The One Dollar Rip-Off

by Ralph Dennis

  When I told him my interest in Tiflon, he’d said I was in luck. He was handling a legal matter for a retired army captain named Morris who’d been working at the Citizens and Farmers Bank at the time of the rip-off. He’d call Morris and have him stand by. Morris owed him a favor anyway.

  Van’s directions got us to his office without much trouble. Find the front of the courthouse. Drive around the right side of the courthouse, go one half block, and watch for a street that intersected. That was Law Range.

  It was a narrow street, still paved with brick. Long flat two-story buildings flanked the street. Lawyers’ signs, about a dozen of them, wagged about in a stiff wind. Van Green’s sign was the newest, the paint not weathered or chipped yet.

  Up a dark staircase. The wooden steps were grooved and dished by God knows how many boots and shoes. There were two rooms to the office suite. The front room and its desk for a receptionist were empty. The door to the inner office was cracked an inch or two. As soon as we reached the top of the stairs Van swung that door wide open and whooped and made a run for me.

  That was all right. He’d always been impulsive. I’d known him since he’d been working about five jobs and going to John Marshall Law School. That’s the little yellow building on Forrest Avenue. It wasn’t sanctioned by any bar association. There was, however, a Georgia law that went back to the times when a young lawyer read the law with an older lawyer. It didn’t matter where you got your knowledge as long as you passed the bar examination. After that, you were as much a lawyer as anybody who went to the University of Georgia or one of the fancy out-of-state schools.

  I caught Van by the shoulders so he couldn’t hug me. I patted him on the back and turned him and did the introductions. He’d met Hump a time or two before. He shook Bill’s hand and waved us into the inner office. It was dank and a little chilled. A portable electric heater guttered away in one corner.

  Van has an odd face. It takes time to get used to it. I think it must have been some kind of deformity from birth: he doesn’t seem to have cheekbones. Instead they’re concave. And his nose is huge and tipped back so that you always feel you’re staring into nostril openings about the size of quarters.

  The inner office smelled of dust. Plastic wrappings on the desk held the bread crust from his lunch sandwich. A large bottle of grape soda made a damp circle on the new blotter.

  Van leaned on the desk and pulled the telephone toward him. “You still want to talk to Captain Morris?”

  I said I did.

  While he made the call, I leaned close to Hump and Bill. “Hungry?”

  “I could eat,” Hump said.

  “You and Bill have something and bring me back a sandwich and something to drink.”

  Van finished his call. “Morris’ll be here in half an hour.”

  “A cafe around here?”

  “Frank’s, on the street behind the courthouse.”

  “They sell beer?”

  Van nodded. I watched Bill out of the corner of my eye. He’d been getting steadier and steadier as the morning went on. Lunch might be the test. That one beer with his meal would have to last him until supper.

  I heard them go down the stairs. The downstairs door closed behind them. I placed a chair at the side of the desk and sat down. “What happened at the Citizens and Farmers Bank?”

  “Captain Morris knows more about it than I do.”

  “For starters I’ll settle for the little you know.”

  “It’s not much,” he said.

  “Come on, Van. This is a small town. It took more than two weeks to run this swindle. You’d hear most of it.”

  “Tidbits.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  He settled into his chair behind the desk. “It started about three weeks ago. Two men come to town in a black 1975 Continental and they take the best suite at the Planters Hotel. It’s all first-class, the clothes and the luggage. The next morning, early, they’re out looking for office space. They’re picky, hard to please. A whole morning and nothing they see interests them. After lunch at the hotel, they stop by the bank. They have a long talk with the president of the bank, J. B. Southern. And they open an account in the name of Apex Investments.”

  “Not very original.”

