If the lieutenant had said “armed robbery” now, I might have been worried. For armed robbery, especially the bank variety, was something I did know about. I’d robbed eighteen branch banks in the last couple of years without a hand being laid on me or even a breath of suspicion drifting in my direction.
I was proud of my success. After all, bank robbery is a demanding line of work. It takes careful planning, courage, intelligence and a fine sense of timing—in addition to a system, of course. For bank work, you need a system, one that takes a million little things into account but stays simple and uncomplicated just the same. That isn’t easy; not when you have to think about armed guards, silent alarms, concealed cameras, patrolling police, hysterical tellers, and a whole potful of unpredictable factors like that; not to mention the big decisions, like which teller in the target bank will be easiest to intimidate; which bank to knock over at what time of what day; and even—this may strike you as strange—how big a score you want to make.
Yes, that’s important. At least, it is in my system, I confine myself to a relatively modest take on each job. Just the contents of a single teller’s cash drawer, that’s all, no more, no less. It’s quick, it’s clean, it’s unimportant to the banks and their insurance companies. A few hundred bucks stolen? A couple of thousand even? Forget it, Charlie. It’s peanuts. Just be damn sure you lock up the vault tonight where the big stuff’s kept!
See what I mean? You can toss a lot of little pebbles into a pool without stirring up much fuss, but heave in one two-ton boulder with a big splash and all hell breaks loose.
My system, what the cops call an MO, was good, I admit it. Our local newspapers and broadcasters had been calling me The Whispering Bandit for two years now, and nagging the police to do something about catching me, so far without result because I stuck to throwing those little pebbles, the frequent small hauls. They suited me fine. Who needs a fortune? Not me. A few hundred a month besides my honest pay kept me comfortably supplied with all the martinis and Sally Ann’s my heart desired.
So you can see why Lieutenant Randall’s mention of counterfeiting relieved me. You can understand, too, why I was calm and unworried when I faced him across the battered desk, in his dingy office at headquarters. Since my conscience was clear, I leaned back in my wooden chair and waited for him to open the ball.
He offered me a cigarette. When I refused, he lit one himself and leaned down beside his desk to drop the paper match into his wastebasket. Then he said, “It’s very good of you to cooperate like this, Mr. Carmichael. Believe me, I appreciate it.”
I shrugged. “Am I cooperating, or am I under arrest? Are you charging me with anything, Lieutenant?”
He seemed genuinely shocked. “Under arrest? Charged with anything? You’ve misunderstood me, I’m afraid.”
“You said you wanted to talk to me about counterfeiting, didn’t you?”
“Sure.” He puffed smoke. “And so I do.” He coughed. “I don’t inhale,” he informed me virtuously. “About this counterfeiting thing, I got a call from Tasso’s Tavern this evening. They reported that a counterfeit bill had been passed at their bar so I naturally took a run out there to check into it. Sure enough, somebody had laid a phony bill on Tasso’s bartender.”
“That’s tough on Tasso,” I said, “but what’s it got to do with me?” I was getting fed up with this foolishness.
“You were there,” he said reasonably, “weren’t you? Sitting at the bar with your young lady?”
“You know I was. Is that any excuse for making me waste my evening like this?”
“I’m not ‘making’ you waste your evening.” The lieutenant’s voice was hurt. “I asked you—politely—if you’d mind coming downtown for a talk, and you agreed quite readily. Is that coercion? Or is it voluntary cooperation?”
“All right, it’s cooperation—but a damn waste of time all the same.”
“I’m glad that’s settled,” said Randall.
“Nuts.” I blustered a little. “Do me a favor, will you? As long as I’m here, pump me dry quick and get it over because this is the last cooperation you’ll ever get from me, and you better believe it. Don’t you know that you can’t push honest citizens around as though we were criminals?”
