Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 6, June, 1953

Hadley was frowning. He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Beats me. Never heard of such a thing, Max. Can’t imagine how anybody could empty out your box.”

“How about Jordan here?”

“Oh, come now, Max. You’ve got to believe his story. Whatever he might or might not do, this is one stunt he wouldn’t dare to pull.”

Max Gilian swung around. His neck inched out of his collar. A slow surge of blood congested the veins in his face. His voice was deliberate. “What were you doing with Lucille tonight? What cooks between you two?”

“Absolutely nothing, Max. Believe me. I met Lucille for the first time while I was defending you. She came to court every day during your trial and sat in the front row. After you were convicted and sent up, I didn’t see her again until this evening. She called my office today. I found the message when I came back from Newark late this afternoon. She said she wanted to see me. I thought it might be something about your safe deposit box. I went to her apartment. It was late and I took her to dinner.”

“What did she want?”

“A divorce, Max. She said she was no longer satisfied with a separation. She asked me to handle the case.”

His eyes were dark, the pupils contracted. “You work pretty fast, don’t you, counselor?”

“You mean because you saw me kissing her? It doesn’t mean a thing. A man kisses a woman good-night, what the hell, Max, there’s nothing to it.”

The tight line of his mouth loosened. His shoulders sagged. He looked parched and empty.

“Yeah,” he said, his tone suddenly listless. “I know. I was watching.” He started to pace slowly around the room. Then he stood looking out the window for a long moment. Hadley met my eyes and gestured helplessly. After a while Max Gilian turned and came over to me.

“They tell me you know how to find things out, Jordan. Any truth in it?”

“Some.”

“Find out who took that dough. Come to me and tell me about it. I’ll get it back and I’ll cut you in.”

“Twenty-five percent, Max.”

“Agreed.”

“You heard him, Hadley.”

“I did,” he said.

“Good enough. Bankers are a close-mouthed bunch of individuals, Max. I’ll need an authorization giving me the right to investigate.”

He pointed at the desk. “Write it out.”

I sat down and found a piece of hotel stationery. Five minutes later I handed him the pen. His fingers shook a little when he signed. He was trembling from impotence and frustration.

“Take it easy, Max,” I said. “Don't burn yourself out.”

He demonstrated his vocabulary. He knew most of the words and he spoke them with feeling. He was still going strong when I walked through the door.

Banks arc closed at night. There was nothing I could do until morning. I went home and got some sleep.

Max Gilian operated outside the law. At any time he might be the subject of an investigation. I suppose that was one of the reasons he had studded his safe deposit boxes in neighboring cities, easily accessible to Manhattan. I knew that he had several in Connecticut and one in White Plains. The Newark box was in the heart of the business district.

I stood outside the Merchant’s Trust, a squat box of granite, solid and functional, large and impersonal, with bronze doors and an armed guard and tellers behind cages. Inside everything was neat and antiseptic. A great business, banking. You let them hold your money at two and one half percent and they lend it out for six. How can they lose?

The armed guard referred me to a man seated at a desk behind the rail. His name, according to the placard, was Ambrose George. Calm and sober and unhurried, the executive type, with one eyebrow perpetually higher than the other.

He listened to my recital and now both eyebrows were high. First he looked incredulous, then he looked patronizing. “Well, now,” he said, “look here. All this is quite impossible. Nobody can get at a safe deposit vault but the legal box-holder. It simply can’t be done.”

“Sure,” I said. “Theoretically. Let’s check the records.”

He reached for the interphone, touched a buzzer, and held a brief conference with the mouthpiece. Then he sat back to wait. He looked at me for a while and then he shifted his focus to the ceiling and drummed his fingers on the desk. He was hoping he could prove his point and I was hoping I could prove mine.

We didn’t have long to wait. A tall thin junior executive appeared with a slip of paper and a card. Mr. Ambrose George held one above the other, studied them, compared them, and a slow smile of satisfaction moved his lips.

“Here it is, counselor. Max Gilian visited the bank six months ago and spent ten minutes in a private room with his box. He signed in on this slip of paper. You can compare his signature with the original card he signed when he leased the box.”

He laid them in front of me, side by side. I am not an examiner of questioned documents, which is the technical name for a handwriting expert. But those two signatures were close enough to fool anybody without a microscope.

“It looks genuine,” I said.

“Exactly.” He was very smug.

“Except for one thing.”

He looked at me sharply. “What’s that?”

“Max Gilian was in Sing Sing prison six months ago.”

Mr. Ambrose George stopped looking smug. The smile dissolved from his mouth and his jaw went perpendicular. He was not at all happy. His chair had suddenly become very uncomfortable and he squirmed around, shifting his center of gravity. His Adam’s apple made a slow and painful round trip. This was precisely the sort of thing that banks constantly dreaded.

He regarded me warily. “You can prove this?” he asked anxiously.

“Absolutely.”

He threw his hands up. “I can't understand it. I’d swear those two signatures are identical. I... I’m afraid I don’t know what to say.”

“How about the attendant who was in charge of the vault at the time?”

He referred to the slip of paper. “Kevin Graham.”

“Can I speak to him?”

“Mr. Graham is no longer employed by the bank.”

I raised one eyebrow. “Fired?”

Ambrose George had suddenly become very much interested in my necktie. “Graham resigned about four months ago.” He was deliberately avoiding my gaze.

“Can you tell me where he lives?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Well, now...”

“It may help us to avoid unpleasant publicity.”

He reached for the phone again and spoke into the mouthpiece. He cradled the instrument and picked up a pencil and wrote out an address for me. I stood up and straightened my hat.

“I imagine this thing can be worked out somehow,” I said.

His nod was vague and committed the bank to nothing. He was staring thoughtfully into space when I left his bottom lip bulging behind his tongue.

Kevin Graham’s address could have been one block away for all I knew. I’m a stranger in Newark, so I took a cab. It was a disconcerting experience. They had bumped the rates and needled the clocks. I watched the meter tick my nickels away until the cab stopped on the outskirts of town.

It was a small frame house, well tended, recently painted, with a neat garden. I moved up the walk and I saw the black crepe hanging from the door and I had a premonition. The shades were drawn, but I could hear the quiet rumble of voices. I removed my hat and knocked.

The door opened and a blade-thin man with a long somber face looked out at me. He smiled tentatively. “How do you do,” he said. “Come in.”

I followed him through a foyer into the living room. A coffin sat upon a wheeled stand in the center of the room. The lid was drawn back. I saw the dead face of a man in his fifties, with shrunken temples and mortician’s rouge on the flat cheeks. The face meant nothing to me. I had never seen the man before.