Serial
James M. Cain wrote six magazine serials, all while he was in California, and he considered them “commercial stories” — written primarily for quick money from either a magazine, studio, or both. But Cain also considered “Old Man Posterity” the only judge of literary merit, and by the Old Man’s measure some of these stories have had a surprising life of their own. Double Indemnity, for example: It was Cain’s first serial, written strictly for a quick sale in the hope of capitalizing on his fame as the author of the controversial, best-selling Postman. The editor of Redbook, especially, had been pressing Ms. Haggard for a Cain mystery. But when Cain sent Double Indemnity to New York, Redbook declined it. This annoyed Cain, who told Alfred A. Knopf that he considered the story “a piece of tripe [that] will never go between hardcovers while I live. The penalty, I suppose, for doing something like this is that you don’t even sell it to magazines.”
Cain gave serious thought to rewriting Double Indemnity in the manner of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, exploring “what forces of destiny brought these particular people to this dreadful spot, at this particular time, on this particular day.” But before he could rework it, Edith Haggard sold Double Indemnity to Liberty, and when it came out over eight weeks in early 1936, it created a sensation. Liberty immediately wanted another, and Cain by then needed money to finance a trip to Mexico to research his still-evolving Serenade. So he wrote a serial about a female opera star whose businessman husband suddenly discovers his voice is better than his wife’s. Cain called this one Two Can Sing, but when he sent it to New York, Liberty turned it down. The editor wanted more murder. Then 20th Century-Fox bought Two Can Sing for $8,000. (It was made twice into movies, in 1939 as Wife, Husband and Friend starring Loretta Young, Warner Baxter, Binnie Barnes, and Cesar Romero, and in 1949 as Everybody Does It starring Linda Darnell, Paul Douglas, and Celeste Holm.) Later, after it sold to the American, it proved the most popular short novel the magazine ever published. The editor, Albert Benjamin, pleaded with Cain for another. By now, Serenade had been published, creating almost as much excitement as Postman, and Cain was hotter than ever.
His next serial grew out of a conversation he once had with a Collier’s editor (“How about a Cinderella story with a modern twist? What about a waitress marrying a Harvard man?”). He wrote it specifically with Collier’s in mind, but when his agent sent the magazine the story — called Modern Cinderella — Collier’s turned it down, primarily, Cain thought, because it was also concerned with organized labor. But Universal bought it for $17,500 late in 1937 and made it into a soppy little film called When Tomorrow Comes, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer.
The following year, Cain wrote Money and the Woman, which Liberty bought immediately. It was also sold to Warner Brothers, and the studio assigned the script to Robert Presnell. When the film, starring Jeffrey Lynn and Brenda Marshall, was released in 1940, Variety said the script was all right and the story okay, “but somewhere along the line, the plot went askew. Result is a mild ‘B’ film.”
Cain did not attempt another serial until late 1941, when, recuperating from an operation and needing money, he wrote Love’s Lovely Counterfeit. It was, he said, the only story he ever wrote with the movies in mind. But it was also a story about the seamier side of city politics, and after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered World War II, neither the magazines nor the studios were interested in fiction criticizing American institutions, and the story never sold.
The following year, still needing money and having a difficult time adjusting to the mood of wartime America, Cain wrote another serial, a story about the involvement between a Reno sheriff and a movie star whose husband is murdered. It was essentially a rewrite of his unproduced play, 7-11, about a Broadway actress, a New York writer, and a murder in a nightclub similar to “21.” He called the story Galloping Domino, but it also failed to sell to either the magazines or a studio.
His next and final attempt at a serial came four years later. By then, Double Indemnity had been published in hardcover and made into a movie, and one of its stars, Edward G. Robinson, had been asking Cain if he would write another story featuring Keyes, the insurance agent Robinson plays in the film. Cain wrote a story about an insurance agent named Ed Horner and a beautiful woman involved in a complicated divorce action in Reno. It also included the character Keyes and several references, in the first draft, at least, to Double Indemnity. But Robinson did not like the story, which Cain called Nevada Moon and, like Galloping Domino, it never sold to either a magazine or a studio.
Cain’s curious career as a magazine serial writer is even stranger when you consider the book-publishing history of these six serials. In 1943, Knopf gathered three of them — Double Indemnity, Two Can Sing (now called Career in C Major), and Money and the Woman (changed to The Embezzler) — into a single hardcover volume titled Three of a Kind. Considering that Cain thought Double Indemnity a “piece of tripe,” and that all his magazine serials were written as commercial quickies, the collection was given a remarkable reception. It was highly praised by the critics, with John K. Hutchens calling Cain “a writer who holds you by the sheer, dazzling pace he sets.” Of the three serials in the Knopf hardcover collection, only Double Indemnity had not already been made into a movie. But the literary response to Three of a Kind enabled Cain’s Hollywood agent, H. N. Swanson, to revive studio interest in the story, which resulted in the now-classic Billy Wilder-Raymond Chandler film.
In 1949 the Saturday Review and the American Library Association compiled a list of books by American authors published in the previous quarter century that librarians felt were the most popular with their readers, and Three of a Kind was the only Cain title on the list. Then, in 1969, Knopf republished Double Indemnity in a hardcover collection called Cain X 3. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and, more than any other of his books, helped create Cain’s “Re-Incarnation,” as he called it, in the 1970s. Today Double Indemnity and Postman continue to live as American classics of suspense writing and will probably give Cain the literary renown which he felt was the only thing that mattered to a writer — other than making a good living at his trade.
Cain’s four other serials also had a curious publishing history. In 1942, after the success of Three of a Kind, Knopf decided to publish Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, despite its anti-American flavor. Although reviewers were hard on the book, it sold very well, and Mencken thought it was one of the best Cain ever wrote. Then, in the late 1940s, with Cain at the height of his fame, Avon published as paperback originals the other serials which Cain had not been able to sell. All three were given new titles — Modern Cinderella became The Root of His Evil, Galloping Domino became Sinful Woman, and Nevada Moon became Jealous Woman. Cain did not like the new titles, but by then he did not really care. He felt that being published as a paperback original was the same as being published in magazines; it did not really count in the literary sweepstakes. Recently, G. K. Hall brought out the three serials in a hardcover volume called Hard Cain, and the three serials, as well as most of his other books, continue to be published in reprint editions around the world, including a series of Cain titles now selling very well in Vintage paperbacks. In fact, paperbacks have been primarily responsible for giving Cain the worldwide literary reputation he valued.
The serial included in this collection — Money and the Woman — was written in early 1938 after Cain had experienced one of the few writer’s blocks of his long career. He had just come back from a trip to Europe and had driven through West Virginia to gather material for The Butterfly, which he was finding impossible to write. He had also been hired briefly by Universal Pictures to work on a script, The Victoria Docks at 8, but then was abruptly fired for reasons unknown. He went back to his typewriter, but could not seem to get going, until finally he had an idea for a story (“The Girl in the Storm”) and then a serial. The serial was triggered by a friend who worked for the same insurance company in Baltimore where Cain’s father had worked. The friend had sent him a study — “1001 Embezzlers” — asking Cain to comment on it. Cain responded with an excellent critique and then began to think about a story involving a man who mortgages his house to help a woman return $9,000 to a bank. Liberty bought it for $4,000, and by the time it finally appeared in Three of a Kind, Cain had decided it was one of his favorite stories. “In The Embezzler,” he wrote in a preface to the Knopf collection, “I find writing that is much simpler, much freer from calculated effect, than I find in the other two [Double Indemnity and Career in C Major].”
Cain was pleased with the collection when it was published in 1941, and he wrote Knopf: “Later, if some of my writing kicks me into prominence, it may be a title that will have occasional spurts of activity.”
Three of a Kind has long been out of print, but the three stories — as most of Cain’s fiction — continue to live.
R.H.
Money and the Woman (The Embezzler)
I
I first met her when she came over to the house one night, after calling me on the telephone and asking if she could see me on a matter of business. I had no idea what she wanted, but supposed it was something about the bank. At the time, I was acting cashier of our little Anita Avenue branch, the smallest of the three we’ve got in Glendale, and the smallest branch we’ve got, for that matter. In the home office, in Los Angeles, I rate as vice president, but I’d been sent out there to check up on the branch, not on what was wrong with it, but what was right with it. Their ratio of savings deposits to commercial deposits was over twice what we had in any other branch, and the Old Man figured it was time somebody went out there and found out what the trick was, in case they’d invented something the rest of the banking world hadn’t heard of.
I found out what the trick was soon enough. It was her husband, a guy named Brent that rated head teller and had charge of the savings department. He’d elected himself little White Father to all those workmen that banked in the branch, and kept after them and made them save until half of them were buying their homes and there wasn’t one of them that didn’t have a good pile of dough in the bank. It was good for us, and still better for those workmen, but in spite of that I didn’t like Brent and I didn’t like his way of doing business. I asked him to lunch one day, but he was too busy, and couldn’t come. I had to wait till we closed, and then we went to a drugstore while he had a glass of milk, and I tried to get out of him something about how he got those deposits every week, and whether he thought any of his methods could be used by the whole organization. But we got off on the wrong foot, because he thought I really meant to criticize, and it took me half an hour to smooth him down. He was a funny guy, so touchy you could hardly talk to him at all, and with a hymn-book-salesman look to him that made you understand why he regarded his work as a kind of a missionary job among these people that carried their accounts with him. I would say he was around thirty, but he looked older. He was tall and thin, and beginning to get bald, but he walked with a stoop and his face had a gray color that you don’t see on a well man. After he drank his milk and ate the two crackers that came with it, he took a little tablet out of an envelope he carried in his pocket, dissolved it in his water, and drank it.
But even when he got it through his head I wasn’t sharpening an axe for him, he wasn’t much help. He kept saying that savings deposits have to be worked up on a personal basis, that the man at the window has to make the depositor feel that he takes an interest in seeing the figures mount up, and more of the same. Once he got a holy look in his eyes, when he said that you can’t make the depositor feel that way unless you really feel that way yourself, and for a few seconds he was a little excited, but that died off. It looks all right, as I write it, but it didn’t sound good. Of course, a big corporation doesn’t like to put things on a personal basis, if it can help it. Institutionalize the bank, but not the man, for the good reason that the man may get an offer somewhere else, and then when he quits he takes all his trade with him. But that wasn’t the only reason it didn’t sound good. There was something about the guy himself that I just didn’t like, and what it was I didn’t know, and didn’t even have enough interest to find out.
So when his wife called up a couple of weeks later, and asked if she could see me that night, at my home, not at the bank, I guess I wasn’t any sweeter about it than I had to be. In the first place, it looked funny she would want to come to my house, instead of the bank, and in the second place, it didn’t sound like good news, and in the third place, if she stayed late, it was going to cut me out of the fights down at the Legion Stadium, and I kind of look forward to them. Still, there wasn’t much I could say except I would see her, so I did. Sam, my Filipino houseboy, was going out, so I fixed a highball tray for myself, and figured if she was as pious as he was, that would shock her enough that she would leave early.
It didn’t shock her a bit. She was quite a lot younger than he was, I would say around twenty-five, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a shape you couldn’t take your eyes off of. She was about medium size, but put together so pretty she looked small. Whether she was really good-looking in the face I don’t know, but if she wasn’t good-looking, there was something about the way she looked at you that had that thing. Her teeth were big and white, and her lips were just the least little bit thick. They gave her a kind of a heavy, sullen look, but one eyebrow had a kind of twitch to it, so she’d say something and no part of her face would move but that, and yet it meant more than most women could put across with everything they had.
All that kind of hit me in the face at once, because it was the last thing I was expecting. I took her coat, and followed her into the living room. She sat down in front of the fire, picked up a cigarette and tapped it on her nail, and began looking around. When her eye lit on the highball tray she was already lighting her cigarette, but she nodded with the smoke curling up in one eye, “Yes, I think I will.”
I laughed, and poured her a drink. It was all that had been said, and yet it got us better acquainted than an hour of talk could have done. She asked me a few questions about myself, mainly if I wasn’t the same Dave Bennett that used to play halfback for U.S.C., and when I told her I was, she figured out my age. She said she was twelve years old at the time she saw me go down for a touchdown on an intercepted pass, which put her around twenty-five, what I took her for. She sipped her drink. I put a log of wood on the fire. I wasn’t quite so hot about the Legion fights.
When she’d finished her drink she put the glass down, motioned me away when I started to fix her another, and said: “Well.”
“Yeah, that awful word.”
“I’m afraid I have bad news.”
“Which is?”
“Charles is sick.”
“He certainly doesn’t look well.”
“He needs an operation.”
“What’s the matter with him — if it’s mentionable?”
“It’s mentionable, even if it’s pretty annoying. He has a duodenal ulcer, and he’s abused himself so much, or at least his stomach, with this intense way he goes about his work, and refusing to go out to lunch, and everything else that he shouldn’t do, that it’s got to that point. I mean, it’s serious. If he had taken better care of himself, it’s something that needn’t have amounted to much at all. But he’s let it go, and now I’m afraid if something isn’t done — well, it’s going to be very serious. I might as well say it. I got the report today, on the examination he had. It says if he’s not operated on at once, he’s going to be dead within a month. He’s — verging on a perforation.”
“And?”
“This part isn’t so easy.”
“...How much?”
“Oh, it isn’t a question of money. That’s all taken care of. He has a policy, one of these clinical hook-ups that entitles him to everything. It’s Charles.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“I can’t seem to get it through his head that this has to be done. I suppose I could, if I showed him what I’ve just got from the doctors, but I don’t want to frighten him any more than I can help. But he’s so wrapped up in his work, he’s such a fanatic about it, that he positively refuses to leave it. He has some idea that these people, these workers, are all going to ruin if he isn’t there to boss them around, and make them save their money, and pay up their installments on their houses, and I don’t know what all. I guess it sounds silly to you. It does to me. But — he won’t quit.”
“You want me to talk to him?”
“Yes, but that’s not quite all. I think, if Charles knew that his work was being done the way he wants it done, and that his job would be there waiting for him when he came out of the hospital, that he’d submit without a great deal of fuss. This is what I’ve been trying to get around to. Will you let me come in and do Charles’s work while he’s gone?”
“...Well — it’s pretty complicated work.”
“Oh no, it’s not. At least not to me. You see, I know every detail of it, as well as he does. I not only know the people, from going around with him while he badgered them into being thrifty, but I used to work in the bank. That’s where I met him. And — I’ll do it beautifully, really. That is, if you don’t object to making it a kind of family affair.”
I thought it over a few minutes, or tried to. I went over in my mind the reasons against it, and didn’t see any that amounted to anything. In fact, it suited me just as well to have her come in, if Brent really had to go to the hospital, because it would peg the job while he was gone, and I wouldn’t have to have a general shake-up, with the other three in the branch moving up a notch, and getting all excited about promotions that probably wouldn’t last very long anyway. But I may as well tell the truth. All that went through my mind, but another thing that went through my mind was her. It wasn’t going to be a bit unpleasant to have her around for the next few weeks. I liked this dame from the start, and for me anyway, she was plenty easy to look at.
“Why — I think that’s all right.”
“You mean I get the job?”
“Yeah — sure.”
“What a relief. I hate to ask for jobs.”
“How about another drink?”
“No, thanks. Well — just a little one.”
I fixed her another drink, and we talked about her husband a little more, and I told her how his work had attracted the attention of the home office, and it seemed to please her. But then all of a sudden I popped out: “Who are you, anyway?”
“Why — I thought I told you.”
“Yeah, but I want to know more.”
“Oh, I’m nobody at all, I’m sorry to say. Let’s see, who am I? Born, Princeton, New Jersey, and not named for a while on account of an argument among relatives. Then when they thought my hair was going to be red they named me Sheila, because it had an Irish sound to it. Then — at the age of ten, taken to California. My father got appointed to the history department of U.C.L.A.”
“And who is your father?”
“Henry W. Rollinson—”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him.”
“Ph.D. to you, just Hank to me. And — let’s see. High school, valedictorian of the class, tagged for college, wouldn’t go. Went out and got myself a job instead. In our little bank. Answered an ad in the paper. Said I was eighteen when I was only sixteen, worked there three years, got a one-dollar raise every year. Then — Charles got interested, and I married him.”
“And, would you kindly explain that?”
“It happens, doesn’t it?”
“Well, it’s none of my business. Skip it.”
“You mean we’re oddly assorted?”
“Slightly.”
“It seems so long ago. Did I mention I was nineteen? At that age you’re very susceptible to — what would you call it? Idealism?”
“...Are you still?”
I didn’t know I was going to say that, and my voice sounded shady. She drained her glass and got up.
“Then, let’s see. What else is there in my little biography? I have two children, one five, the other three, both girls, and both beautiful. And — I sing alto in the Eurydice Women’s Chorus... That’s all, and now I have to be going.”
“Where’d you put your car?”
“I don’t drive. I came by bus.”
“Then — may I drive you home?”
“I’d certainly be grateful if you would... By the way, Charles would kill me if he knew I’d come to you. About him, I mean. I’m supposed to be at a picture show. So tomorrow, don’t get absent-minded and give me away.”
“It’s between you and me,”
“It sounds underhanded, but he’s very peculiar.”
I live on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, and she lived on Mountain Drive, in Glendale. It’s about twenty minutes, but when we got in front of her house, instead of stopping, I drove on. “I just happened to think; it’s awful early for a picture show to let out.”
“So it is, isn’t it?”
