Hence it was not until the last week in Octoher that Beau, made desperate by a series of ever-more-menacing (and constantly harder-to-explain) phone calls, decided to act. Jake, and Toledo, had taken to phoning him at the bank and their voices were not the sort Beau wanted to have the operator hear. Like many who commit crime, however, Beau was brought to the actual deed by idle opportunity as much as by resolve.
It was a period of pre-Christmas inventory.
From the vaults, methodically, with armed guards watching, a number of “portfolios” were fetched for checking. These were, of course, not cardboard “folios” but metal boxes containing lists, account books, receipts, letters, orders, and sheaves of certificates.
And it was while this routine checking was in progress late one afternoon that Miss Tully’s mother got a sudden appendicitis, called the doctor, was whisked to the Jenkins Memorial Hospital which, like the Presbyterian Church and some of the city’s finest residences, was situated on the shore of Crystal Lake. The hospital promptly informed Miss Tully an emergency operation was imminent; that distracted woman, who had served the bank for twenty-seven years (with a total absence of but eleven days), appealed to Beau. He was not very nice about it, but he let her go.
It left him with her work to be “shouldered” in addition to his own. He happened that day to have nothing whatever left to do. It was three fifteen, a rainy, raw afternoon, and the main floor, with cages all around and stand-up desks in rows in the center, was already empty of customers. The doors were closed and Bill Maine, the front-door guard, was reading a copy of the Saturday Evening Post in a shaft of insufficient light that fell from the outer gloom through a high, barred window.
The bank was comparatively quiet. Business machines made more noise than voices. No clerk, of course, could hear the hard rain, for the roof was twenty-odd stories overhead and the rain fell straight. When Miss Tully departed, in still-damp, evil-smelling accouterments for foul weather, Beau was left in his office with three large deposit boxes and Miss Ames, his secretary, a niece of a vice-president, a recent business-school graduate, suffering now from a head cold.
He set himself to do the checking which had engaged Miss Tully, leafing in a desultory way through the amassed holdings of one John M. Jessup, of Larkimer County, a livestock dealer. If Beau remembered rightly, Jessup was about seven feet tall, had a sparrow’s voice, wore two pairs of glasses, had cleaned up on beeves in the First World War, and hadn’t been in at the bank since Truman left office. Beau always remembered people. But even those facts did not move Beau to wider ratiocination. What moved him was the observation, in his hands, of ten one-thousand-dollar bonds, issued by Hobart Metal Products when they had expanded the works on the west side of town.
Just half those, Beau thought, would get me out of all my worries. Only then did he recall the rarity of Mr. Jessup’s visits. And only after that did he glance at the sonorous Miss Ames.
“How would you like,” he said, “to go across to Sherman’s and get me— us —some coffee?”
She took the slight falter in his voice for an employer weakness. “Not much. It’s raining.”