Randall grinned. “I’ve got news for you, Mr. Carmichael. We can push honest citizens around as much as we like. It’s the criminals we have to treat with the utmost gentleness and respect. If you don’t believe me, ask the Supreme Court.” He ground out his cigarette in a stained tray on his desk, then he lifted his eyes to me. “The bartender at Tasso’s Tavern,” he said, “pointed you out to me as the customer who passed the counterfeit bill.”
That really surprised me. It disturbed me some, too, and I thought back to my interrupted session at Tasso’s bar with Sally Ann. I remembered paying for our drinks with a used fifty—President Grant’s picture on the bill had been wrinkled and dirty—and the bill could have come into my possession in only one way. To Randall I said incredulously, “Me?”
He nodded. “The barman said it was the only fifty buck bill he’s handled this week.”
I know now that I should have owned to the fifty; told Randall I won it in a floating crap game or at the racetrack or some place equally untraceable. Instead, I made a bad mistake. I put on an air of amused relief and said, “A fifty! Then the bartender has to be dead wrong about who gave it to him. I haven’t even seen a fifty buck bill for ten years, let alone spent one, Lieutenant!” I called on the truth to convince him. “I’m a short-order cook in MacDougal’s all-night restaurant, working the midnight-to-eight shift. You know many short-order cooks with fifty buck bills to throw around?”
“No,” Randall murmured, “can’t say I do. The barkeep was pretty sure he remembered you giving it to him though.”
“He couldn’t have remembered if his own grandmother gave it to him, not in Tasso’s tonight. The joint was really jumping. You see it yourself. They were lined up three deep at the bar. The bartender was too busy to remember anything.”
Randall gave a reluctant shrug. “Could be,” he said. “Anyway, that’s why I asked you to come down for a talk.”
I said, “Sure, Lieutenant. No hard feelings, now that you’ve explained. If you want to know for the record, I paid for our four drinks, Sally Ann’s and mine, with a five buck bill and gave the barkeep half the change for a tip.” I said this boldly; it would be the bartender’s word against mine. Leave Sally Ann out of it. When she was drinking, she never noticed anything except her own reflection in the backbar mirror.
Randall dropped his eyelids over his cat eyes and sighed. I think it was the first time I’d seen him blink. His face looked entirely different with those yellow eyes covered. “Well, then,” he said, “if you didn’t pass the fifty, maybe you can still give me a little help, Mr. Carmichael.”
“I’ll try.”
“Give me the names of anybody else you knew at the bar in Tasso’s tonight. Somebody passed that fake fifty and I’ve got to find out who it was. If you can give me a couple of names to start on… He paused hopefully.
I shook my head. “Only one I knew was that girl Sally Ann, and she didn’t even tell me her last name. You know how it is. Go into a bar for a drink and ask a babe to have one with you, just for company? Maybe the bartender can help you.”
Randall gave another sigh. “I hope so.”
I stood up. “All right if I blow now?”
He waved a hand. “Sure. But I’ll drive you back. It’s the least I can do.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be free to leave in about five minutes, if you want to wait.”
I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to get away from Randall’s yellow eyes and his false politeness just as soon as I could; and I certainly didn’t want to go back to Tasso’s Tavern. I said, “Never mind, thanks. I’ll catch a cab.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. Then, on a different note, “I’m really counting on that particular fifty buck bill, Mr. Carmichael, do you know it?”
>
“Counting on it?” I said. “For what?”
“To lead me to The Whispering Bandit,” Randall said.
I stiffened all over. For a second I was afraid to turn my head for fear it would creak. “The Whispering Bandit? You mean the bank robber the papers keep talking about?” The words were hard to get out.
“That’s the one,” Randall said. “A two-bit thief who’s got crazy-lucky eighteen times in a row.”
I eased myself back into my chair, interest and animation in my face. With not a trace of his insult to me and my system showing, I asked casually, “How could a counterfeit fifty dollar bill lead you to a bank robber, Lieutenant? That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Oh, it does in a way, considering the off-beat scheme we’re trying right now…out of desperation, you might say.” He sucked his lips, fixed his eyes on a cobwebbed corner of the ceiling. I waited for him to go on, trying not to look anxious.
