I felt ashamed of myself at that, and took her in my arms, and that catch came in my throat again when she sighed, like some child, and relaxed, and closed her eyes.
“Sheila?”
“Yes?”
“We’ll celebrate.”
“All right.”
So we celebrated. She phoned her maid, and said she’d be late, and we went to dinner at a downtown restaurant, and then we drove to a night club on Sunset Boulevard. We didn’t talk about Brent, or the shortage, or anything but ourselves, and what we were going to do with our lives together. We stayed till about one o’clock. I didn’t think of Brent again till we pulled up near her house, and then this same prickly feeling began to come over me. If she noticed anything she didn’t say so. She kissed me good-night, and I started home.
VII
I turned in the drive, put the car away, closed the garage, and walked around to go in the front way. When I started for the door I heard my name called. Somebody got up from a bench under the trees and walked over. It was Helm. “Sorry to be bothering you this hour of night, Mr. Bennett, but I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Well, come in.”
He seemed nervous as I took him inside. I offered him a drink, but he said he didn’t want anything. He sat down and lit a cigarette, and acted like he didn’t know how to begin. Then: “Have you seen Sheila?”
“… Why?”
“I saw you drive off with her.”
“Yes—I had some business with her. We had dinner together. I—just left her a little while ago.”
“Did you see Brent?”
“No. It was late. I didn’t go in.”
“She say anything about him?”
“I guess so. Now and then. … What’s this about?”
“Did you see him leave the bank? Today?”
“He left before you did.”
“Did you see him leave the second time?”
“… He only came in once.”
He kept looking at me, smoking and looking at me. He was a young fellow, twenty-four or -five, I would say, and had only been with us a couple of years. Little by little he was losing his nervousness at talking with me.
“… He went in there twice.”
“He came in once. He rapped on the door, Adler let him in, he stood there talking a few minutes, then he went back to get some stuff out of his locker. Then he left. You were there. Except for the extra tellers, nobody had finished up yet. He must have left fifteen minutes before you did.”
“That’s right. Then I left. I finished up, put my cash box away, and left. I went over to the drugstore to get myself a malted milk, and was sitting there drinking it when he went in.”
“He couldn’t have. We were locked, and—”
“He used a key.”
“… When was this?”
“A little after four. Couple of minutes before you all come out with that spider and dumped it in the gutter.”
“So?”
“I didn’t see him come out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I haven’t seen you. I’ve been looking for you.”
“You saw me drive off with Sheila.”
“Yeah, but it hadn’t occurred to me, at the time. That cop, after he caught the spider, came in the drugstore to buy some film for his camera. I helped him put the spider in an ice-cream container, and punch holes in the top, and I wasn’t watching the bank all that time. Later, it just happened to run through my head that I’d seen all the rest of you leave the bank, but I hadn’t seen Brent. I kept telling myself to forget it, that I’d got a case of nerves from being around money too much, but then—”
“Yeah? What else?”
“I went to a picture tonight with the Snellings.”
“Didn’t Snelling see him leave?”
“I didn’t say anything to Snelling. I don’t know what he saw. But the picture had some Mexican stuff in it, and later, when we went to the Snellings’ apartment, I started a bum argument, and got Snelling to call Charlie to settle it. Brent spent some time in Mexico once. That was about twelve o’clock.”
“And?”
“The maid answered. Charlie wasn’t there.”
We looked at each other, and both knew that twelve o’clock was too late for a guy to be out that had just had a bad operation.
“Come on.”
“You calling Sheila?”
“We’re going to the bank.”
The protection service watchman was due on the hour, and we caught him on his two o’clock round. He took it as a personal insult that we would think anybody could be in the bank without him knowing it, but I made him take us in there just the same, and we went through every part of it. We went upstairs, where the old records were stored, and I looked behind every pile. We went down in the basement and I looked behind every gas furnace. We went all around back of the windows and I looked under every counter. I even looked behind my desk, and under it. That seemed to be all. The watchman went up and punched his clock and we went out on the street again. Helm kind of fingered his chin.
“Well, I guess it was a false alarm.”
“Looks like it.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Report everything.”
“Guess there’s no use calling Sheila.”
“Pretty late, I’m afraid.”
What he meant was, we ought to call Sheila, but he wanted me to do it. He was just as suspicious as he ever was, I could tell that from the way he was acting. Only the watchman was sure we were a couple of nuts. We got in the car, and I took him home, and once more he mumbled something about Sheila, but I decided not to hear him. When I let him out I started for home, but as soon as I was out of sight I cut around the block and headed for Mountain Drive.
A light was on, and the screen door opened as soon as I set my foot on the porch. She was still dressed, and it was almost as though she had been expecting me. I followed her in the living room, and spoke low so nobody in the house could hear us, but I didn’t waste any time on love and kisses.
