“All right, Mr. Krysak. What happened?”
The guard looked unhappy and a bit nervous. After all, he was the guard, and the bank had been held up. And he had also let somebody take his gun from him, which was meat-head-play number one in the cops. Still, this was no time for skirting the truth.
“I was going over to lock up for the day,” he said shamefacedly, “and I guess I wasn’t keeping my eyes open. Anyway, this guy was practically on top of me before I even noticed him. He had on a mask, but you couldn’t hardly tell it was a mask until he was right in front of you. It was one of those opaque plastic jobs, almost skintight, but it hid his face good. And he had a hat on, pulled down. And then he had this gun on me before I could do a thing.…”
He brought his eyes up from the floor. Reardon waited patiently, no censure at all on his face, merely curiosity as to the facts. The guard looked back at him, reassured; besides, the worst part was over. He plunged ahead.
“Well, he made me go downstairs where Mr. Milligan was making up the shipyard payroll like he does every Thursday. Then he made Mr. Milligan open up the gate to the vault and then he took the payroll and locked the two of us up in there and ran upstairs. I had my keys—he never even bothered to take them from me, see, and—”
Reardon interrupted. “Who’s Milligan?”
The young manager was just coming out of his office where he had been telephoning the bad news to the main office and the insurance department there. His face was pale beneath the red hair and freckles; he seemed to be thinking of the mark against his previously perfect record.
“I’m Milligan,” he said. “I’m the manager here.”
Reardon nodded. “How big was this payroll we’re talking about?”
Milligan looked at the assembled faces as if the amount was none of their damned business, and then he shrugged. It would be in all the newspapers, anyway, not to mention radio and television. He said quietly: “Two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars and a little.”
Reardon’s eyebrows rose. “That’s quite a haul. What was it in?”
“Just a regular suitcase,” the manager said. “Brown plastic over a Fiberglas frame; a regular two-suiter. They bought it in a regular luggage-shop. The payroll was too big for a briefcase.”
Reardon had his notebook out. “Any identification on the bag?”
“The bank name was on it in gold leaf, where people usually put their initials, up on top. And the bag had a special lock; the shipyard accounting office has the other key.” Milligan shrugged. “But it wouldn’t be any great sweat to bust it open.”
“Any marking on the money?”
Milligan stared at him. “Why would we mark the shipyard payroll?”
Reardon realized it had been a stupid question. He tried to recover. “What I meant was, what were the denominations?”
“Oh.” The bank manager allowed him to save face. “I’ve the exact list in my office. I’ll get it.”
He disappeared into his office to reappear in moments. Reardon took the proffered list, studied it, and shook his head. The largest bill was a fifty, the majority twenties, tens, fives, and singles. He looked up.
“What about coins? Change?”
“The Brink’s truck picked those up at our main branch,” Milligan said. “We’re not prepared to handle the silver. And the shipyard got the small change in quantity, anyway, not related to the payroll.”
“I see.” Reardon wrote it down, wondering what good it would do. Still, somebody over him would be sure to ask. He looked up from his notebook. “What else did they take?”
“Nothing. Not a damned thing,” Milligan said. He sounded almost angry at this neglect on the part of the robbers. “They didn’t try for anything else in the vault, and they made no attempt at the money in the teller’s cash drawers.” The reason for his apparently irrational anger became clear. He looked around at the others in the room as if they had all been accessories to the crime. His angry blue eyes came back to Reardon. “Those men knew exactly what they wanted, Lieutenant! They knew where it was and exactly when to come and get it! This thing was damned thoroughly planned. And it had to be with somebody’s help!”
Reardon nodded. “It’s possible. Anyway, most robberies are planned, to one degree or another. Even when some youngster with a shopping bag shoves a threatening note to a teller, he obviously has given the matter some thought even if he doesn’t think as much as he should about the consequences. Who knew about the payroll? Other than the people here?”
“I didn’t know about it,” the short fat man said instantly, protestingly.
Reardon decided the fat man might as well serve as an example to them all. He swung around and stared at the fat man fiercely.
“You come into the bank often?”
“Sure. Every day, just before they close,” the fat man said. There was a slight tremor in his voice at being signaled out for attention. “I’ve got a liquor store across the street down a block. I drop off whatever cash I take in by three. These days I don’t like to keep a lot of money around.…” He tried to remind himself he was completely innocent, but the lieutenant’s cold gray eyes made him doubt it. “I—”
Reardon bored in. “You’ve seen the Brink’s truck in front of the bank every Thursday?”
“I—no. I mean, yes, I guess. I mean I didn’t notice it. I didn’t notice it was Thursday, I mean …” The fat man was sweating. He listened to the echo of his words and realized how guilty they sounded. Damn it, he told himself, what am I getting uptight about? “Look, a lot of people probably see the Brink’s truck every Thursday.…”
Reardon refused to stop leaning. “What did you think the Brink’s truck was doing here every Thursday?”
“I—I didn’t think …”
“You have a lot of customers from the shipyard?”
“Well, sure, I’m the closest—”
“They come in on Friday usually?”
“It’s the big day, sure—”
“Because people are thirstier on Friday than on other days?”
