025 Rich and Dangerous

by Carolyn Keene

  Nancy couldn’t help worrying. This was her last chance to catch her quarry. If the killer didn’t rise to the bait, all her work would have been for nothing. Sarah Amberly’s killer would get away, and Nancy would have to go back to River Heights empty-handed.

  But time was running out. Nancy knew she couldn’t ask George and Bess to hang around much longer. They were frightened, and they had good reason. If the murderer did show up, the odds were he’d be armed—and they knew it.

  Bess kept sniffling and blowing her nose. The dust from the netting was getting to her. George was bearing up somewhat better, but Nancy knew that her friends’ patience was wearing thin. This wasn’t their idea of a good time in New York City.

  To pass the time, Bess started to tell a ghost story. It was one she’d heard around the fire at camp, a long time ago. Then George told one, and then Nancy. By the time midnight rolled around, their nerves were jumping.

  “What was that?” screamed Bess, when a window rattled in its casing. The others nearly leaped out of their skins. They were walking a razor’s edge, and the tension was high.

  “Nancy, come on.” Bess sighed. “Can’t we just forget the whole thing? I mean, this is the Big Apple! There’s one huge party going on down there, and we’re missing all the fun!”

  “Bess has a point, Nan,” agreed George. “This doesn’t exactly seem to be panning out. Can’t we—”

  Suddenly the girls fell deadly silent. A floorboard had creaked outside—someone was coming!

  “I sure hope it isn’t my dad again,” whispered Nancy.

  “What do you mean?” said George, her jaw tight with terror. “If it’s not your dad, then—”

  Their eyes fell to the doorknob as it started to turn. It clicked, and the door creaked slowly open.

  Just then, just when they had the killer in their grasp, Bess leaned back and sneezed the biggest, noisiest “kerchoo” in world history.

  As quickly as the door had opened, it shut again, and running footsteps sounded down the hall.

  “Bess!” said George angrily. “How could you?”

  “Never mind that!” said Nancy. “After him!”

  Throwing down the net, the girls ran into the hall, making for the elevator bank. They got there just in time to see a raincoated figure duck into a closing elevator.

  “He’s heading for the lobby! Come on!” yelled Nancy. The girls ducked into the next elevator. Bess pushed L about a hundred times. Nancy leaned against the wall of the car and gathered her strength as they headed down.

  “I’m so glad I wore my running shoes,” said George, looking down at her high-heeled pumps with a weak smile.

  Nancy tried to smile back, but she was too tense. Her heart racing, she peered up at the elevator indicator making its way from the penthouse to the lobby. The antique brass markers seemed to crawl.

  And when the doors opened on the seventh floor to admit a party of Japanese sightseers, her heart almost stopped. After what seemed an eternity, the three friends finally poured out of the elevator into the lobby, looking around for their quarry.

  “We couldn’t have missed him!” George said, more in hope than in confidence.

  “But which way did he go?” asked Bess. “The Plaza exits let out on three different streets.”

  It was Nancy who noticed the swirl of khaki material in the glass revolving doors. “There!” she cried. Once outside, the three girls watched as the figure sprinted up to the hansom cab parked beside the curb on Fifty-ninth Street.

  They saw him push aside the stunned carriage driver, who landed on the pavement. The figure in the raincoat hopped into the driver’s seat, cracked the reins, and took off, heading into the park. The driver picked himself up and started shouting and running after his cab in hopeless pursuit.

  Nancy and her friends weaved through the careening traffic, waving their hands up over their heads and ignoring the red Don’t Walk sign.

  “Sorry!” yelled Bess at the irate drivers who blew their horns at them in a rhythmic city cacophony.

  Another hansom cab was parked across the street. Its driver was standing on the curb, a cup of coffee in his hand, shocked that someone had stolen a cab.

  “Cab!” called Nancy.

  “Are you available?” asked Bess as they ran up to him.

  The driver looked over, obviously trying to decide what to do. Should he follow the other cab or take this fare? “Sure, honey. Hop in.” So saying, he turned to tell the chauffeur of a stretch limo what had happened.

