Man on a Leash by Charles Williams Page A

evident in Richter’s tone. “He came in just a few minutes before the captain and was at that middle stand there with a double handful of nickels, dimes, and quarters spread out on it, counting them.”
    “He didn’t have one hand under the poncho, any TV routine like that?”
    “Oh, no. Anyway, he was still here after the captain went out. He was at one of the tellers’ windows. Getting currency for all that silver, I suppose.”
    “I just don’t get it,” Romstead said. “There’s only one thing that strikes me as a little odd. You asked him to sit down here and write the check, but he refused. Then he stopped at one of the stands and wrote it. Didn’t he have a pen?”
    “Oh, I offered him one.”
    “Did it strike you as strange?”
    “No-o. Not really. It was my impression, I think, that he didn’t want me to go after the money—that is, it’d be quicker if he went too.”
    “Well, when he stopped to write it on the way back to the vault, was it the stand where the hippie was?”
    “No. It was the one at the rear.”
    “Then the hippie couldn’t have seen the amount?”
    “No, not unless he had exceptional eyesight—” Richter stopped, his eyes thoughtful. “Yes, he might have. As I recall now, he finished his counting and had gathered up his silver while your father was writing out the check, and he went past on the other side of the stand, going to one of the tellers’ windows. But I don’t think that’s significant; he could just as easily have seen, or guessed, what the three of us were doing back there by the vault with the bag, if he had robbery in mind. Anyway, as I said, he was still in the bank after your father left.”
    Romstead walked back to the apartment, feeling baffled and frustrated. How could he be right and wrong at the same time?

6
    “If the first supposition is right, then the second one has to be too,” he told Mayo. “Richter missed it, and now I’ve missed it; but it still has to be there.”
    “Not necessarily,” she replied. She was wearing the housecoat and a pair of mules, but she’d combed her hair and put on lipstick. She was perched crosswise in a big armchair in the living room, sipping coffee. “You’re projecting your hypothesis from an opinion, not a known fact, when you say it couldn’t have been kidnap. It could have been a girlfriend.”
    “A quarter million dollars?”
    “Men as tough and as promiscuous as your father have turned out to be vulnerable, the same as anybody else, thousands of times. In which case he’d have come in alone to get the money. It wouldn’t have been voluntary, by any stretch of the imagination, but they wouldn’t have to be there.”
    “No.” He shook his head. “You’re missing the key to the whole thing. They wouldn’t have had to be there to force him to sell the stock either. You ever hear of kidnappers coming in to discuss the thing in person? The threat comes by note or telephone. We couldn’t care less how you raise the money, Jack; just raise it.”
    “But you don’t know they were there. Opinion again.”
    “Yes, they were there. He wasn’t alone when he was talking to Winegaard; that’s implicit in the whole conversation. There are two phones in that house, one in the master bedroom and a wall-mounted extension in the kitchen, and one of the bastards was listening in while the others applied the pressure.
    “Look—in kidnap or blackmail, a specific sum is demanded, and you raise it to suit yourself within the time limit. That being the case, he would have sold selectively, or at least he’d have let Winegaard express an opinion. But he wasn’t trying to raise a specific sum; he was selling a list of stocks with a gun against his head, knowing Winegaard was going to protest in a minute and he had to shut him up before he could mention some stocks that weren’t on the list.”
    She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I guess that’s right.”
    “Sure. And utterly pointless, so far. After