“I’m on a diet,” Sully explained, “so I don’t go to dinners. And I don’t know how to dance.”
He pushed the door to the men’s room open and stood for a moment transfixed. Gibby shoved him out of the way and dove in past him. I was right at Gibby’s heels, but that time our hurry did us no good. Albert Gleason was there. He was on the floor and around his neck he had one of those black canvas straps. His hard white collar had not been enough to save him as Rose Salvaggi’s gold hoop had saved her. Albert Gleason was dead. When we touched the young man’s body, it had already gone cold.
CHAPTER NINE
FOR A BIT there it was Nicholas Cooper Lansing who took command. He did nothing that wasn’t eminently sensible, and I saw no reason to oppose him. He sent for the guards who had evicted Gert Cullinan’s violent boy friend. He suggested that we put out a call to have that fire-eating lad picked up. He questioned Sully on his encounter with the young man. He asked him about when he had last seen Albert Gleason alive. He was efficient and he was thorough.
It seemed to me that it was well that Lansing did prove so competent to pick up the ball and carry it. I shouldn’t have cared at that moment for the job of coping with Sully singlehanded. The chief of Branch Banking went into a dither. The cigar dropped from his mouth, showering sparks and ash all over his vest. He ignored that. He was far too busy shouting and ranting.
Sully was blaming himself. He was accusing himself of stupidity, of carelessness, of criminal neglect. He was criticizing himself for having been complacently content to have had Albert Gleason out of the department when the enraged and redoubtable Mickey had come storming in. He was blaming himself because he had not thought to question so convenient a coincidence. He was telling us that it was all painfully clear to him now. Miss Cullinan’s Mickey had come into the bank and had found Albert Gleason. He had killed Albert Gleason and had then sought to cover himself for the killing by coming to Branch Banking ostensibly to look for Albert Gleason. In Branch Banking he had pushed off every effort that had been made to pacify or to quieten him. He had by his behavior forced Sully’s hand. He had given Sully no choice. He had made it inevitable that Sully should have him ejected from the bank. He had made himself an alibi, and Sully had allowed himself to be tricked into co-operating on it.
It was a theory and one in which Lansing readily, albeit regretfully, concurred. At first flush I was not ready to go along on it. It struck me as elaborate and something less than plausible. I couldn’t quite cotton to the picture of a young man who, having just given full rein to a murderous rage, would go on after the murder to counterfeit that same rage with the subtle purpose of laying a trail that would be confused on the point of the precise time of the killing. The change of character struck me as having been too quick, too abrupt, involving too sharp and sudden a shift from impulse to calculation. I was asking myself whether the shock of having done a criminal act could have had so quickly sobering an effect on this young man that he could have done the turnaround and gone back into Branch Banking to counterfeit those very emotions which he had only the moment before purged from himself with murder.
I spoke my doubt, and Lansing listened politely. Sully was less patient.
“He had to do it,” he said. “He got into the bank. He could never have gotten up here without identifying himself to the guards. He couldn’t hope that it wouldn’t be known that he had been here, and that’s why he couldn’t come and kill Albert and then go without setting up some sort of explanation of what he had been doing here. He did set up an explanation. He wants you to think he came to make a scene in Branch Banking. He made his scene, and I had him put out of the building. He has made it solid that he couldn’t have killed Albert after he made his scene and he expects we’ll think that he wouldn’t have made the scene once he had already killed Albert.”
Lansing backed him up on it. He corroborated the facts of the matter. Mickey couldn’t have reached Branch Banking without some record of his having come past the guards and he couldn’t have left the building without some record of his leaving. That would be a second thought to sober the young man. There would be the thought that he had committed murder and there would be this further thought that he had done it in a place where he had been signed in and would now have to be signed out. In such a situation a killer would be forced to think fast. He would be forced to subtleties.
I put out the call to have the police pick up Gert Cullinan’s Mickey. Someone had to do it, and I was stuck with it because all through this part of it Gibby was oddly bemused. From the moment that the door had opened to reveal the body of Albert Gleason, Gibby had gone into what was for him a most peculiar state of inactivity. His face turned blank. His eyes seemed peculiarly opaque. He moved mechanically. He left it for me to carry the ball.
It worried me, and I was waiting for the first moment I could get him alone and could have a try at snapping him out of it. Brady and Ellerman arrived and with them the Medical Examiner’s man and the lab boys and the rest of the retinue. I think they were a bit startled when they found that they were taking over from me and not from Gibby. I caught no few curious glances they were casting in his direction. This didn’t seem at all like Gibby. A murder had been done, and it appeared that he was holding aloof from it—Jeremiah X. Gibson, the murder specialist; Jeremiah X. Gibson, the man of implacable curiosity. There we were, and Jeremiah X. Gibson had not even one question to ask.
I was marveling at it myself, and I should have known better. I should have known exactly what was happening. The Gibson curiosity had suffered no real change. The Gibson implacability stood undiminished. Gibby had not run out of questions he had to ask. Gibby had not drawn aloof from murder. Gibby was asking questions as always and now he was having answers, answers so satisfactory that he would not allow them to be confused or postponed by any outside distractions. Gibby in this case had reached the point where he was asking the questions of himself and in the answers he was giving himself he was finding satisfaction and contentment. For Gibby the evidence had so far formed itself into a pattern of proof that he could now take new items of evidence in his stride. They were dropping automatically into those places in his pattern that he had left open for them.
