Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (18 page)

“We opened as usual at nine
A.M.
, a half hour ago. These two men came in. I was busy at my desk, opening the morning mail. The men were strangers, but they didn't look suspicious. Emma had her window open, and Helen was in the vault. After a few minutes they walked out and then Emma screamed. They'd handed her a note, telling her to fill a big paper bag with bills or they'd kill us all. I heard a car drive off, but with so much traffic passing, I can't say in which direction they went. Anyway, I ran to the door, then I called you.”

Sheriff Banes felt of his windbreaker pockets for his notebook, finally grabbed a pencil and paper from the manager's desk. “Okay, what was the exact time of the robbery, Tom?”

“I'd say … nine thirty-two
A.M.
”

Nodding, wetting the pencil with his lips, Sheriff Banes wrote that down. “How much did they get?”

“I haven't checked, but around twenty-six thousand dollars, all in small bills.” The manager sat down, holding his head in slim hands. “Hank, we only opened this branch three months ago and a holdup already. I'll be fired!”

“Stop moaning! Can you describe them pretty well, Tom?”

“Well, I only glanced at them, you understand. They both seemed about … thirty, of average build. Wore dark suits and … yes, the heavier one carried a shopping bag. He was the one without a hat and had black hair, neatly combed. The other one had a folded newspaper and wore a hat … I don't remember what color his hair was.”

“I had a good look at them, Hank,” Helen Smith said, coming out of the vault behind the tellers' partition. She was a middle-aged, dumpy woman with faded blonde hair. “The hatless one had very dark hair and a sharp face, a foreign-looking fellow, with one of those thin moustaches. The one wearing the hunting cap, I do believe he was bald and—”

“What color hunting cap, Helen?” The sheriff asked, pencil posed in his pudgy hand.

“Why, sort of a brown cap.”

Emma sat up in her chair. “No, no! It was a kind of orange hat! He was the one who gave me the note, rested his folded newspaper on the counter.”

“Did he talk with an accent?”

“Uncle, none of them talked, just gave me the note. It was typed and read:

Fill this bag with money, or everybody will be killed. There's a sawed-off shotgun in the newspaper. Wait ten minutes before giving any alarm. We have a man with a submachine gun outside.

“I was so scared, I just shoved all the cash I had in my drawer into this big paper bag and nearly fainted! They were blocking my window, so I couldn't signal to Tom or—”

“Where's the note?” Sheriff Banes cut in.

“The note? Why, they took it, with the money.”

Banes groaned. “Think carefully, Emma. Did you notice anything special about the shopping bag?”

“Yes! Now that I think of it, the shopping bag had A&P printed on it!”

The sheriff pushed his hat back and scratched his wild gray hair. “Damn, must be a dozen of those supermarkets within a fifty-mile radius of here. Well …” He turned to the desk and picked up the phone. “I'd best call the state trooper barracks. Anybody notice the make of their getaway car?”

The two women and the manager shook their heads. Emma said, “I think, but I'm not sure now, I saw an old gray sedan parked outside, through the window.”

Shaking his head, the sheriff put the phone down. “Anybody else in the bank?”

Tom said, “No, sir, we'd just opened.”

“How come you had so much cash on hand?” Banes asked.

“Now, Hank—Sheriff Banes, you know one of the reasons they built this branch is, with the bridge open, we handle the payrolls for those two factories on the other side of the river, nineteen thousand, five hundred sixty-eight dollars every Wednesday morning. We make the payroll Tuesday nights. Then there's always five or six thousand in cash in Emma's drawer, at the start of a day.”

Helen shook her head. “Don't know what the world's coming to. We never had a holdup before in the village, as you know, Hank. We—”

The sheriff suddenly walked over to the teller's counter, said, voice full of excitement, “Prints! Did any of you touch this counter?”

Emma shrieked, “I forgot! They both wore pigskin gloves!”

Sheriff Banes shook his head sadly. “Dammit, nothing breaking for us.” He crossed to the window and moved the shade, stared out at the night. “Might get some rain,” he announced.

After a moment he turned and sat on the desk, tore up the paper with his notes. “Okay, that wasn't bad. Emma, you got to keep up your crying act more, especially when the state troopers come. Aunt Helen, you were fine with that description, acted like a real confused hick. Tom, you were good, too, but you have to seem more upset. You know, like it's the end of the world. We'll have a last rehearsal tomorrow, Tuesday night, and I'll take the twenty-six grand with me. I've fixed up a nice hiding place under the floor boards in the jail. Wednesday, you phone me as soon as the bank opens and there's no customers. That's about all. Except keep in mind, we don't talk about this to anybody. We'll wait six or seven months before splitting the money. By then we all came into a little inheritance. Tom, how did I do?”

“You acted the part of a hick cop perfectly, Dad.”

His name was
Nello. Whether this was his given name, or his surname, or simply a sorbiquet he had picked up sometime during the span of his fifty-odd years, I never found out. I doubt even Nello himself knew any longer.

He was what sociologists call “an addictive drinker who has lost all semblance of faith in God, humanity, or himself,” or what the average citizen dismisses unconcernedly as “a skid row wino.”

