A WHOLE LOT OF QUICK CRIME
10 short stories of crime and justice from
QUICK CRIME & MORE QUICK CRIME
Chelsea Graydon
Copyright © 2011 Chelsea Graydon
Published by Fiero Publishing
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
It’s not really that crime is busting out all over (though it can certainly seem that way sometimes), but in this little collection of short crime fiction I’m sharing with you a bunch of quick stories of crimes that can happen. What makes them fun is that there are always quick-witted amateurs and professionals, and sometimes just a kind of ironic justice, there to trip the criminals up, expose them, and make them pay.
Would that life were always so neat and tidy.
So out there awful things may happen and the bad guys may run free far too often, but in here, justice reigns. Because I said so.
Fiat justitia!*
-Chelsea Graydon
June 12, 2011
*Let justice be done!
Electronic eyes only catch so much.
Chelsea Graydon
Copyright © 2011 Chelsea Graydon
Eva dropped her umbrella and grabbed at the bank’s doorframe as a man in a dripping black trench coat shoved past. “Out of the way!”
He jerked to a stop by the deserted teller lines. It was only eight a.m. Was he lost? The man cocked his head up towards a voice inside, and spun to barrel out into the rain again, kicking Eva’s umbrella onto the street as he went. The umbrella crunched under a passing car.
Eva gasped, then froze as he stopped and turned back towards her once more.
“Yoo-hoo!” chirped a voice. It was the plump woman who’d hired her yesterday, waving at her to join her behind the teller’s counter.
Eva ran.
Once safe, she scanned the bank interior and saw the workman up the ladder just inside the entrance. Hand to his ear, the workman watched the steely-haired madman burst in again. He nodded and called down to him with an English accent, “Right. You’re done, Mr. Z. Thanks much.”
“Mr. Z.” snorted, shrugged off his trench coat to reveal an expensive blue suit, and stomped off to the offices in the back.
The workman on the ladder caught Eva’s eye and winked. She smiled tentatively back.
“Mr. Angry Pants is Mr. Zanelli, our branch manager,” whispered the plump woman beside her, Mary Crawford. “He's upset that head office decided on this new video security without his input. The workers have been at it since seven, apparently.”
Still grieving her umbrella, Eva swivelled her head to spot three more cameras hanging from the ceiling in front of and behind the counter, one even pointed to cover anyone opening or closing the bank vault. “Are those on now?” she whispered.
“Oh no. Just installing and testing today. They go on tomorrow. Now,” she smiled at Eva, “let’s go through opening procedures, okay?”
***
By two p.m., Eva was adjusting. She’d worked as a teller two years back and learned quickly. And other than Mr. Zanelli, who regularly stormed out to check on things, everyone seemed nice.
“Security’s never been a problem,” Mary told her during a lull. “What with Buster at the door.” She nodded at the big-knuckled guard.
“Is that why Mr. Zanelli’s so upset about the cameras?” Eva asked.
Mary pursed her lips. “I think he just doesn’t like change. All the drilling into the ceiling, the high-tech monitoring. He thinks head office wants to drive him out.”
Eva nodded then looked up. “The rain’s stopped.”
“It’s about time.”
***
That night Eva was awoken by two policemen at her door. Taken down to the station, she was hustled into a room where a tired-looking Sergeant nodded her to a chair.
“Just getting details, Miss Gordon. Robbery at your bank tonight. Embezzlement actually.”
Eva swallowed. “I just started there. I don’t even–”
“We know. We want your impressions of the people you saw there today. Mr. Albert Zanelli. Did he seem upset? Out of sorts?”
“Well yes. But–”
“The surveillance camera installation. Did that specifically seem to bother him?”
“Yes.”
The Sergeant let out a deep sigh and rubbed his eyes. “Okay.”
Eva leaned forward in her chair. “You have no other suspects?”
The Sergeant looked up as if surprised to see her still there. “What? Sure. Simeon and his camera installers worked late. But none of them had the combo to the vault. None of them has the cash. Besides, we got Zanelli on surveillance tape entering the bank at quarter-to-eight tonight. No one else there. He tripped a silent alarm before he left.”
“An alarm he didn’t know about?”
“It got installed with the cameras. Anyway....”
He gestured towards the door but Eva frowned, the memory of Mr. Zanelli glaring at her making her stay. “The surveillance cameras weren’t supposed to be turned on until tomorrow.”
The Sergeant stared bleary-eyed at her, then shouted through his closed door. “Simeon!” A second later the British workman Eva had seen up the ladder at the bank entered. “John Simeon,” the Sergeant explained. “He owns the company that put the cameras in. Show the lady the tape, please.”
Simeon looked between the Sergeant and Eva, then winked at her and walked to the television and VCR set up on the credenza by the wall. “Right, then. We had this tape running early ‘cause it seemed a little buggy. Wanted to test it.”
