Gossip can have good uses. It is deplored because its uses are so often opposite. They depend on who does the gossiping; through idle talk, the well-disposed sometimes find out about the hidden sufferings of others and go to their aid—or they learn the degree of temptation that resulted in a sin and so forgive the sinner. Without gossip, indeed, life would be dull and much of its subtle business would remain unfinished. It has, however, a poor reputation amongst conscientious people; they usually inhibit impulse if the material in their minds seems of a gossipy nature.
Silence can be unfortunate. If, before Chuck’s departure for the base in Texas, his father had let drop the fact that Beau Bailey had asked him for a loan of five thousand, Beau’s life might have been changed. For Chuck might then have reported noticing Beau, slugged and furtive, as he emerged from a shady building in The Block. Those two facts, if they had by chance come out at the dinner table, might have led Mrs. Conner to express certain observations and opinions she had kept to herself. They were, first, that Charles had returned to service in a concealed but very deep depression, second, that the newspapers had published a picture of Lenore and Kit Sloan and that Lenore didn’t seem very happy in the photograph, and third, that Beau was drinking more than ever while Netta, surprisingly, was going around like a cat with the canary well down and the feathers lapped clear. Nora, then confessing her innocent eavesdropping, could have confirmed what Charles had not disclosed and her mother only suspected: Lenore and Kit were, indeed, resuming an interest, Such, at any rate, were the facts and observations at the collective disposal of the family.
Had they been pooled, through gossip, they would certainly have led the Conners to the conclusion that Beau was in worse financial trouble than usual, that he had possibly done something desperate or illegal to try to scramble from his perennial difficulties, that Netta was
“throwing Lenore at Kit Sloan’s head”—with some success, and in the transparent hope of establishing a state of permanent family solvency—that Lenore had finally told Chuck their affection was impracticable and that their unexpressed “understanding” no longer existed, and that the neighbor girl was not pleased with the exploitation of her beauty.
If they had clearly realized all this, the Connors, being kind-hearted, would have acted.
They would have acted out of generosity, even if the lifelong love of their older son and their deep fondness for Lenore hadn’t been involved. Hank would have offered Beau the five thousand, selling a mortgage he’d taken for a friend, or cashing in some war bonds, or borrowing on his insurance or, perhaps, just asking for a loan from Mr. Morse, the owner of the hardware stores. But since, by and large, the Conners didn’t gossip, the bits and tabs of information which would have made clear a whole only hazily suspected were never assembled.
Beau’s “moral fiber,” such as it was, consisted of conflicts amongst fears. His capacity to be afraid, however, was considerable. A man who was a physical coward, and nothing else, would have capitulated if possible to the warning Jake had emphasized by having Toledo “slug him a couple.” But Beau was more afraid of prison than of blows; could he have served a term under an assumed name, he would have dreaded prison far less than social ostracism. He feared his wife next most of all persons, Minerva Sloan most.
Hence it was not until the last week in Octoher that Beau, made desperate by a series of ever-more-menacing (and constantly harder-to-explain) phone calls, decided to act. Jake, and Toledo, had taken to phoning him at the bank and their voices were not the sort Beau wanted to have the operator hear. Like many who commit crime, however, Beau was brought to the actual deed by idle opportunity as much as by resolve.
It was a period of pre-Christmas inventory.
From the vaults, methodically, with armed guards watching, a number of “portfolios” were fetched for checking. These were, of course, not cardboard “folios” but metal boxes containing lists, account books, receipts, letters, orders, and sheaves of certificates.
And it was while this routine checking was in progress late one afternoon that Miss Tully’s mother got a sudden appendicitis, called the doctor, was whisked to the Jenkins Memorial Hospital which, like the Presbyterian Church and some of the city’s finest residences, was situated on the shore of Crystal Lake. The hospital promptly informed Miss Tully an emergency operation was imminent; that distracted woman, who had served the bank for twenty-seven years (with a total absence of but eleven days), appealed to Beau. He was not very nice about it, but he let her go.
