“Yes,” he answered, “Simpson disappeared four days ago.”
“Has he a family?”
“A wife.”
“And she knows nothing about him, or professes to know nothing?”
“I feel sure she’s as much in the dark as we are.”
“Perhaps—perhaps not,” murmured the bogus detective, joining the tips of his fingers as he had seen Nick do. “Please tell me now how the fellow managed to get hold of the money, to get it out of the bank or banks in which it had been deposited to the credit of the fund. Surely, his wasn’t the only signature required, was it? The checks drawn against the fund must have been countersigned by some one else?”
“They were—by Mr. Driggs, the vice president of our organization.”
“Then how——”
“In a very ingenious way. I wouldn’t have thought John Simpson capable of so much adroitness. I was away at the time, but he prevailed upon Mr. Driggs to withdraw the fund from the two New York banks in which it had been deposited—the Broadway Exchange Bank, and the Hudson National—and to transfer everything to the Cotton and Wool National at Hattontown.”
“Thus making it possible to deal with only one bank, and that a smaller one whose officials presumably were not so wary,” Green Eye commented judicially. “What excuse did he give?”