Thefts of Nick Velvet

by Edward D. Hoch

  “A goodly sum,” Nick admitted. “But where’s your father?”

  “Some months back, when the full value of their shares became known, my father was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in Miami Beach. I’m convinced he was murdered by Alfred Cazar.”

  “For the penny?”

  “For the penny. Chetwind knows both men were inveterate gamblers. If Cazar produced both pennies, with the story that he’d won my father’s in a poker game, Chetwind would accept it without question.”

  “But you have the penny,” Nick said. “You showed it to me.”

  “My father had it hidden where Cazar couldn’t find it. But the very fact that both my father’s body and his home were searched told me that Cazar was behind the crime. If I can’t bring him to justice any other way, I’ll at least turn the tables on him—by stealing his Bermuda penny.”

  “I don’t kill people,” Nick warned her.

  “I didn’t ask you to kill him. I asked you to steal the penny.”

  “He might not surrender it while he lives. He’s already proven to be a very clever customer.”

  Jeanne Kraft eyed Nick with something close to disdain. “Those things he pulled on you were tricks and nothing more. If you fell for them, you deserved to lose your money.”

  “What do you mean ‘tricks’?”

  “The license-plate bet. It’s not a 50-50 proposition at all. You can find the mathematics of it in any good book on gambling. Try Scarne’s Complete Guide to Gambling and it’ll also tell you how he worked the sugar-cube stunt.”

  “You mean that was a trick, too?”

  She nodded. “Sometime before the bet the two sugar cubes were doctored. A drop of insecticide was placed on one side of each cube. To start with, both of these sides were facing up. Then, after you chose your cube, he turned his over while positioning it. The flies were kept away from your cube, but landed on his.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Nick said.

  “It’s so simple when you know how.”

  “But what about his vanishing trick in the car? Any ideas about that?”

  Jeanne Kraft shook her head. “I’ve never heard that one done before.”

  But Nick had. He’d heard about it quite recently, in fact. Gloria had read something in the newspaper about it.

  “I have to find a phone,” he said.

  “What about the penny?”

  “When are you meeting Chetwind?”

  “Tomorrow morning at the racing museum. Ten o’clock.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Nick took a room for himself at the Holiday Inn and phoned home to Gloria. “Nicky, what’s happened?” she asked, alarmed to be hearing from him. He wasn’t in the habit of calling while away.

  “Nothing. I’m okay. I just need some information. Remember that newspaper article you read about the hitchhiker vanishing from the back seat of a car?”

  “Yes?”

  “Get it and read it to me, will you?”

  She left the phone and returned after a few minutes. The newspaper article was just as she’d first reported it—a bizarre account of a white-clad hippie hitchhiker who vanished from the back seats of autos after speaking of religion and judgment. The source for the story was given as a Professor Trout, folklorist at State University in Albany.

  “Thanks, Gloria. That’s what I wanted.”

  “Will you be home soon?”

  “Maybe by tomorrow night, the way things are going.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I always am.”

  He hung up and put through a call to the State University. Professor Trout was not on campus during the summer, but he managed to obtain a home phone number. With one more call he had the man on the wire.

  “I know,” Trout said, speaking briskly. “It’s the damned article. The phone’s been ringing here all week. I suppose you have a disappearance to report too.”

  “In a way,” Nick admitted. “But I have a couple of questions to ask you first. The paper says you’re a folklorist.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Meaning you don’t really believe any of these happenings?”

  “Not exactly,” Trout answered carefully. “Folklore is often based on distorted truths.”

  “I just want an answer, Professor. Are these reports about vanishing hitchhikers to be believed?”

  “Oh, yes, as far as they go. You have to realize that the original reports came from young people—kids pretty well into the drug culture.”

  “Oh? Does that explain how he disappeared?”

  “I think so. These kids often drive when they’re high on something—just as adults do, unfortunately. Since many hallucinogens give one a distorted time-sense, it’s quite likely a driver picked up a hitchhiker, talked with him, dropped him off somewhere without realizing or remembering it, and then really believed he simply vanished from the car. Once a story like that gets started, you always receive accounts of people with similar experiences.”

