The Skeleton's knee

8

Harriet stopped me as I walked into the station. “Ron called from the SA’s office. Everybody’s running late, and they’ve only just started reviewing his evidence on the embezzling case. He’s supposed to be meeting Richard Schimke at the bank in ten minutes. Do you want me to put Dennis on it? He’s the only one around.”

I looked at my watch. “Doesn’t Ron have a file or something?”

She patted a folder lying on her desk. “A list of serial numbers, some photos J.P. took of the money, a couple of the bands that were holding the bills together, and a full breakdown of the dates on the bills, plus the names of the Federal Reserve banks that issued them.”

I scooped up the file as I headed back out the door. “Guess you know where you can find me.”

Vermont National Bank occupies the corner of Main and Elliot, across the street from Allen Rogers’s photo store. I asked for Schimke’s name at the information desk in the lobby and was told to take the elevator to the third floor.

The man who greeted me there was my idea of the small-town banker’s banker: average height, dark blow-dried hair, clean-shaven and pink-cheeked, a little on the chubby side, and blazingly affable. He was wearing an unremarkable dark three-piece suit and sporting an oversized college ring on his right hand and a wedding band on his left. Before I was led to his office, I was sure he’d have a diploma or two on the wall and a photo of his wife and kids on his desk.

But there I was wrong.

His office, at the end of the hall, had been rigged out as a Civil War museum, complete with broadsides, paintings, crossed swords, mounted pistols, and a tattered Confederate battle flag. Interspersed on the walls were framed displays of antique American paper currency-ornate, colorful, and running the gamut from smudged, hand-printed company scrip to lavishly detailed works of art, all dating back to the pre-greenback days when banks, states, and territories felt free to issue their own cash almost at will. I was so startled that I came to a dead stop on the threshold.

Rich Schimke looked back at me with a slightly embarrassed grin. “I guess it’s a little overwhelming at first. It’s just that I had all this stuff at home and never got to see it. I’m still not sure I won’t be told to take it all down; I’ve only had it here a couple of weeks, and I don’t think word has leaked upstairs yet.”

He shook his head sadly. “It’ll be a shame to lose it all again.”

I began walking around, looking at the collection more closely. “Hey, this may make you the most popular guy to visit in this bank.”

“That’d be nice,” he said wistfully.

I looked at him closely, ashamed at having pigeonholed him earlier and sorry to think that he was probably right in foretelling his own fate. I handed him the file I’d brought, hoping to cheer him up. “Well, maybe this’ll help. I’m here officially, and if you can throw any light at all on this, I’ll make sure the brass hears about it.”

He laughed and took the file, parking himself in his own guest chair to look it over. I described the circumstances in which we’d found the loot, how much there’d been, and how it had been bundled. He nodded as I spoke, studying the detailed inventory J.P. had drawn up.

“Well,” he finally said, “it certainly is unusual… Hey, you don’t happen to know whose signatures were on the 1934 notes, do you? You’ve got several of them listed here.”

I looked at him for a second, having forgotten he was a collector as well as a banker. “No; would they be worth a lot?”

“Not a lot-maybe double their face value. You’ve got some others I’d love to look at, too.”

I didn’t answer, not willing to make him promises I probably couldn’t keep.

He caught the implication and returned to the topic at hand. “I take it you sent the serial numbers to the Secret Service?”

I nodded.

“Considering the amount, they should be back to you pretty quick. If it was stolen, three hundred thousand must’ve made a dent in somebody’s pocket.”

“Couldn’t this be an aggravated version of stuffing cash into a mattress?”

Schimke looked doubtful. “Not like this. You’ve got both mint and used money here, but it’s all banded with official bank straps, complete with names and addresses. It looks to me like it came out of several banks in lump sums, and not from the tellers, either. They break the bands around the bundles as soon as they get them, to make the money easier to handle, and they rarely have more than one thousand dollars at one time anyhow, for security reasons. If this guy did stick up a series of banks, he didn’t go down the counters cleaning out the tills and collecting loose bills. All this came straight from the vaults.”

“But not from the same bank?” I asked. I regretted not having had the time to review Tyler’s file. My questions sounded foolish even to me.

But Schimke didn’t seem to notice or care. He shook his head affably. “Oh no. Any money that comes out of a bank legally is either loose or it’s strapped with that bank’s band. It doesn’t matter if it’s old or new money, since no matter where it comes from originally, it’s always recounted and rebanded by the receiver, even if it comes from a Fed bank. From what I can see from your list, this money came from banks in Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, California-”

“Nothing from the East?” I interrupted, struck by the locations of the states.

“No, which brings up something else. All mint notes originate from the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks, which then circulate them to surrounding private banks. In this area-in your own pocket, for instance-the really spanking-new money will be from the Fed bank in Boston, since it hasn’t had a chance to circulate far from where it was printed.”