We drove up in the hills. Up to then we had been plenty gabby, but for the rest of the drive we both felt self-conscious and didn’t have much to say. When I swung down through Glendale again the Alexander Theatre was just letting out. I set her down on the corner, a little way from her house. She shook hands. “Thanks ever so much.”
“Just sell him the idea, and the job’s all set.”
“...I feel terribly guilty, but—”
“Yes?”
“I’ve had a grand time.”
II
She sold me the idea, but she couldn’t sell Brent, not that easy, that is. He squawked, and refused to go to the hospital, or do anything about his ailment at all, except take pills for it. She called me up three or four times about it, and those calls seemed to get longer every night. But one day, when he toppled over at the window, and I had to send him home in a private ambulance, there didn’t seem to be much more he could say. They hauled him off to the hospital, and she came in next day to take his place, and things went along just about the way she said they would, with her doing the work fine and the depositors plunking down their money just like they had before.
The first night he was in the hospital I went down there with a basket of fruit, more as an official gift from the bank than on my own account, and she was there, and of course after we left him I offered to take her home. So I took her. It turned out she had arranged that the maid should spend her nights at the house, on account of the children, while he was in the hospital, so we took a ride. Next night I took her down, and waited for her outside, and we took another ride. After they got through taking X-rays they operated, and it went off all right, and by that time she and I had got the habit. I found a newsreel right near the hospital, and while she was with him, I’d go in and look at the sports, and then we’d go for a little ride.
I didn’t make any passes, she didn’t tell me I was different from other guys she’d known, there was nothing like that. We talked about her kids, and the books we’d read, and sometimes she’d remember about my old football days, and some of the things she’d seen me do out there. But mostly we’d just ride along and say nothing, and I couldn’t help feeling glad when she’d say the doctors wanted Brent to stay there until he was all healed up. He could have stayed there till Christmas, and I wouldn’t have been sore.
The Anita Avenue branch, I think I told you, is the smallest one we’ve got, just a little bank building on a corner, with an alley running alongside and a drugstore across the street. It employs six people, the cashier, the head teller, two other tellers, a girl bookkeeper, and a guard. George Mason had been cashier, but they transferred him and sent me out there, so I was acting cashier. Sheila was taking Brent’s place as head teller. Snelling and Helm were the other two tellers, Miss Church was the bookkeeper, and Adler the guard. Miss Church went in for a lot of apple-polishing with me, or anyway what I took to be apple-polishing. They had to stagger their lunch hours, and she was always insisting that I go out for a full hour at lunch, that she could relieve at any of the windows, that there was no need to hurry back, and more of the same. But I wanted to pull my oar with the rest, so I took a half hour like the rest of them took, and relieved at whatever window needed me, and for a couple of hours I wasn’t at my desk at all.
One day Sheila was out, and the others got back a little early, so I went out. They all ate in a little cafe down the street, so I ate there too, and when I got there she was alone at a table. I would have sat down with her, but she didn’t look up, and I took a seat a couple of tables away. She was looking out the window, smoking, and pretty soon she doused her cigarette and came over where I was. “You’re a little standoffish today, Mrs. Brent.”
“I’ve been doing a little quiet listening.”
“Oh — the two guys in the corner?”
“Do you know who the fat one is?”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s Bunny Kaiser, the leading furniture man of Glendale. ‘She Buys ’Er Stuff from Kaiser.’”
“Isn’t he putting up a building or something? Seems to me we had a deal on, to handle his bonds.”
“He wouldn’t sell bonds. It’s his building, with his own name chiseled over the door, and he wanted to swing the whole thing himself. But he can’t quite make it. The building is up to the first floor now, and he has to make a payment to the contractor. He needs a hundred thousand bucks. Suppose a bright girl got that business for you, would she get a raise?”
“And how would she get that business?”
“Sex appeal! Do you think I haven’t got it?”
“I didn’t say you haven’t got it.”
“You’d better not.”
“Then that’s settled.”
“And—?”
“When’s this payment on the first floor due?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Ouch! That doesn’t give us much time to work.”
“You let me work it, and I’ll put it over.”
“All right, you land that loan, it’s a two-dollar raise.”
“Two-fifty.”
“O.K. — two-fifty.”
“I’ll be late. At the bank, I mean.”
“I’ll take your window.”
So I went back and took her window. About two o’clock a truck driver came in, cashed a pay check with Helm, then came over to me to make a $10 deposit on savings. I took his book, entered the amount, set the $10 so she could put it with her cash when she came in. You understand: They all have cash boxes, and lock them when they go out, and that cash is checked once a month. But when I took out the card in our own file, the total it showed was $150 less than the amount showing in the passbook.
In a bank, you never let the depositor notice anything. You’ve got that smile on your face, and everything’s jake, and that’s fair enough, from his end of it, because the bank is responsible, and what his book shows is what he’s got, so he can’t lose no matter how you play it. Just the same, under that pasted grin, my lips felt a little cold. I picked up his book again, like there was something else I had to do to it, and blobbed a big smear of ink over it. “Well, that’s nice, isn’t it.”
“You sure decorated it.”
“I tell you what, I’m a little busy just now — will you leave that with me? Next time you come in, I’ll have a new one ready for you.”
“Anything you say, Cap.”
“This one’s kind of shopworn, anyway.”
“Yeah, getting greasy.”
By that time I had a receipt ready for the book, and copied the amount down in his presence, and passed it out to him. He went and I set the book aside. It had taken a little time, and three more depositors were in line behind him. The first two books corresponded with the cards, but the last one showed a $200 difference, more on his book than we had on our card. I hated to do what he had seen me do with the other guy, but I had to have that book. I started to enter the deposit, and once more a big blob of ink went on that page.
“Say, what you need is a new pen.”
“What they need is a new teller. To tell you the truth, I’m a little green on this job, just filling in till Mrs. Brent gets back, and I’m hurrying it. If you’ll just leave me this book, now—”
“Sure, that’s all right.”
I wrote the receipt, and signed it, and he went, and I put that book aside. By that time I had a little breathing spell, with nobody at the window, and I checked those books against the cards. Both accounts, on our records, showed withdrawals, running from $25 to $50, that didn’t show on the passbooks. Well, brother, it had to show on the passbooks. If a depositor wants to withdraw, he can’t do it without his book, because that book’s his contract, and we’re bound by it, and he can’t draw any dough unless we write it right down there, what he took out. I began to feel a little sick at my stomach. I began to think of the shifty way Brent had talked when he explained about working the departments up on a personal basis. I began to think about how he refused to go to the hospital, when any sane man would have been begging for the chance. I began to think of that night call Sheila made on me, and all that talk about Brent’s taking things so seriously, and that application she made, to take things over while he was gone.
All that went through my head, but I was still thumbing the cards. My head must have been swimming a little when I first checked them over, but the second time I ran my eye over those two cards I noticed little light pencil checks beside each one of those withdrawals. It flashed through my mind that maybe that was his code. He had to have a code, if he was trying to get away with anything. If a depositor didn’t have his book, and asked for his balance, he had to be able to tell him. I flipped all the cards over. There were light pencil checks on at least half of them, every one against a withdrawal, none of them against a deposit. I wanted to run those checked amounts off on the adding machine, but I didn’t. I was afraid Miss Church would start her apple-polishing again, and offer to do it for me. I flipped the cards over one at a time, slow, and added the amounts in my head. If I was accurate I didn’t know. I’ve got an adding machine mind, and I can do some of those vaudeville stunts without much trouble, but I was too excited to be sure. That didn’t matter, that day. I wouldn’t be far off. And those little pencil checks, by the time I had turned every card, added up to a little more than $8,500.
Just before closing time, around three o’clock, Sheila came in with the fat guy, Bunny Kaiser. I found out why sex appeal had worked, where all our contact men, trying to make a deal for bonds a few months before, had flopped. It was the first time he had ever borrowed a dollar in his life, and he not only hated it, he was so ashamed of it he couldn’t even look at me. Her way of making him feel better was not to argue about it at all, but to pat him on the hand, and it was pathetic the way he ate it up. After a while she gave me the sign to beat it, so I went back and got the vault closed, and chased the rest of them out of there as fast as I could. Then we fixed the thing up, I called the main office for O.K.’s, and around four-thirty he left. She stuck out her hand, pretty excited, and I took it. She began trucking around the floor, snapping her fingers and singing some tune while she danced. All of a sudden she stopped, and made motions like she was brushing herself off.
“Well — is there something on me?”
“...No. Why?”
“You’ve been looking at me — for an hour!”
“I was — looking at the dress.”
“Is there anything the matter with it?”
“It’s different from what girls generally wear around a bank. It — doesn’t look like an office dress.”
“I made it myself.”
“Then that accounts for it.”
III
Brother, if you want to find out how much you think of a woman, just get the idea she’s been playing you for a sucker. I was trembling when I got home, and still trembling when I went up to my room and lay down. I had a mess on my hands, and I knew I had to do something about it. But all I could think of was the way she had taken me for a ride, or I thought she had anyway, and how I had fallen for it, and what a sap I was. My face would feel hot when I thought of those automobile rides, and how I had been too gentlemanly to start anything. Then I would think how she must be laughing at me, and dig my face into the pillow. After a while I got to thinking about tonight. I had a date to take her to the hospital, like I had for the past week, and wondered what I was going to do about that. What I wanted to do was give her a stand-up and never set eyes on her again, but I couldn’t. After what she had said at the bank, about me looking at her, she might tumble I was wise if I didn’t show up. I wasn’t ready for that yet. Whatever I had to do, I wanted my hands free till I had time to think.
So I was waiting, down the street from her house, where we’d been meeting on account of what the neighbors might think if I kept coming to the door, and in a few minutes here she came, and I gave the little tap on the horn and she got in. She didn’t say anything about me looking at her, or what had been said. She kept talking about Kaiser, and how we had put over a fine deal, and how there was plenty more business of the same kind that could be had if I’d only let her go out after it. I went along with it, and for the first time since I’d known her, she got just the least little bit flirty. Nothing that meant much, just some stuff about what a team we could make if we really put our minds to it. But it brought me back to what my face had been red about in the afternoon, and when she went in the hospital I was trembling again.
I didn’t go to the newsreel that night. I sat in the car for the whole hour she was in there, paying her visit to him, and the longer I sat the sorer I got. I hated that woman when she came out of the hospital, and then, while she was climbing in beside me, an idea hit me between the eyes. If that was her game, how far would she go with me? I watched her light a cigarette, and then felt my mouth go dry and hot. I’d soon find out. Instead of heading for the hills, or the ocean, or any of the places we’d been driving, I headed home.
We went in, and I lit the fire without turning on the living-room light. I mumbled something about a drink, and went out in the kitchen. What I really wanted was to see if Sam was in. He wasn’t, and that meant he wouldn’t be in till one or two o’clock, so that was all right. I fixed the highball tray, and went in the living room with it. She had taken off her hat, and was sitting in front of the fire, or to one side of it. There are two sofas in my living room, both of them half facing the fire, and she was on one of them swinging her foot at the flames. I made two highballs, put them on the low table between the sofas, and sat down beside her. She looked up, took her drink, and began to sip it. I made a crack about how black her eyes looked in the firelight, she said they were blue, but it sounded like she wouldn’t mind hearing more. I put my arm around her.
Well, a whole book could be written about how a woman blocks passes when she doesn’t mean to play. If she slaps your face, she’s just a fool, and you might as well go home. If she hands you a lot of stuff that makes you feel like a fool, she doesn’t know her stuff yet, and you better leave her alone. But if she plays it so you’re stopped, and yet nothing much has happened, and you don’t feel like a fool, she knows her stuff, and she’s all right, and you can stick around and take it as it comes, and you won’t wake up next morning wishing that you hadn’t. That was what she did. She didn’t pull away, she didn’t act surprised, she didn’t get off any bum gags. But she didn’t come to me either, and in a minute or two she leaned forward to pick up her glass, and when she leaned back she wasn’t inside of my arm.
I was too sick in my mind though, and too sure I had her sized up right for a trollop, to pay any attention to that, or even figure out what it meant. It went through my mind, just once, that whatever I had to do, down at the bank, I was putting myself in an awful spot, and playing right into her hands, to start something I couldn’t stop. But that only made my mouth feel drier and hotter.
I put my arm around her again, and pulled her to me. She didn’t do anything about it at all, one way or the other. I put my cheek against hers, and began to nose around to her mouth. She didn’t do anything about that either, but her mouth seemed kind of hard to reach. I put my hand on her cheek, and then deliberately let it slide down to her neck, and unbuttoned the top button of her dress. She took my hand away, buttoned her dress, and reached for her drink again, so when she sat back I didn’t have her.
That sip took a long time, and I just sat there, looking at her. When she put the glass down I had my arm around her before she could even lean back. With my other hand I made a swipe, and brushed her dress up clear to where her garters met her girdle. What she did then I don’t know, because something happened that I didn’t expect. Those legs were so beautiful, and so soft, and warm, that something caught me in the throat, and for about one second I had no idea what was going on. Next thing I knew she was standing in front of the fireplace, looking down at me with a drawn face. “Will you kindly tell me what’s got into you tonight?”
“Why — nothing particular.”
“Please, I want to know.”
“Why, I find you exciting, that’s all.”
“Is it something I’ve done?”
“I didn’t notice you doing anything.”
“Something’s come over you, and I don’t know what. Ever since I came in the bank today, with Bunny Kaiser, you’ve been looking at me in a way that’s cold, and hard, and ugly. What is it? Is it what I said at lunch, about my having sex appeal?”
“Well, you’ve got it. We agreed on that.”
“Do you know what I think?”
“No, but I’d like to.”
“I think that remark of mine, or something, has suddenly wakened you up to the fact that I’m a married woman, that I’ve been seeing quite a little of you, and that you think it’s now up to you to be loyal to the ancient masculine tradition, and try to make me.”
“Anyway, I’m trying.”
She reached for her drink, changed her mind, lit a cigarette instead. She stood there for a minute, looking into the fire, inhaling the smoke. Then:
“...I don’t say it couldn’t be done. After all, my home life hasn’t been such a waltz dream for the last year or so. It’s not so pleasant to sit by your husband while he’s coming out of ether, and then have him begin mumbling another woman’s name, instead of your own. I guess that’s why I’ve taken rides with you every night. They’ve been a little breath of something pleasant. Something more than that. Something romantic, and if I pretended they haven’t meant a lot to me, I wouldn’t be telling the truth. They’ve been — little moments under the moon. And then today, when I landed Kaiser, and was bringing him in, I was all excited about it, not so much for the business it meant to the bank, which I don’t give a damn about, or the two-dollar-and-a-half raise, which I don’t give a damn about either, but because it was something you and I had done together, something we’d talk about tonight, and it would be — another moment under the moon, a very bright moon. And then, before I’d been in the bank more than a minute or two, I saw that look in your eye. And tonight, you’ve been — perfectly horrible. It could have been done, I think. I’m afraid I’m only too human. But not this way. And not any more. Could I borrow your telephone?”
I thought maybe she really wanted the bath, so I took her to the extension in my bedroom. I sat down by the fire quite a while, and waited. It was all swimming around in my head, and it hadn’t come out at all like I expected. Down somewhere inside of me, it began to gnaw at me that I had to tell her, I had to come out with the whole thing, when all of a sudden the bell rang. When I opened the door a taxi driver was standing there.
“You called for a cab?”
“No, nobody called.”
He fished out a piece of paper and peered at it, when she came downstairs. “I guess that’s my cab.”
“Oh, you ordered it?”
“Yes. Thanks ever so much. It’s been so pleasant.”
She was as cold as a dead man’s foot, and she was down the walk and gone before I could think of anything to say. I watched her get in the cab, watched it drive off, then closed the door and went back in the living room. When I sat down on the sofa I could still smell her perfume, and her glass was only half drunk. That catch came in my throat again, and I began to curse at myself out loud, even while I was pouring myself a drink.
I had started to find out what she was up to, but all I had found out was that I was nuts about her. I went over and over it till I was dizzy, and nothing she had done, and nothing she had said, proved anything. She might be on the up-and-up, and she might be playing me for a still worse sucker than I had thought she was, a sucker that was going to play her game for her, and not even get anything for it. In the bank, she treated me just like she treated the others, pleasant, polite, and pretty. I didn’t take her to the hospital any more, and that was how we went along for three or four days.
Then came the day for the monthly check on cash, and I tried to kid myself that was what I had been waiting for, before I did anything about the shortage. So I went around with Helm, and checked them all. They opened their boxes, and Helm counted them up, and I counted his count. She stood there while I was counting hers, with a dead pan that could mean anything, and of course it checked to the cent. Down in my heart I knew it would. Those false entries had all been made to balance the cash, and as they went back for a couple of years, there wasn’t a chance that it would show anything in just one month.
That afternoon when I went home I had it out with myself, and woke up that I wasn’t going to do anything about that shortage, that I couldn’t do anything about it, until at least I had spoken to her, anyway acted like a white man.
So that night I drove over to Glendale, and parked right on Mountain Drive where I had always parked. I went early, in case she started sooner when she went by bus, and I waited a long time. I waited so long I almost gave up, but then along about half past seven, here she came out of the house, and walking fast. I waited till she was about a hundred feet away, and then I gave that same little tap on the horn I had given before. She started to run, and I had this sick feeling that she was going by without even speaking, so I didn’t look. I wouldn’t give her that much satisfaction. But before I knew it the door opened and slammed, and there she was on the seat beside me, and she was squeezing my hand, and half whispering:
“I’m so glad you came. So glad.”
