Tweak the Devil's Nose

by Deming, Richard

  “He never held out deposits more than thirty days then?”

  “No,” Jones said. “Sometimes for periods only as long as two or three days. I imagine he would buy some shares, wait for a rise above his purchase price, then immediately sell out, pocket whatever profit he had made and deposit the capital he had withheld.”

  “But wouldn’t your bookkeeper catch the discrepancies between the dates amounts were supposed to be deposited and the actual dates of deposit?”

  Harlan Jones’s angry flush told me what had caused Matilda Graves tears. “She should have, but Knight seemingly knew her shortcomings better than I did. Miss Graves is an efficient secretary and bookkeeper, but apparently she doesn’t do any unnecessary work. The way my partner worked it was really quite simple. By mutual agreement he always took care of bank deposits — that is, he made all trips to the bank. Miss Graves prepared the deposit slips. The account he was tampering with is the company’s basic checking account, into which all monies received are always deposited. We have three other accounts: a petty cash fund of five hundred dollars which Miss Graves is authorized to write checks against for rent, utilities and so forth, a savings account in our joint names and an expense account both Knight and I were authorized to write checks against. But deposits to these accounts are always by transfer of funds from the basic account, you see, and never by direct deposit of monies received. In this way all money transactions have to pass through the basic account, which simplifies bookkeeping.”

  When I believed I had this absorbed, I said, “For instance, your firm receives a profit of a thousand dollars from some transaction, and you decide to deposit it in your savings account. Instead of making a direct deposit, you stick it in the basic account, then write a check against the basic account for one thousand dollars and deposit that.”

  “Exactly. So all Miss Graves’s book entries represent either a deposit or a check written against the basic account. Apparently Willard figured that as long as the final figure on the bank statement jibed with the balance in Miss Graves’s books when she totaled up at the end of each month, she wouldn’t bother to check the deposits appearing on the bank statement against her file of deposit slips. What Willard did was have a rubber stamp made similar to the one the bank uses on duplicate deposit slips. I found it in his desk this morning.”

  Fumbling in his desk drawer, he produced a large rubber stamp, held it up for a moment and dropped it back in the drawer again. “Instead of using a bankbook, Miss Graves always prepares two deposit slips, one for the bank and one to be stamped and returned to her as a receipt. When he wanted capital for a speculation, apparently Willard would withhold one check from deposit, make out new slips and deposit the remainder of whatever Miss Graves had given him. But what he would give to her as a receipt when he returned from the bank would be the duplicate slip she had actually prepared, stamped by him instead of by the bank.”

  “I see,” I said thoughtfully. “So what you’re looking for in that stack of bank statements is large amounts deposited in two separate chunks at periods up to thirty days apart, where your duplicate deposit slips show it deposited all in one piece.”

  “Exactly. And so far I have discovered five instances during the past year. Amounts ranging from five thousand dollars up to the top one of seventy thousand which Willard returned yesterday.” At the thought of the seventy thousand he again ran his handkerchief over the back of his neck. “Prior to this last time it was mainly firm money Willard was playing with, but this belonged to a client. It was advanced to us to buy a certain stock when it falls to the price the client is willing to pay. We would have been ruined if Willard had not gotten it back in the account.”

  “Happen to know what he was planning to do with the seventy thousand?” I asked.

  Jones shook his head. “Apparently he had already done it. The Riverside Bank tells me the deposit was a certified check on the Mohl and Townsend Investment Company, a competitor of ours. Willard must have bought some stock through them, then unloaded it and returned the money just before he got killed.”

  “Have you talked to Mohl and Townsend?”

  Again Jones shook his head. “I don’t plan to. I plan to turn all information I find in our own records over to Inspector Day and let him use it as he wishes. But beyond being thankful that his investments didn’t cost Willard any money, I don’t care what his speculations were now that he’s dead.”

  I thought about Knight’s cheaply furnished frame shack, and wondered if Harlan Jones’s estimate of his dead partner’s luck was quite accurate. Perhaps Knight’s ability to replace his borrowed money before the end of each month was no reflection of his success at speculation, and sometimes he may have had to dig deeply into his personal funds to make up the full amount.

  I forbore mentioning this possibility to Jones, for his tone indicated he wanted to forget his partner’s financial dealings as soon as possible. I wondered whether the disclosure of Knight’s dishonesty had shaken Jones’s conviction that his partner would not have made love to his wife, and whether Isobel might not be called upon to do some explaining when she awakened from her nap.

  It occurred to me that the suspicion his wife had been Knight’s mistress after all might be as much responsible for the state of nerves we found him in as the discovery of his narrowly averted bankruptcy.

  17

  The Mohl and Townsend Investment Company office was a duplicate of the Jones and Knight office with one outstanding difference. Instead of a middle-aged spinster presiding over the reception room, we found a voluptuous blonde who would have been nearly as beautiful as Fausta, had her voluptuousness not been slightly overdone. I have as much admiration for an impressive feminine torso as the next man, but I don’t like to have to approach sidewise to get my arms around a girl. She had a typewriter in front of her, and my first thought when we entered the office was that she obviously must use the touch system, for if she backed up enough to see the keys, she would be too far from the machine to reach it with her fingers.

