Norbit nodded. “We’ll have to wait till this large check clears,” he warned me, but it was just routine. He thought I was a real operator now.
“I’ll come by and pick up your cashier’s check for the entire amount on Wednesday morning. How’ll that be?”
He nodded again.
On Wednesday morning, when I left for the office it was with an overnight bag in my hand containing the minimum clothing and equipment for a flight to Brazil. That’s where I intended to go to find my caviar, champagne, and slender women. I had a confirmed Pan-American reservation on the one-thirty flight to Rio, made two weeks previously. I’d told Hilda I was going out of town on bank business that afternoon for overnight. When I kissed her goodbye, it was with an overwhelming sense of relief that from now on I’d never have to do it again, never have to pretend again to enjoy her silly ham and cabbage and macaroni casserole.
I worked calmly at the bank until the noon hour. Then I cashed a check on my account there that nearly cleaned it out, just for current expenses. Chicken feed to hold me until my cashier’s check was comfortably cashed in Brazil.
I went out to the Farmer’s Bank, picked up my cashier’s check, stowed it in my wallet, and left, thanking Mr. Norbit politely. I now had parlayed a small piece of engraved paper that didn’t even belong to me into a hundred and sixty thousand dollars’ cash.
I drove to the airport, savoring my triumph, put the car in the parking lot and went into the waiting room. It was one-fifteen.
At one-twenty, they called my flight. I rose from my secluded seat in the waiting room and started for the loading gate.
That’s when I saw Hilda.
She was hurrying toward me from the entrance, a tentative smile on her face and a tall, yellow-eyed man in tow.
She came up to me and said happily, “Chester!” She drew the tall man forward by an arm. “This is my husband, Chester Carstairs,” she introduced us. “And this is Lieutenant Randall from the Detective Bureau, darling.”
My heart sank in my chest like a wobbly duck in a downdraft. “Detective!” was all I could get out.
Hilda nodded brightly. “Lieutenant Randall wants to arrest you, darling,” she said. “Mr. Norbit and I asked him to.”
Randall put a firm hand on my arm. I was stunned, completely at a loss. But one thing was sure: I was done for. I could never explain away the duplicate stock certificates.
In the police car, on the way into town, I said to Lieutenant Randall, “How did Norbit get wise, will you please tell me that?” I felt put upon and indignant.
It was Hilda who answered my question.
“Oh, Mr. Norbit didn’t guess for a minute anything was wrong, Chester. Not until I telephoned him.”
I couldn’t believe it. She was a moron about money. “How did you happen to call Mr. Norbit? You never heard of the man!”
“That’s right, darling. Not until this morning. Not until that funny thing came in the mail.”
“What funny thing?”
“That bank statement, or whatever you call it. From the wrong bank, Chester. Don’t you see?”
Gloomily I reflected that it’s the little routine details that trip you up every time. I’d forgotten about monthly bank statements. Me — a banker. I croaked, “The wrong bank?”
“Of course. You work at the First National, silly. I know that much. And our only bank account has been there, naturally. But this morning you got a statement from the Farmer’s Bank. I thought it was a mistake, so I opened it. And you know what, darling? It showed that a Chester Carstairs at our address had more than a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in an account there!” Hilda gulped. “I knew very well you couldn’t have as much money as that! You’re always telling me I have to skimp. So I was sure it was a mistake. I just simply called the Farmer’s Bank and told them so.”
“And you talked to Mr. Norbit, I suppose?”
“Why, yes, and he was very nice. When I told him who I was, he said, ‘Oh, the lady whose Intercontinental stock we’re holding as security for some loan we made your husband.’ ”
“And then you told him it couldn’t be your stock, because it had burned up and you’d just received a new certificate?”
“Well, I didn’t understand why he wanted to know, but I couldn’t just politely refuse to tell him, could I?”
“No, I suppose not,” I said wearily.
“Especially,” Hilda went on, “when he told me you were probably leaving the country right that minute with my money and his too, and not even taking me with you!”
In a weary, injured tone I said, “And you believed him? You’d really think that—”
“I thought it was a possibility, Chester,” she said defensively, “because one of the cancelled checks that came with that bank statement this morning was made out to Pan-American Airways. And it seemed like a lot too much money to pay for the little short trip you’d told me you were taking today. So when I told Mr. Norbit about that—”
“That’s enough, Hilda,” I said. “Don’t go on.” I lapsed into miserable silence. Lieutenant Randall looked at me and grinned.
“Smart girl,” he said, jerking his head toward Hilda.
Hilda was crying now.
“I didn’t want you to leave me, Chester,” she wailed. “I love you — you know that.”
“So you betrayed me to the police?”
Hilda sniffed.
“Yes,” she said solemnly. “This won’t make any difference to me, Chester, I promise you. When you come out of prison, I’ll be waiting for you.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. Sadly I said farewell forever to my dream of caviar, champagne, and slender girls. For me there would never be anything but ham and cabbage, macaroni casserole, and Hilda. If or when I ever get out.
Copyright © 1966 by LeMarg Publishing Corp.
The Mechanical Heart
by Pauline C. Smith
Theirs was a Victorian lifestyle in almost modern dress...
When Mother phoned to tell me Father was to have heart surgery, my immediate thought was: I didn’t know he had a heart — a set of principles, a book of rules, a list of laws perhaps — but a heart? Mother’s calm and proper voice explained in dignified and impersonal terms the reason for the operation and the function of the pacemaker that was to be implanted.
“I’ll get the first plane out,” I promised in a voice as serenely composed as hers. My parents still did this to me, even after ten years of marriage. The minute I made contact, I was their ladylike daughter, with rigid back, fixed smile, feelings nicely buttoned up.
Father’s heart surgery was carried out with Mother’s and my hands folded suitably on our laps; no wailing, no weeping, not even a single heavy sigh to break the proper decorum.
His recovery was handled just as punctiliously with our twice-daily visits to the hospital, Mother at one side of his bed, I at the other, each speaking softly — not about the operation, but about the weather and other insignificant subjects.
Those weeks at home were for me a time of exceeding boredom to which my conditioned reflexes responded so that when sitting I sat straight, with ankles primly crossed, and when standing my legs were puritanically close together.
Mother whiled away the hours writing gracious little thank-you notes for the flowers and cards she’d received. I whiled mine away in my old room, browsing through the artifacts I’d left there.
The most significant of the memorabilia I’d left there seemed to me to be the gloves — short white dancing-school gloves, elbow-length formal gloves. Gloves had been very important when I was young. Cover up, mitten up, don’t let your fingers show — your skin, your pores, your feelings. Don still teases me about leaving my gloves on the first night we spent in a motel, when we were college seniors and left the prom for less formal and more intimate pleasures — which is not true, of course.