I pulled a worn five-dollar bill from my wallet and looked at it. Schimke sidled over and pointed at the round emblem to the left of Lincoln’s portrait.

“That’s from San Francisco, but it’s been around a while, which is why you have to focus either on the straps or the mint notes to get a geographical fix on them. An old, loose note won’t tell you a thing. My point is that all the mint notes listed in your inventory were printed in the West or the Midwest. What you’ve got here”-he tapped the file J.P. had put together-“shows me the new money at least made a beeline from the Reserve bank to the local vault to your suspect.”

“Which implies,” I finished for him, “that he was out West when he collected it.”

Schimke’s eyes were shining by now. “That’s what the mint notes imply, but that’s the funny part; it tells you only that he was out West. It doesn’t even pin down a particular state. I mean, if he had held up one bank, all the bands would be the same. And if he’d hit an armored car, the bands might be different, but they still wouldn’t be from banks thousands of miles apart. It’s a little hard to make sense of it.”

“Unless he robbed a series of banks, like you said, or maybe got cash as payment for something.”

“Yeah-like drugs or racketeering.”

I remained silent, not wanting to encourage too much speculation in someone outside the department. But I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t hit on something. In our naïveté, we’d really focused on Fuller only as a bank robber.

Schimke stood up suddenly, struck by something in the file. “I’ll be damned; I missed this before.” He punched the columns of figures with his fingertip for emphasis. “This might nail down the exact date all this money was collected. Look-while all the older notes are 1963 issues or earlier, only the mint ones are ’69s…”

“Implying that they were taken out of the bank that year.”

“Right. I mean, sometimes you can get mint bills from a smaller, low-volume bank up to a year or so after issue, but everyone of these is crisp, no matter which bank they came from.”

“What percentage of the total is mint in that list?”

He was positively gleeful by now. “That’s the whole point; it’s very high, like thirty percent or so. That would never happen unless the Fed had just released a new printing to be distributed throughout the system. And the fact that the mint samples come from several banks in different states clinches it. I can’t tell you what happened, but it was definitely in 1969.”

I thanked Richard Schimke profusely, vowed him to silence concerning our conversation, and encouraged him to hang tough on his office decor.

When I returned to the station, Harriet was looking pleased with herself. “One down, one to go. The state police dropped off their metal detector ten minutes ago, and the rental place said theirs would be available in an hour, guaranteed. I’ve already told most of the squad to be here by then. Ron, of course, won’t be available.”

I thanked her, then turned, to find J. P. Tyler standing by my office door, a thick file in his hand. “What’s up?”

He handed me the file. “It’s a preliminary report on our forensics search. It doesn’t have any of the state crime lab results yet, but it lists what we found and where we found it. The photographs are arranged from start of search to end, and they’re indexed to the report and the map of the place. I’m afraid you won’t find much.”

I took the file to my desk and opened it before me. I didn’t doubt Tyler’s opinion. I’d been through Fuller’s place twice by now and was pretty sure it was almost as bare as a clean motel room. Nevertheless, I always valued the search report, since it organized a place according to its tiniest details, ignoring the distracting environmental influences that could make your eye skim over a small but important item.

So it was with a cautious curiosity that I pored over the results of yesterday’s hours of crawling with tweezers, sticky tape, and a magnifying glass, seeing for the first time all of our separate findings organized in a logical manner.

I quickly understood what Tyler had meant. Even microscopically, Fuller’s place had been pretty sterile. Hair, dirt, and fingerprint samples were all consistent with a house that had sheltered only one person for a long time, and a lot of intruders just recently. Tyler had even gone the extra yard by determining the hair colors of the search team, the ambulance crew, and Fred Coyner, so that any stray samples could be properly accounted for.

Nothing stood out until I got to the wood stove.

Tyler had been the one nearest the stove. I remembered him opening it, checking its contents with a flashlight, and scribbling in his notebook. Now, in the report’s terse language, I read: “L-18: cast-iron wood-fired heating stove, found with door slightly open. Contents: small quantity cold wood ash, one partially burned wooden kitchen match.”

I began flipping through both the photographs and the rest of the report, looking for any mention of either a candle or a kerosene lamp. I found both eventually, but as stored items, far from the stove, and obviously not in current use.

I sat back and thought for a moment. I’d been brought up with a wood stove heating the home; in fact, once I was old enough, it had been my job to light it every morning before the rest of the family got up. Assembling the wood in the firebox, the kindling at the bottom, piled around a heart of tightly crumpled newspaper, had become a habit so inbred I got so I could do it while still half asleep. It had become totally automatic, including throwing the spent match onto the burgeoning flame. Never had I opened a stove in the morning to find a half-burned match waiting for me. It would have been as incongruous as a rose blooming in February.

