by Emma Lathen
“If you say so.” Dick’s furrowed brow made this statement more a grudging concession than wholehearted agreement. “Then Yves’ only part in the whole deal was to run around the Village switching a couple of checks whenever he got the chance?”
Thatcher shook his head. “His role was much more central than that. Bisson was ideally situated at his travel agency not only to swindle a few tour groups, but to choose charters that began their trip at Lake Placid before going on to other cities. And I doubt if his activities in the Village were as casual as you think. I’m sure he made an effort to select athletes who were planning further travel. We’ve already heard about one who was going on to the West Coast and another who was continuing to Japan. Hathaway wanted to reinforce his plan with geographic dispersal of the fakes.”
“The way you describe it, it sounds surefire. But you caught on to Roger, didn’t you?” Dick blurted, coming to the root of his objection. “So it wasn’t such a wonderful scheme after all.”
“I neglected to mention the other essential ingredient in Hathaway’s script. It was all this,” said Thatcher, waving an arm broadly.
His gesture encompassed the scene before them, the thousands of spectators lining the lakeside, the flags flying in massed array, the torches whose flickering beams were reflected by the ice, the band playing its penultimate selection.
“Under Hathaway’s original timetable, he was like a man committing a crime in a city that’s due to be hit by a nuclear bomb. Clues, witnesses, and victims will all be blown sky high. This little world that has been created in Lake Placid is very temporary. Do you realize that, if Hathaway’s substitution had taken place today, the operators at the Sloan would only now be realizing that something was wrong? By the time the police began asking questions, this little world would have disappeared, scattered to the four corners of the globe. And for weeks fake Eurochecks would be surfacing in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. Small wonder if the authorities believed a major European ring was operating in the United States.”
“And all this fell flat because Yves made a mechanical mistake in paying for a snowmobile?”
Gunther Euler sounded so regretful that he would inevitably have drawn Everett Gabler’s fire if the field had not already been preempted.
“Hathaway is a fool,” Everett said severely. “To develop such a plan and fail to abide by it!”
“He is certainly an incorrigible optimist,” Thatcher began before the blank faces of his audience told him they were not following. He realized he would have to explain in more detail. “Timing was too critical a factor in the plot to be dispensed with. After Hathaway received that warning from the bank at Saranac, he should have told Bisson to play the injured innocent and abandoned the whole attempt.”
Tilly shook her head sadly. “Instead of which he decided he couldn’t rely on Yves and therefore had to kill him.”
Thatcher thought of Roger Hathaway’s talking jag at the police station, the words tumbling out in a torrent of grievance, justification, self-exoneration. Nobody was supposed to be hurt, he had said over and over again. Murder had never entered his mind. But what else could he do? Everything had gone wrong, the fates had conspired against him, and it just wasn’t fair.
“That’s what Hathaway says and, for all I know, he believes it. But I don’t. I think he was consumed by the goal of that $500,000 beyond common sense, beyond prudence, and beyond humanity. No matter what the cost, he was unwilling to stop. And on the surface, the murder seemed to accomplish its purpose. If anything, the disclosures about Yves Bisson tended to support the European theory. Nonetheless Everett is right. It was a colossal mistake. It gave the police, and the Sloan, a breathing space while witnesses were still available. Captain Ormsby was able to isolate the Saranac incident, we were able to bring in Milliken’s crew, and the perpetrator was identified as a member of the Olympic family. On top of all that the blizzard arrived, freezing everybody into place for an additional 48 hours.”
Tilly had been listening intently to every word, a puzzled frown growing by the minute. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said quietly. “You thought the criminal was a European, that it was someone who went snowmobiling at Saranac, and somebody who knew more about banking procedures than Yves Bisson. Mr. Thatcher, did you suspect me of being a murderer?”
There was nothing for it but to tell the truth. “I did wonder,” he confessed ruefully. “Particularly after your first performance at Whiteface. I thought perhaps you had drugged yourself in order to have an excuse for fleeing.”
The storm broke over his head immediately. Dick Noyes and, surprisingly, Gunther were both outraged.
“You’ve got to be crazy! Tilly shoot somebody in cold blood?” Dick gasped. “You only have to look at her.”
Everett’s meticulously organized exculpation was brutally brushed aside.
“You’re like all the rest,” Gunther charged. “It’s easier to find a scapegoat than to clean up the mess.”
“Do you realize she could have killed herself on Whiteface? That course isn’t for babies.”
The only calm one was Tilly, and it took her some time to restrain her supporters. “Well, at least it’s a logical explanation for my being drugged,” she was able to say at last. “And it’s the first one I’ve heard. I still don’t know why it happened.”
Thatcher’s notion that Tilly was quicker-witted than her companions was confirmed. Everett, of course, did not have to fall back on native endowment. He firmly believed that anybody employed by a bank could achieve a level of rational analysis denied his fellows. Roger Hathaway was simply the exception that proved the rule.
