“To start,” Matt said. “You won’t have any trouble spotting me. I’ll be the handsome devil with the look of joyous anticipation in his eyes.”
“Oh, God,” Susan said, and hung up.
Matt put the phone in its cradle and only then noticed a mousy-looking female in her thirties standing in the office door. She held a deep metal tray full of strange-looking forms—bank records, probably, he decided—in both hands.
“Mr. Payne?” she asked.
Matt nodded. She came into the office and, with a grunt, laid the gray metal tray on the glass-topped desk.
“These are the safe-deposit box access records,” she said. “When you’re through with them, would you please tell Dolores, and I’ll come and get them.”
“Thank you,” Matt said, and smiled at her.
He ran his fingers down the forms. Each form was metal-topped, and designed to hang from the reinforced side of the tray. Each form was for one box, and listed not only the names and addresses and social security numbers of every person authorized access to that particular box, but at what time, on what date, someone had the box, and for how long.
What I thought Chase was going to get for me was a list of names of box holders matching—at least the last name—the names on my list. This tray obviously holds a card for every safe-deposit box in the bank.
Is giving me more information than I even asked for, crossing over the confidentiality line, the way they always “cooperate” with the police in a situation like this?
Or only when they trust the cop doing the looking?
Or because of my father’s relationship with Chase?
What difference does it make? Never stick your finger in a gift horse’s mouth.
He had finger-walked his way through perhaps half a dozen of the records when the skinny woman came back, this time carrying a tray in which another kind of bank records lay flat.
“These are the accounts in which you may be interested, Mr. Payne,” the skinny woman said. “Through ‘D.’ The sooner I can have them back, the better. So if you would just ask Dolores to Xerox the ones you’re interested in, then you could send them back. I’d really like it better not to bring you ‘E’ through ‘H’ until you’re through with these. Would that be all right?”
“That would be fine,” Matt said. “Thank you very much.”
Matt picked up the top record in the tray. It was a complete record, going back four years, of the banking activity—the dates and times of deposits; withdrawals; interest payments; and service charges—in a savings account of an individual whose last name—only—matched one of the names on the list Matt had prepared in the Personnel Office in the Roundhouse.
The form (actually three forms, stapled together) under the first was a record of the same activity in the individual’s checking account.
If I get one of these—two of these—for every account holder in this bank with the same last name as the names on the list I gave Mr. Chase, I’ll be in Harrisburg for a month.
Which, considering the rockets that went off when I kissed Susie last night, might not be entirely a bad thing.
For Christ’s sake! What the hell’s the matter with you? Get that stupid idea out of your mind, once and for all!
He reached for the telephone, dialed the operator, and placed a collect call to Sergeant Jason Washington.
“Matthew, my boy! How are things in the capital of our great Commonwealth?”
“Well, I am into the bank.”
“So, apparently, is the opposing side,” Washington replied.
“Excuse me?”
“You first. You seemed surprised.”
“The . . . level of cooperation is much more than I expected.”
“Perhaps it’s your charm,” Washington said. “I understand you were to take someone to dinner last night. Did that happen?”
“Yeah.”