A Perfect Crime

In the chiaroscuro of a city that never quite wakes, Wally Griggs—sepulchral clerk by day, velvet-roguish raconteur by night—smuggles daydreams past the marble colonnades of Halliday’s bank the way a pickpocket palms pearls. His ledger ink smells of iron; his tongue drips molten fiction about safaris that never were, card-sharps he never outwitted, tropic moons he never kissed. The lies glow like phosphorus because everyone needs a lantern in this Depression dusk. Bank potentate Halliday, starched to the brittle point of self-worship, guzzles the tales like absinthe; Mary, heiress of a gutted fortune, hears in them the clatter of rescue. Behind them looms Thaine—glacial prosecutor, erstwhile embezzler of her inheritance—now cloaked in civic virtue, the wolf promoted to gamekeeper. One winter noon Wally spirits bearer bonds into a flapping briefcase, not for larceny but for leverage: he will ransom Mary’s stolen future and buy himself a pulse. Cops pounce; headlines scream; Thaine’s grin is a scalpel. From prison Wally counter-thrusts with a civil suit, flaying the DA’s sanctimony until a jury crowns him a populist David. Cash reclaimed, he stages collapse on the courthouse steps—eyes rolled white, speech fled north—an aphasiac Lazarus. The bonds glide back to their vault like homing ravens; Wally glides into authorship, first novel inked in the same tremulous hand that once signed deposit slips. The metropolis exhales, unaware it has been robbed of its boredom.