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THE BANK VAULT MYSTERY
By
LOUIS F. BOOTH
The Bank Vault Mystery was originally published in 1933 by Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, New York.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
DEDICATION 4
FOREWORD 5
TABLE OF CONTENTS 6
CHARACTERS 7
PROLOGUE 8
I. THURSDAY, MARCH 31st 12
II. FRIDAY, APRIL 1st 37
III. SATURDAY, APRIL 2nd 53
IV. MONDAY, APRIL 4th 58
V. TUESDAY, APRIL 5th 79
VI. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6th 85
VII. THURSDAY, APRIL 7th 104
VIII. FRIDAY, APRIL 8th 112
IX. SATURDAY, APRIL 9th 134
EPILOGUE 147
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 149
DEDICATION
To
M. P. B.
FOREWORD
“That Bank Vault Case,” as Maxwell Fenner usually referred to it, was a strange and involved affair, and made no less so for me by the fact that all my ingenuity (and assiduous nagging besides) was required to worm the details a bit at a time from Fenner’s reluctant lips. He is ordinarily not close-mouthed with me, but after I had extracted the whole tale I readily understood his reticence. However, by altering names and places and a few of the relationships involved, I have concocted a record which, though it quite closely adheres to the facts, I was able to secure Mr. Fenner’s permission to present to the public.
The chronicle includes a brief span of ten days—from a spring Thursday morning to the end of the following week—and the principal actors in the drama were introduced to Fenner from time to time during the early part of that period. To give the reader at the outset the advantage of a background against which, as the story unfolds, the successive events may be seen in their proper perspective, I have preceded the narrative itself with a brief Prologue introducing the more important characters on the morning of that fateful Thursday.
L. F. B.
CHARACTERS
T. Jerome Hanley...Vice President and General Manager, Consolidated American Bank and Trust Company
Jeremy Donegan, Sr....Vault Custodian
Jeremy Donegan, Jr....Assistant Cashier
Christopher Dickson...Chief Engineer, United Construction Co.
Philip Borden...Dickson’s Assistant
James Quinn...Construction Superintendent
Randolph Morton...Consulting Engineer
Stephen Coles...Morton’s Assistant
Elsa Knoeckler...Morton’s Secretary
Adolph Knoeckler...Instrument Shop Proprietor
Schmidt...Newsdealer
Detective Inspector Bryce...New York Police
Burke...Of Bryce’s Staff
McFadden...Of Bryce’s Staff
Quade...Of Bryce’s Staff
Murphy...Of Bryce’s Staff
Dr. Pollard...Coroner
Maxwell Fenner
PROLOGUE
It is the beginning of a day, a Thursday—the last Thursday in March, to be precise—in the Year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and thirty. A chart of the progressing life lines of a number of individuals reveals an interesting tendency to converge. An all-wise graphologist, anticipating this convergence and plotting it in his ledger of fate, would draw, however, no neat intersections, no points of amiable tangency. Rather, his lines would meet in a jumble, a knotty snarl from which some emerge wavering and which some cut straight through, a shambles from which some emerge not at all.
Let us cut a quick cross section through these lines, lay the chart open at a moment on this Thursday morning and for a brief flash examine the lives so exposed:
Detective Inspector Bryce sits before his desk in a dingy, ill-lighted room at Police Headquarters in lower Manhattan. He has pushed his chair a little back and sits straight up; with conscious deliberation he is lighting a heavy black cigar. The eerie glow of the green-shaded desk lamp softens the outline of his face but the quick flare of the match behind his cupped palms catches and brings out an aggressive hardness in the features.
He has just arrived and is assembling his thoughts. He wonders how long he will have to be in court during the morning and whether or not the new Assistant District Attorney, of whom he has no high opinion, will muff the case he has built up against a small-time gambler and racketeer—
Some twenty odd miles north-by-northeast, as the crow flies, Maxwell Fenner is finishing his simple breakfast. As he munches toast with marmalade and sips his coffee, his glance wanders through the casement window out over his garden and the adjoining gardens. There is a fresh greenness bursting upon the lawns and the heavy languor of early spring lies over the whole landscape. Fenner is thinking that it would be splendid if he could stay away from the City altogether today and decides, as the next best alternative, to arrange his day so that at least his afternoon will be free—
Back in Manhattan Mr. T. Jerome Hanley, Vice President and General Manager of the Consolidated American Bank and Trust Company, is being whisked to his office in a comfortable limousine. Weary of looking at the back of his chauffeur’s head, he turns to ‘watch the familiar streets flash by. Down Park Avenue, then down Lafayette Street—the same route he traverses six mornings out of seven, eleven months out of twelve. He must speak to Oscar about it. There must be some other way.
