Well, what Brent had done was fix up a cover for himself with all this stuff about putting it on a personal basis, so no savings depositor that came in the bank would ever deal with anybody but him. That ought to have made George Mason suspicious, but Brent was getting the business in, and you don’t quarrel with a guy that’s doing good. When he got that part the way he wanted it, with him the only one that ever touched the savings file, and the depositors dealing only with him, he went about it exactly the way they all go about it. He picked accounts where he knew he wouldn’t be likely to run into trouble, and he’d make out a false withdrawal slip, generally for somewhere around fifty bucks. He’d sign the depositor’s name to it, just forge it, but he didn’t have to be very good at that part, because nobody passed on those signatures but himself. Then he’d put fifty bucks in his pocket, and of course the false withdrawal slip would balance his cash. Our card had to balance too, of course, so he’d enter the withdrawal on that, but beside each false entry he’d make that little light pencil check that I had caught, and that would tell him what the right balance ought to be, in case the depositor made some inquiry.
Well, how were you going to get that money put back, so the daily cash would balance, so the cards would balance, and so the passbooks would balance, and at the same time leave it so nothing would show later, when the auditors came around? It had me stumped, and I don’t mind telling you for a while I began to get cold feet. What I wanted to do was report it, as was, let Sheila fork up the dough, without saying where she got it, and let Brent get fired and go look himself up a job. It didn’t look like they would do much to him, if the money was put back. But she wouldn’t hear of that. She was afraid they might send him up anyway, and then I would be putting up the money all for nothing, her children would have to grow up under the disgrace, and where we would be was nowhere. There wasn’t much I could say to that. I figured they would probably let him off, but I couldn’t be sure.
It was Sheila that figured out the way. We were riding along one night, just one or two nights after I told her I was going to put up the dough myself, when she began to talk. “The cards, the cash, and the passbooks, is that it?”
“That’s all.”
“The cards and the cash are easy.”
“Oh yeah?”
“That money goes back the same way it came out. Only instead of false withdrawals, I make out false deposits. The cash balances, the posting balances, and the card balances.”
“And the passbooks don’t balance. Listen. If there’s only one passbook—just one—that can tell on us after you’re out of there, and I’m out, we’re sunk. The only chance we’ve got is that the thing is never suspected at all—that no question is ever raised. And, what’s more, we don’t dare make a move till we see every one of the passbooks on those phoney accounts. We think we’ve got his code, how he ticked his false withdrawals, but we can’t be sure, and maybe he didn’t tick them all. Unless we can make a clean job of this, I don’t touch it. Him going to jail is one thing. All three of us going, and me losing my job and nine thousand bucks—oh no.”
“All right then, the passbooks.”
“That’s it—the passbooks.”
“Now when a passbook gets filled up, or there’s some mistake on it, what do we do?”
“Give him a new one, don’t we?”
“Containing how many entries?”
“One, I suppose. His total as of that date.”
“That’s right. And that one entry tells no tales. It checks with the card, and there’s not one figure to check against all those back entries—withdrawals and deposits and so on, running back for years. All right, then; so far, perfect. Now what do we do with his old book? Regularly, I mean.”
“Well—what do we do with it?”
“We put it under a punch, the punch that goes through every page and marks it void, and give it back to him.”
“And then he’s got it—any time an auditor calls for it. Gee, that’s a big help.”
“But if he doesn’t want it?”
“What are you getting at?”
“If he doesn’t want it, we destroy it. It’s no good to us, is it? And it’s not ours, it’s his. But he doesn’t want it.”
“Are you sure we destroy it?”
“I’ve torn up a thousand of them…. And that’s just what we’re going to do now. Between now and the next check on my cash, we’re going to get all those books in. First we check totals, to know exactly where we’re at. Then the depositor gets a new book that tells no tales.”
“Why does he get a new book?”
“He didn’t notice it when he brought the old one in, but the stitching is awfully strained, and it’s almost falling apart. Or I’ve accidentally smeared lipstick on it. Or I just think it’s time he got one of our nice new books, for luck. So he gets a new book with one entry in it—just his total, that’s all. Then I say: ‘You don’t want this, do you?’ And the way I’ll say it, that old book seems positively contaminated. And then right in front of his eyes, as though it’s the way we do it every day, I’ll tear it up, and drop it in the wastebasket.”
“Suppose he does want it?”
“Then I’ll put it under the punch, and give it to him. But somehow that punch is going to make its neat little holes in the exact place where the footings are, and it’s going to be impossible for him, or an auditor, or anybody else, to read those figures. I’ll punch five or six times, you know, and his book will be like Swiss cheese, more holes than anything else.”
“And all the time you’re getting those holes in exactly the right place, he’s going to be on the other side of the window looking at you, wondering what all the hocus-pocus is about.”
“Oh no—it won’t take more than a second or two. You see, I’ve been practicing. I can do it in a jiffy…. But he won’t want that book back. Trust me. I know how to do it.”
