“I doubt if she was in on it.”
“I know she was in on it.”
“If she was, why did she let him go to her father for the dough to cover up the shortage? Looks to me like that was putting it on a little too thick.”
“O.K. — it’s taken me all afternoon to figure that one out, and I had to question the father pretty sharp. He’s plenty bitter against Brent. All right, take it from their point of view, hers and Brent’s. They were short on the accounts, and they figured on a phoney hold-up that would cover their deficit, so nobody would even know there had been a shortage. The first thing to do was get the books in shape, and I’m telling you she made a slick job of that. She didn’t leave a trace, and if it wasn’t for her father, we’d never have known how much they were short. All right, she’s got to get those books in shape, and do it before you next check on her cash. That was the tough part, they were up against time, but she was equal to it, I’ll say that for her. All right, now she brings a spider in, and he slips in the vault and hides there. But they couldn’t be sure what was going to happen next morning, could they? He might get away with it clean, with that handkerchief over his face nobody could identify him, and then later she could call the old man up and say please don’t say anything, she’ll explain to him later, that Charles is horribly upset, and when the cops go to his house, sure enough he is. He’s in bed, still recovering from his operation, and all this and that — but no money anywhere around, and nothing to connect him with it.
“But look: They figure maybe he don’t get away with it. Maybe he gets caught, and then what? All the money’s there, isn’t it? He’s got five doctors to swear he’s off his nut anyway, on account of illness — and he gets off light. With luck, he even gets a suspended sentence, and the only one that’s out is her old man. She shuts him up, and they’re not much worse off than they were before. Well, thanks to a guy named Helm it all went sour. None of it broke like they expected — he got away, but everybody knew who he was, and Adler got killed. So now he’s wanted for murder — and robbery, and she’s held for the same.”
“Is she held?”
“You bet your sweet life she’s held. She doesn’t know it yet — she’s down at that hospital, with a little dope in her arm to quiet her after the awful experience she had, but there’s a cop outside the door right now, and tomorrow when she wakes up maybe she won’t look quite so sexy.”
I lay there with my eyes shut, wondering what I was going to do, but by that time my head was numb, so I didn’t feel anything any more. After a while I heard myself speak to him, “Lou?”
“Yeah?”
“I knew about that shortage.”
“...You mean you suspected it?”
“I knew—”
“You mean you suspected it!”
He fairly screamed it at me. When I opened my eyes he was standing in front of me, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets, his face all twisted and white. Lou is a pretty good-looking guy, big and thickset, with brown eyes and a golf tan all over him, but now he looked like some kind of a wild man.
“If you knew about it, and didn’t report it, there goes our bond! Don’t you get it, Bennett? There goes our bond!”
It was the first I had even thought of the bond. I could see it, though, the second he began to scream, that little line in fine type on the bond. We don’t make our people give individual bond. We carry a group bond on them, ourselves, and that line reads: “...The assured shall report to the Corporation any shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or theft on the part of any of their employees, within twenty-four hours of the time such shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or theft shall be known to them, or to their officers, and failure to report such shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or theft shall be deemed ground for the cancellation of this bond, and the release of the Corporation from liability for such shortage, embezzlement, defalcation, or shortage.” I felt my lips go cold, and the sweat stand out on the palms of my hands, but I went on:
“You’re accusing a woman of crimes I know damned well she didn’t commit, and bond or no bond, I’m telling you—”
“You’re not telling me anything, get that right now!”
He grabbed his hat and ran for the door. “And listen: If you know what’s good for you, you’re not telling anybody else either! If that comes out, there goes our fidelity bond and our burglary bond — we won’t get a cent from the bonding company, we’re hooked for the whole ninety thousand bucks, and — God, ninety thousand bucks! Ninety thousand bucks!”
He went, and I looked at my watch. It was nine o’clock. I called up a florist, and had them send flowers to Adler’s funeral. Then I went upstairs and went to bed, and stared at the ceiling trying to get through my head what I had to face in the morning.
XI
Don’t ask me about the next three days. They were the worst I ever spent in my life. First I went in to the Hall of Justice and talked to Mr. Gaudenzi, the assistant district attorney that was on the case. He listened to me, and took notes, and then things began to hit me.
First I was summoned to appear before the Grand Jury, to tell what I had to say there. I had to waive immunity for that, and boy, if you think it’s fun to have those babies tearing at your throat, you try it once. There’s no judge to help you, no lawyer to object to questions that make you look like a fool, nothing but you, the district attorney, the stenographer, and them. They kept me in there two hours. I squirmed and sweated and tried to get out of admitting why I put up the money for Sheila, but after a while they had it. I admitted I had asked her to divorce Brent and marry me, and that was all they wanted to know. I was hardly home before a long wire from Lou Frazier was delivered, telling me the bonding company had filed notice they denied liability for the money that was gone, and relieving me of duty until further notice. He would have fired me, if he could, but that had to wait till the Old Man got back from Honolulu, as I was an officer of the company, and couldn’t be fired until the Old Man laid it before the directors.
But the worst was the newspapers. The story had been doing pretty well until I got in it. I mean it was on the front page, with pictures and all kinds of stuff about clues to Brent’s whereabouts, one hot tip putting him in Mexico, another in Phoenix, and still another in Del Monte, where an auto-court man said he’d registered the night of the robbery. But when they had my stuff, they went hog wild with it. That gave it a love interest, and what they did to me was just plain murder. They called it the Loot Triangle, and went over to old Dr. Rollinson’s, where Sheila’s children were staying, and got pictures of them, and of him, and stole at least a dozen of her, and they ran every picture of me they could dig out of their files, and I cursed the day I ever posed in a bathing suit while I was in college, with a co-ed skinning the cat on each arm, in an “Adonis” picture for some football publicity.
And what I got for all that hell was that the day before I appeared before them, the Grand Jury indicted Sheila for alteration of a corporation’s records, for embezzlement, and for accessory to robbery with a deadly weapon. The only thing they didn’t indict her for was murder, and why they hadn’t done that I couldn’t understand. So it all went for nothing. I’d nailed myself to the cross, brought all my Federal mortgage notes to prove I’d put up the money, and that she couldn’t have had anything to do with it, and she got indicted just the same. I got so I didn’t have the heart to put my face outside the house, except when a newspaperman showed up, and then I’d go out to take a poke at him, if I could. I sat home and listened to the shortwave radio, tuned to the police broadcasts, wondering if I could pick up something that would mean they were closing in on Brent. That, and the news broadcasts. One of them said Sheila’s bail had been set at $7,500 and that her father had put it up, and that she’d been released. It wouldn’t have done any good for me to have gone down to put up bail. I’d given her all I had, already.