The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope

by C. W. Grafton

  The second item was about depreciation and said that the company was heading for trouble because it was not setting up depreciation as fast as the equipment was depreciating. The rate ought to be stepped up, it said. The report informed the directors that after conferences with the president the above changes had been made in line with sound and conservative policy and the books had been adjusted accordingly.

  I bundled all of the papers together and went out and looked at the names of all the accountants in town in the classified section of the telephone book. I picked out a harmless sounding name that looked like it was just one man all by himself and went out and flagged a cab.

  18 A series of Broadway musical comedy revues that began in the 1920s and ran for many years. In the mid-1940s, Hollywood began to produce film versions. Of course, the revues featured numerous dancing girls.

  19 Lord Thomas Babington Macauley’s five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II (1848–1861), a popular if verbose history.

  20 In trouble. The Oxford English Dictionary reports this usage as early as 1912, though no lexicographer has suggested the origin of the phrase.

  23

  The accountant was all by himself sure enough. The office did not look prosperous and I gathered that even the clients left him all by himself. He must have spent his life on the books of little butcher shops and beer joints because he didn’t know much about inventories and since I didn’t know anything about them at all the conversation was pretty futile. I had picked him because I thought his time would be cheap but I came to the conclusion that anything at all would be an overpayment so after awhile I just thanked him and left.

  I found myself a flossy firm with a lot of typewriters going in it and asked for the top name on the door. His secretary did not want to let me in with one tooth missing and looking as rough as I did but I finally talked her into it and the Great Presence consented to let me be in the room with him for awhile. I figured he probably had a meter that started ticking when I went in the door so I didn’t waste any time. “When you do an inventory on a first-in first-out basis, what happens?”

  I thought for a minute he was going to say nothing happened at all but he took what I said and peeled the skin off and looked for a nice spot to bite into it. “It’s a way of looking at cost,” he said in measured tones. “Prices fluctuate and you buy from time to time and pretty soon you have a quantity of items, all just alike, except for what they cost. Then you take some of them out and sell them. The question is which ones did you sell and how much did they cost you and how much profit did you make.”

  “That sounds all right, which ones did I sell?”

  “On a first-in first-out basis you sold the first ones you had. Your books show what they cost and that’s all of it.”

  “But what if I didn’t sell the first ones? Suppose I sold the last ones?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. They are all the same. You have to have some system and you asked me about a particular system and I told you.”

  I said: “All right, now give out about some other ways.”

  “Well, it depends upon what kind of a business you’re in. Sometimes you have on hand a million little items like a ten-cent store and your stock turns over very fast. You could spend all your profit trying to figure out costs.”

  I tried to be as appreciative an audience as I could. I felt like Dr. Watson. “So what do you do then?” I asked.

  “Usually you have a standard mark-up figure for everything or at least for big classes of items. Whatever it costs, you sell it for half again as much. Then you don’t worry about the individual items but just keep track of the retail price, and the cost is automatically two-thirds of that.”

  “Is that called the base stock method?”

  “No, that’s something else again.”

  I told him to keep right on talking.

  “Perhaps an illustration would be the best way to explain it,” he said. “You run a stationery store. You figure you’ve got to have a hundred reams of a certain kind of paper on hand all the time in order to stay in business. That is your base. Your base stock. Every time you go below a hundred reams you order some more to bring it back up and if you begin to get down pretty close you put in an order so that by the time the shipment comes in you will be back to your minimum standard stock again. Since you aren’t going to fall below that figure you decide to put a value on the hundred reams you have on hand and then pretend you aren’t selling those reams at all. When you sell five reams you pretend you are selling the five reams that you have just ordered to keep from falling below your standard. It is just another way of looking at it.”

  I thought something ought to be dawning on me about this time but something definitely was not dawning at all. I said: “What happens if you do first-in first-out for awhile and then change over to that last way you were talking about?” He got out a pencil and a piece of paper and we assumed some figures and by and by I began to see that if the price of what you are buying is going up when you make your change, the cheap stuff you already have on hand is treated as your base stock with the result that you act like you are selling stuff that cost plenty, and naturally you don’t make much dough. The sun began to come up along the back of my neck and I had a feeling that pretty soon the inside of my cranium would be illuminated if I just sat still and waited. I said: “And if you did it when the price of raw materials is going down then, of course, you’d make a big profit, wouldn’t you?”

  That seemed to be the idea. I was doing fine. I said: “But how in hell can you make any money that way?”

  “You really do just the same business as before. It just doesn’t look as good.”

  I thought that over for a long time and then I thought I had better cut it short since the meter was probably ticking.

  “Suppose,” I said feeling my way along, “suppose there comes a time when you want to make lots and lots of money for awhile. If the price of what you are buying keeps going up and you change back to the other system again, what would happen then?”

