Alma bustled out to meet me. She was a plump woman somewhere between fifty and sixty who wore bright, tight-fitting dresses draped in scarves and gaudy jewelry. Today she sported a combination of red with shocking pink and a series of black and silver bead necklaces. Sailing toward me on spiky black patent-leather pumps, she shook my hand as warmly as though I’d borrowed a million dollars instead of fifty thousand.
“Come on back, Vic. How are you? How’s your apartment? That was a good investment you made. I think I told you at the time you could expect that stretch of Racine to start coming up, and it has. I just renegotiated a mortgage for someone on Barry, and you know, the value of her little two-flat had gone up eightfold. Is that why you’re in today?” She had whisked my folder from a drawer while she spoke.
It was a stretch for me sometimes just to come up with the seven hundred a month on my place on top of my rent downtown. That’s what I needed, all right—to treble my mortgage.
I smiled. “Partly. The part about that piece of Racine coming up. I need some help—help that you may not feel able to give me.”
“Try me, Vic.” She gave a rich laugh, showing a mouthful of bright, even teeth. “You know our motto: ‘Growing with the community we serve.’”
“You know I’m a private investigator, Alma.” She should: my uncertain income had made me a tough sell to her managers. “I’m working for an old woman who lives up the street from me, Harriet Frizell. Mrs. Frizell… well, she belongs to old Racine. The part that hasn’t come up yet. And now she’s fallen on hard times.”
I gave a brief but—I hoped—moving picture of Mrs. Frizell’s plight. “She used to be a customer here, but sometime in February she moved her account to U.S. Metropolitan. I can’t believe she’s got much. But I also can’t believe the pair who leaped in to act as her guardians are neighborhood angels. I’m not asking you to tell me what her assets were—I know you can’t do that. But could you tell me if she gave any reason for making the move?”
Alma fixed bright, merry eyes on me for a minute. “What’s your interest in this, Vic?”
I spread my hands. “Call it neighborly. Her world rotated around her dogs. I agreed to help look after them when she went into the hospital, but came home from a trip out of town to find they’d been put to sleep. It keeps me suspicious of the people who did it.”
She pursed her lips, debating the matter with herself. Finally she turned to the computer on the far side of her desk and played around with the keys. I would have given a week’s pay—from a good week—to read the screen. After a few minutes of tinkering she got up with a brief “I’ll be right back,” and headed for the rear of the bank.
When Alma had disappeared into an office built into the back of the lobby, my baser instincts overcame me: I got up and looked at the screen. The only thing visible was an opening menu. Untrusting woman.
Alma spent quite a while pitching my case to her boss. After ten minutes or so the phone rang on one of the other loan officers’ desks. The woman spoke briefly, then got up and disappeared into the back office as well. I finished the coffee Barbara had given me, memorized an upbeat pamphlet on auto financing, found an ornate ladies’ room in the basement of the bank, and still had time to study a home mortgage brochure before the two women emerged.
They stopped at the second officer’s desk long enough for her to pull a file from her cabinet. Alma brought her over to me, introducing her as Sylvia Wolfe. Ms. Wolfe, a tall, spare woman of about sixty, wore a tidy gray cardigan suit more in keeping with a bank than Alma’s flamboyance. She shook hands briskly, but let Alma do the talking.
“We had a long talk with Mr. Struthers about what we could tell you. Sylvia came along because she actually worked with Mrs. Frizell. Your neighbor had been a customer here since 1926 and it was a blow to lose her. Mr. Struthers decided we could show you the letter Mrs. Frizell sent us, but of course, Sylvia can’t let you look at any of her financial records.”
Ms. Wolfe thumbed through a fat file with expert fingers and wordlessly handed me Mrs. Frizell’s letter asking that her account be closed. The old woman had written on a piece of yellowing lined paper, torn from a pad she might have had since first opening her account. Her writing was disconnected, as though she’d written the letter over a period of several days without bothering to check what she’d said on the previous occasion, but the content was clear enough.
I have had an account at your bank for many years and never would believe you would cheat an old customer, but people take advantage of old women in terrible ways. My money with you is all I have, yet you are paying me only 8 percent, but at another bank I can earn 17 percent, and of course I have my dogs to think about. I want you to sell my seedees [sic] and close my savings account and send my money to U.S. Meterpoltan [sic], I have a form for you to use.