Saving the Reality by Mister Mysterio

Author:Mister Mysterio [Mysterio, Mister]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-02-23T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

A BANK CASE FROM THE OUTSIDE

"It is astonishing," said Gard, the bookkeeper, "how few people know

anything about their own business. Take bank accounts, for instance.

Many people have money in the bank which lies there inactive. There is

not one man in five, having such an account, who can tell the amount of

it."

This statement was launched during the evening meal at Mrs. Hudson's

very respectable boarding-house in the prosperous little town of New

Beaufort, which slumbers in one of the valleys of central New York.

"I must take issue with you there," ventured the elderly rector of the

Episcopal church who, being a widower, boarded with Mrs. Hudson. "I, for

instance, have managed to save a little money for old age and I can tell

the amount of it to a penny."

"And I know just how much I have on deposit," insisted Miss Dolan, the

school-teacher.

"And I am quite sure of mine," asserted a buxom widow who had collected

life insurance.

"As a test of my contention," said Gard, "I am willing to pledge a box

of candy to each of the ladies and cigars to the gentlemen who will set

down the exact amounts of their inactive accounts in the First National

bank and then prove their figures correct by application to the

cashier."

This proposal appealed to those who had been drawn into the incipient

controversy. Next day they asked for the figures, and each had won his

reward. Gard seemed chagrined that his theory should have thus gone to

the winds, but he cheerfully stood treat.

For he had established a fact very important to him. The inactive

accounts of the First National bank of New Beaufort were intact.

This was one of the first steps in an investigation of a financial

institution which, while seemingly in the best of condition, was

suspected of having been looted for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Special agents of the Department of Justice knew that an official of

the bank had been trading heavily in Wall Street and that he had lost.

Gard, a member of this new detective force of the Federal Government,

had been sent to investigate. Representing himself as a bookkeeper he

had secured a position with the leading grocer and had come to board

with Mrs. Hudson.

He stayed three months. At the end of that time he reported the

shortage, fixed the blame upon the man responsible for it, showed the

methods used, cited the accounts from which the money had been stolen,

told what accounts were still intact. Yet he had never been inside the

bank, had seen none of its books, had consulted with nobody familiar

with them, had received no confessions. The manner in which he

accomplished these seemingly impossible ends illustrates most

excellently the methods used by this new detective agency of the

Government.

It was a strange conspiracy of circumstances that brought to New

Beaufort detectives from three different services on the night, two

months later, that Conrad Compton, the enterprising citizen and banker,

was giving his big party.

There was McCord, a plain-clothes man from New York. McCord would not

have been in New Beaufort but for the ramifications of the New York

police department in keeping track of these middle class criminals who

live through the trade of burglary--a calling that is sometimes refined

to art.

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