There was just a little note of pleading on that, as she said it. I had to think it over. I did think it over, for quite a while, and I began to have the feeling that on her end of it, if that was all, she could put it over all right. But then something else began to bother me. “How many of these doctored accounts are there?”
“Forty-seven.”
“And how are you going to get those passbooks in?”
“Well, interest is due on them. I thought I could send out little printed slips—signed ‘per Sheila Brent,’ in ink, so they’d be sure to come to me about it—asking them to bring in their books for interest credits. I never saw anybody that wouldn’t bring in his book if it meant a dollar and twenty-two cents. And a printed slip looks perfectly open and aboveboard, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, a printed slip is about the most harmless, open, and aboveboard thing there is. But this is what I’m thinking: You send out your printed slips, and within a couple of days all those books come in, and you can’t hold them forever. You’ve got to hand them back—or the new ones they’re going to get—or somebody’s going to get suspicious. That means the money’s got to be put back all at once. That’s going to make one awful bulge in your cash. Everybody in the bank is going to wonder at the reason for it, because it’s going to show in the posting.”
“I’ve thought of that. I don’t have to send out all those slips at once. I can send out four or five a day. And then, even if they do come in bunches—the passbooks I mean—I can issue the new books, right away as the old ones are presented, but make the adjustments on the cards and in my cash little by little—three or four hundred dollars a day. That’s not much.”
“No, but while that’s going on, we’re completely defenseless. We’ve got our chins hanging out and no way in the world of putting up a guard. I mean, while you’re holding out those adjustment entries, so you can edge them in gradually, your cash doesn’t balance the books. If then something happened—so I had to call for a cash audit on the spot, or if I got called away to the home office for a couple of days, or something happened to you, so you couldn’t com
e to work—then watch that ship go out of water. You may get away with it. But it’ll have to be done, everything squared up, before the next check on your cash. That’s twenty-one days from now. And at that, a three- or four-hundred-dollar bulge in your cash every day is going to look mighty funny. In the bank, I mean.”
“I could gag it off. I could say I’m keeping after them, to keep their deposits up, the way Charles always did. I don’t think there’s any danger. The cash will be there.”
So that was how we did it. She had the slips printed, and began mailing them out, three or four at a time. For the first few days’ replacement, the cash replacement I mean, I had enough in my own checking account. For the rest, I had to go out and plaster my house. For that I went to the Federal people. It took about a week, and I had to start an outside account, so nobody in the bank would know what I was up to. I took eight thousand bucks, and if you don’t think that hurt, you never plastered your house. Of course, it would be our luck that when the first of those books came in, she was out to lunch, and I was on the window myself. I took in the book, and receipted for it, but Church was only three or four feet away, running a column on one of the adding machines. She heard what I said to the depositor, and was at my elbow before I even knew how she got there.
“I can do that for you, Mr. Bennett. I’ll only be a minute, and there’ll be no need for him to leave his book.”
“Well—I’d rather Mrs. Brent handled it.”
“Oh, very well, then.”
She switched away then, in a huff, and I could feel the sweat in the palms of my hands. That night I warned Sheila. “That Church can bust it up.”
“How?”
“Her damned apple-polishing. She horned in today, wanted to balance that book for me. I had to chase her.”
“Leave her to me.”
“For God’s sake, don’t let her suspect anything.”
“I won’t, don’t worry.”
From then on, we made a kind of routine out of it. She’d get in three or four books, ask the depositors to leave them with her till next day. She’d make out new cards, and tell me the exact amount she needed, that night. I’d hand her that much in cash. Next day, she’d slip it into her cash box, make out new cards for the depositors, slip them in the file, then make out new passbooks and have them ready when the depositors called. Every day we’d be that much nearer home, both praying that nothing would tip it before we got the whole replacement made. Most days I’d say we plugged about $400 into the cash, one or two days a little more.
One night, maybe a week after we started putting the money back, they had the big dinner dance for the whole organization. I guess about a thousand people were there, in the main ballroom of one of the Los Angeles hotels, and it was a pretty nice get-together. They don’t make a pep meeting out of it. The Old Man doesn’t like that kind of thing. He just has a kind of a family gathering, makes them a little speech, and then the dancing starts, and he stands around watching them enjoy themselves. I guess you’ve heard of A. R. Ferguson. He’s founder of the bank, and the minute you look at him you know he’s a big shot. He’s not tall, but he’s straight and stocky, with a little white moustache that makes him look like some kind of a military man.
Well, we all had to go, of course. I sat at the table with the others from the branch, Miss Church, and Helm, and Snelling, and Snelling’s wife, and Sheila. I made it a point not to sit with Sheila. I was afraid to. So after the banquet, when the dancing started, I went over to shake hands with the Old Man. He always treated me fine, just like he treats everybody. He’s got that natural courtesy that no little guy ever quite seems capable of. He asked how I was, and then: “How much longer do you think you’ll be out there in Glendale? Are you nearly done?”
