Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

“Like hell,” Neal snapped, and bolted for the hall. But of course there were other cops out there, and he didn’t get far. When they had subdued him and pulled him back into the dining room, Neal glowered sullenly at Vincent.

“How’d you know? Just tell me that.”

Vincent said, “It was Mr. Ross here. He saw the handwriting on the wall. Or rather, on the mirror.”

The Alias by Lawton O’Connor

“If I were to commit a crime,” said Mr. Nelson West over the bridge table that evening, “it would be for money, and only for money. But I would have the good sense to leave most of the money untouched afterwards.”

“Then what is the point,” his wife said, “in stealing it at all?”

“Ah,” West said. “If you steal enough to begin with, you can use just a small portion of the money and still have enough to have made the crime worthwhile. The trouble with these big bank and payroll robberies is the robbers always become greedy afterwards. They’re not content to spend just the used bills. They have to spend the new bills too, and that way they get caught. Greed.” He shook his head.

Mr. George Simpson, proprietor of the Greater Arizona Realty Company, played a low club from the dummy. “I’ve always thought,” he said, “that one of the reasons they get caught is there’s more than one of them in on the robbery. The police catch one, he tells on the others; or they get mad at each other; or whatever.”

“That’s another thing,” West said. “The crime must be executed by one man. Never trust anyone.”

“But one man alone can’t steal a lot of money,” Simpson said. “It takes timing and planning and somebody to drive the car and so on and so forth.”

“True,” West said.

“Well,” Simpson said with a laugh, putting up a trump from his own hand, “all I can say for you, Nelson, is I’m glad you work for me. By your own definition, you’ll never commit a crime.”

If it had not been for Mr. Hathaway, Simpson would have been right about West. Mr. Hathaway just happened. He came along out of the blue at a time when Nelson West, himself new to Arizona, had been working for Simpson’s Greater Arizona Realty Company, as a sales agent, for no more than four months.

Simpson called West into his inner office. “There’s a guy named Hathaway waiting outside. Take the keys to the Ford place out in the desert and see if you can sell it to him.”

“That deserted monstrosity?” West said. “You couldn’t give it away.”

“This is one nut who just might buy it,” Simpson said. “I’ve been talking to him. He’s an eccentric. Wanted to know the name of a good bank out here, and when I told him, he asked me for the name of another good bank. He’s out here from the East. Rich old guy. No relatives, no ties. Wants to be away by himself.”

West shrugged and went outside and met Mr. Hathaway. Then the two of them got into West’s car and started east, toward the desert.

“I want to stop at a bank first,” Hathaway said. “I’m carrying a lot of money around with me.”

“Mr. Simpson said you were interested in relocating here,” West said. “It’s certainly marvelous country.”

“I’m interested in more than one bank,” Hathaway said. “Two hundred thousand dollars is too much to put in any one bank.”

West swallowed. “Well,” he said, “the thing to do is get it into one bank for now. There’s one in Mesa that has branches all over the state. So we can stop there, and later — tomorrow or the next day — you can transfer some of it. This way you know it’ll be safe. Won’t have to carry it around with you.”

He drove Hathaway to the bank in Mesa, and while Hathaway was inside, he went down the street to a large sporting goods store and bought some bullets and five one-gallon jugs of muriatic acid, which is commonly used for cleaning and regulating swimming pools. He placed these articles in the trunk of his car and was sitting at the wheel when Mr. Hathaway came out of the bank.

“Now let’s see that Ford place.”

West nodded, and they drove a good distance into the desert.

“They were very nice at the bank,” Hathaway said. “I told them I wouldn’t be using the money till they had cleared my cashier’s check back east, but that as soon as possible I wanted to transfer some of it to another bank. They said they understood.”

“Good,” West said. He turned onto a road that was hardly a road at all, leading to a scrubby ridge of hills.

“Nobody around for miles, is there?” Hathaway said.

“You want privacy, here it is.”

“I should think you’d be afraid driving this wasteland by yourself.”

“We all carry guns in the glove compartment,” the real estate agent said. He reached over and opened the glove compartment. “See?” He took out the gun and showed it to Hathaway, then drew back a little and shot the other man twice.