We didn’t say much going in. I went to the newsreel, but what came out on the screen I couldn’t tell you. I was going over and over in my mind what I was going to say to her, or at least trying to. But every time when I’d get talking about it, I’d find myself starting off about her home life, and trying to find out if Brent really had taken up with another woman, and more of the same that only meant one thing. It meant I wanted her for myself. And it meant I was trying to make myself believe that she didn’t know anything about the shortage, that she had been on the up-and-up all the time, that she really liked me. I went back to the car, and got in, and pretty soon she came out of the hospital, and ran down the steps. Then she stopped, and stood there like she was thinking. Then she started for the car again, but she wasn’t running now. She was walking slow. When she got in she leaned back and closed her eyes.
“Dave?”
It was the first time she had ever called me by my first name. I felt my heart jump. “Yes, Sheila?”
“Could we have a fire tonight?”
“I’d love it.”
“I’ve... I’ve got to talk to you.”
So I drove to my house. Sam let us in, but I chased him out. We went in the living room, and once more I didn’t turn on the light. She helped me light the fire, and I started into the kitchen to fix something to drink, but she stopped me.
“I don’t want anything to drink. Unless you do.”
“No. I don’t drink much.”
“Let’s sit down.”
She sat on the sofa, where she had been before, and I sat beside her. I didn’t try any passes. She looked in the fire a long time, and then she took my arm and pulled it around her. “Am I terrible?”
“No.”
“I want it there.”
I started to kiss her, but she raised her hand, covered my lips with her fingers, then pushed my face away. She dropped her head on my shoulder, closed her eyes, and didn’t speak for a long time. Then: “Dave, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“What is it?”
“It’s pretty tragic, and it involves the bank, and if you don’t want to hear it from me, this way, just say so and I’ll go home.”
“...All right. Shoot.”
“Charles is short in his accounts.”
“How much?”
“A little over nine thousand dollars. Nine one one three point two six, if you want the exact amount. I’ve been suspecting it. I noticed one or two things. He kept saying I must have made mistakes in my bookkeeping, but tonight I made him admit it.”
“Well. That’s not so good.”
“How bad is it?”
“It’s pretty bad.”
“Dave, tell me the truth about it. I’ve got to know. What will they do to him? Will they put him in prison?”
“I’m afraid they will.”
“What, actually, does happen?”
“A good bit of what happens is up to the bonding company. If they get tough, he needn’t expect much mercy. It’s dead open-and-shut. They put him under arrest, have him indicted, and the rest of it’s a question of how hard they bear down, and how it hits the court. Sometimes, of course, there are extenuating circumstances—”
“There aren’t any. He didn’t spend that money on me, or on the children, or on his home. I’ve kept all expenses within his salary, and I’ve even managed to save a little for him, every week.”
“Yeah, I noticed your account.”
“He spent it on another woman.”
“I see.”
“Does it make any difference if restitution is made?”
“All the difference in the world.”
“If so, would he get off completely free?”
“There again, it all depends on the bonding company, and the deal that could be made with them. They might figure they’d make any kind of a deal, to get the money back, but as a rule they’re not lenient. They can’t be. The way they look at it, every guy that gets away with it means ten guys next year that’ll try to get away with it.”
“Suppose they never knew it?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Suppose I could find a way to put the money back, I mean suppose I could get the money, and then found a way to make the records conform, so nobody ever knew there was anything wrong.”
“It couldn’t be done.”
“Oh yes, it could.”
“The passbooks would give it away. Sooner or later.”
“Not the way I’d do it.”
“That — I would have to think about.”
“You know what this means to me, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“It’s not on account of me. Or Charles. I try not to wish ill to anybody, but if he had to pay, it might be what he deserves. It’s on account of my two children. Dave, I can’t have them spend the rest of their lives knowing their father was a convict, that he’d been in prison. Do you, can you, understand what that means, Dave?”
For the first time since she had begun to talk, I looked at her then. She was still in my arms, but she was turned to me in a strained, tense kind of way, and her eyes looked haunted. I patted her head, and tried to think. But I knew there was one thing I had to do. I had to clear up my end of it. She had come clean with me, and for a while, anyway, I believed in her. I had to come clean with her.
“Sheila?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got to tell you something.”
“...What is it, Dave?”
“I’ve known this all along. For at least a week.”
“Is that why you were looking at me that day?”
“Yes. It’s why I acted that way, that night. I thought you knew it. I thought you had known it, even when you came to me that night, to ask for the job. I thought you were playing me for a sucker, and I wanted to find out how far you’d go, to get me where you wanted me. Well — that clears that up.”
She was sitting up now, looking at me hard.
“Dave, I didn’t know it.”
“I know you didn’t — now, I know it.”
“I knew about her — this woman he’s been — going around with. I wondered sometimes where he got the money. But this, I had no idea. Until two or three days ago. Until I began to notice discrepancies in the passbooks.”
“Yeah, that’s what I noticed.”
“And that’s why you turned seducer?”
“Yeah. It’s not very natural to me, I guess. I didn’t fool you any. What I’m trying to say is I don’t feel that way about you. I want you every way there is to want somebody, but — I mean it. Do you know what I’m getting at, if anything?”
She nodded, and all of a sudden we were in each other’s arms, and I was kissing her, and she was kissing back, and her lips were warm and soft, and once more I had that feeling in my throat, that catch like I wanted to cry or something. We sat there a long time, not saying anything, just holding each other close. We were halfway to her house before we remembered about the shortage and what we were going to do about it. She begged me once more to give her a chance to save her children from the disgrace. I told her I’d have to think it over, but I knew in my heart I was going to do anything she asked me to.
IV
“Where are you going to get this money?”
“There’s only one place I can possibly get it.”
“Which is?”
“My father.”
“Has he got that much dough?”
“I don’t know... He owns his house. Out in Westwood. He could get something on that. He has a little money. I don’t know how much. But for the last few years his only daughter hasn’t been any expense. I guess he can get it.”
“How’s he going to feel about it?”
“He’s going to hate it. And if he lets me have it, it won’t be on account of Charles. He bears no goodwill to Charles, I can tell you that. And it won’t be on account of me. He was pretty bitter when I even considered marrying Charles, and when I actually went and did it — well, we won’t go into that. But for his grandchildren’s sake, he might. Oh, what a mess. What an awful thing.”
It was the next night, and we were sitting in the car, where I had parked on one of the terraces overlooking the ocean. I suppose it was around eight-thirty, as she hadn’t stayed at the hospital very long. She sat looking out at the surf, and then suddenly I said I might as well drive her over to her father’s. I did, and she didn’t have much to say. I parked near the house, and she went in, and she stayed a long time. It must have been eleven o’clock when she came out. She got in the car, and then she broke down and cried, and there wasn’t much I could do. When she got a little bit under control, I asked, “Well, what luck?”
“Oh, he’ll do it, but it was awful.”
“If he got sore, you can’t blame him much.”
“He didn’t get sore. He just sat there, and shook his head, and there was no question about whether he’d let me have the money or not. But — Dave, an old man, he’s been paying on that house for fifteen years, and last year he got it clear. If he wants to, he can spend his summers in Canada, he and Mamma both. And now — it’s all gone, he’ll have to start paying all over again, all because of this. And he never said a word.”
“What did your mother say?”
“I didn’t tell her. I suppose he will, but I couldn’t, I waited till she went to bed. That’s what kept me so long. Fifteen years, paying regularly every month, and now it’s to go, all because Charles fell for a simpleton that isn’t worth the powder and shot to blow her to hell.”
I didn’t sleep very well that night. I kept thinking of the old history professor, and his house, and Sheila, and Brent lying down there in the hospital with a tube in his belly. Up to then I hadn’t thought much about him. I didn’t like him, and he was washed up with Sheila, and I had just conveniently not thought of him at all. I thought of him now, though, and wondered who the simpleton was that he had fallen for, and whether he was as nuts about her as I was about Sheila. Then I got to wondering whether I thought enough of her to embezzle for her, and that brought me sitting up in bed, staring out the window at the night. I could say I wouldn’t, that I had never stolen from anybody, and never would, but here I was already mixed up in it some kind of way. It was a week since I uncovered that shortage, and I hadn’t said a word about it to the home office, and I was getting ready to help her cover up.
Something popped in me then, about Brent, I mean, and I quit kidding myself. I did some hard figuring in bed there, and I didn’t like it a bit, but I knew what I had to do. Next night, instead of heading for the ocean, I headed for my house again, and pretty soon we were back in front of the fire. I had mixed a drink this time, because at least I felt at peace with myself, and I held her in my arms quite a while before I got to it. Then: “Sheila?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve had it out with myself.”
“Dave, you’re not going to turn him in?”
“No, but I’ve decided that there’s only one person that can take that rap.”
“Who do you mean?”
“Me.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“All right, I drove you over to see your father last night, and he took it pretty hard. Fifteen years, paying on that house, and now it’s all got to go, and he don’t get anything out of it at all. Why should he pay? I got a house, too, and I do get something out of it.”
“What do you get out of it?”
“You.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean I got to cough up that nine thousand bucks.”
“You will not!”
“Look, let’s quit kidding ourselves. All right, Brent stole the dough, he spent it on a cutie, he treated you lousy. He’s father of two children that happen also to be your father’s grandchildren, and that means your father’s got to pay. Well, ain’t that great. Here’s the only thing that matters about this: Brent’s down and out. He’s in the shadow of the penitentiary, he’s in the hospital recovering from one of the worst operations there is, he’s in one hell of a spot. But me — I’m in love with his wife. While he’s down, I’m getting ready to take her away from him, the one thing he’s got left. O.K., that’s not so pretty, but that’s how I feel about it. But the least I can do is kick in with that dough. So, I’m doing it. So, quit bothering your old man. So, that’s all.”
“I can’t let you do it.”
“Why not?”
“If you paid that money, then I’d be bought.”
She got up and began to walk around the room. “You’ve practically said so yourself. You’re getting ready to take a man’s wife away from him, and you’re going to salve your conscience by replacing the money he stole. That’s all very well for him, since he doesn’t seem to want his wife anyway. But can’t you see where it puts me? What can I say to you now? Or what could I say, if I let you put up that money? I can’t pay you back. Not in ten years could I make enough to pay you nine thousand dollars. I’m just your — creature.”
I watched her as she moved around, touching the furniture with her hands, not looking at me, and then all of a sudden a hot, wild feeling went through me, and the blood began to pound in my head. I went over and jerked her around, so she was facing me. “Listen, there’s not many guys that feel for a woman nine thousand dollars’ worth. What’s the matter with that? Don’t you want to be bought?”
I took her in my arms, and shoved my lips against hers. “Is that so tough?”
She opened her mouth, so our teeth were clicking, and just breathed it: “It’s grand, just grand.”
She kissed me then, hard. “So it was just a lot of hooey you were handing me?”
“Just hooey, nothing but hooey. Oh, it’s so good to be bought. I feel like something in a veil, and a harem skirt — and I just love it.”
“Now — we’ll put that money back.”
“Yes, together.”
“We’ll start tomorrow.”
“Isn’t that funny. I’m completely in your power. I’m your slave, and I feel so safe, and know that nothing’s going to happen to me, ever.”
“That’s right. It’s a life sentence for you.”
“Dave, I’ve fallen in love.”
“Me, too.”
V
If you think it’s hard to steal money from a bank, you’re right. But it’s nothing like as hard as it is to put the money back. Maybe I haven’t made it quite clear yet what that bird was doing. In the first place, when there’s a shortage in a bank, it’s always in the savings, because no statements are rendered on them. The commercial depositor, the guy with a checking account, I mean, gets a statement every month. But no statements are rendered to savings depositors. They show up with their passbooks, and plunk their money down, and the deposit is entered in their books, and their books are their statements. They never see the bank’s cards, so naturally the thing can go on a long time before it’s found out, and when it’s found out, it’s most likely to be by accident, like this was, because Brent didn’t figure on his trip to the hospital.
Well, what Brent had done was fix up a cover for himself with all this stuff about putting it on a personal basis, so no savings depositor that came in the bank would ever deal with anybody but him. That ought to have made George Mason suspicious, but Brent was getting the business in, and you don’t quarrel with a guy that’s doing good. When he got that part the way he wanted it, with him the only one that ever touched the savings file, and the depositors dealing only with him, he went about it exactly the way they all go about it. He picked accounts where he knew he wouldn’t be likely to run into trouble, and he’d make out a false withdrawal slip, generally for somewhere around fifty bucks. He’d sign the depositor’s name to it, just forge it, but he didn’t have to be very good at that part, because nobody passed on those signatures but himself. Then he’d put fifty bucks in his pocket, and of course the false withdrawal slip would balance his cash. Our card had to balance too, of course, so he’d enter the withdrawal on that, but beside each false entry he’d make that little light pencil check that I had caught, and that would tell him what the right balance ought to be, in case the depositor made some inquiry.
Well, how were you going to get that money put back, so the daily cash would balance, so the cards would balance, and so the passbooks would balance, and at the same time leave it so nothing would show later, when the auditors came around? It had me stumped, and I don’t mind telling you for a while I began to get cold feet. What I wanted to do was report it, as was, let Sheila fork up the dough, without saying where she got it, and let Brent get fired and go look himself up a job. It didn’t look like they would do much to him, if the money was put back. But she wouldn’t hear of that. She was afraid they might send him up anyway, and then I would be putting up the money all for nothing, her children would have to grow up under the disgrace, and where we would be was nowhere. There wasn’t much I could say to that. I figured they would probably let him off, but I couldn’t be sure.
It was Sheila that figured out the way. We were riding along one night, just one or two nights after I told her I was going to put up the dough myself, when she began to talk. “The cards, the cash, and the passbooks, is that it?”
“That’s all.”
“The cards and the cash are easy.”
“Oh yeah?”
“That money goes back the same way it came out. Only instead of false withdrawals, I make out false deposits. The cash balances, the posting balances, and the card balances.”
“And the passbooks don’t balance. Listen. If there’s only one passbook — just one — that can tell on us after you’re out of there, and I’m out, we’re sunk. The only chance we’ve got is that the thing is never suspected at all — that no question is ever raised. And, what’s more, we don’t dare make a move till we see every one of the passbooks on those phoney accounts. We think we’ve got his code, how he ticked his false withdrawals, but we can’t be sure, and maybe he didn’t tick them all. Unless we can make a clean job of this, I don’t touch it. Him going to jail is one thing. All three of us going, and me losing my job and nine thousand bucks — oh no.”
“All right then, the passbooks.”
“That’s it — the passbooks.”
“Now when a passbook gets filled up, or there’s some mistake on it, what do we do?”
“Give him a new one, don’t we?”
“Containing how many entries?”
“One, I suppose. His total as of that date.”
“That’s right. And that one entry tells no tales. It checks with the card, and there’s not one figure to check against all those back entries — withdrawals and deposits and so on, running back for years. All right, then; so far, perfect. Now what do we do with his old book? Regularly, I mean.”
“Well — what do we do with it?”
“We put it under a punch, the punch that goes through every page and marks it void, and give it back to him.”
“And then he’s got it — any time an auditor calls for it. Gee, that’s a big help.”
“But if he doesn’t want it?”
“What are you getting at?”
“If he doesn’t want it, we destroy it. It’s no good to us, is it? And it’s not ours, it’s his. But he doesn’t want it.”
“Are you sure we destroy it?”
“I’ve torn up a thousand of them... And that’s just what we’re going to do now. Between now and the next check on my cash, we’re going to get all those books in. First we check totals, to know exactly where we’re at. Then the depositor gets a new book that tells no tales.”
“Why does he get a new book?”
“He didn’t notice it when he brought the old one in, but the stitching is awfully strained, and it’s almost falling apart. Or I’ve accidentally smeared lipstick on it. Or I just think it’s time he got one of our nice new books, for luck. So he gets a new book with one entry in it — just his total, that’s all. Then I say: ‘You don’t want this, do you?’ And the way I’ll say it, that old book seems positively contaminated. And then right in front of his eyes, as though it’s the way we do it every day, I’ll tear it up, and drop it in the wastebasket.”
“Suppose he does want it?”
“Then I’ll put it under the punch, and give it to him. But somehow that punch is going to make its neat little holes in the exact place where the footings are, and it’s going to be impossible for him, or an auditor, or anybody else, to read those figures. I’ll punch five or six times, you know, and his book will be like Swiss cheese, more holes than anything else.”
“And all the time you’re getting those holes in exactly the right place, he’s going to be on the other side of the window looking at you, wondering what all the hocus-pocus is about.”
“Oh no — it won’t take more than a second or two. You see, I’ve been practicing. I can do it in a jiffy... But he won’t want that book back. Trust me. I know how to do it.”
There was just a little note of pleading on that, as she said it. I had to think it over. I did think it over, for quite a while, and I began to have the feeling that on her end of it, if that was all, she could put it over all right. But then something else began to bother me. “How many of these doctored accounts are there?”
“Forty-seven.”
“And how are you going to get those passbooks in?”
“Well, interest is due on them. I thought I could send out little printed slips — signed ‘per Sheila Brent,’ in ink, so they’d be sure to come to me about it — asking them to bring in their books for interest credits. I never saw anybody that wouldn’t bring in his book if it meant a dollar and twenty-two cents. And a printed slip looks perfectly open and aboveboard, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, a printed slip is about the most harmless, open, and aboveboard thing there is. But this is what I’m thinking: You send out your printed slips, and within a couple of days all those books come in, and you can’t hold them forever. You’ve got to hand them back — or the new ones they’re going to get — or somebody’s going to get suspicious. That means the money’s got to be put back all at once. That’s going to make one awful bulge in your cash. Everybody in the bank is going to wonder at the reason for it, because it’s going to show in the posting.”
