The One Dollar Rip-Off

by Ralph Dennis

“The check to Bottoms was written on a different bank.”

  Temple nodded. “That’s the frightening part of i

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Close the account down,” I said.

  “It’s not that simple.” Temple carried his cup to the sink and rinsed it out. For a moment I thought he’d ask for another cup, but I saw the decision against it. It was a godawful coffee. “Until we’ve done a bit of accounting it’s hard to know exactly what the take from the First Federal of Boston is. It might be as high as six hundred and fifty thousand. We’re fairly certain that this amount was drawn out in five checks. Checks that were written on our computer and authorized on our check writer. The largest check was for almost two hundred thousand and the smallest was for fifty-five thousand.”

  “Out of one bank?”

  “That’s another reason why I’m in Georgia. Do you know a town named Tiflon?”

  I nodded. It was a town of about thirty thousand up near the South Carolina border. On weekends,, the farmers came to town and the population went up to sixty thousand or so.

  “The five large checks went through the Citizens and Farmers Bank in Tiflon.”

  “I know a lawyer moved there a few years …”

  A short, sharp motion of his hand stopped me. “That’s not my main concern. The bank in Tiflon and what happened there is a matter for the federal government and the bonding companies. It might be in the courts for years.”

  I found my smokes on the kitchen counter next to the radio. I took my time lighting one. Maybe it was just the way his mind jumped around. I was having trouble following him. All right. Back to the original problem. The two-thousand-dollar check.

  “In a rip-off like this,” I said, “it’s modest and a waste of time to go to all that trouble and write a two-thousand-dollar check.”

  “Exactly.”

  “In the other operation the smallest check was for fifty-five thousand. Why two thousand this time?”

  Temple waited. He was going to let me play out my string. I turned to Hump. A shake of his head meant that he wasn’t going to be any help.

  “The other bank the two-thousand-dollar check was drawn against … ?”

  “Bay City National,” Temple said.

  “No phony checks have been presented for payment yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  I nodded. “And you have a feeling that the scam is over, that there is a very good chance that they’ve packed it in?”

  “The timing is bad,” Temple said. “A man bright enough to set up this operation would be bright enough to know that we’re alerted now. If they were going to gut both accounts, it would have happened by now.”

  “But you need to be sure.”

  “Let me put it this way.” He leaned forward and placed all his weight on his hands and pushed himself to his feet. “I spent twenty years building up this company. I’ve been taken, I’ve been made a fool of. When the word of this gets out, it’s going to hurt the company. The bonding company will try to prove that we didn’t exercise the proper precautions. All that. Fine. I can weather that. The real damage will be to the reputation of the management. I can handle that part, if I have to fire everybody from the steno pool up until I lean the bloody ax against my door and start over. And in two or three years, the case will be out of court and I can start rebuilding.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “I want to be sure that another rash of bogus checks doesn’t get presented …”

  “Close the Bay City National account.”

  “That is the one thing I won’t do.”

  His temper flared at me. It burned me and I felt like backing away from him. I wanted to tell him to take his problems somewhere else.

  “There is no way I can deny that I’ve been taken for more than half a million dollars. That’s common knowledge. It will be in the newspapers in the next day or two. But I will be goddamned if I will admit that someone …”

  “Could try to take you for a million or a million and a half?”

  He nodded.

  “That could be expensive pride,” I said. I felt childish, as childish as he was. He was locked in and now I was baiting him. I said, “Back in a minute,” and I left the kitchen and went into the bathroom. I ran water in the basin and ducked my face in it a couple of times. Not that it really did any good. But I wrote Be Calm on the blackboard two hundred times and dried my face and returned to the kitchen.

  “There had to be an inside man,” I said.

  Temple reached into his breast pocket and brought out a small photo. It was about the size of a passport snapshot and there was the mark of the paper clip all down the left side of it. “Eric Pender. He was with the company for eleven years. Harvard Business. Good family. A model employee.”

  I looked at the photograph. It was a narrow dour face, thin lips and neat black hair. Dark-rimmed glasses covered stunned, inward-looking eyes. I passed the photo to Hump.

  “Married?” Hump asked after a slow look.

  “No. Eric lived with and took care of his mother until she died back in the summer.”

  “All this talk,” I said, “so I’ve got to guess he dropped over the edge somewhere.”

  “What?”

  “Eric hauled ass,” I said.

  “Eleven … no, twelve days ago, Eric asked for and got a week of vacation. An aunt in Denver was ill and he was the last of the family. It was not the best time. We were still trying to deal with the problems that the fire had caused. Still, it seemed necessary. At the end of the week he called and said that the aunt had died and that he needed two or three days to handle the funeral and close out her affairs.”

  “And when the overdraft showed up?”

  “We tried to contact him at the address he’d given us in Denver. There was, of course, no such address.”

  “Figures,” I said. I drew the photo toward me and gave it another look. “Can I keep this?”

  He said I could. There were other copies.

  “Odd you’d come to us,” I said. “There are other private agencies that specialize in this kind of hunt-and-find.”

