Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

Treasure Hunt by James McKimmey

Geblick, a hefty man of middle age with a face that mirrored twenty-five years on a police force — eyes tough and suspicious, nose twice broken, chin squared with determined dedication — stared at Barstow, the young and clever attorney, with disbelief. “Oh, no,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” said Barstow, smiling behind his expansive desk in his expansive office; crisp, neat, slim, as well-tailored as Geblick was not.

“Insane,” Geblick said.

“Perhaps he was,” Barstow agreed.

“I tried to run him into the hole for the past year, he dies on me, and now you tell me he willed me everything. Why?”

“Maybe he thought a cop like you doesn’t earn enough.”

“Don’t get smart, Barstow.”

“You see, Geblick? You’re good at muscling a wife-beater into the wagon, but when it comes to good manners, you’re a clod. That’s why Snider’s trial turned the way it did. You had enough evidence to shade him behind bars, if just barely; but you got on the witness chair, and the jury suddenly started feeling sorry for Snider. You alienated the judge. So Snider, if he took that eighty-seven thousand out of the bank that day, got away with it.”

“Cheap, squirrelly little bum,” Geblick managed.

“He willed you his estate, Geblick,” Barstow said, grinning.

Geblick, massive of shoulder and angry looking, stood up. “When did he do it?”

“After the trial, after he had the heart attack, he came in here and told me he’d given me all the money he’d saved over the years, but that he wanted you to have what else he had when he died. And he knew he was going to die soon — the doctors had told him he was ripe for another attack that might kill him.”

“From what money he’d saved,” Geblick said loudly. “Out of what? His lousy veteran’s pension?”

“Royalties, Geblick. He was a songwriter, remember?”

“So sing me one of his songs. You ever hear one?”

“He played some of his records for me one afternoon when we were setting up his defense.”

Geblick swore.

“Why did you hate him so much, Geblick?”

“I hate criminals! And when I got on his trail, I found out that he was weak. I hate that, too!”

“Because his heart turned bad on him, Geblick? He gave you credit for that, you know — hounding him, hounding him.”

“I don’t mean his heart. I mean he couldn’t make it at an honest job. He tricked his way, and cheated, and conned — that’s the only way he could have existed the way he did. Then he finally held up a bank. He’s the kind that siphons off a decent society. Maybe you don’t understand, Mr. Criminal Lawyer, but it’s my job to protect society from creeps like that.”

“And you do work at it, don’t you, Geblick? The paragon of law enforcement. Well, I always figured the cop who was most self-righteous was probably no more than a hairline away from the crooks he went after. Give him the right opportunity—” The attorney snapped his fingers. “And you’ve got another crook.”

Geblick paced, shaking his large head, hearing what he cared to hear. “What did he leave?”

Barstow pushed a set of papers toward him. “I’ve already put the legal work through — he wanted you to be able to have it as soon as you got the news. Nobody else has made a claim against it. He didn’t have a relative alive, not a soul. No friends, either. Just you, Geblick. So here’s the inventory.”

Geblick snorted and slowly read the list, which itemized Snider’s shack-like house, in one of the cheapest sections of town, as well as its meager contents.

“Why?” Geblick said again.

“Maybe he got to liking you, Geblick,” Barstow said. “You trailed after him long enough, didn’t you?”

“The bum!”

“You say. I say he was an inoffensive little guy who tried hard and then just couldn’t make it.”

“He made it for eighty-seven thousand.”

“Come on, Geblick! Where do you see eighty-seven thousand on that inventory?”

“How would it get there?” Geblick exploded. “You think he put it in a bank so you could find it that way?” He shook his head. “He probably hid it in a sewer because that’s where rats like to go.” He looked at the inventory again. “I just don’t get it.”

Barstow studied him, then said, “There’s an old philosophy someone created a long time ago, Geblick. You probably never heard of it, but it says that when you’ve been abused, turn the other cheek. Maybe that’s why he did this, Geblick. Just to give you the other cheek.”

Geblick stared at the dapper attorney, eyes dark and accusing. “You must be crazy.”

The next day, his tour of duty done, Geblick parked his sedan in front of the small house and stared with disgust at the dilapidated structure. The small lot was fenced with old boards ready to collapse. Scraps of paper and beer cans thrown from passing cars littered the front yard.

Geblick pushed himself out of his car and strode through warm twilight air to the door. Using a key Barstow had given him, he let himself into the interior and switched on lights — he’d had the utilities restored.

The living room was a model of disarrangement; old newspapers left where they’d been dropped, ashtrays overflowing with ashes and old butts everywhere, a cushion out of the sagging sofa on the floor, as though Snider might have been using it as a headrest as he lay on his back watching a small black and white television set propped on a discarded orange crate. Geblick walked slowly through the room, his practiced eyes surveying a small phonograph, a record holder, and Snider’s pathetic recording equipment. He’d once told Geblick that he’d gotten it from an amusement park that was closing; it had been in a small booth where a half dollar allowed you to record a few minutes of talk to be mailed to a loved one on an inexpensive lightweight 45 rpm record. On a table in front of the phonograph, beside a pile of music manuscript sheets, was Snider’s old clarinet, now covered with dust; he’d used the instrument to compose his pathetic melodies.

