The building’s doorman looked them over with friendly curiosity. “Mrs. Harvey? I don’t think she’s in.”

The lobby was very comfortable, filled with easy chairs and palms. Several elderly residents sat there, chatting and reading. The doorman called to one of them. “Have you seen Mrs. Harvey come back yet?”

One woman shook her head. “It’s too early. Her physical therapy lasts until four.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot.” The doorman thanked her and turned back to them. “It might be better if you came back tomorrow. She usually doesn’t feel too good until the day after her therapy.”

“Has she been sick?” Nancy asked.

“She’s had a time of it. Got hurt in an accident last year. Her own fault-too proud to ask someone for a ride. Insisted on taking a cab instead. She knew it wasn’t safe.”

“Taking a cab?” Ned asked.

“Taking a Gold Star cab sure isn’t. That phone on my desk is a direct line to the place, but nobody uses it unless they’re desperate.”

“Just a minute,” Nancy spoke calmly, hiding her excitement. “Mrs. Harvey was hurt in a Gold Star cab last year?”

“Hurt isn’t the word. We almost lost her. Only good thing about that cab company is that they took good care of her.”

“You mean their insurance company?” Nancy asked, wanting to be certain she understood clearly.

“Not the way we hear it. You should talk to Tom Tyler, but I saw him drive past awhile ago. Gold Star’s owners hired a fancy ambulance to move her from County General up to Pinebrook.”

Ned’s brows shot up. “The private hospital an hour away from here?”

“That’s the one. The place where rich folks go when they’re sick. Gold Star paid all the bills-and, mind you, she was there two months. They’re even footing the bill for the physical therapy.”

“That was very generous of them,” Nancy said.

“Smart is what it was. It was their fault. The cab’s brakes failed. If she’d made a stink, somebody would have gone to jail over the condition of that cab.”

“Poor?” Ned asked.

“Rattletraps, pure and simple. Falling apart. Three other people in this building have been in one when it’s had an accident. They weren’t hurt, just shaken up. But, as I said, we don’t ride with Gold Star unless we’re desperate.”

“Let’s go, Ned,” Nancy said, pulling him toward the door. “Thank you,” she told the doorman. “We’ll try to come back tomorrow.”

“You look as if you’re about to explode,” Ned said outside on the sidewalk.

“I am! It’s a big break, if I can just figure out how this all fits in to what’s happened to my dad.”

“Why’s it such a big break?”

“Because what we heard in there does not jibe with what I was told this morning. The doorman mentioned four accidents, one of them serious. Those accidents aren’t on record down at central headquarters.”

“How couldn’t they be? Especially Mrs. Harvey’s.”

“I don’t know. But even more important than that is that Gold Star had to know Mid-City was a scam!”

They’d reached George’s car and were talking across the hood. “You’re right,” Ned said. “They would have expected their insurance company to take care of their bills.”

“Exactly. And the doorman was very clear. Gold Star paid Mrs. Harvey’s bills, not Gold Star’s insurer. They had to have filed a claim with Mid-City, but nothing would have happened because Mid-City didn’t exist,” Nancy said. “So why didn’t they report that to the police? Why didn’t they scream bloody murder?”

“Because they knew about Mid-City from the beginning, that’s why,” Ann said half an hour later, slamming a computer printout onto her kitchen table.

“How?” Ned asked.

The reporter’s eyes blazed with fury. “There are fourteen men on the board of directors of the corporation that was listed as Mid-City’s parent company. You with me so far?”

Nancy nodded.

“Three of those men listed themselves as owners of Mid-City, and two will probably go to jail,” Ann said. “That leaves eleven others on that board of directors. Two of those eleven own the Gold Star Cab Company.”

“So they were all in it together,” Bess chimed in. “That’s what they were trying to hide!”

“Is it?” Nancy asked. She was troubled. It was too simple. “I wonder. It could be a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing.”

“That’s possible,” Ann admitted. “A board of directors isn’t usually a close-knit group. They don’t have meetings that often.”

“In some corporations, only once a year,” Ned said. “So the Gold Star guys could say that they had no idea their fellow directors from the parent company were running Mid-City Insurance. If they were smart enough, no one would be able to prove otherwise.”

“They’re probably smart enough, all right,” Nancy grumbled. “They’ve got to be hiding something else. But what?”

“It’s an interesting question,” her father said when Nancy and Ned filled him in that evening. “Think you can find the answer in five days?”

Nancy’s mouth dropped open. “They’ve set your pretrial for five days from now?”

“That’s really rushing things, isn’t it?” Ned asked.

“Indeed it is,” Carson Drew said. “But in comparison to the next item I have to tell you, the pretrial date is the good news.”

Nancy steeled herself. “What’s happened, Dad?”

“The police found an envelope with ten thousand dollars in cash in Jonathan’s office safe.”

“And?” Nancy said, feeling a sudden chill.

“My prints were all over it. And the envelope had been addressed to Jonathan on one of our office typewriters. I might as well slap a label on my forehead and mail myself off to prison.”

Chapter Ten

Nancy rolled out of bed the next morning. Her eyelids felt gritty, and her head ached. Time was against her, and she couldn’t decide what to do. She only had part of the day free. The memorial service for Jonathan Renk was that afternoon, and she wanted to attend.

She wondered if she should go back to her father’s office that morning to try to figure out how this last stunt had been accomplished. The stationery was kept in Ms. Hanson’s office. Her father had told her and Ned that he would have no reason to handle an envelope at all.

“Ms. Hanson types the letters and brings them to me to sign,” he told her. “I never even see the envelopes. I don’t remember handling a blank one they could type a name on.”

It was a puzzle, to say the least, but Nancy finally decided that visiting the office again that day would be a waste of time. Instead, she’d go to Gold Star. The truth had to be there.

Ned had protested that it was much too dangerous. And Nancy did agree with him, but she also felt she had no other choice. With the pretrial date right around the corner, she had to go with what she had. And what she had was the Gold Star Cab Company.

The girl who walked into the garage of Gold Star Cab an hour and a half later had a mop of short, mahogany-brown curls and enormous round glasses. She was chewing gum as if she hadn’t eaten in a week, and the outfit she wore-an oversize top and baggy jeans-disguised her slender figure.

Even Bess and George wouldn’t recognize me, Nancy told herself, making her gum sound off in a series of firecracker pop-pop-pops. It was a part of her new character. She was about to do the acting job of her life.

Gold Star used half of the street-level space of a five-story parking garage, and a business called Fleet’s had the other half. The garage had been built with two entrances, one on McConnell Street and the other on the street behind, Bennett Avenue. The cab company and Fleet’s used the entrance on McConnell, so after Nancy left her Mustang on the third level of the public garage, she had to walk around the block to get to Gold Star.