The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  Lansing frowned. “I don’t follow that,” he said.

  “Blackmail,” Gibby explained. “Albert Gleason saw and heard. He saw enough and heard enough to learn that Homer Coleman had discovered the unknown crime—the crime I mentioned before, the one that is the beginning and source of all these other crimes. He learned enough to know that it had been a profitable crime and that therefore the knowledge of that crime in the hands of a man of less worthy character than Homer Coleman might be turned to a considerable profit. Albert Gleason put money before justice. He might have been forewarned by what happened to Homer Coleman, who put mercy before justice, but this Gleason was one of your stupid smarties. He thought he could handle it and he outsmarted himself.”

  Lansing lined the thing up for himself. “There is this original crime we know nothing of,” he said. “Homer was killed because he learned about it and he tried to straighten the man out without taking the matter to the police. Homer had too great a faith in the goodness of man. He would try to reform anybody. He wouldn’t want to punish anybody.”

  “But he wouldn’t let a wrong go on,” Gibby said, “once he was aware of it. He would insist that it stop. He would insist that restitution be made.”

  “Restitution?” Lansing said. “You did speak of discrepancies on our books, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” said Gibby. “He was killed because he would accept nothing but that this criminal change his ways and make restitution.”

  “Yes,” Lansing agreed. “In his place I should have called the police. Homer was too kind. He tried to do something for this person and he was killed for his pains.”

  “Exactly so,” Gibby said

  Lansing nodded. “The keys were taken,” he said, “because the killer, having removed the man who knew of his crime, then had to remove any documentary record of, or reference to, his crime. Later he attacked Miss Salvaggi because he did not know whether or not, since she had been Mr. Coleman’s secretary, she might be privy to the knowledge Mr. Coleman had of him.” He turned to Rose. “Miss Salvaggi,” he asked, “do you know of any case where Mr. Coleman was trying to set things to rights without calling in the police?”

  Rose shook her head. “No, Mr. Lansing,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “The killer thought you might,” Lansing said. “He thought you might have gone to Mr. Coleman’s house to pick up the documentary evidence against him. He thought you might have such documentary evidence hidden in your apartment.”

  “I suppose so,” Rose sighed.

  “And that leaves Albert Gleason,” Gibby said, “taking up the reins again. Gleason was a fool. Gleason tried blackmail, and Gleason was killed. The killer had planned that this killing, like his other crimes, would also be quite blind, the apparent work of a deranged mind; but then an opportunity presented itself, and we are dealing with a criminal who never passes up an opportunity. Gert’s friend, Mickey, came storming into the office, breathing dire threats against Albert Gleason. That was providential. The worst had already happened to Albert, but here was Mickey just screaming for the blame. Mickey was carefully brought to my attention. The killer thought it a fine idea to set Mickey up as a red herring.”

  Nicholas Cooper Lansing looked at Gibby in astonishment and consternation. “It was I,” he said, “who called the young man to your attention.”

  “And it was the killer who called him to your attention, Mr. Lansing.”

  Lansing frowned. “This is a serious charge, Mr. Gibson. Do you have proof?”

  Gibby swept up the notes I had collected for him. “I have the materials for proof in these,” he said. “These should show that one of the people in this room has checking accounts in more than one Fiveborough National branch.” He paused and read the notes. “They seem to show two people,” he said. “One of them is Mr. Wilberforce. We will consider Mr. Wilberforce first.”

  “An account in the branch near my office,” Wilberforce said, “for business transactions, and an account in the branch near my home for personal transactions. Nothing unusual about that.”

  “Nothing,” Gibby agreed. “What is more important is that you are in no position to use your two accounts for anything more than convenience. We have one man here for whom two accounts, one in each of two Fiveborough National branches, could be more than a convenience. For him they could be a source of profit. One of the tellers recognized among us here one John Jameson. Since there is no John Jameson here, I would like to have that teller in and have him point out to us the man he calls John Jameson.”

  Nicholas Cooper Lansing looked hard at Sully and glowered. “You?” he asked.

  Sully squirmed and Gibby answered for him.

  “Yes, Mr. Lansing, you see the pattern,” Gibby said. “Only the chief of the Branch Banking department could make a profit out of having accounts under aliases in various Fiveborough National branches. But we can have the teller in. We don’t have to guess at it.”

  Sully looked Gibby squarely in the eye. “No need to do that,” he said. “It is my account. If you look up the file on that account you will find that I was the reference for Mr. Jameson. I opened that account, using the name of Jameson, to test out our system here in the bank. I was preparing a report for Mr. Lansing.”

  Gibby looked to Lansing.

