The Chase (10 page)

“I expect agents representing a bank in Salt Lake City to arrive at any moment to check our records.”

“Are they going to examine our books?” she asked as if mildly alarmed.

He shook his head. “Nothing like that. I've heard rumors among my fellow bankers that a bank in Salt Lake City was robbed and that monies stolen might have been deposited in another bank.”

“Do you wish me to take care of the matter?”

“No. Please, simply entertain them until I'm prepared to deal with it.”

If Marion had any inquiries as to the uncertainty about Cromwell's request, she showed no curiosity. “Yes, of course, I'll see that they are comfortable until you wish to see them.”

“That will be all,” said Cromwell. “Thank you.”

As soon as Marion left his office and shut the door, Cromwell reached into his breast pocket and brought out the bank draft from the Salt Lake Bank & Trust. Then he stood and went over to the large stand-up safe that held the bank's ledgers and records. He quickly, and expertly, doctored the books so that it appeared that the draft had already been received and the full amount paid to Eliah Ruskin. Cromwell also made entries that indicated the money had been deducted from his bank's liquid capital.

Cromwell did not have long to wait after finishing doctoring the records. The expected agents walked into his outer office twenty minutes later. Marion had stalled them, saying Mr. Cromwell was extremely busy. When a small buzzer beneath her desk sounded, she showed them into his office.

He was holding a telephone and nodded a greeting while motioning them to take chairs. “Yes, Mr. Abernathy, I will personally see that your account is closed and the funds transferred to the Bank of Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Not at all. Glad to be of service. Have a good trip. Good-bye.”

Cromwell put down the phone with a dead line and no caller on the other end. He stood, came around the desk, and offered his hand. “Hello, I'm Jacob Cromwell, president of the bank.”

“These gentlemen are from Salt Lake City,” said Marion. “They wish to see you about a draft drawn against their bank.” Then she swirled her skirt, a bare inch above the ankles, left the office, and closed the door.

“How can I help you?” Cromwell asked courteously.

One man was tall and gangly, the other short and stocky and sweating. The tall one spoke first. “I'm William Bigalow, and my associate here is Joseph Farnum. We are inquiring if any financial institution in San Francisco might have received a bank draft for four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars drawn on the Salt Lake Bank and Trust.”

Cromwell raised his eyebrows in mock apprehension. “What seems to be the problem?”

“The draft was made under duress by the bank manager before a bandit shot him dead and made off with it, including the bank's money in its vault. We're trying to trace its whereabouts.”

“Oh, my,” said Cromwell, throwing up his hands in a sign of distress. “That draft came into our hands yesterday afternoon.”

The two agents tensed. “You have the draft?” Farnum queried expectantly.

“Yes, it is in a safe in our bookkeeping department.” Cromwell's tone became grave. “Unfortunately, we honored it.”

“You honored it!” Bigalow gasped.

Cromwell shrugged. “Why, yes.”

“With a check, no doubt,” said Farnum, in hope there was still time to stop the bandit from cashing it at another bank.

“No, the gentleman whose name was on the draft asked for cash and we complied.”

Bigalow and Farnum looked at Cromwell in shock. “You paid almost half a million dollars in cash to someone who walked into your bank off the street?” Bigalow frowned severely.

“I checked the draft myself when my manager brought it to me for approval. It appeared perfectly legitimate.”

Bigalow did not look happy. It would be his burden to contact the directors of the Salt Lake Bank and tell them their four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars had vanished.

“What was the name on the draft?”

“A Mr. Eliah Ruskin,” answered Cromwell. “He produced a file of papers that showed Mr. Ruskin was the founder of an insurance company that was going to pay off claims brought on by a fire that destroyed a city block in a town…” Cromwell paused. “I believe he said its name was Bellingham, in Washington State.”

“Can you describe Ruskin?” asked Farnum.

“Very well dressed,” offered Cromwell. “Tall, with blond hair and a large blond mustache. I didn't catch the color of his eyes. But I seem to recall that he carried an unusual cane, with a silver eagle's head.”

“That's Ruskin, all right,” muttered Farnum.

“He didn't waste any time,” Bigalow said to his partner. “He must have caught an express train to get here in a little over a day.”

Farnum stared at Cromwell skeptically. “Didn't you think that was an astronomical amount to pay a perfect stranger from out of state?”

“True, but, as I said, I personally checked the draft to make sure it wasn't a forgery. I asked him why he didn't draw on it from a Seattle bank, but he said his company was opening an office in San Francisco. I assure you that it was a bona fide draft. I could find no reason to be suspicious. We paid, although it took almost every dollar of currency we carried in the vault.”

“The bank we represent won't be happy about this,” Barnum pointed out.