He pushed in the tape and Eva saw the deserted bank lobby from a bird’s eye view, dim light from outside, the time code running. At precisely 7:45 p.m., the door opened, a man in a dripping black trench coat with steely grey hair came stomping in, stopped, the tape stuttered then picked up two minutes later with a slight shift in lighting and the lobby deserted. Sergeant drew his finger over his throat and Simeon shut it off.
“You see, Ma’am....”
Eva bit her lip and frowned hard. She looked at Simeon, then back at the Sergeant. “I bet Zanelli didn’t have the cash on him when you arrested him, did he?”
The Sergeant frowned. Shook his head.
“Did you check the holes in the ceiling for cash? The holes Mr. Simeon and company made when they installed the cameras that could record the vault combination? That could also record Mr. Zanelli when he ran in and out of the bank this morning, supposedly to check the camera coverage? All they’d have to do was fiddle the time codes.”
Simeon’s face fell before he covered it with a disbelieving shake. “This is–”
“Play the tape again,” Eva urged and the Sergeant nodded.
Reluctantly, Simeon did it and Eva made him stop on the image of Zanelli. “You see the puddle around his feet?” Eva pointed.
Again the Sergeant nodded.
Eva said, “It stopped raining at two this afternoon.”
***
The next day Mr. Zanelli came to Eva's teller station. He tossed her a gift-wrapped box then stood staring so intently Eva wished she could crawl up into the hollowed-out ceiling space where they'd found the cash.
Instead she unwrapped the box. Inside lay a beautiful new umbrella.
“I–” She looked up.
“Good work, Miss Gordon.” Zanelli said softly. “Don't leave us.” He cracked an embarrassed smile, nodded at the other tellers, and quickly walked away.
-end-
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This will be his greatest scam ever...
Chelsea Graydon
Copyright © 2011 Chelsea Graydon
I’m a god, Pierre Duschampes, currently going by the name Pierre Plaise, told himself as he waited for Emily to return.
He clinked down his scotch and walked over to run a finger lightly over the keys of Emily's treasured grand piano. He could make her give this to him. He would weave a story of a “foundation for underprivileged artists” or some such, which he’d helped found, and she would tumble all over herself to...
But no. He drew back his finger. The “gifts” which he culled from these women had to be transportable – the Armani wardrobe he wore, his Cartier watch, even his cologne – or they had to be easily convertible to cash.
Still, there was the challenge. The power.
Like the last girl he’d seduced, out in California. Jane Wellesley. For her he’d been Pierre Arlene, a foreign doctor who ran various rescue missions in African and Asia. Little Miss Wellesley had been so desperately private and overlooked in her life that she'd fallen for the noble attentions of Pierre hard and fast, "loaning" him her entire inheritance of $750,000-plus-jewelry a scant two months into their relationship.
He’d quickly deposited it in his secret Geneva account and casually disappeared after one last night of love, which he’d given her as a farewell gift. Such a success that he would normally have taken a full six months off from his “work” and return to Europe, but for the irresistible target Emily Allan had offered.
Ah, Emily Allan.
She'd appeared, suddenly, in all the upper crust New York social blogs as the somewhat plain widow of auto parts magnate William “Buster” Allan. Notoriously private, Emily had recently come out of mourning and been seen around Manhattan. And even though she was rumored to be a Philadelphia blue blood, and obviously well into her thirties, her photo halfway reminded Pierre of young Jane Wellesley. There was that same sad droop of her eyes and mouth, the passed-over appearance, the shyness about her past. Another woman who’d been too-little appreciated in life and needed Pierre’s special brand of attention. And the way the social cognoscenti tweeted about her, the poor thing was practically begging to be wooed.
So Pierre had obliged.
They’d kept their courtship carefully quiet because, said Pierre, his family's old-world wealth and position made social gossip intolerable. Yet their courtship could have been the stuff of legends. They were passionate. They were mad about each other. It was like two kindred souls had met by chance and exploded in a fireball of lust and need and soul-deep trust. (Pierre was particularly good at creating the last of these.)
“Pierre?”
He turned as Emily came back into the room, now in a sleeveless green sheath and a tiara that sparkled in the lamplight. She saw his eyes and blushed. “It’s costume jewelry,” she blurted. “Buster didn’t believe in diamonds.”
“Shame,” Pierre said, gliding to her. “You should be dressed in nothing else.” Then he reached into his pocket for his coup de grâce.. While most of the Wellesley jewelry was safely in Geneva, he’d held back one striking piece.
Emily froze as he produced it, a necklace that glittered with a waterfall of diamonds. “Yes,” Pierre breathed close to her ear as he slipped it around her neck. “They’re real.” And worth at least sixty-five thousand American dollars. He exulted in the audacity of it. Risking sixty-five to net...how much? He’d find out tonight.