I was sliding the twenties from under the roller in the right-hand compartment I was again idly aware of the crisp freshness of the two on top. I didn’t really know why, because in any kind of business where you handle much currency you run across new bills all the time. Perhaps it was because there were two of them back-to-back and because they had curled a little under the roller with their ends sticking up. One of them had what appeared to be a brown stain of some kind along the edge for about half the width of the bill.
I set them aside, put the petty cash receipt in the drawer, and distributed the change into the proper compartments. I slid one of the twenties into my wallet for the stamps and was just closing the drawer when I heard the rasp of a shoe on the pavement outside. I glanced up. It was Otis. He unlocked the door and came on in as I was putting the wallet in my pocket and gathering up the other two twenties for the bank deposit. He lighted a cigarette and looked sadly at the register.
“Tapping the till again, boss?”
His full name is Otis Olin Shaw. He’s around forty-five, and looks a little like the pictures of Lincoln at that age except the black hair is thinning and is gone altogether from a small round spot on his crown. His unvarying facial expression is that of an undertaker who’s just learned his best friend has been cremated by a rival establishment while owing him three hundred dollars. This bleak sadness, however, covers a gall-and-wormwood sense of humor, a lot of intelligence, and something verging on genius when it comes to internal combustion engines.
“Good morning, Herr Schopenhauer,” I said. “What’s the cheery word?”
He shook his head and followed me into the office like an aging Great Dane, sitting down at the desk and watching mournfully as I stuffed the currency and checks into the white bag I used for the deposit. “I was just telling the old lady this morning,” he said, “that there was a chance you might raise me to fourteen a week now that heroin is getting cheaper. . . .”
I added the twenties to the currency and clipped the adding machine tally to the deposit slip. “Don’t count on it,” I said. “That cheap stuff is cut, and I need more of it.”
He raised a hand. “Oh, I don’t begrudge you a nickel of it myself. It’s just—well, the old lady’s always after me. Going around town, she keeps seeing all these women wearing shoes. You know how it is, stooped over that way picking up cigarette butts. . . .”
”Belt her one,” I said, “and keep her at home. What kind of a man are you, anyway?”
“I just haven’t got the heart, boss. She’s usually carrying around one of the kids that’s too weak to walk. . . .”
He had one child, a boy of around fourteen who already looked like something out of the back-field of the Los Angeles Rams. They owned their own home and Otis cleared around a hundred a week with salary, commissions, and overtime, now that he’d got a raise when Barbara was purged and we both had to double part time as clerks.
He went back to the shop. I wrote out checks for a bunch of bills that were due on the tenth, and then opened the big sliding doors at the sides of the building. It was growing hot now at eight thirty of a still and cloudless morning in August. I swept down the showroom around the boats and trailers. We had over a dozen models on the floor, running all the way from a car-top duck boat to a sixteen-foot inboard runabout that sold for close to two thousand.
As soon as the bank opened I called out to Otis to watch the front, took the deposit from the safe, picked up the outgoing mail, and walked over to Main. Brassy sunlight beat on my bare head and I could feel beads of perspiration under the thin sports shirt. I crossed with the light and entered.
It was a small place, a branch of the Mid-South Bank & Trust of Sanport, with only a couple of tellers’ windows and Warren Bennett’s desk behind a railing at the right. I got in line at Arthur Pressler’s window, feeling almost chill in the sudden transition from the outside heat to air-conditioning. At the