  I hadn’t seen him take it out. The first time I saw the checkbook he lifted his hand and opened it. He unclipped a fountain pen and wrote for a few seconds. “It’s not odd at all when you consider the value I place on results. Without knowing anything about this business, you’ve recovered a check worth two thousand dollars. That impressed me. I have better hopes for the results now that you have some understanding of the matter.”

  “You don’t know anything about us,” I said.

  “I know the worst.”

  “Bowser?”

  “The same. He said you two have an old whore’s past and future. Nothing at all.” Temple capped the pen and clipped it to his shirt pocket. “He said more than that.”

  That was to be expected.

  Temple tore off the check and passed it to me. I read it. Two thousand dollars. I passed it on to Hump.

  “I like to make up my own mind,” Temple said.

  “You want us to find those checks?”

  “Or I want your firm assurance that there are no more checks. One or the other.”

  I lit another smoke and looked at Hump. Hump passed the check back to me. I could keep it or return it. That was up to me.

  “Are you interested?” Temple asked.

  I anchored the check to the kitchen table with the sugar dish. “This buys you a week. After that we decide where we are and if it’s worth going on.”

  Temple agreed.

  I was still barefooted. I stood in the doorway and watched Temple do a lumbering sprint toward the rented LTD parked behind my Ford in the driveway. Temple was halfway to the LTD when the engine turned over and the windshield wipers moved. The other windows were fogged and I couldn’t see the man inside. If it was a man.

  I closed the door and went into the kitchen. “The other person in the LTD … ?”

  “His driver or his male secretary or whatever
,” Hump said.

  “That’s money,” I said.

  Hump opened the refrigerator and got out a can of Bud. “It too early for you?”

  I shook my head. “But I can’t drink it in the shower.”

  “Maybe you can’t …” he said.

  After the shower, I dressed in my best dark brown suit and a white shirt. I knotted on a conservative tie and got my raincoat from the closet. I dropped the coat over the back of the kitchen chair and looked in the refrigerator. There wasn’t anything to drink in there but soured orange juice and beer.

  “Bottoms is all we’ve got,” I said.

  “A look in the apartment?”

  “If we can.” I put the other cups in the sink and cleared the table. “I think we showed a lot of restraint. Neither of us said anything about that sheaf of checks Bottoms had the other night. If it was a sheaf in that envelope.”

  “More than one,” Hump said.

  “At least that.” I struggled into my raincoat.

  Hump seemed to notice the suit and the tie for the first time. “You all dressed up for some reason?”

  “Some scam or other if I need it,” I said.

  I parked across the street from the duplex on St. Charles. Hump stayed in the car. I trotted across the street and long-jumped the flooded gutter. I stopped on the walk and looked up the drive. There was a blue VW far up the drive beside the house. I ran up the walk and stopped on the porch long enough to stamp my feet and try to shake some of the rain off my shoes.

  I could see light beyond the blinds in the apartment next to the one where Joe Bottoms had lived. Pasted to the mailbox beside the door was a business card with the previous address blacked out with a few careless pen strokes. MARY SUE BASCUM.

  I touched the buzzer. While I waited, I dug the badly crumpled card out of my wallet. The card identified me as an insurance agent with Nationwide. The card was so dog-eared that, one time when I’d been at Marcy’s, I’d ironed the back of it with her steam iron.

  Two locks. I heard both of them pulled back and the rattle of the door chain when it was attached. The door opened about two inches. “What do you want?”

  The smell of her first. The scent of bath oil and the stifling cloud of dusting powder. I had more trouble with powder than with perfume or cologne. “It’s about Mr. Joseph Bottoms.”

  “You must not read the paper,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  I angled to the left a few inches so that I could see her. I still couldn’t see much. What I could see of her face led me to believe that she was in her early thirties, that she was slender, and that her blond hair was worn in those freak little curls.

  I passed her the Nationwide card. I waited while she read it. I could see one eye and when she lowered the eyelid I could see some blue or blue-green makeup on it.

  “He was insured with your company?”

  “That’s right. For more than five years.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “The beneficiary is an aunt in Detroit. We’ve been in touch with her and she’s given us authorization to pick up his copy of the policy.”

  “There’s no trick in this?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “It’s only a formality.”

  “And this isn’t some way of cheating … ?”

  I gave her my best disarming smile and just in case that wasn’t good enough I threw in a boyish shake of my head. “If I find the policy, I’ll be happy to give you a receipt for it.” A beat. “Of course, this assumes that you have a key to the apartment.”

  “The rental agent, Mr. Borman, left a key with me last night. He said some family might be coming by for his things. I didn’t know they had to come all the way from Detroit.”

  “I’m only interested in his copy of the policy.”

  “And you won’t leave before …” She broke it off. “I have to make sure that you don’t take anything out of the apartment.”

  “I’ll wait for you,” I said.

  She closed the door. She returned about half a minute later and passed me a key on a tag through the opening. “I’ll be over as soon as I’ve finished dressing.”

