The Bank Vault Mystery

by Louis F. Booth

  Highly gratified that his surmises had been so accurate, Fenner thought of going to see Borden again. Perhaps when he told him the results of his interview with Lowman,’ Borden would realize the hopelessness of his situation and throw himself upon the mercy of the law. But Borden could not afford to do that, Fenner decided quickly. The theft was bad, but the murder charges Borden could never own up to. If Morton died there would be two of them. No; Borden would simply have to brazen it through to whatever end was in store.

  Fenner knew that when the district attorney received the facts as he had outlined them in Hanley’s office, he would begin building his case at once. He knew, too, that Bryce was already probably turning over the scanty facts he had and digging for more. The whole ground would have to be gone over more thoroughly. He, Fenner, would be called upon first to help in the arrangement of the case, later to testify. It would all be very drawn out and infinitely boring.

  He reviewed the afternoon briefly. One fact caught his mind and held it: it was that Borden had taken the pains to deny the one particular accusation in the chain which Fenner felt least sure of—the planting of the tag on Morton. Fenner wondered if he could safely infer from this that in the other particulars he was correct. He knew, of course, that he was right in a general way, but there were many details and loose ends to be explained.

  But if he was right in everything else and wrong about the tag, then where did the tag come from? Rather, how did Morton acquire it? Borden perpetrated the theft. Where did Morton’s trail cross Borden’s after that event? At Knoeckler’s shop first, Fenner remembered. In the excitement of having killed Knoeckler, Borden must have failed to get the tag back. Of course, and Morton could have found it there, either on that fatal evening a week past when he waited for Elsa, or since then while he was going about the business of straightening out the old man’s affairs. That would account for Morton’s suspicions of Borden, too. Only why had he not come directly to the police with his information? Odd thing! Also, where would Morton’s missing assistant fit into that picture? Fenner decided that here were some angles worth a few mental gymnastics. He concluded that, rather than go around to the jail to talk further with Borden, he would allow that gentleman to stew in his own juice over night, while he, Fenner, went home and forgot the case until his mind cleared so that he could do it justice.

  5

  But if he thought he was so easily to forget the case, even for only over night, he was mistaken. His way to the Subway took him within a block of the Consolidated Bank job. When he should have been half way up to the Pennsylvania Station, he was there at the truck gate peering in. A murky dusk was falling and the rain still persisted. A few oilskin-clad figures moved soddenly about beneath the pale glow of the flood lights. The soaked timber braces glistened.

  Fenner remained for only a moment, an indefinable but strong conviction upon him that somewhere in the dark pit before him was concealed the key to his puzzle, and equally strong presentiment that only fate in its good time would reveal it. He faced about and started for home, changed his mind for the second time and turned his steps toward Center Street and Philip Borden’s cell.

  Bryce was not in his office but arrived almost upon Fenner’s heels.

  “Upon second thought,” Fenner explained, “I’d like to talk to Borden again.”

  “Glad you came back. He looks to me like he’s about ready to give in now. Shall we have him up?”

  “Please. Have you been third-degreeing him?”

  “Oh, not to speak of.” Bryce pushed a button, issued a curt order to the officer who responded, and in a few minutes Borden was brought in. He was pale and visibly less assured than when he had left the bank, but there were no visible marks of violence upon him.

  “Well, my boy, the inspector tells me you’ve decided to come clean. I think you’re wise.”

  Borden stiffened and for a moment it appeared that an angry retort was framed upon his lips, but as suddenly he slumped into his chair and dropped his gaze to the floor. There was a moment of tense silence.

  “Well, how about it?” Fenner urged kindly.

  “I suppose I may as well,” Borden agreed in a low voice. “There isn’t much that you don’t already know about the money. I took it just about as you figured out; but as for the rest—I know nothing about it. Knoeckler and Mr. Morton, I mean.”

  “Then why did you go to Knoeckler’s shop that afternoon?”

  “He phoned me. I’d dropped the tag there. He read the papers and doped it out as you said. He wanted half.”