  “I had asked for no such report,” Lansing said.

  “I was doing it on my own,” said Sully. “I had been offered a vice-presidency. I didn’t want it on seniority alone. I wanted to do something to earn it.’

  “What about your profit?” Gibby asked.

  Sully exploded. “Profit,” he growled. “I have nothing to do with purchasing and I have nothing to do with loans or discounts. Nobody even would offer me a bribe or anything like that.”

  “And you have nothing to do with cash or negotiable paper of any kind,” Gibby added. “You never handle anything but canceled checks and they are worthless. They are also dull. Your good friend Homer Coleman wants to give you an opportunity to better yourself. He wants to lift you out of the poorest job held by any employee of your rank in the whole bank. He wants to make you a vice-president, but you won’t have it. You like it where you are. You want to stay there.”

  “I’m not ambitious,” Sully growled. “I didn’t want anything I hadn’t earned.”

  “You’re a greedy thief,” Gibby snarled. “Mr. Coleman was a kindly man. He wanted to understand you and your problems. It worried him that you weren’t ambitious. He wanted to know why. Once he started thinking that way, he learned why. It was simple enough. You had two checking accounts. You would draw a check on account A for let us say $100. You would deposit it in account B. The money was credited to you in account B and the canceled check was sent to Branch Banking for collection. That meant it came to your desk. Before you distributed the work to your boys and girls, you took from the bundle of the branch in which you had account B, the check you had drawn. You pocketed that check, destroyed it, and flushed it down the drain. Then you gave the bundles out to your people. The branch where you had account B was informed that they had reported $100 too much for collection. They checked and could find no error in their books. It was thrown into the shortage and overage account. The check you had destroyed naturally never got through to the branch where you have account A and was, therefore, never charged against that account. You had robbed the bank of $100.”

  Sully turned to Lansing. “Mr. Lansing,” he said. “I came to work for you when I was seventeen. I’ve been here ever since. You know me, Mr. Lansing. Are you going to believe a pipe dream like that when there isn’t any proof to support it? There isn’t any evidence.”

  Lansing shook his head. “This is a serious matter, Mr. Gibson,” he said. “I cannot believe it of Jim Sully.”

  “I can help you believe it,” Gibby said. “There are indications and there will be evidence, but first the indications. Mr. Sully has checking accounts in two branches, one fraudulently opened under an assumed name. If he keeps the sums small en
ough, works the fraud in both directions, and occasionally moves his accounts from one branch to another, you will agree that it is possible for him to turn a nice profit on these manipulations week after week, month after month, year after year?”

  “It is possible, but…” Lansing began.

  Gibby didn’t give him time to finish. “Other indications,” he said. “Mr. Sully never went to the Bank Club parties. He appeared at no employee dinners and he stayed away from dances. If a man were working this deal I had described he would be careful to keep away from these parties where his face might become known to too many of the employees, known to people who worked out in the branches. He wouldn’t want to be greeted by two of the branch managers at a bank party as a depositor in both their branches, as both Sully and Jameson. Last night was the first time he attended any of the parties and then at the insistence of Mr. Coleman. I believe that Mr. Coleman insisted with the purpose of making the Sully face known to all the Fiveborough National personnel. Mr. Coleman was helping him to reform by making him come out of the seclusive privacy which had helped him in his crime. Mr. Coleman was strengthening his character by removing the possibility of temptation, and Mr. Coleman was insisting on restitution. Mr. Coleman was killed. You must see the pattern. The man clings to an obscure position. He refuses to better himself and he is determined to make his obscurity even the more obscure by having no part in any of these entertainments open to him and all his fellow workers.”

  “That’s not proof,” Sully screamed. “Mr. Lansing, you know it isn’t proof.”

  “The proof,” Gibby said, “will be developed. It will develop easily from a comparison between the dates and the amounts of discrepancies taken care of in the shortage and overage accounts of the branches with the dates and amounts of deposits to your accounts and the dates and amounts of the checks you cashed.”

  Sully may have been prepared with an answer for that. He was in no way prepared for Jeb Wilberforce. I would never have thought that anything could happen so fast. Wilberforce had come out from behind Rose Salvaggi and Art Fuller, moving closer to Gibby as he listened to Gibby’s development of the details of his case. Suddenly Wilberforce whirled about and pounced on Sully. With one hand he hauled that pudgy worm out of his chair. He shook Sully so that the man’s head bobbled on his short, thick neck.

  “You slimy, creeping rat,” he shouted. “That you dared even to touch a man like Homer Coleman—that’s sickening. You with your cheap, sneaking, paltry embezzlements. You aren’t even a rat. You’re a stinking little mouse with poison in your bite. You nibble at crime.”

