Snider, he realized, had known the personal habits inside that neighborhood bank as well as he’d known his own; he’d had his savings account there for twenty years. Because business picked up during the lunch hour, most of the employees took their lunch break after one o’clock, so the usual force from one to two was two tellers and the assistant manager. There were a front and a rear entrance. Customers were no more than occasional during that interval. Without showing the faintest ingeniousness, Snider had slipped on a rubber mask and thin leather gloves and gone in the back entrance carrying a plastic bag. He’d herded all three employees into an open vault. He’d taken what money he could find in there, closed the door, then taken all the money from the tellers’ cages. He’d done it in roughly four minutes, during which time not another soul had stepped into that bank. Then he’d run out and down an alley where he’d disappeared.
The clue to identity, beyond the employees’ description of his slight and short build, had been Geblick’s ticket to the robber: an old leather watchband which had broken during the little man’s haste to collect that eighty-seven thousand. The watch had been found just inside the back entrance. On the back had been engraved “To Artie from Ma.”
Artie Snider had not denied the watch was his when Geblick had focused ownership down to him. He’d simply claimed that he’d been in the bank late that morning, which he had.
During the trial, Geblick had claimed that Snider had been doing a last minute casing of the bank. The defense attorney, Barstow, had accused Geblick of seeking a quick and easy arrest for a robbery he couldn’t honestly solve. The jury had seen fit to believe Barstow and Snider.
Now the trial was over, Snider had been acquitted, and he was dead. But his guilt, Geblick thought, is still real, and that note proves it. Geblick reached inside his jacket pocket and took it out to read the message again.
Having done so, he carried the clean sheets back to the little house, made the bed, and began taking the house apart.
During the next days, he ate canned food warmed on Snider’s old stove. He slept in Snider’s bed. He removed every fiber-board, which comprised the walls, from the interior. There was no basement, but he was able to crawl through a small opening underneath the kitchen and, with a flashlight, search all of the ground down there as well as the surfaces between the floor joists. He found nothing.
He nailed the fiberboards back, then walked with dark and scowling features through the house again. As he stopped in the small bathroom, he felt a sudden surge of fury at himself for having missed the obvious simply because he’s been thinking about how he would fake some kind of injury so that he could have disability money coming in as well as the retirement, then move down to Guayama or Mazatlán where he could turn that eighty-seven grand he was going to find into a fortune. Jaw muscles jerking, he lifted the cover of the commode and saw a note taped to the bottom surface. He removed it and unfolded the paper, which carried the message:
SINCE YOU FIGURED WHERE THIS WAS, GEBLICK, FIGURE WHAT PATTY THE MILKMAID MEANS.
“Peloski,” Geblick said into the telephone in the booth two blocks from the little house, “what have we got on Patty the Milkmaid?”
“You don’t quit even when you’re on vacation, do you, Geblick?”
“What’s on her?”
“What’s she in?”
“Dope, maybe. Shoplifting. I don’t know. I’m telling you to find out. She sounds like a broad in the Tenderloin. Get on it, Peloski. I’ll check with you in an hour.”
An hour later Geblick listened to Peloski saying, “All we got is Patty the Cow.”
“Which?”
“Cow. She’s in the Tenderloin, all right — she’s a hooker,” Peloski said.
Geblick was sweating. He kicked open the door of the booth to get air. “You sure that’s it, Peloski?”
“All except Jones. He said for you to try Aesop.”
“Aesop? We got a make on him?”
“Nah, I looked.”
“So what’s Jones talking about?”
“Who knows? He said that, then just shut his mouth and grinned. You know, like he does. He’s queer.”
“You’re not kidding.”
In the small house again, Geblick surveyed the contents of the tiny kitchen cupboard. There was only one object possibly large enough to contain a sheaf of currency. He removed a box of salt and tore it apart savagely, then watched angrily as salt spilled onto a counter. He threw the empty carton against the wall.
Eyes thinned, he moved through the house reexamining. Patty the Milkmaid, he thought. Maybe it didn’t make any sense whatever — because Snider was surely crazy enough to have written anything. Yet he’d been wise enough, Geblick thought, to have left his notes in places where an experienced detective would find them.
He returned to the bedroom and stared at the books there. He’d already gone through them, one by one, opening each to check for a hollow inside. So, no, he found, nothing there...
His good eyes found it then, on the spine of a thin volume bound in black leather. Aesop.
He yanked the book out, opened it, and studied one fable after another, until he reached the one entitled “The Milkmaid and Her Pail.” It was, he slowly discovered, a tale about Patty going to market with a milk pail on her head, planning the rewards she would achieve with the profits from selling the milk — after which she spilled it.
Geblick read the moral of the story at the end:
“DO NOT COUNT YOUR CHICKENS BEFORE THEY ARE HATCHED.”
Geblick blinked. He licked his lips. He hunched his huge shoulders. Then he saw the thin lines which had been drawn under several of the letters. He said them aloud: “OCRERD.”
He went down the block and bought a bottle of whisky and returned to the small living room. After he’d finished his first glass, after his mind had started to function more imaginatively, he began to hear Snider’s high, rasping voice calling to him: “Ocrerd, Geblick! You’ve been ocrerd!”
With three glasses of whisky gone, he got up abruptly an lurched his way to the door. He went to the phone booth down the street and found the number of the city library. He dialed and asked for the reference librarian, who answered in a wispish, precise voice, “May I help you?”
“I want to know what’s happened to me if I’ve been ocrerd,” Geblick said.
“I beg your pardon,” the librarian answered haughtily.
“What I want,” Geblick said, trying to control his temper, “is to find out what it means to be ocrerd. Isn’t that reasonable? Don’t you have a dictionary, lady?”
“Yes,” the librarian said. “But I won’t be shouted at.”
“I’m not shouting!” Geblick said, forcing his voice down. “What does it mean?”
“How do you spell it?”
Geblick told her. There was silence. Then the woman said: “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t mean anything?”
“It isn’t a word. I even looked in the slang dictionary, a dreadful book, really. And it isn’t there either. Whatever’s happened to you, it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
“Oh, it doesn’t, doesn’t it!”
“Not in the dictionary it doesn’t.”
“You’re shouting, lady.”