“It looks genuine,” I said.
“Exactly.” He was very smug.
“Except for one thing.”
He looked at me sharply. “What’s that?”
“Max Gilian was in Sing Sing prison six months ago.”
Mr. Ambrose George stopped looking smug. The smile dissolved from his mouth and his jaw went perpendicular. He was not at all happy. His chair had suddenly become very uncomfortable and he squirmed around, shifting his center of gravity. His Adam’s apple made a slow and painful round trip. This was precisely the sort of thing that banks constantly dreaded.
He regarded me warily. “You can prove this?” he asked anxiously.
“Absolutely.”
He threw his hands up. “I can't understand it. I’d swear those two signatures are identical. I... I’m afraid I don’t know what to say.”
“How about the attendant who was in charge of the vault at the time?”
He referred to the slip of paper. “Kevin Graham.”
“Can I speak to him?”
“Mr. Graham is no longer employed by the bank.”
I raised one eyebrow. “Fired?”
Ambrose George had suddenly become very much interested in my necktie. “Graham resigned about four months ago.” He was deliberately avoiding my gaze.
“Can you tell me where he lives?” I asked.
He hesitated. “Well, now...”
“It may help us to avoid unpleasant publicity.”
He reached for the phone again and spoke into the mouthpiece. He cradled the instrument and picked up a pencil and wrote out an address for me. I stood up and straightened my hat.
“I imagine this thing can be worked out somehow,” I said.
His nod was vague and committed the bank to nothing. He was staring thoughtfully into space when I left his bottom lip bulging behind his tongue.
Kevin Graham’s address could have been one block away for all I knew. I’m a stranger in Newark, so I took a cab. It was a disconcerting experience. They had bumped the rates and needled the clocks. I watched the meter tick my nickels away until the cab stopped on the outskirts of town.
It was a small frame house, well tended, recently painted, with a neat garden. I moved up the walk and I saw the black crepe hanging from the door and I had a premonition. The shades were drawn, but I could hear the quiet rumble of voices. I removed my hat and knocked.
The door opened and a blade-thin man with a long somber face looked out at me. He smiled tentatively. “How do you do,” he said. “Come in.”
I followed him through a foyer into the living room. A coffin sat upon a wheeled stand in the center of the room. The lid was drawn back. I saw the dead face of a man in his fifties, with shrunken temples and mortician’s rouge on the flat cheeks. The face meant nothing to me. I had never seen the man before.
About ten people, mostly men, were deployed around the body on folding chairs. There was silence while they stared at me incuriously for a moment, and then they continued to converse in low tones.
I was attending a wake.
The man beside me pulled out a plug of tobacco, bit off a chunk, started to put it away, reconsidered, and offered me some. I shook my head. He regarded me along the side of his nose curiously.
“You from the bank?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Friend of Kevin’s?”
I nodded sadly.
“Tough,” he said. “I hope they catch the hit-and-run driver that nailed him.” He shook his head. “Poor Kevin. He was carrying a bit of a load and he never seen them headlights. Plunk! Clouted him into the right field bleachers.”
He pulled a flat pint of Irish from his pocket, coupled it to his main intake, and irrigated his throat. He shoved the bottle at me. “Shot of whiskey, mister?”
I accepted the offer. Drinking with a man is the best way to gain his confidence. One small swallow was enough. It must have been distilled from old dynamite and I felt like an amateur sword swallower. The mumble of voices continued around us. Smoke hung like a disembodied cloud over the corpse. The room was nicely furnished. A thirty inch television set stood in one corner and the floor was soft with broad-loom.
“Where did the accident happen?” I asked.
My informant wiped his lips, recapped the bottle, and tucked it away. “Right outside. Not ten feet from his own front yard.” He heaved a melancholy sigh. “Hell of a way for a fightin’ Irishman to go. And so soon after he came into a bit of money.”
“Money?”
“From his Aunt Emily, saints preserve her, who passed away in the old country.”
I looked properly respectful. “When was that?”
“ ’Bout five — six months ago.”
“How’s the family taking it?”
No answer. He hesitated. He peered at me sharply, suddenly remote, suspicion incubating in his eyes. “You ask a lot of questions, friend. You a cop?”
“Me?” I put my back up as if I’d been insulted. I pointed to my feet. “Do I look like a cop?” A double wrinkle of doubt appeared over his nose. I said, “It’s just that I didn’t know Kevin very well. I met him in the tavern a couple of times and we knocked off a few together.”
That reminded him and he got out his bottle and took a long pull. I had one too. What my stomach needed was a special lining installed by the Bethlehem Steel Company. My informant produced a handkerchief and blew his nose violently.
“Ah,” he murmured, “poor Kevin. No family at all. Nobody but his friends to mourn for him.”
I nodded sympathetically. After a moment I stood up and paid my last respects. Then I departed.
Fifteen minutes passed before I could flush a cab out there in the suburbs. The cab took me to the railroad station and I ran for a train. Rattling along under the Hudson River I thought: Like hell it was an accident. Somebody pointed an automobile straight at Kevin Graham and gunned the engine.
This was a driver who really had a motive to run.
I concentrated. I took the known facts and weighed them against probabilities. I sifted and speculated and added an inference or two, and the case began to shape up. If only I could fill in one or two little pieces.
The scheme was a beaut, conjured with imagination and daringly executed.
The train took me to Manhattan. I got out of Penn Station at 33rd Street and went straight to Gracie Square. There was a doorman on duty this time. He performed and I went through. The elevator took me up to Lucille Gilian’s apartment and I rang the bell. I rang it long and hard.
She wasn’t home.
I extracted two ten dollar bills from my wallet on the way down. I tapped on the pane of glass and beckoned to the doorman and he joined me in the lobby. I fanned out the bills and hung them under his nose. He maintained a calm front, but his eyes were greedy.
“A bonus,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Easily earned.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you answer a few questions?”
He was willing. Money is the best tongue loosener I know. I pumped him about Lucille Gilian and he came up with answers. She was a mighty fine lady. Didn’t skate around with a lot of men at all. Concentrated mostly on one boy friend, a fine-looking gentleman. The doorman had used his eyes and he gave me a good description.
It fitted. Perfectly.
I tucked the double sawbuck into his breast pocket and walked out. There was a drug store on the corner. I went in and patronized the telephone booth. The switchboard operator at Max Gilian’s hotel put me through.
“How do you feel, Max?” I asked.
“Lousy. Did you find my two hundred grand?”