“Yep,” the girl said, “Friday is our big day.”
No, Anson thought. Thursday is our big day.
Jeremy Thorpe stood at the far end of the counter, the ballpoint pen in his hand. He took out his passbook, opened it before him, and then drew a deposit slip from one of the cubbyholes beneath the counter. He flipped the deposit slip over so that he could write on the blank yellow surface, and then he knotted his brow as if he were trying to work out a tricky problem in arithmetic.
He drew a large rectangle on the back of the deposit slip. On the north side of the rectangle, he drew two lines which intersected the side, and between the lines he scribbled the word “doors.” In the right-hand corner of the rectangle, he drew a small square resembling a desk, and he labeled it “mgr.” Across the entire south side of the rectangle, opposite his “doors,” he drew a line representing the half wall dividing the tellers’ cages from the remainder of the bank. He jotted four lines onto this to show the approximate position of the cages, and another line to indicate the locked doorway that led to the back of the bank and the vault. In the left-hand corner of his plan, the east and north sides intersected in a right angle which he labeled “counter.”
He folded the deposit slip in half, slipped it into his coat pocket, took a new deposit slip from the cubbyhole, and filled it in for a deposit of five dollars. In the space that asked for his name, he did not write Jeremy Thorpe. He carefully lettered in the words “Arthur Samuels.” He brought the deposit slip and a five-dollar bill to one of the cages, waiting behind a small man in a dark suit.
This was the third time he’d been inside the bank. He’d opened an account close to a month ago with fifty dollars. He’d added twenty dollars to it last week. He was adding five dollars to it now. He’d used different tellers for each deposit. The teller who took his passbook and money now had never seen Jeremy Thorpe before, and he certainly didn’t know his name wasn’t really Arthur Samuels. The teller stamped the book, put the money and deposit slip into his drawer, and handed the book back to Jeremy. Jeremy put the passbook into its protective case, and then walked directly to the doors, glancing once at the manager’s desk which was on his left behind a short wooden railing. The big bronze doors were folded back against the wall, and the uniformed bank guard was chatting with a white-haired woman. Jeremy pushed open one of the glass doors and walked down the stairs into the sunshine. This was Tuesday.
From the soda fountain across the way from the bank, Carl Semmer could see the bank very clearly. There was a driveway to the right of the bank, and a door was at the end of that driveway, and the payroll trucks would roll up that driveway on Thursday. The guards would step out and enter through the door at the end of the driveway, and the payrolls for American Steel and Tartogue Aircraft would be carried back to the vault, awaiting the demands of the employees’ checks next day. He had sat at the soda fountain counter on two payroll delivery days thus far. On both those days, the American Steel payroll had arrived in an armored car bearing the shield of International Armored Car Corp. On the fourteenth of last month, it had arrived at 2:01 P.M. On the thirty-first of last month, it had arrived at 2:07 P.M. On both occasions it had taken the guards approximately six minutes to deliver the payroll and back the truck out into the street. They had then turned left around the corner and been out of sight before an additional minute had expired.
On the fourteenth, the Safeguard Company’s truck bearing the second payroll had arrived at 2:10, several minutes after the first truck departed. On the thirty-first, the Safeguard Company’s truck arrived while the first truck was still in the driveway. It waited in front of the A&P alongside the bank’s driveway, and when the first truck swung out into the street and around the corner, it pulled up to the rear door at 2:15. On both occasions, each truck was gone and out of sight by 2:22 P.M.
Carl had watched these operations with careful scrutiny. He was now watching an equally important operation.
The big clock on the outside wall of the bank read 2:59. He glanced at his own wristwatch to check the time, and then his eyes moved to the front steps where he saw Anson Grubb starting for the doors. Anson entered the glass doors and moved into the bank. Carl’s eyes fled to the clock again. The big hand was moving slowly, almost imperceptibly.
Three o’clock.
Jeremy Thorpe started up the front steps of the bank. From behind the glass doors, the uniformed guard shook his head, smiled a sad smile at Jeremy, and then began closing the big bronze doors. Jeremy snapped his fingers, turned, and walked down the steps again and turned left toward the A&P. Carl studied his watch. It took thirty seconds to close the big bronze doors.
He kept watching the front of the bank. At 3:05, one of the bronze doors opened, and an old lady started down the steps. The door closed behind her. At 3:07, the door opened again, and two more people left the bank. At 3:10, four people left. At 3:17, two people left. At 3:21, Anson Grubb left the bank. Carl knew he would be the last person to leave. He paid for his coffee and went back to the furnished room at the other end of town.
This was Wednesday.
“The payroll trucks should be gone by 2:25,” Anson said that night. “We’ll give ourselves leeway and say they’ll be gone by 2:30. Add another five minutes to that in case there are any foul-ups inside the bank, and we can figure the money’ll be safe in the vault by 2:35.”
He scratched his chin thoughtfully. He was a tall man with wild black hair. His eyes were blue, and his nose was long and thin. He wore an immaculate blue suit, and a black homburg rested on the chair beside him. One knee was raised as he leaned onto the chair, the trouser leg pulled back in a crease-preserving manner.
“Where’s the plan, Jerry?” he said.
Jeremy Thorpe rose and walked to the dresser. He opened the top drawer and removed an eight-by-eleven enlargement of the plan he’d sketched onto the deposit slip. He brought this to the table, put it in the center under the hanging lightbulb and said, “I’m no Michelangelo.”
The other men studied the plan once more. They had seen it often enough since Jeremy had drawn it up, but they studied it again, coupling it with their own memories of what they’d seen inside the bank, giving the two-dimensional drawing a three-dimensional reality.
“What do you think?” Anson said.
“Looks good,” Carl answered. He was a short man with a pug nose and bad teeth. He was smoking now, and the gray smoke of his cigarette drifted up past the cooler gray of his eyes. He wore his brown hair in a crew cut.
“Jerry?”
“I like it,” Jeremy said. He blinked his eyes. Now that the time was close, he was getting a little nervous. The nervousness showed in his pale features. He tweaked his feminine nose, and his lids blinked again, like short flesh curtains spasmodically closing and opening over his brown eyes.
“Only two of us are going in, you understand that, don’t you?” Anson said.
Carl nodded.
“Jerry?”
“I understand.”
“You think we can knock it over with just two inside?” Carl asked. “Maybe we all ought to go in.”
“We can do it,” Anson said.
“There’s just one weak spot in the plan,” Jeremy said, blinking.
“What’s that?”
“The last guy to leave.”
“How do you figure that to be a weak spot?”
“Suppose the timing is off? What happens then?”