THE SAND HILL
REVIEW http://www.sandhillreview.org
2001 May
By Charleyne Ward Marshall
Karl Schiller attended the Washington
Territorial University in Seattle, graduating with a degree in Commerce. He was
a military cadet there, afterwards joining an outfit called the Seattle Rifles.
Practicing with his long carbine in the hills and meadows of Snohomish County,
he held the rifle high, picking off flowers as he imagined defending the Kyber Pass or fighting the last Indian uprising. A few
years after that he joined the 1st Washington Volunteers, which was
eventually absorbed into the U.S. Army. He spent two years in the
Philippines during the Spanish-American war.
Before the war, however, he had
obtained a position as an auditor with State of Washington under a special
program for those who had the fame to be a graduate of the university when the
state was just a territory. He, like others of his graduating class, was
taken to be a sort of pioneer.
In the beginning, before he went off
to war, this was quite the thing to be, and he proudly displayed his degree on
a prominent spot on the wall behind his desk. But when he came back from
the Philippines, he discovered that being a pioneer meant being backward and
unsophisticated.
He resumed his job for the State, but
found that younger men failed to give him the respect that he was used
to. He felt that he was not only an educational pioneer, but a war hero,
and more than once he found it very convenient to speak of the days on San Juan
Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, and no one ever came forward to point out the
thousands of miles that lay between San Juan and Manila. He eventually
put his degree away in the attic, and when World War I broke out and became the
Great War, he no longer talked about his military exploits. But soon neither
his degree nor his experience made him the center of any attention. He
grew bitter about it, but could not do anything to change Matters.
Except with women. They loved
his heroic charges, marksmanship and grenade-tossing, and when prohibition came
along, he took what he read in magazines, and with his usual swagger, made it
his own experience. They loved his showdowns with the mob.
His job for the State of Washington
was as an auditor, and that meant he was gone very frequently in trips around
the state. He never wore a wedding ring, and his wife Katie didn’t make
anything of it, but Karl found it saved him embarrassing explanations on many a
night. It wasn’t necessary for him to travel around the state, he could
have gotten a more centralized position if he had insisted on it. In
fact, he had actually turned it down several times. But it would have
taken away his dreams.
When he was in the Philippines, he had
discovered that he was handsome enough to be very attractive to the ladies
there, something that didn’t happen to him at home. He had married Katie,
whom he had met at church, soon after college. She was very puritan,
duty-bound, husband-serving and church-obeying. These women in Manila
were free and very exciting and he felt that they set him free, too. When
he returned, he did not want to lose his standing in the local community,
because he did enjoy the sense of pride he gained on Sunday mornings when he
was home, taking his family to church, showing off his daughters, who were very
good-looking if not quite beautiful.
The one missing element of his life
was that he never had the opportunity to take a vacation. This was
because Karl’s job was quite demanding, as he told his wife. It was the
price he had to pay for a higher income.
At one point, his income began to
increase dramatically. He was not only able to buy a new house, and pay
for household help, but also a big new car. He started a fund at the church to
help those most desperately in need during the Depression. He didn’t
actually hand out money to people, there were church administrators to make
choices and give out food, but he decided how much. He kept it very
quiet. Only the church board knew that he was the benefactor.
His new money came from something he
learned on the job. He audited various State and local financial organizations,
such as cities, and counties, and sundry agencies such as the Port of
Seattle. He appeared to be very good at his trade. In a second, he
could spot irregularities clumsily disguised or books carelessly altered.
He could note labels changed, accounts not balanced, spending that was out of
line with budgets, individual expenditures that were extravagant. He was
able to improve the standards of bookkeeping in many places.
It was during one trip to Spokane that
he developed the concept that was to become the source of his wealth. He
was auditing the books of the city library. He noticed that they had a
relatively small budget as these things go, but that it was quite lopsided in
how it worked. That is, they had a large income from the City for
expenses, and a small income from readers for fines. They had all that
money in one fund. As a result, it was very easy to audit. Others
might have found it difficult, but he could read the records very easily, and
soon discovered a discrepancy. He added a few things up and was ready for
a discussion.
Now in these situations, which came up
regularly, the cause might be petty larceny, or it might be petty
mistakes. Sometimes he couldn’t tell, until he completed a series of
interviews. He always started with the person who handled the money the most
directly, and when it was a beautiful woman, he gave her a chance to clarify
things. If she was willing to play cards with him, he was willing to show
her how to deal. In this case, Jane Simpson was a quite willing
accomplice.
He had looked at her up and down from
the day he walked into the office, and when she looked him right in the eye, he
did not disguise his interest in her breasts. At one point during the
three days he spent there, they walked towards each other in a dim, empty
hallway. He was carrying a ledger book in front of him close to his
chest, and so was she. She dropped her arms down so that the book was at
her side, stared him straight in the eye, and kept walking towards him, so that
in the end, walking slowly, they bumped into each other and his hands touched
her soft breasts. She then moved out of the way without saying a word and
walked on down the hall. He turned around and looked at her, but said
nothing. From his office, he called her and offered to take her out to dinner,
and then bought some whiskey and took her to his hotel, where the flames of the
Far East were rekindled for a night. She was wearing a ring, but they
never discussed it.