  “That’s the only explanation you’ve come up with?” Nick asked, unable to conceal his disappointment. He knew he hadn’t been high on anything when Alfred Cazar vanished.

  “What other possibility is there?”

  “None, I suppose,” Nick answered with a sigh. “Thank you, Professor.”

  Though it was late afternoon, Nick walked a mile east on Lincoln Avenue to the Saratoga Race Course. The day’s races were just finishing as he reached the gate, and he stood aside to watch the faces of the people as they exited. Happy, sad, glowing, disgruntled—their faces told their day’s fortunes. He watched one man empty his pockets of losing tickets and walk on, while another immediately pounced on them to search for an overlooked winner.

  He’d come in hopes of catching a glimpse of a reincarnated Alfred Cazar, but the little man was nowhere visible in the crowd. Finally, as the departing throng thinned, he gave up and headed back to the red-brick Gideon Putnam Hotel to see Hugo Blaze.

  The bulky man was in his room, and when he let Nick in he motioned him to a chair. “I’m on the phone,” he explained. “Won’t be a minute.”

  Nick heard him talking to New York, apparently reporting to someone on the disappearance of Alfred Cazar. When he hung up, Nick asked, “Any word of him back there?”

  “Not a thing. He seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Are you going to stay here?”

  Blaze shrugged. “Why not? My salary is paid for another two weeks, and my job was to accompany him up here. I can only assume he’ll turn up.”

  Nick nodded. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  All the while they were dining in the elegant and spacious room downstairs, Nick’s thoughts were somewhere else. Cazar had the Bermuda penny, and Cazar had disappeared. There was no way to steal it unless he could find the man, and that seemed impossible.

  “Saratoga has changed a great deal these past years,” Blaze was saying. “The gambling casino is now a museum, and most of the big old hotels are gone. They even issue health warnings about the mineral water.”

  “There must be someplace you can find a decent poker game,” Nick suggested.

  “Oh, sure. You interested?”

  “I might be.” Nick was remembering the Canadian, Brian Chetwind, and his liking for poker. If he planned to meet Jeanne in the morning at the racing museum, the odds were he was already in town. And he might well be found at a high-stakes game.

  So after dinner they took the rented car and drove up North Broadway to a rambling white guest house on the edge of town. “This place was here at the turn of the century,” Hugo Blaze explained. “And there was gambling here then.”

  He led Nick inside, through sitting rooms still lush with opulence of another era. Finally, in the rear, they passed through a double door into a large game room. Here seven men sat around a green-topped poker table moving their stacks of chips in and out of play like the money moguls they probably were. Nick noticed a craps table at one side
of the room too, but for the moment all the action was on poker.

  Nick studied the faces of the men at the table, trying to decide if one might be the Canadian. He listened to the names they called each other, but there seemed to be no Brian at the table. “This the only game around?” Nick asked Blaze.

  “It’s the best game around. There’s usually one in the back room at the Orange Dollar, too.”

  “Let’s try that.”

  The Orange Dollar was an old-fashioned roadhouse a bit farther along North Broadway. The back-room poker game was noisier and more crowded here, and Nick knew at once he’d found the right place. “Raise you, Chetwind,” one of the players was saying as he entered, addressing a tall man who sat with his back to the door.

  “You going to stay around here?” Blaze asked Nick.

  “I think so, for a while.”

  “I’m going off to the track. Rather lose my money on a horse than a deck of cards, any day.”

  “Racing at night?”

  “They’ve got a harness track that operates at night. I told you this was a swinging place.”

  After Hugo Blaze left, Nick remained watching the poker game. One busted player offered his chair, but Nick shook his head. He hadn’t come to gamble, only to speak to Brian Chetwind.

  After about an hour the Canadian cashed in his chips and rose from the chair with a wide stretch of his arms. “Enough for now. I’ll see you birds tomorrow.”

  He sauntered over to a little bar at one end of the room and Nick joined him there. “You’re Brian Chetwind, aren’t you?”