“I’ve thought of that. I don’t have to send out all those slips at once. I can send out four or five a day. And then, even if they do come in bunches — the passbooks I mean — I can issue the new books, right away as the old ones are presented, but make the adjustments on the cards and in my cash little by little — three or four hundred dollars a day. That’s not much.”
“No, but while that’s going on, we’re completely defenseless. We’ve got our chins hanging out and no way in the world of putting up a guard. I mean, while you’re holding out those adjustment entries, so you can edge them in gradually, your cash doesn’t balance the books. If then something happened — so I had to call for a cash audit on the spot, or if I got called away to the home office for a couple of days, or something happened to you, so you couldn’t come to work — then watch that ship go out of water. You may get away with it. But it’ll have to be done, everything squared up, before the next check on your cash. That’s twenty-one days from now. And at that, a three- or four-hundred-dollar bulge in your cash every day is going to look mighty funny. In the bank, I mean.”
“I could gag it off. I could say I’m keeping after them, to keep their deposits up, the way Charles always did. I don’t think there’s any danger. The cash will be there.”
So that was how we did it. She had the slips printed, and began mailing them out, three or four at a time. For the first few days’ replacement, the cash replacement I mean, I had enough in my own checking account. For the rest, I had to go out and plaster my house. For that I went to the Federal people. It took about a week, and I had to start an outside account, so nobody in the bank would know what I was up to. I took eight thousand bucks, and if you don’t think that hurt, you never plastered your house. Of course, it would be our luck that when the first of those books came in, she was out to lunch, and I was on the window myself. I took in the book, and receipted for it, but Church was only three or four feet away, running a column on one of the adding machines. She heard what I said to the depositor, and was at my elbow before I even knew how she got there.
“I can do that for you, Mr. Bennett. I’ll only be a minute, and there’ll be no need for him to leave his book.”
“Well — I’d rather Mrs. Brent handled it.”
“Oh, very well, then.”
She switched away then, in a huff, and I could feel the sweat in the palms of my hands. That night I warned Sheila. “That Church can bust it up.”
“How?”
“Her damned apple-polishing. She horned in today, wanted to balance that book for me. I had to chase her.”
“Leave her to me.”
“For God’s sake, don’t let her suspect anything.”
“I won’t, don’t worry.”
From then on, we made a kind of routine out of it. She’d get in three or four books, ask the depositors to leave them with her till next day. She’d make out new cards, and tell me the exact amount she needed, that night. I’d hand her that much in cash. Next day, she’d slip it into her cash box, make out new cards for the depositors, slip them in the file, then make out new passbooks and have them ready when the depositors called. Every day we’d be that much nearer home, both praying that nothing would tip it before we got the whole replacement made. Most days I’d say we plugged about $400 into the cash, one or two days a little more.
One night, maybe a week after we started putting the money back, they had the big dinner dance for the whole organization. I guess about a thousand people were there, in the main ballroom of one of the Los Angeles hotels, and it was a pretty nice get-together. They don’t make a pep meeting out of it. The Old Man doesn’t like that kind of thing. He just has a kind of a family gathering, makes them a little speech, and then the dancing starts, and he stands around watching them enjoy themselves. I guess you’ve heard of A. R. Ferguson. He’s founder of the bank, and the minute you look at him you know he’s a big shot. He’s not tall, but he’s straight and stocky, with a little white moustache that makes him look like some kind of a military man.
Well, we all had to go, of course. I sat at the table with the others from the branch, Miss Church, and Helm, and Snelling, and Snelling’s wife, and Sheila. I made it a point not to sit with Sheila. I was afraid to. So after the banquet, when the dancing started, I went over to shake hands with the Old Man. He always treated me fine, just like he treats everybody. He’s got that natural courtesy that no little guy ever quite seems capable of. He asked how I was, and then: “How much longer do you think you’ll be out there in Glendale? Are you nearly done?”
An icy feeling began to go over me. If he yanked me now, and returned me to the home office, there went all chance of covering that shortage, and God only knew what they would find out, if it was half covered and half not.
“Why, I tell you, Mr. Ferguson, if you can possibly arrange it, I’d like to stay out there till after the first of the month.”
“...So long?”
“Well, I’ve found some things out there that are well worth making a thorough study of, it seems to me. Fact of the matter, I had thought of writing an article about them in addition to my report. I thought I’d send it to the American Banker, and if I could have a little more time—”
“In that case, take all the time you want.”
“I thought it wouldn’t hurt us any.”
“I only wish more of our officials would write.”
“Gives us a little prestige.”
“—and makes them think!”
My mouth did it all. I was standing behind it, not knowing what was coming out from one minute to the next. I hadn’t thought of any article, up to that very second, and I give you one guess how I felt. I felt like a heel, and all the worse on account of the fine way he treated me. We stood there a few minutes, he telling me how he was leaving for Honolulu the next day, but he’d be back within the month, and looked forward to reading what I had to say as soon as he came back. Then he motioned in the direction of the dance floor. “Who’s the girl in blue?”
“Mrs. Brent.”
“Oh yes, I want to speak to her.”
We did some broken-floor dodging, and got over to where Sheila was dancing with Helm. They stopped, and I introduced the Old Man, and he asked how Brent was coming along after the operation, and then cut in on Helm, and danced Sheila off. I wasn’t in much of a humor when I met her outside later and took her home. “What’s the matter, Dave?”
“Couldn’t quite look the Old Man in the eye, that’s all.”
“Have you got cold feet?”
“Just feeling the strain.”
“If you have got cold feet, and want to quit, there’s nothing I can say. Nothing at all.”
“All I got to say is I’ll be glad when we’re clear of that heel, and can kick him out of the bank and out of our lives.”
“In two weeks it’ll be done.”
“How is he?”
“He’s leaving the hospital Saturday.”
“That’s nice.”
“He’s not coming home yet. The doctor insists that he go up to Arrowhead to get his strength back. He’ll be there three or four weeks. He has friends there.”
“What have you told him, by the way?”
“Nothing.”
“Just nothing?”
“Not one word.”
“He had an ulcer, is that what you said?”
“Yes.”
“I was reading in a medical magazine the other day what causes it. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Worry.”
“So?”
“It might help the recuperating process if he knew it was O.K. about the shortage. Lying in a hospital, with a thing like that staring you in the face, that may not be so good. For his health anyway.”
“What am I to tell him?”
“Why, I don’t know. That you’ve fixed it up.”
“If I tell him I’ve fixed it up, so nobody is going to know it, he knows I’ve got some kind of assistance in the bank. That’ll terrify him, and I don’t know what he’s likely to do about it. He may speak to somebody, and the whole thing will come out. And who am I going to say has let me have the money, so I can put it back? You?”
“Do you have to say?”
“No. I don’t have to say anything at all, and I’m not going to. The less you’re involved in this the better. If he worries, he ought to be used to it by now. It won’t hurt that young man to do quite a little suffering over what he’s done to me — and to you.”
“It’s up to you.”
“He knows something’s cooking, all right, but he doesn’t know what. I look forward to seeing his face when I tell him I’m off to — where did you say?”
“...I said Reno.”
“Do you still say Reno?”
“I don’t generally change my mind, once it’s made up.”
“You can, if you want to.”
“Shut up.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Neither do I.”
VI
We kept putting the money back, and I kept getting jitterier every day. I kept worrying that something would happen, that maybe the Old Man hadn’t left a memo about me before he went away, and that I’d get a call to report to the home office; that maybe Sheila would get sick and somebody else would have to do her work; that some depositor might think it was funny, the slip he had got to bring his book in, and begin asking about it somewhere.
One day she asked me to drive her home from the bank. By that time I was so nervous I never went anywhere with her in the daytime, and even at night I never met her anywhere that somebody might see us. But she said one of the children was sick, and she wanted a ride in case she had to get stuff from the drugstore that the doctor had ordered, and that anyway nobody was there but the maid and she didn’t matter. By that time Brent had gone to the lake, to get his strength back, and she had the house to herself.
So I went. It was the first time I’d ever been in her home, and it was fixed up nice, and smelled like her, and the kids were the sweetest little pair you ever saw. The oldest was named Anna, and the younger was named Charlotte. She was the one that was sick. She was in bed with a cold, and took it like a little soldier. Another time, it would have tickled me to death to sit and watch her boss Sheila around, and watch Sheila wait on her, and take the bossing just like that was how it ought to be. But now I couldn’t even keep still that long. When I found out I wasn’t needed I ducked, and went home and filled up some more paper with the phoney article I had to have ready for the Old Man when he got back. It was called, “Building a Strong Savings Department.”
We got to the last day before the monthly check on cash. Six hundred dollars had to go into her box that day, over and above the regular day’s receipts. It was a lot, but it was a Wednesday, the day the factories all around us paid off, and deposits were sure to be heavy, so it looked like we could get away with it. We had all the passbooks in. It had taken some strong-arm work to get the last three we needed, and what she had done was go to those people the night before, like Brent had always done, and ask where they’d been, and why they hadn’t put anything on savings. By sitting around a few minutes she managed to get their books, and then I drove her over to my place and we checked it all up. Then I gave her the cash she needed, and it looked like she was set.
But I kept wanting to know how she stood, whether it had all gone through like we hoped. I couldn’t catch her eye and I couldn’t get a word with her. They were lined up at her window four and five deep all day long, and she didn’t go out to lunch. She had sandwiches and milk sent in. On Wednesday they send out two extra tellers from the home office, to help handle the extra business, and every time one of them would go to her for help on something, and she’d have to leave her window for a minute, I’d feel the sweat on the palms of my hands, and lose track of what I was doing. I’m telling you it was a long day.
Along about two-thirty, though, it slacked off, and by five minutes to three there was nobody in there, and at three sharp Adler, the guard, locked the door. We went on finishing up. The home office tellers got through first, because all they had to do was balance one day’s deposits, and around three-thirty they turned in their sheets, asked me to give them a count, and left. I sat at my desk, staring at papers, doing anything to keep from marching around and tip it that I had something on my mind.
Around quarter to four there came a tap on the glass, and I didn’t look up. There’s always that late depositor trying to get in, and if he catches your eye you’re sunk. I went right on staring at my papers, but I heard Adler open and then who should be there but Brent, with a grin on his face, a satchel in one hand, and a heavy coat of sunburn all over him. There was a chorus of “Hey’s,” and they all went out to shake hands, all except Sheila, and ask him how he was, and when he was coming back to work. He said he’d got home last night, and would be back any time now. There didn’t seem to be much I could do but shake hands too, so I gritted my teeth and did it, but I didn’t ask him when he was coming back to work.
Then he said he’d come in for some of his stuff, and on his way back to the lockers he spoke to Sheila, and she spoke, without looking up. Then the rest of them went back to work. “Gee, he sure looks good, don’t he?”
“Different from when he left.”
“He must have put on twenty pounds.”
“They fixed him up all right.”
Pretty soon he came out again, closing his grip, and there was some more talk, and he went. They all counted their cash, turned in their sheets, and put their cash boxes into the vault. Helm wheeled the trucks in, with the records on them, and then he went. Snelling went back to set the time lock.
That was when Church started some more of her apple-polishing. She was about as unappetizing a girl as I ever saw. She was thick, and dumpy, with a delivery like she was making a speech all the time. She sounded like a dietician demonstrating a range in a department store basement, and she started in on a wonderful new adding machine that had just come on the market, and didn’t I think we ought to have one. I said it sounded good, but I wanted to think it over. So then she said it all over again, and just about when she got going good she gave a little squeal and began pointing at the floor.
Down there was about the evilest-looking thing you ever saw in your life. It was one of these ground spiders you see out here in California, about the size of a tarantula and just about as dangerous. It was about three inches long, I would say, and was walking toward me with a clumsy gait but getting there all the time. I raised my foot to step on it, and she gave another squeal and said if I squashed it she’d die. By that time they were all standing around — Snelling, Sheila, and Adler. Snelling said get a piece of paper and throw it out the door, and Sheila said yes, for heaven’s sake do something about it quick. Adler took a piece of paper off my desk, and rolled it into a funnel, and then took a pen and pushed the thing into the paper, Then he folded the funnel shut and we all went out and watched him dump the spider into the gutter. Then a cop came along and borrowed the funnel and caught it again and said he was going to take it home to his wife, so they could take pictures of it with their home movie camera.
We went back in the bank, and Snelling and I closed the vault, and he went. Church went. Adler went back for his last tour around before closing. That left me alone with Sheila. I stepped back to where she was by the lockers, looking in the mirror while she put on her hat. “Well?”
“It’s all done.”
“You put back the cash.”
“To the last cent.”
“The cards are all in?”
“It all checks to the last decimal point.”
That was what I’d been praying for, for the last month, and yet as soon as I had it, it took me about one-fifth of a second to get sore, about Brent.
“Is he driving you home?”
“If so, he didn’t mention it.”
“Suppose you wait in my car. There’s a couple of things I want to talk to you about. It’s just across the street.”
She went, and Adler changed into his street clothes, and he and I locked up, and I bounced over to the car. I didn’t head for her house, I headed for mine, but I didn’t wait till we got there before I opened up.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was back?”
“Were you interested?”
“Yeah, plenty.”
“Well, since you ask me, I didn’t know he was back — when I left you last night. He was there waiting for me when I got in. Today, I haven’t had one minute to talk to you, or anybody.”
“I thought he was due to spend a month up there.”
“So did I.”
“Then what’s he doing back?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Trying to find out what’s going to happen to him, perhaps. Tomorrow, you may recall, you’ll check the cash, and he knows it. That may account for why he cut his recuperation short.”
“Are you sure he didn’t have a date with you, now he’s feeling better? To be waiting for you after you said goodnight to me?”
“I stayed with the children, if that’s what you mean.”
I don’t know if I believed any of that or not. I think I told you I was nuts about her, and all the money she’d cost me, and all the trouble she’d brought, only seemed to make it worse. The idea that she’d spent a night in the same house with him, and hadn’t said anything to me about it, left me with a prickly feeling all over. Since I’d been going around with her, it was the first time that part of it had come up. He’d been in the hospital, and from there he’d gone right up to the lake, so in a way up to then he hadn’t seemed real. But he seemed real now, all right, and I was still as sore as a bear when we got to my house, and went in. Sam lit the fire, and she sat down, but I didn’t. I kept marching around the room, and she smoked, and watched me.
“All right, this guy’s got to be told.”
“He will be.”
“He’s got to be told everything.”
“Dave, he’ll be told, he’ll be told everything, and a little more even than you know he’s going to be told — when I’m ready to tell him.”
“What’s the matter with now?”
“I’m not equal to it.”
“What’s that — a stall?”
“Will you sit down for a moment?”
“All right, I’m sitting.”
“Here — beside me.”
I moved over beside her, and she took my hand and looked me in the eyes. “Dave, have you forgotten something?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I think you have... I think you’ve forgotten that today we finished what we started to do. That, thanks to you, I don’t have to lie awake every night staring at the ceiling, wondering whether my father is going to be ruined, my children are going to be ruined — to say nothing of myself. That you’ve done something for me that was so dangerous to you I hate to think what would have happened if something had gone wrong. It would have wrecked your career, and it’s such a nice, promising career. But it wasn’t wrong, Dave. It was wonderfully right. It was decenter than any man I know of would have done, would even have thought of doing. And now it’s done. There’s not one card, one comma, one missing penny to show — and I can sleep, Dave. That’s all that matters to me today.”
“O.K. — then you’re leaving him.”
“Of course I am, but—”
“You’re leaving him tonight. You’re coming in here, with your two kids, and if that bothers you, then I’ll move out. We’re going over there now, and—”
“We’re doing nothing of the kind.”
“I’m telling you—”
“And I’m telling you! Do you think I’m going over there now, and starting a quarrel that’s going to last until three o’clock in the morning and maybe until dawn? That’s going to wander all over the earth, from how horribly he says I’ve treated him to who’s going to have the children — the way I feel now? I certainly shall not. When I’m ready, when I know exactly what I’m going to say, when I’ve got the children safely over to my father’s, when it’s all planned and I can do it in one terrible half hour — then I’ll do it. In the meantime, if he’s biting his fingernails, if he’s frightened to death over what’s going to happen to him — that’s perfectly all right with me. A little of that won’t hurt him. When it’s all done, then I go at once to Reno, if you still want me to, and then my life can go on... Don’t you know what I’m trying to tell you, Dave? What you’re worried about just couldn’t happen. Why — he hasn’t even looked at me that way in over a year. Dave, tonight I want to be happy. With you. That’s all.”
I felt ashamed of myself at that, and took her in my arms, and that catch came in my throat again when she sighed, like some child, and relaxed, and closed her eyes.
“Sheila?”
“Yes?”
“We’ll celebrate.”
“All right.”
So we celebrated. She phoned her maid, and said she’d be late, and we went to dinner at a downtown restaurant, and then we drove to a night club on Sunset Boulevard. We didn’t talk about Brent, or the shortage, or anything but ourselves, and what we were going to do with our lives together. We stayed till about one o’clock. I didn’t think of Brent again till we pulled up near her house, and then this same prickly feeling began to come over me. If she noticed anything she didn’t say so. She kissed me good-night, and I started home.
VII
I turned in the drive, put the car away, closed the garage, and walked around to go in the front way. When I started for the door I heard my name called. Somebody got up from a bench under the trees and walked over. It was Helm. “Sorry to be bothering you this hour of night, Mr. Bennett, but I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Well, come in.”
