Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

Geblick read the message twice, laboriously. Then he ran out to his car where he still had a list of serial numbers the bank had produced after the money had been stolen. He ran a thumbnail along the numbers until he found the one that matched the one on the bill.

Geblick had put in for his vacation in the fall, but he had the seniority to request and get a change.

Carrying tools purchased from a hardware store, as well as a suitcase, he returned to the house he’d just inherited. He straightened the furniture, dusted, then swept the rug. He washed the dishes in the kitchen. He stripped sheets from the bed and carried them to a laundromat on the corner. As the washer went to work, he returned to the house and carefully squeezed every inch of the mattress. He searched through the few pieces of worn clothing Snider had left in the closet. Then he went back to the laundromat where he put the washed sheets in a dryer. While that operation was being completed, he sat in a metal chair, staring straight ahead.

Snider, he realized, had known the personal habits inside that neighborhood bank as well as he’d known his own; he’d had his savings account there for twenty years. Because business picked up during the lunch hour, most of the employees took their lunch break after one o’clock, so the usual force from one to two was two tellers and the assistant manager. There were a front and a rear entrance. Customers were no more than occasional during that interval. Without showing the faintest ingeniousness, Snider had slipped on a rubber mask and thin leather gloves and gone in the back entrance carrying a plastic bag. He’d herded all three employees into an open vault. He’d taken what money he could find in there, closed the door, then taken all the money from the tellers’ cages. He’d done it in roughly four minutes, during which time not another soul had stepped into that bank. Then he’d run out and down an alley where he’d disappeared.

The clue to identity, beyond the employees’ description of his slight and short build, had been Geblick’s ticket to the robber: an old leather watchband which had broken during the little man’s haste to collect that eighty-seven thousand. The watch had been found just inside the back entrance. On the back had been engraved “To Artie from Ma.”

Artie Snider had not denied the watch was his when Geblick had focused ownership down to him. He’d simply claimed that he’d been in the bank late that morning, which he had.

During the trial, Geblick had claimed that Snider had been doing a last minute casing of the bank. The defense attorney, Barstow, had accused Geblick of seeking a quick and easy arrest for a robbery he couldn’t honestly solve. The jury had seen fit to believe Barstow and Snider.

Now the trial was over, Snider had been acquitted, and he was dead. But his guilt, Geblick thought, is still real, and that note proves it. Geblick reached inside his jacket pocket and took it out to read the message again.

Having done so, he carried the clean sheets back to the little house, made the bed, and began taking the house apart.

During the next days, he ate canned food warmed on Snider’s old stove. He slept in Snider’s bed. He removed every fiber-board, which comprised the walls, from the interior. There was no basement, but he was able to crawl through a small opening underneath the kitchen and, with a flashlight, search all of the ground down there as well as the surfaces between the floor joists. He found nothing.

He nailed the fiberboards back, then walked with dark and scowling features through the house again. As he stopped in the small bathroom, he felt a sudden surge of fury at himself for having missed the obvious simply because he’s been thinking about how he would fake some kind of injury so that he could have disability money coming in as well as the retirement, then move down to Guayama or Mazatlán where he could turn that eighty-seven grand he was going to find into a fortune. Jaw muscles jerking, he lifted the cover of the commode and saw a note taped to the bottom surface. He removed it and unfolded the paper, which carried the message:

SINCE YOU FIGURED WHERE THIS WAS, GEBLICK, FIGURE WHAT PATTY THE MILKMAID MEANS.

“Peloski,” Geblick said into the telephone in the booth two blocks from the little house, “what have we got on Patty the Milkmaid?”

“You don’t quit even when you’re on vacation, do you, Geblick?”

“What’s on her?”

“What’s she in?”

“Dope, maybe. Shoplifting. I don’t know. I’m telling you to find out. She sounds like a broad in the Tenderloin. Get on it, Peloski. I’ll check with you in an hour.”

An hour later Geblick listened to Peloski saying, “All we got is Patty the Cow.”

“Which?”

“Cow. She’s in the Tenderloin, all right — she’s a hooker,” Peloski said.

Geblick was sweating. He kicked open the door of the booth to get air. “You sure that’s it, Peloski?”