I breezed into the shadowy old marble of Rivertown’s only bank – a place purposefully kept as dark as the town’s city hall – to see what I could learn about Rosamund’s check. And perhaps to enjoy a bite of a chocolate chip cookie, if luck was holding.
The bank’s president, a brother-in-law of Rivertown’s city treasurer and a man who knew to do as he was told, sat at the only desk with his back to the lobby. Except for the ancient teller behind the old-fashioned gilded cage, who was his mother, the lobby was deserted. The bank rarely drew retail customers. It served mostly to launder cash bribes collected at city hall.
I wanted to know something – anything – factual about Rosamund Reynolds.
I set her check on the president’s desk. ‘What can you tell me about this payee?’
He looked up from a newspaper crossword puzzle entitled ‘Just for Kids,’ set down his stub of chew-pocked pencil and shrugged. ‘It’s a cashier’s check. It’s good.’
‘Why is there no bank name printed on it?’
‘Not printing a bank name makes customers think cashier’s checks are private. It’s phony baloney. The routing number at the bottom always identifies the bank.’
‘What bank issued this one?’
He sighed and typed the routing number into his computer. After a minute, he handed up the check. ‘Chicago Manufacturers Bank and Trust,’ he said.
‘Never heard of them.’
‘They probably never heard of you, either.’ His laugh was more of a squeal, appropriate for a man who spent his days with his mom in a deserted bank lobby. He picked up his stub of pencil, anxious to get back to the intellectual combat of the child’s crossword puzzle.
I walked over to the teller window, filled out a deposit slip and handed the check to the ancient. ‘I’d like a thousand in fifties back.’
My account contained twelve dollars. Rosamund’s check wouldn’t simply moisten the parched bottom of my well; it was about to drench it like a tsunami. I braced myself for the wave.
The ancient smirked, cutting a hundred more wrinkles into her wizened face. ‘The check’s got to clear first. You can have twelve dollars.’
‘Your son said cashier’s checks are solid. I want to deposit one thousand into my account and take a grand back in cash.’
‘How do you want the twelve?’
‘In twenty fifties,’ I said, furious. The woman wouldn’t know a tsunami if a hundred foot wall of water smacked her in the face.
She handed across a ten, a single and four quarters, slammed her cash drawer shut and shuffled away.
A last insult waited. One lone chocolate chip cookie lay in the discolored plastic dish by the window, but someone had taken a bite out of it and put it back, rejected.
I felt like the cookie. My trip to the bank had been no triumph.
Rivertown, being Rivertown, offered ready alternatives for getting cash. The handiest was the Discount Den, one of the hot goods emporiums in the darker blocks off Rivertown’s main sin strip.
My friend Leo Brumsky bought his outrageous Hawaiian shirts and luminescent slacks there, but most of its offerings are of a more sporadic nature and depend on what has recently fallen out of a truck or rail car. Cash, though, is always in stock at the Discount Den. One does not purchase warm goods with Discover or American Express.
‘Ding Dongs? Twinkies?’ I asked in time with the dangling bells I’d set jingling, stepping into the gloom. The Discount Den also did a fine business in stale-dated sugary goods, thanks, in part, to me.
The crafty little owner, noticing the bandages flapping on my hands, set a box of happy-colored Flintstones bandages on the counter instead and shook his head. ‘Can’t keep them in stock since their bakery went bankrupt for a time.’
‘Peeps,’ a woman said.
I hadn’t noticed her in the shadows in the back, bent over a carton. ‘Pardon me?’ I asked.
She straightened up and came to the counter clutching an armful of small, pastel-colored packages. Each contained marshmallow bunnies, lined up like bright little corpses preserved beneath cellophane. By now they would have hardened to rocks since Easter was seven months’ gone.
‘Peeps,’ she said, ‘for when there are no Twinkies.’ She smiled, exposing one tooth. It looked to be dark yellow but in the gloom I supposed it could have been gray. For sure, it looked insufficient for rock-hard marshmallow.
Jangling the bells, stepping out, she paused. ‘Microwave,’ she said, and took her treasures out into the sunlight.
I am always interested in any research that involves sugar and beat it to the back for two packs of purple bunnies and one of the green. I set them on the counter next to the Flintstones bandages and took out my checkbook.
The owner knew me and knew my check for a thousand dollars would be good. He only nicked me five percent, counting out nine hundred and forty-nine dollars, keeping a buck for the weakly adhesive Flintstones bandages. He threw in the Peeps for free, either because some small part of him wanted to make a grand gesture or because he figured I’d noticed that the stiff little rabbits, petrified like driftwood, were past their sell-by dates by not one, but four, Easters.