“I'm not worried,” Cromwell replied significantly. “The Cromwell Bank has done nothing illegitimate or illegal. We have adhered to the rules and regulations of banking. As to the Salt Lake Bank and Trust failing to meet their obligations, I'm not concerned. Besides their insurance company paying for the theft of the currency, I happen to know their assets are more than ample to cover a half-million-dollar loss.”

Barnum addressed Bigalow without turning in his direction. “We had better get to the nearest telegraph office and notify the Salt Lake Bank and Trust directors. They won't be pleased.”

“Yes.” Bigalow nodded heavily. “They may not take this lying down.”

“They have no choice but to honor the draft. It is safe to say the banking commission will agree in Cromwell Bank's favor, should the directors of the Salt Lake Bank wish to enter a protest.”

The two agents came to their feet.

“We'll need a statement from you, Mr. Cromwell,” announced Farnum, “stating the circumstances of the payment.”

“I shall have my attorneys draw it up first thing in the morning.”

“Thank you for your consideration.”

“Not at all,” said Cromwell, remaining seated. “I'll do all in my power to cooperate.”

As soon as the agents left, Cromwell called in Miss Morgan. “Please see that I am not disturbed for the next two hours.”

“I'll see to it,” she said efficiently.

Seconds after the door closed, Cromwell walked over and quietly locked it. Then he lifted the heavy suitcase under the desk onto the teak surface and opened it. The currency was piled loosely inside, some in stacks wrapped with paper bands.

Methodically, Cromwell began to count and stack the bills, wrapping the loose ones with bands as he inked in the amount. When he finished, he had his desktop filled with neatly piled bundles of cash, marked and counted. The tally came to two hundred forty-one thousand dollars. Then he carefully put the money back in the suitcase, slid the suitcase back under the desk, and opened several ledgers, entering deposits in bogus accounts, which he had set up previously to conceal money stolen over the years. Money that he used to build up the assets needed to open his own bank. Satisfied that he was covered by all the entries, he buzzed Miss Morgan and informed her that he was ready to deal with the day-to-day business of running a successful house of finance.

The banking hours were from ten o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. When closing time rolled around, Cromwell waited until the employees had all left for home and the bank was locked up. Now, alone in the bank's vast interior, he carried the suitcase down the elevator to the main floor and into the bank vault, which was still open according to his instructions. He placed the currency, one stack at a time, in the proper bins that were used by the tellers for customer transactions. The receipts he had made up would be turned over to his chief accountant in the morning, who would record the juggled deposits without knowing the serial numbers.

Jacob Cromwell felt pleased with himself. Swindling as well as robbing the bank in Salt Lake City had been his most bold undertaking to date. And he was not about to repeat it. The evil act would throw off his pursuers, who would think he was becoming more daring, and be led into thinking he might try robbing a major city's bank again. But he knew when not to press his luck. Such a robbery was extremely complicated. When he went out on a crime spree again, it would be in a small town yet to be selected.

After closing the vault and throwing the locks and timer, he went down to the basement and slipped out to the street through a hidden door that only he knew existed. Whistling “Yankee Doodle,” he hailed a cab and rode to California Street, where he took the cable car up the steep, twenty-four-percent grade of the three-hundred-seventy-five-foot-high slope to his house on Nob Hill, the “hill which is covered with palaces,” as Robert Louis Stevenson described it.

Cromwell's mansion amid mansions sat on a small picturesque lane called Cushman Street. The other monuments to wealth had been built by the bonanza-mining types and the big-four barons of the Central Pacific, later the Southern Pacific Railroad: Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker. To the eye of a creative artist or designer, the mansions looked like monstrosities of architecture gone mad with ostentation.

Unlike the others that were built of wood, Cromwell and his sister Margaret's house was constructed of quarried stone and reflected more of a sedate, almost library-like exterior. There were some who thought it bore a striking resemblance to the White House in Washington.

He found his sister impatiently waiting. At her urging, he quickly readied himself for a night on the Barbary Coast. Yes indeed, he thought, as he dressed in his evening clothes, it had been a productive week. One more success to add to his growing sense of invincibility.

I
RVINE COULD NOT COME UP WITH CURRENCY SERIAL
numbers in Bozeman. Not only had the bank failed to record them; it had gone out of business due to the robbery. By the time their assets made up for the loss, the bank had collapsed, and the founder sold what few assets that were left, including the building, to a rich silver miner.

Irvine pushed on to the next robbed bank on his list and took the Northern Pacific Railroad to the mining town of Elkhorn, Montana, located at an elevation of 6,444 feet above sea level. A booming mining town with twenty-five hundred residents, Elkhorn had produced some ten million dollars in gold and silver from 1872 until 1906. The Butcher Bandit had robbed its bank three years earlier, leaving four dead bodies behind.

