Ed McBain - Another Part of the City

“I forgot this.”

“A silver deal? A man coming here to buy silver contracts? Long? When we’re involved with the Kidds in a big...”

“I really don’t see the importance of someone calling for an...”

“Oh, did someone call?”

“If his name was in my appointment calendar, then I’m assuming he called for an appointment.”

“Let’s look at your appointment calendar, okay, Lowell? Let’s see if Peter Dodge’s name is in it.”

“Assume it’s in it,” Rothstein said. “Assume he came here, and I forgot he was here. What the hell difference does it make?”

“Why did you lie to a detective investigating a homicide?”

“I didn’t lie to him. I honestly forgot that Dodge was here.”

“But now you remember he was here, huh?”

“I guess he was here. If you insist he was here, then he was here.”

The two men looked at each other. There was a long silence.

“Then why’d you lie to Reardon?” Phelps asked. “If Dodge did come here...”

“I didn’t lie. We get a lot of customers in here, I simply forgot...”

“No,” Phelps said.

“Well, listen,” Lowell said, shrugging, “what can I tell you?”

“You can tell me why you lied.”

Rothstein said nothing.

“How did Olivia know he’d been here?”

“Reardon? Olivia knows Reardon was...?”

“No, Dodge. Peter Dodge. She mentioned his name. She said he’d taken a position. How’d she know that, Lowell?”

Rothstein said nothing.

“And you can tell me something else, Lowell, while you’re at it. Something else that’s been bothering me.” He looked across the desk and nodded, as though silently agreeing with what he was about to say. He nodded again. He kept nodding. “When Olivia was here last week, she mentioned that you’d already seen the purchasing schedule. How come you saw it, Lowell, when I didn’t?”

“Joe...”

“No, don’t ‘Joe’ me. What the hell is going on? Did you see that schedule before I did?”

“No.”

“Then why did Olivia think you’d seen it?”

“I told you. She has a lot on her mind, she...”

“I don’t believe you about that, either,” Phelps said, and shook his head. “I thought we were partners, I thought...”

“We are.”

“I’m into this up to my ears...”

“So am I.”

“The CFTC is asking questions...”

“Don’t worry about them.”

“I worry about my partner lying to me!” Phelps said.

“Joe,” Rothstein said, “trust me.”

Phelps looked at him, nodding. He kept nodding for a long time. Then he said, “Lowell, whenever anyone says, ‘Trust me,’ do you know what I do?”

“What do you do, Joe?” Rothstein said, and smiled.

“I hide the family silver,” Phelps said.

The two men stared at each other.

Rothstein sighed heavily.

“Okay,” he said at last.

“Okay what?”

“This is what happened.” Rothstein said.

They’d been waiting outside the building for less than twenty minutes when Phelps came out.

“There he is,” Reardon said.

Phelps was carrying a briefcase. He stepped to the curb, and immediately hailed a taxi.

“Stay with him,” Reardon said.

The taxi pulled away from the curb. Ruiz pulled the Plymouth sedan out after it.

“Heading uptown,” he said.

“Don’t lose him, Alex.”

The traffic got heavier as they reached the midtown area. This was two days before Christmas and the city was thronged with shoppers. The taxi kept moving slowly and steadily uptown. Santa Clauses rang their bells on street corners. Salvation Army ladies played their trombones and said “God bless you” to anyone who dropped a coin in their kettle. On Fifty-seventh Street, the taxi made a right turn and headed east. The light on the corner turned red just as Ruiz approached it.

“Run it.” Reardon said.

Ruiz made the right turn.

The traffic cop on the corner yelled at the car.

“Heading for the bridge, you think?” Ruiz asked, ignoring him.

“I don’t know,” Reardon said.

On Sutton Place, the taxi made another right, and then began slowing.

“Back off,” Reardon said.

Ruiz slowed the car.

The taxi stopped in front of an apartment building. Phelps got out, nodded to the doorman, and then swiftly entered the building.

“What now?” Ruiz asked.

“We wait,” Reardon said.

It was twenty minutes past eleven when Rothstein discovered his partner had left the office. He had called Phelps’s secretary to ask if Mr. Phelps was busy for lunch today, figuring he’d take him to a good place, smooth his ruffled feathers. Alice told him there was nothing on Mr. Phelps’s appointment calendar, but she couldn’t check with him because he was in the vault just now.

“What do you mean?” Rothstein said. “Our vault?”

“Yes, sir. I was carrying some papers to Mr. Donahue’s office, and I saw Mr. Phelps going into the vault.”

“When was that?” Rothstein asked.

“Oh, about twenty minutes ago.”

“And he’s still there?”

“Well, I don’t know that for sure, sir, but he’s not in his office.”

“Thank you,” Rothstein said, and immediately dialed the vault’s extension.

“Hello?” a man’s voice said.

“Who’s this?” Rothstein asked.

“Donahue.”

“Mike, this is Lowell,” he said. “Is Joe there in the vault?”

“Nobody here but us chickens,” Donahue said.

“You sure he’s not in there?”

“Not unless he’s hiding in one of the lock boxes,” Donahue said.

“Thanks,” Rothstein said, and put the receiver back on its cradle. Frowning, he came around his desk, went out of his office, walked past his secretary, went down the hall past Phelps’s office, and then turned right at the end of the corridor, heading for the vault. Donahue was just coming out, swinging the heavy steel vault door shut.

“That’s okay, leave it,” Rothstein said.

Donahue nodded, and went off down the hallway.

The vault was lined with safety deposit lock boxes in various sizes, each containing securities for the firm’s customers. Two keys were necessary to open any box: the customer’s individual key and the firm’s master key. The customer keys were held by the firm’s individual brokers, to facilitate the clipping of coupons on a quarterly basis. Each of the brokers had a master key as well. Except in its design, this was not like a bank vault, where a box holder had to sign in each time he wanted access. The only people using this vault were people employed by Rothstein-Phelps, all of them carefully screened before they were hired, all of them presumably honest.

There was only one lock box that concerned Rothstein at the moment.

If his partner hadn’t made that comment about hiding the silver...

If his partner hadn’t turned absolutely white when Rothstein told him about Dodge’s visit...

If his partner hadn’t seemed on the thin edge of panic when Rothstein told him about the phone call he’d made after Dodge’s visit...

If his partner wasn’t running so goddamned scared...

Then maybe Rothstein wouldn’t have been so concerned about that particular lock box.

That particular box belonged to a widow named Phyllis Katzman.

It contained close to three and a half million dollars in bearer bonds.

Rothstein went directly to that box.

He took his keys from his pocket, searched for the Katzman key and the master key, and unlocked the box.

The box was empty.

Three million four hundred and eighty thousand dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds, payable on demand to the bearer, were gone.