I watched the clerk pick up a desk phone, heard him ask for 1409. He waited quite a while, then hung up. “Nobody answers,” he said.
“Of course not. They’ve gone.”
But they were still in the hotel. I thought: I’ll have them call the police. We’ll go to every room on the fourteenth floor. If we don’t find them, we’ll go through every room in the hotel. We’ll get them.
Then I realized that wasn’t bright. Supposing I did find them. I couldn’t prove anything. There were two of them, their words against mine. Even Herb, the bartender, recognizing that the girl was the one who’d been in the bar with me, left when I did, wouldn’t prove anything. That was out.
I got a better idea. I told the clerk: “Never mind. Skip it. I’ll handle it myself.”
I turned away from the desk and went out onto the street. I crossed the street and got into a darkened doorway over there, where I could watch the hotel exit. I stood there. This would be better. One or both of them would have to leave the hotel sometime. They would have to report to whoever had hired them to do this to me. I’d follow, find out who it was. Then I’d really have something to work on. But maybe they wouldn’t go to their boss. They might telephone him or her and report on what had happened. Well, that was a chance I’d have to take.
While I waited, I went over the whole thing in my mind. I got the setup pretty clearly. They were trying to frame me for the embezzlement, so it must’ve been worked in a way that would have been possible for me to accomplish. There was only one way that was possible. I didn’t actually handle any company cash. But I got the checks for other people and mailed them to them. To our artists and writers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in checks.
The procedure was this. I had to voucher for a script or art work when it was turned in, as managing editor of the comics magazine group. The business office made out checks for those vouchers and the individual checks in turn were given back to me to mail to the artists and writers. The average writer’s check for a single script was sixty to seventy dollars. The average artist’s check was for twenty dollars a comic-book page, which meant their checks averaged about one hundred and sixty dollars. We paid editorial bills twice a week. It would be a comparatively simple thing for me, in connivance with somebody in the business office, to make out vouchers to phoney names, for scripts and/or art work that hadn’t even been done, a couple of times a week. Then, when I got the checks, to sign them with the name they were made out to, then double-endorse them with another phoney name, with which I’d already established a bank account, and deposit them to that account.
Liz Tremayne, the bookkeeper, if working with me on this deal, could easily cover for me on the books, until the end of the fiscal year when the regular annual auditing took place.
I had never thought of this possibility to defraud Emcee Publications out of thousands of dollars before. But I thought of it now. Plenty. The more I thought of it, the more I realized how badly that confession would make things look for me.
But since I hadn’t done this, I had to figure out who had. Nobody but me handled checks and vouchers in the editorial department. Almost anybody in the business office could have worked the deal. All they had to do was get hold of a stack of editorial voucher forms from the stock room, learn to forge my handwriting, and – working with Liz Tremayne, who kept books and made out the checks – they wouldn’t even have to be too clever with that. But how about the people who signed the checks? Wouldn’t they get suspicious over a couple of extra checks being there twice a week?
The checks bore two signatures, M. C. Malkom’s, the president’s, and the authorized counter-signature, which would be Ronny Chernow’s, as head of the Business Office. Chernow! Since Emcee Publications put out other books besides comics – Confession magazines and a string of pulps – there would probably be twenty or thirty checks to be signed twice a week.
Mr Malkom probably never even looked at them, but went through them and signed them one right after the other as fast as he could. Especially since the checks always went up for his final signature close to five o’clock in the afternoon. But Chernow wouldn’t rush through those checks, signing them, without examining them. That was part of his job, to double check on things like that, make sure a mistake hadn’t been made and two checks made out in error for the same material.
That did it. I knew then that Ronny Chernow was the one who had been working this embezzlement deal, who had decided to frame me for it. It all stacked up. Chernow, himself, gambled, played the market a lot. I’d seen the newspapers on his desk, turned to the racing entries and the market listings, many times. This was the answer to how he lived a life that would seem to take three times his salary.
I thought, then, too, about Liz Tremayne, the bookkeeper. She was a girl you could not figure. She was tall and neat, but you could never tell much about her figure. She always wore loose-fitting dresses or severely tailored suits. She wore double-lensed glasses and little if any makeup. She wore her brown hair pulled back into a severe bun. I remembered that she had nice features, but the way she dressed and wore her hair, you’d never notice that. She impressed everyone as being a very plain, unattractive girl. No sex appeal at all.
Yet, I also remember now, a long time ago, hearing Ronny Chernow, standing with a bunch of other men from the office by the water cooler one day, watching Liz Tremayne go past. Ronny had said: “You see all that protective coloration? But it doesn’t fool me. Put some makeup on that baby, fix her hair right, get her into the right dresses and take those horrible glasses off and I’ll bet she’d knock your eyes out. And that kind – once you break through that icy surface – man, oh, man!”
We’d all thought Ronny was crazy, then. But I saw now where he could be right. And that tied in with Liz helping him out with this deal. The quiet, plain, bookish type like that often went crazy for a man who was a complete opposite like Chernow. Especially once he’d started paying a lot of attention to her, began softening her up. And a woman in love with a man, often would do anything for him.
So there it was. Now what was I going to do with it? Chernow was my man. He knew I stopped in at the Marlo bar for a cocktail every Friday night. He’d hired Vivian and Smitty to do a job on me. He’d had her planted in the bar, then came in, himself, to put the finger on me, so she wouldn’t make any mistake and get the wrong guy. He’d even suckered me into staying for another drink, when I was ready to leave, tried to plant the idea in my mind of making a play for Vivian. It all tied in, nicely.
3. Ugly Duckling
ACROSS the street was a barber shop, with a clock in the window. The time was 8:10. It hardly seemed possible that all this had happened in only a couple of hours. It seemed like I’d been up half the night, already. And then I remembered Fran. She’d be expecting me home. I should have been there, even, before this. She’d get upset, worried. I had to call her. But I wondered what I could tell her. The truth would drive her crazy with anxiety. I’d have to make up something to tell her.
I decided not to wait any longer for Vivian and Smitty to leave the hotel. Now I knew who was behind all this, I didn’t necessarily need them; I walked down to the corner, entered a cigar store and called Fran. While I was waiting for her to answer, I counted the money I had in my pocket. I’d taken a five-dollar bill from my pay, this noontime, put that in my pocket and placed the rest of my cash in my wallet. Smitty had gotten that. Lunch and the drinks tonight had left me with a dollar bill and a few cents change from the five.