Man-Trap

XI

In the outer office of the Jones and Knight Investment Company we found the secretary-bookkeeper Matilda Graves poring over a huge ledger. As nearly as I could tell the ledger contained nothing but columns of figures, but they must have been sad figures, for she furtively dabbed at her eyes with a piece of Kleenex when we entered, and her face was flushed from weeping.

When she spoke to Harlan Jones over the intercom, she announced only that I was there, so Fausta entering his private office with me was a surprise to him. We found him feverishly comparing a pile of bank statements with what seemed to be a stack of duplicate deposit slips. He did not seem particularly glad to see me, but his eyes lighted with almost breathless interest when they touched Fausta.

“Miss Fausta Moreni,” I said. “This is Mr. Jones, Fausta.”

Jones’ round body popped out of its chair like a bounced rubber ball. His face fixed in an almost groveling smile, he told Fausta he was delighted to meet her and quickly rounded the desk to hold a chair for her.

He let me find my own chair.

When he had fussily reseated himself, he continued to gaze at Fausta as though fascinated. It was a common reaction for men to pant slightly the first time they saw Fausta, but Jones seemed to be overdoing it.

I said, “I understand Mrs. Jones was released finally, Mr. Jones.”

“Yes,” he said, wrenching his nervous gaze from Fausta long enough to look at me. “I just spoke to her on the phone. She plans to take a shower and then nap until she recovers from the ordeal.”

“What I really dropped in about was the bank deposit slip found in Willard Knight’s pocket,” I said. “Inspector Day told me you went to the bank this morning to check on it. Find out anything?”

“I’m still finding things out,” he said, gesturing towards the pile of bank statements and deposit slips on his desk. “It’s a rather appalling discovery to make about a dead partner, but it seems Knight has been juggling the basic company account for some time.”

“Shortages?”

He shook his head. “Fortunately no. At least as nearly as I can make out from a quick check, and I don’t believe that an audit will disclose any shortage either. But had it not been for the deposit Knight made only yesterday afternoon only a few hours before he died, the firm would be seventy thousand short. And that would have meant bankruptcy.” Drawing a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped the back of his neck and shivered again over the narrow escape.

“The seventy thousand belonged to the firm, did it?” I asked. “And Knight replaced it on the Q.T.?”

“Worse than that. It was a client’s money in our custody. Apparently Knight had been using funds intrusted to us for his own personal speculations for nearly a year. Frequently, instead of depositing a check received from a client, he would use the money for market speculation first, then deposit it after he had made use of it. Apparently he was consistently lucky, or at least not unlucky, for while I am sure he never made any very substantial profits, he never seems to have lost his illegally borrowed capital either. At least the records indicate he always managed to deposit what he had withheld before the last day of the month, so that the bank statement always showed the proper balance.”

“He never held out deposits more than thirty days then?”

“No,” Jones said. “Sometimes for periods only as long as two or three days. I imagine he would buy some shares, wait for a rise above his purchase price, then immediately sell out, pocket whatever profit he had made and deposit the capital he had withheld.”

“But wouldn’t your bookkeeper catch the discrepancies between the dates amounts were supposed to be deposited and the actual dates of deposit?”

Harlan Jones’ angry flush told me what caused Matilda Graves’ tears. “She should have, but Knight seemingly knew her shortcomings better than I did. Miss Graves is an efficient secretary and bookkeeper, but apparently she doesn’t do any unnecessary work. The way my partner worked it was really quite simple. By mutual agreement he always took care of bank deposits... that is, he made all trips to the bank. Miss Graves prepared the deposit slips. The account he was tampering with is the company’s basic checking account into which all monies received are always deposited. We have three other accounts: a petty cash fund of five hundred dollars which Miss Graves is authorized to write checks against for rent, utilities and so forth; a savings account in our joint names, and an expense account both Knight and I were authorized to write checks against. But deposits to these accounts are always by transfer of funds from the basic account, you see, and never by direct deposit of monies received. In this way all money transactions have to pass through the basic account, which simplifies bookkeeping.”

When I believed I had this absorbed, I said, “For instance, your firm receives a profit of a thousand dollars from some transaction, and you decide to deposit it in your savings account. Instead of making a direct deposit, you stick it in the basic account, then write a check against the basic account for one thousand dollars and deposit that.”