He did discuss the financial
irregularities with her, and conceived of a novel method of resolving the
problem, which he promised to confide in her, without mention of any
requirement on her part to reciprocate. Of course, he knew already that
she was quite passionate about reciprocating. He decided that he would have to
stay a few extra days in Spokane to resolve the issue, a Matter he settled with
a couple of phone calls, one to the office and one to home.
He devised a system of two accounts to
replace the one single account. One was a general account, in which the
major balances were kept. The other was a revolving account for current
income and expenditures. Each month the revolving account would be
cleared to the general account. That way, there would be no
confusion. It was quite clear to him that there would be no improvement
in internal controls, but there would be an improvement in her self
confidence. And he could report a resolution of a minor potential problem
without embarrassment to any of the interested authorities.
His next opportunity to install his
new technique came rather soon. The Port of Seattle had been ignored for
a while, so the Commissioner asked him to perform an audit, which he was happy
to do. It meant that he would have to stay at home but he did not
object. He had found a new girlfriend, Mabel Armstrong, whom he had met
one evening at the Blue Moon Club, where he stopped for a drink, well out of
his way, before going home. Mabel was well educated and well traveled,
spoke French even, quite good-looking, and possessed of a desire for love and a
nubile body to go with it. She had been recently dumped by a wealthy man,
and needed a friend. At first Karl seemed only that, but over time they
developed deeper bonds. He had met the woman whom he wished he had
married. He was quite honest about his position, and she was quite honest
to herself about her chances with men and happy to accept her arrangement as
his mistress. But she began to be more demanding and he began to worry
about his ability to keep her content.
The gentleman at the Port of Seattle
who kept the accounts with the irregularities soon showed himself to be
incompetent to know the difference between confusion and crime and Karl was
able to get him fired and replaced with Mabel. She took the job only with
the knowledge that Karl himself would soon be working with her.
Karl also found out prior to coming to
work on the discrepant accounts that the auditor of the Port of Seattle was
about to retire. When he discovered that the position would be open, and
that he could place his own girlfriend in the position of accounting clerk, he
decided that this would be the perfect time to once again install his
dual-account system.
One of the major procedures of the
State audit staff was to audit only one major account at a time. The
rational was simple. By coming back more than one time during the annual
audit, the auditor increased the chances that anything improper would be
discovered. The key to Karl’s personal income, however, was simply that
all audits were planned in advance. He knew when the auditor would be
there, so he could arrange with Mabel to do the necessary work, and then he
could quite confidently announce his own audit work prior to their arrival, so
that they, dealing with one of their own, so to speak, could keep their work to
a minimum.
Having set up his two accounts, the
current revolving account, and the long-term general account with balances,
Karl was ready to keep his Mabel in style. All it took was about a
thousand dollars a month. Three months of doing this and he could buy her
a decent house. Every month thereafter, another thousand to make life
more livable. He had all the sex he could get, often at the office, often
in the house he had bought for her. They ate dinner out quite frequently
in neighborhoods far from home. A thousand dollars a month and he was
able to get a bigger home for his family, and fund his church welfare
activities even more. Mabel drove a beautiful car, he drove a beautiful
car, his wife drove a beautiful car, even the pastor drove a beautiful car.
The Port Commissioner was happy that
the books were kept in such beautiful order with never a hint of any
irregularity. Karl’s method made this possible. He always
took his thousand dollars out of the revolving fund. Once a year, when
the auditor from the State announced that he was coming over to audit the
revolving fund, Karl would instruct Mabel to move some extra money over from
the general fund. Later, when the auditor came over to audit the general
fund, there would always be enough in the revolving fund to cover the
difference.
This system kept Karl Schiller happy
for several years. After all, annual audits could be managed very
easily. In fact, he had kept his contacts with the State auditor’s office
and was pretty much aware of their activities.
He had told his wife that this new job
was not a sedentary one, but rather just a major addition to his work, and that
he still had to travel frequently, just not as frequently as before. He
could not, of course, go off with Mabel and leave the funds unattended, so she
would take a vacation to Europe without him, which was fine with her since she
enjoyed culture much more than him.
He kept a boat in the Tacoma yacht
harbor, and on frequent weekends he would take a new girlfriend out on lovely
sunset cruises, weather permitting.
Then something happened.
Someone uncovered a major problem with
the finances at the Spokane library. A certain Jane Simpson had absconded
with several thousand dollars, most likely to Canada. Several auditors
were required to be there immediately to look into this most serious
Matter. At the same time, for no particular reason, a rash of illnesses
hit the audit offices, thus reducing the number of people to cover the
necessary work.
In a hurry, a decision was made to put
off some of the upcoming audit work, and to hurry up some others.