He forgets the scenery, for unpleasantly it occurs to him that if the market has another sinking spell today he will be in a fair way to be closed out. He will not supply any more collateral—simply can not; and he has a shrewd suspicion from the display of weakness yesterday that there will be further breaking. If only a temporary rally would set in! He could get out then without a total loss, and (believe Mr. Hanley!) he’d have brains enough to wait a long time before he got back in again. Well, the worst they can do is to close out his account. He will still be V.P. and G.M. of the Consolidated, which isn’t half bad at forty-five; and his income from that source will be undiminished. He sinks back into the cushions, not sure that it wouldn’t be a relief to be sold out and have the uncertainty over with—
On a Subway Express the Jeremy Donegans, Senior and Junior, form part of a packed mass of swaying humanity being rushed through the East River Tubes from Brooklyn to the towers of Downtown New York. Donegan, Sr., is seated half dozing. Donegan, Jr., stands or, rather, is suspended before him. With one hand he clings to a swinging strap, with the other he holds a skillfully folded newspaper. He reads that the Yankee pitching staff is to be supplemented this season by somebody-or-other formerly with the Cardinals. With three quarters of his mind he is wondering what the girl or woman behind him looks like, whose soft, unwilling body he can feel pressed so tightly against his own—
Somewhere between Hanover Square and Canal Street a jolting, rattling Second Avenue Elevated train snakes its tortuous way downtown, “—less crowded and it gets you there quickly, too,” as their advertising points out. In the third car, carefully separate
d by a few inches from an Italian laborer on one side and a homeward-bound charwoman on the other, sits Randolph Morton. His ankles are crossed; a brown leather briefcase rests upon his knees; in one hand he holds a pair of immaculate tan pigskin gloves with which from time to time he absently flicks imaginary specks of dust from the portfolio.
Business has been rotten. In the last six months he hasn’t made expenses. At Chatham Square he is thinking, gratefully, that his commission for designing and supervising the foundations for the new Consolidated American Building will pull him out of the hole. That job is certainly proving a life saver. Still—it is almost completed. If nothing new comes in, he might yet have to dispense with Steve Coles, his only remaining assistant. The firm has surely fallen upon evil times! He glances about. At Fulton Street he is pondering his home life, or lack of it. He is marveling that a woman could change in a few years to the extent that his wife has changed. He thinks of his children away at school, but suddenly it is Hanover Square and he has to get off—
In lower Fulton Street old Adolph Knoeckler steps out of his shop and glances up and down the street. The morning sun, burning away the faint haze, falls kindly upon his bald skull. He hobbles several doors up the street and into the stationery shop of his friend and countryman, Schmidt, for his morning paper. He is puzzling over an unwonted abstraction which he fancies he has observed in his daughter of late. He folds the paper across, scarce seeing it at all, caught in a sudden nostalgic surge of recollection.
Back in Germany in his youth Knoeckler had been a fine lens maker. He had met reverses and had come to New York, almost a middle-aged man, and had married and set up an instrument repair business in lower Fulton Street. His wife had died when Elsa was born. Adolph sometimes wonders if things might not have been different with his daughter if her mother had lived. Adolph had been both father and mother to Elsa during her childhood. He remembers her dandled on his knee listening to stories in his broken dialect; he remembers how he used to take her places on Sundays, to see the animals at the zoo, to the harbor to watch the ships; how he used to buy her pretty little frilly dresses; how he himself braided up her pigtails. The recollection saddens him. As she had grown up they had grown apart; as she had found outside friends and amusements Adolph had quietly withdrawn into himself. There had been steadily less in common, less to talk of, until now she has almost slipped from him completely—
At this moment it is not alone Adolph Knoeckler who is worrying over Elsa. On that same Subway Express which brings the Donegans to work, and not half a car’s length removed from them, we find Stephen Coles. Coles and the Donegans have never met and will never come face to face, yet their lives from this morning forward are inextricably woven into a single confused pattern.
Coles’ usually stolid face reflects quiet concern. He is worried about his job with Randolph Morton. The foundations for the new Consolidated are nearing completion and Morton has nothing else in prospect. But it is not the possible loss of the job as such which troubles Coles this morning, though in times like these leaving any job is not an enviable necessity. It is that he would also be leaving Elsa Knoeckler. No longer, then, would he be able to glance up and watch her at her desk, to absorb covertly for minutes on end the sweet, half-turned profile, to memorize the soft line of cheek and chin. It is true that Elsa has never encouraged him, though she has occasionally gone out with him upon repeated urging. It is true, in fact, that she has always done her best to discourage his attention, but Coles is not quite able to abandon hope altogether. He wonders why her father has formed such an odd dislike for him. If it weren’t for that perhaps—
A half dozen blocks southwest of Knoeckler’s shop, or three blocks due west of the Consolidated Bank, at a few minutes after nine o’clock—she had heard the Trinity chimes around the corner booming the hour as she entered the building—Elsa Knoeckler unlocks the offices of Marten, Morton and Purcell, Consulting Engineers. She finds the place dusty and hot with the stuffy quiet that offices acquire simply by staying shut up over night. The sun streaming beneath the half drawn shades pours in two oblique shafts of light and draws into emphatic relief the same thin film of dust Elsa has carefully removed from Mr. Morton’s desk morning after morning for the past ten months.
