Kenneth Robeson
Tuned for Murder
CHAPTER I
Dollars on Wings
The man stood on the downtown corner doing things that no one had ever seen done before. Outrageous, crazy things you might have expected to see done in an institution where the windows are barred and the walls are padded, but never on a street corner in the financial section of a respectable city.
Garfield City was extremely respectable, as towns go. It was in southern New York State in a hill region where quarries, mines and farming produced a lot of wealth. It was filled with well-to-do people and middle-class people. A sober-sided, reputable city of ninety thousand inhabitants, it distinctly was not in the habit of having men stand on its corners and do such things.
If the man had been an ordinary citizen, it would not have been so perplexing. But he was not an ordinary citizen.
He was about sixty, with a Palm Beach tan showing over the velvet collar of a lightweight spring topcoat, for which he had probably paid some tailor a couple of hundred dollars. He was portly, impressive in appearance, and had a dominating eye. He looked like “big time.” But he wasn’t acting like “big time.”
He was standing on the downtown corner occupied by the Garfield City National Bank. He had a sheaf of one-dollar bills in his right hand. Sticking out of both overcoat pockets were more one-dollar bills. Sticking up from the overcoat collar at the back of his neck were still more.
He was handing out a dollar — and a comment — to every person who passed him on the sidewalk. The walk had been crowded enough before, since it was noon and in the heart of the city. It was more crowded now, with the advent of free one-dollar bills.
People were lined up for a block in a gaping, puzzled but expectant queue. Other people, hundreds, stood and stared, held back by policemen whose faces were studies of pain and indecision. Now and then one would start toward the man with the dollar bills; then he’d turn back to keeping the crowd in order.
Plainly, they didn’t know what to do. Nobody knew what to do.
A woman got to the man on the corner. She was a very large woman, with a very small silver-fox neckpiece.
“Compliments of the Garfield City National Bank,” said the man on the corner, handing the woman a crisp, new dollar. He looked at the fur neckpiece. “Your necklace seems to have gotten moldy, madam.”
The woman gasped angrily. But she wasn’t too angry to take the dollar. She grabbed it and went on, muttering to herself, but with eyes that were almost scared.
A man with a dog was next. He was a large man. The dog was very small and looked even smaller in the crook of the man’s beefy arm. The dog howled suddenly.
“And here is your dollar, sir,” said the man on the corner. “Compliments of the Garfield Bank. You might buy a new dog with it — something that looks more like a dog and less like a four-legged mustache.”
“Why, you—” began the man.
He was elbowed out of the way by a too-thin shopgirl with eyes only for the next extended dollar.
“With best wishes of the Garfield City Bank,” said the man. “Buy a bottle of olives with it. Swallow them one at a time, whole, and you can go to a masquerade as a string of beads.”
The thin girl flounced off. But she didn’t refuse the dollar. The parade went on, with each person getting a nice new dollar bill and a nasty crack.
Compliments of the Garfield City National Bank. Well, the man had a right to mouth those words.
He had more of an audience than showed on the street. In the bank building behind him, eight feet up from the sidewalk and barred like the U.S. Mint, was a window. In the window were clustered all nine executives of the bank.
“We’ve got to get him away from there,” moaned the vice president in charge of new accounts. “He’ll ruin the bank’s prestige. And once a bank’s prestige is ruined, the bank is nothing but a pile of marble and old bronze.”
“He’s crazy,” nodded the cashier, eyes tortured.
One of the others looked scared.
“You mean eccentric, don’t you?” he said. “I’d be careful, saying the president, himself, is crazy.”
“Look,” said the cashier, “what’s the craziest thing a — a farmer, for instance, could do?”
“I don’t know,” said the other. “Pull out the crops and cultivate the weeds, I suppose.”
“What’s the craziest thing a salesman could do?”
“Take a consignment of salt-dried herring to the desert to sell, or something.”
“Now, what’s the craziest thing a banker could do?”
“Give away money,” nodded the other.
“So,” said the cashier, “that man out there, whether or not he is president of the Garfield City National Bank, is stark crazy!”
“He’ll put the bank out of business,” bleated the vice president in charge of new accounts. “Can’t somebody do something?”
“How about you doing something?”
“Oh, no!” said the vice president. “He might wake up tomorrow and not be crazy. And then I wouldn’t have my job.”
“He never showed any signs of mental instability before,” said the vice president in charge of loans. “Whatever it is that set him off, must have happened to him today. Was he here in the bank all morning?”
The cashier shook his head. “He went out to the Garfield Gear Company about a new short-term loan they want. You know how he handles them himself because Jenner, the president, is a friend of his.”
“That’s all he did?”
“That’s all. And there’s nothing about a visit to Garfield Gear to make a man act the way he’s acting.”
Outside, the line was three blocks long, and the bank president was reaching for the bills stuck in his overcoat collar. He was almost out.
“For you, sir,” he said, handing one to a young fellow in a checkered cap. “Compliments of the bank. And why don’t you wash your ears? Then you wouldn’t have to try to hide them with a hideous-looking thing like that cap.”
“I’ll take a sock—” snarled the young man.
He saw a cop looking at him, and slunk off. The cop turned his perspiring face toward a brother cop.
“We’ll have to run him in, Casey. There ain’t anything else to do.”
“You do it, then,” was the prompt reply. “Me — I’m not takin’ John R. Blandell, president of the Garfield Bank, to the cooler.”
“We don’t have to take him to the cooler. We could take him to a brain doc.”
“I’m not goin’ to accuse a bank president of bein’ nuts, either.”
The portly president turned with all the dignity of a multimillionaire to a ragged, gaping newsboy, standing at his elbow.
“Go into the bank, please,” he directed. “Tell them Mr. Blandell wants more dollar bills. New dollar bills. Thousands and thousands of them.”
“Gee! Yes, sir,” breathed the boy.
He darted in through the bronze revolving doors. And the bank guard caught his arm.
“You! What did Mr. Blandell send you in for?”
“More dough,” said the boy. “He’s about shot all his dollar bills.”
“Naturally,” said the guard, “he’ll get no more bills. You stay in here.”
In the window, the bank executives were getting more worried than ever. They were experienced in crowd psychology. They could read in people’s faces the things the people were beginning to say, out there.
“Hey! I’ve got my cash in that bank,” a man said, beginning to edge toward the revolving door. “I don’t want any money in a madhouse like that. If the president’s goofy, what about the rest? I’m going to take my money out, fast.”
“Me, too,” said his neighbor. “Maybe it’s some of my dollars he’s passing out!”