Read Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories for Free Online

department and the bank for false arrest, defamation of character, and anything else the lawyer can think up."
    He was taken to police headquarters, allowed to call in a public defender, and then interrogated at great length. Not once did he waver from the story he had told in the bank.
    Finally, he was taken to Freiberg's office. The detective looked tired, and his voice was grim when he said, "All right, you're free to go."
    "You mean you finally believe I'm telling the truth?"
    "No," Freiberg said, "I don't. I'm inclined to believe Cox. But we've got nothing to hold you on. Those three poker buddies of yours confirmed your story about a game tonight and you being the banker. We can't find anything to implicate you and you've got no criminal record. It's Cox's word against yours—two respectable citizens—and without the money or some kind of hard evidence, there's not a damned thing we can do." He leaned forward suddenly, his eyes cold and hard. "But understand this, Blanchard: we're not giving up. We'll be watching you—watching you every minute."
    "Watch all you like," Blanchard said. "I'm innocent."
     
    O n a night three weeks later, Blanchard knocked on the door of unit nine, the Beaverwood Motel, in a city sixteen miles away. As soon as he had identified himself, the door opened and he was admitted. He took off his coat and grinned at the sandy-haired man who had let him in.
    "Hello, Cox," he said.
    "Blanchard," the bank teller acknowledged. "You made sure you weren't followed?"
    "Of course."
    "But the police are still watching you?"
    "Not as closely as they were in the beginning. Stop worrying, will you? The whole thing worked beautifully."
    "Yes, it did, didn't it?"
    "Sure," Blanchard said. "Freiberg still thinks I passed the money to an accomplice somehow, but he can't prove it. Like he told me, it's your word against mine. They don't have any idea that it was actually you who passed the money, much less how it was done."
    The room's third occupant—the stout, gray-haired man who had been at Cox's window when Blanchard entered the bank that day—looked up from where he was pouring drinks at a sideboard. "Or that the money was already out of the bank, safely tucked into my briefcase, when the two of you went into your little act."
    Blanchard took one of the drinks the gray-haired man offered and raised the glass high. "Well, here's to crime," he said.
    They laughed and drank, and then they sat down to split the $65,100 into three equal shares . . .

SWEET FEVER
     
    Q uarter before midnight, like   on every evening except the Sabbath or when it's storming or when my rheumatism gets to paining too bad, me and Billy Bob went down to the Chigger Mountain railroad tunnel to wait for the night freight from St. Louis. This here was a fine summer evening, with a big old fat yellow moon hung above the pines on Hankers Ridge and mockingbirds and cicadas and toads making a soft ruckus. Nights like this, I have me a good feeling, hopeful, and I know Billy Bob does too.
    They's a bog hollow on the near side of the tunnel opening, and beside it a woody slope, not too steep. Halfway down the slope is a big Catalpa tree, and that was where we always sat, side by side with our backs up against the trunk.
    So we come on down to there, me hobbling some with my cane and Billy Bob holding onto my arm. That moon was so bright you could see the melons lying in Ferdie Johnson's patch over on the left, and the rail tracks had a sleek oiled look coming out of the tunnel mouth and leading off toward the Sabreville yards a mile up the line. On the far side of the tracks, the woods and the rundown shacks that used to be a hobo jungle before the county sheriff closed it off thirty years back had them a silvery cast, like they was all coated in winter frost.
    We set down under the Catalpa tree and I leaned my head back to catch my wind. Billy Bob said, "Granpa, you feeling right?"
    "Fine, boy."
    "Rheumatism ain't started paining you?"
    Not