Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

The Alias by Lawton O’Connor

“If I were to commit a crime,” said Mr. Nelson West over the bridge table that evening, “it would be for money, and only for money. But I would have the good sense to leave most of the money untouched afterwards.”

“Then what is the point,” his wife said, “in stealing it at all?”

“Ah,” West said. “If you steal enough to begin with, you can use just a small portion of the money and still have enough to have made the crime worthwhile. The trouble with these big bank and payroll robberies is the robbers always become greedy afterwards. They’re not content to spend just the used bills. They have to spend the new bills too, and that way they get caught. Greed.” He shook his head.

Mr. George Simpson, proprietor of the Greater Arizona Realty Company, played a low club from the dummy. “I’ve always thought,” he said, “that one of the reasons they get caught is there’s more than one of them in on the robbery. The police catch one, he tells on the others; or they get mad at each other; or whatever.”

“That’s another thing,” West said. “The crime must be executed by one man. Never trust anyone.”

“But one man alone can’t steal a lot of money,” Simpson said. “It takes timing and planning and somebody to drive the car and so on and so forth.”

“True,” West said.

“Well,” Simpson said with a laugh, putting up a trump from his own hand, “all I can say for you, Nelson, is I’m glad you work for me. By your own definition, you’ll never commit a crime.”

If it had not been for Mr. Hathaway, Simpson would have been right about West. Mr. Hathaway just happened. He came along out of the blue at a time when Nelson West, himself new to Arizona, had been working for Simpson’s Greater Arizona Realty Company, as a sales agent, for no more than four months.

Simpson called West into his inner office. “There’s a guy named Hathaway waiting outside. Take the keys to the Ford place out in the desert and see if you can sell it to him.”

“That deserted monstrosity?” West said. “You couldn’t give it away.”

“This is one nut who just might buy it,” Simpson said. “I’ve been talking to him. He’s an eccentric. Wanted to know the name of a good bank out here, and when I told him, he asked me for the name of another good bank. He’s out here from the East. Rich old guy. No relatives, no ties. Wants to be away by himself.”

West shrugged and went outside and met Mr. Hathaway. Then the two of them got into West’s car and started east, toward the desert.

“I want to stop at a bank first,” Hathaway said. “I’m carrying a lot of money around with me.”

“Mr. Simpson said you were interested in relocating here,” West said. “It’s certainly marvelous country.”

“I’m interested in more than one bank,” Hathaway said. “Two hundred thousand dollars is too much to put in any one bank.”

West swallowed. “Well,” he said, “the thing to do is get it into one bank for now. There’s one in Mesa that has branches all over the state. So we can stop there, and later — tomorrow or the next day — you can transfer some of it. This way you know it’ll be safe. Won’t have to carry it around with you.”

He drove Hathaway to the bank in Mesa, and while Hathaway was inside, he went down the street to a large sporting goods store and bought some bullets and five one-gallon jugs of muriatic acid, which is commonly used for cleaning and regulating swimming pools. He placed these articles in the trunk of his car and was sitting at the wheel when Mr. Hathaway came out of the bank.

“Now let’s see that Ford place.”

West nodded, and they drove a good distance into the desert.

“They were very nice at the bank,” Hathaway said. “I told them I wouldn’t be using the money till they had cleared my cashier’s check back east, but that as soon as possible I wanted to transfer some of it to another bank. They said they understood.”

“Good,” West said. He turned onto a road that was hardly a road at all, leading to a scrubby ridge of hills.

“Nobody around for miles, is there?” Hathaway said.

“You want privacy, here it is.”

“I should think you’d be afraid driving this wasteland by yourself.”

“We all carry guns in the glove compartment,” the real estate agent said. He reached over and opened the glove compartment. “See?” He took out the gun and showed it to Hathaway, then drew back a little and shot the other man twice.

The road led among the deserted cave formations on the narrow sides and declivities of the upland. West stopped the car and dragged the body of the dead man to a particularly inverted formation of rock. Then he went back to the car and got the acid, and when he was finished with his work there was no recognizing Mr. Hathaway — not now and not, certainly, at any future date when someone might stumble across Mr. Hathaway. The odds were about a hundred to one that anybody ever would.

Then West took the labels off the acid jugs and burned them, and then smashed the jugs themselves on a plateau of rock nearby. Finally, he replaced the used bullets in the gun, put it back in the glove compartment, and drove home.

Rather than try to get rid of any of the contents of Hathaway’s pockets, he took them all home with him. That night, he suggested to his wife that she visit her mother in California, something his wife had been talking of doing for some time. She agreed to leave the following day.