  Nancy watched the other horse-drawn cab disappear into Central Park. “Please, sir—we’ve got to hurry!” she cried.

  “Just a minute, just a minute,” he said.

  “We don’t have a minute!” George yelled, climbing into the driver’s seat as Nancy and Bess clambered into the passenger seat.

  “Hey! What are you girls doing?” screamed the driver.

  Nancy turned back and shrugged. “Sorry, it’s an emergency!” With that, George cracked the reins and they were off.

  The clip-clop of the horse’s hooves turned to a fast gallop. Nancy and Bess had to hold tight to the edge of their seats to keep from falling. But George had done it—the other cab was in sight.

  “Stop!” Nancy yelled at the top of her lungs as they pulled closer. “Stop!”

  The intruder in the first cab turned to see how close they were, and in that moment George was able to gain on him, cutting the distance between the two carriages in half.

  Around the scalloped curves of Central Park Drive they went, dodging angry motorists who swerved to avoid them. At Eighty-third Street, where the great gray bulk of the Metropolitan Museum loomed up out of the night, the girls’ cab pulled up almost beside the lead carriage.

  Thinking quickly, and acting even faster, Nancy climbed over a stunned Bess and opened the low door of the cab. “Wish me luck!” she shouted, before taking a flying leap.

  “Nancy—No!” Bess cried out, too late. In horror, she watched as Nancy grabbed hold of the other cab just in time to avoid falling and being crunched under the rear wheels and those of the oncoming traffic.

  Nancy climbed to the roof of the cab, unnoticed by its driver, who was intent on making his getaway.

  Finally, with lightning speed, Nancy pounced, landing a karate chop to the base of the driver’s skull. He slumped forward, letting the reins go limp.

  Instantly, to stop him from falling, Nancy grabbed the unconscious driver with one hand and reached for the reins with the other. She pulled the horses to a halt at the side of the road.

  Bess and George drew up just in front of them and ran to where Nancy was bent over the limp figure. They strained to see better as Nancy removed the oversize hat, revealing the face of Pieter van Druten!

  Just then, the wail of a police siren split the night, and an officer came running, his gun drawn.

  “What in the world is going on here?” he cried.

  “Take us to the Plaza Hotel, officer,” said Nancy, rising to her feet. “We’ve just caught a murderer!”

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  ALL RIGHT, MISS Drew, now suppose you just start at the beginning and tell us what this is all about.” Detective Ritter, his eyes baggy and his face pasty from hours of wakefulness, glowered at everyone—except the detective and uniformed officer from New York’s police force.

  George and Bess sat on easy chairs in one corner. Behind George’s chair stood Jack Kale, his hand on George’s shoulder. On an ottoman in the other corner sat Alison Kale, and next to her, Nancy Drew, who now prepared to tell her story.

  “She assaulted me, officer!” shouted Pieter van Druten to the police detective. “I want to press charges to the full extent of the law!”

  “This man poisoned Sarah Amberly, and killed Maximilian, too,” said Nancy gravely, rising to her feet and indicating Pieter. “I’m sure of it.”

  Ritter looked at the police detective and got a nod to continue before he walked over to Nancy. “Go ah
ead, let’s hear how you came to this so-called conclusion of yours.”

  Nancy took a long, deep breath. Convincing Joe Ritter was going to be even harder than netting Pieter van Druten had been.

  “I felt he was threatening from the first,” she began, pacing the room to clear her head. “The way he snapped at Maximilian, the way he tried to control Sarah . . . When she died, I suspected Pieter immediately.

  “The problem was, it seemed as though he couldn’t have done it. I mean, Bess and George and I saw him at Trump Tower, right about the time the murder was committed—”

  “Unbelievable!” gasped Pieter, his pale eyes flashing with hatred. “You saw me there yourself, and yet you have the absolute gall to accuse me—

  “Hold on, buddy. Why don’t you let her finish, and then you can yell your head off, okay?” snapped Ritter, his patience thin. He seemed to feel it should have been him explaining things, not Nancy, and he wasn’t at all comfortable with his position as a part of the audience.