  Wilberforce’s free right hand hovered threateningly. It was as though he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to choke Sully or to slap him. It was as though he were bracing himself for whatever it would be that he might do to the man, as though he wanted to smash the loathsome creature, and as though he had a revulsion against so much as touching his loathsomeness.

  Sully tried to scuttle away from him, but Wilberforce had him in a fast grip. Sully couldn’t move; but, if ever a man scuttled without moving, he did it then. He seemed to contract himself inside his clothes, drawing himself together, making himself small. His eyes darted about in wild appeal. He was speechless with terror, but his eyes were screaming for help.

  His glance fell on me and his eyes met mine. I wanted to look away, to pretend he wasn’t there. It made my gorge rise to go to him. I didn’t like myself for taking him away from Wilberforce, but a man does what he must. You either believe in due process or you don’t. Gibby and I have no choice. We’re in the due process business.

  I pushed Wilberforce off. “Sorry,” I said. “We can’t let you do that.”

  Wilberforce wasn’t easily pushed off. He followed after me, shoving as we went.

  “You push Art Fuller around,” he growled, “and this thing—it has rights.”

  Gibby helped me out on it. “We have to save him for a jury,” he said.

  “A jury?” Wilberforce shouted with outrage. “A jury of his peers? Where do you go to find the peers of a thing like that? What are you going to use for a jury, bedbugs?”

  Gibby grinned at him. “We don’t have to find him his moral peers,” he said. “He’ll have a jury of men. They’ll take care of him.”

  Wilberforce calmed down a bit. “It’s the pettiness of it I can’t take,” he said. “For his lousy, little hundred bucks here and hundred bucks there he had to kill Coleman. How could he think it was worth it?”

  Lansing nodded sympathetically. “I suppose that’s the way it had to be,” he said sadly. “It would have to be something as small as this, something as disgusting. A man who was anything at all a man could not have brought himself to raise his hand against Homer.” He turned to Gibby and me. “I needn’t tell you,” he said, “how we at Fiveborough National feel about this. You know that you have at your disposal all of our resources for the development of the details of your proof.”

  “I know,” Gibby said. “Thanks. We’ll have no trouble developing it now.”

  Actually, Gibby had been optimistic. It wasn’t that easy. We later learned that no checks had been cashed. All had been presented for deposit, and always the deposit had been made up of a check and cash, so that the amount deposited to the Sully or the Jameson account never did tally exactly with the differences found in the books. The dates did tally. Every one of these discrepancies was on a date when Sully had made a deposit in the account of the bank that had a difference in the amount of checks presented for collection and the amount Branch Banking credited for collections. It made a picture that was difficult for clarification to a jury, but that doesn’t matter too much since we also had the record of the main-office guards, a record that showed that, of the bank employees who had signed in early enough to be in Coleman’s office to make the attempt on Rose Salvaggi’s life, only James Sully had signed out again and been gone quite long enough for the trip out to Queens and for the ransacking of Rose’s apartment and the return to his desk in Branch Banking. That did it. The jury saw the pattern.

  We had to follow it all the way through with the jury, Gibby and I, and all the way we had with us the intelligent interest of Nicholas Cooper Lansing and the slightly nitwitted interest of Cary Willard. The young people rather dropped out of it that day in Lansing’s office. We were still there when an unappeased Wilberforce told Lansing that Rose Salvaggi would be taking the rest of the day off.

  “I’m taking them to the marriage license bureau,” he said. “There’s been too much nonsense about it already.”

  Lansing smiled and turned to Gibby. “Will you present any obstacles?” He asked. “This matter of parole?”

  “We’ll call it paroled to Mrs. Fuller,” Gibby said, “and we’ll keep an eye on him till she has him hooked.”

  I was watching their faces when Gibby said it and I had the curious thought that Homer Coleman would have liked what I saw there. I had a hunch that he would have thought it well worth dying if his death could be at all instrumental in producing those looks of happiness. These pleasant reveries of mine were interrupted by a small outburst of violence across the room.

  “You’re taking the rest of the day off, too,” Mickey told Gert.

  “What for?” she asked.

  “Because I tell you to,” he growled.

  “You don’t tell me anything,” she screamed. “After what you’ve been thinking of me, I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  He started for her and she screamed some more. A couple of cops grabbed him and held him off. He grinned at her.

  “Come over here and kiss me, baby,” he said. “If you put your hand in my left-hand pants pocket, you’ll find two bucks in there. It’ll be for the license.”

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTr />
  CHAPTER NINE