It left him with her work to be “shouldered” in addition to his own. He happened that day to have nothing whatever left to do. It was three fifteen, a rainy, raw afternoon, and the main floor, with cages all around and stand-up desks in rows in the center, was already empty of customers. The doors were closed and Bill Maine, the front-door guard, was reading a copy of the Saturday Evening Post in a shaft of insufficient light that fell from the outer gloom through a high, barred window.
The bank was comparatively quiet. Business machines made more noise than voices. No clerk, of course, could hear the hard rain, for the roof was twenty-odd stories overhead and the rain fell straight. When Miss Tully departed, in still-damp, evil-smelling accouterments for foul weather, Beau was left in his office with three large deposit boxes and Miss Ames, his secretary, a niece of a vice-president, a recent business-school graduate, suffering now from a head cold.
He set himself to do the checking which had engaged Miss Tully, leafing in a desultory way through the amassed holdings of one John M. Jessup, of Larkimer County, a livestock dealer. If Beau remembered rightly, Jessup was about seven feet tall, had a sparrow’s voice, wore two pairs of glasses, had cleaned up on beeves in the First World War, and hadn’t been in at the bank since Truman left office. Beau always remembered people. But even those facts did not move Beau to wider ratiocination. What moved him was the observation, in his hands, of ten one-thousand-dollar bonds, issued by Hobart Metal Products when they had expanded the works on the west side of town.
Just half those, Beau thought, would get me out of all my worries. Only then did he recall the rarity of Mr. Jessup’s visits. And only after that did he glance at the sonorous Miss Ames.
“How would you like,” he said, “to go across to Sherman’s and get me— us —some coffee?”
She took the slight falter in his voice for an employer weakness. “Not much. It’s raining.”
“You go underground. There’s a passage. One of the girls down in the stenographic pool will show you.” Beau made up, that time, for his prior lack of assurance.
The girl said, “Oke,” stuck her gum on the under edge of her desk, rose, and began to make up: there might be boys in the passageway.
When she had departed, Beau studied the opaque glass walls of his cubicle and decided they were, indeed, opaque. Then he looked briefly from the door, at an empty corridor. After that he tried to remember the present market value of Hobart Metal bonds. He thought it was par, but wasn’t sure. If he were going to borrow five, he might as well be certain and take six. He folded them on their creases and tucked them carefully into an inside breast pocket. Only then did he remember his exposure in the window. He whirled with horror and stared up at the stacked panes across the street. Lights shown in everyone and rain poured between. There were faces and people moving, but no one seemed to be interested in him, in anything in his direction which—when you considered—probably looked like nothing but a lot of teeming rain.
He took the inventory list and correctly reduced the number of listed bonds from ten to four. He then made out, in a disguised writing, a receipt for six bonds and signed it with an indecipherable scrawl, using a bank pen and bank ink. He pulled out the nib afterward, put in a new one, and pocketed the old. Nobody, he thought, could prove who had written the receipt or show with what it had been signed. Not even experts. And, anyway, the absence of the bonds would go unsuspected.
It took two more days to complete the transaction and set his mind at rest. Or momentarily at rest.
The following morning was still rainy. Taking Netta somewhat into his confidence, he explained it would be “useful” if she alibied him with a slight cold. She did not enquire more deeply. She called the bank and talked about “a couple of degrees temperature” and “doctor’s orders.”
It happened, owing to Country Club contacts, that Beau knew an officer in the Ferndale Branch of the Owen National Bank of Commerce, who was a “good man to go to in a tight spot.”
His name was Wesley Martinson. Beau had cultivated the man, played a few rounds of golf with him, come to call him “Wes”—probably because his subconscious mind invariably noted down the fact that a fellow useful in a tight spot might someday be handy to him. Beau had that kind of foresight—quantities of it.
Wes greeted him without surprise, ushered him into a private room in the branch bank, sat, performed smoking amenities and said, “Well, Beau, what can we do for you?”
Beau had pretty much taken the measure of his man, through the medium of a hundred off-color stories retailed by Wes with almost writhing relish. Beau therefore chuckled and said,
“Frankly, I want you to help me perform a small robbery.”
Wes chortled. “Son, that’s what banks are for. And you’ve come to the right banker.”
