Robert Alter - 101 Mystery Stories

They took him down to police headquarters and placed him in a small room, leaving him alone until a public defender could be summoned. Then he was subjected to an unending stream of questions, and through long hours he told the exact same story he had in the bank, vehemently proclaiming his innocence.

Shortly after eleven he was taken to Salzberg’s office. The detective looked tired and grim as he explained that the three men with whom Blanchard was to have played poker that night had confirmed the game and the fact that he was to have been banker; that an investigation had borne out that Blanchard did not have a criminal record, had in fact never been arrested; that he was well-liked and respected by his neighbors and his co-workers at Curtis Tool and Die; that the holdup note had had only Cox’s and Hoffman’s fingerprints on it; that a search of Blanchard’s apartment had revealed no evidence that he had manufactured the note; and, finally that another search of the bank had been undertaken — Cox and the guard and the other employees again questioned extensively — without anything new having been learned or the whereabouts of the missing money discovered.

Salzberg rotated his pen between his fingers, leaning back in his chair. He watched Blanchard for a moment, and then he said, “All right, you’re free to go.”

“You mean you finally believe I’m telling the truth?”

“No,” Salzberg said, “I don’t. I’m inclined to believe Cox, if you want the truth. We checked him out, too, as a matter of routine, and his background is even more spotless than yours. But it’s his word against yours — two respectable citizens — and without the money we’ve simply got nothing to hold you on.” He swung his body forward suddenly, his eyes cold and brightly hard. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Blanchard: we’ll be watching you — watching you very carefully.”

“Watch all you like,” Blanchard said exhaustedly. “I’m innocent.”

On a night three weeks later, Blanchard knocked on the door of unit 9, the Beaverwood Motel, in a city sixteen miles distant. 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 bankteller acknowledged. He moistened his lips. “You made sure you weren’t followed here, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“But the police are still watching you?”

“Yes, but not nearly as closely as they were in the beginning.” Blanchard cuffed him lightly on the shoulder. “Stop worrying, will you? The whole thing worked beautifully.”

“Yes, it did, didn’t it?”

“Sure,” Blanchard said. “Salzberg 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 — and they’re taking yours, just as we expected. They don’t have an 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 evening — looked up from where he was pouring drinks at a sideboard. “Or that the money was already out of the bank, safely tucked into the inside pockets of my coat, when the two of you went into your little act.”

Blanchard took one of the drinks from the gray-haired man and raised the glass high. “Well, here’s to crime,” he said. “ Perfect crime, that is.”

They laughed and drank, and then they sat down to split the $35,100 into three equal shares...

I had been just about to leave when my buzzer sounded.

She was about five feet six, had raven black hair, and I had never seen her before.

Her eyes seemed to calculate my apartment. “For two hundred twenty-five dollars, you are not lost. You have come to absolutely the right place.”

“If your name is James Brannon, I have.”

I took her wrap. “I’m sorry, but the apartment isn’t for rent. If that’s why you came up?”

“No. I’m here because the boy scouts find the darndest things.” She took a seat on a divan. “You may call me Madelaine.”

“Madelaine,” I said, “it is the last thought in my mind to insult you. but nevertheless, in all fairness, I think I ought to mention that there are some things I do not play for. It is a principle of mine.”

She smiled. “I don’t go around knocking on strange doors for my living, James, if that’s what you’re thinking. As a matter of fact, I’m a schoolteacher. Mathematics.”

“Really,” I said. “I’m rather good with figures myself.”

“So the superintendent told me. We accidentally got around to discussing that while I pretended to be pricing apartments.”

“Madelaine,” I said, “all this must have a beginning. Could you start there?”

She nodded. “That would be in April on an old back road. It is a shortcut and I use it whenever I feel that I might be late for school. You see, I live with my parents in the country and I commute to the high school in Jefferson every day, which takes some planning.”

I went about fixing two drinks.

“It is a one-lane road, hardly ever used, and you can imagine how irritated I was to find another car blocking the way.” She looked at me and smiled again. “I don’t remember what model it was, but the car was large and expensive and empty. I blew my horn for perhaps ten minutes, but no one appeared. Finally I decided to take a chance and just managed to inch my car around it. I almost went into the ditch and it was the only time that semester I was late for school.”

“Is Scotch all right?”

She nodded. “And now we come to this month of October and the boy scouts. It seems that Troop 181, Jefferson, was rooting about in the woods beside that particular road looking for arrowheads or mushrooms or whatever boys look for, when two of them noticed a depression in the ground. Their active imaginations told them it might be an Indian grave. And so the little ones dug, and what do you think they found?”

I gave her a glass. “A body, I’ll bet.”

“Exactly. Not Indian, of course. And through various gruesome means, the police identified it as that of Mrs. Irene Linton. She was last seen leaving her apartment in this city on April fourteenth. The police gave her husband a rather rough time, but eventually they decided he was innocent of her death. It does seem, though, that they suspect she was having an affair. However, she kept it so secret that they have been unable to find out who the man was.”

Madelaine sipped her drink. “I took the trouble to check back in my school records, and I discovered that I’d been late on April fifteenth, the day after Mrs. Linton was last seen. Having established that, I drove to the license bureau, fluttered my eyes at a tall male clerk, and got the confidential information that license number P31416 belongs to one James Brannon.”

I walked over to the fireplace. “And now you’re going to tell me that the very big and very expensive car blocking the road on the morning of April fifteenth was mine? You have a remarkable memory, Madelaine. You see a license number in Apirl and it remains with you until October? Or did you write it down for some reason at the time?”

“No. But as I said, I happen to be a mathematics teacher and the license number struck a note and remained in my memory. If you will recall your elementary arithmetic, you must remember that pi equals 3.1416,” she said smugly.

“Madelaine,” I said, “I have the strange feeling that you don’t intend to go to the police with your information.”