  The Canadian was tall and handsome, with gray hair fashionably styled across his forehead. He looked like money. “That’s me. Do I know you?”

  “Nick Velvet’s the name. I’m doing some work for an acquaintance of yours—Jeanne Kraft.”

  The tall Canadian nodded. “Lovely young lady. Terrible thing about her father.”

  “I understand you’re meeting her tomorrow.”

  “That’s correct. We have a business deal to close.”

  “And Alfred Cazar?”

  “Cazar? You know him, too?”

  “Yes,” Nick admitted. “I drove up here with him from New York.”

  “Glad he’s here. I’ve been looking for him.”

  “I’ll be frank, Mr. Chetwind. I know something of your dealings with Cazar and the late Jesse Kraft. I know about the two Bermuda pennies.”

  “I see. And what is your interest?”

  “I’m looking after Miss Kraft’s interests. It’s important that I know if Cazar has contacted you today.”

  “I told you I’d been looking for him, didn’t I?” Chetwind was growing impatient. “If you’re some sort of strongarm man hired by Miss Kraft, you can be assured that I intend to pay my debts.”

  “Nothing like that,” Nick said. “She’ll see you in the morning, Mr. Chetwind.”

  He left the Canadian and went outside. Hugo Blaze had taken the car, and it was necessary to hire a taxi to drive him to the Grand Union Motel where Jeanne was staying. During the ride he couldn’t help considering a possibility which hadn’t occurred to Jesse Kraft’s daughter. There was someone besides Alfred Cazar with a motive for killing Kraft and stealing his Bermuda penny.

  Brian Chetwind would have the strongest motive in the world—if he wasn’t able to pay off his debts.

  Nick hadn’t really expected Jeanne Kraft to sit in her room all night, but it was frustrating nonetheless when she failed to answer his knock. There were too many places where she might be—the harness track, the concert, the summer theater, or even one of the mineral baths.

  He was about to walk away when he heard a sound, very low, from the other side of her door. “Jeanne? Are you in there?” he called.

  The low sound was repeated, and now he recognized it as a moan. He tried the door but it was locked. “Jeanne!”

  “… help me …” she said from the other side of the door, her voice little more than a whisper.

  “Can you reach the knob to open the door?”

  There was a few moments’ pause, then the door opened. Jeanne Kraft was sagging against the wall, holding her head. “He was waiting for me, Nick. He hit me.”

  “Who hit you?”

  “I didn’t see him, but it must have been—” Her eyes caught sight of the purse on the floor, its contents scattered across the rug. She dropped to her knees and pawed through the purse, then gasped out, “Cazar! He stole my Bermuda penny!”

  “You’re sure it’s gone?”

  “Of course I’m sure! I had it hidden inside the lining here.”

  “Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”

  Her face was a picture of dejection. “So now he’s got both pennies.”

  “Or neither.”

  “What?”

  “Have you considered the possibility that Chetwind might have killed your father, made Cazar disappear from that car, and assaulted you—all to keep from paying his gambling debts?”

  “But he’s a wealthy man!”

  “Is he? I was with him tonight. He left a poker game quite early, and it wasn’t the biggest game in town.”

  “I still think it was Cazar. If only you could find him!”

  “To know where he is I have to know how he pulled that vanishing act,” Nick said. “Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it ever since it happened. Funny thing—it’s almost as if the wrong man disappeared. If it had been Hugo Blaze who vanished instead of Cazar, I’d know how it was done.”

  But she wasn’t listening. She sat looking at her purse and shaking her head. “What will I do now, Nick?”

  “Meet Chetwind as planned tomorrow morning, just as if you still had the penny. In. fact, I think we’ll both go meet him.”

  The town awoke slowly, perhaps with a hangover from the night before, and Nick and Jeanne had the coffee shop almost to themselves for breakfast. “What happens at the museum?” he asked. “It would seem a pretty public place for a meeting.”

  “At ten each morning they show films of the previous day’s races. I’m to meet Chetwind there, but we’ll probably go elsewhere for the actual exchange.” Then, remembering, she added, “Of course, I no longer have anything to exchange.”

