James Cain - The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

Well, how were you going to get that money put back, so the daily cash would balance, so the cards would balance, and so the passbooks would balance, and at the same time leave it so nothing would show later, when the auditors came around? It had me stumped, and I don’t mind telling you for a while I began to get cold feet. What I wanted to do was report it, as was, let Sheila fork up the dough, without saying where she got it, and let Brent get fired and go look himself up a job. It didn’t look like they would do much to him, if the money was put back. But she wouldn’t hear of that. She was afraid they might send him up anyway, and then I would be putting up the money all for nothing, her children would have to grow up under the disgrace, and where we would be was nowhere. There wasn’t much I could say to that. I figured they would probably let him off, but I couldn’t be sure.

It was Sheila that figured out the way. We were riding along one night, just one or two nights after I told her I was going to put up the dough myself, when she began to talk. “The cards, the cash, and the passbooks, is that it?”

“That’s all.”

“The cards and the cash are easy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That money goes back the same way it came out. Only instead of false withdrawals, I make out false deposits. The cash balances, the posting balances, and the card balances.”

“And the passbooks don’t balance. Listen. If there’s only one passbook — just one — that can tell on us after you’re out of there, and I’m out, we’re sunk. The only chance we’ve got is that the thing is never suspected at all — that no question is ever raised. And, what’s more, we don’t dare make a move till we see every one of the passbooks on those phoney accounts. We think we’ve got his code, how he ticked his false withdrawals, but we can’t be sure, and maybe he didn’t tick them all. Unless we can make a clean job of this, I don’t touch it. Him going to jail is one thing. All three of us going, and me losing my job and nine thousand bucks — oh no.”

“All right then, the passbooks.”

“That’s it — the passbooks.”

“Now when a passbook gets filled up, or there’s some mistake on it, what do we do?”

“Give him a new one, don’t we?”

“Containing how many entries?”

“One, I suppose. His total as of that date.”

“That’s right. And that one entry tells no tales. It checks with the card, and there’s not one figure to check against all those back entries — withdrawals and deposits and so on, running back for years. All right, then; so far, perfect. Now what do we do with his old book? Regularly, I mean.”

“Well — what do we do with it?”

“We put it under a punch, the punch that goes through every page and marks it void, and give it back to him.”

“And then he’s got it — any time an auditor calls for it. Gee, that’s a big help.”

“But if he doesn’t want it?”

“What are you getting at?”

“If he doesn’t want it, we destroy it. It’s no good to us, is it? And it’s not ours, it’s his. But he doesn’t want it.”

“Are you sure we destroy it?”

“I’ve torn up a thousand of them... And that’s just what we’re going to do now. Between now and the next check on my cash, we’re going to get all those books in. First we check totals, to know exactly where we’re at. Then the depositor gets a new book that tells no tales.”

“Why does he get a new book?”

“He didn’t notice it when he brought the old one in, but the stitching is awfully strained, and it’s almost falling apart. Or I’ve accidentally smeared lipstick on it. Or I just think it’s time he got one of our nice new books, for luck. So he gets a new book with one entry in it — just his total, that’s all. Then I say: ‘You don’t want this, do you?’ And the way I’ll say it, that old book seems positively contaminated. And then right in front of his eyes, as though it’s the way we do it every day, I’ll tear it up, and drop it in the wastebasket.”

“Suppose he does want it?”

“Then I’ll put it under the punch, and give it to him. But somehow that punch is going to make its neat little holes in the exact place where the footings are, and it’s going to be impossible for him, or an auditor, or anybody else, to read those figures. I’ll punch five or six times, you know, and his book will be like Swiss cheese, more holes than anything else.”

“And all the time you’re getting those holes in exactly the right place, he’s going to be on the other side of the window looking at you, wondering what all the hocus-pocus is about.”

“Oh no — it won’t take more than a second or two. You see, I’ve been practicing. I can do it in a jiffy... But he won’t want that book back. Trust me. I know how to do it.”

There was just a little note of pleading on that, as she said it. I had to think it over. I did think it over, for quite a while, and I began to have the feeling that on her end of it, if that was all, she could put it over all right. But then something else began to bother me. “How many of these doctored accounts are there?”

“Forty-seven.”

“And how are you going to get those passbooks in?”

“Well, interest is due on them. I thought I could send out little printed slips — signed ‘per Sheila Brent,’ in ink, so they’d be sure to come to me about it — asking them to bring in their books for interest credits. I never saw anybody that wouldn’t bring in his book if it meant a dollar and twenty-two cents. And a printed slip looks perfectly open and aboveboard, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, a printed slip is about the most harmless, open, and aboveboard thing there is. But this is what I’m thinking: You send out your printed slips, and within a couple of days all those books come in, and you can’t hold them forever. You’ve got to hand them back — or the new ones they’re going to get — or somebody’s going to get suspicious. That means the money’s got to be put back all at once. That’s going to make one awful bulge in your cash. Everybody in the bank is going to wonder at the reason for it, because it’s going to show in the posting.”

“I’ve thought of that. I don’t have to send out all those slips at once. I can send out four or five a day. And then, even if they do come in bunches — the passbooks I mean — I can issue the new books, right away as the old ones are presented, but make the adjustments on the cards and in my cash little by little — three or four hundred dollars a day. That’s not much.”

“No, but while that’s going on, we’re completely defenseless. We’ve got our chins hanging out and no way in the world of putting up a guard. I mean, while you’re holding out those adjustment entries, so you can edge them in gradually, your cash doesn’t balance the books. If then something happened — so I had to call for a cash audit on the spot, or if I got called away to the home office for a couple of days, or something happened to you, so you couldn’t come to work — then watch that ship go out of water. You may get away with it. But it’ll have to be done, everything squared up, before the next check on your cash. That’s twenty-one days from now. And at that, a three- or four-hundred-dollar bulge in your cash every day is going to look mighty funny. In the bank, I mean.”

“I could gag it off. I could say I’m keeping after them, to keep their deposits up, the way Charles always did. I don’t think there’s any danger. The cash will be there.”

So that was how we did it. She had the slips printed, and began mailing them out, three or four at a time. For the first few days’ replacement, the cash replacement I mean, I had enough in my own checking account. For the rest, I had to go out and plaster my house. For that I went to the Federal people. It took about a week, and I had to start an outside account, so nobody in the bank would know what I was up to. I took eight thousand bucks, and if you don’t think that hurt, you never plastered your house. Of course, it would be our luck that when the first of those books came in, she was out to lunch, and I was on the window myself. I took in the book, and receipted for it, but Church was only three or four feet away, running a column on one of the adding machines. She heard what I said to the depositor, and was at my elbow before I even knew how she got there.