The kitchen, a small alcove off the living room, was similarly littered. Unwashed dishes were still in the sink.

Face set in distaste, Geblick crossed back through the living room, passed a small dirty-looking bathroom, and went into the bedroom, thinking that he might have to pay someone to take the thing off his hands.

Snider’s books — old, dogeared, some with their covers barely hanging on — were in a bookcase made of raw boards and old bricks. An old fashioned iron-framed bed supported a mattress that sagged treacherously. The covers were just as Snider had left them — he’d died halfway from the front door to the street one morning, and they’d found him there.

Shaking his head, Geblick hooked a huge hand around a corner of the mattress and jerked it up. The action was a secondary response as a result of his years of searching bedrooms where people had a predilection for hiding things under mattresses.

Holding the mattress up, he saw a sheet of paper clipped to a twenty dollar bill on the springs. He picked both up and read the black-crayoned message on the paper:

Geblick read the message twice, laboriously. Then he ran out to his car where he still had a list of serial numbers the bank had produced after the money had been stolen. He ran a thumbnail along the numbers until he found the one that matched the one on the bill.

Geblick had put in for his vacation in the fall, but he had the seniority to request and get a change.

Carrying tools purchased from a hardware store, as well as a suitcase, he returned to the house he’d just inherited. He straightened the furniture, dusted, then swept the rug. He washed the dishes in the kitchen. He stripped sheets from the bed and carried them to a laundromat on the corner. As the washer went to work, he returned to the house and carefully squeezed every inch of the mattress. He searched through the few pieces of worn clothing Snider had left in the closet. Then he went back to the laundromat where he put the washed sheets in a dryer. While that operation was being completed, he sat in a metal chair, staring straight ahead.

Snider, he realized, had known the personal habits inside that neighborhood bank as well as he’d known his own; he’d had his savings account there for twenty years. Because business picked up during the lunch hour, most of the employees took their lunch break after one o’clock, so the usual force from one to two was two tellers and the assistant manager. There were a front and a rear entrance. Customers were no more than occasional during that interval. Without showing the faintest ingeniousness, Snider had slipped on a rubber mask and thin leather gloves and gone in the back entrance carrying a plastic bag. He’d herded all three employees into an open vault. He’d taken what money he could find in there, closed the door, then taken all the money from the tellers’ cages. He’d done it in roughly four minutes, during which time not another soul had stepped into that bank. Then he’d run out and down an alley where he’d disappeared.

The clue to identity, beyond the employees’ description of his slight and short build, had been Geblick’s ticket to the robber: an old leather watchband which had broken during the little man’s haste to collect that eighty-seven thousand. The watch had been found just inside the back entrance. On the back had been engraved “To Artie from Ma.”

Artie Snider had not denied the watch was his when Geblick had focused ownership down to him. He’d simply claimed that he’d been in the bank late that morning, which he had.

During the trial, Geblick had claimed that Snider had been doing a last minute casing of the bank. The defense attorney, Barstow, had accused Geblick of seeking a quick and easy arrest for a robbery he couldn’t honestly solve. The jury had seen fit to believe Barstow and Snider.

Now the trial was over, Snider had been acquitted, and he was dead. But his guilt, Geblick thought, is still real, and that note proves it. Geblick reached inside his jacket pocket and took it out to read the message again.

Having done so, he carried the clean sheets back to the little house, made the bed, and began taking the house apart.

During the next days, he ate canned food warmed on Snider’s old stove. He slept in Snider’s bed. He removed every fiber-board, which comprised the walls, from the interior. There was no basement, but he was able to crawl through a small opening underneath the kitchen and, with a flashlight, search all of the ground down there as well as the surfaces between the floor joists. He found nothing.

He nailed the fiberboards back, then walked with dark and scowling features through the house again. As he stopped in the small bathroom, he felt a sudden surge of fury at himself for having missed the obvious simply because he’s been thinking about how he would fake some kind of injury so that he could have disability money coming in as well as the retirement, then move down to Guayama or Mazatlán where he could turn that eighty-seven grand he was going to find into a fortune. Jaw muscles jerking, he lifted the cover of the commode and saw a note taped to the bottom surface. He removed it and unfolded the paper, which carried the message:

“Peloski,” Geblick said into the telephone in the booth two blocks from the little house, “what have we got on Patty the Milkmaid?”

“You don’t quit even when you’re on vacation, do you, Geblick?”

“What’s on her?”

“What’s she in?”

“Dope, maybe. Shoplifting. I don’t know. I’m telling you to find out. She sounds like a broad in the Tenderloin. Get on it, Peloski. I’ll check with you in an hour.”

An hour later Geblick listened to Peloski saying, “All we got is Patty the Cow.”

“Which?”

“Cow. She’s in the Tenderloin, all right — she’s a hooker,” Peloski said.

Geblick was sweating. He kicked open the door of the booth to get air. “You sure that’s it, Peloski?”

“All except Jones. He said for you to try Aesop.”

“Aesop? We got a make on him?”

“Nah, I looked.”

“So what’s Jones talking about?”