  “Maybe they didn’t plan to be. Anyway, they deposit a check drawn on the Temple Construction Company in Boston. That check is in the amount of about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s a big deposit for this town and I guess you could say the red carpet, such as it is, was rolled out for them. Later that day, after seeing some more real estate they settle for an office suite over on H Street. It’s an old building and there’s the question of knocking out a wall or two to make the rooms big enough. The owner, Jess Carter, agrees to that and he agrees to have the outside of the building sandblasted. They sign a one-year lease and Carter gets a check written on an Atlanta bank for one month’s rent and a deposit. Apex Investments allows as how they’re going to do their own remodeling on the inside of the suite. Sure enough, the next day they show up at Liz Hoffman’s. Liz is the only person in town calls herself an interior decorator.” Van lit a cigarette and blew a puff at me. “Liz is also one fine piece of ass. I think she learned that at some art school in New York. Anyway, she’s hired to do some preliminary designs. And after they leave her, there’s a visit to Arch Ford, who sells office furniture. What they want is all top-drawer. They do some looking about in books and they place an order with Arch. Desks and chairs and a conference table that seats ten and matching chairs for that. Arch ain’t talking about it now, but I heard the order ran to somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand. That’s about half a year’s income for Arch and he promises to get that order off right away and he promises delivery in two to three weeks.”

  “Nice people,” I said. “I can see what they were doing for the economy.”

  “Oh, lord, how they shook it up. And later that same day they stopped by the bank and deposited another check. This one is for two hundred thousand or so.”

  “Another Temple Construction Company check?”

  “What else? They stay another night at the hotel and they tell the manager they want to keep the suite while they’re out of town for three or four days. They’d like to leave some things there. Of course that’s fine with the manager. He’s been hearing tales about some high spending. And that noon, just before they leave town, they deposit another check. Fifty-five thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a bit more than four hundred thousand,” I said.

  “And that’s about all I know. The next ten or twelve days, they’re in and out of town. They’re still picky. Liz Hoffman’s design is rejected but they give her a small retainer and she goes back to the drawing board. All that work she’s doing has about five or six men thinking about sleeping with their wives again. And Jess Carter has a crew of carpenters knocking out walls and he brings a sandblasting crew in all the way from Atlanta. Only the best is good enough for him now. The town’s all excited. It’s about to become a boom town. And then, before anybody realizes what happened, it’s over. The two men leave town tor what is supposed to be another two- or three-day trip and they never come back.”

  “With a suitcase of money?”

  “They did carry at least one suitcase with them,” Van said. He stubbed out his cigarette. “And now the blight’s hit the town. That big shipment of furniture arrived the other day and Arch don’t know what to do with it. Jess Carter’s got a building with a new-looking outside and some walls knocked out inside and he’s expecting a big bill from that sandblasting company in Atlanta. Liz Hoffman finished her new design. She says it’s the best thing she ever did, only she don’t know where to send it. The only good thing I can report is that Liz ain’t wearing underwear anymore.”

  “You see the two men?”

  “A time or two just in passing.”

  “Give me a description.”

  Van pushed back his chair and stood up. He fiddled with the cord to th
e blinds behind the desk. They opened and showed a gray fall day. “The older one gave his name as Edmund Frost. He was about fifty. Weighed about a hundred and ninety, about five-ten. Silver-gray hair. A good tan. Round pudgy face like a baby. Wore a big diamond pinkie ring. He gave out he was president of the company.”

  “The other one?”

  “The younger one said his name was Richard Hart. Six-one or so. Lean. Dark hair. Long jagged face. Wore a bushy mustache. He was supposed to be treasurer.”

  “Age?”

  “Late thirties. Maybe forty at the most.”

  “Wear glasses?”

  “Hart? No.”

  I brought the photo of Eric Pender from my jacket pocket. He was the man who’d worked in Frank Temple’s main office in the accounting department. The one who’d disappeared while he was supposed to be at the deathbed of an aunt in Denver. I passed the photo to Van. He held it in the light from the window.

  “I can’t be sure.” He gave it another long look. “Without the glasses and with a mustache added on it might be.”

