The dishonest one was Stanley Graff, the outside salesman.
For some time Babbitt had been worried about Graff. He did not keep his word to tenants. In order to rent a house he would promise repairs which the owner had not authorized. It was suspected that he juggled inventories of furnished houses so that when the tenant left he had to pay for articles which had never been in the house and the price of which Graff put into his pocket. Babbitt had not been able to prove these suspicions, and though he had rather planned to discharge Graff he had never quite found time for it.
Now into Babbitt’s private room charged a red-faced man, panting, “Look here! I’ve come to raise particular merry hell, and unless you have that fellow pinched, I will!”
“What’s— Calm down, o’ man. What’s trouble?”
“Trouble! Huh! Here’s the trouble—”
“Sit down and take it easy! They can hear you all over the building!”
“This fellow Graff you got working for you, he leases me a house. I was in yesterday and signs the lease, all O.K., and he was to get the owner’s signature and mail me the lease last night. Well, and he did. This morning I comes down to breakfast and the girl says a fellow had come to the house right after the early delivery and told her he wanted an envelope that had been mailed by mistake, big long envelope with ‘Babbitt-Thompson’ in the corner of it. Sure enough, there it was, so she lets him have it. And she describes the fellow to me, and it was this Graff. So I ’phones to him and he, the poor fool, he admits it! He says after my lease was all signed he got a better offer from another fellow and he wanted my lease back. Now what you going to do about it?”
“Your name is—?”
“William Varney—W. K. Varney.”
“Oh, yes. That was the Garrison house.” Babbitt sounded the buzzer. When Miss McGoun came in, he demanded, “Graff gone out?”