Black Mask (Vol. 20, No. 8 — October 1937)

Nothing To Worry About by Herbert A. Woodbury

Standing there, the last in line at the teller’s grilled window, drably inconspicuous in his steel-rimmed spectacles and his baggy brown suit, Horatio Boggs kept telling himself over and over again that there was nothing to worry about.

If the crinkly, crisp, brand-new, twenty-dollar Federal Reserve note, the amount of which he had entered upon his deposit slip, didn’t pass the muster of the teller’s, Dan Meyers’, eagle eye, why then Dan would confiscate the note, of course. But Dan, who’d been taking Mr. Boggs’ deposits every Friday afternoon for twenty-four years, wouldn’t guess for an instant that he, drab, dowdy little Mr. Boggs, possessed, hidden away in a safety deposit box, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two more such counterfeit twenties. No, there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

Often, during the long years that he had worked as a runner for Cameron and Calahan, Bonds, Mr. Boggs had been tempted. Again and again when he had been sent out to deliver fifty or a hundred or a thousand unregistered coupon Liberties, he had thought wistfully how easy it would be, simply to walk off with them; disappear. But it was a mood which had always passed. For Horatio Boggs had the prudence and the good sense to realize that it wouldn’t really be easy at all. They’d broadcast his name; his picture. And eventually, in Tahiti, or in Honolulu, or in Bali — which the travel circulars called the last paradise — wherever he’d fled the detectives employed by the company which had insured the bonds against theft would find him.

No, he might dream. He might scheme and plot. He might occasionally pilfer postage stamps from the office till. But that was all.

And that might have continued to be all; that might have been a portrait of Horatio Boggs to the very end of his colorless and uneventful existence, had he not, on that fourth of July, driven to the Jersey shore.

He’d long since left Philadelphia and Camden behind him. The scrub pines had thinned out; the tang of salt had come into the air. He’d been approaching Fisher’s Landing, when, abruptly, up ahead where a white cross arm said Cross Crossings Corefully, he had come upon sheer chaos and annihilation. A light sedan had been hit by a shore-bound express; reduced to a twisted mass. The train still blocked the crossing. The concrete was jammed with parked cars.

Applying the brakes of his coupé, turning off the ignition and carefully — very carefully and prudently — putting the key in his pocket, Mr. Boggs had joined the throngs of the curious. Worming his way into the front ranks of the crowd, he had reached the spot where two Jersey troopers in sky-blue uniforms were kneeling beside something half naked. Something quite terrible. Someone had said, “It’s Terry Colt.”

Mr. Boggs read the newspapers, of course. He knew who Terry Colt was. Terry Colt had commenced in the headlines in Prohibition days; he was out on bail, now, awaiting trial on the charge of smuggling aliens. But if there was any thrill to be found in gazing down upon a dead and mangled big shot, Mr. Boggs had left it abruptly to those with constitutions stronger than his own.

Nauseated, quite sick at his stomach, Mr. Boggs had turned away. Seeing for the instant in the death of Terry Colt, who had failed to cross a crossing carefully, simply a vindication of his own lifelong philosophy of prudence and caution, Mr. Boggs had wandered back along the tracks toward the road.

Here was a tire. Here a single spoke. There a tiny patch of blood-stained gray broadcloth. Here was Terry Colt’s shoe, tom from his foot. And there — Abruptly, Horatio Boggs had come to a halt. There, trampled deep into the marshy grass, was something which looked very much like a bond house runner’s leather wallet!

Then, upstairs in his room in West Philadelphia, after breakfast, the morning of the fifth, Mr. Boggs had sadly, and not deliriously as upon the day before, taken stock a second time of the contents of Terry Colt’s wallet. He’d spread out upon his bed one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three twenty dollar bills.

Counterfeits! The story of Terry Colt’s death had been in the morning Inquirer. Very early the morning of the fourth, it seemed, U. S. Treasury agents had raided an apartment in North Philadelphia. They’d arrested two men and a woman; confiscated copper plates for turning out counterfeit twenties and tens. Terry Colt, alone of those who had been in the apartment, had escaped. Flyers had gone out over the teletypes of four States. Later in the morning, a Jersey trooper had recognized Terry Colt at the wheel of his car; had given pursuit, and in his escape, Terry Colt had tried to push a train out of his way. There wasn’t any mention, of course, of a lost wallet. Because nobody knew that a wallet had been lost. Nobody, there in that excited and morbid crowd had seen drab, inconspicuous little Mr. Boggs swiftly tuck the leather case beneath his coat. He’d got away with it, all right. But what good had it done him?

