The Complete Crime Stories (31 page)

Money and the Woman (The Embezzler)

I

I
first met her when she came over to the house one night, after calling me on the telephone and asking if she could see me on a matter of business. I had no idea what she wanted, but supposed it was something about the bank. At the time, I was acting cashier of our little Anita Avenue branch, the smallest of the three we've got in Glendale, and the smallest branch we've got, for that matter. In the home office, in Los Angeles, I rate as vice president, but I'd been sent out there to check up on the branch, not on what was wrong with it, but what was right with it. Their ratio of savings deposits to commercial deposits was over twice what we had in any other branch, and the Old Man figured it was time somebody went out there and found out what the trick was, in case they'd invented something the rest of the banking world hadn't heard of.

I found out what the trick was soon enough. It was her husband, a guy named Brent that rated head teller and had charge of the savings department. He'd elected himself little White Father to all those workmen that banked in the branch, and kept after them and made them save until half of them were buying their homes and there wasn't one of them that didn't have a good pile of dough in the bank. It was good for us, and still better for those workmen, but in spite of that I didn't like Brent and I didn't like his way of doing business. I asked him to lunch one day, but he was too busy, and couldn't come. I had to wait till we closed, and then we went to a drugstore while he had a glass of milk, and I tried to get out of him something about how he got those deposits every week, and whether he thought any of his methods could be used by the whole organization. But we got off on the wrong foot, because he thought I really meant to criticize, and it took me half an hour to smooth him down. He was a funny guy, so touchy you could hardly talk to him at all, and with a hymn-book-salesman look to him that made you understand why he regarded his work as a kind of a missionary job among these people that carried their accounts with him. I would say he was around thirty, but he looked older. He was tall and thin, and beginning to get bald, but he walked with a stoop and his face had a gray color that you don't see on a well man. After he drank his milk and ate the two crackers that came with it, he took a little tablet out of an envelope he carried in his pocket, dissolved it in his water, and drank it.

But even when he got it through his head I wasn't sharpening an axe for him, he wasn't much help. He kept saying that savings deposits have to be worked up on a personal basis, that the man at the window has to make the depositor feel that he takes an interest in seeing the figures mount up, and more of the same. Once he got a holy look in his eyes, when he said that you can't make the depositor feel that way unless you really feel that way yourself, and for a few seconds he was a little excited, but that died off. It looks all right, as I write it, but it didn't sound good. Of course, a big corporation doesn't like to put things on a personal basis, if it can help it. Institutionalize the bank, but not the man, for the good reason that the man may get an offer somewhere else, and then when he quits he takes all his trade with him. But that wasn't the only reason it didn't sound good. There was something about the guy himself that I just didn't like, and what it was I didn't know, and didn't even have enough interest to find out.

So when his wife called up a couple of weeks later, and asked if she could see me that night, at my home, not at the bank, I guess I wasn't any sweeter about it than I had to be. In the first place, it looked funny she would want to come to my house, instead of the bank, and in the second place, it didn't sound like good news, and in the third place, if she stayed late, it was going to cut me out of the fights down at the Legion Stadium, and I kind of look forward to them. Still, there wasn't much I could say except I would see her, so I did. Sam, my Filipino houseboy, was going out, so I fixed a highball tray for myself, and figured if she was as pious as he was, that would shock her enough that she would leave early.

It didn't shock her a bit. She was quite a lot younger than he was, I would say around twenty-five, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a shape you couldn't take your eyes off of. She was about medium size, but put together so pretty she looked small. Whether she was really good-looking in the face I don't know, but if she wasn't good-looking, there was something about the way she looked at you that had that thing. Her teeth were big and white, and her lips were just the least little bit thick. They gave her a kind of a heavy, sullen look, but one eyebrow had a kind of twitch to it, so she'd say something and no part of her face would move but that, and yet it meant more than most women could put across with everything they had.

All that kind of hit me in the face at once, because it was the last thing I was expecting. I took her coat, and followed her into the living room. She sat down in front of the fire, picked up a cigarette and tapped it on her nail, and began looking around. When her eye lit on the highball tray she was already lighting her cigarette, but she nodded with the smoke curling up in one eye, “Yes, I think I will.”

I laughed, and poured her a drink. It was all that had been said, and yet it got us better acquainted than an hour of talk could have done. She asked me a few questions about myself, mainly if I wasn't the same Dave Bennett that used to play halfback for U.S.C., and when I told her I was, she figured out my age. She said she was twelve years old at the time she saw me go down for a touchdown on an intercepted pass, which put her around twenty-five, what I took her for. She sipped her drink. I put a log of wood on the fire. I wasn't quite so hot about the Legion fights.

When she'd finished her drink she put the glass down, motioned me away when I started to fix her another, and said: “Well.”

“Yeah, that awful word.”

“I'm afraid I have bad news.”

“Which is?”

“Charles is sick.”

“He certainly doesn't look well.”

“He needs an operation.”

“What's the matter with him—if it's mentionable?”

“It's mentionable, even if it's pretty annoying. He has a duodenal­ ulcer, and he's abused himself so much, or at least his stomach, with this intense way he goes about his work, and refusing­ to go out to lunch, and everything else that he shouldn't do, that it's got to that point. I mean, it's serious. If he had taken better care of himself, it's something that needn't have amounted to much at all. But he's let it go, and now I'm afraid if something isn't done—well, it's going to be very serious. I might as well say it. I got the report today, on the examination he had. It says if he's not operated on at once, he's going to be dead within a month. He's—verging­ on a perforation.”

“And?”

“This part isn't so easy.”

“… How much?”