He seemed nervous as I took him inside. I offered him a drink, but he said he didn’t want anything. He sat down and lit a cigarette, and acted like he didn’t know how to begin. Then: “Have you seen Sheila?”
“...Why?”
“I saw you drive off with her.”
“Yes — I had some business with her. We had dinner together. I — just left her a little while ago.”
“Did you see Brent?”
“No. It was late. I didn’t go in.”
“She say anything about him?”
“I guess so. Now and then... What’s this about?”
“Did you see him leave the bank? Today?”
“He left before you did.”
“Did you see him leave the second time?”
“...He only came in once.”
He kept looking at me, smoking and looking at me. He was a young fellow, twenty-four or — five, I would say, and had only been with us a couple of years. Little by little he was losing his nervousness at talking with me.
“...He went in there twice.”
“He came in once. He rapped on the door, Adler let him in, he stood there talking a few minutes, then he went back to get some stuff out of his locker. Then he left. You were there. Except for the extra tellers, nobody had finished up yet. He must have left fifteen minutes before you did.”
“That’s right. Then I left. I finished up, put my cash box away, and left. I went over to the drugstore to get myself a malted milk, and was sitting there drinking it when he went in.”
“He couldn’t have. We were locked, and—”
“He used a key.”
“...When was this?”
“A little after four. Couple of minutes before you all come out with that spider and dumped it in the gutter.”
“So?”
“I didn’t see him come out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I haven’t seen you. I’ve been looking for you.”
“You saw me drive off with Sheila.”
“Yeah, but it hadn’t occurred to me, at the time. That cop, after he caught the spider, came in the drugstore to buy some film for his camera. I helped him put the spider in an ice-cream container, and punch holes in the top, and I wasn’t watching the bank all that time. Later, it just happened to run through my head that I’d seen all the rest of you leave the bank, but I hadn’t seen Brent. I kept telling myself to forget it, that I’d got a case of nerves from being around money too much, but then—”
“Yeah? What else?”
“I went to a picture tonight with the Snellings.”
“Didn’t Snelling see him leave?”
“I didn’t say anything to Snelling. I don’t know what he saw. But the picture had some Mexican stuff in it, and later, when we went to the Snellings’ apartment, I started a bum argument, and got Snelling to call Charlie to settle it. Brent spent some time in Mexico once. That was about twelve o’clock.”
“And?”
“The maid answered. Charlie wasn’t there.”
We looked at each other, and both knew that twelve o’clock was too late for a guy to be out that had just had a bad operation.
“Come on.”
“You calling Sheila?”
“We’re going to the bank.”
The protection service watchman was due on the hour, and we caught him on his two o’clock round. He took it as a personal insult that we would think anybody could be in the bank without him knowing it, but I made him take us in there just the same, and we went through every part of it. We went upstairs, where the old records were stored, and I looked behind every pile. We went down in the basement and I looked behind every gas furnace. We went all around back of the windows and I looked under every counter. I even looked behind my desk, and under it. That seemed to be all. The watchman went up and punched his clock and we went out on the street again. Helm kind of fingered his chin.
“Well, I guess it was a false alarm.”
“Looks like it.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Report everything.”
“Guess there’s no use calling Sheila.”
“Pretty late, I’m afraid.”
What he meant was, we ought to call Sheila, but he wanted me to do it. He was just as suspicious as he ever was, I could tell that from the way he was acting. Only the watchman was sure we were a couple of nuts. We got in the car, and I took him home, and once more he mumbled something about Sheila, but I decided not to hear him. When I let him out I started for home, but as soon as I was out of sight I cut around the block and headed for Mountain Drive.
A light was on, and the screen door opened as soon as I set my foot on the porch. She was still dressed, and it was almost as though she had been expecting me. I followed her in the living room, and spoke low so nobody in the house could hear us, but I didn’t waste any time on love and kisses.
“Where’s Brent?”
“...He’s in the vault.”
She spoke in a whisper, and sank into a chair without looking at me, but every doubt I’d had about her in the beginning, I mean, every hunch that she’d been playing me for a sucker, swept back over me so even looking at her made me tremble. I had to lick my lips a couple of times before I could even talk. “Funny you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know it.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know it? If you know it now, why didn’t you know it then? You trying to tell me he stepped out of there for a couple of minutes, borrowed my telephone, and called you up? He might as well be in a tomb as be in that place, till it opens at eight-thirty this morning.”
“Are you done?”
“I’m still asking you why you didn’t tell me.”
“When I got in, and found he wasn’t home, I went out looking for him. Or at any rate, for the car. I went to where he generally parks it — when he’s out. It wasn’t there. Coming home I had to go by the bank. As I went by, the red light winked, just once.”
I don’t know if you know how a vault works. There’s two switches inside. One lights the overhead stuff that you turn on when somebody wants to get into his safe deposit box; the other works the red light that’s always on over the door in the daytime. That’s the danger signal, and any employee of the bank always looks to see that it’s on whenever he goes inside. When the vault is closed the light’s turned off, and I had turned it off myself that afternoon, when I locked the vault with Snelling. At night, all curtains are raised in the bank, so cops, watchman, and passersby can see inside. If the red light went on, it would show, but I didn’t believe she’d seen it. I didn’t believe she’d even been by the bank. “So the red light winked, hey? Funny it wasn’t winking when I left there not ten minutes ago.”
“I said it winked once. I don’t think it was a signal. I think he bumped his shoulder against it, by accident. If he were signaling, he’d keep on winking it, wouldn’t he?”
“How’d he get in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do know.”
“I don’t know, but the only way I can think of is that he slipped in there while we were all gathered around, looking at that spider.”
“That you conveniently on purpose brought in there.”
“Or that he did.”
“What’s he doing in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, come on, quit stalling me!”
She got up and began walking around. “Dave, it’s easy to see you think I know all about this. That I know more than I’m telling. That Charles and I are in some kind of plot. I don’t know anything I can say. I know a lot I could say if I wasn’t—”
She stopped, came to life like some kind of a tiger, and began hammering her fists against the wall.
“—bought! That was what was wrong! I ought to have cut my heart out, suffered anything rather than let you give me that money! Why did I ever take it? Why didn’t I tell you to—”
“Why didn’t you do what I begged you to do? Come over here today and let him have it between the eyes — tell him the truth, that you were through, and this was the end of it?”
“Because, God help me, I wanted to be happy!”
“No!.. Because, God help you, you knew he wasn’t over here! Because you knew he was in that vault, and you were afraid I’d find it out!”
“It isn’t true! How can you say that?”
“Do you know what I think? I think you took that money off me, day by day, and that not one penny of it ever found its way into your cash box. And then I think you and he decided on a little phoney hold-up, to cover that shortage, and that that’s what he’s doing in the vault. And if Helm hadn’t got into it, and noticed that Brent didn’t come out of the bank the second time he went in, I don’t see anything that was to stop you from getting away with it. You knew I didn’t dare open my trap about the dough I had put up. And if he came out of there masked, and made a quick getaway, I don’t know who was going to swear it was him, if it hadn’t been for Helm. Now it’s in the soup. All right, Mrs. Brent, that vault that don’t take any messages till eight-thirty, that works both ways. If he can’t get any word to you, you can’t get any word to him. Just let him start that little game that looked so good yesterday afternoon, and he’s going to get the surprise of his life, and so are you. There’ll be a reception committee waiting for him when he comes out of there, and maybe they’ll include you in it too.”
She looked straight at me the whole time I was talking, and the lamplight caught her eyes, so they shot fire. There was something catlike about her shape anyway, and with her eyes blazing like that, she looked like something out of the jungle. But all of a sudden that woman was gone, and she was crumpled up in front of me, on the sofa, crying in a queer, jerky way. Then I hated myself for what I had said, and had to dig in with my fingernails to keep from crying too.
After a while the phone rang. From what she said, I could tell it was her father, and that he’d been trying to reach her all afternoon and all night. She listened a long time, and when she hung up she lay back and closed her eyes. “He’s in there to put the money back.”
“...Where’d he get it?”
“He got it this morning. Yesterday morning. From my father.”
“Your father had that much — ready?”
“He got it after I talked to him that night. Then when I told him I wouldn’t need it, he kept it, in his safe deposit box — just in case. Charles went over there yesterday and said he had to have it — against the check-up on my cash. Papa went down to the Westwood bank with him, and got it out, and gave it to him. He was afraid to call me at the bank. He kept trying to reach me here. The maid left me a note, but it was so late when I got in I didn’t call... So, now I pay a price for not telling him. Charles, I mean. For letting him worry.”
“I was for telling him, you may remember.”
“Yes, I remember.”
It was quite a while after that before either of us said anything. All that time my mind was going around like a squirrel cage, trying to reconstruct for myself what was going on in that vault. She must have been doing the same thing, because pretty soon she said, “Dave?”
“Yes?”
“Suppose he does put the money back?”
“Then — we’re sunk.”
“What, actually, will happen?”
“If I find him in there, the least I can do is hold him till I’ve checked every cent in that vault. I find nine thousand more cash than the books show. All right. What then?”
“You mean the whole thing comes out?”
“On what we’ve been doing, you can get away with it as long as nobody’s got the least suspicion of it. Let a thing like this happen, let them really begin to check, and it’ll come out so fast it’ll make your head swim.”
“And there goes your job?”
“Suppose you were the home office, how would you like it?”
“...I’ve brought you nothing but misery, Dave.”
“I — asked for it.”
“I can understand why you feel bitter.”
“I said some things I didn’t mean.”
“Dave.”
“Yes?”
“There’s one chance, if you’ll take it.”
“What’s that?”
“Charles.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It may be a blessing, after all, that I told him nothing. He can’t be sure what I’ve done while he’s been away — whether I carried his false entries right along, whether I corrected them, and left the cash short — and it does look as though he’d check, before he did anything. He’s a wizard at books, you know. And every record he needs is in there. Do you know what I’m getting at, Dave?”
“Not quite.”
“You’ll have to play dummy’s hand, and let him lead.”
“I don’t want anything to do with him.”
“I’d like to wring his neck. But if you just don’t force things, if you just act natural, and let me have a few seconds with him, so we’ll know just what he has done, then — maybe it’ll all come out all right. He certainly would be a boob to put the money back when he finds out it’s already been put back.”
“Has it been?”
“Don’t you know?”
I took her in my arms then, and for that long was able to forget what was staring us in the face, and I still felt close to her when I left.
VIII
For the second time that night I went home, and this time I turned out all the lights, and went upstairs, and took off my clothes, and went to bed. I tried to sleep, and couldn’t. It was all running through my mind, and especially what I was going to do when I opened that vault at eight-thirty. How could I act natural about it? If I could guess he was in the vault, Helm must have guessed it. He’d be watching me, waiting for every move, and he’d be doing that even if he didn’t have any suspicion of me, which by now he must have, on account of being out that late with Sheila. All that ran through my mind, and after a while I’d figured a way to cover it, by openly saying something to him, and telling him I was going to go along with it, just wait and see what Brent had to say for himself, in case he was really in there. Then I tried once more to go to sleep. But this time it wasn’t the play at the vault that was bothering me, it was Sheila. I kept going over and over it, what was said between us, the dirty cracks I had made, how she had taken them, and all the rest of it. Just as day began to break I found myself sitting up in bed. How I knew it I don’t know, what I had to go on I haven’t any idea, but I knew perfectly well that she was holding out on me, that there was something back of it all that she wasn’t telling.
I unhooked the phone and dialed. You don’t stay around a bank very long before you know the number of your chief guard. I was calling Dyer, and in a minute or two he answered, pretty sour. “Hello?”
“Dyer?”
“Yeah, who is it?”
“Sorry to wake you up. This is Dave Bennett.”
“What do you want?”
“I want some help.”
“Well, what the hell is it?”
“I got reason to think there’s a man in our vault. Out in the Anita Avenue branch in Glendale. What he’s up to I don’t know, but I want you out there when I open up. And I’d like you to bring a couple of men with you.”
Up to then he’d been just a sleepy guy that used to be a city detective. Now he snapped out of it like something had hit him. “What do you mean you got reason to think? Who is this guy?”
“I’ll give you that part when I see you. Can you meet me by seven o’clock? Is that too early?”
“Whenever you say, Mr. Bennett.”
“Then be at my house at seven, and bring your men with you. I’ll give you the dope, and I’ll tell you how I want you to do it.”
He took the address, and I went back to bed.
I went to bed, and lay there trying to figure out what it was I wanted him to do anyway. After a while I had it straightened out. I wanted him close enough to protect the bank, and myself as well, in case Sheila was lying to me, and I wanted him far enough away for her to have those few seconds with Brent, in case she wasn’t. I mean, if Brent was really up to something, I wanted him covered every way there was, and by guys that would shoot. But if he came out with a foolish look on his face, and pretended he’d been locked in by mistake, and she found out we could still cover up that book-doctoring, I wanted to leave that open too. I figured on it, and after a while I thought I had it doped out so it would work.
Around six o’clock I got up, bathed, shaved, and dressed. I routed out Sam and had him make me some coffee, and fix up some bacon and eggs. I told him to stand by in case the men that were coming hadn’t had any breakfast. Then I went in the living room and began to march around it. It was cold. I lit the fire. My head kept spinning around.
Bight on the tick of seven the doorbell rang and there they were, Dyer and his two mugs. Dyer’s a tall, thin man with a bony face and eyes like gimlets. I’d say he was around fifty. The other two were around my own age, somewhere over thirty, with big shoulders, thick necks, and red faces. They looked exactly like what they were: ex-cops that had got jobs as guards in a bank. One was named Halligan, the other Lewis. They all said yes on breakfast, so we went in the dining room and Sam made it pretty quick with the service.
I gave it to Dyer, as quick as I could, about Brent being off for a couple of months, with his operation, and how he’d come in yesterday to get his stuff, and Helm had seen him go in the bank a second time, and not come out, and how Sheila had gone out looking for him late at night, and thought she saw the red light flash. I had to tell him that much, to protect myself afterward, because God only knew what was going to come out, and I didn’t even feel I was safe on Sheila’s end of it. I didn’t say anything about the shortage, or Sheila’s father, or any of that part. I told what I had to tell, and made it short.
“Now what I figure is, Brent got in there somehow just before we closed it up, maybe just looking around, and that he got locked in there by accident. However, I can’t be sure. Maybe — it doesn’t seem very likely — he’s up to something. So what I’d like you guys to do is to be outside, just be where you can see what’s going on. If it’s all quiet, I’ll give you the word, and you can go on home, If anything happens, you’re there. Of course, a man spends a night in a vault, he may not feel so good by morning. We may need an ambulance. If so, I’ll let you know.”
I breathed a little easier. It had sounded all right, and Dyer kept on wolfing down his toast and eggs. When they were gone he put sugar and cream in his coffee, stirred it around, and lit a cigarette. “Well — that’s how you got it figured out.”
“I imagine I’m not far off.”
“All I got to say, you got a trusting disposition.”
“What do you make of it?”
“This guy’s a regular employee, you say?”
“He’s been head teller.”
“Then he couldn’t get locked in by mistake. He couldn’t no more do that than a doctor could sew himself up in a man’s belly by mistake. Furthermore, you couldn’t lock him in by mistake. You take all the usual care, don’t you, when you lock a vault?”
“I think so.”
“And you done it regular, yesterday?”
“As well as I can recall.”
“You looked around in there?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you didn’t see nothing?”
“No, certainly not.”
“Then he’s in there on purpose.”
The other two nodded, and looked at me like I must not be very bright.
Dyer went on: “It’s possible for a man to hide hisself in a vault. I’ve thought of it, many a time, how it could be done. You think of a lot of things in my business. Once them trucks are wheeled in, with the records on them, if he once got in without being seen, he could stoop down behind them, and keep quiet, and when you come to close up you wouldn’t see him. But not by accident. Never.”
I was feeling funny in the stomach. I had to take a tack I didn’t like.
“Of course, there’s a human element in it. There’s nothing in this man’s record that gives any ground whatever for thinking he’d pull anything. Fact of the matter, that’s what I’m doing in the branch. I was sent out there to study his methods in the savings department. I’ve been so much impressed by his work that I’m going to write an article about it.”
“When did he get in there, do you think?”
“Well, we found a spider. A big one.”
“One of them bad dreams with fur all over them?”
“That’s it. And we were all gathered around looking at it. And arguing about how to get it out of there. I imagine he was standing there looking at it too. We all went out to throw it in the street, and he must have gone in the vault. Perhaps just looking around. Perhaps to open his box, I don’t know. And — was in there when I closed it up.”
“That don’t hit you funny?”
“Not particularly.”
“If you wanted to get everybody in one place in that bank, and everybody looking in one direction, so you could slip in the vault, you couldn’t think of nothing better than one of them spiders, could you? Unless it was a rattlesnake.”
“That strikes me as a little farfetched.”
“Not if he’s just back from the mountains. From Lake Arrowhead, I think you said. That’s where they have them spiders. I never seen one around Glendale. If he happened to turn that spider loose the first time he come in, all he had to do was wait till you found it, and he could easy slip in.”
“He’d be running an awful risk.”
“No risk. Suppose you seen him? He was looking at the spider too, wasn’t he? He come in with his key to see what all the fuss was about. Thought maybe there was trouble... Mr. Bennett, I’m telling you, he’s not locked in by accident. It couldn’t happen.”
“...What would you suggest?”
