.
“What has Robert Long got to do with this matter?” he asked slowly.
Rexforth snorted sarcastically. “You were alone with him for half an hour when the man knew he was dying, Shayne. He had a burden of guilt on his conscience, and inside him was the bitter knowledge that all of it had been for naught. That all his careful plans and the subsequent wreckage of his business had been for nothing and now the money would never be recovered. Because even if Long’s wife knew the secret… and I am convinced she did… he knew O’Keefe would never in this world be willing to share it with her.
“How fortuitous it must have appeared to Robert Long that you were there to hear his dying confession and listen to his secret. Not the police. Not some crook who would try to take it all. But Mike Shayne. A tough private detective with a reputation for flouting the law when it served his own ends, yet with a certain reputation as a square-shooter withal. Of course he made an arrangement with you to approach O’Keefe in prison and induce him to cooperate with you, on your promise, I assume, that it was strictly a private matter between the two of you and that O’Keefe’s former wife would not share a cent.
“Without flattering myself unduly, Mr. Shayne,” Rexforth went on complacently, “as soon as I read the newspaper story about Long’s death, some such possibility of an arrangement flashed through my mind. It was so obvious… if one has dealt with thieves and crooks as long as I and know how their minds work. And so I waited, continuing the same careful surveillance over O’Keefe in prison that I have maintained ever since he was sentenced. And when I was informed of your first visit to him shortly after Long’s death, I knew my deductions were correct. I knew I had only to wait for you to conclude your careful arrangements to recover the money, and be ready to claim it for my company.”
He stopped talking abruptly, took off his glasses and polished them carefully with a corner of the sheet from the bed.
“It seems to me,” Shayne protested mildly, “that you’re making a lot of wild assumptions based on very few facts… or no facts at all. I’m not admitting anything at this point, you understand? Since I don’t know any of the background on the case, I simply don’t see how you arrived at any of these conclusions.”
Rexforth replaced his glasses firmly on his nose and smiled boastfully. “The embezzlement stunk to me from the beginning,” he announced. “When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you get a feeling about such things. There was Julius O’Keefe, a six-thousand a year bookkeeper completely bonded by our company, and there was Robert Long, owner of the brokerage firm and consequently not bonded at all. O’Keefe did not impress me as the type of mentality to work out the details of a theft on such a grand scale. He was a little man, driven to distraction by a young, avaricious and very beautiful wife, who might pilfer a few hundreds or a few thousands from his employer, but would never think beyond that.
“So I looked for a master-mind who had planned and guided the operation, and there was only Robert Long who could possibly fit into the picture. He was in the perfect position to have conspired with O’Keefe, and I was convinced almost from the first that he had done so.”
“But you say he was owner of the business,” Shayne protested. “How could he profit by stealing from it?”
“It is not at all new in my experience,” said Rexforth didactically, as though delivering a lecture on economics in a classroom. “Consider first: He had absolutely nothing to lose. O’Keefe was fully bonded and North American would make good every penny of the loss if O’Keefe were convicted. He had only to confess and accept full blame, and we had no alternative. We did pay that loss, Mr. Shayne. The full hundred thousand. Not a penny of it was ever recovered. O’Keefe’s story was that he had spent it all over a period of time… on gambling and women. It was a manifest absurdity when you explored the man’s past life, but there was no
Shayne said slowly, “I see. So you think they split the proceeds and O’Keefe went to jail while Long remained a free man. Why would he do a crazy thing like that?”
“It wasn’t so crazy. It would have been planned that way from the beginning. He
“Why wouldn’t such an arrangement appeal to a man like that? Prison sentences for embezzlers are notoriously short. By pleading guilty and throwing himself on the mercy of the court, he can anticipate spending a few years in the penitentiary as a guest of the taxpayers, and emerge a free man… and with a bankroll of fifty thousand dollars. How else could a man like that hope to ever amass such a sum even as a result of a lifetime of hard, honest work? Of course he would jump at the opportunity if properly presented to him.”
“I can see it from O’Keefe’s viewpoint,” Shayne conceded. “But why should Long take a risk of that sort? You say he was owner of a brokerage firm large enough to sustain a loss of a hundred grand. He wasn’t living in middle-class poverty. And if I understand you rightly in discussing the recovery of the full hundred thousand, it must be your opinion that he didn’t even get his half at the time.”
“I’m positive he didn’t, Mr. Shayne. I’m certain in my own mind that the two men agreed beforehand to put the money in a safe place where neither of them could touch any of it until O’Keefe had paid his debt to the State and was free to enjoy his portion of it. Several things lead me to that conclusion,” he went on precisely.
“His brokerage firm went bankrupt within a year after the affair, indicating that it was not as firmly solvent as appeared on the surface, and certainly that he had not an extra fifty thousand to pour into it. From that point, he went downhill. I have kept very careful track of him, Mr. Shayne. The case has been almost a personal obsession with me. Long was connected with a couple of shady ventures, which were not successful, and he eventually ended up in Miami as a cheap gangster, who was murdered because he welshed on a bet.”
“That may all be true,” agreed Shayne. “But I still don’t see enough motive for a man to take such a chance in the first place.”
“There was another motive, Shayne, as I am sure you know already. In fact,” he went on fussily, “I’m sure you must be at least partially aware of everything I’ve told you here. The only reason I go over it is to convince you how perfect my case is… to show you beyond the shadow of a doubt that I can go into court and prove that the
