Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories (5 page)

At length she said, "I wish we hadn't done it. Before God, I wish we hadn't done it."

"Ellen, it was the perfect crime!"

"Was it? Was it really?"

"You know it was."

"I don't know it. Not anymore."

"Damn you, woman, stop talking that way."

"I can't help it," she said. "I'm afraid. I been afraid for a long time."

"Of what?" George said. "We weren't caught, were we? Won't never be caught now."

"Not by the law."

"Now what's that supposed to mean?"

"There's no such thing as the perfect crime, George," she said. "I know that and so do you."

"I don't know any such thing."

"Yes you do. Down deep, we've both known it all along. We haven't gone unpunished for what we did—but we haven't paid the full price, either. Won't be long now before we do. Not much longer at all."

They sat once more in silence, with nothing left to say, with the cloying fragrance of the honeysuckle in their nostrils and the songs of the crickets and tree frogs swelling in their ears. Sat without touching, without looking at each other on the deep-shadowed porch . . . remembering . . . waiting.

Ellen and George Granger, seventy-nine and eighty-one years of age, who had committed the perfect crime in the year 1931
.

(With Jeffrey M. Wallmann)

G
loved hands thrust into the pockets of his heavy tweed overcoat, Steve Blanchard entered the Midwestern National Exchange Bank a few minutes before three P.M. on a snowy Thursday in December. A uniformed guard stood near the main entrance doors with a ring of keys in his hand, his eyes cast upward to the clock on the side wall. Blanchard's steps echoed hollowly as he crossed the almost-deserted lobby to the teller at window four, the only one open at this late hour. He waited until a stout, gray-haired man had finished his transaction, then moved up to the window.

A small nameplate indicated that the teller's name was James Cox. He was a thin young man with dark eyes and sand-colored hair. He smiled at Blanchard, said, "Yes, sir, may I help you?"

Blanchard took the folded piece of paper from his coat pocket and slid it across the counter. The second hand on the wall clock made two full sweeps, half of a third, and then Blanchard turned and strode quickly away without looking back.

He had just passed through the entrance doors, was letting them swing closed behind him, when Cox shouted, "Stop that man! He just robbed me, Sam. Stop him!"

Blanchard halted on the snow-covered sidewalk outside and turned, his angular face a mask of surprise. The guard, a florid man with mild blue eyes, remained motionless for a moment; then, like an activated robot, he pulled the doors open, stepped out, and grasped Blanchard by the coat with his left hand, his right fumbling the service revolver off his hip.

"What the hell is going on?" Blanchard demanded.

The guard drew him roughly inside, holding the revolver pressed against Blanchard's ribs. The near-funereal silence of three o'clock closing had dissolved now into excited murmurings, the scrape of chairs, the slap of shoes on the marble floor as the bank's employees surged away from their desks. Cox ran out from behind his teller's window, the president of Midwestern National Exchange Bank, Allard Hoffman, at his heels. The teller's eyes were wide and excited; he held a piece of paper clenched in his right hand. Hoffman looked angrily officious.

"He held me up," Cox said as they reached Blanchard and the guard. "Every bill I had over a ten."

Blanchard gave his head a small, numb shake. "I don't believe this," he said. He stared at Cox. "What's the matter with you? You know I didn't try to hold you up."

"Look in his overcoat pockets, Sam," Cox said. "That's where he put the money."

"You're crazy—"

"Go ahead, Sam, look in his pockets," Hoffman said.

The guard instructed Blanchard to turn around and keep his hands upraised. When Blanchard obeyed, the guard patted his pockets, frowned, and then made a thorough one-handed search. After which he looked as bewildered as Blanchard. In his hand he held a thin pigskin wallet and seven rolls of pennies, nickels and dimes.

"This is all he's got on him," he said.

"What?" Cox burst out. "Sam, I saw him put that money into his overcoat pockets."

"Well, it's not there now."

"Of course it's not there," Blanchard said angrily. "I told you I didn't commit any robbery."

Cox opened the folded piece of paper he held. "This is the note he gave me, Mr. Hoffman. Read it for yourself."

Hoffman took the note. It had been fashioned of letters cut from a newspaper and glued to a sheet of plain paper, and it said:
Give me all your big bills, I have a gun. If you try any heroics I'll kill you. I'm not kidding
. The bank president put voice to the message as he read it.

"He's not carrying any weapon, either," Sam said positively.

"I believed the note about that," Cox said, "but I made up my mind to shout nonetheless. I just couldn't stand by and watch him get away with the bank's money."

"I don't know where you got that note," Blanchard said to Cox, "but I didn't give it to you. I handed you a slip of paper, that's true, but it was just a list of those rolls of coins and you know it."

"You claim Mr. Cox gave them to you?" Hoffman asked him.

"Certainly he did. In exchange for twenty-eight dollars in fives and ones."

"I did not give him any coin rolls," Cox said with mounting exasperation. "I did exactly what it says in that note. I gave him every large bill I had in the cash drawer. The vault cart happened to be behind me at the time, since my cage was the only one open, and he told me to give him what was on that too. He must have gotten sixty-five or seventy thousand altogether."

"You're a liar," Blanchard snapped.

"You're the one who's lying!"

"I don't have your damned money. You've searched me, haven't you? All I've got is about twenty dollars in my wallet."

"Well," Hoffman said darkly, "somebody has it."

At that moment two plainclothes detectives entered the bank, having been summoned by a hurried call from one of the other Midwestern officials. The one in charge, a lumbering and disheveled man with small, bright eyes, was named Freiberg. He instructed the guard to lock the doors, and when that was done he said, "All right, let's hear what happened."