Beau took the bonds from a very old and battered big envelope which bore his name and in which for years he had kept unpaid bills. It looked exactly like something that had lain in a vault a long while, holding bonds. He threw the parchment-stiff, aging paper on Wesley Martinson’s desk. “Want to borrow on these.”
Wes picked them up, studied them and said, “They don’t look counterfeit.”
Beau chuckled. “Nope. Something I stashed before the tax rate knifed us. Trouble is, I don’t want the little woman to realize I’m borrowing on them.”
The other man frowned. “I see.”
“The hell you do see! However, I’ll let you in on the sight, one of these days. She has”—Beau made curves with his hands. “All blonde, and when I say all, I mean all.”
Wes unconsciously ran his tongue along the underside of his long top lip. “Isn’t that kind of skidding around, for the cashier of Sloan?”
“With her you don’t skid, son. She’s safely married.”
As Beau knew, the invention suited his own need for cover as well as the other man’s mind. Wes chuckled. “I guess Owen National can help you maintain your little relationship. Security’s okay. You know the rates.”
“I should!” Beau said and took the proffered pen.
Not that evening, but the next, Beau made his way to The Block. He was determined, having obtained the needed money, and a few hundreds extra, for private use when and if and as needed, to expose himself to no further risks. So he approached by bus, then taxi, and then a second taxi and at last on foot.
Jake was there, in his littered office. He took the five one-thousand-dollar bills without comment. He dug in a greasy file for some time, produced Beau’s I.O.U.’s, handed them over, and then looked across his cigar stub. “Where’d you get the dough?”
“Borrowed it,” Beau answered cheerfully.
“Off who?”
“Friend.”
“What friend?”
“I can’t say. It was—a woman.” Beau was suddenly very nervous. He had entered the gambling place confidently, whistling a little. He had thought that all Jake wanted was the money. He realized, in a new way, that he was in the windowless back room of a stone building which once had been a house and was now empty, pretty much. At least the big downstairs room, with the wheels and dice tables under dusty canvas, was empty and had been for months-since the latest police cleanup.
“What woman?” Jake said.
“I told you…. Look! I paid. We’re square. So what?”
Jake didn’t have a mean face, a vicious face, even a very Italian face. He looked like every other man who stands in a dirty white apron beside a green-grocery stall in an open market. He hardly lifted his voice. “Toledo,” he called, and Toledo, who did have a vicious face, came in from the dark hall.
It was not necessary to say anything to Beau about the meaning of Toledo’s summons.
Toledo had, a month before, landed three crashing blows on Beau’s face, flooding him with agony, weakening his knees, almost making him throw up.
“I just want to know,” Jake said, “if this is hot money. I don’t care whether it’s hot or not. I take it, either way. I just want to know. Ask him, Toledo.”
Before Beau could cry, “No!” the first blow knocked him off his feet and halfway across the dirty, worn carpet. He got up. He got out a handkerchief. Shaking like a rabbit in a snake’s mouth, he said gaspingly, “Okay. I had to borrow a couple of bonds from a dead account at the bank. You guys won’t wait. The bank can.”
“Whose account?”
“I forget,” Beau said.
“Ask him whose account, Toledo.”
Beau managed to stave it off this time by darting to the farthest corner as he said, “John Jessup.” Jake nodded thoughtfully. “So okay. What are you hanging around here for?”
Beau ran out of the room, ran down the stairs, tripped, almost fell, and found the gloomy sanctuary of night. He hadn’t gone many blocks before he realized, clearly, rather than in a horror-strewn corner of his brain, that now—and forever—Jake really had him by the short hair.
Sweat broke out over him; for several blocks he couldn’t remember which street led back to Market.
Beau was one of the luckless….
Two weeks after the termination of his dealings with Jake, two weeks of blessed relief after an at least temporary termination, Beau walked across the marble floor of the bank, on the way to lunch. He had decided, as usual—after a struggle, as usual—that he’d have two Manhattans and pork chops: weather was really cold now.
His eye detected a singular customer amongst the hurrying, queued scores, the dozens writing and blotting at the desk.
It was a very, very tall man, wearing two pairs of glasses, waiting in line at one of the “Trust Funds” windows.
It was John Jessup.