The Moneychangers (16 page)

If the phone had been answered, Wainwright would have made an excuse about a wrong number and revised his plans. As it was, he now headed for his car, parked in the headquarters basement garage.

Before leaving the garage he o
pened the trunk
of the car and removed a slim chamois case, placing it in an inside pock
et. He then drove across town.

He walked toward the apartment building casually but taking in details. A three-story structure, probably forty years old and showing signs o
f disrepair. He guessed it con
tained two dozen or so apartments. No doorman was visible. Inside a vestibule Nolan Wainwright could see an array of mail boxes and call buttons. Dual glass doors opened-from the street to the vestibule; beyond them was a more solid door, undoubtedly locked. The time was 10:30. Traffic
on the street was light. No

other pedestrians were near the apartment house. He went in.

Next to the mail boxes were three rows of buzzers and a speaker-phone. Wainwright saw the name EASTIN and depressed the button beside it. As he expected, there was no response.

(guessing that 2G indicated the second floor, he chose a bell button at random with the prefix 3 and pressed it. A man's voice on the speaker-phone rasped, "Yeah, who is it?" The name beside the button was Appleby.

"Western Union," Wainwright said. "Telegram for Appleby." "Okay, bring it up."

Behind the heavy interior door a buzzer sounded and a lock clicked open. Wainwright opened the door and went in quickly.

Immediately ahead was an elevator which he ignored. He saw a stairway to the right and went up it, two stairs at a ti
me, to the second floor.
On his way Wainwright reflected on the astounding innocence of people generally. He hoped that Appleby, whoever he was, would not wait too long for his telegram. This night Mr. Appleby would suffer no harm beyond minor puzzlement, perhaps frustration, though he might have fared far worse. Yet apartment tenants everywhere, despite repeated warnings, continued to do exactly the same. Of course, Appleby might grow suspicious and alert the police, though Wainwright dou
bted it. In any case, a few min
utes from now it would make no difference.

Apartment 2G was near the end of the second-floor corridor and the lock proved uncomplicated. Wainwright tried a succession of slim blades from the chamois case he had pocketed, and on the fourth attempt the lock cylinder turned. The door swung open and he went in, dosing the door behind him.

He waited, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness, then crossed to a window and drew drapes. He found a light switch and turned it on. The apartment
was small, designed for use by
one
person; it was a single room divided into areas. A living
-
dining space contained a sofa, armchair, portable TV, and meal table. A bed was located behind a partition; the kitchenette had folding louvered doors. Two other doors which Wainwright checked revealed a bathroom and a storage closet. The place was orderly and clean. Several shelves of books and a few framed prints added a touch of personality.

Without wasting time, Wainwright began a systematic, thorough search
.

He tried to suppress, as he worked, gnawing self
-
criticism for the illegal acts he was committing tonight. He did not wholly succeed. Nolan Wainwright was aware that everything he had done so far represented a reversal of his moral standards, a negation of his belief in law and order. Yet anger drove him. Anger and the knowledge of failure, four days ago, within himself.

He remembered with excruciating clarity, even now, the mute appeal in the eyes of the you
ng Puerto Rican girl, Juanita Nu
nez, when he encountered her for the first time last Wednesday and began the interrogation. It was an appeal wh
ich said unmistakably: You and I
. .. you are black, I am brown. Therefore you, of all people, should realize I am alone here, at a disadvantage, and desperately need help and fairness. But while recognizing the appeal, he had brushed it aside harshly, so that afterwards contempt replaced it, and he remembered that in the girl's eyes too.

This memory, coupled with chagrin at having been duped by Miles Eastin, made Wainwright determined to beat Eastin at his game, no matter if the law was bent in doing it.

Therefore, methodically, as his police training had taught him, Wainwright went on searching, determined that if evidence existed he would find it.

Half an hour later he knew that few places remained where anything could be hidden. He had examined cupboards, drawers and contents, had probed furniture, opened suitcases, inspected pictures on the walls, and removed the back of the TV. He also riffled through books, noting that an entire shelf was devoted to what someone
had told him was Eastin's hobby the study of money through the ages. Along with the books, a portfolio contained sketches and photographs of ancient coins and banknotes. But of anything incriminating there was no trace. Finally he piled furniture in one corner and rolled up the living area rug. Then, with a flashlight, he went over every inch of floorboard.

Without the flashlight's aid he would have missed the carefully sawn board, but two lines, lighter colored than the wood elsewhere, betrayed where cuts had been made. He gently pried up the foot or so of board between the lines and in the space beneath were a small black ledger and cash in twenty-dollar bills.

Working quickly, he replaced the board, the rug, the furniture.

He counted the cash; it totaled six thousand dollars. Then he studied the small black ledger briefly, realized it was a betting record and he whistled softly at the size and number of amounts involved.

He put the book down it could be examined in detail later on an occasional table in front of the sofa, with the money beside it.

Finding
the money surprised him. He had
no doubt it was the six thousand dollars missing from the bank on Wednesday, but he would have expected Eastin to have exchanged it by now, or have deposited it elsewhere. Police work had taught him that criminals did foolish, unexpected things, and this was one.

What still had to be learned was how Eastin had taken the
money and brought it here.

Wainwright glanced around the apartment, after which he turned out the lights. He reopened the drapes and, settling comfortably on the sofa, waited.

In the semidarkness, with the small apartment lighted by reflections from the street
outside, his thoughts drifted.
He thought again of Juanita Nunez and wished somehow he could make amends. Then he remembered the FBI report about her missing husband, Carlos, who had been traced to Phoenix, Arizona, and it occurred to Wainwright that this informatio
n might be used to help the girl .. ,

Of course, Miles Eastin's
story about having seen Carlos Nunez in the bank the same day as the cash loss was a fabrication intended to throw even more suspicion on Juanita.