Cox related his version of the affair. Freiberg, writing laboriously in a notebook, didn't interrupt. When the teller had finished, Freiberg turned to Blanchard. "Now what's your story?"

Blanchard told him about the rolls of coins. "I wanted them for a poker game some friends of mine and I set up for tonight." He made a wry mouth. "I'm supposed to be the banker."

"He also claims to have given Mr. Cox a list of what he wanted in the way of coins," Hoffman said.

"The only note he gave me is that holdup note," Cox insisted. "He must have gotten those coins elsewhere, had them in his pocket when he came in here."

"Why don't you check his cage?" Blanchard countered. "That list of mine has to be around here somewhere." He glared at Cox. "Maybe you'll even find your missing cash."

"Are you suggesting I stole that money?" Cox shouted.

Hoffman said stiffly, "Mr. Cox has been a trusted employee of Midwestern National for four years."

"Well, I've been a trusted employee of Curtis Tool and Die for a hell of a lot longer," Blanchard said. "What does any of that prove?"

"All right, that's enough." Freiberg looked at the bank president. "Mr. Hoffman, detail someone to find out exactly how much money is missing." Then he turned to the other plainclothesman. "Flynn, question the rest of the employees; maybe one of them saw or heard something. You might as well go through Mr. Cox's cage and personal possessions, too."

Cox was incredulous. "You mean you're taking this thief's word over mine?"

"I'm not taking anybody's word, Mr. Cox. I'm just trying to find out what happened here today." He paused. "Would you mind emptying all your pockets for me?"

"Of course I mind," Cox said in an icily controlled voice. "But I'll do it just the same. I have nothing to hide."

It appeared that he hadn't, as far as his person went. He did not have either a list of coins or any appreciable amount of money.

Freiberg sighed. "Okay," he said, "let's go over it again . . ."

Sometime later, Hoffman and Flynn tendered their reports. A check of receipts and records revealed that a total of $65,100 was missing. No list of coins had been found in or about Cox's cage or among his possessions, and there were exactly as many coin rolls in his cash drawer as he was supposed to have. None of the other employees could shed any light on the matter; no one had been near Cox's cage at the time. Nor did any of them have the missing money on his person, among his belongings, or at his work station.

"Neither the money nor this alleged note of yours seems to be anywhere in the bank," Freiberg said to Blanchard. "How do you explain that?"

"I can't explain it. I can only tell you the truth. I did not steal that money."

Freiberg asked the guard, Sam, "How far outside did he get before you collared him?"

"No more than a couple of steps."

"Did he have time to pass the money to an accomplice?"

"I doubt it. But I wasn't paying any attention to him until Mr. Cox yelled."

"I don't know much about large sums of cash," Blanchard said coldly, "but sixty-five thousand must be a lot of bills. I couldn't have passed that much to somebody in the couple of seconds I was outside."

"He's got a point," Sam admitted.

"Why don't you search him?" Blanchard's voice was heavy with frustration and sarcasm. "Maybe he's my accomplice."

"I was expecting this," Sam said. "Go ahead, search me. That'll get the idea I had anything to do with this out of everybody's mind."

Flynn searched him. No large amount of cash, nothing incriminating.

Hoffman was beside himself. "That money didn't disappear by itself. I still say this man Blanchard is responsible."

Freiberg nodded. "We'll take him downtown and see what we can do there about shaking his story."

"Go ahead," Blanchard growled, "but I want a lawyer before I answer any more questions. And if charges are pressed against me, I'll sue the police department and the bank for false arrest, defamation of character, and anything else the lawyer can think up."

He was taken to police headquarters, allowed to call in a public defender, and then interrogated at great length. Not once did he waver from the story he had told in the bank.

Finally, he was taken to Freiberg's office. The detective looked tired, and his voice was grim when he said, "All right, you're free to go."

"You mean you finally believe I'm telling the truth?"

"No," Freiberg said, "I don't. I'm inclined to believe Cox. But we've got nothing to hold you on. Those three poker buddies of yours confirmed your story about a game tonight and you being the banker. We can't find anything to implicate you and you've got no criminal record. It's Cox's word against yours—two respectable citizens—and without the money or some kind of hard evidence, there's not a damned thing we can do." He leaned forward suddenly, his eyes cold and hard. "But understand this, Blanchard: we're not giving up. We'll be watching you—watching you every minute."

"Watch all you like," Blanchard said. "I'm innocent."

O
n a night three weeks later, Blanchard knocked on the door of unit nine, the Beaverwood Motel, in a city sixteen miles away. As soon as he had identified himself, the door opened and he was admitted. He took off his coat and grinned at the sandy-haired man who had let him in.

"Hello, Cox," he said.

"Blanchard," the bank teller acknowledged. "You made sure you weren't followed?"

"Of course."

"But the police are still watching you?"

"Not as closely as they were in the beginning. Stop worrying, will you? The whole thing worked beautifully."

"Yes, it did, didn't it?"

"Sure," Blanchard said. "Freiberg still thinks I passed the money to an accomplice somehow, but he can't prove it. Like he told me, it's your word against mine. They don't have any idea that it was actually you who passed the money, much less how it was done."

The room's third occupant—the stout, gray-haired man who had been at Cox's window when Blanchard entered the bank that day—looked up from where he was pouring drinks at a sideboard. "Or that the money was already out of the bank, safely tucked into my briefcase, when the two of you went into your little act."

Blanchard took one of the drinks the gray-haired man offered and raised the glass high. "Well, here's to crime," he said.

They laughed and drank, and then they sat down to split the $65,100 into three equal shares . . .