  “Well—“ Fenner’s gold pencil appeared in his hand and he twirled it meditatively.

  “I saw I was in a hole and there was nothing I could do about it,” Borden continued. “I dickered with him and we settled on fifty thousand. I told him he’d have to wait a month or two, and he said he’d keep the tag.”

  “Sounds fishy to me,” Bryce put in coldly.

  “How did you leave Knoeckler? Did he seem much disturbed?” Fenner asked, ignoring his colleague’s comment.

  “I left him sitting at his desk. He seemed—well, no more excited than you’d expect under the circumstances. I swear to God I never touched him! I don’t remember about the next day, Mr. Fenner. When I came in the store and you sprung it on me he was dead, it sort of took my breath away. At first I was glad and relieved. Then I thought of the tag and that he must have left it about the place somewhere. I didn’t know what to do. I looked around as well as I could and didn’t see it, so I decided I’d have to take a chance and let things ride. That’s all I know.”

  “What were you and Mr. Morton arguing about on Wednesday afternoon a short time before he was hurt?” Fenner asked after a moment’s thought.

  “About leveling the pier bottoms. Morton was too particular and it was slowing up the job.”

  “That all?”

  “That’s a lot of baloney, Max,” Bryce cut in gruffly. “From what Quade told me, they were having it hot and heavy, and they wouldn’t get that way over pier bottoms.”

  Borden said shortly: “That’s all we discussed.”

  “How do you suppose Morton got that tag?” Fenner next inquired.

  “I don’t know. He must’ve found it in the shop. He was the old man’s executor.”

  “How did you know that?” Fenner snapped.

  “Coles told me,” Borden replied evenly.

  “Where’s Coles now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  Borden rubbed his chin. “Wednesday afternoon about five or five-thirty, I think.”

  “Do you know Coles well? Did he tell you anything else about himself or Morton?”

  “I didn’t know him so very well. We used—“ He stopped for Fenner’s gold pencil had clattered to the floor. The detective, leaning over to recover it, grunted: “Go on.”

  “We used to talk once in a while on the job. Wednesday afternoon while we were waiting for Morton to show up, Coles seemed to feel like unloading his chest. He told me that Knoeckler’s daughter worked at their place and that Morton was making a play for her. I guess Coles had a yen on her himself. Anyway he was pretty sore. Spoke of him as a ‘dirty buzzard’ and talked of quitting his job.”

  Fenner thrust the pencil into his pocket. Bryce chewed his dead cigar. Borden glanced furtively from one to the other.

  “Now will you be good enough to tell us just why you decided to clear out when you did?” Fenner resumed.

  Borden hesitated only a moment. “Well, when I found out Morton was interested in Knoeckler’s affairs, I got worried about the tag. I knew that if he found it he’d wise up the same as old Adolph had. So when it began to look as if he’d soon be out and around, I thought I’d better go.”

  Fenner got up. “We’ll get all of this down in black and white tomorrow morning and you can sign it. That will be all for this evening.”

  A guard took Borden’s arm and conducted him out of the office.

  “Wh
at do you think of it now?” the inspector asked warily.

  “Not a bad yarn if he can stick to it. That remains to be seen. Now let’s do a little summing up: If what he says is true, then Borden committed the theft, Knoeckler reasoned it out and attempted to blackmail him, to which Borden agreed to submit. Knoeckler later, presumably from the intense excitement, had a stroke and fell downstairs. That ends it as far as Borden is concerned. Morton either had a genuine accident or Stephen Coles dropped the bar on him and cleared out. Fits together pretty well at that. The only thing that could really upset it would be for Coles to come back. This Borden is as clever as they come!”

  “Or for Morton to give us something new,” Bryce amended.

  “Yes; that might happen.” Fenner looked at his watch and found that it was after seven o’clock. “There’s one thing more; then I’ll run along. Look in your notes, Inspector, and tell me when Borden left the job on Wednesday evening.”

  Bryce looked and in a few seconds announced: “About quarter after eight. He went out with Dickson.”