“I’d suggest that me, and Halligan, and Lewis, are covering that vault with guns when you open the door, and that we take him right in custody and get it out of him what he was doing in there. If he’s got dough on him, then we’ll know. I’d treat him just like anybody else that hid hisself in a vault. I wouldn’t take no chances whatever.”
“I can’t stand for that.”
“Why not?”
For just a split second, I didn’t know why not. All I knew was that if he was searched, even if he hadn’t put his father-in-law’s money back in the cash box, they’d find it on him, and a man with nine thousand dollars on him, unaccounted for, stepping out of a bank vault, was going to mean an investigation that was going to ruin me. But if you’ve got to think fast, you can do it. I acted like he ought to know why not. “Why — morale.”
“What do you mean, morale?”
“I can’t have those people out there, those other employees, I mean, see that at the first crack out of the box, for no reason whatever, I treat the senior member of the staff like some kind of a bandit. It just wouldn’t do.”
“I don’t agree on that at all.”
“Well, put yourself in their place.”
“They work for a bank, don’t they?”
“They’re not criminals.”
“Every person that works for a bank is automatically under suspicion from the minute he goes in until he comes out. Ain’t nothing personal about it. They’re just people that are entrusted with other people’s money, and not nothing at all is taken for granted. That’s why they’re under bond. That’s why they’re checked all the time — they know it, they want it that way. And if he’s got any sense, even when he sees our guns, supposing he is on the up-and-up, and he’s in there by mistake, he knows it. But he’s not on the up-and-up, and you owe it to them other people in there to give them the protection they’re entitled to.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“It’s up to you. But I want to be on record, in the presence of Halligan and Lewis, that I warned you. You hear what I say, Mr. Bennett?”
“...I hear what you say.”
My stomach was feeling still worse, but I gave them their orders. They were to take positions outside. They weren’t to come in unless they were needed. They were to wait him out.
I led, driving over to the bank, and they followed, in Dyer’s car. When I went past the bank I touched the horn and Dyer waved at me, so I could catch him in the mirror. They had wanted me to show them the bank, because they were all from the home office and had never been there. A couple of blocks up Anita Avenue I turned the corner and stopped. They pulled in ahead of me and parked. Dyer looked out. “All right. I got it.”
I drove on, turned another corner, kept on around the block and parked where I could see the bank. In a minute or two along came Helm, unlocked the door and went in. He’s first in, every morning. In about five minutes Snelling drove up, and parked in front of the drugstore. Then Sheila came walking down the street, stopped at Snelling’s car, and stood there talking to him.
The curtains on the bank door came down. This was all part of opening the bank, you understand, and didn’t have anything to do with the vault. The first man in goes all through the bank. That’s in case somebody got in there during the night. They’ve been known to chop holes in the roof even, to be there waiting with a gun when the vault is opened.
He goes all through the bank, then if everything’s O.K. he goes to the front door and lowers the curtains. That’s a signal to the man across the street, who’s always there by that time. But even that’s not all. The man across the street doesn’t go in till the first man comes out of the bank, crosses over, and gives the word. That’s also in case there’s somebody in there with a gun. Maybe he knows all about those curtains. Maybe he tells the first man to go lower the curtains, and be quick about it. But if the first man doesn’t come out as soon as he lowers the curtains, the man across the street knows there’s something wrong, and puts in a call, quick.
The curtains were lowered, and Helm came out, and Snelling got out of his car, I climbed out and crossed over. Snelling and Helm went in, and Sheila dropped back with me.
“What are you going to do, Dave?”
“Give him his chance.”
“If only he hasn’t done something dumb.”
“Get to him. Get to him and find out what’s what. I’m going to take it as easy as I can. I’m going to stall, listen to what he has to say, tell him I’ll have to ask him to stick around till we check — and then you get at it. Find out. And let me know.”
“Do the others know?”
“No, but Helm’s guessed it.”
“Do you ever pray?”
“I prayed all I know.”
Adler came up then and we went in. I looked at the clock. It was twenty after eight. Helm and Snelling had their dust cloths, polishing up their counters. Sheila went back and started to polish hers. Adler went back to the lockers to put on his uniform. I sat down at my desk, opened it, and took out some papers. They were the same papers I’d been stalling with the afternoon before. It seemed a long time ago, but I began stalling with them again. Don’t ask me what they were. I don’t know yet.
My phone rang. It was Church. She said she wasn’t feeling well, and would it be all right if she didn’t come in today? I said yeah, perfectly all right. She said she hated to miss a day, but she was afraid if she didn’t take care of herself she’d really get sick. I said certainly, she ought to take care of herself. She said she certainly hoped I hadn’t forgotten about the adding machine, that it was a wonderful value for the money, and would probably pay for itself in a year by what it would save. I said I hadn’t forgotten it. She said it all over again about how bad she felt, and I said get well, that was the main thing. She hung up. I looked at the clock. It was twenty-five after eight.
Helm stepped over, and gave my desk a wipe with his cloth. As he leaned down he said: “There’s a guy in front of the drugstore I don’t like the looks of, and two more down the street.”
I looked over. Dyer was there, reading a paper.
“Yeah, I know. I sent for them.”
“O.K.”
“Have you said anything, Helm? To the others?”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“No use starting anything, just on a hunch.”
“That’s it. I’ll help you open the vault.”
“Yes, sir.”
“See the front door is open.”
“I’ll open it now.”
At last the clock said eight-thirty, and the time lock clicked off. Adler came in from the lockers, strapping his belt on over his uniform. Snelling spoke to Helm, and went over to the vault. It takes two men to open a vault, even after the time lock goes off, one to each combination. I opened the second drawer of my desk, took out the automatic that was in there, threw off the catch, slipped it in my coat pocket, and went back there.
“I’ll do that, Snelling.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Bennett. Helm and I have it down to a fine art. We’ve got so we can even do it to music.”
“I’ll try it, just once.”
“O.K. — you spin and I’ll whistle.”
He grinned at Sheila, and began to whistle. He was hoping I’d forgotten the combination, and would have to ask help, and then he’d have a laugh on the boss. Helm looked at me, and I nodded. He spun his dial, I spun mine. I swung the door open.
At first, for one wild second, I thought there was nobody in there at all. I snapped on the switch, and couldn’t see anything. But then my eye caught bright marks on the steel panels of the compartments that hold the safe deposit boxes. Then I saw the trucks had all been switched. They’re steel frames, about four feet high, that hold the records. They run on rubber wheels, and when they’re loaded they’re plenty heavy. When they were put in there, they were all crosswise of the door. Now they were end to it, one jammed up against the other, and not three feet away from me. I dropped my hand in my gun pocket, and opened my mouth to call, and right that second the near truck hit me.
It hit me in the pit of the stomach. He must have been crouched behind it, like a runner, braced against the rear shelves and watching the time lock for the exact second we’d be in there. I went over backwards, still trying to get out the gun. The truck was right over me, like it had been shot out of a cannon. A roller went over my leg, and then I could see it crashing down on top of me.
I must have gone out for a split second when it hit my head, because the next thing I knew screams were ringing in my ears, and then I could see Adler and Snelling, against the wall, their hands over their heads.
But that wasn’t the main thing I saw. It was this madman, this maniac, in front of the vault, waving an automatic, yelling that it was a stick-up, to put them up and keep them up, that whoever moved was going to get killed. If he had hoped to get away with it without being recognized, I can’t say he didn’t have a chance. He was dressed different from the way he was the day before. He must have brought the stuff in the grip. He had on a sweat shirt that made him look three times as big as he really was, a pair of rough pants and rough shoes, a black silk handkerchief over the lower part of his face, a felt hat pulled down over his eyes — and this horrible voice.
He was yelling, and the screaming was coming from Sheila. She seemed to be behind me, and was telling him to cut it out. I couldn’t see Helm. The truck was on top of me, and I couldn’t see anything clear, on account of the wallop on my head. Brent was standing right over me.
Then, right back of his head, a chip fell out of the wall. I didn’t hear any shot at all, but he must have, because Dyer fired, from the street, right through the glass window. Brent turned, toward the street, and I saw Adler grab at his holster. I doubled up my legs and drove against the truck, straight at Brent. It missed him, and crashed against the wall, right beside Adler. Brent wheeled and fired. Adler fired. I fired. Brent fired again. Then he made one leap, and heaved the grip, which he had in his other hand, straight through the glass at the rear of the bank. You understand: The bank is on a corner, and on two sides there’s glass. There’s glass on half the third side too, at the rear, facing the parking lot. It was through that window that he heaved the grip. The glass broke with a crash, and left a hole the size of a door. He went right through it.
I jumped up, and dived after him, through the hole. I could hear Dyer and his two men coming up the street behind me, shooting as they came. They hadn’t come in the bank at all. At the first yelp that Sheila let out they began shooting through the glass.
He was just grabbing up the grip as I got there and leveled his gun right at me. I dropped to the ground and shot. He shot. There was a volley of shots from Dyer and Halligan and Lewis. He ran about five steps, and jumped into the car. It was a blue sedan; the door was open and it was already moving when he landed on it. It shot ahead, straight across the parking lot and over to Grove Street. I raised my gun to shoot at the tires. Two kids came around the corner carrying school-books. They stopped and blinked. I didn’t fire. The car was gone.
I turned around and stepped back through the hole in the glass. The place was full of smoke, from the shooting. Sheila, Helm, and Snelling were stooped down, around Adler. He was lying a little to one side of the vault, and a drop of blood was trickling down back of his ear. It was the look on their faces that told me. Adler was dead.
IX
I started for the telephone. It was on my desk, at the front of the bank, and my legs felt queer as I walked along toward it, back of the windows. Dyer was there ahead of me. He came through the brass gate, from the other side, and reached for it.
“I’m using that for a second, Dyer.”
He didn’t answer, and didn’t look at me, just picked up the phone and started to dial. So far as he was concerned, I was the heel that was responsible for it all, by not doing what he said, and he was letting me know it. I felt that way about it too, but I wasn’t taking anything off him. I grabbed him by the neck of his coat and jerked him back on his heels.
“Didn’t you hear what I said?”
His face got white, and he stood there beside me, his nostrils fanning and his little gray eyes drawn down to points. I broke his connection and dialed the home office. When they came in I asked for Lou Frazier. His title is vice president, same as mine, but he’s special assistant to the Old Man, and with the Old Man in Honolulu, he was in charge. His secretary said he wasn’t there, but then she said wait a minute, he’s just come in. She put him on.
“Lou?”
“Yeah?”
“Dave Bennett, in Glendale.”
“What is it, Dave?”
“We’ve had some trouble. You better get out. And bring some money. There’ll be a run.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Stick-up. Guard killed. I think we’re cleaned.”
“O.K. — how much do you need?”
“Twenty thousand, to start. If we need more, you can send for it later. And step on it.”
“On my way.”
While I was talking, the sirens were screeching, and now the place was full of cops. Outside, an ambulance was pulling in, and about five hundred people standing around, with more coming by the second. When I hung up, a drop of blood ran off the end of my nose on the blotter, and then it began to patter down in a stream. I put my hand to my head. My hair was all sticky and wet, and when I looked, my fingers were full of blood. I tried to think what caused it, then remembered the truck falling on me.
“Dyer?”
“...Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Frazier is on his way out. He’s bringing money to meet all demands. You’re to stay here with Halligan and Lewis, and keep order, and hold yourself ready for anything he tells you. Let the police take care of Adler.”
“They’re taking him out now.”
I looked, and two of them, with the ambulance crew, were carrying him out. They were going the front way. Halligan had opened the door. Lewis and five or six cops were already outside, keeping the people back. They put him in the ambulance. Helm started out there, but I called him.
“Get in the vault, check it up.”
“We’ve been in. Snelling and I.”
“What did he get?”
“He got it all. Forty-four thousand, cash. And that’s not all. He got in the boxes. He left the little boxes alone. He went in the others with a chisel, the ones that had big valuables and securities in them, and he took it all from them, too. He knew which ones.”
“Mr. Frazier is on his way out with cash for the depositors. As soon as that’s under way, make a list of all the rifled boxes, get the box holders on the phone if you can, send them wires otherwise, and get them in here.”
“I’ll start on it now.”
The ambulance crew came in, and started over toward me. I waved them away, and they went off with Adler. Sheila came over to me.
“Mr. Kaiser wants to speak to you.”
He was right behind her, Bunny Kaiser, the guy she had brought in for the $100,000 loan the afternoon I had found the shortage. I was just opening my mouth to tell him that all demands would be met, that he could take his turn with the other depositors as soon as we opened, when he motioned to the windows. Every window on one side was full of breaks and bullet holes, and the back window had the big hole in it where Brent had thrown his grip through it.
“Mr. Bennett, I just wanted to say, I’ve got my glaziers at work now, they’re just starting on the plate glass windows for my building, they’ve got plenty of stock, and if you want, I’ll send them over and they can get you fixed up here. Them breaks don’t look so good.”
“That would help, Mr. Kaiser.”
“Right away.”
“And — thanks.”
I stuck out my left hand, the one that wasn’t covered with blood, and he took it. I must have been pretty wrung up. For just that long it seemed to me I loved him more than anybody on earth. At a time like that, what it means to you, one kind word.
The glaziers were already ripping out the broken glass when Lou Frazier got there. He had a box of cash, four extra tellers, and one uniformed guard, all he could get into his car. He came over, and I gave it to him quick, what he needed to know. He stepped out on the sidewalk with his cash box, held it up, and made a speech:
“All demands will be met. In five minutes the windows will open, all depositors kindly fall in line, the tellers will identify you, and positively nobody but depositors will be admitted!”
He had Snelling with him, and Snelling began to pick depositors out of the crowd, and the cops and the new guard formed them in line, out on the sidewalk. He came in the bank again, and his tellers set the upset truck on its wheels again, and rolled the others out, and they and Helm started to get things ready to pay. Dyer was inside by now. Lou went over to him, and jerked his thumb toward me.
“Get him out of here.”
It was the first time it had dawned on me that I must be an awful-looking thing, sitting there at my desk in the front of the bank, with blood all over me. Dyer came over and called another ambulance. Sheila took her handkerchief and started to wipe off my face. It was full of blood in a second. She took my own handkerchief out of my pocket, and did the best she could with it. From the way Lou looked away every time his eye fell on me, I figured she only made it worse.
Lou opened the doors, and forty or fifty depositors filed in. “Savings depositors on this side, please have your passbooks ready.”
He split them up to four windows. There was a little wait, and then those at the head of the line began to get their money. Four or five went out, counting bills. Two or three that had been in line saw we were paying, and dropped out. A guy counting bills stopped, then fell in at the end of the line, to put his money back in.
The run was over.
My head began to go around, and I felt sick to my stomach. Next thing I knew, there was an ambulance siren, and then a doctor in a white coat was standing in front of me, with two orderlies beside him. “Think you can go, or you going to need a little help?”
“Oh, I can go.”
“Better lean on me.”
I leaned on him, and I must have looked pretty terrible, because Sheila turned away from me, and started to cry. It was the first she had broken down since it happened, and she couldn’t fight it back. Her shoulders kept jerking and the doctor motioned to one of the orderlies.
“Guess we better take her along too.”
“Guess we better.”
They rode us in together, she on one stretcher, me on the other, the doctor riding backwards, between us. As we went he worked on my cut. He kept swabbing at it, and I could feel the sting of the antiseptic. But I wasn’t thinking about that. Once out of the bank, Sheila broke down completely, and it was terrible to hear the sound in her voice, as the sobs came out of her. The doctors talked to her a little, but kept on working on me. It was a swell ride.
X
It was the same old hospital again, and they lifted her out, and wheeled her away somewhere, and then they took me out. They wheeled me in an elevator, and we went up, and they wheeled me out of the elevator to a room, and then two more doctors came and looked at me. One of them was an older man, and he didn’t seem to be an intern. “Well, Mr. Bennett, you’ve got a bad head.”
“Sew it up, it’ll be all right.”
“I’m putting you under an anesthetic, for that.”
“No anesthetic, I’ve got things to do.”
“Do you want to bear that scar the rest of your life?”
“What are you talking about, scar?”
“I’m telling you, you’ve got a bad head. Now if—”
“O.K. — but get at it.”
He went, and an orderly came in and started to undress me, but I stopped him and made him call my house. When he had Sam on the line I talked, and told him to drop everything and get in there with another suit of clothes, a clean shirt, fresh necktie, and everything else clean. Then I slipped out of the rest of my clothes, and they put a hospital shirt on me, and a nurse came in and jabbed me with a hypodermic, and they took me up to the operating room. A doctor put a mask over my face and told me to breathe in a natural manner, and that was the last I knew for a while.
When I came out of it I was back in the room again, and the nurse was sitting there, and my head was all wrapped in bandages. They hadn’t used ether, they had used some other stuff, so in about five minutes I was myself again, though I felt pretty sick. I asked for a paper. She had one on her lap, reading it, and handed it over. It was an early edition, and the robbery was smeared all over the front page, with Brent’s picture, and Adler’s picture, and my picture, one of my old football pictures. There was no trace of Brent yet, it said, but the preliminary estimate of what he got was put at $90,000. That included $44,000 from the bank, and around $46,000 taken from the private safe deposit boxes. The story made me the hero. I knew he was in the vault, it said, and although I brought guards with me, I insisted on being the first man in the vault, and suffered a serious head injury as a result. Adler got killed on the first exchange of shots, after I opened fire. He left a wife and one child, and the funeral would probably be held tomorrow.