“Hathaway was in a panic,” Thatcher explained. “You see, he made his substitution in the vault as quickly as possible, which meant that most of the counterfeits had already been signed with fictitious names. Milliken and his crew could have looked forever for Ludwig Mueller, Etienne Dumont, and Elsa Grunbacher. But it would have been overly suspicious if none of the payees was identifiable. So Hathaway brought along a handful of blanks that night and filled in the names of athletes at Olympic Village who had cashed bona fide checks that day. Of course under his original plan the athletes would have been long gone before questions were asked. But under the new circumstances he came a cropper in at least two cases. With a West German, he signed the wrong denomination. But you were the real problem.”
“Why?” Tilly demanded, exasperated. “It wasn’t as if I was the only one complaining that my check was good. He told me himself everybody was saying the same thing.”
Thatcher smiled at her. “He was lying. Everybody else was making a general statement they couldn’t support. You were very specific. In the first place, you could follow your check from issuance to the moment of cashing and kept records to prove it had the same number all the way. Second, unlike most of the others, you cashed it at the Sloan instead of a commercial establishment. So there was no grey area for hanky-panky. And finally, your worst offense, I am afraid, was that you work for a bank. Given enough time to concentrate, you were bound to figure out the substitution had occurred on the other side of the teller’s counter. Really, all things considered, it’s surprising that Hathaway didn’t try to throttle you on the spot.”
The pleasantry misfired. It would be a long time before Tilly Lowengard recognized any material for badinage in her encounter with Roger Hathaway.
“Oh yes?” she said, tossing her head so violently that Dick removed his injuries to a safe distance. “I’d have liked to see him try. But shooting from ambush and poison were more his style.”
Everett was every bit as serious. “The data supports your view. And of course he had to work with what was at hand. He happened to have his allergy medicine so he dosed you with an indiscriminate amount and hoped for the best. I suppose, John, that is what you meant by calling him an incorrigible optimist.”
“Yes. Every threat to Hathaway produced a spur-of-the-moment response that ignored wider imp
lications. He killed Bisson on that principle instead of back pedaling. With Tilly, he didn’t care if she crashed on the slope or was expelled from the Olympics, so long as she went away. Naturally he didn’t bargain on the storm making her removal impossible.”
“He didn’t bargain on Bernard or Egon either,” Dick said, beginning to cheer up.
“Who could?” Thatcher retorted, but even as the words left his mouth he was having second thoughts. With individual affirmative action on the rise, the range of probabilities in any given situation had expanded alarmingly.
The young men burst into loud guffaws at the recollection of Melville dangling helplessly over Whiteface. Tilly recalled them to order once more. To her the aftermath of her expulsion was not high jinks with cable cars, but a baffling period of safety exploding into sudden peril.
“I still don’t understand why Roger Hathaway tried to shoot me at the end. After all, I’d been here for over two days after he drugged me. We met each other at the disco a couple of times, nothing happened, and then, out of the blue, he wants to kill me.”
Thatcher set himself to correcting this egocentric approach. “Quite a lot happened, although it did not appear to involve you. From Hathaway’s viewpoint the drugging had worked. You had other things to think about, and your supporters assumed a competitor was responsible. Nonetheless he was slowly going mad as he watched the progress of the investigation.”
The athletes were all members of their own generation, adhering to its shibboleths and conventions as rigorously as any young Victorian. To them it was axiomatic that officialdom, most especially the police, was inept at best and corrupt at worst.
“What progress?” scoffed Euler. “The police kept harping on that trip to Twin Forks and Hathaway wasn’t even there!”
Gabler frowned at him. “Considering that of the seven survivors from that trip, five were busily suppressing certain facets of their activities, it is scarcely surprising the police were misled.”
“You’re underestimating Captain Ormsby’s results,” Thatcher added more temperately. “By concentrating on the Saranac trip he managed to extract a damagingly clear account of Yves Bisson’s last day, quite apart from reducing the number of suspects. But what was really tearing Hathaway apart was the Sloan’s performance. We had managed to get a crew into Lake Placid just before the blizzard, and they spent 48 hours cross-examining all the athletes and sales clerks who would have been unavailable under the original timetable.”
Dick Noyes had an objection. “Roger didn’t look like he was coming apart at the seams to me.”
“In his position it was normal to be very worried. He was a bank manager sitting on top of a major loss. But consider what he had to put up with. He had to stand there and watch while the European theory went down the drain, while Everett and I gradually became convinced that the murderer was part of the Olympic family, while Milliken proved that substitutions occurred after Eurochecks were cashed in stores. By the time you delivered the death blows in the bank this morning, he was already desperate.”
Dick and Tilly were dumfounded. For them the scene in the bank was already a towering personal landmark, their first quarrel, and one of such shattering dimensions it had threatened their entire future.
“What did it have to do with Roger?” Dick asked as resentfully as if Hathaway had intruded into the bedroom.
“I barely noticed he was there,” said Tilly with patent sincerity.
Slowly Thatcher listed the damning items they had been too preoccupied to notice. “Hathaway knew that German marks and French francs were going to be investigated before Swiss francs. He thought he had some time in hand until Tilly marched up to the counter and told the world that her first Eurocheck had been good right up to the moment it reached a Sloan teller. On top of that, she had acquired far too much information about the chemical analysis of her specimen. Enough to exonerate her competition and narrow down the group that could possibly have drugged her.”
