She forced a smile. “Yes. Not much crowd at the bank. I did get back in a hurry.”
The bit of dialogue pleased her. The cashier had noticed specifically that her absence from the store had been of briefer duration than usual. He would remember that when the detectives made inquiry.
She seated herself at her typewriter. Beside her, on the battered oak desk, she placed the innocuous appearing brown paper package, the package containing one hundred thousand dollars. She was horribly nervous, but apparently no one noticed anything unusual in her manner. The wall clock indicated the hour of 10:30. From then until noon she must work.
It was difficult. Her thoughts were focused upon the money before her. Once a clerk stopped by her desk to chat and his hand rested idly upon the package of money. She felt as though she must scream. But he moved away eventually. She breathed more easily.
At five minutes after noon she left the office for her lunch. With her went the package of money. She made her way to the City Trust and Savings Company, an imposing edifice of white marble nearly opposite the Third National. She entered the building and descended the broad stairway to the safety deposit vaults, noticing with relief that there was an unusually large crowd there. She extended her key to the ancient man in charge.
“Two-thirty-five, please. Mrs. Harriet Dare.”
Mrs. Dare, now dead, had been Phyllis' sister. Phyllis had access to the box. Too, she maintained in this bank a box in her own name, so that should official investigation progress to the point of examining the safety-deposit box of Phyllis Robinson, nothing to excite suspicion would be found. That was one of the strongest links in the safety chain that Cliff Wallace had welded.
The man in charge ran through his index and handed her a card to sign. Her hand trembled as she wrote her name: Phyllis Robinson. The old man took her key and his, unlocked the box and left her. There were a number of persons in the vault: One pompous gentleman ostentatiously clipping coupons from Liberty Bonds of fifty-dollar denomination; an old lady who had already locked her box and was struggling vainly to assure herself that it was thoroughly locked; a fair haired clerk from a broker's office assuming the businesslike airs of his employer; a half dozen others, each reassuringly absorbed in his own business. Phyllis took her box—it was a large one—and carried it into one of the private booths which stood just outside the vault door.
She placed the tin box and her package side by side on the mahogany shelf. A quick survey of the place assured her that she was not observed. She wondered vaguely why she was not. It seemed as though someone must know. But apparently no one did. Swiftly she transferred the hundred thousand dollars to the strong box. She was amazed to find herself computing financial possibilities when all the while she was frightened. It was an amount to yield seven thousand dollars a year carefully invested. Two persons could live comfortably on seven thousand dollars a year. And that meant every year—there'd be no diminution of principal. Nearly one hundred and fifty dollars a week. Every comfort and many luxuries assured. Freedom. Independence. Fear.
She returned the box to its compartment and emerged upon the street again. With the money put safely away a load had lifted from her shoulders. She felt a sense of enormous relief. The danger mark had been passed, the scheme appeared to have justified itself. But now her nerves were jangling as they had not been before. She was frightened, not so much for what the immediate future might hold as by the experience through which she had just passed. No longer was she keyed up by action. Retrospection left her weak and afraid. She knew that she couldn’t do it again; marveled at the fact that she had committed this act at all.
She ate a tiny meal at the dairy lunch which she patronized regularly. At 12:40 she returned to the office, where she threw herself into the grind of routine work, seeking forgetfulness and ease for her jangling nerves. But her thoughts were not on the letters she typed; they were at the bank with Clifford Wallace, chief paying teller.
Meanwhile Cliff's inscrutable, rather hard face gave no indication of the seethe within him. He did his work with mechanical precision, counting large sums of money with incredible speed, checking and rechecking his payments, attending to his routine work with the deftness and accuracy that had won him this post.
There was in his manner no slightest indication that he had just engineered the theft of one hundred thousand dollars in currency. Never friendly at best, he was perhaps this day a trifle more reserved than usual; but even had his fellow workers noticed the fact they would have ascribed it to the abnormal pressure of work. It was seldom that three big pay rolls became due at one time And the handling of such huge sums of money is likely to cause temporary irascibility in even the most genial of men.
The hour hand of the big clock on the marble wall crept to the figure two. A gong sounded. Immediately work was suspended at the long rows of windows. Then the little barred doors were dropped, the patrons of the bank drifted out gradually, and the bedlam of a busy day was succeeded by the drone of after-hours work—the clackety-clack of adding machines, the rustle of checks, the slamming of books, the clink of silver and gold.
Pencil in hand, Cliff Wallace checked over the money in his vault. Paying Tellers Numbers Two, Three and Four made their reports first. Then Wallace gave his attention to his own cash. The door of his cage was open, so that the cages of the four paying tellers were temporarily en suité. Behind Wallace's back the door of the cash vault gaped. The vault itself was part of his cage, its contents Wallace's responsibility. He worked swiftly and expertly. And then, a few minutes before 4:30 o'clock, he presented himself before Robert Warren, president of the Third National. He was nervous and ill at ease. In his left hand he held a paper covered with figures. His face was expressionless, unless one was sufficiently keen to observe the hunted, haunted look in his cold blue eyes. Here was the crisis. He pulled up a chair and seated himself, after having first closed the door of the president's office.
“Mr. Warren”—his voice was steady and incisive, giving no hint of the emotional strain under which he labored—“I have just checked over the cash. I am precisely one hundred thousand dollars short.”
The president's swivel chair creaked. The gentleman strangled on a puff of cigar smoke. His big, spatulate hands came down on the polished mahogany desk surface with a thump. His eyes widened.
“You—you are what?”
“My cash is one hundred thousand dollars short.”
The statement appeared to have difficulty in penetrating.
“My dear Mr. Wallace—that is impossible! An exact amount?”
Cliff was more at ease. It was a scene he had rehearsed a hundred times, and it was developing just as anticipated.
“I realize the impossibility, sir. But it is nevertheless a fact.”
Robert Warren's face hardened slightly. He regarded his chief paying teller with a critical, speculative glance. Wallace returned look for look. The president spoke:
“Please explain yourself, Mr. Wallace. Am I listening to a statement or a confession?”
“A statement, sir.”
“H’m!” Warren was himself again. Only superficially was the man genial. He had cultivated geniality as a business asset. Basically he was utterly emotionless. He realized that the thing to which he gave ear was of vital import, and as that realization hammered home, his demeanor became intransigently frigid. “H'm! A statement?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your cash is—er—an even one hundred thousand dollars short?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How does that happen?”
“I’m trying to find out myself.”
“You are quite sure?”
“Certainly, sir. I would not have come