CHAPTER XIX

Uncovering the Facts

“Peter,” Judy said after a little silence, “you’re looking for facts, and I do have something that may help you uncover them. It’s—right here.”

She handed him the slip of paper she had been saving and told him what it was.

“Lawson’s post office box number!” exclaimed Peter. “I can’t believe it. You should be working for us—”

“For you, Peter,” she interrupted quietly.

“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.”

“Her husband? Oh dear!” Judy exclaimed. “Irene is married. I ought to warn her—”

“No, please, don’t alarm her,” Peter interrupted. “It didn’t happen the way they planned. I’m sure of that. It was supposed to take place Saturday night—”

“It was Saturday night that Clarissa disappeared. But she isn’t an actress, and she isn’t married.”

“And she isn’t a phantom,” Peter added. “Whatever else we know about her, we can be perfectly sure she’s real. She may be in real danger, too. If I can’t find Lawson I want the confidence men who are working with him. This is no small outfit. It appears to be a nationwide organization. We want the top men, not just the tough kids they hire to do the shooting for them.”

“Do you really think they were hired?” Judy asked.

“We know they were following orders. Their minds, in some way, had been taken over by the minds of the criminals who gave those orders.”

“I see.” Judy was quiet a moment. Did these mind manipulators have, in their possession, some fiendish machine more dangerous than an atom bomb? It was a terrifying thought.

“Peter,” she asked, “what about Irene? Why didn’t she have a nightmare like Pauline and Flo and me? Irene told me this morning that she hadn’t dreamed an unpleasant thing.”

“Was she on the tour with you?”

“No, she’d gone to her rehearsal. We didn’t see her again until it was time for the show. There were a lot of people we didn’t know on the tour with us,” Judy remembered. “There was an ad man from Flo’s office, too. He was the one who quarreled with Mr. Lenz.”

“Mr. Lenz?”

“The projectionist. Irene’s show isn’t all live, you know. Sometimes they run film strips. Nearly all the commercials are on film. The show is sponsored by a tooth paste company now, but she’s thinking of getting a new sponsor so she can be on one of the big networks. It would be almost like having her visit us every Saturday evening in our home. She was against it at first,” Judy went on. “Flo asked me to talk her into it.”

“Did you?”

“No. Irene knows what’s right,” declared Judy. “I still can’t imagine her saying she uses a product when she doesn’t. And she’d never use golden hair wash. She hates the idea of everybody being blond as much as I do. Imagine it, Peter! No more black or brown hair. No more dark blondes like Clarissa and Honey—”

“And no more redheads. We couldn’t let _that_ happen!” Peter exclaimed.

Judy gave him one of her special smiles. Gray eyes met blue ones in a moment of understanding. Then she said, “I want to help. I’ll begin by making a list of the things we did Saturday.”

“Ask Pauline and Flo to go over it with you,” Peter suggested. “Then call up Irene. I would call her myself. They’ve given me a telephone right here at my bedside. But it would be better if you made the call from the booth outside.”

“What’ll I say? I’m so mixed up at this point I’m not sure what I’m trying to find out. Am I supposed to ask her about Clarissa or this unknown actress?”

“You’re trying to find out about that redheaded patient upstairs, for one thing,” Peter told her. “Ask Irene to come in and pay her a visit. She may know who she is.”