“Who knows? He said that, then just shut his mouth and grinned. You know, like he does. He’s queer.”

“You’re not kidding.”

In the small house again, Geblick surveyed the contents of the tiny kitchen cupboard. There was only one object possibly large enough to contain a sheaf of currency. He removed a box of salt and tore it apart savagely, then watched angrily as salt spilled onto a counter. He threw the empty carton against the wall.

Eyes thinned, he moved through the house reexamining. Patty the Milkmaid, he thought. Maybe it didn’t make any sense whatever — because Snider was surely crazy enough to have written anything. Yet he’d been wise enough, Geblick thought, to have left his notes in places where an experienced detective would find them.

He returned to the bedroom and stared at the books there. He’d already gone through them, one by one, opening each to check for a hollow inside. So, no, he found, nothing there...

His good eyes found it then, on the spine of a thin volume bound in black leather. Aesop.

He yanked the book out, opened it, and studied one fable after another, until he reached the one entitled “The Milkmaid and Her Pail.” It was, he slowly discovered, a tale about Patty going to market with a milk pail on her head, planning the rewards she would achieve with the profits from selling the milk — after which she spilled it.

Geblick read the moral of the story at the end:

Geblick blinked. He licked his lips. He hunched his huge shoulders. Then he saw the thin lines which had been drawn under several of the letters. He said them aloud: “OCRERD.”

He went down the block and bought a bottle of whisky and returned to the small living room. After he’d finished his first glass, after his mind had started to function more imaginatively, he began to hear Snider’s high, rasping voice calling to him: “Ocrerd, Geblick! You’ve been ocrerd!”

With three glasses of whisky gone, he got up abruptly an lurched his way to the door. He went to the phone booth down the street and found the number of the city library. He dialed and asked for the reference librarian, who answered in a wispish, precise voice, “May I help you?”

“I want to know what’s happened to me if I’ve been ocrerd,” Geblick said.

“I beg your pardon,” the librarian answered haughtily.

“What I want,” Geblick said, trying to control his temper, “is to find out what it means to be ocrerd. Isn’t that reasonable? Don’t you have a dictionary, lady?”

“Yes,” the librarian said. “But I won’t be shouted at.”

“I’m not shouting!” Geblick said, forcing his voice down. “What does it mean?”

“How do you spell it?”

Geblick told her. There was silence. Then the woman said: “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t mean anything?”

“It isn’t a word. I even looked in the slang dictionary, a dreadful book, really. And it isn’t there either. Whatever’s happened to you, it doesn’t mean anything at all.”

“Oh, it doesn’t, doesn’t it!”

“Not in the dictionary it doesn’t.”

“You’re shouting, lady.”

Again silence, then finally: “I do not mean to shout at people who need help. I repeat that it simply does not mean anything. Unless... well, it might be an anagram mightn’t it?”

“How?”

“ANAGRAM. I shall look up the exact definition for you.” Then: “A word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another. That’s Webster talking, sir.”

“Transposing the letters,” Geblick said, frowning darkly, trying to make his brain work better than it was.

“I love them, really. Let’s see now. What could we make?”

Geblick listened to the woman mumbling.

Finally she said, “Droecr?”

“What?” Geblick demanded.

“But that isn’t anything either, is it?” she said. “Wait! There it is! Record!”

“What?”

“That’s all I can see it could be. RECORD. But that doesn’t mean very much either, does it?”

“Oh, the hell it doesn’t.” Geblick said loudly, and slammed down the receiver.

He returned to the house at a run. He locked the door behind him, then knelt in front of Snider’s old phonograph and his collection of records, which were held upright in their wire holder. Feeling his hands begin to shake, he took a record from the holder and placed it on the turntable. He started the machine. In a moment, he heard the sound of Snider’s clarinet — coarse, off-pitch, squeaking — playing a ragged, nondescript melody that made Geblick’s ears hurt.

He played the record through, then started another.

He rubbed his head, which was aching now, and grabbed his whisky bottle.

Another and another. His nerves had begun to hum.

Finally the clarinet stopped and a familiar rasping, high voice, said, “Eh, Geblick?”

Geblick wagged his head, balanced on hands and knees, listening tensely.

“Oh, what say you, Geblick? Eh?”

“Where is it?” Geblick demanded.

“I’m going to tell you exactly where it is, Geblick. So that you may be rewarded for your diligence, your hounding, your torture.”

“Where!”

“Are you listening, Geblick?”

“Yes!”

“Then here are the precise instructions, and the only instructions, you will receive. Geblick?”

“Spit it out, Snider!”

“Listen closely, then, as I tell you exactly how to find the money. It is hidden in the, hidden in the, hidden in the...”

Geblick stared at the turning record as the voice repeated the phrase.

Eyes wild, he stopped the machine and bent closely over the record to see that the needle was poised at the very edge of the final groove where there was a slight nick which appeared to have been created deliberately.

“No!” he whispered.

He started the machine again. The voice was ghostly and wavering, then it became clear again, as it repeated, “...hidden in the, hidden in the, hidden in the...”

Geblick fell back, and lay on the floor, listening. Finally, and although he had not done so in forty-three years, he began to cry.