He came into my office just before ten o'clock on one of San Francisco's bitter cold autumn mornings. He had been a lawyer once, in a small town in Northern California, and there were still signs of intelligence, of manners and education, in his gaunt face. I had first encountered him more than twelve years ago, when Police Lieutenant Eberhardt and I had been rookie patrolmen. I didn't know, and had never asked, what private hell had led him from small town respectability to the oblivion of our Skid Row.

He stood just inside the door, his small hands nervously rolling and unrolling the brim of a shapeless brown fedora. His thin, almost emaciated body was encased in a pair of once-brown slacks and a tweed jacket that had worn through at both elbows, and his faded blue eyes had that tangible filminess about them that comes from too many bottles of cheap sweet wine. This morning he was sober—cold and painfully sober.

I said, “It's been a long time, Nello.”

“A long time,” he agreed vaguely.

“Some coffee?”

“No. No, thanks.”

I poured myself a cup from the pot I keep on an old two-burner on top of one of my filing cabinets and set it down on the desk blotter. “What can I do for you?”

He cleared his throat, his lips moving as if he were tasting something by memory. Then he seemed to change his mind and took a step toward the door. “Maybe I shouldn't have come,” he said to the floor. “Maybe I'd better go.”

“Wait, now. What is it, Nello?”

“Chaucer,” he said. “It's Chaucer.”

I frowned a little. Chaucer was another habitué of the Row, like Nello an educated man who had lost part of himself sometime, somewhere, somehow; he had once taught English literature at a high school in Kansas or Nebraska, and that was where he'd got his nickname. He and Nello had been companions for a long time.

I said, “What about Chaucer?”

“He's dead,” Nello said tonelessly. “I heard it on the grapevine just a little while ago. The police found him in an alley on Hubbell Street, near the railroad yards, early this morning. He was beaten to death.”

“Do they know who did it?”

Nello shook his head. “But I think I might know why he was killed.”

“Have you gone to the police?”

“No.”

I didn't need to ask why not; noninvolvement with the law was a code by which the Row people lived, even when one of their own died violently. I said, “If you have some information that might help find Chaucer's killer, you'd better take it to them, Nello.”

His lips curved into a sad, fleeting smile. “What good would it do?” he asked. “They don't care about a man like Chaucer—a wino, a bum, a nobody. Why should they bother when one of us dies?”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes, I believe it.”

“Well, you're wrong,” I said. “When someone is murdered, no matter who he is, the police do everything in their power to find the party or parties responsible. I know that for a fact, Nello; I was a cop once, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Then why did you come to me?” I asked quietly. “In a way, I'm still a cop. If you don't believe the police will care, what made you think
I
would?”

“I don't know,” he said. “You were always fair and decent to me, you and your friend. I thought … Look, maybe I just better go.”

“It's up to you.”

He hesitated. There was a struggle going on inside him between an almost forgotten sense of duty and the unwritten decree of the Row. Finally, he moved forward in a ponderous way and sat in the chair across from me. He put the fedora on his knee and looked at the veined backs of his hands.

I said, “Do you want to tell me about it now?”

“I can't pay you anything, you know.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “About the only thing I can do is take whatever you give me to the police and see that it gets into the proper hands. Communication with me isn't privileged; that's the law.”

“I know the law,” Nello said. “Or I knew it once.”

“Okay, then.”

He took a long breath, coughed, and wiped at his mouth with the palm of one hand. When he began talking, his voice was low, almost monotonous. “About three weeks ago Chaucer and I were sharing a bottle of muskie in a doorway on Sixth. It was after midnight, and the streets were empty. Old Jenny—she was one of us, a nice old lady—was standing on the corner across the street, waiting for the light to change. When it did, she started across the intersection. There were headlights approaching along Sixth, coming very fast, but I thought the car would stop at the red light. Only it didn't. It came straight on through. There was no time for Chaucer or me to call out a warning. The car hit Old Jenny, slowed for a moment, then kept on going and disappeared around the corner. Chaucer and I ran over to where Old Jenny was lying in the street, but there was nothing we could do for her; she was dead. We left, then, before the police came.”

Again, the code of noninvolvement. Nello passed a hand over his face, as if the length of his explanation had left him momentarily drained. I waited silently, and after a moment he went on, “Last weekend Chaucer was panhandling in Union Square. He saw the hit-and-run car parked on the street near there. It had been repaired, he said, and had a fresh coat of paint.”

“How did he know it was the same car?” I put in.

“He had gotten the license number that night on the Sixth.”

“Did he tell you what it was?”

“No,” Nello said. “I think he found out the name of the car's owner on Union Square, from the registration, but he didn't tell me who it was. I saw him yesterday afternoon, around three, and he was in high spirits. He said he had to take care of some business, and that if it panned out he was going to be in the chips for the first time in a long while.”

I began to get it then. “You think he went out to see the owner of this car and tried to shake him down, is that it? And got himself killed for the effort.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything that might lead to the owner?”

He moved his head from side to side.

“Chaucer didn't mention the make and model?”

“No.”

“Or where the owner lived?”

“No, nothing at all.”

I lighted a cigarette and thought over in my mind what he had told me. After a time I said, “All right, Nello. I'll see what I can do. As soon as anything turns up, I'll let you know.”

He nodded listlessly and got to his feet. I had the feeling, watching him shuffle toward the door, that he didn't really believe anything would turn up at all.