  I saw that he’d run down. He seemed to be waiting for Captain Morris. I led the talk off to other things. The Atlanta he’d known when he was there, what his prospects were in Tiflon.

  “It takes time for a town to accept an outsider,” he said.

  “Unless he carries big checks,” I said.

  “That would help,” he said. There was a beat. “Friendship aside, I’ll be putting in a bill to you, Jim.”

  I nodded. “And “I’ll pay it.” And I’d find a way to pass that expense on to Frank Temple.

  Even without the background information about Morris, I’d have guessed that he was a retired or passed-over army officer. It was partly the way he carried himself. The ramrod back, the way he moved his arms, the almost strut and march that was his walk. His shoes were light brown chukka boots and they seemed to have a spit shine. The tan twill trousers might have once been part of his uniform. Or perhaps he preferred that cloth and cut after his military service.

  It was a weathered face with a ruddy cast to it. His sandy red hair had been carefully combed and arranged to mask a bald spot. Square blocky hands with cleaned and buffed nails rested on his knees. As he talked, listening to him, I saw beyond the stiffness and the military carriage. There was something soft and defeated about him, a pent-up wronged sense of himself.

  Hump and Bill sat behind me. They’d placed chairs near the door that led to the outer office. After lunch and the beer, I had the feeling that Bill was about to fall asleep.

  Van started Captain Morris off. The first few minutes he seemed to be walking in Van’s tracks, telling me what I’d already heard. Hump and Bill hadn’t heard it so I didn’t try to push him forward. I let him go at his own pace.

  “I didn’t like it,” Morris said. “There was something odd about it. It just didn’t make sense.”

  “Why did you feel that?” It was my question. After Van had primed the captain’s pump he’d backed away and left it to me.

  “It was the way Southern handled it.”

  I looked at Van. He said, “J. B. Southern, president of the bank.”

  I nodded. “How was that?”

  “Like anything they wanted they could have.”

  “It’s what banks promise on TV,” I said.

  “But we know better, don’t we? In seven days, they deposited five checks that amounted to something in excess of six hundred and forty thousand dollars.”

  That was close to Frank Temple’s estimate. “What bothered you?”

  “How the withdrawals were handled.”

  “You were a teller?”

  “I was head teller,” Morris said. “As soon as the first check cleared, Mr. Hart gave Mr. Southern notice that he’d be drawing a hundred and fifty thousand out the next day. He wanted it in twenties.”

  “And you handled it.”

  “Mr. Southern assigned me to put the money together.”

  “But you didn’t like it?”

  “It didn’t seem like good banking procedure. That much money in cash, it seemed strange. But what really bothered me was the instruction Mr. Southern gave me that I wasn’t to fill out the federal form.”

  “Which form is that?”

  “It’s a regulation. It used to be ten thousand but now it’s five thousand.”

  “What?”

  “It concerns cash withdrawals. A withdrawal that large would normally be telephoned to the FBI in a matter of minutes. It’s their way of keeping an eye out for kidnappings. But there’s a form that has to be filled out. The government likes to keep tabs on any-one dealing in large cash amounts.”

  “What did Southern say?”

  “He told me to forget the form. I did.”

  “And then?”

  “The next day they drew out two hundred thousand dollars. Mr. Southern put that together himself. He didn’t bother to ask me.”

  “Tell them about the armored car,” Van said.

  “Two days later,” Morris said, “there was supposed to be another withdrawal. It turned out we didn’t have enough cash reserve on hand to handle it. Mr. Southern made a call to Atlanta and an armored car brought in some large amount in twenties. I wasn’t involved so I’m not sure how much it was. It must have been at least a hundred thousand.”

  “Tell them about the time you were short a few twenties,” Van said.

  “Once Mr. Southern had made up the package but he was short five twenties. He went around to the tellers and borrowed twenties from them to make up the proper amount.”