He could see that Terry Colt’s bills weren’t genuine. The paper was thinner. Or was it, really? The ink seemed lighter. Or did it? What was it that the paper said about the confiscated plates? Why, it said that they were the work of a former U. S. Treasury engraver, and that had it been possible to use them with adequate ink upon at all adequate paper, they would have seemed perfect. Well, the paper and the ink would certainly have fooled Mr. Boggs. Ordinarily. Not now, of course. Not after he’d read that Terry Colt’s latest illegal racket was counterfeit currency. But once. Yes, and—

Mr. Boggs wondered abruptly whether these bills wouldn’t still fool a lot of people who didn’t know where they’d come from. Look at them! Numbered consecutively like real bills. Nothing very miraculous about it, maybe. Any job printer who printed consecutively numbered tickets or sales slips could have superimposed those numbers upon the engravings of the bills. But it went to show, thought Mr. Boggs, the infinite care and patience and finesse which had been taken with the whole job. Suppose these bills would fool even an expert, like Dan Meyers at the bank? Why, then a man could spend all of them. With impunity. Couldn’t he?

The line there at Dan Meyers’ grilled window moved on up. Telling himself not to worry — what was there to worry about? — if this sample bill taken at random from the lot didn’t pass muster, he could convince Dan that he’d got it quite innocently, couldn’t he? Mr. Boggs handed Dan Meyers his pass book and deposit slip.

An eternity passed. A million years.

Dan Meyers handed Mr. Boggs back his pass book, the deposit duly entered. Dan tossed the twenty into a pile of other twenties in a drawer. And Horatio Boggs stood there for a second, giddy, reeling!

Then his life-long prudence and caution asserted themselves. A uniformed armored car messenger who’d taken the place back of Mr. Boggs in line was stepping up to Dan’s window. Horatio Boggs elbowed in ahead of the messenger again. But Dan hadn’t even looked at that twenty! The possibility of Mr. Boggs handing him a note which was queer, hadn’t even remotely occurred to Dan. Dan, carelessly, had accepted the bill without the slightest examination.

“Dan,” said Mr. Boggs tremulously, “I wonder if you’d take a good look at that twenty I just— You see—” And now he was offering it gratuitously to Dan: the story he’d been going to tell Dan, if Dan challenged him. How he’d been having a beer in a taproom on South Broad. How the man next to him had offered the bartender a twenty which the bartender couldn’t change. And then how he, Mr. Boggs, the Good Samaritan, had taken three fives and five ones from his own wallet, and... “But I got to worrying about it afterwards, see? I read about this raid on a gang of counterfeiters out in North Philadelphia, and I—”

Was he talking too much, he wondered suddenly? Should he have hinted to Dan that he suspected the precise source of the bill? But no. No, he evidently hadn’t been talking too much. Dan had good-humoredly picked up the bill again; and felt it, this time; scrutinized it; turned it over and scrutinized its other side. And Dan’s expression hadn’t changed. It was smiling good humor, still. As if Dan understood perfectly what must have gone on in the mind of timid fussy little old Mr. Boggs — the inevitable childish fears following the changing of the twenty for an utter stranger.

“As good as gold,” Dan grinned.

Heart pumping wildly, head swimming in delirium, he left poor old Dan Meyers. Yes, poor old Dan Meyers — stuck there in his teller’s cage, accepting deposits, cashing checks, making up factory payrolls and handing them out to uniformed messengers, to the end of his unexciting days. He, Horatio Boggs, was free!

And he was free. But, prudent, cautious, sensible always, he wasn’t a damned fool about it. Some men would have dashed off to the South Seas carrying their fortunes, in cash, on their persons, and been robbed of it, or murdered for it in some native brothel. Not Mr. Boggs! Mr. Boggs realized that it would be far wiser to let the bank guard his fortune. And, prudent and cautious about that, too, he bided his time against the day when he could logically explain so large a cash deposit.

He let a week slip past. That following Friday, he cashed his weekly pay check from Cameron & Calahan, instead of, as he’d done for twenty-four years, depositing it

“Going down to Bowie, Saturday afternoon,” he said to Dan.

“And play the ponies?” Dan had his little joke.

“And maybe play the ponies,” Mr. Boggs confessed. Because that was where he was going to be clever. He intended actually to commence frequenting the tracks. Actually to get a reputation as a gambler.