There was a description of Brent’s sedan, and the license number. Dyer had got that, as the car drove off, and it checked with the plates issued in Brent’s name. There was quite a lot about the fact that the car was moving when he jumped aboard, and how that proved he had accomplices. There was nothing about Sheila, except that she had been taken to the hospital for nervous collapse, and nothing about the shortage at all. The nurse got up and came over to feed me some ice. “Well, how does it feel to be a hero?”
“Feels great.”
“You had quite a time out there.”
“Yeah, quite a time.”
Pretty soon Sam got there with my clothes, and I told him to stand by. Then two detectives came in and began asking questions. I told them as little as I could, but I had to tell them about Helm, and Sheila seeing the red light, and how I’d gone against Dyer’s advice, and what happened at the bank. They dug in pretty hard, but I stalled as well as I could, and after a while they went.
Sam went out and got a later edition of the afternoon paper. They had a bigger layout now on the pictures. Brent’s picture was still three columns, but my picture and Adler’s picture were smaller, and in an inset there was a picture of Sheila. It said police had a talk with her, at the hospital, and that she was unable to give any clue as to why Brent had committed the crime, or as to his whereabouts. Then, at the end, it said: “It was intimated, however, that Mrs. Brent will be questioned further.”
At that I hopped out of bed. The nurse jumped up and tried to stop me, but I knew I had to get away from where cops could get at me, anyway, until the thing broke enough that I knew what I was going to do.
“What are you doing, Mr. Bennett?”
“I’m going home.”
“But you can’t! You’re to stay until—”
“I said I’m going home. Now if you want to stick around and watch me dress, that’s O.K. by me, but if you’re a nice girl, now is the time to beat it out in the hall.”
While I was dressing they all tried to stop me, the nurse and the intern, and the head nurse, but I had Sam pitch the bloody clothes into the suitcase he had brought, and in about five minutes we were off. At the desk downstairs I wrote a check for my bill, and asked the woman how was Mrs. Brent.
“Oh, she’ll be all right, but of course it was a terrible shock to her.”
“She still here?”
“Well, they’re questioning her, you know.”
“Who?”
“The police... If you ask me, she’ll be held.”
“You mean — arrested?”
“Apparently she knows something.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Don’t say I told you.”
“I won’t, of course.”
Sam had a taxi by then, and we got in. I had the driver go out to Glendale, and pull up beside my car, where I had left it on Anita Avenue. I had Sam take the wheel, and told him to drive around and keep on driving. He took Foothill, and went on up past San Fernando somewhere, I didn’t pay any attention where.
Going past the bank, I saw the glass was all in place, and a gold-leafer was inside, putting on the lettering. I couldn’t see who was in there. Late in the afternoon we came back through Los Angeles, and I bought a paper. My picture was gone now, and so was Adler’s, and Brent’s was smaller. Sheila’s was four columns wide, and in an inset was a picture of her father, Dr. Henry W. Rollinson, of U.C.L.A. The headline stretched clear across the page, and called it a “cover-up robbery.” I didn’t bother to read any more. If Dr. Rollinson had told his story, the whole thing was in the soup.
Sam drove me home then, and fixed me something to eat. I went in the living room and lay down, expecting cops, and wondered what I was going to tell them.
Around eight o’clock the doorbell rang, and I answered myself. But it wasn’t cops, it was Lou Frazier. He came in and I had Sam fix him a drink. He seemed to need it. I lay down on the sofa again, and held on to my head. It didn’t ache, and I felt all right, but I was getting ready. I wanted an excuse not to talk any more than I had to. After he got part of his drink down he started in.
“You seen the afternoon papers?”
“Just the headlines.”
“The guy was short in his accounts.”
“Looks like it.”
“She was in on it.”
“Who?”
“The wife. That sexy-looking thing known as Sheila. She doctored the books for him. We just locked up a half hour ago. I’ve just come from there. Well boy, it’s a crime what that dame got away with. That system in the savings department, all that stuff you went out there to make a report on — that was nothing but a cover. The laugh’s on you, Bennett. Now you got a real article for the American Banker.”
“I doubt if she was in on it.”
“I know she was in on it.”
“If she was, why did she let him go to her father for the dough to cover up the shortage? Looks to me like that was putting it on a little too thick.”
“O.K. — it’s taken me all afternoon to figure that one out, and I had to question the father pretty sharp. He’s plenty bitter against Brent. All right, take it from their point of view, hers and Brent’s. They were short on the accounts, and they figured on a phoney hold-up that would cover their deficit, so nobody would even know there had been a shortage. The first thing to do was get the books in shape, and I’m telling you she made a slick job of that. She didn’t leave a trace, and if it wasn’t for her father, we’d never have known how much they were short. All right, she’s got to get those books in shape, and do it before you next check on her cash. That was the tough part, they were up against time, but she was equal to it, I’ll say that for her. All right, now she brings a spider in, and he slips in the vault and hides there. But they couldn’t be sure what was going to happen next morning, could they? He might get away with it clean, with that handkerchief over his face nobody could identify him, and then later she could call the old man up and say please don’t say anything, she’ll explain to him later, that Charles is horribly upset, and when the cops go to his house, sure enough he is. He’s in bed, still recovering from his operation, and all this and that — but no money anywhere around, and nothing to connect him with it.
“But look: They figure maybe he don’t get away with it. Maybe he gets caught, and then what? All the money’s there, isn’t it? He’s got five doctors to swear he’s off his nut anyway, on account of illness — and he gets off light. With luck, he even gets a suspended sentence, and the only one that’s out is her old man. She shuts him up, and they’re not much worse off than they were before. Well, thanks to a guy named Helm it all went sour. None of it broke like they expected — he got away, but everybody knew who he was, and Adler got killed. So now he’s wanted for murder — and robbery, and she’s held for the same.”
“Is she held?”
“You bet your sweet life she’s held. She doesn’t know it yet — she’s down at that hospital, with a little dope in her arm to quiet her after the awful experience she had, but there’s a cop outside the door right now, and tomorrow when she wakes up maybe she won’t look quite so sexy.”
I lay there with my eyes shut, wondering what I was going to do, but by that time my head was numb, so I didn’t feel anything any more. After a while I heard myself speak to him, “Lou?”
“Yeah?”
“I knew about that shortage.”
“...You mean you suspected it?”
“I knew—”
“You mean you suspected it!”
He fairly screamed it at me. When I opened my eyes he was standing in front of me, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets, his face all twisted and white. Lou is a pretty good-looking guy, big and thickset, with brown eyes and a golf tan all over him, but now he looked like some kind of a wild man.
“If you knew about it, and didn’t report it, there goes our bond! Don’t you get it, Bennett? There goes our bond!”
It was the first I had even thought of the bond. I could see it, though, the second he began to scream, that little line in fine type on the bond. We don’t make our people give individual bond. We carry a group bond on them, ourselves, and that line reads: “...The assured shall report to the Corporation any shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or theft on the part of any of their employees, within twenty-four hours of the time such shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or theft shall be known to them, or to their officers, and failure to report such shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or theft shall be deemed ground for the cancellation of this bond, and the release of the Corporation from liability for such shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or shortage.” I felt my lips go cold, and the sweat stand out on the palms of my hands, but I went on:
“You’re accusing a woman of crimes I know damned well she didn’t commit, and bond or no bond, I’m telling you—”
“You’re not telling me anything, get that right now!”
He grabbed his hat and ran for the door. “And listen: If you know what’s good for you, you’re not telling anybody else either! If that comes out, there goes our fidelity bond and our burglary bond — we won’t get a cent from the bonding company, we’re hooked for the whole ninety thousand bucks, and — God, ninety thousand bucks! Ninety thousand bucks!”
He went, and I looked at my watch. It was nine o’clock. I called up a florist, and had them send flowers to Adler’s funeral. Then I went upstairs and went to bed, and stared at the ceiling trying to get through my head what I had to face in the morning.
XI
Don’t ask me about the next three days. They were the worst I ever spent in my life. First I went in to the Hall of Justice and talked to Mr. Gaudenzi, the assistant district attorney that was on the case. He listened to me, and took notes, and then things began to hit me.
First I was summoned to appear before the Grand Jury, to tell what I had to say there. I had to waive immunity for that, and boy, if you think it’s fun to have those babies tearing at your throat, you try it once. There’s no judge to help you, no lawyer to object to questions that make you look like a fool, nothing but you, the district attorney, the stenographer, and them. They kept me in there two hours. I squirmed and sweated and tried to get out of admitting why I put up the money for Sheila, but after a while they had it. I admitted I had asked her to divorce Brent and marry me, and that was all they wanted to know. I was hardly home before a long wire from Lou Frazier was delivered, telling me the bonding company had filed notice they denied liability for the money that was gone, and relieving me of duty until further notice. He would have fired me, if he could, but that had to wait till the Old Man got back from Honolulu, as I was an officer of the company, and couldn’t be fired until the Old Man laid it before the directors.
But the worst was the newspapers. The story had been doing pretty well until I got in it. I mean it was on the front page, with pictures and all kinds of stuff about clues to Brent’s whereabouts, one hot tip putting him in Mexico, another in Phoenix, and still another in Del Monte, where an auto-court man said he’d registered the night of the robbery. But when they had my stuff, they went hog wild with it. That gave it a love interest, and what they did to me was just plain murder. They called it the Loot Triangle, and went over to old Dr. Rollinson’s, where Sheila’s children were staying, and got pictures of them, and of him, and stole at least a dozen of her, and they ran every picture of me they could dig out of their files, and I cursed the day I ever posed in a bathing suit while I was in college, with a co-ed skinning the cat on each arm, in an “Adonis” picture for some football publicity.
And what I got for all that hell was that the day before I appeared before them, the Grand Jury indicted Sheila for alteration of a corporation’s records, for embezzlement, and for accessory to robbery with a deadly weapon. The only thing they didn’t indict her for was murder, and why they hadn’t done that I couldn’t understand. So it all went for nothing. I’d nailed myself to the cross, brought all my Federal mortgage notes to prove I’d put up the money, and that she couldn’t have had anything to do with it, and she got indicted just the same. I got so I didn’t have the heart to put my face outside the house, except when a newspaperman showed up, and then I’d go out to take a poke at him, if I could. I sat home and listened to the shortwave radio, tuned to the police broadcasts, wondering if I could pick up something that would mean they were closing in on Brent. That, and the news broadcasts. One of them said Sheila’s bail had been set at $7,500 and that her father had put it up, and that she’d been released. It wouldn’t have done any good for me to have gone down to put up bail. I’d given her all I had, already.
That day I got in the car and took a ride, just to keep from going nuts. Coming back I drove by the bank and peeped in. Snelling was at my desk. Church was at Sheila’s window. Helm was at Snelling’s place, and there were two tellers I’d never seen before.
When I tuned in on the news, after supper that night, for the first time there was some sign the story was slackening off. The guy said Brent hadn’t been caught yet, but there was no more stuff about me, or about Sheila. I relaxed a little, but then after a while something began to bore into me. Where was Brent? If she was out on bail, was she meeting him? I’d done all I could to clear her, but that didn’t mean I was sure she was innocent, or felt any different about her than I had before. The idea that she might be meeting him somewhere, that she had played me for a sucker that way, right from the start, set me to tramping around that living room once more, and I tried to tell myself to forget it, to forget her, to wipe the whole thing off the slate and be done with it, and I couldn’t. Around eight-thirty I did something I guess I’m not proud of. I got in the car, drove over there, and parked down the street about half a block, to see what I could see.
There was a light on, and I sat there a long time. You’d be surprised what went on, the newspaper reporters that rang the bell, and got kicked out, the cars that drove by, and slowed down so fat women could rubber in there, the peeping that was going on from upstairs windows of houses. After a while the light went off. The door opened, and Sheila came out. She started down the street, toward me. I felt if she saw me there I’d die of shame. I dropped down behind the wheel, and bent over on one side so I couldn’t be seen from the pavement, and held my breath. I could hear her footsteps coming on, quick, like she was in a hurry to get somewhere. They went right on by the car, without stopping, but through the window, almost in a whisper, I heard her say: “You’re being watched.”
I knew in a flash then, why she hadn’t been indicted for murder. If they’d done that, she wouldn’t have been entitled to bail. They indicted her, but they left it so she could get out, and then they began doing the same thing I’d been doing: watching her, to see if she’d make some break that would lead them to Brent.
Next day I made up my mind I had to see her. But how to see her was tough. If they were watching her that close, they’d probably tapped in on her phone, and any wire I sent her would be read before she got it, that was a cinch. I figured on it awhile, and then I went down in the kitchen to see Sam. “You got a basket here?”
“Yes sir, a big market basket.”
“O.K., I tell you what you do. Put a couple of loaves of bread in it, put on your white coat, and get on over to this address on Mountain Drive. Co in the back way, knock, ask for Mrs. Brent. Make sure you’re talking to her, and that nobody else is around. Tell her I want to see her, and will she meet me tonight at seven o’clock, at the same place she used to meet me downtown, after she came from the hospital. Tell her I’ll be waiting in the car.”
“Yes sir, seven o’clock.”
“You got that all straight?”
“I have, sir.”
“There’s cops all around the house. If you’re stopped, tell them nothing, and if possible, don’t let them know who you are.”
“Just leave it to me.”
I took an hour that night shaking anybody that might be following me. I drove up to Saugus, and coming in to San Fernando I shoved up to ninety, and I knew nobody was back of me, because I could see everything behind. At San Fernando I cut over to Van Nuys, and drove in to the hospital from there. It was one minute after seven when I pulled in to the curb, but I hadn’t even stopped rolling before the door opened and she jumped in. I kept right on.
“You’re being followed.”
“I think not. I shook them.”
“I couldn’t. I think my taxi driver had his instructions before he came to the house. They’re about two hundred yards behind.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“They’re there.”
We drove on, me trying to think what I wanted to say. But it was she that started it.
“Dave?”
“Yes?”
“We may never see each other again, after tonight. I think I’d better begin. You’ve — been on my mind, quite a lot. Among other things.”
“All right, begin.”
“I’ve done you a great wrong.”
“I didn’t say so.”
“You didn’t have to. I felt everything you were thinking in that terrible ride that morning in the ambulance. I’ve done you a great wrong, and I’ve done myself a great wrong. I forgot one thing a woman can never forget. I didn’t forget it. But I — closed my eyes to it.”
“Yeah, and what was that?”
“That a woman must come to a man, as they say in court, with clean hands. In some countries, she has to bring more than that. Something in her hand, something on her back, something on the ox cart — a dowry. In this country we waive that, but we don’t waive the clean hands. I couldn’t give you them. If I was going to come to you, I had to come with encumbrances, terrible encumbrances. I had to be bought.”
“I suggested that.”
“Dave, it can’t be done. I’ve asked you to pay a price for me that no man can pay. I’ve cost you a shocking amount of money, I’ve cost you your career, I’ve cost you your good name. On account of me you’ve been pilloried in the newspapers, you’ve endured torture. You’ve stood by me beautifully, you did everything you could for me, before that awful morning and since — but I’m not worth it. No woman can be, and no woman has a right to think she is. Very well, then, you don’t have to stand by me any longer. You can consider yourself released, and if it lies in my power, I’ll make up to you what I’ve cost you. The career, the notoriety, I can’t do anything about. The money, God willing, someday I shall repay you. I guess that’s what I wanted to say. I guess that’s all I wanted to say. That — and good-bye.”
I thought that over for five or ten miles. It was no time for lolly-gagging. She had said what she meant and I had to say what I meant. And I wasn’t kidding myself that a lot of it wasn’t true. The whole mess, from the time we had started doctoring those books, and putting the money back, I had just hated, and they weren’t love scenes, those nights when we were getting ready for the next day’s skulduggery. They were nervous sessions, and she never looked quite so pretty going home as she had coming over. But it still wasn’t what was on my mind. If I could be sure she was on the up-and-up with me, I’d still feel she was worth it, and I’d still stand by her, if she needed me and wanted me. I made up my mind I was going to hit it on the nose. “Sheila?”
“Yes, Dave.”
“I did feel that way in the ambulance.”
“There’s no need to tell me.”
“Partly on account of what you’ve been talking about, maybe. There’s no use kidding ourselves. It was one awful morning, and we’ve both had awful mornings since. But that wasn’t the main thing.”
“...What was the main thing?”
“I wasn’t sure, I haven’t been sure from the beginning, and I’m not sure now, that you haven’t been two-timing me.”
“What are you talking about? Two-timing you with whom?”
“Brent.”
“With Charles? Are you crazy?”
“No, I’m not crazy. All right, now you get it. I’ve known from the beginning, and I’m perfectly sure of it now, that you know more about this than you’ve been telling, that you’ve held out on me, that you’ve held out on the cops. All right, now you can put it on the line. Were you in on this thing with Brent or not?”
“Dave, how can you ask such a thing?”
“Do you know where he is?”
“...Yes.”
“That’s all I want to know.”
I said it mechanically, because to tell you the truth I’d about decided she was on the up-and-up all the way down the line, and when she said that it hit me between the eyes like a fist. I could feel my breath trembling as we drove along, and I could feel her looking at me too. Then she began to speak in a hard, strained voice, like she was forcing herself to talk, and measuring everything she said.
“I know where he is, and I’ve known a lot more about him than I ever told you. Before that morning, I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to wash a lot of dirty linen, even before you. Since that morning I haven’t told anybody because — I want him to escape!”
“Oh, you do!”