Finally he said, “It’s a childish scheme. Really childish. It probably won’t work at all. How could it? In the first place it was dreamed up by an amateur, not even a cop. A nosey reader sent the idea in a letter to the president of the last bank The Whispering Bandit robbed.”
I kept quiet, not doing much breathing.
“A nutty idea,” Randall went on, “but I was willing to try anything to get the newspapers off my back.” He shot an uncertain look at me. “As long as you’ve been inconvenienced by it, Mr. Carmichael, I guess maybe you’re entitled to hear what the deal is—if you’re interested.”
“I’m interested,” I said. “Everybody in town’s interested in The Whispering Bandit.”
“Don’t I know it! Well, the thing is, that fake fifty dollar bill at Tasso’s is a kind of a trap.”
I felt cold on the back of my neck. I turned to see if the office door behind me was open. It wasn’t.
“A trap?” I repeated.
He nodded. “You’ve got to understand that we know the MO of The Whispering Bandit pretty good by this time.”
“What’s an MO?” I thought I ought to ask.
“Method of operation. Like The Whispering Bandit always speaks in a whisper to disguise his voice during holdups, for instance. Always works alone. Changes his appearance for every job. Takes only one drawer of cash at each heist. Makes his raids during the noon hour at small isolated branch banks in a geographical suburban pattern that’s pretty well defined now, after eighteen robberies. Stuff like that, that’s part of his MO. Do you follow me?”
“Yes, but not about the counterfeit fifty.”
“I’m coming to that. Once we know the regular MO of The Whispering Bandit, we can kind of figure ahead of him a little, can’t we? Take a rough guess at what banks he’ll be hitting next and, even more important, what teller in any bank he’s likely to point his Woodsman target pistol at, and ask for the money in her cash drawer.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No, I’m not. It’s all part of his pattern. It’s always a girl teller that he holds up, never a man; and it’s always the prettiest girl teller in the bank.”
I stared at him. He was telling me things about my system that I didn’t even know myself. “How come the prettiest teller?” I asked, fascinated.
Randall laughed shortly. “The guy’s probably a psycho, gets his jollies from scaring pretty girls with a gun. How do I know? Anyway, that was the basis of our counterfeit money trap for him.”
“The pretty teller bit?”
“That, and the list of branch banks we figured he might hit next. See, we just picked out the prettiest teller in each of those possible branch banks; or the teller, rather, that The Whispering Bandit would think the prettiest, judging from his past selections. Then we fixed up a little bundle of money for her to keep in her cash drawer at all times, separate from her regular cash. It was just a few genuine tens and twenties, with two counterfeit fifties we borrowed from the Treasury boys mixed in. Used money, understand; not banded, just loose in the drawer, but never to be touched unless The Whispering Bandit showed up. Too, we fixed it with every one of those girl tellers that if The Whispering Bandit showed up at her window some noontime, she was to give him all the money in her cash drawer immediately and without arguing—especially the stack that had the two fake fifties in it. You begin to see the plot, Mr. Carmichael?”
“Sure,” I said out of a dry throat. “Then I suppose you passed the word that counterfeit fifty dollar bills were showing up around town, and warned stores and bars and places to watch out for them. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well.” I managed a small grin. “So that’s why Tasso’s bartender called you so quick tonight.”
“Yep. That fifty he took in rang all the bells. I thought we had The Whispering Bandit at last, because there were two fake fifties in the loot he lifted two weeks ago from the South Side branch of the Second National and this was one of them. No doubt about it.”
I felt sick. Two fake fifties; then the other one was still under the mattress in my room at the fleabag hotel where I lived. I’ve got to get out of here, I thought in a panic, I’ve got to get home quick, I’ve got to burn that damned bill, I’ve got to leave town…
Randall’s telephone rang. He picked it up and listened to a tinny voice on the other end, nodding his head from time to time. When he hung up, he said, “That call concerned you, Mr. Carmichael.”
