Cutter sent his chair crashing backward. He lunged forward and grabbed at the card which Mason held. Mason jerked the card back from Cutter’s grasp, and Cutter shouted to the officers, “Arrest that man! I don’t give a damn who he is!”
One of the officers moved forward. Mason stepped backward, his outstretched left arm holding the officer back, his right hand keeping the card behind his back. “Don’t be a fool,” he said to the officer. “Look at Rooney.”
Rooney collapsed into a chair, as though his knees had suddenly become unhinged. His face was gray and pasty.
Mason said, “You’re head auditor at the Products Refining Company, Rooney. You draw a salary of four hundred and sixty dollars a month. Between two and three months ago, Carl Moar, who worked under you as a bookkeeper, mysteriously disappeared. You immediately called the attention of the directors to the fact that there was a shortage in the books. You knew that shortage would be discovered anyway, because they’d insist on a complete audit, with a bookkeeper vanishing as Moar did. Now then, perhaps you’ll be kind enough to explain to these gentlemen how you managed to save enough money to buy almost five thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry out of a salary of four hundred and sixty a month.”
Rooney made a deprecatory gesture with his hands, and said, “All right, you’ve got me.”
“How long,” Mason asked, “has this embezzlement been going on?”
Arthur Cutter slowly seated himself in his big swivel chair.
“By God,” he said, “I don’t like this.”
“No one asked you to,” Mason told him. Then, turning to Rooney, “How long has this been going on, Rooney?”
Rooney said, “Look here. We can fix this thing up. No one needs to know anything about it except us. I’m related to Charles Whitmore Dail, the president of the company. He’ll give me hell, but he’ll put up the money rather than have the scandal.”