  I left her and Fausta eying each other with mutual hostility while I had a talk with the senior partner in his private office.

  Alfred Mohl was a dried-up specimen of about seventy, and about as conservative as you might expect an investment broker to be. To put it mildly, he was not enthusiastic about discussing the business affairs of a client, even though the client’s deceased condition made it unlikely the company would draw further business from him. Only after I had convinced him I was working in co-operation with the homicide department, and we had reason to suspect Willard Knight’s speculations somehow tied in with his murder, did he reluctantly unload.

  “We have been handling transactions for Mr. Knight about three years,” he finally told me. “Mostly of the speculative type. He was not an — ah — conservative investor.”

  I asked, “Didn’t you think it strange that a rival investment broker would buy stock through you, when he easily could have done so through his own firm?”

  “I sometimes wondered about it,” Mohl admitted. “But it is not part of a broker’s duty to question a client’s motive for giving him business.”

  “It never occurred to you Knight might be speculating with money not belonging to him?”

  Alfred Mohl looked shocked. “Certainly not!”

  “Well, it seems he was. Could you tell me just what his investments were, and how he made out on each one?”

  He pressed a button on his desk, and when the large-bosomed blonde came in, asked her to bring him the file on Willard Knight. When she brought it to him, he pored over it about ten minutes while I silently smoked a cigar. Occasionally he made a note on a slip of paper.

  “Here is the entire story,” he said finally, closing the file folder and handing me the paper on which he had been making notes.

  Neatly divided into four columns was a list of a dozen stock transactions, the first column consisting of the names of stocks, the second the number of shares purchased, the third t
he purchase price, and the last the selling date and price.

  A quick glance showed me the transactions were spread over a period of three years and, as Harlan Jones had guessed, each separate transaction was completed within a calendar month, making it possible for Knight to return the “borrowed” money to the company account in time to have it included on the end-of-the-month bank statement. Ten of the transactions indicated Knight had made a profit, the smallest profit being two hundred dollars and the largest three thousand. But the other two transactions explained the cheapness of Willard Knight’s home.

  Between the two he had taken a loss of thirty-five thousand.

  In my head I added up his wins, subtracted from his two large losses and came out with a debit balance of approximately twenty thousand. The last transaction was the only one of the lot which showed neither profit nor loss. In the three weeks Knight had held shares, the market price had not changed a decimal.

  It was the largest transaction on the list — thirty-five thousand shares of Ilco Utilities at two dollars a share. And Ilco Utilities was one of the companies in which Walter Lancaster had also been a large stockholder.

  I thanked Mr. Mohl for his co-operation, collected Fausta and departed. She and the front-office blonde failed to exchange farewells, but the blonde signified her awareness of my departure with a dazzling good-bye smile. Ordinarily this would have brought a caustic remark from Fausta the moment we were outside, but apparently she was still acting the role of the skittish maiden pursued by a wolf.

  When she made no comment whatever on the blonde, I couldn’t resist saying, “Good-looking girl, that secretary.”

  “Yes,” Fausta agreed sweetly. “I think she liked you too. She would be a nice girl for you, because she is just your type.”

  “My type?”

  “Earthy. Very physical. Probably she would admire a man who chased women about the house trying to tear their clothes off.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “When did I ever …?”

  “Also you could catch her easy because she could not run very fast,” Fausta interrupted. “Naturally she would have to lean backward when she ran, on account of being so top-heavy in front. The girl has a wonderful build, has she not? Like a show girl, almost.”

  She paused a moment, then added, “A dairy show.”

  Glancing at my watch, I diplomatically changed the subject by muttering that it was only a little after three. “Day and Hannegan don’t want their sleep disturbed until four,” I said. “Let’s go interrupt Isobel Jones’s nap.”

  Fausta raised one eyebrow. “Isobel? I did not know you and the lady were on a first-name basis.”

  “I’m an informal guy,” I growled. “I call all my mistresses by their first names, Miss Moreni.”

  We did not succeed in interrupting Isobel’s nap, because she wasn’t asleep when we arrived. Attired in a scanty sun suit, she was seated on the front porch sipping a highball, the color of which led me to believe it was the usual mixture of Scotch and bourbon. Fausta eyed the narrow halter and brief shorts of our hostess dubiously, unsuccessfully searched for boniness in Isobel’s soft shoulders, or the faint indication of wrinkles in her smooth throat, then greeted her with a sisterly smile in which there was only the barest suggestion of sororicide.

  Before returning the greeting with an identically sweet smile, Isobel subjected Fausta to an equally quick but thorough examination. I never fail to be fascinated by the coldly calculating way in which beautiful women study each other whenever they encounter, and momentarily it always sends a chill along my spine. If anyone ever looked me over with the expression used by the gentler sex in examining each other, I would back into a corner with a gun in my hand.

