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Therald was a dude that worked there a while, he was from a little town some distance off, knew some of his family. Had a cousin in high school with me, about two years younger. Seriously hot, sweet kid. Therald was three or four years older than me I guess. He was preparing to be a loan officer, taking the necessary courses at night, working in the loan department. The loan department had a couple of teller windows and a couple of clerks. I worked there for a time, learing the ropes, the idea that I would be doing something in management at some point. The had to women there, one older one - I probably overestimated her age - and a young one that was pretty hot. She was married to a Pentecost preacher, real nice guy, she was pretty silly but nice. Anyhow Therald was working there, clerical stuff, researching and whatever all we did, and flirting with the women. Especially the pretty young one, Carolyn. I flirted with her too but it was all just fun, I wasn't seriously trying to get her in the sack even if she was likely to go for it. Turned out later she wasn't as reluctant to fool around as a preacher's wife would be expected to. But she didn't do it with Therald, much as he probably wanted to. That came later with another loan officer. OK, I guess Therald was good-looking, better than me for sure. Dressed sharp too. Silly though, and talking to the women he was sillier than usual. Anyway the one woman at the bank he did boff was a hot secretary that everybody wanted to including me. Another fellow that did regretted it. More on that later. Therald didn't stay long. I don't remember why he left but heard he had moved back to the small town he came from. Some years later, about the time I left the bank, I heard he had gotten killed. Shot dead at his used car business. A young guy he had repossesed a car from came to the car lot and shot him with a high-powered rifle as we called anything that wasn't a .22 rimfire but generally meant something like a .30-06. The 06 being everybody's favorite deer gun even if it was a bit of overkill most of the time. Some years later a lot of guys were going to the .308 for deer. Friend of mine - the one whose dad was a super rich farmer (not the one that died in the garden) was seriously into guns. He had to have a Weatherby .300 and because he could he got one. My favorite -06 was a little Remington 742. That was a few years later though, when I moved into a better paying work. A guy that worked for us doing electrical and cabling told me about a dude that was selling some guns and I checked them out. Bought a .444 Marlin and a Remington 742. He had a Marlin .30-30 that I wanted but he told me it was a gift from his father and didn't want to sell it, which I understood. Would've done the same myself. Anyhow this 742 was a short version, eighteen inch barrel (actually I believe it was eighteen and a half because gunmakers were playing it safe on account of the laws) where the regular ones had either a 22 or 24, I forget now. It had a four-round magazine which was fine for deer hunting, if you did it right you didn't generally need a second shot. Later in the 80s when I was more into survivalism I picked up several eight-round magazines for it in case it had to do for defense. Shooting a lot in a short time out of a regular hunting rifle - as opposed to a military weapon - wasn't a good idea. They had a reputation for jamming but the little shooting I did with the big mags I rarely had a problem. And as I said deer usually went down with one shot from an aught-six and the ranges I was used to. BTW that big Marlin is a big piece of gun, about like two or three .44 mags in one shot. I'd wanted one since I read the Executioner novels back in the day, Mack began his career with one. So... where was I? Oh yeah, Therald left the bank and was selling used cars in a little town where bad things happen, more now than then but it happened to him. He was a helluva nice guy, good-natured, this kid - 19 I believe - just up and shot him dead. Kid eventually went to prison but by then (1988) it was already getting to where people didn't have to pay up as they should, especially if they were black and really-especially if the victim was white. It wasn't but a few years after that a young woman - I knew her slightly from school - was at her mother's house while her mother was out of town for a while, went to check on it - and a young black man about the age of the one that killed Therald had broken into the house. He proceeded to tie her up and rape her repeatedly over a period of several days. He eventually went to prison but as in the case of Therald's killer he got off light. But Therald was dead, and you don't recover from that. So that was it, thirty-eight and dead. As far as I know he wasn't married so no widow, young as he was grieving parents - they lived another twenty-some years. Looking at it today, we have people dying all over the place, whole families in minivans wiped out by illegals driving drunk, ones and twos here and there murdered by illegals, it adds up to hundreds a year of innocent lives snuffed out because the country is run by evil people don't just not care - they want it to happen. Those like Therald was just a handful of years older than me may be better off they didn't live to see it. What I see coming I don't like. OK, the later is that the super hot secretary everybody wanted to do and occasionally one did, when the guy that did her and regretted it (her husband beat the tar out of him) later admitted that Therald did her. She was an odd one in some ways, and what I learned about women as I got older I found that what looks like nice more than often than not is not nice at least occasionally. But sex - especially at that age - is pretty powerful and women are more inclined to fool around when they shouldn't because of complex emotions that aren't the reason for men - most men just want to fuck. And they really want to fuck hot women. OK? Most of us aren't very nice in most business but when it comes to sex most of us are pretty predatory. I'm in a small group in several categories and have more self-control about sex that most men. Just the way I am, whether born that way or from environment.