“Where’s Brent?”
“… He’s in the vault.”
She spoke in a whisper, and sank into a chair without looking at me, but every doubt I’d had about her in the beginning, I mean, every hunch that she’d been playing me for a sucker, swept back over me so even looking at her made me tremble. I had to lick my lips a couple of times before I could even talk. “Funny you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know it.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know it? If you know it now, why didn’t you know it then? You trying to tell me he stepped out of there for a couple of minutes, borrowed my telephone, and called you up? He might as well be in a tomb as be in that place, till it opens at eight-thirty this morning.”
“Are you done?”
“I’m still asking you why you didn’t tell me.”
“When I got in, and found he wasn’t home, I went out looking for him. Or at any rate, for the car. I went to where he generally parks it—when he’s out. It wasn’t there. Coming home I had to go by the bank. As I went by, the red light winked, just once.”
I don’t know if you know how a vault works. There’s two switches inside. One lights the overhead stuff that you turn on when somebody wants to get into his safe deposit box; the other works the red light that’s always on over the door in the daytime. That’s the danger signal, and any employee of the bank always looks to see that it’s on whenever he goes inside. When the vault is closed the light’s turned off, and I had turned it off myself that afternoon, when I locked the vault with Snelling. At night, all curtains are raised in the bank, so cops, watchman, and passersby can see inside. If the red light went on, it would show, but I didn’t believe she’d seen it. I didn’t believe she’d even been by the bank. “So the
red light winked, hey? Funny it wasn’t winking when I left there not ten minutes ago.”
“I said it winked once. I don’t think it was a signal. I think he bumped his shoulder against it, by accident. If he were signaling, he’d keep on winking it, wouldn’t he?”
“How’d he get in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do know.”
“I don’t know, but the only way I can think of is that he slipped in there while we were all gathered around, looking at that spider.”
“That you conveniently on purpose brought in there.”
“Or that he did.”
“What’s he doing in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, come on, quit stalling me!”
She got up and began walking around. “Dave, it’s easy to see you think I know all about this. That I know more than I’m telling. That Charles and I are in some kind of plot. I don’t know anything I can say. I know a lot I could say if I wasn’t—”
She stopped, came to life like some kind of a tiger, and began hammering her fists against the wall.
“—bought! That was what was wrong! I ought to have cut my heart out, suffered anything rather than let you give me that money! Why did I ever take it? Why didn’t I tell you to—”
“Why didn’t you do what I begged you to do? Come over here today and let him have it between the eyes—tell him the truth, that you were through, and this was the end of it?”
“Because, God help me, I wanted to be happy!”
“No! … Because, God help you, you knew he wasn’t over here! Because you knew he was in that vault, and you were afraid I’d find it out!”
“It isn’t true! How can you say that?”
“Do you know what I think? I think you took that money off me, day by day, and that not one penny of it ever found its way into your cash box. And then I think you and he decided on a little phoney hold-up, to cover that shortage, and that that’s what he’s doing in the vault. And if Helm hadn’t got into it, and noticed that Brent didn’t come out of the bank the second time he went in, I don’t see anything that was to stop you from getting away with it. You knew I didn’t dare open my trap about the dough I had put up. And if he came out of there masked, and made a quick getaway, I don’t know who was going to swear it was him, if it hadn’t been for Helm. Now it’s in the soup. All right, Mrs. Brent, that vault that don’t take any messages till eight-thirty, that works both ways. If he can’t get any word to you, you can’t get any word to him. Just let him start that little game that looked so good yesterday afternoon, and he’s going to get the surprise of his life, and so are you. There’ll be a reception committee waiting for him when he comes out of there, and maybe they’ll include you in it too.”
She looked straight at me the whole time I was talking, and the lamplight caught her eyes, so they shot fire. There was something catlike about her shape anyway, and with her eyes blazing like that, she looked like something out of the jungle. But all of a sudden that woman was gone, and she was crumpled up in front of me, on the sofa, crying in a queer, jerky way. Then I hated myself for what I had said, and had to dig in with my fingernails to keep from crying too.
After a while the phone rang. From what she said, I could tell it was her father, and that he’d been trying to reach her all afternoon and all night. She listened a long time, and when she hung up she lay back and closed her eyes. “He’s in there to put the money back.”
“… Where’d he get it?”
“He got it this morning. Yesterday morning. From my father.”
“Your father had that much—ready?”
“He got it after I talked to him that night. Then when I told him I wouldn’t need it, he kept it, in his safe deposit box—just in case. Charles went over there yesterday and said he had to have it—against the check-up on my cash. Papa went down to the Westwood bank with him, and got it out, and gave it to him. He was afraid to call me at the bank. He kept trying to reach me here. The maid left me a note, but it was so late when I got in I didn’t call. … So, now I pay a price for not telling him. Charles, I mean. For letting him worry.”
