The Complete Crime Stories (34 page)

“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.”