Tilly was staring at him. “But I narrowed it down to the ones who were at Saranac.”
“Yes, and promptly appealed to Hathaway for confirmation because he was sitting right beside you,” Thatcher reminded her. “Whereupon Dick drew the proper conclusion that the murderer had drugged you. No wonder Hathaway urged you to go ahead and race. He had decided to kill you before Milliken got to you, particularly when it came out that you weren’t even leaving the country, but going to Colorado instead.”
“Yes, she is,” Dick said proudly. “We’re flying out tomorrow.”
This was quite enough to divert both of them.
“Dick says I’ll love it.” Tilly was so excited she was unconsciously yanking and twisting the gold medal still draped around her neck. “It seems it’s just like Switzerland.”
From their dossiers Thatcher knew that Dick had never been in Europe and Tilly had never been west of New York. How had they ever managed to come up with this conclusion?
“There are mountains and snow,” Tilly continued rhapsodically, “and pastures filled with Holsteins.”
Suddenly Richard Noyes, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, emerged.
“No,” he said firmly. “Not dairy cattle. Beef cattle.”
For a moment Tilly faltered. But then, “Well, I expect it’s all the same,” she concluded buoyantly.
Thatcher decided he had been too captious. To the eyes of young love, Colorado and Switzerland probably were identical. Gunther Euler’s eyes, however, had been fixed unwaveringly on Roger Hathaway’s get-rich-quick scheme. He was the only one not satisfied by Thatcher’s recitation.
“I understand what Hathaway did,” he said heavily. “But how did you find out? You must have known when you went to Whiteface to warn Tilly.”
“Oh, yes,” Thatcher agreed. “I’m only surprised that we didn’t tumble to it sooner. There was never any doubt about the qualifications of the murderer. He had to be able to ski, he had to have some knowledge of the financial system, he had to have sufficient European connections to contact Bisson and, of course, he had to be a man who wanted money.”
He came under fire from three directions at once.
“No wonder you didn’t think of Roger,” said Dick. Then, before this could be mistaken as a tribute to character, he scraped his chin reflectively and went on. “The guy I was chasing was such a good skier I never figured it could be anyone that old.”
“Why should he need money?” queried Tilly. “I thought he had a promising future at the Sloan. Wasn’t the Lake Placid job a plum?”
“How could he have European connections? He gave up skiing before he was international class,” Gunther objected.
Thatcher stared them all down. “The man who ambushed Yves Bisson had to be at home on skis, he did not have to be a champion. And there are other forms of foreign experience besides competitive athletics. Hathaway had been stationed at the Sloan’s London branch for several years. During that period he went to winter sports resorts on the continent. We all know he was at Innsbruck. He had ample opportunity to meet Bisson.”
Gunther and Dick were silenced, but not Tilly. “You said he needed money,” she persisted.
“I said he wanted money.” Thatcher paused, then saw an obvious parallel. “In the course of investigating Yves Bisson we heard a good deal about young athletes being exposed to the jet set and wanting to become a permanent part of it. The same could be said of Roger Hathaway. While he was in London he was married to a rich wife, moved in a circle of rich people, took part in the golden life. All that came to an end with his divorce, and he was back to working for a living. Yes, you were right when you said he had a promising future, but he wasn’t willing to wait for it. He wanted a golden present.”
The opportunity for moralizing was irresistible to Everett Gabler. “An unhealthy attitude for a young banker, as well as a young athlete,” he remarked to the surrounding countryside. “Look where it has led Hathaway.”
Given the provocation, Gunther Euler was mildness its
elf. “At least this athlete doesn’t think in terms of robbery and murder. I leave that to you bankers. And as long as I don’t break any laws and I don’t hurt anybody, I don’t see why you should complain if I make a good thing out of my ski jumping.”
His untroubled assurance was a far cry from the defiant cockiness he had exhibited that morning, and Tilly was swift to guess the reason. “Gunther! Does that mean your deal with Wennerdonk’s is going through?”
“They showed the 90-meter live on German television, and that made me a national hero.” Euler grinned broadly. “Herr Wennerdonk and I signed the contract at dinner just now.”
Tilly was delighted. “But how wonderful! Why in the world didn’t you tell us?”
“Because you were getting a gold medal, Tilly. I wasn’t going to butt in on your big moment.”
Not for the first time Thatcher noticed that success sweetens almost everybody’s disposition. But Gunther Euler was still a novice at consideration for others and, when Tilly vented her feelings by hugging him violently, he was relieved to return to the business at hand.
“All right,” he said sternly enough to cover his recent lapse, “you’ve said that Hathaway could meet the qualifications. But how did you pinpoint him? Especially with the police concentrating on Saranac?”
“That concentration paid off. Captain Ormsby was working on the assumption there was no reasonable way for the murderer to learn of Bisson’s mistake except through seeing it. But when Coach Vaux was questioned after his arrest, he produced a surprising observation. He said that Yves Bisson had stopped worrying the night before his murder. Ormsby was willing to modify his original opinion. He reasoned that perhaps Bisson had confided in his confederate and been reassured.”
