In the last episode of Special Delivery, Rocky discovered the man introducing himself as Rollo Betancourt was setting him up to steal a statue in a house at the seaside town of Parker Beach. The following begins the entry in the Rocky Stone notebooks, dated April 26th, 1949:
It wasn't the oldest scam in the book, but it was written in an early chapter. Find some dope, a private investigator perhaps, someone blessed with the ability to steal something valuable anyhow, make him think he's doing it for a good cause, say, to keep some innocent truck driver from getting killed, collect the valuables and dispose of the poor sap who stole it. All you need is a man on the inside to play the innocent truck driver, a man with all the information, and a woman with a shapely body. I shouldn't have taken it personally. After all, they did believe I was capable of sneaking a statue out of a beachside home without getting the cops on my tail.
There were two questions left on my mind and to get the answer to the first, I camped out at the office of the best forgery expert I knew, a guy by the name of George Sharples who holds out in the basement of the Justice Building while he waits for the District Attorney to cast something interesting at him. He arrived late and gave me a weary smile when he saw me, a smile that broadened when I passed him the stack of bills and asked him what I had. We stood in front of his door and he flipped through it like a card sharp.
“Paper's good,” George stated as he thumbed along each hundred.
“So there's a chance these are real?”
He turned his eyes away from his task and looked up at me with a glimmer in his eye. “Would you be disappointed if they were?”
“To tell the truth, yes.”
“Well, you're in luck,” he added, and handed the money back. “The top one's real, the rest are, if you'll pardon the technical term, phonies. The printing is slightly to one side, a hundredth of an inch.”
If I didn't know how much he knew his business I would have laughed at him. “Thanks, George. I owe you one. A real one.”
“The top one's real, you know,” he said, seriously.
“I don't owe you that much. Besides, I'm fresh out of paying customers at the moment.”
Phonies. They were all phonies. The urge to pay a call on Jesse Weller to tell her what I thought of her and her money rose up inside me but I decided to save it for later, because the second question on my mind needed answering. The solution was written on the slip of paper the fake Rollo Betancourt had given me and all it took was a trip to Parker Beach.
The rain started up again. It was quiet at first, but it grew to a deluge as I drove west toward the ocean. At the edge of the city it was so bad I had to pull off the road and I sat and waited there for five minutes. The thought of that statue appeared in my head and I couldn't wait any longer, even though there were no signs of letting up. I sloshed back on to the road and crawled along the coast to Parker Beach. There, the rain slowed and the sun cracked through the clouds. The natives must have enough money to buy their way into nice weather.
I floated off the road into a sandy patch in the grass across the street from a squat, square 40-room behemoth built on stilts along the beachfront. A whitewashed stone sat on the ground just to the right of the paved driveway, the number '5480' painted on its side. The grounds were immaculate and well-groomed, shrubs cut perfectly round, grass cut like greens at the country club. A line of trees stood evenly in front of the house like sentinels. The only sour note was a garish wooden mailbox carved to look like a palm out along the road. A folded piece of soggy paper was stuck into it along the side. The owners wouldn't stand for a flaw like that spoiling their view if they were inside. Nobody home.
As I continued to watch, a quiet roar of an engine sounded along the road. A car drove past mine and pulled off in the sand in front of mine. It was an Alfa Romeo. Those were commonplace in this neck of the woods, but I knew I had seen this one the day before. My old friend James Wong was back.
Will Rocky discover why Jesse Weller and the fake Rollo Betancourt want the statue? How has James Wong become involved? Find out next week in The Adventures of Rocky Stone!
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