The Mystery of Monster Mountain - Carey M. V. - Страница 22

“She isn’t saying anything until she sees a lawyer,” snarled Havemeyer, “and I’m not, either.”

“I think we can reconstruct what happened,” said Jupe cheerfully. “Havemeyer came here and registered at the inn. He saw that, by an uncanny coincidence, Anna Schmid was almost an exact double of his wife. This would have been a meaningless discovery were it not for the fact that Havemeyer is a criminal.”

“A stock swindler,” put in Jensen. “He soft-talked my sister into investing ten thousand dollars in a mining company that’s been an empty hole in the ground for twenty years. Trouble is, there is a mine even if it’s worthless, and we couldn’t nail anything on him.”

“And you are not a nature photographer,” accused Pete.

Jensen grinned. “I own a hardware store in Tahoe. My sister spotted Havemeyer and this woman going into a coffee shop. She had a camera with her and she snapped them when they came out, and took down the license number of the car they were using. We figured the woman was another sucker he had lined up. When we checked out the license number, we got the name and address of Anna Schmid, and I came up here. I needed Havemeyer’s photo because I’d never met him, and that gave me the nature photographer idea. There isn’t too much reason to come to Sky Village in the summertime, so I brought my sister’s camera and said I was taking pictures of the wildlife.”

“You planned to warn Anna if Havemeyer tried to swindle her?” asked Bob.

“I wanted to protect her, and I also wanted to catch him in the act and get him tossed into jail. Only when I got here, he seemed to be married to Anna Schmid, and that was a new wrinkle. I went through her papers one night, and I couldn’t see any evidence that he was transferring her property to his name. I couldn’t figure out what the dickens he was up to.”

Jupe nodded sympathetically. “So we can go back to the beginning again and imagine Havemeyer meeting Anna Schmid for the first time and seeing the incredible resemblance between Anna and his wife. At first he couldn’t quite decide how to turn this to his advantage. Almost from force of habit he tried to conduct a swindle in the way he usually does. He tried to sell Anna Schmid fake stock. When she refused to buy, he wasn’t disturbed. He had an ace in the hole — a wife who is so much like the real Anna Schmid that she could fool anyone. With her help, Havemeyer could get possession of everything Anna Schmid owned.

“Havemeyer stayed on at the inn until he was thoroughly acquainted with the way Anna ran things. I think we’re safe in assuming that he went through the papers and ledgers in her office until he knew exactly what Anna was worth. And Anna made no secret of the fact that she kept her money in a safe deposit box. Not as convenient as a checking account, but the fake Anna could take the cash out of the box as easily as the real Anna.

“When Havemeyer was ready,” Jupe continued, “he locked Anna up in the hermit’s cabin and drove her car to Lake Tahoe, where he picked up fake-Anna. The two returned to Sky Village and announced that Anna Schmid had married Joe Havemeyer. Everything went smoothly, except that they couldn’t find the safe deposit key.

“I am sure they were very upset when Anna’s cousins arrived unannounced. However. they knew about Hans and Konrad. In their search for the key they must have gone through all of Anna’s letters and seen the snapshots of her cousins.

“Havemeyer was afraid it would look odd if he wasn’t cordial to his new wife’s relatives, so he invited them to stay at the inn. That really put fake-Anna on the spot. But she did very well, I must say. She knew she couldn’t talk German with Hans and Konrad because her accent would not be the same as the real Anna’s. She is German, but doubtless we’ll find that she comes from a part of Germany where the dialect is not the same as in Bavaria. She insisted that they all speak English so as not to exclude her husband from the conversation.”

“But she still got plenty nervous,” Pete put in. “She said Hans and Konrad made her nervous.”

Jupiter went on, “She was also greatly upset at the thought of going to the bank and requesting a new key and having to sign for it — probably in the presence of a bank officer. The routine procedure for entering the safe deposit vault wouldn’t be too difficult. She would still have to sign in, but the attendant at the vault wouldn’t look closely at her signature or question her. Why should he? He knew Anna Schmid well. Getting a new key would be more complicated. She might do or say something wrong. The bank official might carefully compare her signature to the signature on Anna Schmid’s registration.

“So fake-Anna became nervous about signing Anna Schmid’s name. She apologized too much to the man who delivered the cement, and she and Joe Havemeyer quarreled. Havemeyer made her practice writing Anna’s name and he got us out of the house when she did it. But we saw her ‘homework’ paper. Then I knew that she was not really Anna, and I knew why Havemeyer went to the meadow every day.”

The deputy closed his notebook and stared at Anna Schmid. He then turned and looked at fake-Anna. “If I weren’t seeing it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe that two human beings could be so much alike,” he said. “But what about that gun — the tranquilizer gun? Was that the gun Havemeyer used to threaten you, Miss Schmid?”

“No,” said Anna. “The gun he used was a shotgun.”

“It’s in the closet,” Pete told the deputy.

The door behind Jensen’s chair rattled. Jensen stood up, put the chair to one side, and opened the door.

Mr. Smathers trotted into the room. He was smoke-stained and incredibly grimy, but very brisk and bright. “Everything’s fine here, I see,” he said. Then his eyes lighted on Anna Schmid lying on the sofa, and on fake-Anna crouched near the table. He saw the deputy with his notebook, and Hans grimly blocking the kitchen doorway. “My word.” he said.

“It’s pretty complicated, Mr. Smathers,” Bob told him. “We’ll explain it to you later.”

“Does he have anything to do with this?” asked the deputy, nodding toward Smathers.

“I hardly think so,” said Jupiter. “I believe Mr. Smathers is exactly what  he claims to be — a man who can talk to animals.”

“And they listen,” declared Smathers cheerfully.

“Sure, sure,” said the deputy. “Now maybe somebody will tell me why this guy had a tranquilizer gun?”

“Hideous, isn’t it?” said Mr. Smathers. “Almost worse than a conventional firearm. Imagine wanting to capture a wild creature and put it in a cage. Disgraceful!”

The deputy’s expression was one of total bewilderment. “You mean that in addition to everything else, this man was out to bag a bear?”

“Not a bear,” said Pete.

Mr. Smathers chuckled. “Would you believe, officer, that Mr. Havemeyer thinks there is a monster of some type on this mountain? He harbored the idiotic idea that he could capture a being unknown to science and exhibit it to the public, doubtless charging a fee for anyone who wanted to look at it!”

“A monster?” said the deputy. “The guy’s got cracks in his brain”

“Indeed he does,” said Mr. Smathers. “We all know there are no such things as monsters, don’t we?”

The Three Investigators gaped at the weedy little man. Mr. Smathers smiled and went upstairs.