“Oh, it isn't a question of money. That's all taken care of. He has a policy, one of these clinical hook-ups that entitles him to everything. It's Charles.”

“I don't quite follow you.”

“I can't seem to get it through his head that this has to be done. I suppose I could, if I showed him what I've just got from the doctors, but I don't want to frighten him any more than I can help. But he's so wrapped up in his work, he's such a fanatic about it, that he positively refuses to leave it. He has some idea that these people, these workers, are all going to ruin if he isn't there to boss them around, and make them save their money, and pay up their installments on their houses, and I don't know what all. I guess it sounds silly to you. It does to me. But—he won't quit.”

“You want me to talk to him?”

“Yes, but that's not quite all. I think, if Charles knew that his work was being done the way he wants it done, and that his job would be there waiting for him when he came out of the hospital, that he'd submit without a great deal of fuss. This is what I've been trying to get around to. Will you let me come in and do Charles's work while he's gone?”

“… Well—it's pretty complicated work.”

“Oh no, it's not. At least not to me. You see, I know every detail of it, as well as he does. I not only know the people, from going around with him while he badgered them into being thrifty, but I used to work in the bank. That's where I met him. And—I'll do it beautifully, really. That is, if you don't object to making it a kind of family affair.”

I thought it over a few minutes, or tried to. I went over in my mind the reasons against it, and didn't see any that amounted to anything. In fact, it suited me just as well to have her come in, if Brent really had to go to the hospital, because it would peg the job while he was gone, and I wouldn't have to have a general shake-up, with the other three in the branch moving up a notch, and getting all excited about promotions that probably wouldn't last very long anyway. But I may as well tell the truth. All that went through my mind, but another thing that went through my mind was her. It wasn't going to be a bit unpleasant to have her around for the next few weeks. I liked this dame from the start, and for me anyway, she was plenty easy to look at.

“Why—I think that's all right.”

“You mean I get the job?”

“Yeah—sure.”

“What a relief. I hate to ask for jobs.”

“How about another drink?”

“No, thanks. Well—just a little one.”

I fixed her another drink, and we talked about her husband a little more, and I told her how his work had attracted the attention of the home office, and it seemed to please her. But then all of a sudden I popped out: “Who are you, anyway?”

“Why—I thought I told you.”

“Yeah, but I want to know more.”

“Oh, I'm nobody at all, I'm sorry to say. Let's see, who am I? Born, Princeton, New Jersey, and not named for a while on account of an argument among relatives. Then when they thought my hair was going to be red they named me Sheila, because it had an Irish sound to it. Then—at the age of ten, taken to California. My father got appointed to the history department of U.C.L.A.”

“And who is your father?”

“Henry W. Rollinson—”

“Oh, yes, I've heard of him.”

“Ph.D. to you, just Hank to me. And—let's see. High school, valedictorian of the class, tagged for college, wouldn't go. Went out and got myself a job instead. In our little bank. Answered an ad in the paper. Said I was eighteen when I was only sixteen, worked there three years, got a one-dollar raise every year. Then—Charles got interested, and I married him.”

“And, would you kindly explain
that?”

“It happens, doesn't it?”

“Well, it's none of my business. Skip it.”

“You mean we're oddly assorted?”

“Slightly.”

“It seems so long ago. Did I mention I was nineteen? At that age you're very susceptible to—what would you call it? Idealism?”

“… Are you still?”

I didn't know I was going to say that, and my voice sounded shady. She drained her glass and got up.

“Then, let's see. What else is there in my little biography? I have two children, one five, the other three, both girls, and both beautiful. And—I sing alto in the Eurydice Women's Chorus. … That's all, and now I have to be going.”

“Where'd you put your car?”

“I don't drive. I came by bus.”

“Then—may I drive you home?”

“I'd certainly be grateful if you would. … By the way, Charles would kill me if he knew I'd come to you. About him, I mean. I'm supposed to be at a picture show. So tomorrow, don't get absent-minded and give me away.”

“It's between you and me,”

“It sounds underhanded, but he's very peculiar.”

I live on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, and she lived on Mountain Drive, in Glendale. It's about twenty minutes, but when we got in front of her house, instead of stopping, I drove on. “I just happened to think; it's awful early for a picture show to let out.”

“So it is, isn't it?”

We drove up in the hills. Up to then we had been plenty gabby, but for the rest of the drive we both felt self-conscious and didn't have much to say. When I swung down through Glendale again the Alexander Theatre was just letting out. I set her down on the corner, a little way from her house. She shook hands. “Thanks ever so much.”

“Just sell him the idea, and the job's all set.”

“… I feel terribly guilty, but—”

“Yes?”

“I've had a grand time.”

II

She sold me the idea, but she couldn't sell Brent, not that easy, that is. He squawked, and refused to go to the hospital, or do anything about his ailment at all, except take pills for it. She called me up three or four times about it, and those calls seemed to get longer every night. But one day, when he toppled over at the window, and I had to send him home in a private ambulance, there didn't seem to be much more he could say. They hauled him off to the hospital, and she came in next day to take his place, and things went along just about the way she said they would, with her doing the work fine and the depositors plunking down their money just like they had before.

The first night he was in the hospital I went down there with a basket of fruit, more as an official gift from the bank than on my own account, and she was there, and of course after we left him I offered to take her home. So I took her. It turned out she had arranged that the maid should spend her nights at the house, on account of the children, while he was in the hospital, so we took a ride. Next night I took her down, and waited for her outside, and we took another ride. After they got through taking X-rays they operated, and it went off all right, and by that time she and I had got the habit. I found a newsreel right near the hospital, and while she was with him, I'd go in and look at the sports, and then we'd go for a little ride.