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The Embezzlers
by
He felt safer with Constance installed as his private secretary.True, Beverley and Dumont had viewed her from the start withsuspicion.
Constance had been thinking hard out in her little office since shehad begun to understand how matters stood. “Well?” she demanded.”What of it? Don’t try to conceal it. Let them discover it. Gofurther. Dare them. Court exposure.”
It was bold and ingenious. What a woman she was for meetingemergencies. Murray, who had a will that had been accustomed to bendothers to his purposes except in the instance where they had benthim and nearly broken him, recognized the masterful mind ofConstance. He was willing to allow her to play the game.
Thus Constance began collecting the very data that would have sentMurray to jail for bribery. Day by day as she worked on, thesituation became more and more delicate. They found themselves alonemuch of the time now. Beverley was, or pretended to be, busy onother matters and avoided Dodge as much as possible. Only theregular routine affairs passed through his hands, but he saidnothing. It gave him more time with her. Dumont came in as rarely asit was possible.
And as they worked along gathering the data Constance came to admireMurray more than ever. She worked patiently over the big books,taking only those on which the accountant was not engaged at suchtimes as she could get them without exciting suspicion. Togetherthey dug out the extent of the frauds that had been practiced on theGovernment for years back. From the letter files they rescued notesand orders and letters, pieced them together into as near acontinuous record as they could make. With his own knowledge of thebooks Dodge could count on making better progress on the essentialthings than the regular accountant of the audit company. He feltsure that they would finish sooner and that they would have a closerreport of the frauds of all kinds than could be uncovered by the manwho had been set on the trail of Dodge to discover just how much ofthe illicit gains he had taken for himself.
Constance became aware soon that whenever she left the office atnight she was being followed. She had at first studiously repelledthe offers of Murray to see her home. It was not that he had takenadvantage of the situation into which she had put herself. He wouldnever have done that. Still, she wished a little more time toanalyze her own conflicting feelings toward him. Then, too, severaltimes in the crowded subway cars she had noticed a face that wasfamiliar. It was Drummond, never looking directly at her, alwaysengrossed in something else, yet never failing to note where she wasgoing. That must be, she reasoned, some of the work of Beverley andDumont.
Murray was now working feverishly. As he worked he found himselffeeling differently toward the whole affair. He actually came toenjoy it with all its risks and uncertainty, to enjoy gathering thedata which, he should have said, ought really to be destroyed. Oftenhe caught himself wishing that everything had come out all right inthe end and that Constance really was his private secretary.
Every moment with her seemed now to pass so quickly that he wouldwillingly have smashed all the clocks and destroyed all thecalendars. Association with other women had been tame beside his newfriendship with her. She had suffered, felt, lived. She fascinatedhim, as often over the books they would stop to talk, talk of thingsthe most irrelevant, yet to him the most interesting, until shewould bring him back inevitably to the point of their work and starthim again with a new power and incentive toward the purpose she hadin mind.
To Constance he seemed to fill a blank spot in her empty life. Ifshe had been bitter toward the world for what had happened to her,the pleasure of helping another to beat that harsh world seemed anunspeakably sweet compensation.
At last even Constance herself began to realize it. It was not,after all, merely the bitterness toward society, that lured her on.She was not a woman carved out of a block of stone. There was asweetness about this association that carried her along as if in adream. She was actually falling in love with him.