Authors: Harry Bingham
Yet, the odd fact was, that Mr Rogers was careful of his appearance and even a little vain. He combed his hair three times a day. He flossed his teeth. He was fussy about the way his shirts were starched and ironed. He kept a spare shirt and necktie in the drawer of his desk.
And Pen noticed.
She noticed because she made a point of noticing everything. She noticed the ring of dandruff that shone like a middle-aged halo on his jacket. She noticed the fact that, regular as clockwork, he went to the toilet after his morning coffee, after lunch, and after his cup of afternoon tea.
And, as she noticed these things, a plan began to germinate. She already had, from Arnie, a small rectangular tin containing a flat pad of modelling putty, kept damp under a strip of gauze. To this, she added two other items. First, a sweet pastry with custardy goo in the base and lashings of white icing sugar on top. Secondly, she bought, from an advert in one of the women’s magazines, one of ‘Sally Simpson’s
patented
M
AGICAL
Clothes Genies – three rubs is all it takes to turn
old
into
new
!!!’ The Clothes Genie was basically a small wooden pad with a fine-bristled brush set into it. The brush had a kind of waxy adhesive coating, which Pen guessed would gum up completely after a couple of uses.
She began to keep watch. From her desk in the open area of the bank, she could see Mr Rogers’ glass-paned office door. The tea came around at four o’clock. As the bank’s second most senior officer, Mr Rogers was the second person to receive his tea. It took him six minutes to drink the tea, finish his biscuit and get up to go to the loo.
One Tuesday afternoon, she watched Mr Rogers’ door as the girl went inside with his tray of tea things. Using the big black-numbered clock on the wall, Pen counted the minutes. As she did so, she took her pastry from its bag and began to eat; She ate untidily. A piece of the pastry fell off, making a big white floury blotch on her skirt. She appeared not to notice and kept her eye on the clock. Five minutes.
She stood up. She had a file in her hand and a pointless question ready to ask. She walked over to her boss’s office, knocked and entered. He hadn’t yet finished his tea, and a quarter of his biscuit remained unnibbled.
‘Oh, Mr Rogers, sir!’ said Pen, in her demure Sarah Torrance voice. ‘I’m so sorry. You’re in the middle of tea.’ She stood, visibly hesitant.
Rogers frowned. He didn’t like being interrupted during his tea break. On the other hand, he liked any opportunity to display what a glorious thing it was to be a deputy manager of the second biggest bank in north-eastern Florida. He adopted a magnanimous expression and waved his quarter-biscuit in a lordly, commanding way.
‘That’s all right, Sarah. Just so long as you remember to think first next time.’
‘Yes, Mr Rogers.’
He finished his biscuit and drained his tea. ‘Now what was it?’
She opened the file. ‘It’s these checking accounts. Some customers have got fifty-cent credits against their names, while others…’
Hers was a long, confused, rambling question – not one that could be answered in a minute.
‘I don’t have time right now,’ Rogers began. Then his eye fell on Pen’s skirt. It wasn’t the first time that he’d looked there, but it was the first time Pen acknowledged his glance.
‘Oh!’
She looked flurried and embarrassed. She couldn’t quite manage a blush, but did her best anyway. She patted her skirt ineffectually, then pulled out her Clothes Genie.
‘My Clothes Genie,’ she explained apologetically. ‘It really works.’ She dabbed at the icing sugar, which duly began to disappear. Pen looked at the dandruff on his suit jacket, which was so thick it looked like someone had been dusting for prints. ‘If you want, I could…’ she began, then tailed off. She let her eyes slide away again, as though guilty of impertinence.
Mr Rogers was caught between a rock – his desire to take a leak – and a hard place: his desire to get rid of his dandruff. He shuffled awkwardly. His ring of keys sagged heavily in his right-hand jacket pocket. He could take them with him to the toilet, of course, but it would look a little odd. Mr Rogers was not a man who enjoyed being laughed at. Pen decided to give him a nudge.
‘It would only take a moment. I’d be all done by the time you were back.’
That decided it. He shrugged off his jacket and handed it to Pen, as though she were his personal maid. ‘Thank you, Sarah. We can talk about those checking accounts in a moment.’
‘Yes, Mr Rogers.’
