Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories Read Online Free PDF

then Blanchard turned and strode quickly away without looking back.
    He had just passed through the entrance doors, was letting them swing closed behind him, when Cox shouted, "Stop that man! He just robbed me, Sam. Stop him!"
    Blanchard halted on the snow-covered sidewalk outside and turned, his angular face a mask of surprise. The guard, a florid man with mild blue eyes, remained motionless for a moment; then, like an activated robot, he pulled the doors open, stepped out, and grasped Blanchard by the coat with his left hand, his right fumbling the service revolver off his hip.
    "What the hell is going on?" Blanchard demanded.
    The guard drew him roughly inside, holding the revolver pressed against Blanchard's ribs. The near-funereal silence of three o'clock closing had dissolved now into excited murmurings, the scrape of chairs, the slap of shoes on the marble floor as the bank's employees surged away from their desks. Cox ran out from behind his teller's window, the president of Midwestern National Exchange Bank, Allard Hoffman, at his heels. The teller's eyes were wide and excited; he held a piece of paper clenched in his right hand. Hoffman looked angrily officious.
    "He held me up," Cox said as they reached Blanchard and the guard. "Every bill I had over a ten."
    Blanchard gave his head a small, numb shake. "I don't believe this," he said. He stared at Cox. "What's the matter with you? You know I didn't try to hold you up."
    "Look in his overcoat pockets, Sam," Cox said. "That's where he put the money."
    "You're crazy—"
    "Go ahead, Sam, look in his pockets," Hoffman said.
    The guard instructed Blanchard to turn around and keep his hands upraised. When Blanchard obeyed, the guard patted his pockets, frowned, and then made a thorough one-handed search. After which he looked as bewildered as Blanchard. In his hand he held a thin pigskin wallet and seven rolls of pennies, nickels and dimes.
    "This is all he's got on him," he said.
    "What?" Cox burst out. "Sam, I saw him put that money into his overcoat pockets."
    "Well, it's not there now."
    "Of course it's not there," Blanchard said angrily. "I told you I didn't commit any robbery."
    Cox opened the folded piece of paper he held. "This is the note he gave me, Mr. Hoffman. Read it for yourself."
    Hoffman took the note. It had been fashioned of letters cut from a newspaper and glued to a sheet of plain paper, and it said: Give me all your big bills, I have a gun. If you try any heroics I'll kill you. I'm not kidding . The bank president put voice to the message as he read it.
    "He's not carrying any weapon, either," Sam said positively.
    "I believed the note about that," Cox said, "but I made up my mind to shout nonetheless. I just couldn't stand by and watch him get away with the bank's money."
    "I don't know where you got that note," Blanchard said to Cox, "but I didn't give it to you. I handed you a slip of paper, that's true, but it was just a list of those rolls of coins and you know it."
    "You claim Mr. Cox gave them to you?" Hoffman asked him.
    "Certainly he did. In exchange for twenty-eight dollars in fives and ones."
    "I did not give him any coin rolls," Cox said with mounting exasperation. "I did exactly what it says in that note. I gave him every large bill I had in the cash drawer. The vault cart happened to be behind me at the time, since my cage was the only one open, and he told me to give him what was on that too. He must have gotten sixty-five or seventy thousand altogether."
    "You're a liar," Blanchard snapped.
    "You're the one who's lying!"
    "I don't have your damned money. You've searched me, haven't you? All I've got is about twenty dollars in my wallet."
    "Well," Hoffman said darkly, "somebody has it."
    At that moment two plainclothes detectives entered the bank, having been summoned by a hurried call from one of the other Midwestern officials. The one in charge, a lumbering and disheveled man with small, bright eyes, was named Freiberg. He instructed