Included in this was the Port of Seattle, one of the bigger clients of the
State auditors office. Not only would they take care of this year’s audit
sooner, but they would cover all the accounts at once. Perhaps they
couldn’t be as thorough and detailed, but they could be more complete.
They called Karl Schiller very late in the afternoon and informed him that they
would be there within three days
It didn’t take Karl long to realize
that he didn’t have $120,000 to put back in the revolving fund, and he couldn’t
get it from the general fund. He thought for a moment whether he could get them
to take a day or two between looking at the separate funds, but even to him it
seemed like the request would be a red flag.
His world came crashing down on him
without warning. He had thought about what he would do at retirement, imagining
himself sailing down to Mexico with Mabel in his yacht, not quite thinking it
through whether he could get faster south of the border with his yacht than the
police on the telephone or in a car.
Now his colleagues, his mother and her
family, his wife, his daughters and their families, his pastor and the church
board, and all the members of the church, and his neighbors, would realize that
he was a criminal and an adulterer. He saw the sordid newspaper pictures of
Mabel and him trying to hide their faces.
He could feel his face becoming hot
and red. The muscles in his neck began to stiffen. He looked
over at Mabel who was looking at him and was ready to cry. She looked up
at him and asked him what was wrong.
“Nothing, really. They have
changed all my plans,” he said, looking her in the eye.
“I tell you what,” he continued,
“let’s not let it get to us. We’ll leave early and forget it all at the
Blue Moon. That’s where we met, you remember?”
“OK,” she said.
“Good. You go home and get
dressed for the evening. I have a couple of errands to make and then I’ll
come by and pick you up and we’ll go out.” He gave her a kiss on the
mouth, turned around and went into his office and closed the door.
He picked up the phone and asked the
operator for the number of the Denny Pharmacy and asked her to place the call.
When the pharmacist answered, he said, “This is Karl Schiller, the State
auditor. We are having a rat problem here, and I’m going to come by and
pick up some cyanide to get rid of them. I’m sure a small bottle, say 6
ounces, should be enough. I’ll bring you an official letter.” The
pharmacist said that would be satisfactory and hung up.
Karl put on his coat, and walked out
the door, saying goodbye to no one. He went over the nearest bar and
ordered a double vodka straight up, drinking it down, putting his glass on the
bar, and walking out. He got in his car and went to the pharmacy, handing
over the letter and picking up the small bottle of poison. He continued
on to Mabel’s house. When he got there, he went in and took a shower and
shaved, and put on his tuxedo.
“This must be some occasion,” she
said. “Do I get jewelry, too?”
“No,” he said, solemnly. “I just
want to have a good time to chase away the crummy news I got today.”
“Won’t you at least tell me what it
was?” She went over to him and put her arm around his waist. “Maybe you would
like a good rubdown and a good old-fashioned lay to relax you, honey.”
He pulled back. “Thank you for the
offer, but I’m too nervous now. Let’s get going. In a while, maybe
after a couple of drinks, I’ll tell you all about it. By then we’ll just
be laughing at it.”
They got in the car and took off,
silent the entire way until they pulled into the parking lot of the Blue Moon
Club. It was still relatively early in the evening, but the place was
pretty full for dinner. The band was setting up for the night, almost
ready to play.
“I wonder if they’re going to have a
singer tonight,” said Mabel.
“Don’t know. You know, you never
did give it a shot at singing with an orchestra.”
“Oh, don’t kid me about that, I never
was any good.”
The headwaiter came over and escorted
them to a table.
“Can I get you anything to drink
before dinner?”
They ordered a couple of
old-fashions. Karl pulled out a cigarette case and offered her
one. He lit her cigarette, then lit one for himself. He put his
hand down and felt the little bottle in his side picket.
“Excuse me one second, honey,” he
said. He got up, went to the bar and ordered two double vodkas straight
up, gave the bartender a hundred dollar bill and said “Here, keep this, I won’t
need it where I’m going.”
He drank one vodka quickly, then took
the other drink and walked away. As a waiter passed him by, he grabbed the
small drinks tray and put his vodka on it and went over to the men’s
room. Inside, alone, he poured half the bottle of cyanide into the drink,
threw the bottle into the trash can in the corner, straightened his hair and
tie, looked one last time into the mirror, standing up straight, and walked out
into the club.
As he passed each table, he held out
the tray, laughing and pulling it back at the last moment just when someone’s
hand was about to grasp the glass.
“Hey, you’re a kidder,” a lady said.
“Not today, honey.”
At last he went up to the stage, and
stepped up to the bandstand microphone and turned it on.
He tapped it twice, blew into it to
test the sound, then said “Here’s to a classy way to go!”
He gulped down the drink and dropped
the glass. As he fell to the floor with a wrenching grimace, he held his
stomach for a few moments, then shivered and lay there silent and
unmoving. Mabel screamed, and other women screamed. A saxophone
player went over and felt his pulse and looked up at Mabel.
“He’s dead!”