“No, it’s not that—”
“Could it possibly be because Friday’s payday?”
“I guess—”
Reardon glared at him. “What do you mean, you guess? Every Thursday you see a Brink’s truck pick up money and head for the shipyard. And every Friday your business booms because it’s payday at the yard. So how can you tell me you didn’t know the bank here was putting up the payroll on Thursday?”
“I—” The fat man clamped his mouth shut. He said to himself: I must have known down deep the Brink’s truck was taking the payroll over to the yard every Thursday, but honest to God—
Lieutenant Reardon had gotten his point across, at least to his own satisfaction, and was now disregarding the sweating, pale fat man. He turned to the manager.
“As I was saying, who knew about the payroll other than the people here? Including him?”
“Well,” Milligan said, determined not to leave anyone out after seeing Reardon at work, “the Brink’s people know, of course. They pick up the payroll at—” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Around now. They should be here any minute. And the shipyard people know, of course; it’s their payroll. I don’t know how many people there are involved in the payment over there, but it would be easy enough to find out. And of course our people downtown know, in the main office and in the insurance section.” He considered a moment and then nodded his head. “That would be about all, I think.”
“About all?” Reardon studied the red-haired young man a moment and laid down his notebook. It looked as if half the town could have known about the payroll and the Brink’s pickup and, for all he knew, did. Not to mention the neighborhood, including other merchants. After all, a Brink’s truck stopping to make a pickup at a weekly schedule—how much brains did it take to figure out they weren’t stopping for lunch at three-thirty in the afternoon? Well, at least Wheaton’s death would give him plenty of people to work on the case;
a cop’s death in the line of duty took precedence over everything else in Homicide. As well as in all other departments. And it would take an army of men to check out everyone who might have been involved.
Reardon sighed. He swung around, considering the gaping faces still shocked at his treatment of the fat man, disregarding their censure. A cop was killed, he tried to tell them silently, and then knew they could not understand.
“All right, folks. What else can you tell me?”
Whereas before nobody wanted to speak, now they all started to talk at the same time.
“They wore gray suits and wide-brimmed hats, all just alike, like triplets, like in the old Edward G. Robinson movies, like in Little Caesar—”
“The man with the machine gun spoke real polite, but I’d hate to get him mad at me—”
“The one at the front door sounded like he came from the South—”
“They were in here exactly three minutes—”
“They were wearing these rubber gloves,” the fat man said, anxious to erase the previous encounter and prove his good intentions. “Like doctors put on before they make you bend over and—”
Reardon held up his hand abruptly. “Hold it! One at a time! What did you say, ma’am?”
The woman, one of the tellers, said, “I said, they were in here exactly three minutes, maybe a few seconds less. I was watching that clock on the wall there.” She pointed a bony finger. “I didn’t want to even look at that gun!”
“Three minutes? You’re wrong, Alice! It had to be at least ten!”
“It had to be a lot longer than that! Ten minutes! That’s a coffee break!”
Reardon looked at Mike Krysak. The guard said, “I don’t figure it was much more than three minutes, Lieutenant. They were organized and they knew what they wanted.”
“Apparently it was long enough,” Reardon said, and frowned. “Which brings up another question. What happened to your silent alarm? It rang at the Bay View Station after the robbery was over.”
“A damned good question!” the manager said bitterly. “Ask the girls why none of them stepped on an alarm button!”
The girls—mostly in their late forties or early fifties—reacted with normal indignation.
“I happened to be over at the file cabinets near the billing machine checking this gentleman’s balance—”
“I didn’t happen to be near a button. They put them in such ridiculous—”
The last teller to speak was the one who had noticed the clock. She said, “The man said, ‘Don’t move,’ and he had that gun in his hand so I didn’t move.” She made it sound like one-plus-one-equals-two.
“On the other hand,” Reardon said to nobody in particular, “I suppose if there were alarm buttons on the floor near the file cabinets and everyplace else, the girls would be stepping on them accidentally a dozen times a day, which is about all we need. In any event, it took the patrol car five minutes to make it here, so the chances are the robbers would still have gotten away.” He surveyed the group. “What else? What did they look like?”
The former hostages looked at each other for help. Someone said, “They were—well, they were all about the same size.…” Another added, “Wearing the same clothes …”
“Triplets?” Reardon asked sarcastically.
“Well, I guess maybe the guy with the machine gun was a little taller,” the guard said.
“Look,” Reardon said with a patience he was about to lose, “let’s say they were all exactly the same size to the quarter of an inch, and they all weighed the same to within a pound. Now, let me try again: were they as big as King Kong or smaller than a breadbox?”
“Oh!” The idea finally came across.
“He was a little bigger than me, the guy who put the gun on me,” the guard said. “Maybe five eleven, or six feet.”
“At last!” Reardon said fervently, and wrote it down. “Fat or skinny?”
“Medium,” Krysak said firmly.
“Thank you,” Reardon said, and turned to the manager. “How about that camera? How long does it take to develop the film?”
A note of pride crept into the manager’s boyish voice. It was as if he were trying to salvage some small bit of comfort from a very bad situation.