  “So,” continued Nancy, “at first I didn’t think he could have done it. That left two possibilities —Jack Kale and Alison Kale.

  “Both of them had reasons for killing Sarah Amberly. She had threatened to disinherit Jack, and she’d quarreled with Alison just the night before. No offense, but both of them are, well—a little unstable, and both of them had plenty of opportunity to give her the overdose.

  “Every piece of evidence pointed to one or the other of them—the stolen ruby ring and jewelry box, and the note of Alison’s that I found, the one that said ‘Kill—Kill—Kill—’ ”

  “Wait a minute!” Ritter jumped to his feet. “You never told me anything about that. I ought to turn you in for obstructing justice!”

  “If you’ll just wait a few minutes,” said Nancy calmly, “I think you’ll change your mind about that.”

  Scowling more than ever, Ritter took his seat again.

  “Anyway, as I was saying,” Nancy resumed, “all the evidence pointed toward the Kales, and away from van Druten. But I just didn’t feel right about it somehow. Sarah herself had told me, whatever happened, not to blame Alison. And everything I found out about Alison after that made me agree with Sarah.” Nancy glanced over at Alison, who looked up at her, her grateful face red with embarrassment.

  “Alison never liked Pieter van Druten,” Nancy went on. “Neither did Jack Kale. In fact, I myself wondered about that. Why would someone as sharp about people as Sarah Amberly give her heart to a man like Pieter? And I realized—she wouldn’t.”

  “You’re lying!” growled van Druten. “Sarah and I loved each other! We were completely devoted! This girl is slandering me. Are you going to allow her to malign the dead like this?”

  “Let her finish,” Ritter barked, pointing at Pieter.

  Nancy began pacing the room again. As she went, the eyes of Pieter van Druten followed her every move. Even now, that look of his made her skin crawl.

  “My first real clue, if you can call it that, was Sarah’s last words. She said: ’The Devil, the Fool, and Death.’ I wondered what she meant, until Madame Rosa told me. The Devil, the Fool, and Death are all tarot cards, and according to Madame Rosa they might have stood for people in Sarah’s life. Sarah told me, for instance, that I was the Three of Cups. So it stood to reason that she would connect her family with tarot cards, too.

  “But which card stood for which person? I remembered the arguments I overheard between Sarah and the Kales. She’d called Alison a fool, and she told Jack he was a devil—that left only Pieter as the Death card.”

  Van Druten stood up, his face purple with rage. “If that’s the sort of evidence you have against me, I hope you’ve got yourself a good lawyer, because you’re going to need one!”

  “I do,” said Nancy, looking at her father, who stood by the door now, a package in his hands. “But I don’t think I’ll need him. Not if you’ll hear me out.”

  She looked over at Ritter, who nodded for her to continue.

  “I knew it was only a hunch, but what if Sarah had been trying to tell me who had killed her? I thought about it for hours—and then it came to me.

  “The first time I ever saw Sarah, she was shouting at everyone about how her pills were always running low. The night I had to give her a pill to save her life, I counted the pills left in the bottle. There were ten. The next night, after her death, I counted again—there were only seven. The dose indicated on the bottle was one pill every evening. That meant at least two were missing!

  “Then it came to me. What if Pieter had put a couple of crushed-up pills in Sarah’s tea—she always had a cup in the evening. Then, when she took her normal dose an hour later, an overdose would have resulted, causing death. Pieter only had to make sure he was seen elsewhere at the time of death, and his alibi was ironclad!”

  Bess gasped out loud, sitting up on the couch. “You mean when we saw him that night, he had just come from—oh no!” Her hand flew to her mouth in horror.

  Nancy ignored Bess’s remark. “I felt sure that I was right,” she went on. “But if I was, Pieter had committed the perfect crime. Or had he? When we saw him, he was holding an airline ticket.

  “Just in case? I wondered. A careful criminal always has a getaway planned. And whoever killed Sarah Amberly was very careful—which is why I never thought Jack Kale killed her, by the way. He’s so reckless as a gambler, it wouldn’t be like him to plan things out so carefully.”

  Jack smiled at her from across the room. “You tell ’em, Nancy,” he said.