  “Let me worry about that. If Cazar has both pennies, he’ll show up for the meeting, too. If he doesn’t have them, that puts the finger on Chetwind.”

  “And you’ll get them back for me? Both of them?”

  “Both of them,” he assured her. “And it won’t cost you anything extra. Two for the price of one.”

  By ten o’clock there was a fair crowd at the National Museum of Racing, across Union Avenue from the track itself. Nick let Jeanne walk ahead of him and enter the darkened area where films of the previous day’s races would be shown. He stayed near a display case, looking over past racing trophies while he kept an eye on the main entrance.

  He’d only been watching a few moments when Brian Chetwind hurried through the doors, heading straight for the film without a glance to his right or left. A minute later Hugo Blaze strode in.

  Nick hesitated only an instant. The whole caper had been one big gamble from the beginning, with license plates, sugar cubes, horses, and cards. Now it was time for him to gamble. “Blaze!” he called softly. “Over here.”

  Hugo Blaze paused, hesitated, then walked over to the display case where Nick stood. “What’s up?”

  “In here,” Nick said, motioning toward the men’s room door. “It’s important.”

  Hugo Blaze stepped inside, looking puzzled, and Nick followed him. A moment later Nick came out alone and headed across the lobby toward the film showing. Jeanne Kraft was just emerging with Chetwind.

  “Nick, what can I do? He’s ready to pay off, but he needs the coins!”

  “Wait here a moment,” Nick told the Canadian. Then he steered Jeanne back across the lobby to the men’s room door.

  “In there?”

  Nick nodded. “I want you to meet Mr. Hugo Blaze.”
/>
  He opened the door wide enough so she could see the unconscious man sprawled on the tile floor. “But—but, Nick, that’s not Blaze! That’s Alfred Cazar!”

  Nick Velvet smiled. “I just won a bet with myself. And here, young lady, are your two Bermuda pennies.”

  Nick and Jeanne left Saratoga by car later that day. For them the season was over. “Look!” she exclaimed, holding up for Nick the thick packets of bonds that Brian Chetwind had given her. “They’re worth more than a quarter of a million on today’s market!”

  “He’s an honest man.”

  She nodded agreement. “That’s more than I can say about Cazar. But how did you know he was Blaze? And how did they work that disappearance from the car?”

  “When I first met the older man in his hotel room at the Waldorf, he simply said he was Cazar and I believed him. But right from the start I felt there was something funny. Blaze kept calling him ‘boss,’ overdoing the supposed relationship.

  “The fake Cazar showed me the Bermuda penny for two reasons—to see if I was interested, and to fool me as to its location. When I revealed my interest, they knew I’d been hired by you, and they used a clever dodge like the old shell game. The fake Cazar simply slipped the penny to the real Cazar and then the fake Cazar disappeared. I couldn’t steal it if I thought it had vanished along with him. The penny was only inches away from me all the time, yet it was safer than in a bank vault.”

  “But how did the fake Cazar disappear?”

  “They’d just given me the job of driving a strange car. I saw them come back and heard the fake Cazar in the rear seat. Fastening his seat belt. Then he slammed the door.” That should have told me something. It’s far more natural to close the door before you fasten the belt. But back-seat belts aren’t connected to any buzzer system, and I simply assumed he was still in the car.

  “Meanwhile, the real Cazar—or Blaze—was distracting my attention by explaining the car’s automatic shift. I started up, with Cazar’s voice talking to me from the back seat, and drove away. In reality my back-seat passenger was left behind, probably crouched behind a gas pump. His work was done, and he probably got a cab or hitched a ride back to New York.”

  “But the voice!”

  “You told me yourself that Cazar had been a night-club entertainer—a mimic and impressionist. I suspect he knew a little ventriloquism, too. While he sat in the front seat calmly smoking a cigarette, he was imitating the absent man’s voice in such a way that it appeared to come from the rear. I couldn’t see him in my rearview mirror, but I certainly believed he was there.