Six weeks drifted by. Mr. Boggs learned, for various considerations to various touts, that a sleeper was coming to life, today, in the third, or in the seventh. He learned that a maiden could be a gelding; was a horse which had never won a race; and not, as he’d always thought, a young filly. He learned what it meant to play ’em across the board. He lost and he continued to lose, but it didn’t matter. He might be digging deeper and deeper into his savings of twenty-four years to finance these gambling expeditions. Wind of his bets and losses might have reached the ears of Mr. Calahan; and Cameron & Calahan might, regretfully, have discharged him. What of it? There was nothing to worry about. Sooner or later in the season, some horse was bound to win a race at odds great enough to make logical his story of an afternoon’s winnings having been pyramided into thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and forty dollars. It’d be easy enough to pick a winner, when you didn’t have to pick him until after the race was over.

Six weeks. Then, one afternoon, the favorites all trailed in a sea of mud. And a nag, fittingly enough named Liberty, galloped in, paying forty to one.

That next morning, Mr. Boggs stood again at Dan Meyers’ grilled teller’s window, handing Dan one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two crisp, brand-new twenties. Heart in his mouth, he said, “Hit a nag named Liberty right on the nose. Had a hunch and I—”

Saying nothing, calmly accepting his story, Dan Meyers entered the deposit, thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and forty dollars, very neatly and without comment in Mr. Boggs’ pass book. Mr. Boggs said good-by to Dan — to poor old Dan, plodding old wheel horse that he’d used to be, stuck there in his teller’s cage for life.

He didn’t see the bank guard trail him to Cameron & Calahan’s. He was sitting in Mr. Calahan’s private office, lording it over the boss who’d discharged him, condescendingly asking Calahan’s advice on the safe investment of his winnings when Dan Meyers and a city detective and a Pinkham operative working for the Midland Insurance Co. came in.

Panic swept over Mr. Boggs. He made a leap for the far door. A shadow hurtled throught the air behind him. Strong arms locked ’round his knees, bore him to the floor with a crash... When he opened his eyes, he was lying on Mr. Calahan’s couch. Dan Meyers was looking down at him. He glared back at Dan Meyers.

“And you knew all the time?” he asked Dan bitterly. “You accepted that first twenty just to give me confidence enough to bring the rest of them in to you?”

Dan colored sheepishly. “It’d make a good story, that way,” Dan said, “me the amateur sleuth who encouraged you to— But I’m afraid I wasn’t as clever as that. Nope, you fooled me on that first bill, Horatio. Took me in completely. I said, ‘Good as gold’ and entered it in your pass book, and it wasn’t until today when you brought me in the other eighteen hundred and sixty-two of them that I realized what you were up to, six weeks ago. When you asked me to look that sample twenty over carefully, you were trying to find out whether it was hot. You wondered if I had a record of its serial number. And when I didn’t pounce on it, you guessed there wasn’t any such record. Only, there was, it happened. Been keeping such a record, every week for the insurance company, ever since the Philadelphia Distilling Co. hold-up two years ago.

“Well, as I say, that one bill got by me. You were so clever pretending you were afraid it was counterfeit, that that’s all I examined it for; its genuineness. Didn’t glance at its number. But today when you handed me eighteen hundred and sixty-two brand-new twenties — just one twenty less than the eighteen hundred and sixty-three twenties that were stolen when our armored car was knocked off on its way to the Philadelphia Distilling Company last June, I knew, then. It wasn’t a hunch. It was a ton of bricks falling on me. I signaled a bank guard to follow you. I dived into my drawer for my list of the serial numbers of that week; I checked your deposit against my list, and—”

Only Dan Meyers’ voice had blurred. Horatio Boggs sat there in a daze. Then the bills had been genuine all the time? Genuine, but so hot that Terry Colt had been afraid to try to pass them? He saw all of a sudden, what Terry Colt had been doing at the counterfeiters’ apartment. He’d been trying to sell his roll at a discount. Men who shoved the queer would probably be equally able to shove the hot. Horatio Boggs sat there, sickness and nausea rolling up in him. He, he guessed, if he hadn’t been quite so prudent and so cautious, could have taken those bills to some far city, and passed them, one at a time. Nobody’d ever have suspected drab, inconspicuous little Mr. Boggs any more than Dan Meyers had suspected him that first time. But now—

He guessed that he wouldn’t hang for the murder of the uniformed messenger who’d died in the armored car holdup, although a jury might not believe he’d found the money. He guessed that — for what he had left in his old savings account at the bank — he could hire a lawyer clever enough to persuade the jury of his innocence of everything except having been an utter damned fool. But he guessed that he’d never see Tahiti or Bali, the last paradise. Nope... Poor old Dan Meyers might. Poor old Dan Meyers who’d spent all his life making up factory payrolls, jotting down serial numbers, week after week, was probably due for a pretty nice reward. And he’d once condescendingly pitied old Dan, thought Horatio Boggs. Dan, who hadn’t anything to worry about...