“I was for telling him, you may remember.”
“Yes, I remember.”
It was quite a while after that before either of us said anything. All that time my mind was going around like a squirrel cage, trying to reconstruct for myself what was going on in that vault. She must have been doing the same thing, because pretty soon she said, “Dave?”
“Yes?”
“Suppose he does put the money back?”
“Then—we’re sunk.”
“What, actually, will happen?”
“If I find him in there, the least I can do is hold him till I’ve checked every cent in that vault. I find nine thousand more cash than the books show. All right. What then?”
“You mean the whole thing comes out?”
“On what we’ve been doing, you can get away with it as long as nobody’s got the least suspicion of it. Let a thing like this happen, let them really begin to check, and it’ll come out so fast it’ll make your head swim.”
“And there goes your job?”
“Suppose you were the home office, how would you like it?”
“… I’ve brought you nothing but misery, Dave.”
“I—asked for it.”
“I can understand why you feel bitter.”
“I said some things I didn’t mean.”
“Dave.”
“Yes?”
“There’s one chance, if you’ll take it.”
“What’s that?”
“Charles.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It may be a blessing, after all, that I told him nothing. He can’t be sure what I’ve done while he’s been away—whether I carried his false entries right along, whether I corrected them, and left the cash short—and it does look as though he’d check, before he did anything. He’s a wizard at books, you know. And every record he needs is in there. Do you know what I’m getting at, Dave?”
“Not quite.”
“You’ll have to play dummy’s hand, and let him lead.”
“I don’t want anything to do with him.”
“I’d like to wring his neck. But if you just don’t force things, if you just act natural, and let me have a few seconds with him, so we’ll know just what he has done, then—maybe it’ll all come out all right. He certainly would be a boob to put the money back when he finds out it’s already been put back.”
“Has it been?”
“Don’t you know?”
I took her in my arms then, and for that long was able to forget what was staring us in the face, and I still felt close to her when I left.
VIII
For the second time that night I went home, and this time I turned out all the lights, and went upstairs, and took off my clothes, and went to bed. I tried to sleep, and couldn’t. It was all running through my mind, and especially what I was going to do when I opened that vault at eight-thirty. How could I act natural about it? If I could guess he was in the vault, Helm must have guessed it. He’d be watching me, waiting for every move, and he’d be doing that even if he didn’t have any suspicion of me, which by now he must have, on account of being out that late with Sheila. All that ran through my mind, and after a while I’d figured a way to cover it, by openly saying something to him, and telling him I was going to go along with it, just wait and see what Brent had to say for himself, in case he was really in there. Then I tried once more to go to sleep. But this time it wasn’t the play at the vault that was bothering me, it was Sheila. I kept going over and over it, what was said between us, the dirty cracks I had made, how she had taken them, and all the rest of it. Just as day began to break I found myself sitting up in bed. How I knew it I don’t
know, what I had to go on I haven’t any idea, but I knew perfectly well that she was holding out on me, that there was something back of it all that she wasn’t telling.
I unhooked the phone and dialed. You don’t stay around a bank very long before you know the number of your chief guard. I was calling Dyer, and in a minute or two he answered, pretty sour. “Hello?”
“Dyer?”
“Yeah, who is it?”
“Sorry to wake you up. This is Dave Bennett.”
“What do you want?”
“I want some help.”
“Well, what the hell is it?”
“I got reason to think there’s a man in our vault. Out in the Anita Avenue branch in Glendale. What he’s up to I don’t know, but I want you out there when I open up. And I’d like you to bring a couple of men with you.”
Up to then he’d been just a sleepy guy that used to be a city detective. Now he snapped out of it like something had hit him. “What do you mean you got reason to think? Who is this guy?”
“I’ll give you that part when I see you. Can you meet me by seven o’clock? Is that too early?”
“Whenever you say, Mr. Bennett.”
“Then be at my house at seven, and bring your men with you. I’ll give you the dope, and I’ll tell you how I want you to do it.”
He took the address, and I went back to bed.
I went to bed, and lay there trying to figure out what it was I wanted him to do anyway. After a while I had it straightened out. I wanted him close enough to protect the bank, and myself as well, in case Sheila was lying to me, and I wanted him far enough away for her to have those few seconds with Brent, in case she wasn’t. I mean, if Brent was really up to something, I wanted him covered every way there was, and by guys that would shoot. But if he came out with a foolish look on his face, and pretended he’d been locked in by mistake, and she found out we could still cover up that book-doctoring, I wanted to leave that open too. I figured on it, and after a while I thought I had it doped out so it would work.