A little wearily she crosses the office to raise the shades and throw the windows open. She stands before one, slowly peeling off her gloves, and looks out. There is stolid resignation in the almost imperceptible droop of her lips, scarce belied by the frown gathering between her eyes. Across the narrow canyon she can see in another building tier on crowded tier of offices with different names and varying occupants but somehow of an essential sameness. Mechanically she notes faint stirrings here and there signaling the beginning of another bustling day. Elsa is weary of bustling days. Though of late there hasn’t been so much work, there is always the deadening pressure of office routine, and in her life generally a poisoning monotony of hopeless and pointless repetition. Several times—long ago they seem to her now—she had fancied she saw avenues of escape but always they had failed to materialize. There was Henry, first, whom she had “gone with” for more than a year, but somehow he had drifted away; that was four years ago—then Lawrence with whom she could not have gotten along anyway—then Marty with whom she had fallen madly in love only to discover that he had a wife and three small children out in Flat-bush. For a while after that Elsa had wanted only to die, but somehow it had been simpler to go on living, swallowing her misery, penning up her despair so effectually that even her father never quite suspected the depth of her bitterness. For a while she had drifted, changing positions frequently, until she had happened to become Randolph Morton’s secretary.
Thinking back, Elsa sighs a little relief at this stage. It has been nicer here than in any of the other places she has worked. She has become gradually resigned to the groove into which her life has been arbitrarily fitted, but she is not able to avoid a depressing consciousness of the passage of time and a haunting, recurrent bitterness that life is passing her by. Elsa is twenty-seven; her mirror shows her tiny crow’s-feet outside the corners of her eyes; a vague growing weariness warns her that youth is but a transient stage. Elsa is not hard to look upon, clear-eyed, comely in a wholesome way, with brown hair she has never cut and usually manages to keep in soft waves. Her frown deepens. She ponders a decision she has been making over night. She had thought her mind made up but there are so many things to consider. Her father will be heartbroken—Footsteps in the corridor outside remind her of the time, so she puts away her hat and coat and starts to arrange her employer’s disordered desk—
A mile and a half southwest of the tip of Manhattan in the smoking cabin of a Staten Island Ferry, New York bound, Christopher Dickson sucks upon a consoling pipe. He is late, for him an unusual circumstance. By now he should be at his office far uptown. It had been necessary to wait at St. George for his bank to open so that he could procure from his safe deposit box a number of Liberty Bonds. Nervously his hand touches his breast. Yes; the bonds are still there, reposing in a long fat envelope in an inner coat pocket. Reluctantly he will post the bonds at his brokers to protect his dwindling margins. Three months ago the wiseacres and quidnuncs had proclaimed, “The bottom has been reached!” Three months ago he had read in reputable journals, “Now is the time to lay the foundations of a fortune!” The wiseacres had been wrong; so had the quidnuncs.
Dickson is thinking: “If Myra ever finds out about the bonds—Still, there is no reason why she should, and what women don’t know won’t hurt them.” Irritably he raps his pipe out against the edge of the bench and walks out to the front deck—
In an ultra-modern office building uptown Philip Borden is being raised from the first to the twenty-eighth floor in a high-speed, micro-drive elevator. The uniformed operator says, “Mornin’, sir.”
The lone passenger replies, “Morning, Doc. Take the boss up yet?”
“Nope; Mistah Dickson ain’t been in yet.”
The
reply barely registers. Borden is thinking that his mother ought to see a doctor about that peculiar pain between her shoulder blades. It might be something serious which shouldn’t be neglected. He’ll have to be more insistent—“Twenty-eight, sir.”
The car stops—
But now we have seen enough. Let us close up the chart and get on with our story.
I. THURSDAY, MARCH 31st
1
THE Jeremy Donegans, father and son, halted at the entrance of the Consolidated American Bank and Trust Company Building. Old Jeremy had worked for the “Consolidated” for thirty years, his son for five. Without thinking much about it, both felt that they had become parts of the huge banking institution.
It was a rare morning, even for the sunny end of March; much too fine a morning for old Jeremy or young Jerry to go inside until the last possible moment. Jeremy glanced up the street to where Trinity Church loomed at the end of it, purpling in the morning sun. The golden hands on the tower indicated a quarter before nine o’clock.
“Let’s take a look at the new building job. We’ve got ten minutes yet,” he suggested. Across the street the Consolidated American Company was starting the erection of its new sixty-story home.
Young Jerry nodded and they sauntered across and leaned against the railing of a truck-loading platform overlooking the building site. Through the spaces in the cross-lot bracing they could see away down beneath them in the bottom of the excavation swarms of laborers, their figures from that height foreshortened grotesquely, picking away and shoveling, loading up dirt buckets and stone skips. Periodically the heaped buckets were hoisted by derrick out of the hole and, with a great creaking of booms and rattle of cable, swung in a swift, high, wide arc to trucks waiting in the street where they were noisily dumped, then sent back for more.
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