Felony File Read Free Page B

door was shutting—I couldn't swear to
anything, except they were both white and one had dark hair."
    " All I could say, about the same," said
Lee. "It was so fast—their timing was so good—they sure as
hell knew what they were doing."
    " It was a damned slick operation all right,"
said Landers. He and Grace had been over in the Accounting department
of Bullock's most of the afternoon, looking at the terrain, talking
to the clerks there. "What sticks out at first glance is that
they knew your whole routine."
    " And we heard something about that this
morning," said Jason Grace in his gentle voice, "but I'd
like to run through it again, to get it straight." His
regular-featured brown face, with its moustache as neat as Mendoza's,
wore a deceptively lazy expression. "What struck me about
it—thar's a big store, with a lot of different departments on seven
floors. It must take some doing to collect the day's take from
everywhere in such a short time."
    " Not really, sir," said Masters. "It's
planning that does it, all right—a set routine. Like we told you,
the store closes at six except for Saturdays when it's open till
nine. So at around five-fifteen, the different department heads start
to close out the cash registers, see? The amount in every register is
totaled and entered on a little form. Then they add up the total of
all the checks and put that down too. The cash goes in one little bag
and the checks in another, and then they both go in a bag together,
marked for that department. By this time it'll be getting on to a
quarter of six, and there aren't usually many last-minute customers
but if so it's easy enough to add in those sales. As soon as the
doors close at six-come to think, it is a kind of split-second timed
thing—the department heads take their bags to number three freight
elevator. There's one of us on every floor right by that elevator—I'm
on the seventh floor. Elevator collects the first-floor bags, goes up
to the second floor, and so on. After it's gone up, the guards on the
first, second, third and fourth floors, they go down to secure all
the street entrances, check the rest rooms, be sure all the people
are out. The rest of us go up to Accounting with the bags."
    " That would be about what time usually?"
asked Landers.
    " It doesn't take long," said Lee. "About
twenty past?"
    He consulted Masters.
    " Twenty past to half past six," said
Masters. "Split the difference. It's all kind of down pat, see?
In Accounting—I mean the hall by the elevator where the door to
Accounting is—we wheel all the bags in on a big dolly, and there'll
be five or six men to handle 'em. They take it in turns. They take
the paper forms out of each bag, and seal the bags—that takes maybe
another twenty minutes. Tell the truth, I don't know where those
forms go, files somewhere, I suppose, they just take 'em into the
Accounting office and then they leave and we take the bags down by
freight elevator five, that's the one closest to the alley between
the buildings."
    Bullock's store had two separate buildings joined by
an arcade below, a mezzanine above. "By that time Decker—he's
the ground-floor guard—has brought the van around, we load the bags
and drive straight to the bank. That'll be about seven-fifteen, it's
only a couple of blocks. The guards there are always waiting, and in
three minutes we've handed over to them and the bags are on the way
to the vault."
    " These birds had to know that routine,"
said Grace, "to catch you all flat-footed the way they did."
    " You can sure as hell say that again," said
Lee feelingly. "What the men in Accounting say—they come out
to the elevator about six-fifteen, to be there when we come up—these
jokers must have hid some place, probably on the seventh floor, until
about ten past six. And something else, they knew how to get up to
the eighth floor, which not everybody would. That elevator's not for
general use, and it's way down at the end of a dead-end aisle in
Ladies'