  “Young man,” he said smiling, “you have an imagination that will either get you in jail or put warts on your fingers from clipping coupons. It would be much simpler to rob a bank and be done with it.”

  “Is there anything wrong with either system?”

  “From an accounting standpoint, no. Not if you know when to use one system and when to use the other. But the federal government does not approve of the base stock method for income tax purposes.”

  This was getting a little off base and I did not want to go any farther with it. I wanted to pay him for his time but he said it was all right and never mind.

  24

  I looked at my watch and found I had spent more time at the library than I thought. My head was aching abominably and before I left the building, I stopped at the newsstand and asked the girl if she had any aspirin. While she was looking in the drawer back of the counter, a man brought in the first edition of the Louisville Times and put a pile of them right in front of me. He was in a hurry and he put the pile upside down so that an item at the bottom of the front page caught my eye as quickly as if it had winked at me. It was one of these little pieces of spot news that they jam into the front page at the last minute, down in the corner. The heading said SNEAK THIEF GETS RECORDS. The item said:

  A sneak thief entered the offices of Yoland & Jolley, Certified Public Accountants in the Heyburn Building, just as the office was opening for business this morning, talked himself into the private office of Gregory Yoland, senior partner of the firm, and then calmly walked out with a bundle of valuable records while Mr. Yoland was engaged at the telephone in an adjoining room. Mr. Yoland and Miss Mayberry Judson, secretary, immediately gave the alarm but the culprit had mingled with the crowd in the lobby and was not immediately apprehended. Police officers working on the case said that the thief had been described
as a short, heavily built man of about 35, with bruises on his face and a lower front tooth missing. He was dressed in a brown suit, tan shoes and straw hat. It was said that the thief obtained entry by identifying himself as a member of a prominent law firm of another city, but police were working on the theory that this was merely a ruse and would not disclose the name given. George Clay, cab driver giving an address on Catalpa Street, reported that he had taken a man answering the above description to the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library shortly after 9:00 a.m. An early arrest is expected.

  I wondered if there was any way to grow a new tooth, remove bruises, reduce thirty pounds or grow eight inches taller in a few minutes, but decided there wasn’t. I thought about buying a new suit and incidentally giving my tortured stomach a rest, but with the other details so accurately reported, I thought it would be a waste of time and money.

  There wasn’t any water at the newsstand so I took two tablets out of the box and munched them disagreeably as I walked down the street wondering how long it would be before I was on the inside looking out.

  A block or so away I went into a shoe repair shop and gave the man at the counter two bits to wrap up my bundle of papers and put a string around it. Then I found a Western Union office and paid out another two bits to have the package delivered to the office of Yoland & Jolley. The girl seemed to have trouble with the name and address and I wondered if she were stalling, but then it occurred to me that the newspaper had just hit the streets and it might be some time before I was in real danger. I borrowed a telephone directory but it didn’t list anyone by the name of Phoebe Murdoch. There were three people listed who spelled their names with a k instead of an h, but no “Murdochs” at all. I tried several other spellings but no results.

  Just to be sure, I went over to the Court House, looked up the indexes and got a clerk to dig out the adoption file for me. The name was definitely spelled with an h several times and there was the name signed plainly at the end of a notarized statement. I inquired about the company that publishes the city directories and found it was only a few blocks away.

  They had back numbers almost to the time of Daniel Boone and wouldn’t mind if I took a look.

  I found a Phoebe Murdoch listed in 1915 at the address given in the Court records. I followed her through volume after volume until about 1925 and then she disappeared altogether. I noted the last address on the back of an envelope and then on an off-chance I asked the directory people if there was any way to tell whether she moved, died or got married, and they said there wasn’t.

  I didn’t like the idea of doing too much messing around with my description and criminal activities on the front page of every newspaper, but I did want to see Miss Phoebe Murdoch or find out what had happened to her. I walked down Third Street to the State Board of Health office and ordered an attested copy of the death certificate of a Miss Phoebe Murdoch who died a resident of Jefferson County probably in 1925, but they said if she was dead, she must have died some place else. I wanted to check the marriage records, but that meant going back into the Court House right in the teeth of the law and I didn’t think it was quite as important as that.

  Not being familiar with the town, I didn’t have the faintest idea how you got to the last known address of the lady I was looking for, so I muttered a prayer and flagged a cab. I was careful to keep my mouth shut as much as possible.

  The neighborhood was modest but respectable enough. I paid the cabdriver, rang the bell, and a woman who looked like Edna Mae Oliver told me in a few well-chosen words that she never heard of anyone by that name and slammed the door.21 Then I crossed the street and rang every doorbell for a while and from the character of the reception I was getting I might as well have been selling Bluine,22 like if you sell enough of it you get a “Marvo” chemical set packed for shipment in a handsome cardboard case in three colors. It began to look as if Miss Phoebe Murdoch was going to have to be one of the major unsolved crimes of history, but I decided I would ring two more bells, then give it up as a bad job.