“We’re miles ahead of either still cameras or even movies, Lieutenant,” he said, “at least at the Farmers & Mercantile. That’s a TV camera up there, with an instant-replay tape attachment. We can look at the tape replays anytime you want in my office.”
“Good,” Reardon said heartily and meant it. “Then let’s, shall we?”
He moved into the small office followed by the manager. Milligan started to close the door but Reardon stopped him.
“Let them all see it. Maybe it will bring something to mind.”
“Oh. Sure. Sorry.” Milligan went over to a complicated machine in one corner; the last of the stragglers crowding into the office could be seen in bluish light on one of the twin screens on the machine. The second screen was blank. The manager checked his watch, set a timer on the dial panel, and pressed a button. There was a brief second’s whirring and suddenly sound blared in the small room. The manager instantly twisted a knob and the racket subsided to tolerable levels. Reardon studied the machine admiringly.
“Sound too, eh?”
“Oh, sure. Next year they’ll have color, they say.” The manager sounded as if he thought the police probably used smoke signals for communications. He reached for a button. “Ready?”
There was a small disturbance at the main door of the bank and the police officer stationed there came over to the office and poked his head in. He was followed by a burly man in a semi-police outfit, although the revolver he carried was official-looking enough.
“Brink’s truck is here, Lieutenant.”
Reardon looked at the manager. Milligan looked past the policeman to the Brink’s driver.
“We had a holdup, Charley. You’ll have to pick up the payroll at the main office in town. They’re making it up now.”
The Brink’s man shrugged and left. The romance of a robbery missed him completely; besides, it wasn’t his money. In fact, after all the years of toting the stuff from one place to another, he had long since convinced himself it wasn’t money at all, but only bits of colored paper. He felt this to be a far healthier attitude, especially for a man with a big family and a small income.
The manager returned to his electronic pride and joy, the replay machine. Reardon gave him a nod; Milligan pressed a button. The second screen sprang to life. The guard bit his lip as he watched himself walking so innocently toward the man who had pulled the gun on him. What on earth had he been dreaming of not to have seen the man, not to have been prepared for an emergency like that? On the other hand, he reminded himself, he could well be dead now, like that cop outside, and went back to watching the film.
The tape faithfully reproduced the action that had passed. The second gunman moved to the center of the room; the drape was drawn and the submachine gun uncased and raised, sweeping the room. The TV camera had miraculously adjusted its lens to accommodate the change in lighting when the drape had been closed; the scene rolled on with perfect visibility.
“Nobody move and nobody gets hurt.…”
They all watched the small screen as if seeing the action for the first time with their own roles in the drama being taken by strangers. The man guarding the door could be seen to turn, foreshortened a bit by the acute angle of the camera.
“Customah. Guess Ah closed fo’ the day too soon.”
One of the women tellers suddenly spoke.
“I remember now. I thought it was funny how none of them sounded as if they came from the same place.”
Reardon spoke without taking his eyes from the screen. “Did any of them sound as if he came from around here?”
“Here?” The woman thought about it a moment and then shook her head. “Here they sound like they come from all over.” Which, Reardon thought, was on a par with the othe
r help he’d gotten, although he could not deny that the woman was merely speaking the truth.
A second chipped in. “Like I said before, the one at the door sounded like he was from the South. Like he did just now.” The voice faded dubiously as nobody complimented her on the contribution.
The film continued. The gunman from the basement vault appeared with the suitcase; together with the man carrying the machine gun he backed up to meet the third at the door. The pistol was raised, and then the camera was merely recording the momentary tableau before everyone started to move, everyone except the fat man who continued to stand in shock. The manager flicked off the screen and looked at Reardon.
“Any help?”
Reardon was staring at the blank screen. He said, almost to himself, “A sense of humor …”
Milligan frowned in nonunderstanding. “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing,” Reardon said and came back to the present. “It might help, the tape, I mean.” The clothing the three men had worn had looked familiar; now he remembered where he had last seen it. It was the type of hat and suit worn in the old gangster movies, circa 1930. Shades of early Cagney, he thought; someone had a sense of humor. But there was something else about the film he had just seen that was also familiar, other than the clothes, and this he could not place. Probably something I saw recently on television, he thought; it’ll come to me. He put the thought aside. “I’ll want that tape, of course. Down at the Hall we’ll make voice-graphs. You’d be surprised how accurately we can spot a man’s home just from voice-graphs. They’re like fingerprints, and just as useful in catching and convicting people.”
It was, of course, so much garbage; the fact was that even when, once in a blue moon, the voice-graph helped in finding a criminal, juries still looked at this evidence in much the manner that juries looked at fingerprints in the days of Bertillon. But Reardon tossed the statement in for the benefit of the small group before him. If any one of them was involved, let him sweat a bit. The lieutenant came to his feet.
“I’d appreciate one more bit of co-operation from all of you, if you don’t mind, and then you’ll be free. I’d like each one to take a pencil and paper and write down your name, address, and phone number. Then I’d like you to put down exactly where you were and what you were doing at the time of the robbery, as well as an accurate description of what happened as you saw it. And any ideas you might have about the robbery. When you’re finished, give them to the officer at the door. He’ll get them to me.”
Bank Job Page 2