“Exactly. So all Miss Graves’ book entries represent either a deposit or a check written against the basic account. Apparently Willard figured that as long as the final figure on the bank statement jibed with the balance in Miss Graves’ books when she totalled up at the end of each month, she wouldn’t bother to check the deposits appearing on the bank statement against her file of deposit slips. What Willard did was have a rubber stamp made similar to the one the bank uses on duplicate deposit slips. I found it in his desk this morning.”

Fumbling in his desk drawer, he produced a large rubber stamp, held it up for a moment and dropped it back in the drawer again. “Instead of using a bank book, Miss Graves always prepares two deposit slips, one for the bank and one to be stamped and returned to her as a receipt. When he wanted capital for a speculation, apparently Willard would withhold one check from deposit, make out new slips and deposit the remainder of whatever Miss Graves had given him. But what he would give to her as a receipt when he returned from the bank would be the duplicate slip she had actually prepared, stamped by him instead of by the bank.”

“I see,” I said thoughtfully. “So what you’re looking for in that stack of bank statements is large amounts deposited in two separate chunks at periods up to thirty days apart, where your duplicate deposit slips show it deposited all in one piece.”

“Exactly. And so far I have discovered five instances during the past year. Amounts ranging from five thousand dollars up to the top one of seventy thousand which Willard returned yesterday.” At the thought of the seventy thousand he again ran his handkerchief over the back of his neck. “Prior to this last time it was mainly firm money Willard was playing with, but this belonged to a client. It was advanced to us to buy a certain stock when it falls to the price the client is willing to pay. We would have been ruined if Willard had not gotten it back in the account.”

“Happen to know what he was planning to do with the seventy thousand?” I asked.

Jones shook his head. “Apparently he had already done it. The Riverside Bank tells me the deposit was a certified check on the Mohl and Townsend Investment Company, a competitor of ours. Willard must have bought some stock through them, then unloaded it and returned the money just before he got killed.”

“Have you talked to Mohl and Townsend?”

Again Jones shook his head. “I don’t plan to. I plan to turn all information I find in our own records over to Inspector Day and let him use it as he wishes. But beyond being thankful that his investments didn’t cost Willard any money, I don’t care what his speculations were now that he’s dead.”

The Mohl and Townsend Investment Company office was a duplicate of the Jones and Knight office with one outstanding difference. Instead of a middle-aged spinster presiding over the reception room, we found a voluptuous blonde who would have been nearly as beautiful as Fausta, had her voluptuousness not been slightly overdone. I have as much admiration for an impressive feminine torso as the next man, but I don’t like to have to approach side-wise to get my arms around a girl. She had a typewriter in front of her, and my first thought when we entered the office was that she obviously must use the touch system, for if she backed up enough to see the keys, she would be too far from the machine to reach it with her fingers.

I left her and Fausta eyeing each other with mutual hostility while I had a talk with the senior partner in his private office.

Alfred Mohl was a dried up specimen of about seventy, and about as conservative as you might expect an investment broker to be. To put it mildly, he was not enthusiastic about discussing the business affairs of a client, even though the client’s deceased condition made it unlikely the company would draw further business from him. Only after I had convinced him I was working in cooperation with the Homicide Department, and we had reason to suspect Willard Knight’s speculations somehow tied in with his murder, did he reluctantly unload.

“We have been handling transactions for Mr. Knight about three years,” he finally told me. “Mostly of the speculative type. He was not an... ah... conservative investor.”

I asked, “Didn’t you think it strange that a rival investment broker would buy stock through you when he easily could have done so through his own firm?”

“I sometimes wondered about it,” Mohl admitted. “But it is not part of a broker’s duty to question a client’s motive for giving him business.”

“It never occurred to you Knight might be speculating with money not belonging to him?”

Alfred Mohl looked shocked. “Certainly not!”

“Well, it seems he was. Could you tell me just what his investments were, and how he made out on each one?”

He pressed a button on his desk, and when the large bosomed blonde came in, asked her to bring him the file on Willard Knight. When she brought it to him, he pored over it about ten minutes while I silently smoked a cigar. Occasionally he made a note on a slip of paper.

“Here is the entire story,” he said finally, closing the file folder and handing me the paper on which he had been making notes.

Neatly divided into four columns was a list of a dozen stock transactions, the first column consisting of the names of stocks, the second the number of shares purchased, the third the purchase price, and the last the selling date and price.

A quick glance showed that in ten of the transactions Knight had made a profit, the smallest profit being two hundred dollars and the largest three thousand. But the other two transactions explained the cheapness of Willard Knight’s home.

Between the two he had taken a loss of thirty-five thousand.