Just before the train pulled into the town station, Irvine studied, for the tenth time since leaving Bozeman, the report on the robbery in Elkhorn. It was the same modus operandi the bandit used on all his other robberies. Disguised as a miner, he entered the bank soon after the currency shipment had arrived to pay the three thousand men working the quartz lodes. As usual, there were no witnesses to the actual crime. All four victims—the bank manager, a teller, and a husband and wife making a withdrawal—had been shot in the head at close range. Again, the shots went unheard, and the bandit escaped into the atmosphere without leaving a clue.

Irvine checked into the Grand Hotel before walking down the street to the Marvin Schmidt Bank, its new name taken from the miner who bought it. The architecture of the bank building was typical of the current style in most mining towns. Local stone laid with a Gothic theme. He walked though a corner door, facing the intersection of Old Creek and Pinon Streets. The manager sat behind a low partition not far from a massive steel safe painted with a huge elk standing on a rock outcropping.

“Mr. Sigler?” inquired Irvine.

A young man with black hair, brushed back and oiled, looked up at the greeting. His eyes were a shade of dark green, and his features indicated Indian blood in his ancestry. He wore comfortable cotton pants, a shirt with soft collar, and no tie. He lifted a pair of spectacles from the desk and set them on the bridge of his nose.

“I'm Sigler. How can I help you?”

“I'm Glenn Irvine with the Van Dorn Detective Agency, here for an investigation into the robbery a few years ago.”

Sigler quickly frowned with an attitude of annoyance. “Don't you think it's a little late for Van Dorn to arrive on the scene? The robbery and murders took place back in 1903.”

“We were not engaged to make an investigation at that time,” Irvine retorted.

“So why are you here at this late date?”

“To record the serial numbers of the bills taken by the robbery, if they were listed in a register.”

“Who is paying for your services?” Sigler insisted.

Irvine could imagine Sigler's distrust and incomprehension. He might have felt the same if he was in the bank manager's shoes. “The United States government. They want the robberies and murders to stop.”

“Strikes me that the bastard can't be caught,” Sigler said coldly.

“If he walks on two legs,” said Irvine confidently, “the Van Dorn Agency will catch him.”

“I'll believe it when I see it,” Sigler said indifferently.

“May I see your register of serial numbers? If we have those from the stolen bills, we will make every effort to trace them.”

“What makes you think they were recorded?”

Irvine shrugged. “Nothing. But it never hurts to ask.”

Sigler fished around in his desk and retrieved a set of keys. “We keep all the old bank records in a storehouse behind the building.”

He motioned for Irvine to follow him as he led the way through a back door toward a small stone building sitting in the middle of the bank's property. The door protested with a loud squeak as it opened on unoiled hinges. Inside, shelves held rows of ledgers and account books. A small table and chair sat at the back of the storeroom.

“Sit down, Mr. Irvine, and I'll see what I can find.”

Irvine was not optimistic. Finding a bank that kept a record of serial numbers of its currency seemed highly improbable. It was a long shot, but every avenue had to be followed. He watched as Sigler went through several clothbound ledgers. At last, he opened one and nodded.

“Here you are,” Sigler said triumphantly. “The serial numbers our bookkeeper recorded of all the currency in the vault two days before the robbery. Some of the bills, of course, were distributed to customers. But most were taken by the bandit.”

Irvine was stunned as he opened the book and stared at the columns of neatly inked numbers within the lines of the pages. There were several different kinds of large banknotes. Gold certificates, silver certificates, notes issued by individual banks were recorded in the ledger. United States Treasury serial numbers were printed vertically and horizontally on the sides; the local bank that issued them added their own number at the bottom. Most came from the Continental & Commercial National Bank of Chicago and the Crocker First National Bank of San Francisco. He looked up at Sigler, now fired with elation.

“You don't know what this means,” Irvine said, gratified beyond his greatest expectations. “Now we can pass out numbers on the stolen bills to every bank in the country where the bandit might have deposited them. Handbills with the numbers can also be distributed to merchants throughout the West, urging them to be on the lookout for the bills.”

“Good luck,” said Sigler pessimistically. “It's hardly possible that you can trace them back three years. Any one of them could have changed hands a hundred times by now.”

“You're probably right, but hopefully the bandit is still spending them.”

“Slim chance of that,” Sigler said with a tight grin. “I'll bet a month's wage he spent it all a long time ago.”

Sigler
was
probably right, Irvine thought. But Irvine was not discouraged. Bell had said that it would be an insignificant mistake that would trip the bandit up. Now it was only a question of getting the information out to banks and merchants and hope there would be a response that led to the whereabouts of the mysterious killer.