Carolyn Keene - This Side of Evil

“Lake Sinclair is being blackmailed! But that’s not possible!” He picked up a small gold keychain and began to turn it over nervously in his fingers. In front of him, in a filigreed silver holder, was a stack of cream-colored notepaper with a thin blue line down the left margin. “No. No, I simply don’t believe it,” he said.

“Well, consider this then,” Nancy told him, standing. “Yesterday, there was an accident in the apartment where we’re staying. I was nearly burned with liquid nitrogen that spilled out of a Thermos bottle in a cabinet over my head. It was a frighteningly clever booby trap, and it was set up by somebody with access to liquid nitrogen.”

“Yes, but any chemist could have provided—” Dr. Dandridge began. His voice was thin and panicky.

“Wait,” Nancy cautioned. “There’s more. A few minutes after that I received a threatening note. It was typed on cream-colored paper—paper identical to that pad right in front of you.” She picked up a piece of the paper, folded it carefully, and put it in her skirt pocket. “I submit, Dr. Dandridge, that there is very good reason to believe that you or one of your staff is deeply involved with blackmail.”

“Well, it isn’t me!” the doctor exclaimed. The keys still in his hand, he stood up. “I have what you detectives call an airtight alibi. For the last two days, I’ve been in New York. I just got back this morning.”

Nancy frowned. All the clues pointed to Dandridge. If it wasn’t him, then it had to be one of his staff.

The doctor bent over and picked up an expensive-looking leather briefcase. He put it down flat on his desk. “Anyway,” he said wearily, “there’s another reason I can’t be your blackmailer.” He inserted one of the keys into the briefcase lock and began to open the lid.

Nancy tensed, and behind her George gasped out loud. What did he have in the briefcase? A gun? Slowly, the briefcase was opened. . . .

Chapter Eight

“Money!” George exclaimed.

“There’s fifty thousand dollars here,” Dr. Dandridge said grimly. “It’s the third installment—and I don’t know how many more there’ll be.”

Nancy whistled softly. “Fifty thousand dollars!” Annette LeBeau, Lake Sinclair, Emile Dandridge—each of them paying tens of thousands of dollars. There was no question about it. Nancy had stumbled onto a big-time criminal operation that was netting somebody lots of money.

“See all this fine furniture?” Dr. Dandridge said, waving his arm. “Well, none of it belongs to me anymore. I’ve had to mortgage it. My office equipment, too. If it doesn’t stop pretty soon, I’m going to be totally ruined.”

Nancy turned around and glanced at the diplomas on the wall. “The blackmailer found out about your phony medical degrees, didn’t he?”

Emile Dandridge stared at her. “How did you know?” he whispered.

Nancy shrugged and pointed to a diploma. “It wasn’t hard to figure out,” she said. “Nobody finishes a residency in six months.”

Dr. Dandridge seemed to shrivel, Nancy thought, like a balloon after the air had been let out of it. “So that’s how the blackmailer discovered it,” he said wearily. “Why didn’t I ever notice?” He went to the wall and took the diploma down, shaking his head. “I just never paid any attention to the dates.”

“You don’t even have a medical degree, do you?” Nancy asked.

“That’s not true. I did graduate from medical school—in Mexico. My grades weren’t good enough to get me into a Canadian school.”

Nancy looked at him. “And you figured that a Mexican degree would turn off your wealthy clients. So, instead, you had someone forge a diploma from a prestigious American medical school.”

Dr. Dandridge sank into the leather chair behind his desk. “The blackmailer must have seen the diplomas, just the way you did, and then checked it out. I’m sure there’s no other way it could have been discovered. I was very careful.”

“That means that the blackmailer has been in this office,” Nancy said. “I’ll need to question your staff members. But first”—she looked at the briefcase filled with wrapped packets of bills—“you’ve been told to leave this money at Nelson’s Column, right?”

Dr. Dandridge stared at her. “Exactly. I put the money into a red plastic bag and dump it in a trash can. How did you know?”

“It’s the blackmailer’s method,” Nancy said. She glanced at the money again. “Is the drop scheduled for today?”

The doctor nodded. “At five o’clock,” he said.

“George, this is it!” Nancy told her friend excitedly. “It’s just what we’ve been waiting for—a real break!”

“What do you want me to do?” Dr. Dandridge asked.

“Go ahead with the drop, exactly as you’ve been instructed. But our blackmailer’s going to have some company. When he picks up the money, we’ll be there to pick him up.”

“If the blackmailer is one of Dr. Dandridge’s staff, it won’t be a ‘him,’ ” George reminded her.

“Oh, that’s right,” Nancy said. “The blackmailer could be a woman.” She turned to the doctor. “I’d like to talk to your staff now. One at a time, please.”

Nancy and George didn’t learn a thing from the doctor’s staff—a receptionist and two nurses. It was hard to picture any of them as the blackmailer, Nancy decided. The receptionist was barely out of her teens. One of the nurses was a grandmother in her sixties, and the other had worked in the office for only a few days. They hardly seemed like killers, either. They were all genuinely surprised by Nancy’s questions. And George’s careful check of the office typewriters revealed nothing.

“What about the person your new nurse replaced?” Nancy asked the doctor when she was finished.

“I’ve just expanded the staff,” he explained. “I’ve had to take on more patients in order to meet the blackmailer’s demands, so I had to hire another nurse.”

Nancy frowned in frustration as she and George left the office. “I just don’t understand it,” she said. “All of the clues—the liquid nitrogen, the notepaper, the blackmailing of Lake Sinclair—led to Dandridge’s office. I’m afraid we’ve reached a dead end.”

“Not quite,” George said, her voice full of anticipation. “There’s still the drop this afternoon.” She was obviously looking forward to the action.

“Right,” Nancy said. “We’d better tell Ned. And I’ve got to call Ashley Amberton to let her know about this new development.”

Ms. Amberton sounded very impressed with Nancy’s detective work. “You mean, you actually spotted the discrepancies in his diplomas yourself?” she asked in disbelief.

“That’s right,” Nancy said. “He admitted it, of course. But now we know that the blackmailer must have had access to Dr. Dandridge’s office. Otherwise, he couldn’t have known about the fake diploma.”

“You are an incredibly astute young woman, Nancy,” Ms. Amberton said. “I’ll report your progress to Mr. Cherbourg when I see him this afternoon.”

“Well, maybe I’ll have an even better report this evening,” Nancy said. “By then, we might even know who our blackmailer is!”

At five o’clock the rush-hour traffic was heavy and the plaza around Nelson’s Column was crowded with tourists and people on their way home from work. It was beginning to drizzle, and lights were coming on in the late afternoon.

“Let’s wait across the street, behind those brick pillars,” Nancy told George and Ned. She pointed to a large building on the other side of the street. “That way, we can watch what’s going on in the plaza without being seen.”