I turned my head. “Sorry Leo. What’s up?”
“One of the girls is two-hundred and fifty dollars short.”
“We’ll find it,” I said. “We always do. What do you think the encore will be tonight?”
“Carl, I’ve checked and double-checked and triple-checked. It’s gone.”
I sighed. I would have given anything to have seen the encore.
“All right. Come to my office with what you’ve got.”
It didn’t take any time at all. There was no way around it. I wasn’t happy that he’d brought Helen with him, but she was the one with the missing money.
I looked over the paperwork and said, “Well, this is a problem.”
Helen looked terrified. It didn’t make sense. This wasn’t like her at all. “Can you give Leo and me a minute?” I asked. “We have to talk. I’ll call you back in a minute.”
She nodded, on the brink of tears. After the door closed, I said to Leo, “I’m inclined to think she didn’t steal it.”
“Me, too,” he said. “But this isn’t twenty or thirty dollars. You just sent her back out there, so in a few minutes, every girl in the club is going to know the money is missing. If you don’t fire her, it’s open season. Even if she didn’t steal it, she made the mistake.”
“God this sucks,” I said as the music from Rollie’s encore ended.
“Yeah,” he said. Then he brightened. “Look. Let’s give her a suspension. We’ll tell her we don’t think she stole it and we know it was a mistake, but we can’t let a mistake that big go unpunished. We’ll just suspend her for a few shifts.”
“We’ll have to make it a week,” I said. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than firing her.”