He shook his head sadly. “It’ll be a shame to lose it all again.”
I began walking around, looking at the collection more closely. “Hey, this may make you the most popular guy to visit in this bank.”
“That’d be nice,” he said wistfully.
I looked at him closely, ashamed at having pigeonholed him earlier and sorry to think that he was probably right in foretelling his own fate. I handed him the file I’d brought, hoping to cheer him up. “Well, maybe this’ll help. I’m here officially, and if you can throw any light at all on this, I’ll make sure the brass hears about it.”
He laughed and took the file, parking himself in his own guest chair to look it over. I described the circumstances in which we’d found the loot, how much there’d been, and how it had been bundled. He nodded as I spoke, studying the detailed inventory J.P. had drawn up.
“Well,” he finally said, “it certainly is unusual… Hey, you don’t happen to know whose signatures were on the 1934 notes, do you? You’ve got several of them listed here.”
I looked at him for a second, having forgotten he was a collector as well as a banker. “No; would they be worth a lot?”
“Not a lot-maybe double their face value. You’ve got some others I’d love to look at, too.”
I didn’t answer, not willing to make him promises I probably couldn’t keep.
He caught the implication and returned to the topic at hand. “I take it you sent the serial numbers to the Secret Service?”
I nodded.
“Considering the amount, they should be back to you pretty quick. If it was stolen, three hundred thousand must’ve made a dent in somebody’s pocket.”
“Couldn’t this be an aggravated version of stuffing cash into a mattress?”
Schimke looked doubtful. “Not like this. You’ve got both mint and used money here, but it’s all banded with official bank straps, complete with names and addresses. It looks to me like it came out of several banks in lump sums, and not from the tellers, either. They break the bands around the bundles as soon as they get them, to make the money easier to handle, and they rarely have more than one thousand dollars at one time anyhow, for security reasons. If this guy did stick up a series of banks, he didn’t go down the counters cleaning out the tills and collecting loose bills. All this came straight from the vaults.”
“But not from the same bank?” I asked. I regretted not having had the time to review Tyler’s file. My questions sounded foolish even to me.
But Schimke didn’t seem to notice or care. He shook his head affably. “Oh no. Any money that comes out of a bank legally is either loose or it’s strapped with that bank’s band. It doesn’t matter if it’s old or new money, since no matter where it comes from originally, it’s always recounted and rebanded by the receiver, even if it comes from a Fed bank. From what I can see from your list, this money came from banks in Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, California-”
“Nothing from the East?” I interrupted, struck by the locations of the states.
“No, which brings up something else. All mint notes originate from the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks, which then circulate them to surrounding private banks. In this area-in your own pocket, for instance-the really spanking-new money will be from the Fed bank in Boston, since it hasn’t had a chance to circulate far from where it was printed.”
I pulled a worn five-dollar bill from my wallet and looked at it. Schimke sidled over and pointed at the round emblem to the left of Lincoln’s portrait.
“That’s from San Francisco, but it’s been around a while, which is why you have to focus either on the straps or the mint notes to get a geographical fix on them. An old, loose note won’t tell you a thing. My point is that all the mint notes listed in your inventory were printed in the West or the Midwest. What you’ve got here”-he tapped the file J.P. had put together-“shows me the new money at least made a beeline from the Reserve bank to the local vault to your suspect.”
“Which implies,” I finished for him, “that he was out West when he collected it.”
Schimke’s eyes were shining by now. “That’s what the mint notes imply, but that’s the funny part; it tells you only that he was out West. It doesn’t even pin down a particular state. I mean, if he had held up one bank, all the bands would be the same. And if he’d hit an armored car, the bands might be different, but they still wouldn’t be from banks thousands of miles apart. It’s a little hard to make sense of it.”
“Unless he robbed a series of banks, like you said, or maybe got cash as payment for something.”
“Yeah-like drugs or racketeering.”
I remained silent, not wanting to encourage too much speculation in someone outside the department. But I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t hit on something. In our naïveté, we’d really focused on Fuller only as a bank robber.
Schimke stood up suddenly, struck by something in the file. “I’ll be damned; I missed this before.” He punched the columns of figures with his fingertip for emphasis. “This might nail down the exact date all this money was collected. Look-while all the older notes are 1963 issues or earlier, only the mint ones are ’69s…”
“Implying that they were taken out of the bank that year.”
“Right. I mean, sometimes you can get mint bills from a smaller, low-volume bank up to a year or so after issue, but everyone of these is crisp, no matter which bank they came from.”
“What percentage of the total is mint in that list?”
He was positively gleeful by now. “That’s the whole point; it’s very high, like thirty percent or so. That would never happen unless the Fed had just released a new printing to be distributed throughout the system. And the fact that the mint samples come from several banks in different states clinches it. I can’t tell you what happened, but it was definitely in 1969.”
I thanked Richard Schimke profusely, vowed him to silence concerning our conversation, and encouraged him to hang tough on his office decor.
When I returned to the station, Harriet was looking pleased with herself. “One down, one to go. The state police dropped off their metal detector ten minutes ago, and the rental place said theirs would be available in an hour, guaranteed. I’ve already told most of the squad to be here by then. Ron, of course, won’t be available.”
I thanked her, then turned, to find J. P. Tyler standing by my office door, a thick file in his hand. “What’s up?”
He handed me the file. “It’s a preliminary report on our forensics search. It doesn’t have any of the state crime lab results yet, but it lists what we found and where we found it. The photographs are arranged from start of search to end, and they’re indexed to the report and the map of the place. I’m afraid you won’t find much.”
I took the file to my desk and opened it before me. I didn’t doubt Tyler’s opinion. I’d been through Fuller’s place twice by now and was pretty sure it was almost as bare as a clean motel room. Nevertheless, I always valued the search report, since it organized a place according to its tiniest details, ignoring the distracting environmental influences that could make your eye skim over a small but important item.
So it was with a cautious curiosity that I pored over the results of yesterday’s hours of crawling with tweezers, sticky tape, and a magnifying glass, seeing for the first time all of our separate findings organized in a logical manner.
I quickly understood what Tyler had meant. Even microscopically, Fuller’s place had been pretty sterile. Hair, dirt, and fingerprint samples were all consistent with a house that had sheltered only one person for a long time, and a lot of intruders just recently. Tyler had even gone the extra yard by determining the hair colors of the search team, the ambulance crew, and Fred Coyner, so that any stray samples could be properly accounted for.