“You go underground. There’s a passage. One of the girls down in the stenographic pool will show you.” Beau made up, that time, for his prior lack of assurance.
The girl said, “Oke,” stuck her gum on the under edge of her desk, rose, and began to make up: there might be boys in the passageway.
When she had departed, Beau studied the opaque glass walls of his cubicle and decided they were, indeed, opaque. Then he looked briefly from the door, at an empty corridor. After that he tried to remember the present market value of Hobart Metal bonds. He thought it was par, but wasn’t sure. If he were going to borrow five, he might as well be certain and take six. He folded them on their creases and tucked them carefully into an inside breast pocket. Only then did he remember his exposure in the window. He whirled with horror and stared up at the stacked panes across the street. Lights shown in everyone and rain poured between. There were faces and people moving, but no one seemed to be interested in him, in anything in his direction which—when you considered—probably looked like nothing but a lot of teeming rain.
He took the inventory list and correctly reduced the number of listed bonds from ten to four. He then made out, in a disguised writing, a receipt for six bonds and signed it with an indecipherable scrawl, using a bank pen and bank ink. He pulled out the nib afterward, put in a new one, and pocketed the old. Nobody, he thought, could prove who had written the receipt or show with what it had been signed. Not even experts. And, anyway, the absence of the bonds would go unsuspected.
It took two more days to complete the transaction and set his mind at rest. Or momentarily at rest.
The following morning was still rainy. Taking Netta somewhat into his confidence, he explained it would be “useful” if she alibied him with a slight cold. She did not enquire more deeply. She called the bank and talked about “a couple of degrees temperature” and “doctor’s orders.”
It happened, owing to Country Club contacts, that Beau knew an officer in the Ferndale Branch of the Owen National Bank of Commerce, who was a “good man to go to in a tight spot.”
His name was Wesley Martinson. Beau had cultivated the man, played a few rounds of golf with him, come to call him “Wes”—probably because his subconscious mind invariably noted down the fact that a fellow useful in a tight spot might someday be handy to him. Beau had that kind of foresight—quantities of it.
Wes greeted him without surprise, ushered him into a private room in the branch bank, sat, performed smoking amenities and said, “Well, Beau, what can we do for you?”
Beau had pretty much taken the measure of his man, through the medium of a hundred off-color stories retailed by Wes with almost writhing relish. Beau therefore chuckled and said,