I should have then known that he was doing what a chemist does when he isolates a new element. He knows from the periodic table that there should be an element, heretofore unknown, to fill the gap between two known elements. He is sufficiently familiar with the elements that surround it to permit him to predict with great accuracy the characteristics and the specific gravity of the unknown. So it was in Gibby’s mind when we came on the body of Albert Gleason. He already had a pattern—you might call it the periodic table of these crimes—and there had been in this pattern a gap into which the murder of Albert Gleason automatically fitted.
Of this crime he had had something of the chemist’s foreknowledge. He had been able to predict almost exactly the characteristics and, we might say, the specific gravity of the murder of Albert Gleason. If he seemed inattentive it was because he was giving only so much attention as was necessary to an event which he had already to a very considerable extent discounted. It took very little of Gibby’s attention to determine that the characteristics of this crime were such as would make it fit properly into the gap he’d had in his pattern.
You will be asking why, if he had foreseen this murder, he had done nothing to forestall it. It is, however, by no means true that he had done nothing. He had done everything anyone could do. I saw that later. I also saw something else. Gibby had not foreseen this killing as specifically as all that. He had constructed a pattern in which such a killing would fit neatly enough, but his pattern had never required for its completion either the death of Albert Gleason or even any attempt on the life of Albert Gleason. It was just that the pattern he had evolved was so constructed that, given a sufficient quantity of foolhardiness on the part of Albert Gleason, the death of Albert Gleason would automatically become an integral part of t
he pattern.
At this point in the series of events Gibby was not much interested in this fresh murder. In his thinking he could dismiss it with one simple comment: Albert Gleason had been that much a fool.
When the Medical Examiner and the police had taken over from me, Sully remained with them. They were depending on him for all the information on Gleason that would be needed for filling out all those departmental forms which are part of the necessary routine. Gibby and I went with Nicholas Cooper Lansing to his private office. It was up there that Gibby came out of his reverie and, belatedly, I thought, seemed to be taking some interest in the late Albert Gleason and in the nature of his taking off.
He began questioning Lansing on the nature and functions of the Branch Banking department. A couple of phases of the department’s functions seemed to be of special interest to him. He remarked on the location of the department’s office, a notably isolated position in the building, and Lansing explained that the job the department did involved virtually none of the interdepartmental conferring and communication that would be a large part of the working day almost anywhere else in the bank.
“They receive their bundles of checks,” he said. “They process them. They prepare the outgoing bundles. Messengers deliver the bundles to them and messengers pick up the bundles from them. These messengers are virtually their only contact with any other part of our organization. They do a job that requires no more central a location.”
It seemed a small point and one hardly worth laboring. It was self-evident that the murder of Albert Gleason might have been more difficult to bring off in the middle of the working day if Gleason had been employed in some other department, some part of the bank where there would be constant comings and goings. The corridors in the neighborhood of Sully’s department were quieter and less frequented than most, but I could see little value in going on and on about that. When Gibby finally did leave it, however, he went to work on another point which seemed to me even less germane. He verified the fact that Branch Banking performed an operation that was largely mechanical and that required a minimum of competence. He elicited from Lansing the further information that, since it was so simple an operation, the wage scale in the Branch Banking department, from bottom to top, was at the lowest levels of any department in all of Fiveborough National.
“It is not only that the work does not require anything very much in the way of competence,” Lansing explained. “It is also that it puts on the people in the department almost nothing in the way of responsibility. It is in essence a sorting job, and the paper they handle is only of record value—checks that have already been processed through one of our branches. There is nothing negotiable there. There is no risk involved, no judgment, no policy making or even understanding or interpretation of policy.”
Gibby was listening to this stuff with the keenest and most eager attention. You would have thought that there was an important clew in every word. I was watching him more than I was listening to the exchange of questions and answers between him and Lansing. I could tell that he was on to something and that it was something hot. The way I was seeing it, we would hardly be ready to take our next step until the police would come up with Gert Cullinan’s Mickey. To be quite honest about that, I was at this point not at all certain of what steps we could take when they would turn up with that unfortunate youth, but there was this evident eagerness of Gibby’s, and I know him well enough to recognize that he doesn’t go eager unless there is something to be eager about. I was quite certain that he saw directions in which we could profitably take it. I set all this Q and A down to just something he was doing to fill in the time till the police would come up with Mickey and he could charge into action. Lansing broke out cigars that were at least the equal of Wilberforce’s Coronas. We lived high that day.
“You said the department wage is low from bottom to top,” Gibby said to Lansing. “Top, I suppose, would be James Sully.”
“Yes,” Lansing said. “Jim gets less than any other chief in the bank. On the other hand we are giving him more than we have ever given any other chief in Branch Banking and more than I would guess we are ever likely to give a chief of that department again.”
Gibby nodded. “That will be because he has more seniority than any other chief in the bank,” he said.