He left. Pen now had two and a quarter minutes. She knew how long, because she’d timed his toilet visits in the past. With one brisk shake, she shook most of the dandruff off the jacket and laid it out on the desk. She reached for the keys.
There were fourteen keys on the ring and she needed prints of just two: the key to the office and the key to the cupboard where the ledgers were kept. The office key was easy. It was a five-cylinder mortice lock and there was only one key which looked remotely right. She took the key and pressed its cold metal head softly into the bed of putty. One done, one to go.
The key to the cupboard was harder. It was a smaller, simpler key, and Rogers had four possible versions on his keyring. Working fast, Pen took three prints cleanly and accurately, but she’d left herself too little room to take a fourth print. All she had was the quarter-inch edge of the putty, which might be too little for Arnie to work with.
She pressed the tip of the fourth key into the edge of the putty. It didn’t seem to come out right the first time, so she did it a second time, then a third time to make sure. Down the hall, the door to the toilet clicked open, then shut. There were footsteps in the corridor. Pen jammed the bunch of keys back into the jacket, put the tin of putty into her pocket, and bent over the dandruff with her Clothes Genie. Rogers came in.
‘Ah, Sarah! Still working away?’
‘Done, Mr Rogers.’
Pen held his jacket up, the keys sagging in the pocket. The dandruff ring had almost completely gone. Mr Rogers put his jacket on, patting the collar and twitching the front to conceal his belly. With a sudden wash of relief, Pen realised she was in the clear.
‘Now what was it you wanted to see me about?’
‘That’s OK, Mr Rogers, I’ll figure it out.’
Willard was sick of Manhattan.
Money! The town was obsessed by it. From Wall Street banker to Bowery bum, everyone was clawing their way over the next guy to make a nickel, a buck, a million dollars. It wasn’t that Willard didn’t like money. Far from it. He loved the stuff. But his boyhood had taught him some wrong lessons. He’d thought money was a thing you grew into, like a pair of shoes or a family yacht. The reality of hustling for it had come as a shock, an unpleasant one.
And so, though he made a living, got on, did well, from time to time he grew sick of it all. Times like now. Times when a tired afternoon was collapsing into an exhausted neon-lit evening. Times when the last shreds of conscience set up a wail in his head that never quite left. Then a shadow fell across his desk. He looked up.
‘Hello, Larry!’
‘Speaking as your doctor, I have to tell you that you’re imbibing too much work and too little alcohol.’
‘Don’t tell me, tell Powell.’
‘What do you say to going out and seeing if we can drink until we see quadruple?’
‘I’d say you were drinking too much.’
Which was true: Willard had begun to realise that Ronson was a drunk, a capable one admittedly, but still a drunk and getting worse each month.
‘All right, we’ll compromise. Triple. Or triple and a half.’
‘I –’
Willard stared down at his desk. He’d hired eight pilots and had sent them to an army airfield in West Virginia to train in low-level flying and aerial observation. The pilots were the sort of men that Roeder liked. Most of them had served jail terms. All of them had either no wives and no kids or several wives and too many kids. They all liked booze, or girls, or gaming, or fist fights, or all four pastimes combined. The eight men would train for a month. At the end of the period Willard would keep the four best and send them to Marion. Some time in between now and then, Dorcan Roeder would have Rockwell killed.
‘God, Larry, don’t you ever get sick of it all?’
‘Why should I? The first signs of civilisation are always the same: proof that man had learned to ferment and distill. The grape, the grain, even, my dear sermoniser, the humble potato.’
‘I didn’t mean the booze, Larry, I meant –’
He paused. The air in the building began to seem not just stale but actually suffocating. He had a clear picture of his old commander, being cold-bloodedly killed by one of Roeder’s stooges.
‘I –’
‘Do you know that’s the third time you’ve started a sentence without finishing it?’
‘Listen, Larry, I’m not feeling well. I need to get out. Sorry.’
He grabbed coat and hat and strode out to catch the elevator. It jerked its way down, collecting departing clerks and secretaries as it went. Willard stood aside to let a couple of people get in. A mousy little woman in a blue felt hat. A clerk in a thin grey suit. More people got on. No one got off. The elevator hit the ground floor and began to clear. Willard was at the back and waited. But the woman in the blue hat didn’t leave. Willard looked at her properly for the first time and recognised her: Annie Hooper.