  I got a photo of Eric Pender from my pocket. I didn’t show it to him. That would be later. “I understand you’re no longer with the bank.”

  “That’s true. The day after he borrowed the twenties from the tellers he fired me.”

  “He give a reason?”

  “He said my work wasn’t up to the bank’s standards. I think it was because I wouldn’t lend him any twenties. He asked me and I didn’t even bother to look in my wallet.”

  Van leaned forward and placed his elbows on the desk. “Captain Morris is my client. We have a large damage suit against the bank. I’d rather we didn’t talk about that aspect of the matter.”

  “All right.” I opened my hand and flipped the photo of Eric Pender. Face up now, I passed it to Captain Morris. He cupped it in his right hand and studied it. When he passed it back to me after a minute or so his head was shaking. “It could be Hart. But I can’t be sure. It could be if he’d changed to contacts and if the mustache was false. You know, nobody believes me but I’d swear his mustache wasn’t real. One day, that first time they made the withdrawal, I looked at Hart and one whole side of the mustache had come unstuck. Maybe he saw the way I stared at him. He reached up and patted it back into place.”

  “Tell me about the other man,” I said.

  “Frost,” Van said.

  “I don’t know exactly what you want to know. He did most of the talking. It was a soft, cultured voice. One with a lot of southern accent in it but more educated. It was for sure that he was running the show. One look at Hart and Hart would jump.”

  I repeated the description that Van had given me. Fifty, five-ten or eleven. One-ninety, tanned. Gray hair and a diamond pinkie ring. “Anything else you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Scars, anything like that?”

  “Not that I remember.” He hesitated. “Yes, there was one thing I didn’t even tell the police. I just remembered it. I only saw it once. It was the afternoon they opened the account. I’d brought some papers to Mr. Southern’s desk. When I backed away, I looked down at the back of Edmund Frost’s hand.” Morris closed his eyes. I saw him spread both hands on his knees. “It was on his right hand.” He opened his eyes and blinked. “It must have been a birthmark. Two small red dots that looked like a snakebite.”

  I heard a strangled cough behind me. I turned and saw that Bill Heffner was wide awake, leaning forward. At first, I thought he might be havin
g some kind of attack like DT’s. I met his eyes and winked.

  There wasn’t much more Morris could tell us. Nobody’d bothered to get the tag numbers from the black Continental. The numbers they’d put down on the hotel registration had been scrambled. It was close but no cigar when the police started checking that out. Not that it really meant much. Anyone smart enough to pull this swindle wouldn’t be caught through tag numbers on a car they’d used as part of the window dressings.

  The bitterness, the anger had to wear down. I listened to Morris a bit more and I gave him my best grave sympathetic look. It was the kind of coin he wanted. It satisfied him, it filled him out, and when payment was complete Van walked him down the stairs and out to his car.

  As soon as they left the office, Bill jumped to his feet and did a few seconds of buck-and-wing. I must have looked at him as though he’d gone crazy. He stopped and laughed. He quick-stepped past Hump, whose face must have mirrored mine. He closed the door that led to the outer office. It was done with a stage flourish. He whirled and placed his back against the door. “I guess you’re all wondering why I’ve asked you here.”

  “What the hell, Bill?” That from Hump.

  “It’s simple. I think I’m going to earn my pay.”

  “What does that mean?” I got up and pushed the chair against the desk.

  “Ben Pride.”

  “Huh?”

  Bill stretched out his right arm, the hand out, palm down. He tapped the back of the hand. “The deuce mark. I’ve spent all day trying to think who might be good enough to run this kind of scam and get away with it. Running it ain’t that much. Getting away with it is. All that planning, all the details, the whole design. Might be ten men could do it and that deuce mark culled them for me. The man called himself Edmund Frost, that was Ben Pride.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A legend,” Bill said. “The king of them all. The bench mark you measure yourself against.” A cat-eating grin. “That is, if you’re in my business.”