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  The door closed. I heard the locks slide home. I quick-walked for the Bottoms half of the duplex. I didn’t know how much time I had. I’d have to use what there was. I unlocked the door and went in. I hit the light switch on the way by and headed straight for the closet. I stood in the closet opening and played it back through my mind. Joe Bottoms had stood where I was now. He’d reached up with his right hand … up and to the right. I got on my tiptoes and ran my hand the length of the top shelf. I came away with nothing but dust. The dust fell on me in swirls. I stepped away, coughed, and moved on to the clothing. I patted down each shirt, each pair of trousers, each jacket.

  Zero. I turned away. The chest of drawers. I went through that next. The top drawer held socks, T-shirts, and boxer shorts. The middle drawer showed neatly stacked shirts. The bottom one contained half a dozen sweaters. Off to the right, under a blue cardigan I found a neat stack of letters held together by a rubber band. A flip through these. All from the same girl in Greensboro, North Carolina. Edna Reese. All with a dormitory address at UNC-G. Probably his love life.

  One eye on the closed door. I didn’t know how long I had. Maybe a few more minutes. Maybe no time at all. The hurry was in me. I sprinted for the bathroom. Not in the medicine cabinet. Shaving gear and one sad unopened three-pack of Trojans.

  The kitchen. Rattling through the battered collection of plates and stainless steel that came with the apartment. Two saucepans and one skillet. Nothing. I whirled and looked at the bed. It was still unmade. I was about to head there. I could check under the mattress and inside the pillowcases. Just on impulse, out of no more than my usual curiosity, I jerked open the door to the small refrigerator and looked inside. A carton of eggs, some bacon, almost half a gallon of orange juice. I was closing the door when something caught my eye. I leaned over and pulled out the clear plastic vegetable crisper. There it was. The envelope. Right on top of a browning half head of lettuce.

  It had the slime feel to it. Holding it, I jammed the crisper shut with my right foot and slammed the refrigerator door. Flap sealed. I tore away the end and looked inside. It wasn’t the thick sheaf of checks I’d expected. Four or five. I didn’t have time to spread them out and total them. I unbuttoned my shirt right at my navel. I worked the envelope in and past my side, until it fitted into the small of my back. It rested there, long and thin and flat and cold as an ice cube.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the woman next door to arrive. She’d dressed in a plum-colored pantsuit and a yellow slicker and rain hat. “Did you find it?”

  “No sign of the policy,” I said. At least that much was true. I hadn’t found any kind of policy. “But we’ll pay the claim. There won’t be any trouble about that.”

  An abstract nod. A border of those blond curls bounced like spring wire. “I guess he wasn’t expecting anyone to see the apartment.”

  “I guess not.”

  She gave the room one last sweep with her eyes. “You through here?”

  I said I was. She waited on the porch while I switched off the lights and locked the door. I returned the key to her and followed her across the porch to her door. “Did you know him well?”

  “Just to speak to in passing. He tried to come on but I put him off. Those young types don’t interest me.” Her eyes brushed me, read all there was, and went blank. I wasn’t her type either. “He was awfully young.”

  “All of us were at one time,” I said.

  I could almost feel her heart stop. A deep breath and it was past and she’d decided I was talking about myself. Thirty or so was still young. Over forty was next door to dead.

  “He have any friends? People you saw him with?”

  A bad move. Instead of my two steps to the front and three to the side I’d stepped directly on her big toe. “Why do you ask?”


  “I’m still thinking about the policy. He might have left his papers with a friend.”

  It didn’t satisfy her.

  “Or maybe he had a safety-deposit box.”

  Confusion. She couldn’t hold suspicion and one reasonable thought in her head at the same time. “He had some visitors now and then. Once or twice they had loud arguments late at night.”

  “You see them?”

  “I was in bed. I wasn’t about to get out of bed and look at them when they left.”

  “Male voices?”

  She nodded. “And one of them, from his voice, I’d say he was black.”

  That would fit. The black in the parking lot perhaps.

  I thanked her and watched her enter her apartment and close and lock the door behind her. I was in the middle of the street, getting wet and not liking it, when I realized she hadn’t given me my Nationwide Insurance card back. Shit. Now I’d have to have another batch printed up.

  It was a late lunch. Frank Temple, Hump, and I were in the Polaris Room, the bubble-topped restaurant and lounge high above the Regency. We’d told the hostess we’d be ordering lunch and we’d been given a table next to the window. The Room turned slowly, one full circuit about every hour, and we sat and watched the city under construction. The drinks came. Vodka martinis all the way around. Temple had a sip of his before he said, “I’d like to see what you’ve found.”

  “That’s why I’m here.” I reached into my raincoat and brought out the envelope. I placed it on the tablecloth next to his elbow. I didn’t have to read the bad news with him. I’d let Hump do the driving across town. It had given me time to study the checks a number of times. All were written on the Bay City National Bank and, discounting the odd cents involved, the five checks totaled $65,000. The payee, on each check, was left blank and the date hadn’t been typed in.

  “One theory went out the window,” Temple said. He returned the checks to the envelope and left it in front of him. “Counting the check the police have, this second rip-off is headed toward seventy thousand and we don’t know if this is the end.”

  “Notice the sequence?”

  He had. The check we’d taken from Joe Bottoms had been numbered 223455. The five I’d found in the vegetable crisper had followed that one. 223456 through 223460.