Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

The door slammed again. It was the first time I had ever heard Fausta swear.

I waited a few minutes, then knocked on the door. When nothing happened, I opened it and peered in. Fausta was seated on the bed smoking a cigarette.

“The following starts now,” I said. “I’m off to headquarters, so stop sulking and come along.”

“I do not think I want to follow you around.”

“You don’t have any choice,” I told her. “Either follow willingly, or I’ll haul you down and have Day slap you in protective custody as a material witness.”

Her eyes glittered at me, but she made no move.

Walking over to the bed, I took the cigarette from her hand, crushed it out on a bed-stand ashtray and jerked her to her feet. Grabbing her by the shoulders, I slammed her against my chest and kissed her.

One sharp-toed pump kicked against my good leg. Momentarily she writhed like a snake and tried to turn her head away, then suddenly wound her arms about my neck and started to choke me to death. All at once instead of kissing her, I found myself simply hanging on while she kissed me. Just as steam began to issue from my ears, she jerked free, stepped back a pace and regarded me with her head cocked to one side.

I reached for her again, she side-stepped with a mocking smile and calmly walked into the front room. In the glass over the mantel she repaired her lipstick while I watched broodingly. I realized my reaching for her after she had jerked away had been a mistake, for all she had wanted was a show of interest on my part so that she could repulse it. I had reacted exactly as she wanted, and for the rest of the day she would probably treat me with standoffish skittishness, as though I were a wolf whose passes she must constantly guard against. I contemplated the prospect dubiously, recognizing she had neatly managed to reverse our usual roles.

Wiping the lipstick from my mouth with a handkerchief, I growled at her, “If the temperament fit is over, let’s go.”

At Police Headquarters we were informed both Warren Day and Lieutenant Hannegan were taking naps in the infirmary and had left instructions for no one to rouse them until four. Since it was only two P.M.. when we arrived, I told the desk we would not wait.

As an afterthought I inquired about Isobel Jones and learned she had been released on bond as a material witness only an hour before.

“Let’s visit the lady’s husband,” I said to Fausta. “Probably I can get the same information from him I wanted from the inspector anyway.”

In the outer office of the Jones and Knight Investment Company we found the secretary-bookkeeper Matilda Graves poring over a huge ledger. As nearly as I could tell the ledger contained nothing but columns of figures, but they must have been sad figures, for she furtively dabbed at her eyes with a piece of Kleenex when we entered, and her face was flushed from weeping. Surely Knight’s death had not brought on her grief, I thought, for during our previous conversations I had gotten the distinct impression she not only did not care much for the shaggy-haired partner, but was actually afraid of him.

Later, during our conversation with her remaining employer, we learned Matilda’s tears were solely for herself, and stemmed from Jones’s discovery that she had been doing a sloppy job of bookkeeping.

When she spoke to Harlan Jones over the intercom, she announced only that I was there, so Fausta entering his private office with me was a surprise to him. We found him feverishly comparing a pile of bank statements with what seemed to be a stack of duplicate deposit slips. He did not seem particularly glad to see me, but his eyes lighted with almost breathless interest when they touched Fausta.

“Miss Fausta Moreni,” I said. “This is Mr. Jones, Fausta.”

Jones’s round body popped out of its chair like a bounced rubber ball. His face fixed in an almost groveling smile, he told Fausta he was delighted to meet her and quickly rounded the desk to hold a chair for her. He let me find my own chair.

When he had fussily reseated himself, he continued to gaze at Fausta as though fascinated. It was a common reaction for men to pant slightly the first time they saw Fausta, but Jones seemed to be overdoing it. I glanced at her to check if our momentary struggle at her apartment had loosened some strap and allowed more of her to show than she intended, but she was as fully dressed as is customary for women to dress during the summer in our part of the country. That is not very fully, but Fausta’s lightweight sleeveless dress exposed nothing more interesting than her smooth shoulders and equally smooth neck.

I finally deduced Harlan Jones was not upset so much by Fausta as just plain upset. The emotion he was exhibiting was not passion, but ordinary nervousness, and I guessed that our appearance had nothing to do with it. He had been jittering like a monkey on a string before we ever entered the office, I decided, and since he was poring over bank statements when we arrived, I guessed it was these which had raised his blood pressure.

I said, “I understand Mrs. Jones was released finally, Mr. Jones.”

“Yes,” he said, wrenching his nervous gaze from Fausta long enough to look at me. “I just spoke to her on the phone. She plans to take a shower and then nap until she recovers from the ordeal.”

The ordeal had been two-sided, I thought. She had accounted for herself pretty well inasmuch as she had Homicide’s two top men laid out on their backs.

“What I really dropped in about was the bank-deposit slip found in Willard Knight’s pocket,” I said. “Inspector Day told me you went to the bank this morning to check on it. Find out anything?”

“I’m still finding things out,” he said, gesturing toward the pile of bank statements and deposit slips on his desk. “It’s a rather appalling discovery to make about a dead partner, but it seems Knight has been juggling the basic company account for some time.”

“Finding shortages?”

He shook his head. “Fortunately no. At least as nearly as I can make out from a quick check, and I don’t believe that an audit will disclose any shortage either. But had it not been for the deposit Knight made only yesterday afternoon just a few hours before he died, the firm would be seventy thousand short. And that would have meant bankruptcy.” Drawing a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped the back of his neck and shivered again over the narrow escape.

“The seventy thousand belonged to the firm, did it?” I asked. “And Knight replaced it on the q.t.?”

“Worse than that. It was a client’s money in our custody. Apparently Knight had been using funds intrusted to us for his own personal speculations for nearly a year. Frequently instead of depositing a check received from a client, he would use the money for market speculation first, then deposit it after he had made use of it. Apparently he was consistently lucky, or at least not unlucky, for while I am sure he never made any very substantial profits, he never seems to have lost his illegally borrowed capital either. At least the records indicate he always managed to deposit what he had withheld before the last day of the month, so that the bank statement always showed the proper balance.”

“He never held out deposits more than thirty days then?”

“No,” Jones said. “Sometimes for periods only as long as two or three days. I imagine he would buy some shares, wait for a rise above his purchase price, then immediately sell out, pocket whatever profit he had made and deposit the capital he had withheld.”

“But wouldn’t your bookkeeper catch the discrepancies between the dates amounts were supposed to be deposited and the actual dates of deposit?”

Harlan Jones’s angry flush told me what had caused Matilda Graves tears. “She should have, but Knight seemingly knew her shortcomings better than I did. Miss Graves is an efficient secretary and bookkeeper, but apparently she doesn’t do any unnecessary work. The way my partner worked it was really quite simple. By mutual agreement he always took care of bank deposits — that is, he made all trips to the bank. Miss Graves prepared the deposit slips. The account he was tampering with is the company’s basic checking account, into which all monies received are always deposited. We have three other accounts: a petty cash fund of five hundred dollars which Miss Graves is authorized to write checks against for rent, utilities and so forth, a savings account in our joint names and an expense account both Knight and I were authorized to write checks against. But deposits to these accounts are always by transfer of funds from the basic account, you see, and never by direct deposit of monies received. In this way all money transactions have to pass through the basic account, which simplifies bookkeeping.”