  “And it must have been about six-thirty when we left, wasn’t it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Coles wasn’t there then but he must have come back. Quade told us that the night timekeeper had last seen him about eight o’clock, slightly inebriated. Borden says he didn’t see him after ‘five or five-thirty.’ Funny, isn’t it? Then so far as we know he was last seen by the timekeeper. I’d better talk to that chap right now. He’d be there at this hour, wouldn’t he?” He reached for his hat but did not get up.

  Bryce made no immediate reply and Fenner fell into a brown study from which he emerged only when the inspector remarked: “Maybe we’ll get a break and turn up Coles in a day or two. Then we’d be finished and, believe me, there’d be no regrets.”

  “I’d not count on learning anything from Stephen Coles. Not unless you’ve got a couple of good spirit mediums on your staff.”

  Bryce sat up. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know how it was done or where he is, but ever since he’s been gone I’ve had a strong hunch poor Coles is quite beyond our ‘turning him up.’”

  “You think he’s done in, too?” Bryce gasped.

  “I think he might be. If Borden is telling the truth, he doesn’t even know that Coles is missing. Yet a few minutes ago when I asked him about Coles he replied: ‘I didn’t know him very well.’”

  “What of it?”

  “Wouldn’t the natural answer have been: ‘I don’t know him so very well’?”

  “But when could he? How could he? Remember one thing, Max: Borden hasn’t been out of our sight till this morning for a week.”

  “That’s not literally true. Out of your ken, is what you mean.”

  “All right; have it your way; but when? Where?”

  Fenner turned up his palms in a gesture of negation. “That’s what we must find out.” He got to his feet. “I really am going, this time. I must stop at the job. I’ll ring you up if anything develops. Otherwise we resume in the morning, n’est-ce-pas?”

  IX. SATURDAY, APRIL 9th

  1

  A FEW minutes after eight the next morning Joe and Giuseppi Spinelli, among a gang of seven or eight carpenter laborers, swung off the ladders into the bottommost depths of the Consolidated Building excavation. It was Saturday, a half-holiday, pay day, and with spring in the air to boot. Small wonder that in the hearts of Joe and Giuseppi there swelled a warm flood of the joy of living. This morning they would strip forms; this afternoon and tomorrow they would congregate and argue, yell at their women, lap up Guinea Red, and sleep.

  Stripping forms consisted of demolishing the temporary wood encasement into which the concrete for the walls was poured, after the material had hardened. The small gang spread in pairs along the basement wall and with wrecking bars and crowbars attacked the wood panels. To the accompaniment of noisy splintering of timber, the heavy clank of hammer and bar, cheerful small talk, and occasional brief bursts of Venetian melody, the new concrete wall was gradually exposed, glistening in its smooth, gray newness. As it dried out it would become white.

  A board at a time, the forms came down, Joe Spinelli at one end, Giuseppi at the other; the wrecking bars thrust behind an edge, a quick wrench, and off the planks flew. There was an easy rhythm to the men’s movements; the boards clattered to the growing pile with mechanical regularity.

  Abruptly the rhythm ceased. Joe had pried his end free but the loosened board did not fall off. He looked up and saw his brother, rigid, spellbound, staring at the wall exposed by the removal of the last board. He moved over to Giuseppi, then stopped, frozen in his tracks. The outline of a human hand, palm out, fingers spread, like a fearful grisly warning, faced them from the surface of the concrete wall. Timidly Giuseppi reached out with his bar and touched the palm. It was soft, pudgy, yielding before the iron and allowing several small bits of concrete to flake off from the edge of the pattern.

  “Mother of God!” His teeth chattered and he crossed himself.

  “Tony! Benito! Here; look!” Joe came to his senses and called to the others. They gathered around, awestruck, gesticulating. Finally one, cooler than the others, ran to the ladder and up.

  Soon he returned with a labor foreman and the superintendent. Quinn examined the find briefly and said: “Here; chop out a little concrete around it and let’s see what we’ve got.”