In my head I added up his wins, subtracted from his two large losses and came out with a debit balance of approximately twenty thousand. The last transaction was the only one of the lot which showed neither profit nor loss. In the three weeks Knight had held shares, the market price had not changed a decimal.

It was the largest transaction on the list... thirty-five thousand shares of Ilco Utilities at two dollars a share. And Ilco Utilities was one of the companies in which Walter Lancaster had also been a large stockholder.

I thanked Mr. Mohl for his cooperation, collected Fausta and departed.

I said, “Let’s go interrupt Isobel Jones’s nap.”

Fausta raised one eyebrow. “Isobel? I did not know you and the lady were on a first name basis.”

“I’m an informal guy,” I growled. “I call all my mistresses by their first names, Miss Moreni.”

WE DID not succeed in interrupting Isobel’s nap, because she wasn’t asleep when we arrived. Attired in a scanty sun suit, she was seated on the front porch sipping a highball, the color of which led me to believe it was the usual mixture of Scotch and bourbon. Fausta eyed the narrow halter and brief shorts of our hostess dubiously, unsuccessfully searched for boniness in Isobel’s soft shoulders, or the faint indication of wrinkles in her smooth throat, then greeted her with a sisterly smile in which there was only the barest suggestion of sororicide.

Fausta seated herself in a canvas chair similar to the one Isobel occupied, and I sat in the green porch swing.

I said, “I know you were answering questions all night, Mrs. Jones. But would it upset you to answer one or two more?”

“Why no. But I told Inspector Day everything I knew about poor Willard. I couldn’t sleep, you see, so I took a little walk and dropped in at the Sheridan merely because it was handy...”

“I heard that story,” I interrupted. “Let’s work on a different one. Let’s go back to the night Walter Lancaster was murdered.”

She looked surprised. “Mr. Lancaster? But obviously Willard had nothing to do with that. You don’t think I did, do you?”

“No. You know you rather amaze me, Isobel. You don’t seem in the least grief stricken over Knight.”

“Of course I feel terrible about it,” Isobel said in a tone lacking the slightest evidence of grief. “But after all I didn’t know Willard very well. He was my husband’s partner and all, but we didn’t move in the same social group, and actually he was more of a friend of my husband than of me.”

I shook my head at her wonderingly. “Isobel, you’re one of the best actresses I ever encountered. In the face of all the evidence, do you really expect to convince either me or the cops you weren’t carrying on an affair with Knight?”

She straightened her back indignantly. “Why, Manny Moon! To say a thing like that in my own house! Or on the porch of my house anyway. When I tell my husband...”

“The cops already told him,” I said. “He doesn’t believe them, and after witnessing your convincing performance, I understand why. But I’m not your husband, and personally I don’t care how many lovers you have. I also have no intention of spoiling your husband’s beautiful faith in you. All I want is verification of some things I’ve already figured out, and only oral verification. You don’t have to sign anything, and if you object to a witness, Fausta can go inside while we talk.”

Isobel said primly, “There is nothing I have to say that I can’t say in front of a witness.”

“All right,” I said resignedly. “Let’s start with the morning after Lancaster’s death. Knight’s wife says that when Willard saw the morning paper, at first he acted elated, then upset, and when she questioned him, he refused to tell what it was in the news that affected him, but he did remark it was a mixed blessing. Obviously what he saw was the news of Lancaster’s death.”

Isobel looked politely interested but offered no comment.

“What elated him,” I went on, “was the realization that Lancaster had not had time before he died to make public certain irregularities he had uncovered in a firm both Knight and Lancaster held large interests in.”

Isobel said, “I know nothing of Mr. Knight’s business affairs. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know anything about my husband’s.”

“Then I’ll bring you up to date. Knight had misappropriated seventy thousand dollars of the company’s money in order to speculate and stood to lose it if Lancaster made his announcement. Lancaster’s sudden death gave him time to dispose of the stock and return the money to the company account.” I examined her for a trace of surprise, found none and asked, “Doesn’t it even worry you that Knight nearly bankrupted your husband?”

“Harlan told me about it over the phone,” she said serenely. “Since Willard managed to return everything before he died I can’t see any cause for worry.”

I conceded that hole. “Then we come to Knight’s second reaction. When the first wave of elation passed he became upset. And the more he thought about it the more upset he became. Finally he grew so upset he decided to run and hide. Know why?”