  It didn’t take two more bells. The next one I rung a pretty girl was about to slam the door in my face, as usual, and then said, “Murdoch! Wait a minute.” She left the door open and called out something toward the back of the house with a voice that Paul Robeson23 would trade his in for. A fat woman waddled out of somewhere wiping soap off of her hands and fumbling for her glasses. She peered at me intently and I thought for a moment that she must be checking up on a brown suit, tan shoes, straw hat, missing tooth, etc., until I remembered that I hadn’t seen any newspapers on any front porches and probably it was a later edition that was delivered at home. Finally the fat woman said:

  “Yes, I remember a Miss Murdoch a long time ago. She lived over there.”

  “I am a lawyer trying to find the heirs of a Dr. Ellis Murdoch of Philadelphia. I think maybe Miss Phoebe Murdoch would come in for a pretty good slice of the estate. Do you know what happened to her?”

  The fat woman said to come in and sit down and wanted to know was it a very big estate and she didn’t know Miss Murdoch had any relatives in Philadelphia but it was a little world and anything could happen, couldn’t it.

  I said anything could certainly happen and for example how about what happened to Miss Phoebe Murdoch. Well, she didn’t rightly know and would have to think about it and maybe ask her husband and how many other relatives were there and what did he die of. I wondered what she would say if I told her he died of leprosy but I told her cancer because that seemed safe enough. It seems she had an Uncle Tobias who died of cancer in Minneapolis in 1910 and I thought that was pretty interesting and I said it was quite a coincidence and she said yes, wasn’t it.

  Her husband ran a secondhand store on Market Street. Would she call him and see what he knew about Miss Phoebe Murdoch. Well she didn’t know about that. He didn’t like for her to call him in the daytime because he might lose a sale sometime, but then maybe he wouldn’t mind if it was about lost heirs and things like that like on the radio, and it certainly would be a big help to me if she would do just that very thing and she believed she would. I had to sit there while she went over the whole thing by telephone, including Uncle Tobias and his cancer, but finally she came back and said that Miss Phoebe Murdoch had sold her house and moved out of town, he thought to Cincinnati or New Orleans or some such place. I asked if there was anyone else in the neighborhood who had lived there as long as she had and she said no the place had changed a good deal and a lot of people had got the idea that they were too high-toned and had moved to other parts of town, but come to think of it there was a Mrs. Kilgallen over on the next street whose house backed up to where Miss Murdoch used to live and she had been there a long time. I thanked her and hoped that Mrs. Kilgallen did not have an Uncle Tobias, especially if he had cancer sometime or other. I thought I probably could have saved a lot of time by making it leprosy after all.

  Mrs. Kilgallen was a neat little woman who sat with her feet together and her hands in her lap. She remembered Miss Murdoch very well and liked her all right except that they always had a sort of dispute about something she couldn’t remember now exactly what it was. She didn’t know what had happened to Miss Murdoch but wished she was still living there, even with the dispute and everything, because the people she sold her place to and all the subsequent occupants of the premises were pretty common and one of them had got caught with a still in the attic and was in the papers and everything. I asked if Miss Murdoch had ever gotten over the severe burns she had and Mrs. Kilgallen said that must have been after she left since she didn’t have any burns that she knew of, although she herself had once burned her hand pretty bad on the stove.

  I said good-bye and was closing the door behind me when the telephone rang and in a minute Mrs. Kilgallen came pattering to the door to tell me to wait a minute. Then she went back to finish her conversation and when she returned it seems that the call was from the fat lady and s
he said the postman had just been by her house and he had been on that route ever since anyone could remember and maybe he would know something.

  I had spent a lot of time already but the postman sounded like he might be a good bet so I walked around the block and caught up with him. He was friendly enough and said I could do all the talking I wanted to if I was willing to walk along with him so he wouldn’t lose any time. At that point he blew his whistle and left me on a sidewalk while he went up some steps and stuck something in a mailbox.

  He remembered Miss Phoebe Murdoch all right, and then blew his whistle and went up some more steps and I waited for him again. Between that house and the next one I learned that Miss Murdoch was not very friendly, but perfectly respectable, and then there was that whistle again. We completed the block in this fashion and to the best of my recollection every house on both sides of the street got a communication of some sort through the facilities of the post office department on that day. Sometimes he would not get back to the subject at all between two houses but would get off on the subject of people in the neighborhood, or talk to the lady on the porch he had just left or on the porch he was about to get to. He seemed to be about my last chance to make any progress so I put up with this procedure with all the patience I could muster and it was about the end of the block on the far side of the street when I finally got it out of him that Miss Murdoch had indeed left a forwarding address and at that point I asked would he mind very much if we just stood still for a minute and got through what we were talking about and if his time were awfully valuable, I would pay it to him in cash. He wanted to see the cash in advance and he did and so we stopped.