  All the men hung back. Quinn looked up impatiently. “Don’t stand there like a God-damned bunch of dummies. Here! Gimme that bar!” Suiting his actions to his words he seized a bar from the man nearest him and with a few deft strokes broke out enough concrete to reveal a man’s hand and wrist. He looked for only a moment, then stepped back and, gaging from the position of the hand and wrist, started cautiously cutting into the concrete at a point several feet away. The concrete, still comparatively green, broke away without great difficulty. After a quarter of an hour of cautious exploration an unusually large chunk pried out revealed, about a half foot back from the wall surface, a small section of matted hair. Five minutes more of feverish activity and a face—misshapen, stone gray like the fresh concrete, one glazed eye open, the other hideously mutilated—was exposed. Quinn recognized the mortal remains of Stephen Coles.

  He straightened up and issued crisp instructions: “Go on with the forms, boys. Martin,” this to the foreman who had come down with him, “get a couple of air drills down here. He’ll have to be cut out. Better rig up a frame and hang a couple of tarpaulins on each side, or the whole damned job will be demoralized. You better get some level heads on those drills, too. We want him out in one piece. You’ll have to figure on taking out about two feet of concrete all around. Snap out of it, now!”

  Quinn went up to the office shanty and asked Quade to notify the police. This was about half past nine. Inspector Bryce at the time was in his office, together with Murphy, McFadden, a stenographer and Philip Borden. The stenographer had just prepared a transcription of Borden’s detailed confession. The latter, haggard and worn from a long night of questioning, slumped in his chair at one end of the desk. His story as he had related it the previous evening to Fenner and Bryce remained unchanged. Ten hours of sustained, intense grilling had not shaken him from it, and Bryce had reached the reluctant conclusion that his colleague’s doubts had been ill founded.

  When the phone buzzed Bryce picked it up, acknowledged himself, and listened while Quade told him what had happened at the job. He eyed Borden’s dejected figure grimly as he hung up the receiver and said: “You’d better not sign that thing just yet. There will be a few additions. Believe it or not, Stephen Coles has come back!”

  He called to the guards: “Take him away, boys. I’ve got to go out.”

  2

  Two hours later the clay that had been Stephen Coles was transferred from its snug, torrid grave to a refrigerated slab in the city morgue. The head had been bashed in; otherwise the cadaver seemed intact.

  Fenner and
Bryce came to headquarters together. Fenner had come to the station late that morning and had overtaken the inspector just as he reached the job. It had been a gruesome two hours. The removal of Coles’ body from the wall had been a grisly, nauseating task. It had been there less than three days, but the heat generated by the concrete as it hardened had stimulated the processes of putrefaction, and the men operating the chipping hammers and breaking away the concrete could work for only short periods without relief. One, indeed, collapsed and had to be taken away, shaky and vomiting.

  Fenner paced the room nervously but Bryce flopped into his chair.

  “Let’s get Borden up here and get this thing over with,” the inspector suggested impatiently. “You say you’re sure, now?”

  “Yes, I’m sure now. Borden said he last saw Coles about five-thirty Wednesday. The night timekeeper told me last night he’d seen Borden and Coles standing together on the bracing a little before eight o’clock on Wednesday. The spot he pointed out was almost directly over the place he was found. They were concreting that section of wall on Wednesday evening. Yet it’s still circumstantial. Borden might not break down.”

  “If we throw all that in his face he’ll break down, all right.”

  “Better still,” Fenner suggested, “we might take him around to the morgue to review the handiwork. That ghastly sight would break him down if anything would.”

  “We’ll get him up, anyway.” Bryce lifted his telephone receiver. “Bring that fellow Borden back here, Clancy,” he ordered curtly.

  Bryce lit his cigar and Fenner walked over to the window to wait. Five minutes passed, five minutes of somber quiet with both men lost in their thoughts. Bryce roused himself, realized the elapsed time, and reached impatiently for the desk buzzer. A rattle of shots in the next wing of the building cut the movement short. There was a noisy shuffle, shouts of excitement, then more shots. Bryce sprang to his feet and ran from the room, Fenner following. The stir of clamor in the building died as quickly as it had risen.