Then Mays was sitting up, one hand beneath Nudger’s shirt. There was amazement and rage in his contorted features. “You bastard! You’re wired! Everything we said’s been recorded!”
With strength exploding from this fresh infusion of rage, he lunged again at Nudger, trying for a chokehold. This time Nudger managed to bend his knee and place a foot against Mays’s soft midsection. He shoved hard and Mays grunted and lurched backward into a crouch, slamming into the wall and hitting his head hard. He glared at Nudger and felt around on the floor for one of the jagged pieces of the broken ashtray.
“Lose a contact lens?” Hammersmith asked. His bulk suddenly loomed over Mays. Two blue uniforms flanked him, behind Police Special revolvers aimed steady and ready at Mays.
“Did you get enough of that on tape?” Nudger asked, peeling adhesive strips and transmitter from his bare chest, wincing with pain.
“Every incriminating word,” Hammersmith said. He began reading Mays his rights as two more uniforms came in and jerked Mays to his feet, frisked him, and handcuffed his wrists behind his back.
“I didn’t have any choice about what I did,” Mays was saying, looking at Nudger now as if pleading for understanding and pity. “They knew about me, even if they didn’t realize it. The knowledge was out there, floating around like something rotten in their memories. It could have washed ashore on alcohol anytime, with any unexpected change in the current. I couldn’t live knowing that, so the three of them had to die.”
“Two out of three isn’t bad,” Hammersmith told him. “It might win you the gas chamber.”
Telex
Martin J. Miller, Jr
Martin J. Miller, Jr. is a private investigator in southern California. He has been in the field for over twenty years, and his company specializes in internal business crime. About “Telex” he writes, “This is my first serious attempt at fiction, although I have had numerous articles published in the field of military and ordnance history. Contacts within the banking industry assure me that the crime described in ‘Telex’ is theoretically possible. The second adventure of Mike McDermott and Quad Investigations is in the word processor.”
International Merchants Bank was head-quartered in the heart of downtown L.A., a thirty-story black glass box in the midst of a herd of glass boxes with little logos plastered around their tops. I met Robin Hendricks in the lobby as we had arranged on Friday at 2 P.M.
I had first met Robin three years ago. She was setting up a computer program for a client and I was doing the security survey for Quad Investigations. I’m one of four partners in a private-investigation firm specializing in business crime. We worked together on security for the computer system. Robin was employed by a local systems-analysis firm, Laidlaw. Our relationship now extended beyond business hours.
“Hi, Robin. Where’s this guy we’re supposed to see?”
“Our man’s on the twenty-seventh floor, Mike. Let’s go on up.”
In naval parlance, we were heading for officer country. If the twenty-seventh floor had been on an aircraft carrier, we would have just stepped onto the flag bridge and the admiral’s office would be straight ahead. Of course, I’d never seen a navy ship with plush pile carpet and real wood paneling. The admiral’s secretary was waiting for us at the receptionist’s desk.
“Miss Hendricks, Mr. McDermott? Mr. Naughton will see you now. Please follow me.” The admiral turned out to be Daniel J. Naughton, chief executive officer of International Merchants Bank. We weren’t going to see a mere task force commander; we were going to see the man who ran the whole bloody navy.
The only person in Naughton’s office was Daniel J. Naughton. I had seen pictures of Naughton in the business pages and occasionally in the “View” section of the L.A. Times at some function or charity ball. He looked more impressive in person. He was fifty-five to sixty and looked it, but he was in good shape. Gray hair, steel-rim glasses, six feet, maybe 220 pounds. His stomach didn’t sag. His eyes were clear, hard, penetrating. I didn’t think one could fool around with Daniel J. Naughton, at least for very long. One thing you learn as a cop or P.I. is to look at the eyes. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the eyes will tell you what’s going on inside.
Naughton shook hands and asked us to sit down. “Has Miss Hendricks explained the situation to you, Mr. McDermott?”
“No sir, only that it involves computer theft of some kind.”
“Good. I wanted to brief you myself. Miss Hendricks says that you and your firm are the best in your line of work. I checked on my own, she’s right. Quad Investigations has a good reputation. So do you. I know Miss Hendricks is good; her company charges me a thousand dollars a day for her and she’s worth every dime. She tracked down our problem in three weeks. We’d spent two months on it and had got nowhere.”
Naughton continued the briefing. Three months ago the Fed had pulled a major audit of the bank’s accounts. This happened when Congress started beating its gums about the latest headline, in this case a bank failure in Idaho. Naughton’s opinion of Congress wasn’t very high. I was beginning to like the man.
The audit had turned up a shortage of five million three. The bank rechecked, the Fed rechecked, and the shortage grew to five million seven. The bank examiners were not amused. Naughton was not amused. The audit department started over, still short. The head of the automated data processing department had left several weeks before the audit began, and the new man hadn’t had time to really get into the system.
Laidlaw was called. They had helped to install and set up the bank’s whole computer system several years before. Laidlaw sent Robin. Robin assumed that the simple answer was probably the correct one: if five million seven was missing, someone had taken it.
She started with the program. At the end of the first week she had determined that it had been tampered with. The bank had assumed it was an accounting error. Score one for Robin. At the end of the second week she knew how it had been done. More study of the computer system, some good old-fashioned gumshoe legwork, and a lucky break in the communication center had turned up the answer.
Over the years I had learned a lot about banking from Bob Johnson, one of my partners in Quad and a C.P.A. — things the average citizen never thinks about. Banks have very impressive vaults to store their money in. But that’s only for the green stuff. Most of a bank’s money doesn’t exist as actual dollars. It exists only in the ledgers. And in today’s world it really exists only in some computer memory-storage system. Banks whisk this money all around the country and around the world — thousands, millions, billions by data-transmission lines, microwave relay, communications satellites, computer to computer.
The banks keep a big pile of this “paper money” to handle all the transactions that occur each day. It’s called the “float.” Bank floats take in and put out whole bunches of money. Millions, billions if you count up all the different banks. Essentially, the banks have no immediate control over this float. So somewhere later on, float transactions are reconciled, and everything should balance. Sometimes they don’t. Think of your own checkbook. If people really knew how vulnerable their money was in the bank, they’d put it in a tin can and bury it in the backyard.
But while it isn’t hard to steal from the bank’s float, eventually the auditors will find out and begin to backtrack until they find where it went. If you are going to steal, you have to keep the bank from finding out or, if they do, from finding out where the money went. Then, you have to devise a way for your audit trail to get lost so you can actually turn that paper money into real dollars, green stuff.