of them unless they come by my desk and sign themselves in.”
Matt turned to Chase.
“Mr. Chase, as an officer of this bank, do you have the authority to grant Lieutenant Deitrich and myself access to safe-deposit box number 421?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I ask you now, Mr. Chase, for permission to examine box 421, which has been identified to me as the box to which Mrs. Worner arranged . . . irregular access. Do I have your permission?”
Chase nodded.
“Would you verbalize your answer, please, sir?”
“You have my permission to go into the box,” Chase said.
“You’re going to need Timmy’s key,” Mrs. Worner said. “It takes two keys to get into a box.”
“The bank doesn’t have a master key?” Matt asked, surprised.
Chase shook his head.
“We’ll have to call a locksmith,” Matt said. “Or break into it.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Chase said. “Who will pay for repairing that damage?”
“I will,” Adelaide Worner said. “This is my fault.”
“Give me the bank’s key, Adelaide, please,” Lieutenant Deitrich said.
“It’s in my desk outside,” she said. “I’ll have to get it.”
“Please,” Deitrich said.
“Why don’t we send for a locksmith?” Chase asked. “I’ll pay for it.”
“We may not have to, Mr. Chase,” Deitrich said. “Let me see what I can do with that lock.”
He took a leather case, about the size of Matt’s credentials folder, from his jacket pocket. It contained an array of small stainless-steel picks.
Twenty seconds after Mrs. Worner had given him the bank’s key to box 421, Deitrich pulled the stainless-steel door to it open.
“There it is,” he said to Matt.
“Let’s see what’s in it,” Matt said.
The box was nearly full of stacks of currency, neatly held together with rubber bands.
“My God! Look at all that money!” Mrs. Worner exclaimed.
There was something else. Matt took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and fished a large gold-cased wristwatch with a matching band out of the box. The bezel of the watch was diamond-studded, and there was a diamond chip on the dial where each of the hour numbers would normally be.
“Does anyone really think Mrs. Calhoun inherited this from her grandmother?”
“What is it?” Deitrich asked.
“It’s a Rolex, of course. What else?”
Matt held it out for Deitrich to see, and then let the gold-cased watch slip back off the ballpoint pen into the box.
“I think we should have pictures of this,” he said. “And I’d like to fingerprint the watch and the box. Maybe they can even get something off the currency. How much trouble would that cause you, Lieutenant?”
“No more than dialing a telephone,” Deitrich said. “I can have a forensic-evidence team here in five minutes.”
“There’s a telephone on my desk,” Adelaide Worner said. “You first dial nine, that gets you an outside line, and then you dial your number.”
“Thank you, Adelaide,” Deitrich said.
“When you come back—we don’t want some shyster lawyer accusing us of breaking the chain of evidence—so one of us is going to have to stay here until we get pictures and fingerprints. I need to call Philadelphia.”
“I’ll be back in thirty seconds,” Deitrich said, and walked out of the room.
“What happens to me now, Mr. Chase?” Adelaide Worner asked.
“We’ll have to think about that, Adelaide,” Chase said. “We’ll try to work something out.”
“Inspector Wohl,” Wohl said.
“Matt, boss.”
“What have you got?”
“A forensic-evidence team is on its way here—here being the safe-deposit vault of the First Harrisburg Bank and Trust—to see if they can lift some prints from, and in any case, photograph box 421 and its contents.”
“In other words, you served the search warrant?”
“We didn’t need to; it was an unauthorized box, still under the control of the bank. The defense can’t claim that the accused had a right to privacy by keeping something in a box that wasn’t under his control. The lady let us into it. And a Harrisburg police stenographer is about to type up her statement, which ties Calhoun to it with a big red bow.”
“Good job!”
“The difficult takes a little time, the impossible a little longer.”
“What’s in the box?”
“What looks like thirty, forty thousand dollars. Maybe more. I’m going to wait until they take pictures and maybe lift some prints before I count it. But a whole great big bunch of money! And a wristwatch that looks like something a drug dealer, or a pimp, would have on his wrist.”
“A Rolex, maybe?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you got the serial number? It’s on the back of the case.”
“No, but I can get it in thirty seconds.”
“Get it,” Wohl ordered.
A minute later, Matt had read the serial number to him over the phone.