The Kidnapper by Robert Bloch Read Free Book Online Page B

your insurance policy. Now shut up and listen!”
    “All right, Steve.”
    “You deposit five hundred bucks, and make sure you tell the guy your boy friend is coming home from Korea this fall—you want to get married then. See? That’s why I want you to go to a Savings and Loan joint instead of a bank. So you get a chance to talk to someone, and he’ll remember you. Because the cops will investigate everything you’ve done for the past week or so at least. And what will they find? Here’s a girl puts her savings into an account, plans on getting hitched. Doesn’t sound like she’s going to be involved in a kidnapping the very next day, does it?”
    “But I’ll have disappeared.”
    “That’s right. And they’ll look for you—but not for kidnapping, just for questioning. And they’ll never find you.”
    “How’ll you work that?”
    “I was coming to it, if you’d only shut up for a while and listen. You take Shirley Mae out of school. Specs is waiting to pick you up, in the alley before the corner. He’ll drive back down the alley, not out on the street. You’ll be at the cottage in half an hour, long before anybody misses you at the house. It’ll take that long for Paul to figure something’s gone wrong. Then, for a day or so, they’ll be trying to locate you.
    “The police will come out to the house. They’ll find all your clothes and stuff, still there. Nothing missing. First thing they’ll figure is somebody snatched you both. And the call will go out to locate Mary Adams. Five three, weight one-twenty or whatever, brown hair, brown eyes.
    “But don’t worry. There won’t be any such person any more. Instead there’ll be a Mrs. George Henderson, who moved into a cottage out at Long Lake the day before, for a two-week vacation with her husband. Mrs. George Henderson’ll be about five five with high heels on, and she wears sunglasses outdoors and horn-rimmed glasses indoors. And she’ll have blonde hair. She’ll also have entirely different clothes—I’ll buy ’em with the four hundred you got left. Nobody will have seen me, so they won’t look for me. Specs will still be working. Perfect setup.”
    “But won’t they get suspicious after a while?”
    “Sure. They’ll suspect everybody—but by the time the second day rolls around, the police will get a letter from you. It’s going to tell all about the kidnapping. Three men in a blue Chevvie, looked like Mexicans or Dagos. How they came up alongside you and snatched the kid and drove off. How you were scared when they let you out uptown, heading south. How you were afraid to go back because you knew you’d get mixed up with the cops, get all this publicity, lose your job. So you took a bus there at the uptown terminal and kept going. And now you’ll never come back.”
    “But the letter’ll be postmarked—”
    “New Orleans, airmail. Haven’t you ever read any of these ads in the back of the magazines? Amaze Your Friends —you send two bits to some guy in New Orleans or California and he re-mails your letter from there, makes whoever gets it think you’ve been travelling. That’s what we’ll do. The letter goes out when we snatch the kid. It gets to New Orleans, is airmailed back. The heat’s off. And when the police get to checking on you and find out about the Savings and Loan and nothing being missing, they’ll believe the pitch. So you’re safe, too.”
    “But won’t somebody see Shirley Mae at the cottage? And what about collecting the ransom money? And returning her to the Warrens?”
    “They’ll never see the kid at the cottage. First of all, because I’m going to make sure that the one next door to wherever we go isn’t rented. Secondly, because we won’t bring her into the house until after dark.”
    I patted her arm. “And about the ransom money, and getting her back home—that’s my department. You don’t think I’m letting you and Specs take all the risk, do you? My job is to get the dough,