He saw his wife off on the plane the next morning, then purchased some plain stationery and envelopes at the airport counter and went to a telephone and called Mr. Simpson.

“I think I’ve got that twenty-four-hour virus,” he said. “I’d better not come in till tomorrow.”

“Take care of yourself,” Simpson said. “How did Hathaway like the Ford place?”

“Sounded interested, believe it or not,” West said. “He’s going to let us know.”

When he had finished with his phone conversation, West drove home and took from his own suit the contents of Hathaway’s pockets. There were several items of identification — a New York driver’s license, Social Security card, and so forth. There was nothing to indicate that Hathaway had any connections of a personal nature in the East. He must have been telling the truth when he said he had no relatives, no ties.

There was a checkbook from the Mesa bank and a savings book as well, indicating that Hathaway had deposited a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in the checking account and twenty-five thousand in the savings. For a time, West practiced imitating Hathaway’s signature. Finally he got it down to his satisfaction.

Then he wrote out a check for three thousand dollars and made it out to the Greater Arizona Realty Company. He signed Hathaway’s name to the check, and on the border of the check wrote “Earnest Money on Ford Property.” Then he put the check in an envelope, addressed the envelope to Mr. Simpson at the realty office, and went out and mailed it.

West was at his desk the next morning when Simpson came over with the check.

“That Hathaway’s a real nut,” Simpson said. “Here’s a deposit on the property, but no note with it or anything. Where’s he staying?”

“I don’t know,” West said. “I thought you knew.” He shrugged. “Well, at least you’ve got his money. You’ll be hearing from him.” He paused. “If his check’s any good. Anybody crazy enough to buy that Ford place would do anything.”

“Well, suppose I just call the bank and find out if it’s good,” Simpson said.

“Good idea,” West said.

He waited, and in a few minutes Simpson came back. “Good as gold,” he said.

“Then we’ve made a sale,” West said happily.

He waited until Simpson had come back from lunch before making the next move. Then he went into Simpson’s office and said, “That fellow Hathaway called while you were out to lunch. He’s a nut, all right. Now he’s leaving town for a few weeks, but he wanted to make sure we’d hold the house for him.”

“So long as we’ve got his money,” Simpson said, “I don’t care what he does.”

West had not yet, in the time he had lived in Arizona, been anywhere northwest of Phoenix. Now, however, he went to the Glendale branch of the bank in which Hathaway had opened his account. Here he identified himself as Hathaway, producing the bank books on the other branch as proof, and transferred eighty-five thousand dollars to the Glendale branch.

He did not touch any of this money. Instead, over the next two weeks, he drew several checks on the Mesa bank and cashed them at the Glendale bank.

When he had fifty thousand in cash, he stopped. There was still eighty-five thousand in the Glendale bank and sixty-two thousand in the Mesa bank.

At this point, West destroyed all the Hathaway bank books and other credentials. He would spend the money slowly and keep it hidden, never depositing it to his own bank account. For this purpose, he took out a safe deposit box at his own bank, into which he put most of the money.

If I were to commit a crime, he had said, it would be for money... most of the money would be left untouched... it would be done alone, for you never can trust anyone else...

Rules One, Two, and Three — it was as simple as that. Certainly, people would start asking questions about the missing Mr. Hathaway: Simpson at the office, and possibly the motel where Hathaway had been staying and which he’d used as his address when taking out his bank account. But no matter who investigated the matter, there was no linking the missing man to Nelson West. West was not even the last man to have seen Hathaway alive; the last man to have seen “Hathaway” was the teller at the Glendale bank. And there was no linking West with anything in Glendale. If there had been, it would have happened by now.

It was not, indeed, for a period of several more weeks before Simpson greeted him at his desk one morning and said, “What in tarnation ever happened to that fellow Hathaway?”

“Beats me,” West said.

“Did you know he was a crook?”

“What?”

Simpson nodded. “Embezzler. Took two hundred grand, back east. That’s why he was yelling about getting to a bank when he was here that day. Wanted to get cash as soon as he could. And the business about wanting a house away from everybody and telling you he’d left town and all that. Wanted to make sure his tracks were covered.”

West blinked. “How’d you find all that out?”

“I’ve got two FBI guys in my office inside. They tracked him this far. You and I and a teller at a bank out in Glendale are the ones who saw him most recently. The teller’s in my office too. Come in.”

Nelson West stood up. “The teller can identify Hathaway?”

“Name wasn’t Hathaway at all,” Simpson nodded, leading the way into his office. “Alias. Real name was Gerson or something. Had phony credentials and everything...”

The only thing that had gone wrong with his rules for crime, West realized brokenly, was Rule Three... you can never trust anyone else.

Including, he amended it now, your victim.