Galvan blinked and turned away. “Perhaps I am only tired of the indecision of it all.”
“Or mad with the power of this moment.” He waited no longer, but threw back the sheet and hurled himself across the cabin at the little man. He grabbed him by the neck and was tightening his grip on the wrinkled throat when the secretary drew a pistol and fired a single shot at close range.
Harris stumbled backward, seeing the two of them — the only two in the world who knew — suddenly tall above him, and he felt very tired as his life drained away. Again there came to him the unmistakable odor of melting, and he wondered if perhaps he was back in the dead plane, if all that went between had been but a drowning man’s dream...
Or was this the way the earth smelled, as it died?
96
Shell Game
William Jeffrey
Gloved hands thrust into the pockets of his heavy tweed overcoat, Steve Blanchard entered the Midwestern National Exchange Bank a few minutes before three P.M. on a snowy Friday in December. A uniformed guard stood near the maintenance doors with a ring of keys in his hand, his eyes cast upward to the clock on a side wall, and Blanchard’s steps echoed hollowly as he crossed the nearly-deserted lobby to the teller at window 4, the only one open at this late hour. He waited until a stout, gray-haired man had finished his transaction, and then moved up to the window.
A small bronze plaque positioned to the right indicated that the teller’s name was James Cox. He was a thin, relaxed young man with dark eyes and sand-colored hair. He smiled at Blanchard, said, “Yes, sir, may I help you?”
Blanchard took the folded piece of paper from his coat pocket and slid it across the marble counter. The second hand on the wall clock made two full sweeps, half of a third, and then Blanchard turned and strode quickly away without looking back.
He had just passed through the entrance doors, was letting them swing closed behind him, when Cox shouted, “Stop that man! He just robbed me, Sam. Stop him!”
Blanchard halted on the snow-covered sidewalk outside and turned, his angular face a mask of surprise. The guard, a fat, florid man with mild blue eyes, remained motionless for a moment; then, like an activated robot, he pulled the doors open, stepped out, and grasped Blanchard by the coat with his left hand, his right fumbling the service revolver off his hip.
“What the hell’s going on?” Blanchard asked.
The guard drew him roughly inside the bank, holding the revolver pressed tightly against Blanchard’s ribs. The near funereal silence of three o’clock closing had dissolved now into excited murmurings, the scrape of chairs, and the slap of shoes on the marble flooring as the bank’s employees surged away from their desks. Cox ran out from behind his teller’s window, and the president of the Midwestern National Exchange Bank, Allard Hoffman, was at his heels. The teller held a piece of paper clenched in the fingers of his right hand, and his eyes were wide and excited; Hoffman looked angrily officious.
“He held me up,” Cox said breathlessly as they reached Blanchard and the guard. “Every bill I had over a five.”
Blanchard gave his head a small, numb shake. “I don’t believe this,” he said. He stared at Cox. “What’s the matter with you? You know I didn’t try to hold you up.”
“Look in his overcoat pockets, Sam,” Cox said. “That’s where he put the money.”
“You’re crazy,” Blanchard said incredulously.
“Go ahead, Sam, look in his pockets,” Hoffman said.
The guard instructed Blanchard to turn around, and to keep his hands upraised. His eyes still wide with amazement, Blanchard obeyed. The guard patted his pockets, frowned, and then made a thorough, one-handed search. A moment later he stepped back, his forehead corrugated with bewilderment akin to that of Blanchard’s; in his hand he held a thin pigskin wallet and seven rolls of pennies, nickels and dimes.
“This is all he’s got on him” he said.
“What?” Cox exploded. “Listen, Sam, I saw him put that money into his overcoat pockets.”
“Well, it’s not there now.”
“Of course it’s not there,” Blanchard said. He turned slightly, keeping his hands up, but his face was flushed with anger. “I told you I didn’t commit any robbery.”
Cox opened the folded piece of paper he held. “This is the note he gave me, Mr. Hoffman. Read it for yourself.”
Hoffman took the note. It had been fashioned of letters cut from a newspaper and glued to a sheet of plain white paper, and it said: Give me all your big bills, I have a gun. If you try any heroics, I’ll kill you. I’m not kidding. The bank president put voice to the message as he read it.
“He’s not carrying any weapon, either,” Sam said positively.
“I believed the note about that,” Cox said, “but I made up my mind to shout nonetheless. I just couldn’t stand by and watch him get away with the bank’s money.”
“I don’t know where you got that note,” Blanchard said to Cox, “but I didn’t give it to you. I handed you a slip of paper, that’s true enough, but it was just a list of those rolls of coins and you know it.”
“You claim Cox gave them to you?” Hoffman asked him.
“Certainly he did. In exchange for twenty-eight dollars, mostly in singles.”
“I didn’t give him any coin rolls,” Cox said with mounting exasperation. “I did exactly what it says in that note. I gave him every large bill I had in the cash drawer. The vault cart happened to be behind me too, since my cage was the only one open, and he told me to give him what was on that as well. He must have gotten twenty-five or thirty thousand altogether.”
“You’re a liar,” Blanchard snapped.
“You’re the only one who’s lying!”
“I don’t have your damned money. You’ve searched me and I don’t have it. All I’ve got is about twenty-four dollars in my wallet.”
“Well,” Hoffman said darkly, “somebody has it.”
At that moment two plainclothes detectives entered the bank, summoned by a hurried telephone call from one of the other Midwestern officials. They introduced themselves without preamble; one was named Salzberg, a lumbering and disheveled man with small, bright eyes; the other, named Flynn, was gray-mustached, the owner of a prominent veined nose.
Salzberg appeared to be the one in charge. He instructed the guard to lock the bank doors, and in a dog-eared notebook wrote Hoffman’s and Cox’s names, and Blanchard’s, taken from the driver’s license in the pigskin wallet. He took the holdup note from Cox, balancing it gingerly on the palm of his hand, then put it into an envelope which appeared from, and disappeared again into, an inside pocket of his rumpled suit.
He looked very surprised when Hoffman told him that Blanchard had been searched, and that the money had not been found on him. He said, “All right, let’s hear what happened.”
Cox related his version of the affair. Salzberg, writing laboriously in his notebook, didn’t interrupt. When the teller had finished, Salzberg turned to Blanchard. “Now, what’s your story?”
Blanchard told him about the rolls of coins. “I wanted them for a poker game some friends of mine and I set up for tonight.” He made a wry mouth. “I’m supposed to be the banker.”
“He also claims to have given Mr. Cox a list of what he wanted in the way of coins,” Hoffman said.
“The only note he gave me was that holdup note,” Cox said with thinly controlled anger. “He must have gotten those coins elsewhere, had them in his pocket when he came in here.”
Blanchard’s anger was just as thinly contained. He said to Salzberg, “Listen, why don’t you check his cage? That list of mine has got to be around here somewhere.” He glared at Cox. “Maybe you’ll even find your damned missing money. I’ve heard stories of embezzling tellers trying to frame an innocent—”