The paunchy young man drained the glass and set it on the bookcase. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “On our way, Weldon. This very minute.” He came over and held his hand out to Helen. She took it shyly. He said, “Sorry we had to bother you this way, Mrs. Weldon, but you know how those things are.” He gave Tom a bleak look. “You got you a good lady here, friend. Come on, Willy.”
They clumped heavily down the stairs. Tom heard one of them chuckle at something the other one said as they went out the front door. He walked to the front windows and watched the car move slowly down the street.
“They’ve got no right,” Tom said in a thick voice.
“It’s something they had to do. They explained that. Darling, have you had anything at all to eat?”
“No, but I couldn’t eat anything.”
“You must. You look so dreadful, so tired. Scrambled eggs, maybe. Bacon?”
“I... guess so.”
“Come out to the kitchen and tell me about all this while I fix it, honey. What makes them think you could do anything — crooked?”
“My furtive expression, I guess.” He sat at the kitchen table and lighted a cigarette. He said, “I’ll tell you the facts. It’s what they’re going by. In a crazy way, I don’t blame them.”
It didn’t take long to tell her. The eggs were done and she was putting them on the plate when he finished. Frowning, she walked to the table and sat down.
“And Vic doesn’t believe you?”
“No.”
She said fiercely, “When they find out you didn’t do it, Tom, neither one of us will ever speak to him again.”
He felt the sting in his eyes. “I half expected you to wonder whether I—”
“Tom!”
“Well, I have been kind of lousy lately — yammering at you, going off in my little private huff.”
“But I know you. I know you couldn’t steal.”
“And I know I didn’t. So where did the money go? Evaporation? Hundreds and fifties. Wrapped. A little pack. Easy to hide. They had me strip, you know. And went through my locker.” His voice had gone shrill, harsh.
“Please, Tom. Please. Don’t do that to yourself. You have to think, you know. You didn’t take the money. You didn’t give it to that girl. Somebody took it. It didn’t walk away.”
“We went over that during my — interview. There are a lot of slick tricks. Every teller knows that. Bent pins and adhesive tape and chewing gum on the end of a cane. It gets to be second nature to be conscious of the money, to make sure it’s well back from the cage opening. There’s always a slicker who’s willing to try it.”
“Can you remember any other strangers who came to your window?”
“We had the usual last-minute rush, from quarter of three until closing. There were several strangers. Nothing special about them. One with a traveler’s check. One at the wrong window. Others, probably. I can’t remember. You see, I didn’t know then that it was going to be important to remember.”
“And you didn’t notice that the stack of bills was gone until you started to balance out for the day?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“When was the last time you did any housekeeping behind your window?”
“Around two thirty, I think. If the money had been gone then, I think I would have noticed it. Just noticed the physical lack of it.”
“Was the whole stack gone?”
“One whole stack.”
Helen and Tom sat up and went over it again and again. He was sick with emotional fatigue. Finally Helen said, “We’re not making sense any more. We’ve got to sleep, darling.”
He thought he would be unable to sleep. But sleep came over him like a black tide in flood. When he woke up, it was morning, and Helen was up. He heard the kids chattering in the kitchen. He knew he should go out and speak to them, go out with a morning smile and a confident manner. But somehow he couldn’t quite manage it. He waited until he heard Helen at the door with them, giving Tommy the usual morning admonition not to let his sister cross the streets without holding her hand. He heard the staccato sound of their feet on the wooden stairs, heard the front door slam lustily.
When he went out to breakfast, his high-school yearbook was beside his glass of orange juice. He frowned at it and then suddenly grinned at Helen. “You’re a smart kid.”
“I thought if you could find her you could tell them her name, and then they could find out you didn’t lie.”
He sat there at the breakfast table and went through all the pictures. He could not find her among the graduates. Concealing his sense of dismay, acting confident for Helen’s sake, he turned to the group pictures in the back, pictures that had been taken during the school year.
“Come here,” he said. “This one. Right here.”
“Are you absolutely certain, dear?”
“Let me see. The names are down here. Second row. Third from the left. One, two, here it is. Martha Dolvac.”
He phoned police headquarters and asked for Lieutenant Durand. There was a long wait after he gave his name. “Lieutenant? This is Tom Weldon.”
“Did your wife give you the right steer? Ready to talk?”
“I haven’t got any confession, if that’s what you mean. I want to give you a name. The dark-haired woman in the bar. Martha Dolvac. Maybe you could trace her from the Briggs High School records.”
“If you didn’t make up the name.”
“I’ve got a picture of her here. Out of my yearbook. I think I remember that she was a junior when I was a senior. Will you check it?”
“Sure. And suppose it nails it a little tighter, Weldon?”
“It won’t,” Tom said, trying to make his voice sound confident. He hoped that it did. “Will you let me know?”
“You want to come in this morning and give us the straight story?”
“You’ve had the straight story, Lieutenant.”
Tom hung up quickly, the palms of his hands sweaty. Even if he straightened out the distorted version of that conversation at Tige’s Grill, it didn’t solve how the money disappeared.
He took a sheet of white paper and a ruler and made a scale drawing of his cage, looking down at it from above. After the years he had spent in the cage, he could remember every detail of it. It was roughly six feet by five feet. On the window side, where he faced the public, it was five feet across. The wall was eight feet high, with the bronze grille set into it. There was a three-and-a-half-inch gap between the bottom of the window and the counter, but the grille could be unlatched from the inside and swung outward to permit the passage of bulky items. Inside his cubicle there was a counter on each side of him, with his cash drawer under the counter on his right. He usually stacked the bills on the counter above the cash drawer. The change machine was between the stacked currency and the barred window. The sides of his cubicle, of wire mesh in a three-quarter-inch diamond pattern, were about six feet high.
At the rear of his cage was a wire door which could only be opened from the inside. He remembered the days when the front wall, between the windows, had been of wood. It had given the tellers too much of a closed-in feeling, so it had been changed to heavy, shatterproof plate glass.
On his detailed sketch he marked the location of the stack of bills which had disappeared. It had been, he remembered, a stack of wrapped packets, with a rubber band encircling the stack.
Helen stood beside him and examined the drawing. “We’ll say the money was there at two thirty?”
“I can’t be sure of that. I just think it was. It could have been gone.”