An icy feeling began to go over me. If he yanked me now, and returned me to the home office, there went all chance of covering that shortage, and God only knew what they would find out, if it was half covered and half not.
“Why, I tell you, Mr. Ferguson, if you can possibly arrange it, I’d like to stay out there till after the first of the month.”
“…So long?”
“Well, I’ve found some things out there that are well worth making a thorough study of, it seems to me. Fact of the matter, I had thought of writing an article about them in addition to my report. I thought I’d send it to the American Banker, and if I could have a little more time—”
“In that case, take all the time you want.”
“I thought it wouldn’t hurt us any.”
“I only wish more of our officials would write.”
“Gives us a little prestige.”
“—and makes them think!”
My mouth did it all. I was standing behind it, not knowing what was coming out from one minute to the next. I hadn’t thought of any article, up to that very second, and I give you one guess how I felt. I felt like a heel, and all the worse on account of the fine way he treated me. We stood there a few minutes, he telling me how he was leaving for Honolulu the next day, but he’d be back within the month, and looked forward to reading what I had to say as soon as he came back. Then he motioned in the direction of the dance floor. “Who’s the girl in blue?”
“Mrs. Brent.”
“Oh yes, I want to speak to her.”
We did some broken-floor dodging, and got over to where Sheila was dancing with Helm. They stopped, and I introduced the Old Man, and he asked how Brent was coming along after the operation, and then cut in on Helm, and danced Sheila off. I wasn’t in much of a humor when I met her outside later and took her home. “What’s the matter, Dave?”
“Couldn’t quite look the Old Man in the eye, that’s all.”
“Have you got cold feet?”
“Just feeling the strain.”
“If you have got cold feet, and want to quit, there’s nothing I can say. Nothing at all.”
“All I got to say is I’ll be glad when we’re clear of that heel, and can kick him out of the bank and out of our lives.”
“In two weeks it’ll be done.”
“How is he?”
“He’s leaving the hospital Saturday.”
“That’s nice.”
“He’s not coming home yet. The doctor insists that he go up to Arrowhead to get his strength back. He’ll be there three or four weeks. He has friends there.”
“What have you told him, by the way?”
“Nothing.”
“Just nothing?”
“Not one word.”
“He had an ulcer, is that what you said?”
“Yes.”
“I was reading in a medical magazine the other day what causes it. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Worry.”
“So?”
“It might help the recuperating process if he knew it was O.K. about the shortage. Lying in a hospital, with a thing like that staring you in the face, that may not be so good. For his health anyway.”
“What am I to tell him?”
“Why, I don’t know. That you’ve fixed it up.”
“If I tell him I’ve fixed it up, so nobody is going to know it, he knows I’ve got some kind of assistance in the bank. That’ll terrify him, and I don’t know what he’s likely to do about it. He may speak to somebody, and the whole thing will come out. And who am I going to say has let me have the money, so I can put it back? You?”
“Do you have to say?”
“No. I don’t have to say anything at all, and I’m not going to. The less you’re involved in this the better. If he worries, he ought to be used to it by now. It won’t hurt that young man to do quite a little suffering over what he’s done to me—and to you.”
“It’s up to you.”
“He knows something’s cooking, all right, but he doesn’t know what. I look forward to seeing his face when I tell him I’m off to—where did you say?”
“…I said Reno.”
“Do you still say Reno?”
; “I don’t generally change my mind, once it’s made up.”
“You can, if you want to.”
“Shut up.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Neither do I.”
VI
WE KEPT PUTTING THE money back, and I kept getting jitterier every day. I kept worrying that something would happen, that maybe the Old Man hadn’t left a memo about me before he went away, and that I’d get a call to report to the home office; that maybe Sheila would get sick and somebody else would have to do her work; that some depositor might think it was funny, the slip he had got to bring his book in, and begin asking about it somewhere.
One day she asked me to drive her home from the bank. By that time I was so nervous I never went anywhere with her in the daytime, and even at night I never met her anywhere that somebody might see us. But she said one of the children was sick, and she wanted a ride in case she had to get stuff from the drugstore that the doctor had ordered, and that anyway nobody was there but the maid and she didn’t matter. By that time Brent had gone to the lake, to get his strength back, and she had the house to herself.
So I went. It was the first time I’d ever been in her home, and it was fixed up nice, and smelled like her, and the kids were the sweetest little pair you ever saw. The oldest was named Anna, and the younger was named Charlotte. She was the one that was sick. She was in bed with a cold, and took it like a little soldier. Another time, it would have tickled me to death to sit and watch her boss Sheila around, and watch Sheila wait on her, and take the bossing just like that was how it ought to be. But now I couldn’t even keep still that long. When I found out I wasn’t needed I ducked, and went home and filled up some more paper with the phoney article I had to have ready for the Old Man when he got back. It was called, “Building a Strong Savings Department.”