‘Gosh, Annie, sorry! Hello! I didn’t recognise you under that hat.’
Annie pulled her hat backwards a little, as though apologising for wearing it. ‘They’re working you too hard, I expect. Too busy.’
Willard, always quick and subtle in reading the signs of feminine attraction, saw that Annie was thrilled and slightly nervous to be talking to him again. Her cheeks pinked a little and her hand moved twice to her blouse collar. He also heard a tiny hint of disappointment, as though her last words had been code for ‘too important to see your old friends any more’.
‘Busy? Well, you know the Firm, Annie. They sweat us hard enough, don’t they?’
While talking, they walked outside. A miserable east wind brought in air cold and wet from the ocean. The streets were heavy and damp. Annie tucked her coat collar up and pulled out a delicate woman’s umbrella.
‘No, no, no,’ exclaimed Willard, and whipped out his own much larger brolly, which he made a great show of unfolding and holding over Annie’s head.
‘Thanks.’ Because of having to stand under the umbrella, Annie was brought right up close to Willard. She blushed again, harder this time.
‘Where to?’ he asked.
‘Well that depends…’
‘On…?’
‘Well I’m going home, but I don’t want to drag you out of your way.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘I usually take the subway.’
For no reason except habit, Willard had already begun to steer Annie towards his usual cab rank, although, if he’d bothered to think about it, he’d have known that Annie wouldn’t think of taking an expensive taxi ride. It made sense to turn around and walk her back up to the subway, only that would have meant admitting a mistake with his first choice of direction.
‘Gee, no, can’t have you taking the subway – not in weather like this,’ he said illogically. ‘Let me run you home in a cab.’
A moment later, they were in a cab splashing its way uptown. Annie smiled at him. He smiled back.
‘Where are you off to?’ she asked.
‘Hmm? Me?’
‘Business, I suppose? Larry says you’re terribly important these days.’
‘Lord, no! I mean, I’m busy enough, but I had to get out today, Annie. I couldn’t take another minute.’
There was a short pause.
‘Congratulations, by the way.’
‘Sorry?’
‘On your engagement, I mean. I haven’t seen you since then.’
‘Oh, yes. Rosalind.’ Willard nodded.
‘She’s a lucky girl.’
‘Yes, isn’t she? I mean, she’s a super girl. I thought that’s what you said. Super.’
The conversation remained idiotic and halting as the cab clattered through traffic. It reached Annie’s apartment building, then stopped. Willard got out, paid off the cab, and saw Annie to her door. The two of them watched the cab grind away in a spray of puddle water.
‘You’re getting out here?’ she asked, in surprise. ‘Aren’t you…?’
Willard grinned brightly. ‘Thought I might ask an old friend for some coffee. If that’s all right.’
‘Of course, yes.’
Annie pushed through the front door to her apartment building and led the way up. Before long, Willard found himself, as had happened once before, sitting on Annie’s little sofa, drinking coffee, watching the rain fall outside. Since he was last there, there’d been one addition to Annie’s apartment. It was a movie poster, from
When We Were Heroes
. Willard’s magnificently resolute frown dominated the little room. Noticing the pinkness hiding up in Annie’s freckled cheeks, he didn’t mention the poster. Nor did she. They drank coffee, finished, then made more. He didn’t get up to go. He felt like he’d dropped out of his own life. Not for long, just for an hour or two. But crazily, and just for that hour, Willard felt something he should never have felt. Not there. Not with Annie. He felt this: he felt relaxed. He felt at home.
Pen had told everyone she was going to Europe. She’d packed bags, made arrangements, booked tickets, gone to New York – and never got on the boat. Admittedly, there was somebody on the boat, name of Penelope Hamilton, but it wasn’t her. Wrong height. Wrong build. Wrong everything. Roeder took the call from his man at the docks, then called Powell.
‘The Hamilton girl. She’s given us the slip. She hasn’t gone to Europe at all.’
‘You telling me this because you want a crack at Rockwell early? I said to wait.’
‘No. Not that. Least not until we got the girl. Once we got the girl, I want to take her, Rockwell, the mechanic, and anyone else I feel like, all at the same time.’
‘All of them together? This ain’t Chicago, you know.’
‘We’ll do it nice. Nothing that even looks like homicide.’
‘You asked young Thornton? He should have a say in this.’