“Yes. Ordinarily a man with that much seniority would have gone on into a vice-presidency or at least have been transferred to head up a more important department.”
Gibby sighed. “Too bad,” he said. “I suppose now with Coleman gone, Sully will never have his vice-presidency.”
Lansing shook his head. “That was all settled weeks ago,” he said. “Jim had turned it down and that was it.”
“Does he want transfer to another department instead?” Gibby asked.
“No,” Lansing said. He spoke thoughtfully. “Jim takes a good deal of understanding. Jim is a completely simple person, and in this world of ours where people constantly seem to be growing more complex, such simplicity as Jim Sully’s has come to be baffling. Jim wants nothing. He has his department. He has gone as far as he cares to go. He doesn’t have any delusions about his ability. He knows he couldn’t cope with anything that wasn’t as easy as the operation of his department. It has never for a moment been considered by him or by anyone else that he might be given chief of any other operation. He knows and we know that he wouldn’t be up to it.”
“Doesn’t it take even more to be up to a vice-presidency?” Gibby asked.
Lansing smiled. It was a gentle and mildly rueful smile. “Not necessarily,” he said. “As a vice-president, Sully would carry no weight or responsibility. He has only a couple of years before retirement, and the main difference would be that he would have certain privileges and dignities as a v. p. There would be more generous vacations and a better pension. We would expect no activity of him.”
“Something in the nature of a lower-case figurehead,” Gibby remarked. “I should think that he would have felt up to that.”
Lansing shrugged. “You can hardly offer a man a vice-presidency,” he said, “and at the same time make it that clear to him that it would be so empty a title. It’s better to offer a man nothing at all than to humiliate him in that fashion. I am afraid Sully, through a lifetime in the bank, has formed an exalted notion of the functions and abilities of our vice-presidents. He assumes that he would have to be a Homer Coleman to be up to the job.”
“I should think that even the simplest of men,” said Gibby with a small bark in his tone, “would be aware that he might have to be no more than a Cary Willard.”
Lansing laughed. “I’m afraid Jim is not even up to being a Cary Willard,” he said, “since he is not even up to recognizing how very little that takes.”
Gibby didn’t laugh with him. I did, and Gibby waited impatiently until we would be through laughing. As soon as he could be, he was in there pitching.
“I’m going to need quite a gang of your people, Mr. Lansing,” he said. “I hope you will be able to put them at my disposal without disrupting your banking operations too much.”
Lansing sobered. “Anything you say,” he said.
“I would like you to bring down here a man from each one of your branch banks,” Gibby said.
“The managers?” Lansing asked. “Any man? Why?”
It was obvious that the request made no sense to him, but he was too polite to say as much.
“You will know better than I,” Gibby said, “which man in each branch would be most likely to help me. I would want a man who could do two things. I would want him to know whether or not there have been any notable differences in the books of his branch in the last few weeks and I would want him to be able to recognize a man if the man is or has been a depositor in his branch.”
“The second half of that,” Lansing said, “is easy. A teller from each of the branches would be the best for that. A teller more than anyone else would know the depositors.”
“Would a teller kno
w the rest of it?” Gibby asked.
“There would hardly be any rest of it, Mr. Gibson,” Lansing said a touch stiffly. “You cannot know much about banks if you think we could function over a period of even a few weeks with notable differences on our books. All our books have to prove out each day.”
Gibby’s eyebrows went up. “No shortage and overage account?” he asked.
“Oh, that,” Lansing said. “Yes, as a last resort. If the amount is not large and a diligent search has been made for the error and the error is not detectable, we do throw it into the shortage and overage account and forget about it. That is standard practice.”
“Right,” Gibby said. “What we’re after would be something that went on completely within the frame of standard practice.”
Lansing looked baffled. He picked the phone off his desk.
“I’ll get you a teller from each branch,” he said.
“Thank you very much,” said Gibby.
Lansing was still on the phone arranging for Gibby’s roundup of bank tellers when his secretary came in to tell us that the police had picked up Michael Halloran and were holding him for us in the offices of the Branch Banking department. Lansing offered us the use of his own office, and we had Gert Cullinan’s Mickey up there for questioning. Brady brought him up and Lansing sat tight. Gibby didn’t seem to mind that. He didn’t seem to care much who was in on this session. I even wondered how much he cared about the session as a whole. There was nothing wrong with his questioning. He gave the lad a thorough going over, but I have seen Gibby when he has his heart in one of these things and it was not the same Gibby, not by a long shot.
In my view of the thing Mickey Halloran looked like a boy who was asking for the electric chair. He was a big hulk of a lad, quite big enough to hand even the redoubtable Gert Cullinan a poke in the eye if he felt so inclined. He hadn’t shaved that morning and the dark stubble of his black beard cast a heavy shadow along his massive jaw. I took special notice of his jaw and of his hands and it seemed to me that both contributed equally to the tough, mean look of Michael Halloran. His hands were also massive and they were badly cared for. The fingernails were broken and grime encrusted; and, so far as I could see, there was only one way Michael Halloran knew to manifest emotion. He balled his hands up into fists. This was a notably rough fellow.
The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends Page 16