Read Online Hark! by Ed McBain - Free Book Online

back to the drop-leaf desk in the bedroom, opened the FirstBank statement again.
    The statement showed checks written in April to American Express, Visa, and MasterCard.
    So where were the credit cards?
    Was that what he’d been after?
    The lady’s credit cards?
    The Deaf Man?
    Planning to charge a camcorder or a stereo to the lady’s credit cards?
    Come on now.
    That hardly seemed his style.
    And yet…
    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May…
    Maybe the poor man had fallen upon hard times.
    And summer’s lease hath all too short a date…
    Maybe he needed a new wardrobe for the coming summer season.
    Still and all…
    Credit cards?
    Such small-time shit for such a big-time schemer.
    She decided to pay a visit to the FirstBank branch on Salisbury Street.
    Â 
    M ELISSA HAD PRACTICED signing the name a hundred or more times. Copying it from Gloria Stanford’s driver’s license and credit cards. Gloria Stanford, Gloria Stanford, again and again. She now knew it almost the way she knew her own name. Melissa Summers, Gloria Stanford. Interchangeable.
    There was a photo of a good-looking blonde on both the license and in the corner of one of the credit cards. But except for the blond hair, Gloria Stanford—whoever the hell she might be—bore no resemblance to Melissa Summers, none at all.
    Melissa had pointed this out to Adam.
    â€œWe don’t look at all alike,” she’d said.
    â€œNo problem,” he’d assured her. “One thing certain about a so-called personal banker is that he wouldn’t know you if he tripped over you in his own bathroom.”
    She hoped so.
    She did not know what crime it might be to try getting into someone else’s safe-deposit box, but she had a feeling she could spend a lot of time upstate if she got caught doing it. Be ironic, wouldn’t it? Get sent up for signing someone else’s name on a bank’s signature card, after she’d been hooking all these years with never so much as a blemish on her spotless career—well, that one prostitution bust in L.A., but she was still Carmela Sammarone then.
    Her high-heeled shoes clicked noisily on the bank’s polished marble floor as she approached the desk at the rear. A bespectacled woman looked up at her, smiled. Handing her the little red envelope with the key in it, Melissa returned the smile. The woman shook the key out of the envelope, opened a file drawer with numbered index cards in it, fingered swiftly through them, yanked one out, silently read the name on it, looked up, asked “Miss Stanford?,” and without waiting for an answer, handed the card to Melissa for signature. Gloria Stanford’s true signature marched down the length of the card like so many identical siblings:
    Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
    Melissa added her forgery just below the last true signature:
    Gloria Stanford
    Close, but no cigar.
    On the other hand, who was watching the store?
    The lady in the eyeglasses glanced cursorily at the signature, and then opened the gate in the railing and led Melissa back to the rows upon rows of stainless steel boxes. She used first Gloria’s key and next the bank’s own key to open the door to one of the boxes, and then yanked the box out of the row and handed it, deep and sleek, to Melissa.
    â€œWill you need a room, Miss Stanford?” she asked.
    â€œYes, please,” Melissa said.
    Her heart was pounding.
    In the small room, with the door locked, Melissa lifted the lid of the box and peered into it.
    There seemed to be a whole big shitpot full of hundred-dollar bills in that box.
    She wondered if Adam would find her and shoot her if she ran off with all that money.
    She decided he would.
    Â 
    W HEN E ILEEN B URKE got to the bank, the woman in the eyeglasses told her that Miss Stanford had been there not ten minutes earlier. She