Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

When I believed I had this absorbed, I said, “For instance, your firm receives a profit of a thousand dollars from some transaction, and you decide to deposit it in your savings account. Instead of making a direct deposit, you stick it in the basic account, then write a check against the basic account for one thousand dollars and deposit that.”

“Exactly. So all Miss Graves’s book entries represent either a deposit or a check written against the basic account. Apparently Willard figured that as long as the final figure on the bank statement jibed with the balance in Miss Graves’s books when she totaled up at the end of each month, she wouldn’t bother to check the deposits appearing on the bank statement against her file of deposit slips. What Willard did was have a rubber stamp made similar to the one the bank uses on duplicate deposit slips. I found it in his desk this morning.”

Fumbling in his desk drawer, he produced a large rubber stamp, held it up for a moment and dropped it back in the drawer again. “Instead of using a bankbook, Miss Graves always prepares two deposit slips, one for the bank and one to be stamped and returned to her as a receipt. When he wanted capital for a speculation, apparently Willard would withhold one check from deposit, make out new slips and deposit the remainder of whatever Miss Graves had given him. But what he would give to her as a receipt when he returned from the bank would be the duplicate slip she had actually prepared, stamped by him instead of by the bank.”

“I see,” I said thoughtfully. “So what you’re looking for in that stack of bank statements is large amounts deposited in two separate chunks at periods up to thirty days apart, where your duplicate deposit slips show it deposited all in one piece.”

“Exactly. And so far I have discovered five instances during the past year. Amounts ranging from five thousand dollars up to the top one of seventy thousand which Willard returned yesterday.” At the thought of the seventy thousand he again ran his handkerchief over the back of his neck. “Prior to this last time it was mainly firm money Willard was playing with, but this belonged to a client. It was advanced to us to buy a certain stock when it falls to the price the client is willing to pay. We would have been ruined if Willard had not gotten it back in the account.”

“Happen to know what he was planning to do with the seventy thousand?” I asked.

Jones shook his head. “Apparently he had already done it. The Riverside Bank tells me the deposit was a certified check on the Mohl and Townsend Investment Company, a competitor of ours. Willard must have bought some stock through them, then unloaded it and returned the money just before he got killed.”

“Have you talked to Mohl and Townsend?”

Again Jones shook his head. “I don’t plan to. I plan to turn all information I find in our own records over to Inspector Day and let him use it as he wishes. But beyond being thankful that his investments didn’t cost Willard any money, I don’t care what his speculations were now that he’s dead.”

I thought about Knight’s cheaply furnished frame shack, and wondered if Harlan Jones’s estimate of his dead partner’s luck was quite accurate. Perhaps Knight’s ability to replace his borrowed money before the end of each month was no reflection of his success at speculation, and sometimes he may have had to dig deeply into his personal funds to make up the full amount.

I forbore mentioning this possibility to Jones, for his tone indicated he wanted to forget his partner’s financial dealings as soon as possible. I wondered whether the disclosure of Knight’s dishonesty had shaken Jones’s conviction that his partner would not have made love to his wife, and whether Isobel might not be called upon to do some explaining when she awakened from her nap.

It occurred to me that the suspicion his wife had been Knight’s mistress after all might be as much responsible for the state of nerves we found him in as the discovery of his narrowly averted bankruptcy.

The Mohl and Townsend Investment Company office was a duplicate of the Jones and Knight office with one outstanding difference. Instead of a middle-aged spinster presiding over the reception room, we found a voluptuous blonde who would have been nearly as beautiful as Fausta, had her voluptuousness not been slightly overdone. I have as much admiration for an impressive feminine torso as the next man, but I don’t like to have to approach sidewise to get my arms around a girl. She had a typewriter in front of her, and my first thought when we entered the office was that she obviously must use the touch system, for if she backed up enough to see the keys, she would be too far from the machine to reach it with her fingers.

I left her and Fausta eying each other with mutual hostility while I had a talk with the senior partner in his private office.

Alfred Mohl was a dried-up specimen of about seventy, and about as conservative as you might expect an investment broker to be. To put it mildly, he was not enthusiastic about discussing the business affairs of a client, even though the client’s deceased condition made it unlikely the company would draw further business from him. Only after I had convinced him I was working in co-operation with the homicide department, and we had reason to suspect Willard Knight’s speculations somehow tied in with his murder, did he reluctantly unload.

“We have been handling transactions for Mr. Knight about three years,” he finally told me. “Mostly of the speculative type. He was not an — ah — conservative investor.”

I asked, “Didn’t you think it strange that a rival investment broker would buy stock through you, when he easily could have done so through his own firm?”

“I sometimes wondered about it,” Mohl admitted. “But it is not part of a broker’s duty to question a client’s motive for giving him business.”

“It never occurred to you Knight might be speculating with money not belonging to him?”

Alfred Mohl looked shocked. “Certainly not!”

“Well, it seems he was. Could you tell me just what his investments were, and how he made out on each one?”

He pressed a button on his desk, and when the large-bosomed blonde came in, asked her to bring him the file on Willard Knight. When she brought it to him, he pored over it about ten minutes while I silently smoked a cigar. Occasionally he made a note on a slip of paper.

“Here is the entire story,” he said finally, closing the file folder and handing me the paper on which he had been making notes.

Neatly divided into four columns was a list of a dozen stock transactions, the first column consisting of the names of stocks, the second the number of shares purchased, the third the purchase price, and the last the selling date and price.

A quick glance showed me the transactions were spread over a period of three years and, as Harlan Jones had guessed, each separate transaction was completed within a calendar month, making it possible for Knight to return the “borrowed” money to the company account in time to have it included on the end-of-the-month bank statement. Ten of the transactions indicated Knight had made a profit, the smallest profit being two hundred dollars and the largest three thousand. But the other two transactions explained the cheapness of Willard Knight’s home.

Between the two he had taken a loss of thirty-five thousand.

In my head I added up his wins, subtracted from his two large losses and came out with a debit balance of approximately twenty thousand. The last transaction was the only one of the lot which showed neither profit nor loss. In the three weeks Knight had held shares, the market price had not changed a decimal.