I hit the intercom button on my phone and dialed Tyler’s extension. “Do you remember looking into Fuller’s wood stove?”

“Sure.”

“All you saw was cold wood ash and the match; no burned paper or anything else unusual?”

J.P. paused at the other end, never one to dismiss such a question without thought. “There was nothing obvious, Joe, but that’s not to say something couldn’t have been burned and then destroyed to blend into the regular ash.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

I pawed over the assorted papers on my desk and finally came up with the report from the medical examiner’s office. I flipped it open and went over the section detailing the body’s appearance. There was nothing unusual concerning Fuller’s hands or fingernails, except a small cut on his forefinger-probably the result of a blood draw at the hospital-and a note that they had obviously been exposed to a lifetime of manual labor and exposure to the soil. There was a footnote that the hospital had cleaned up the patient prior to his death.

I called Rescue, Inc. and asked to talk to John Breen, the paramedic who had initially treated Abraham Fuller. “This is Joe Gunther, from the PD. Do you remember anything unusual about Fuller’s hands when you picked him up?”

“His hands?” There was a pause. “What do you mean ‘unusual’?”

I didn’t want to plant any ideas in his head. “You tell me.”

Again he hesitated. “Well, they were workingman’s hands. Let’s see… Yeah, there was one thing. His right hand was sooty-the palm had ash stains all over it. And his fingertip was cut-pricked, actually. It wasn’t bleeding much, though. It stopped before I could do anything about it.”

So much for blood draws, not that any alternatives leapt to mind. “Did you notice the soot before or after he sent you guys outside for that five minutes?”

“After. He wouldn’t let us near him before then.”

I was a little disappointed at that. “How about an odor after you went back in?”

Breen chuckled. “There was an odor all right. He was lying in the middle of it.”

“No-I mean something else, something new.”

“No, sorry. It smelled pretty raw in there. If there’d been another odor, I doubt we would have smelled it, anyhow.”

“Okay. Thanks a lot.”

I tried to picture what must have happened: Fuller, after deciding to go on the ambulance, sends the crew outside, drags himself to where he’s hidden the money, pulls out his emergencies-only red bag, along with some sort of document. He then drags himself back to the stove, near where he was lying to begin with, and burns the document with a match he tosses into the stove. Finally, after the document has been destroyed, he crumples the ashes up in his right hand so they’ll mingle with the wood ashes in the stove, and then he crawls back to the rug near the bookcase.

I considered that Coyner, or whoever had stolen the chart, might also have burned something in the stove, maybe even the chart itself, minus the frame and glass. But the first scenario made more sense, especially with Fuller’s stained right hand.

It meant that Fuller had taken the precaution of burning the paper, either because he didn’t want someone to find it while he was recuperating in the hospital or because he suspected he wasn’t going to survive. Initially, after all, he had told Breen and his partner to let him die in peace.

If he hadn’t thought he was going to return, burning something self-incriminating wouldn’t make much sense. Unless the document-whatever it was-incriminated someone else.

After all, why live in a house for twenty years, eliminating everything that might reveal your past, and yet keep a self-incriminating document for posterity? Whatever it was he’d burned had to have pointed the finger at someone else, someone who posed a threat to him personally and yet whose secret he’d wanted to die with him if necessary.

Had that been the same person who had stolen the chart?

I began studying Tyler’s photographs one by one, focusing on every detail, hunting for anything odd. What burned in my mind now was the most banal of revelations: The person who had stolen the chart had to have known it was there to begin with. Did he, therefore, also know about the incriminating document? And if he did, then why wasn’t the place torn apart in a desperate search?

I pulled open the file containing my own photographs, the ones including both the chart and the unfocused shadow of someone lurking outside the window. I placed my shots of the building’s interior next to Tyler’s and compared them, looking for any discrepancies. The chart had vanished in the time between the taking of both sets of photographs; maybe something else had disappeared, too-something that had told the thief his secret was secure and that he had no need to conduct a frantic search.

Tyler had also taken a shot of the bookcase, straight-on, as I had. I laid them side by side and looked from one to the other, back and forth, my eyes aching with the concentration. What finally froze me wasn’t a single item but rather the absence of one; there was a small gap on the bottom shelf, near the stove, in Tyler’s picture. I squinted at my own picture, where the same gap was filled with the spine of a paperback book, the title of which had been circled with a broad band, like a felt-tip pen.

I sat back, curiously satisfied. The photos were in color, but the mark around the book’s title merely appeared brown. I was convinced, however, that had the picture been taken earlier, just after Fuller’s departure on the ambulance, the circle would have been as red as the blood from his pricked fingertip.

I stared at the now-missing book, smiling at its intended pun and admiring the mind of the man who had brought it to my attention, and to that of the chart thief. It was a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.