Аврам Дэвидсон: Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

“What have you got in mind?”

“Wade, just what do you know about me?”

“Know about you? You moved down here from the north about... let me see...”

“Twenty-four years ago last month. I was forty-one years old. What did folks find out about me?”

“Found out you were a well-educated man, and you’d done well in some kind of business ’way up north, and then your wife died and it kind of took the heart out of you, so you retired early, with enough to live on if you took it easy. And there was something about your health being shaky.”

“I had to let folks think that so they wouldn’t think it strange a man that age doing nothing at all.”

“Well, you bought a couple acres of land out there at the inlet, and you built that house all by yourself, learning as you went along, and it must have been a little over a year after you moved down you married Sue Purdley, a girl twenty years younger, a girl been in several kinds of trouble around here, enough so folks figured she made herself a pretty good deal.”

“She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” Garlan said.

“They all got looks when they’re young enough,” Illigan said. “If she hadn’t hooked you, Will, about the only thing left for her would have been some cracker boy from back in the sloughs to keep her swole up with kids, barefoot, and beat the tar out of her every Saturday night.”

“If we could have had children, maybe it would have...”

“It wouldn’t have been a bit different. To get any good out of a Purdley woman, you’ve got to be meaner than she is, and you’re just too gentle a man, Will.”

“Know anything else about me?”

Illigan shook his head. “Guess not. You live quiet. You’re a good man to go fishing with. You keep your house and grounds up nice. What is there I should know?”

“I’m a methodical man, Wade. I plan things carefully. I never thought I’d be telling anybody this. I feel scared to tell you now, but I don’t know why, because the life I have isn’t worth living, and that isn’t the way I planned it. Way back in 1935 I started planning it all out. And in 1938, ten days before I arrived here, I walked out of a bank in Michigan with a hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars.”

Illigan’s feet thumped hard against the floor as he came erect in his chair. “You what!”

Will Garlan stared out the window, his face placid. “I studied the mistakes all the other ones make. They go to foreign places where they stand out like a sore thumb. Or they get to spending too much. Or they have to talk to somebody about it. One thing I decided. You have to have a new identity all ready and waiting. I came down alone in 1937 and got that identity sort of started down here, so it was ready and waiting when I came down. My name isn’t Will Garlan, naturally. But I’ve used it so long it feels like it was. The name I started with feels strange in my mind now. J. Allan Welch. The J was for Jerome. People called me Al. They looked for J. Allan Welch for a long time. Maybe they’re still looking. Probably the bonding company still is, anyhow. I guess it was a shock to them.”

“Do you know what the hell you’re saying, man?”

“I was the Assistant Cashier. There was one little flaw in the way the worn-out money was handled, when we sacked it up to send it back to the Federal Reserve Bank for credit. Everybody checked everybody else, but there was one little flaw, and after I found it, I got them used to seeing me with a big box.

“I used to order stuff to be sent express and pick it up on my lunch hour so I’d have a box around, wrapped in brown paper, tied with cord. Then I made a box. It looked solid and tied, but you could pull one end open — it was on a spring. When it was shut, the cord matched. I had the cord glued on. I cut newspaper into stacks the size of wrapped money and I had it in that box. The other tricky part was the seal on the heavy canvas sack. I figured a way to fix the sack so it would look sealed when it wasn’t.

“I had a dummy sack in my cellar at home and I practised until I got the time way down. I got it down to where it took me just eighteen seconds to open the sack, exchange the wrapped money, and reseal the sack the right way.

“I waited until we had the right kind of accumulation — three big sacks for pickup, with one stuffed with nothing but wrapped bundles of twenties and fifties. I rigged the seal on that one. I made the exchange one Friday morning, and all that day I worked with that parcel of money closely. I had no cause to worry. The sack was the right shape and heft and I’d sealed it right, and nobody would find out anything until it got to the Federal Reserve Bank and they started to check the amount and denominations against the outside tag and the inside packing slip.

“By then I had a car nobody knew about, registered in Indiana in the name of Will Garlan. I had a wallet full of identification for Will Garlan. I had clothes and everything in that car. When I left work, I didn’t even go home. I went right to that car and headed south. I spent all that first night in a tourist cabin going over that money, weeding out everything too badly tom and weeding out gold certificates. I burned all that in a ravine the next day. I had a hundred and twenty-seven thousand left.

“Soon as I settled here, Wade, I got me a post-office box and I sent for a lot of cheap stuff so I’d get on so many mailing lists nobody would notice I wasn’t getting any personal mail. Or any money. That’s the thing about me nobody has ever seemed to notice much. No investments, Wade. No bank accounts. No social security. I deal in cash. I buy things on time and pay the installments in cash. For twenty-four years, Wade, I’ve been living directly off the money I carried out of that bank in that box.”

“Where do you keep it?”

“When I built that house, I built me a good place.”

“How much do you have left?”

“I don’t know exactly. I sealed it into fruit jars to keep the dampness and the bugs from getting into it. There’s ten jars left and I’d say there’s somewhere between five and six thousand in a jar. I’ve lived small, Wade. It keeps people from wondering.”

“Does Sue know about this?”

“What do you think?”

“I’d say she doesn’t.”

“You’re right. That’s the one thing I’ve never let her know anything about. For years she’s been at me to find out where the money comes from. She thinks it comes in the mail. I take it out when she’s away from the house. Then I make her think I’ve brought it back from town when I make my next trip. If she ever knew she was living right on top of money like that, she’d find it and start spending like a fool. I wouldn’t be able to stop her.”

Slowly, wonderingly Illigan shook his head. He made a clucking sound in the silence. “Be damned,” he said softly. “Why didn’t you just wait one day when she was away from the house and take it all and go some place else?”

“I guess a man can run just one time. I’m settled here. This is my home. I’ve got no heart for running again, Sheriff.”

“Don’t you know what I have to do to you?”

“I guess you have to tell those people up there to come and get me. There must be some kind of reward in it for you. And it will surprise them to recover so much of it after so long. I guess I’ll go to prison, Wade. And I’d rather go for that than for killing Sue. Or hurting her. Anyhow, none of it has ever been like I thought it would be. There’s nothing left. I guess I wouldn’t have too bad a time in prison. Maybe they’d give me something to do and leave me alone.”

“I don’t know what the hell to say, Will. I just honestly don’t.”

“There isn’t anything to say. I suppose you’ll want to come out with me and get the money. I could pack a bag and you could bring me back here. I wouldn’t want to stay there, Wade. Not another minute.” He paused. “I guess I could be charged with bigamy too. But Lillian is dead now. I read it in one of those crime magazines a couple of years ago, about unsolved cases. They wrote about the Welch case, and they said she died in 1954.”