Richard Deming: Tweak the Devil’s Nose

Subduing an odd reluctance to put my back to the man, I turned to try the crossing again.

“Want me to help you across?” the Farmer asked.

Slowly I turned to look at him. “That crack makes us even, Farmer. You saved my life; now I’m saving yours by ignoring the crack.”

He grinned at me, a grin as sardonic as Bugs Bunny’s. With dignity I crossed to my car, first looking carefully both ways, climbed under the wheel and glanced back to where he had been standing.

He had disappeared.

Since the only lead I had picked up in Carson City was the widow’s vague idea that Lancaster had been worried over his impending conference with the Jones and Knight Investment Company, I decided to take a chance on finding someone still at the company office, even though it was just five o’clock when I drove off the bridge on my own side of the river. Stopping at the first tavern I saw for a glance in the phone book, I discovered the office was only a few blocks up Broadway, just south of the Federal Reserve Building. I made it by ten after five and found a parking place right in front of the entrance.

According to the building directory, Jones and Knight Investment Company was on the fourth floor. A colored girl took me up in an elevator, informing me as I got off that the elevators stopped running at six.

Though the office building in which it was housed was old and beginning to look run down in a genteel sort of way, the office of Jones and Knight had an air of prosperity about it. Thick carpeting covered the floor of the reception room, the furniture was solidly expensive and Venetian blinds hung at the windows.

A middle-aged woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses sat at a desk in the reception room. Apparently I would have missed her had I been five minutes later, for she was just powdering her nose in preparation to go home.

“Mr. Jones or Mr. Knight in?” I asked.

“No, sir,” she said politely. “We close at five. Did you have an appointment?”

I shook my head. “I’m a private investigator inquiring into the Lancaster killing.” I let her look at my license and took a soft leather chair while she was examining it.

She looked it over so long a time, I got the impression she was using it as an excuse to gather herself together after the shock of my announcement. And since my announcement had not seemed particularly shocking to me, her reaction intrigued me.

“My name is Matilda Graves, Mr. Moon,” she said finally. “I’m secretary and bookkeeper of the firm. You know, of course, the police have already been here.”

“Yes, but something new has come up since their visit. Are you the only employee aside from the partners, Miss Graves?”

She nodded, not quite seeming to trust her voice.

“Are you sufficiently in Jones’s and Knight’s confidence to know what Mr. Lancaster’s meeting with them was about yesterday?”

Quickly she shook her head. “Mr. Lancaster wasn’t an account of ours, Mr. Moon. He was merely an old friend of Mr. Knight’s. Naturally I would have known, or at least been able to guess what his business with Mr. Knight was had Mr. Lancaster been one of our accounts.

It would be hard for an investment company bookkeeper not to know the business affairs of most of the company’s clients. But this was a personal business matter between Mr. Lancaster and Mr. Knight.”

“How do you know it was a personal business matter if you don’t know what it was? Couldn’t it have been a personal social matter?”

I asked the question in an easy tone, with no intention of upsetting her, but she surprised me by turning dead white.

“The police never questioned me at all,” she said in a faint voice. “I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to decide whether or not I ought to contact them. But if I caused Mr. Knight trouble and there was nothing to it, I might lose my job. Anyway—”

“What about Mr. Knight?” I prompted.

“I thought about talking it over with Mr. Jones and asking his advice, but he doesn’t know anything about it, and that would put him in the same position I am. Making trouble for Mr. Knight, I mean. And after all, they’re partners, so you see it would be uncomfortable for him. He’s such a nice man. Mr. Jones, I mean, not Mr. Knight.” She added hurriedly, “Not that Mr. Knight isn’t nice too, but I mean—”

I said, “Just a minute, Miss Graves. Take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”

She took me literally. She took a deep breath and started at the beginning. It took her a long time and I had to interrupt with questions about every third sentence, but I finally pieced together what was bothering her.

She said Walter Lancaster had met with Knight in Knight’s office at about three P.M... and the two had argued for two hours. Jones had been using a dictaphone in his own office, which was right next to Knight’s, and had not been present at the conference.

I stopped her long enough to ask if she had gotten the impression Jones was deliberately excluded from the conference, or simply had not bothered to attend.

“Why neither, I think,” she said. “Since it wasn’t a company matter, but a personal thing between Mr. Lancaster and Mr. Knight, I suppose Mr. Jones had no reason to sit in. He did go in for a minute once, when Mr. Knight started shouting. I guess to calm Mr. Knight down. But he came right out again and went back to his own office. Mr. Knight didn’t shout any more, but he had left the key open on his call box, and I heard everything he and Mr. Lancaster said.”

It developed there had been quite an argument. Miss Graves did not catch it all (she explained her mind was too occupied with her own duties to listen closely, though I suspect the real reason she missed portions of the argument was that it is difficult to hear over an interoffice communication system unless the speaker speaks directly into the box), but she gathered the reason for Walter Lancaster’s visit was to learn if his old school chum had actually invested in a stock he had discussed with Lancaster some weeks previously.

Apparently Knight had, for when the lieutenant governor announced he had unearthed some kind of irregularity in the corporation which issued the stock, and intended to make it public the next day, Knight blew up. He insisted Lancaster had induced him to buy the stock, an accusation Lancaster flatly denied, declaring that while he had no intimation at the time of their discussion that the corporation was shaky, Knight knew very well he never gave market advice to anyone, and certainly he would not have presumed to give it to a professional investment broker.

Grudgingly Knight admitted that while Lancaster might not have recommended the investment, he had given the impression he considered it a sound one, and the least he could do was hold off his announcement twenty-four hours so that both of them could unload.

Lancaster declared he would not allow the public to be cheated any more than it already had been. He said that while no one but himself as yet knew of the stock’s false value, a rumor about a possible boom in its value (which rumor apparently had induced Knight to invest) had the other major stockholders watching it closely. A sudden dumping by two of the large stockholders would cause others to dump too, he said, and result in the usual situation of letting small stockholders take the rap while those who could best afford the loss scurried to safety. Patiently he explained a fact which must have been obvious to Knight as an investment broker: that saving themselves was possible only by sticking someone else. He held the revolutionary theory that it was as dishonest for a stockholder to dump stock he knew was worthless as it was for a corporation to issue such stock. In both cases, he pointed out, you are offering the public an investment you know may ruin the investors, and the fact that it was not only legal, but was not even regarded as unethical in market circles, did not alter his opinion that morally it was outright fraud.