“Me?” I said.
“Couple of my boys have been visiting your room,” the lieutenant’s tone was almost apologetic, “and I’m afraid Tasso’s bartender was right about who passed the fifty, Mr. Carmichael.”
Words of doom! Casually said, but doomsters all the same. I flipped. My voice went up three notches. “Visiting my room!” I yelled.
Randall held up a hand placatingly. “All in order,” he said. “They had a proper warrant for the search. In fact, we’ve had the warrant ready for a month—all except for filling in your name.” He coughed.
“Tasso’s bartender came up with that when he called to report the fake fifty. He knew your name, it seems, because somebody called you on the bar telephone at Tasso’s once, and when the bartender asked if Andrew Carmichael was in the house, you took the call. Remember that?”
All too well. The cold feeling on the back of my neck was spreading downward between my shoulder blades. I tried to think.
Randall didn’t give me much chance. He went right on. “Once we had your name, it didn’t take us five minutes to find out where you lived, fill in the blank warrant, and start my boys over to your hotel. Then I came out to Tasso’s.”
“You said I wasn’t under arrest!” I sounded shrill, even to myself. “You said I wasn’t charged with anything.”
“You weren’t. Not then, but you are now.”
I did the best I could. “You got me here under false pretenses, Lieutenant. You’ve questioned me without my lawyer being present or informing me of my rights. You’ve deprived me of my constitutional—”
Randall closed his eyes again. “I did nothing of the sort.”
“You did. You’ve questioned me. You’ve accused me, at least by implication, of being The Whispering Bandit. You’ve tried to trick me into confessing.”
“Oh, no.” He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a compact tape recorder. “I think this tape will confirm that most of the questioning was done by you, and most of the confessing, if any, done by me, when I told you about our little trap for The Whispering Bandit.”
When had he switched on that tape recorder, the smooth devil? When he reached to discard his first burnt match in the wastebasket?
I gave it another try. “You were deliberately holding me here while your men searched my room.”
“That I admit,” he said, bland as cream. “And don’t you want to know what they found there?” I didn’t answer, so he went on, “I’ll tell you. Item: one counterfeit fifty dollar bill stashed with genuine currency under the mattress and with a serial number that identifies it
as one of the two false fifties stolen two weeks ago from the South Side branch of the Second National Bank. Item: three pairs of contact lenses, various colors. Item: three hair pieces, three sets of false eyebrows, two sets of false mustaches and beards, matching colors. Item: one Colt Woodsman revolver. Item: a complete file of local newspapers detailing exploits of The Whispering Bandit, going back more than two years.” He looked at me sadly, and clicked his tongue. “Shall I go on, Mr. Carmichael?”
Miserably I shook my head.
“Now you get your lawyer,” Randall said. “Now we charge you with multiple armed robbery offenses. Now the Supreme Court steps in to assure you tender loving care. Because now, Mr. Carmichael, you’re sure as hell going to spend a little time in the sneezer as The Whispering Bandit!”
I didn’t doubt it. I said, “Very smart, Lieutenant. Very clever. Quite a gag you’ve pulled on me, I’ll admit.”
“It’s not my gag. I told you that.” He opened the middle drawer of his desk, making a show of it. “I’ve got the original letter here that suggested the idea.”
He pulled out a single sheet of paper. “Here it is. Would you care to see it?”
He held it out to me. Automatically, I took it and read the few lines scrawled on it in pencil:
Dere Mr. Presidant of the bank:
I know a way to fool The Whispring Bandit. When he holds up your bank, you could give him play money instead of reel money. Thank you.
Richard Stevenson, Age 9
I tossed the letter back on Randall’s desk. He looked at me and his expression was hard to read. “The bank president started an account at his bank for young Richard Stevenson in the amount of five dollars,” he told me. “Wasn’t that nice?”
“Great,” I said. Then I began to laugh.
Do you blame me for not liking kids?
The Library Fuzz Page 29