Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 6, May 1961

“It mounts up. By one o’clock in the afternoon, I’ve probably packaged up to three hundred thousand dollars, mostly in hundreds and fifties, and then down to twenties, tens, fives, and ones. They pick up at about one or two in the afternoon, each, of course, separately. Their own cashiers distribute the money into pay-envelopes and their own guards do the distributing to the various plants on Friday.”

“Pretty important,” she said, “aren’t you?”

“Not really. Accurate, or let’s call it dependable. I’m glad I have the job because it shows that they depend on me, and that I’m in excellent standing, and that I’m in fairly good shape in my bid for the job I want. Of course, Mr. Hodges says — perhaps he’s kidding — that for the Board of Directors I may be lacking in just one thing.”

“And that?” she said.

“A wife,” he said.

“That all?” she said.

“According to Mr. Hodges, it would add to my stature, stability, something. In the opinion of the Board of directors.”

“And being a bachelor? That would be fatal?”

“I hope not,” he said, and flushed, and changed the subject and told her about the banquet each year on the fifteenth of December at the Grand Ballroom of The Commodore when the speeches were made and the bonuses declared and another thousand dollars added to the First National Mercantile Heroism Award.

“Heroism Award?” she said. “What’s that?”

“It’s been accumulating for twenty-one years.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Last time it was paid was twenty-two years ago to an employee named Edwin Samuelson.”

“But what is it?”

“An award of a thousand dollars if one of the employees of the bank performs an act of heroism. If no one does during that year, another thousand dollars is added the next year, and so on and so on. Right now it stands at twenty-one thousand dollars.”

“No one has been a hero in twenty-one years?”

He smiled, kissed her forehead. “That’s not as strange as it sounds. Very few people, during a lifetime, perform an act of heroism, that is, ordinary people, in ordinary walks of life. There must be both the opportunity, which happens very rarely, and the inclination to act on such opportunity. Actually, an act of heroism is a rare occurrence. We have eighty-two people employed in the bank; nice, ordinary people. In twenty-one years, nobody was a hero. In the bank, there’s never been a holdup, or, really any kind of untoward happening. In our private lives, we just go along, humdrum and normal.”

“How would you like to win a Heroism Award?”

“Me?”

“The Evangeline Ashley Heroism Award.”

“Love it. How?”

“Put your arms around me and kiss me. But like a hero.”

And on the twenty-third day of March he asked her to marry him. He even made a joke. “For me, for Mr. Hodges, for the Board of Directors,” he said. “But especially for me.”

The moment was propitious. She was at low ebb. She was unsettled, at loose ends, disappointed, and fearful. Her brief career as an actress had been preposterous even to her. Her return to Florida had been a descent, step by step, from glorified waitress in the Upstairs Room, to the tumultuous affair with Bill Grant, to the sickening and simultaneous affair with Orgaz, to the tiresome job as hostess in a tea room.

Bill Grant was gone. Orgaz was dead, by her hand. She had no job, no plans, no prospects. And she gave grave heed to the warning she had received, a warning which it would be dangerous to ignore. She was, in fact, grateful for the warning, for she knew, from Bill Grant, that Pedro’s associates were not men who had need to give warnings. If she were an embarrassment to one of them he could have squashed her somewhere in the dark and ended any embarrassment. Instead it had been his whim to send an underling with a warning. She had no intention of staying in Florida beyond the prescribed period.

She remembered that hungover morning with the elderly director just prior to her exodus from Hollywood. She remembered his words. Go home and catch up with a nice young guy your own age and get married and have babies and live happily ever after. What have you to lose?

And so she accepted the proposal of Oscar Blinney.

IX

They were married on the morning of the twenty-sixth day of March. During the forenoon of the twenty-sixth day of March, her worldly goods — her Savings Bank account — under arrangements made by Banker Blinney, were transferred in her name to the Mount Vernon Savings Bank in the State of New York from the Miami Savings Bank in the State of Florida.