“I assume because he thought he might be suspected of the murder. I seem to recall your mentioning he had threatened Mr. Lancaster.”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t only that. Innocent people don’t run, even when they know they’ll be suspected. Knight had two other reasons for running. First, because he couldn’t afford to be delayed even for questioning until he unloaded that stock, and second, because he didn’t want it known where he had actually been when Lancaster was shot.”

Isobel’s bored attention settled on her drink.

“He was with you, of course,” I said. “As he probably always was when he told his wife he had a board meeting. I imagine if we got Mrs. Knight and your husband to compare notes, we’d find Willard’s board meetings always coincided with your husband’s trips out of town.”

She said quickly, “I thought you weren’t interested in destroying my husband’s beautiful faith.”

I grinned at her. “I’m not. I just want my hypotheses verified. When you can’t get verification from one source you try another. And beautiful as your husband’s faith is, I have an idea a session with me and Mrs. Knight would shake it.” I let her absorb this a few moments, then added, “Of course, if I could get a few halfway sensible answers out of you it wouldn’t be necessary to bring Mrs. Knight and Harlan together.”

Isobel swished ice around in her glass, looked thoughtful, and cast a surreptitious side glance at Fausta.

“I will step into your front room,” Fausta said dryly, rising from her chair.

She entered the house without glancing back at us.

Isobel examined the swishing ice a moment, then said, “It’s true Willard stopped by Monday night. But it was only a social call.”

“What time did he arrive?”

“About six fifteen.”

“A quarter hour after your husband’s plane left for Kansas City. How long did this social call last?”

“Well, he stayed for dinner...”

When her voice trailed off, I asked, “What time did he leave?”

“Late, I guess. Rather late.”

“His wife said he got home about one A.M. That when he left?”

“Oh no. Not that late.”

“A quarter of one?”

“I guess,” she said reluctantly. “Along in there somewhere.”

“And you stayed here the whole time? You didn’t go out?”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t spend an evening out with a man who was not my husband.”

“I see,” I said. “Was Knight gone any of this time?”

“Gone?”

“From the house.”

She shook her head.

“You’re certain? Perhaps while you were washing dishes?”

“He wiped,” Isobel said. “He wasn’t out of my sight all evening. Except...”

She paused and I asked, “Except when?”

“Well, a little after nine he went down the basement for more beer because the refrigerator was empty, and was gone nearly a half hour. He got interested in Harlan’s tool bench.”

“A little after nine,” I repeated. “With perfect timing, he could have driven to El Patio, shot Lancaster and driven back again in a half hour. Could you hear him moving around in the basement?”

“No. But I know he didn’t leave the house.”

“How?”

Suddenly she grinned a reckless grin straight at me. “He didn’t have any pants on. And the pants were draped over a chair within my sight all the time that he was gone.”

“That settles that,” I said. “One last question. Your meeting with Knight last night wasn’t accidental at all, was it?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Just trying to make all parts of the puzzle fit. Let me guess. He phoned you to arrange the meeting, and what he wanted was to work out some story which would get him off the hook for Lancaster’s murder, without disclosing he was over here with his pants off at the time Lancaster died.”

“You put it rather crudely,” Isobel frowned.

Her zany jiggling back and forth between candid admission and offended virtue began to irk me. “You mentioned his pants first,” I said. “Why do you balk at admitting a planned meeting with Knight in public after admitting he spent a pantless six and a half hours with you in private?”

“He didn’t have his pants off the whole time,” she said primly.

I scowled at her and she said, “All right. He phoned me to meet him at the Sheridan and I sneaked out after Harlan went to sleep. We worked out a story that we had both gone to the auto races Monday night, only not together. I was going to tell the police I saw him in the crowd, but too far away to speak. The races last from eight thirty until ten thirty, so he would have been alibied for the time Mr. Lancaster was shot. After Willard died, there wasn’t any point in the story, of course, because it didn’t make any difference whether the police thought he killed Lancaster or not.”

I examined her face, trying to decide whether this, finally, was the truth. It was, I decided, because the reasoning was so peculiarly her own. When she said it didn’t make any difference whether the police suspected a dead man of killing Lancaster or not, she meant simply that it didn’t make any difference to her. The fact that settling on Knight as Lancaster’s murderer would allow the real killer to go free, did not concern her. Nothing concerned her which did not directly affect herself.

I climbed out of the swing. “Thanks, Isobel. I’ll keep our conversation as confidential as possible.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said, smiling up at me. “Drop back again sometime. Without your lady friend.”

“Shall I wear pants?” I asked.

“Of course, silly. At least till you get here.”