That despicable bastard! What kind of man was he, first to direct blame toward the gi
rl, and later to add to it? The
security chief felt his fists tighten, then warned himself not to allow his feelings to become too strong.

The warning was necessary, and he knew why. It was because of an incident long buried in his mind and which he seldom disinterred. Without really wanting to, he began remembering it.

Nolan Wainwright, now nearly fifty, had been spawned in the city's slums and, from birth, had found life's odds stacked against him. He grew up with survival as a daily challenge and with crime petty and otherwise a surrounding norm. In his teens he had run with a ghetto gang to whom brushes with the law were proof of manhood.

Like others, before and since, from the same slum background, he was driven by an urge to be somebody, to be noticed in whatever way, to release an inner rage against obscurity. He had no experience or philosophy to weigh alternatives, so participation in street crime appeared the only, the inevitable route. It seemed likely he would graduate, as many of his contemporaries did, to a police and prison record.

That he did not was due, in part, to chance; in part, to Bufflehead Kelly.

Bufflehead was a not-too-bright, lazy, amiable elderly neighborhood cop who had learned that a policeman's survival in the ghetto could be lengthened by adroitly being somewhere else when trouble erupted, and by taking action only when a problem loomed directly under his nose. Superiors complained that his arrest record was the worst in the precinct, but against this in Bufflehead's view his retirement and pension moved satisfyingly closer every year.

But the teenage Nolan Wainwright had loomed under Bufflehead's nose the night of an attempted gang-bust into a warehouse which the beat cop unwittingly disturbed,
so everyone had run, escaping, except Wainwright who tripped and fell at Bufflehead's feet.

"Y' stupid, clumsy monkey," Bufflehead complained. "Now it's all kinds of pa
per and court work you'll be caus
in' me this night."

Kelly detested paperwork and court appearances which cut annoyingly into a policeman's off-duty time.

In the end he compromised. Instead of arresting and charging Wainwright he took him, the same night, to the police gym and, in Bufflehe
ad's own words, "beat the b'jesus
out of him" in a boxing ring.

Nolan Wainwright, bruised, sore, and with one eye badly swollen though still with no arrest record reacted with hatred. As soon as possible he would smash Bufflehead Kelly to a pulp, an objective which brought him back to the police gym and Bufflehead for lessons in how to do it. It was, Wainwright realized long afterward, the needed outlet for his rage. He learned quickly. When the time arrived to reduce the slightly stupid, lazy cop to a punished punching bag, he found the desire to do so had evaporated. Instead he had become fond of the old man, an emotion surprising to the youth himself.

A year went by during which Wainwright co
ntinued boxing, stayed in school
and managed to keep out of trouble. Then one night Bufflehead, while on duty, accidentally interrupted a holdup of a grocery store. Undoubtedly the cop was more startled than the two small-time hoodlums involved and would certainly not have impeded, them since both were armed. As investigation afterward brought out, Bufflehead did not even try to draw his gun.

But one robber panicked and, before running, fired a sawed-off shotgun into Bufflehead's gut.

News of the shooting spread quickly and a crowd gathered. It included young Nolan Wainwright.

He would always remember as he did now the sight and sound of harmless, lazy Bufflehead, conscious, writhing, wailing, screaming in demented agony as blood and entrails gushed from his capacious, mortal wound

An ambulance was
a long time coming. Moments be
fore it arrived, Bufflehead, still screaming, died.

The incident left its mark forever on Nolan Wainwright, though it was not Bufflehead's death itself which affected him most. Nor did the arrest and later execution of the thief who fired the shot, and his companion, seem more than anticlimactic.

What shocked and influenced him above all else was the appalling, senseless waste. The original crime was mean, foolish, foredoomed to failure; yet, in failing, its devastation was outrageously immense. Within young Wainwright's mind that single thought, that reasoning, persisted. It proved a catharsis through which he came to see all crime as equally negative, equally destructive and, later still, as an evil to be fought. Perhaps, from the beginning, a streak of puritanism had been latent, deep inside him. If so, it surfaced.

He progressed from youth to manhood as an individual with uncompromising standards and, because of this, became something of a loner, among his friends and eventually when he became a cop. But he was an efficient cop who learned and rose fast, and was incorruptible, as Ben Rosselli and his aides once learned.

And later still, within
First Mercantile American Bank
, Wainwright's strong feelings stayed with him.

It was possible that the security chief dozed off, but a key inserted in the apartment lock alerted him. Cautiously he sat up. His illuminated watch dial showed it was shortly after midnight.

A shadowy figure came in; a shaft of outside light revealed it as Eastin. Then the door closed and Wainwright heard Eastin fumble for a switch. The light came on.

Eastin saw Wainwright at
once and his surprise was tota
l. His mouth dropped open, blood drained from his face. He tried to speak, but gulped, and no words came.

Wainwright stood up, glaring. His voice cut like a knife. "How much did you steal today?"

Before Eastin could answer or recover, Wainwright seized him by the coat lapels, turned him and pushed.
He fell sprawling on the sofa.
 
      As surprise turned to indignation, the young man spluttered, "Who let you in? What the hell do you…" His eyes moved to the money and the small black ledger, and he stopped.

"That's right," Wainwright said harshly, "I came for the bank's money, or what little is left." He motioned to the bills stacked on the table. "We know what's there, is what you took on Wednesday. And in case you're wondering, we know about the milked accounts and all the rest."