  “Well,” Nancy resumed, taking a deep breath. “After he bought the ticket, Pieter stopped at the dry cleaners to drop off a shirt. And I thought, why did he do that? One shirt, at ten o’clock at night?

  “I managed to get the shirt before it was cleaned. And my dad had it analyzed by Interpol’s lab. Dad?”

  Carson cleared his throat and pulled the soiled shirt out of the bag. “We just got the results of the test an hour ago. Tea stains,” he said, pointing to them. “And traces of Sarah Amberly’s medicine —oxytomicin.”

  “My first hard evidence.” Nancy smiled. Pieter van Druten looked as if he were about to explode. On either side of him, two policemen kept watch, just in case he decided to move.

  “What about Maximilian?” Ritter wanted to know. “I had him pegged for the killer, to tell you the truth.” For the first time, Ritter was speaking to Nancy with some real respect.

  “Well, his hatred of the Amberlys was intense. It was almost an obsession. And that made me suspect him,” Nancy agreed. “I have a feeling that if I had dug into his background a little, I would have found some old skeletons in the closet, something connected with Sarah and Joshua Amberly. But that’s a whole other story.

  “When I was pushed,” Nancy continued, “down in the basement, I thought he had done it. But when he was killed too, I realized that his game wasn’t murder—it was blackmail. And that it must have been the person he was following—Pieter van Druten—who had tried to kill me. Maximilian must have gone down there expecting a payoff. Only he got a payoff he wasn’t expecting.

  “I checked with the staff,” said Nancy. “The night Sarah died, Maximilian was the one who brought her tea from room service. My guess is that he saw Pieter putting the medicine in the tea. And by the way, Pieter, you slipped up when you left the door of the suite wide open. After Sarah’s death, Maximilian must have put two and two together, and put the screws on Pieter. He even warned me not to mess around in matters that didn’t concern me. I guess he was trying to protect his little blackmail racket. Unfortunately for him, he messed around with the wrong person.”

  There was silence in the room. Ritter scratched his head, going over everything Nancy had said.

  “Wait—I still don’t get it,” he said. “Why in the world would van Druten here want to bump off the old lady? All he had to do was marry her, and he would have had everything. Why kill her?”

  Nancy looked over at Pieter. He was smiling at her, darin
g her to explain that one. It was a smile of triumph, a smile that said, “Now I’ve got you.”

  “That had me stumped, too.” Nancy nodded. “Pieter stood to lose if Sarah died before she married him. I didn’t know what to think, until I remembered Alison saying something about Sarah being a ‘one-man woman.’

  “I thought of all the things Sarah had told me about her dead husband Joshua, about the way she kept his ring on her night table, and I thought, what if Sarah had told Pieter she would never marry him?

  “And something else—Pieter van Druten was supposed to have diamond mines in South Africa, so why didn’t he know the jewels in the missing jewelry box were fakes? I remember him saying they were very valuable when they were first missing. Either he didn’t know their value, or he was trying to make Alison look guilty. Either way, something was fishy. So I had my father check on him through Interpol.”

  Carson reached into his pocket and handed Nancy an envelope.

  “It seems Pieter van Druten was not a diamond mine owner at all, but a well-known con man, who served time in Robbin Island Prison for grand larceny and fraud. And another thing, Pieter van Druten was an alias. This man’s real name is Patrick Kale!”

  An electric charge ran through the room. Suddenly Pieter shot to his feet, ready to lunge at Nancy. He was restrained just in time by the two burly officers and forced to take his seat again.

  “Yes, a distant relative.” Nancy nodded. “A con man whose hand is played out in his native country. One day he reads an obituary in the papers—the death of the famous Joshua Amberly, Boston millionaire. Widow Sarah, née Kale—and a plan forms in his mind.

  “He’s a handsome man, Patrick Kale, suave and debonair. The ladies have always liked him. So he goes to America under another name and gets to know the wealthy widow.

  “Sarah Amberly is lonely and likes his company. He’s doing well, getting closer to his goal. And then one day, she tells him she can never marry him, that she will always be a ‘one-man woman.’ And that’s when he decides to kill her.