The Mystery of the Monster Mountain - M. V. Carey [40]
“She isn’t saying anything until she sees a lawyer,” snarled Havemeyer, “and I’m not, either.”
“I think we can reconstruct what happened,” said Jupe cheerfully. “Havemeyer came here and registered at the inn. He saw that, by an uncanny coincidence, Anna Schmid was almost an exact double of his wife. This would have been a meaningless discovery were it not for the fact that Havemeyer is a criminal.”
“A stock swindler,” put in Jensen. “He soft-talked my sister into investing ten thousand dollars in a mining company that’s been an empty hole in the ground for twenty years. Trouble is, there is a mine even if it’s worthless, and we couldn’t nail anything on him.”
“And you are not a nature photographer,” accused Pete.
Jensen grinned. “I own a hardware store in Tahoe. My sister spotted Havemeyer and this woman going into a coffee shop. She had a camera with her and she snapped them when they came out, and took down the license number of the car they were using. We figured the woman was another sucker he had lined up. When we checked out the license number, we got the name and address of Anna Schmid, and I came up here. I needed Havemeyer’s photo because I’d never met him, and that gave me the nature photographer idea. There isn’t too much reason to come to Sky Village in the summertime, so I brought my sister’s camera and said I was taking pictures of the wildlife.”
“You planned to warn Anna if Havemeyer tried to swindle her?” asked Bob.
“I wanted to protect her, and I also wanted to catch him in the act and get him tossed into jail. Only when I got here, he seemed to be married to Anna Schmid, and that was a new wrinkle. I went through her papers one night, and I couldn’t see any evidence that he was transferring her property to his name. I couldn’t figure out what the dickens he was up to.”
Jupe nodded sympathetically. “So we can go back to the beginning again and imagine Havemeyer meeting Anna Schmid for the first time and seeing the incredible resemblance between Anna and his wife. At first he couldn’t quite decide how to turn this to his advantage. Almost from force of habit he tried to conduct a swindle in the way he usually does. He tried to sell Anna Schmid fake stock. When she refused to buy, he wasn’t disturbed. He had an ace in the hole — a wife who is so much like the real Anna Schmid that she could fool anyone. With her help, Havemeyer could get possession of everything Anna Schmid owned.
“Havemeyer stayed on at the inn until he was thoroughly acquainted with the way Anna ran things. I think we’re safe in assuming that he went through the papers and ledgers in her office until he knew exactly what Anna was worth. And Anna made no secret of the fact that she kept her money in a safe deposit box. Not as convenient as a checking account, but the fake Anna could take the cash out of the box as easily as the real Anna.
“When Havemeyer was ready,” Jupe continued, “he locked Anna up in the hermit’s cabin and drove her car to Lake Tahoe, where he picked up fake Anna. The two returned to Sky Village and announced that Anna Schmid had married Joe
Havemeyer. Everything went smoothly, except that they couldn’t find the safe deposit key.
“I am sure they were very upset when Anna’s cousins arrived unannounced.
However, they knew about Hans and Konrad. In their search for the key they must have gone through all of Anna’s letters and
seen the snapshots of her cousins.
“Havemeyer was afraid it would look
odd if he wasn’t cordial to his new wife’s
relatives, so he invited them to stay at the inn. That really put fake Anna on the spot.
But she did very well, I must say. She knew
she couldn’t talk German with Hans and
Konrad because her accent would not be
the same as the real Anna’s. She is
German, but doubtless we’ll find that she
comes from a part of Germany where the
dialect is not the same as in Bavaria. She
insisted that they all speak English so as
not to exclude her husband from the
conversation.”
“But she still got plenty