“I pulled you into it, when I discovered that shortage, for the reason I told you. So my children wouldn’t grow up knowing their father was in prison. I’m shielding Charles now, I’m holding out on you, as you put it, because if I don’t, they’re going to grow up knowing their father was executed for murder. I won’t have it! I don’t care if the bank loses ninety thousand dollars, or a million dollars, I don’t care if your career is ruined — I might as well tell you the truth, Dave — if there’s any way I can prevent it, my children are not going to have their lives blighted by that horrible disgrace.”
That cleared it up at last. And then something came over me. I knew we were going through the same old thing again, that I’d be helping her cover up something, that I wasn’t going to have any more of that. If she and I were to go on, it had to be a clean slate between us, and I felt myself tighten. “So far as I’m concerned I won’t have that.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“And not because of what you said about me. I’m not asking you to put me ahead of your children, or anything ahead of your children.”
“I couldn’t, even if you did ask me.”
“It’s because the game is up, and you may as well learn that your children aren’t any better than anybody else.”
“I’m sorry. To me they are.”
“They’ll learn, before they die, that they’ve got to play the cards God dealt them, and you’ll learn it too, if I know anything about it. What you’re doing, you’re ruining other lives, to say nothing of your own life, and doing wrong, too — to save them. O.K., play it your own way. But that lets me out.”
“Then it’s good-bye?”
“I guess it is.”
“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
She was crying now, and she took my hand and gave it a little jerky shake. I loved her more than I’d ever loved her, and I wanted to stop, and put my arms around her, and start all over again, but I didn’t. I knew it wouldn’t get us anywhere at all, and I kept right on driving. We’d got to the beach by then, by way of Pico Boulevard, and I ran up through Santa Monica to Wilshire, then turned back to take her home. We were done, and I could feel it that she had called the turn. We’d never see each other again.
How far we’d got I don’t know, but we were somewhere coming in toward Westwood. She had quieted down, and was leaning against the window with her eyes closed, when all of a sudden she sat up and turned up the radio. I had got so I kept it in shortwave all the time now, and it was turned low, so you could hardly hear it, but it was on. A cop’s voice was just finishing an order, and then it was repeated: “Car number forty-two, Car number forty-two... Proceed to number six eight two five Sanborn Avenue, Westwood, at once... Two children missing from home of Dr. Henry W. Rollinson...”
I stepped on it hard, but she grabbed me.
“Stop!”
“I’m taking you there!”
“Stop! I said stop — will you please stop!”
I couldn’t make any sense out of her, but I pulled over and we skidded to a stop. She jumped out. I jumped out, “Will you kindly tell me what we’re stopping here for? They’re your kids, don’t you get it—?”
But she was on the curb, waving back the way we had come. Just then a pair of headlights snapped on. I hadn’t seen any car, but it dawned on me this must be that car that had been following us. She kept on waving, then started to run toward it. At that, the car came up. A couple of detectives were inside. She didn’t even wait till she stopped before she screamed: “Did you get that call?”
“What call?”
“The Westwood call, about the children?”
“Baby, that was for Car forty-two.”
“Will you wipe that grin off your face and listen to me? Those are my children. They’ve been taken by my husband, and it means he’s getting ready to skip, to wherever he’s going—”
She never even finished. Those cops hopped out and she gave it to them as fast as she could. She said he’d be sure to stop at his hideout before he blew, that they were to follow us there, that we’d lead the way if they’d only stop talking and hurry. But the cops had a different idea. They knew by now it was a question of time, so they split the cars up. One of them went ahead in the police car, after she gave him the address, the other took the wheel of my car, and we jumped in on the back seat. Boy, if you think you can drive, you ought to try it once with a pair of cops. We went through Westwood with everything wide open, it wasn’t five minutes before we were in Hollywood, and we just kept on going. We didn’t stop for any kind of a light, and I don’t think we were under eighty the whole trip.
All the time she kept holding on to my hand and praying: “Oh God, if we’re only in time! If we’re only in time!”
XII
We pulled up in front of a little white apartment house in Glendale. Sheila jumped out, and the cops and myself were right beside her. She whispered for us to keep quiet. Then she stepped on the grass, went around to the side of the house, and looked up. A light was on in one window. Then she went back to the garage. It was open, and she peeped in. Then she came back to the front and went inside, still motioning to us to keep quiet. We followed her, and she went up to the second floor. She tiptoed to the third door on the right, stood there a minute, and listened. She tiptoed back to where we were. The cops had their guns out by now. Then she marched right up to the door, her heels clicking on the floor, and rapped. It opened right away, and a woman was standing there. She had a cigarette in one hand and her hat and coat on, like she was getting ready to go out. I had to look twice to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It was Church.
“Where are my children?”
“Well, Sheila, how should I know—?”
Sheila grabbed her and jerked her out into the hall. “Where are my children, I said.”
“They’re all right. He just wanted to see them a minute before he—”
She stopped when one of the cops walked up behind her, stepped through the open door with his gun ready, and went inside. The other cop stayed in the hall, right beside Sheila and Church, his gun in his hand, listening. After a minute or two the cop that went in came to the door and motioned us inside. Sheila and Church went in, then I went in, then the other cop stepped inside, but stood where he could cover the hall. It was a one-room furnished apartment, with a dining alcove to one side, and a bathroom. All doors were open; even the closet door, where the cop had opened them, ready to shoot if he had to. In the middle of the floor were a couple of suitcases strapped up tight. The cop that went in first walked over to Church.
“All right, Fats, spit it out.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Where are those kids?”
“How should I know—?”
“You want that puss mashed in?”
“...He’s bringing them here.”
“When?”
“Now. He ought to be here by now.”
“What for?”
“To take with us. We were going to blow.”
“He using a car?”
“He’s using his car.”
“O.K. — open them suitcases.”
“I have no key. He—”
“I said open them.”
She stooped down and began to unstrap the suitcases. The cop poked her behind with the gun.
“Come on, step on it, step on it!”
When she had them unstrapped, she took keys from her handbag and unlocked them. The cop kicked them open. Then he whistled. From the larger of the two suitcases money began tumbling on the floor, some of it in bundles, with rubber bands around it, some of it with paper wrappers still on, showing the amounts. That was the new money we had had in the vault, stuff that had never even been touched. Church began to curse at Sheila.
“It’s all there, and now you’ve got what you want, haven’t you? You think I didn’t know what you were doing? You think I didn’t see you fixing those cards up so you could send him up when they found that shortage? All right, he beat you to it, and he took your old man for a ride too — that sanctimonious old fool! But you haven’t got him yet, and you haven’t got those brats! I’ll—”
She made a dive for the door, but the cop was standing there and threw her back. Then he spoke to the other one, the one that was stooped down, fingering the money. “Jake!”
“Yeah?”
“He’ll be here for that dough. You better put in a call. No use taking chances. We need more men.”
“God, I never seen that much dough.”
He stepped over to the phone and lifted the receiver to dial. Just then, from outside, I heard a car horn give a kind of a rattle, like they give when they’re tapped three or four times quick. Church heard it too, and opened her mouth to scream. That scream never came out. Sheila leaped at her, caught her throat with one hand, and covered her mouth with the other. She turned her head around to the cops.
“Go on, hurry up, he’s out there.”
The cops dived out and piled down the stairs, and I was right after them. They no sooner reached the door than there was a shot, from a car parked out front, right behind my car. One cop ducked behind a big urn beside the door, the other ran behind a tree. The car was moving now, and I meant to get that guy if it was the last thing I did on earth. I ran off to the right, across the apartment house lawn and the lawn next to it and the lawn next to that, as hard as I could. There was no way he could turn. If he was going to get away, he had to pass me. I got to a car that was parked about fifty feet up the street, and crouched down in front of it, right on the front bumper, so that the car was between him and me. He was in second now, and giving her the gun, but I jumped and caught the door handle.
What happened in the next ten seconds I’m not sure I know myself. The speed of the car threw me back, so I lost my grip on the door handle, and I hit my head on the fender. I was still wearing a bandage, from the other cut, so that wasn’t so good. But I caught the rear door handle, and hung on. All that happened quicker than I can tell it, but being thrown back that way, I guess that’s what saved me. He must have thought I was still up front, because inside the car he began to shoot, and I saw holes appear in the front door, one by one. I had some crazy idea I had to count them, so I’d know when he’d shot his shells out. I saw three holes, one right after the other. But then I woke up that there were more shots than holes, that some of those shots were coming from behind. That meant the cops had got in it again. I was right in the line of fire, and I wanted to drop off and lay in the street, but I held on. Then these screams began coming from the back seat, and I remembered the kids. I yelled at the cops that the children were back there, but just then the car slacked and gave a yaw to the left, and we went crashing into the curb and stopped.
I got up, opened the front door, and jumped aside, quick. There was no need to jump. He was lying curled up on the front seat, with his head hanging down, and all over the upholstery was blood. But what I saw, when one of the cops ran up and opened the rear door, was just pitiful. The oldest of the kids, Anna, was down on the floor moaning, and her sister, the little three-year-old, Charlotte, was up on the seat, screaming at her father to look at Anna, that Anna was hurt.
Her father wasn’t saying anything.
It seemed funny that the cop, the one that had treated Church so rough, could be so swell when it came to a couple of children. He kept calling them Sissy, and got the little one calmed down in just about a minute, and the other one too, the one that was shot. The other cop ran back to the apartment house, to phone for help, and to collar Church before she could run off with that dough, and he caught her just as she was beating it out the door. This one stayed right with the car, and he no sooner got the children quiet than he had Sheila on his hands, and about five hundred people that began collecting from every place there was.
Sheila was like a wild woman, but she didn’t have a chance with that cop. He wouldn’t let her touch Anna, and he wouldn’t let Anna be moved till the doctors moved her. There on the floor of the car was where she was going to stay, he said, and nothing that Sheila said could change him. I figured he was right, and put my arms around her, and tried to get her quiet, and in a minute or two I felt her stiffen and knew she was going to do everything she could to keep herself under control.
The ambulances got there at last, and they put Brent in one, and the little girl in the other, and Sheila rode in with her. I took little Charlotte in my car. As she left me, Sheila touched my arm.
“More hospitals.”
“You’ve had a dose.”
“But this — Dave!”
It was one in the morning before they got through in the operating room, and long before that the nurses put little Charlotte to bed. From what she said to me on the way in, and what the cops and I were able to piece together, it wasn’t one of the cop’s shots that had hit Anna at all.
What happened was that the kids were asleep on the back seat, both of them, when Brent pulled up in front of the apartment house, and didn’t know a thing till he started to shoot through the door at me. Then the oldest one jumped up and spoke to her father. When he didn’t answer she stood up and tried to talk to him on his left side, back of where he was trying to shoot and drive at the same time. That must have been when he turned and let the cops have it over his shoulder. Except that instead of getting the cops, he got his own child.
When it was all over I took Sheila home. I didn’t take her to Glendale. I took her to her father’s house in Westwood. She had phoned him what had happened, and they were waiting for her. She looked like a ghost of herself, and leaned against the window with her eyes closed. “Did they tell you about Brent?”
She opened her eyes.
“...No. How is he?”
“He won’t be executed for murder.”
“You mean—?”
“He died. On the table.”
She closed her eyes again, and didn’t speak for a while, and when she did it was in a dull, lifeless way.
“Charles was all right, a fine man — until he met Church. I don’t know what effect she had on him. He went completely insane about her, and then he began to go bad. What he did, I mean at the bank that morning, wasn’t his think-up, it was hers.”
“But why, will you tell me that?”
“To get back at me. At my father. At the world. At everything. You noticed what she said to me? With her that meant an obsession that I was set to ruin Charles, and if I was, then they would strike first, that’s all. Charles was completely under her, and she’s bad. Really, I’m not sure she’s quite sane.”
“What a thing to call a sweetie.”
“I think that was part of the hold she had on him. He wasn’t a very masculine man. With me, I think he felt on the defensive, though certainly I never gave him any reason to. But with her, with that colorless, dietician nature that she had — I think he felt like a man. I mean, she excited him. Because she is such a frump, she gave him something I could never give him.”
“I begin to get it now.”
“Isn’t that funny? He was my husband, and I don’t care whether he’s alive or dead — I simply don’t care. All I can think of is that little thing down there—”
“What do the doctors say?”
“They don’t know. It’s entirely her constitution and how it develops. It was through her abdomen, and there were eleven perforations, and there’ll be peritonitis, and maybe other complications — and they can’t even know what’s going to happen for two or three days yet. And the loss of blood was frightful.”
“They’ll give her transfusions.”
“She had one, while they were operating. That was what they were waiting for. They didn’t dare start till the donor arrived.”
“If blood’s what it takes, I’ve got plenty.”
She started to cry, and caught my arm. “Even blood, Dave? Is there anything you haven’t given me?”
“Forget it.”
“Dave?”
“Yes?”
“If I’d played the cards that God dealt me, it wouldn’t have happened. That’s the awful part. If I’m to be punished — all right, it’s what I deserve. But if only the punishment — doesn’t fall on her!”
XIII
The newspapers gave Sheila a break, I’ll say that for them, once the cops exonerated her. They played the story up big, but they made her the heroine of it, and I can’t complain of what they said about me, except I’d rather they hadn’t said anything. Church took a plea and got sent over to Tehachapi for a while. She even admitted she was the one that brought in the spider. All the money was there, so Dr. Rollinson got his stake back, and the bonding company had nothing to pay, which kind of eased off what had been keeping me awake nights.
But that wasn’t what Sheila and I had to worry about. It was that poor kid down there in the hospital, and that was just awful. The doctors knew what was coming, all right. For two or three days she went along and you’d have thought she was doing fine, except that her temperature kept rising a little bit at a time, and her eyes kept getting brighter and her cheeks redder. Then the peritonitis broke, and broke plenty. For two weeks her temperature stayed up around 104, and then when it seemed she had that licked, pneumonia set in. She was in oxygen for three days, and when she came out of it she was so weak you couldn’t believe she could live at all. Then, at last, she began to get better.
All that time I took Sheila in there twice a day, and we’d sit and watch the chart, and in between we’d talk about what we were going to do with our lives. I had no idea. The mess over the bond was all cleared up, but I hadn’t been told to come back to work, and I didn’t expect to be. And after the way my name had been plastered on the front pages all over the country, I didn’t know where I could get a job, or whether I could get a job. I knew a little about banking, but in banking the first thing you’ve got to have is a good name.
Then one night we were sitting there, Sheila and myself, with the two kids on the bed, looking at a picture book, when the door opened, and the Old Man walked in. It was the first time we had seen him since the night he danced with Sheila, just before he sailed for Honolulu. He had a box of flowers, and handed them to Sheila with a bow. “Just dropped in to see how the little girl is getting along.”
Sheila took the flowers and turned away quickly to hide how she felt, then rang for the nurse and sent them out to be put in water. Then she introduced him to the children, and he sat on the bed and kidded along with them, and they let him look at the pictures in the picture book. The flowers came back, and Sheila caught her breath, and they were jumbo chrysanthemums all right. She thanked him for them, and he said they came from his own garden in Beverly. The nurse went and the kids kind of quieted down again, and Sheila went over to him, and sat down beside him on the bed, and took his hand. “You think this is a surprise, don’t you?”
“Well, I can do better.”
He dug in his pocket and fished up a couple of little dolls. The kids went nuts over them, and that was the end of talk for about five minutes. But Sheila was still hanging on to the Old Man’s hand, and went on: “It’s no surprise at all. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Oh, you have.”
“I saw you were back.”
“I got back yesterday.”
“I knew you’d come.”
The Old Man looked at me and grinned. “I must have done pretty well in that dance. I must have uncorked a pretty good rhumba.”
“I’d say you did all right.”
Sheik laughed, and kissed his hand, and got up and moved into a chair. He moved into a chair too, and looked at his chrysanthemums and said, “Well, when you like somebody you have to bring her flowers.”
“And when you like somebody, you know they’ll do it.”
He sat there a minute, and then he said, “I think you two are about the silliest pair of fools I ever knew. Just about the silliest.”
“We think so too.”
“But not a pair of crooks... I read a little about it, in Honolulu, and when I got back I went into it from beginning to end, thoroughly. If I’d been here, I’d have let you have it right in the neck, just exactly where Lou Frazier let you have it, and I haven’t one word of criticism to offer for what he did. But I wasn’t here. I was away, I’m glad to say. Now that I’m back I can’t find it in me to hold it against you. It was against all rules, all prudence, but it wasn’t morally wrong. And — it was silly. But all of us, I suppose, are silly now and then. Even I feel the impulse — especially when dancing the rhumba.”
He stopped and let his fingertips touch in front of his eyes, and stared through them for a minute or so. Then he went on:
“But — the official family is the official family, and while Frazier isn’t quite as sore as he was, he’s not exactly friendly, even yet. I don’t think there’s anything for you in the home office for some little time yet, Bennett — at any rate, until this blows over a little. However, I’ve about decided to open a branch in Honolulu. How would you like to take charge of that?”
Brother, does a cat like liver?
So Honolulu’s where we are now, all five of us: Sheila, and myself, and Anna, and Charlotte, and Arthur, a little number you haven’t heard about yet, that arrived about a year after we got here, and that was named after the Old Man. They’re out there on the beach now, and I can see them from where I’m writing on the veranda, and my wife looks kind of pretty in a bathing suit, if anybody happens to ask you. The Old Man was in a few weeks ago, and told us that Frazier’s been moved East, and any time I want to go back, it’s all clear, and he’ll find a spot for me. But I don’t know. I like it here, and Sheila likes it here, and the kids like it here, and the branch is doing fine. And another thing: I’m not so sure I want to make it too handy for Sheila and the Old Man to dance the rhumba.
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