“We think she has been used, Mr. Chase,” Matt said. “I can’t really believe there will be much interest in putting her in prison. Providing, of course, she comes to understand the mess she’s in, and cooperates.”
“Used by whom?” Chase asked coldly.
“Her across-the-backyard neighbor,” Deitrich said. “Who is the uncle of the police officer now under arrest.”
“You’re suggesting that she’s . . . that they’re involved? Personally, I mean?”
“It looks that way, Mr. Chase,” Deitrich said.
Chase considered that a moment.
“The poor woman,” he said, and then shifted into his banker’s role: “Exactly what is it you want from me? How is the bank involved in this?”
“We just learned—we left a car watching her house; they got on the radio—that she is in her car, and apparently on her way here, to work,” Deitrich said.
“You mean she’s not here now?”
“I suppose she’s come in late today,” Matt said.
Chase gave him a dirty look. This tragic situation was obviously not the place for levity.
“When she comes in, Mr. Chase,” Matt said, “we’d like to talk to her here, in your office.”
“To what end?” Chase demanded coldly.
“Detective Payne thinks,” Deitrich picked up on Chase’s annoyance with Matt and answered for him, “and I agree, that when she sees us here, and knows that we know, she’ll give us what we want.”
“I just can’t believe this of Adelaide.”
“Frankly, I feel sorry for her,” Deitrich said. “I hope that she sees that the only thing for her to do is admit that she’s done something really foolish, and tries to help us straighten it out.”
“And the alternative?”
“We’re prepared to arrest her on suspicion of receiving stolen property,” Matt said. “Other charges are possible.”
“You’re going to arrest her, here, now, right in the bank?”
“If that becomes necessary, yes, sir,” Matt said.
“And once you arrest her, then what?”
“We’ll interview her. Ask for her cooperation. If she’s unwilling to cooperate, then we’ll get a search warrant for the safe-deposit box.”
“No judge will give you—no judge should give you, it wouldn’t be fair to our customers—a warrant to go into every safe-deposit box in the bank.”
“No, sir,” Matt said. “But I’m sure I can get a judge to give me one requiring the bank to give me access to every unrented safe-deposit box. I think that’s what Mrs. Worner has done, permit Calhoun to use an unrented box. Or maybe she’s got a box, and she’s letting him use hers. But I think we’ll find we’re talking about an unrented box.”
Chase looked at him coldly, then at Deitrich, and then back at Matt.
“And what you hope I’ll do—this is it, isn’t it?—is that I’ll talk to her.”
“That would be in everybody’s best interests, Mr. Chase,” Dietrich said.
“Yes, I suppose it would,” Chase said thoughtfully, and sighed audibly. “We’ll have to let her go, of course. The bank simply cannot tolerate—”
“There she is,” Deitrich said softly, gesturing through the glass wall to the wide lobby.
Mrs. Adelaide Worner was pulling at the knob of a door marked “Employees Only” to make sure that she had closed it well. Then she started to walk across the polished marble floor of the bank lobby toward the safe-deposit-box vault.