Had they been pooled, through gossip, they would certainly have led the Conners to the conclusion that Beau was in worse financial trouble than usual, that he had possibly done something desperate or illegal to try to scramble from his perennial difficulties, that Netta was
“throwing Lenore at Kit Sloan’s head”—with some success, and in the transparent hope of establishing a state of permanent family solvency—that Lenore had finally told Chuck their affection was impracticable and that their unexpressed “understanding” no longer existed, and that the neighbor girl was not pleased with the exploitation of her beauty.
If they had clearly realized all this, the Connors, being kind-hearted, would have acted.
They would have acted out of generosity, even if the lifelong love of their older son and their deep fondness for Lenore hadn’t been involved. Hank would have offered Beau the five thousand, selling a mortgage he’d taken for a friend, or cashing in some war bonds, or borrowing on his insurance or, perhaps, just asking for a loan from Mr. Morse, the owner of the hardware stores. But since, by and large, the Conners didn’t gossip, the bits and tabs of information which would have made clear a whole only hazily suspected were never assembled.
Beau’s “moral fiber,” such as it was, consisted of conflicts amongst fears. His capacity to be afraid, however, was considerable. A man who was a physical coward, and nothing else, would have capitulated if possible to the warning Jake had emphasized by having Toledo “slug him a couple.” But Beau was more afraid of prison than of blows; could he have served a term under an assumed name, he would have dreaded prison far less than social ostracism. He feared his wife next most of all persons, Minerva Sloan most.
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.”
“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.”