  I said, “We thought we’d have to wake you up, Mrs. Jones. Your husband told us you meant to take a nap.”

  “I planned to,” she said. “I hardly got two hours’ sleep last night, but the excitement and the ordeal of being questioned by the police has me so on edge, I doubt I’ll ever sleep again. Will you people have a drink?”

  Both Fausta and I shook our heads. Fausta seated herself in a canvas chair similar to the one Isobel occupied, and I sat in the green porch swing.

  I said, “I know you were answering questions all night, Mrs. Jones. But would it upset you to answer one or two more?”

  “Why, no. But I told Inspector Day everything I knew about poor Willard. I couldn’t sleep, you see, so I took a little walk and dropped in at the Sheridan merely because it was handy — ”

  “I heard that story,” I interrupted. “Let’s work on a different one. Let’s go back to the night Walter Lancaster was murdered.”

  She looked surprised. “Mr. Lancaster? But obviously Willard had nothing to do with that. You don’t think I did, do you?”

  “No. You know you rather amaze me, Isobel. You don’t seem in the least grief-stricken over Knight.”

  This got me two reactions: a smoldering look from Fausta for switching to Isobel’s first name, and a deprecating shrug from Isobel.

  “Of course I feel terrible about it,” the latter said in a tone lacking the slightest evidence of grief. “But after all I didn’t know Willard very well. He was my husband’s partner and all, but we didn’t move in the same social group, and actually he was more of a friend of my husband than of me.”

  I shook my head at her wonderingly. “Isobel, you’re one of the best actresses I ever encountered. In the face of all the evidence, do you really expect to convince either me or the cops you weren’t carrying on an affair with Knight?”

  She straightened her back indignantly. “Why, Manny Moon! To say a thing like that in my own house! Or on the porch of my house anyway. When I tell my husband …”

  “The cops already told him,” I said. “He doesn’t believe them, and after witnessing your convincing performance, I understand why. But I’m not your husband, and personally I don’t care how many lovers you have. I also have no intention of spoiling your husband’s beautiful faith in you. All I want is verification of some things I’ve already figured out, and only oral verification. You don’t have to sign anything, and if you object to a witness, Fausta can go inside while we talk.”

  Isobel said primly, “There is nothing I have to say I can’t say in front of a witness.”

  “All right,” I said resignedly. “Let’s start with the morning after Lancaster’s death. Willard Knight’s wife says that when Willard saw the morning paper, at first he acted elated, then upset, and when she questioned him, he refused to tell what it was in the news that affected him, but he did remark it was a mixed blessing. Obviously what he saw was the news of Lancaster’s death.”

  Isobel looked politely interested, but offered no comment.

  “What elated him,” I went on, “was the realization that Lancaster had not had time before he died to make public certain irregularities he had uncovered in a firm both Knight and Lancaster held large interest in.”

  Isobel said, “I know nothing of Mr. Knight’s business affairs. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know anything about my husband’s.”

  “Then I’ll bring you up to date. Knight had misappropriated seventy thousand dollars of the company’s money in order to speculate, and stood to lose it if Lancaster made his announcement. Lancaster’s sudden death gave him time to dispose of the stock and return the money to the company account.” I examined her for a trace of surprise, found none and asked, “Doesn’t it even worry you that Knight nearly bankrupted your husband?”

  “Harlan told me about it over the phone,” she said serenely. “Since Willard managed to return everything before he died, I can’t see any cause for worry.”

  I conceded that hole. “Then we come to Knight’s second reaction. When the first wave of elation passed, he became upset. And the more he thought about it, the more upset he became. Finally he grew so upset, he decided to run and hide. Know why?”

  “I assume because he thought he might be suspected of the murder. I seem to re
call your mentioning he had threatened Mr. Lancaster.”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t only that. Innocent people don’t run, even when they know they’ll be suspected. Knight had two other reasons for running. First, because he couldn’t afford to be delayed even for questioning until he unloaded that stock, and second because he didn’t want it known where he had actually been when Lancaster was shot.”

  Isobel’s bored attention settled on her drink. “He was with you, of course,” I said. “As he probably always was when he told his wife he had a board meeting. I imagine if we got Mrs. Knight and your husband to compare notes, we’d find Willard’s board meetings always coincided with your husband’s trips out of town.”

  She said quickly, “I thought you weren’t interested in destroying my husband’s beautiful faith.”

  I grinned at her. “I’m not. I just want my hypotheses verified. When you can’t get verification from one source, you try another. And beautiful as your husband’s faith is, I have an idea a session with me and Mrs. Knight would shake it.” I let her absorb this a few moments, then added, “Of course, if I could get a few halfway sensible answers out of you, it wouldn’t be necessary to bring Mrs. Knight and Harlan together.”

  Isobel swished ice around in her glass, looked thoughtful, and cast a surreptitious side glance at Fausta.

  “I will step into your front room,” Fausta said dryly, rising from her chair.