The Mystery of the Millionaire

gathered her wits. “I’d say he was about twenty-five. He was about your height, but very slender. Frail, almost. He had hair about the color of mine. Eyes, too. I mean, he had eyes about the color of mine, too. His nose was long and thin, but not too long. It was a nice nose. His lips were sort of thin. That’s why I was surprised when he turned out to have a good sense of humor.”
    “See?” Honey asked proudly. “I told you Trixie would remember everything. She always does.”
    “What was he wearing?” Jim asked.
    McGraw waved one hand in a gesture of dismissal. “That doesn’t matter. He’d be wearing what you’d expect a census taker to wear.”
    “That’s right,” Trixie agreed. “He had a clipboard, and he had a whole bunch of printed forms on it. The one on the top was all filled out, as if he’d just come from another house.” McGraw nodded. “He sounds like a real pro, all right,” he said.
    “What are you going to do next?” Trixie asked. “Track him down,” McGraw growled. “The license number was a dead end—a rental. But with this information, I ought to be able to find out who he is. Then there are ways of finding out who he’s working for.”
    “How?” Trixie pursued.
    McGraw looked at her scornfully. Now that he had the information he wanted from her, she was once again just a meddlesome teen-ager, the look seemed to say. “Contacts,” he said.
    “Oh,” Trixie said humbly.
    “Speaking of contacts,” McGraw said, turning from Trixie to Laura, “one of my sources in Buffalo turned up a lead that’s worth following.”
    “About my father?” Laura asked eagerly. McGraw ignored the question. He leafed back through his notebook and read from his notes as he spoke. “My source reports having seen a man answering Anthony Ramsey’s description. It was in a cheap restaurant up there that’s known to be an underworld hangout. He looked bad—haggard, unshaven, that kind of thing. And there were two men with him who stuck right with him. Didn’t let him out of their sight.”
    Laura gripped the back of a chair hard, as if it were her grasp on reality. “What does that mean?”
    McGraw shrugged. “If the man was your father, it could mean he’s being held prisoner by the two men.”
    “But why?” Laura’s voice was a wail. “There’s been no ransom demand. What do they want? Why are they holding my father?”
    McGraw closed the notebook and slapped it rhythmically against the palm of his hand. “A string of neighborhood grocery stores like your father’s could come in very handy for the mob. The stores have been around for a while. Everyone knows about them. Everyone knows they’re clean and honest. They could be used for the syndicate’s purposes for a long time before the cops got wise.”
    “What purposes would the syndicate use them for?” It was Honey who spoke, and Trixie looked at her gratefully. She had wondered the same thing, but she was reluctant to draw McGraw’s scorn again.
    “Numbers rackets and dope peddling are a couple of things that come to mind immediately,” McGraw said casually, “but it’s more likely that they’d want them for ‘laundering’ their money. That’s where they alter the accounts of legitimate businesses to include their illegitimate gains so that it looks like they’d got them on the up and up.”
    “Oh!” Laura wailed. “I can’t bear the thought of my father’s stores being used for things like that!”
    “Maybe he can’t, either,” McGraw suggested. “Let’s say the mob approaches him and makes him an offer—a nice percentage of the take in return for the use of his stores. Your father refuses. They make him another offer. He refuses again. Maybe he even threatens to go to the cops. Now he’s got the mob over a barrel. He has something on them, but they have nothing on him. They have to try a little harder to ‘convince’ him.”
    “But why would they make him an offer in the first place?” Laura asked. “You said yourself that my father’s stores have a reputation for honesty.”
    “They’d have to have some reason for thinking their offer would be accepted,” McGraw said. “Some good reason, like Frank Riebe telling them it would be.”
    “Frank!” Laura’s voice betrayed her disgust. “I’ve fought so hard against believing that Frank could be involved in this. But everywhere I turn, I see more and more evidence that he’s behind all of it.”
    “I think we’re getting away