Clara was a chick that looked dodgy from the beginning. Formerly fairly attractive at thirty-something is not good. I don't know how well most people analyze the vibes - I seem to do it automagically. Can't explain it, it just happens. She had an almost frail build - not skinny but it showed in the hands, again something I can't explain. She was friendly but it was that office friendly, didn't get close to anyone. She was in the loan department, or note department as they called it. One of her main jobs as a note teller - taking payments people came in to pay in person, which was most of it then as everything wouldn't be electronic for a couple of decades. People making payments, car payments mostly, came in on paydays and made their payment. It was pretty busy on Fridays and the two tellers there were pretty busy. Not the way installment loans worked, and the way the system was set up to handle them, was if a customer wasn't going to be able to make a payment they could come in and see their loan officer and get an extension - essentially pay a small fee to skip the current month's payment. There was a form they had to sign and it went to the loan department and one of the clerks would make the adjustments on the computer, as we said. It required two passwords and one had to be a supervisor, but other than that it was just a matter of changing a couple of fields in the record for that account. This was 1970s technology, or early 80s by then. Green screen terminals and rows of data, no mouses or mice or whatever. A lot of people came in and made payments, a couple hundred dollars or so was an average car payment, and the teller would take the money and put the payment book coupon in the stack of stuff going up to the computer and the it was all good for another month. I guess she wasn't dumb as she soon figured out if she put the money in her pocket and disposed of the payment coupon she could cover it up by changing the payment date. If she had a supervisor to put in the required password, or if she knew a 9-level password as they were called. The passwords were just four characters but it would be hard to guess one - or even try to - without being noticed. Password failures were logged and the auditor looked at the report daily. But it wasn't that difficult for someone determined to see what another employee was typing when they entered a password and we suppose that's how she did it. So with that accomplished she began pocketing money. She got caught quicker than she otherwise would have - when the unauthorized data entries were notice - because the supervisor saw her stuffing money in her pockets but the cash drawer was never short. But the payment extensions got noticed too, the ones without the paperwork. So one day Bill - the alcoholic chain-smoking cashier with the gambling habit that was banging his secretary - came up to my office and asked me some questions. How to do some special repors. Once I figured out what he wanted I produced it and he looked and it and said that it was good. A few days the auditor came over and told me they had arrested Clara. They had her dead bang with the digital trail and witnesses to her pocketing money and made a criminal complaint and it was off to jail. She got bailed quick, her husband was some kind of county government employee as I recollect, and would be tried at some point. She had taken some few thousand dollars, I believe something over twenty thousand. But that ten thousand that disappeared had been during her time there - the one some had looked kind of sideways at Bill about - and it was suggested that might be hung on her. She never did confess to it if it was her. Anyhow time went by and one day Jay the auditor told me that she had copped a plea - pleaded guilty and made restitution in the form of a cashier's check for the amount in the complaint. Where she got the money was anyone's guess. As I said her husband had a good job, they had a nice house and a big boat and all, so he may have had the cash to keep her out of prison. It seems they moved away not long after that.
The bookeeper at the Exxon distributor didn't work for the bank but we got in on her scandal. Someone or other at the bank talked the software company that did our system to write what they called an accounts receivable factoring program. A set of programs really but most people didn't talk as techincal as me. In the business we'd call a set of programs for some purpose a package. Anyway they finally got it done - the programmer (what they called people that wrote programs back then) that wrote it spent a lot of time in the bank and was there at night when I was. We'd talk code and have a couple of beers and I'd help him with the accounting angles. He got it done and tested good and they sold it to a couple or three customers, I believe one was a local department store and a couple were petroleum product distributors. The way it worked was the customer had his accounts receiveable - that's the money customers owed him to be paid each month - and bank would give him his money up front minus a few percent and the customers would send their payments to the bank, using a different post office box so they didn't know it was the bank. If a customer didn't pay he had to take the account back and do his own collecting so theoretically it was pretty good money for the bank since the computer wasn't doing anything else ninety percent of the time. If they had sold a bunch of them it would have added up to something but they never did, just the handful. I believe the guy that pushed it to get done was the one that was banging the hot secretary that he shouldn't have and got beat up and he left after a while and went to sell farm equipment. When a customer signed up they had to bring in the account books and have them put into the system, and so their bookkeeper or whoever did the accounts would be working with our people to get that done. Pretty simple stuff. One of the petroleum product distributors had a bookkeeper that seemed a little dodgy but we didn't think much of it, figuring it was the confusion with something new. It took a while to the the numbers straight but it got him to looking. He was a good old boy, farmer with the oil business on the side. He was the Exxon dealer so it was pretty big. I used to fill up my cars at a big Exxon gas station he had there. Turned out Exxon was sending him big checks, some kind of rebate or incentive or something based on his sales. And he had some sales, being the Exxon distributor for a big area. The bookkeeper was cashing the checks at the other bank, back then there was nothing unusual about cashing checks for thousands of dollars and they knew her and her employer and never had any complaints until he found out. She took him for sixty thousand or so, that would be in 1985-ish dollars. Figure 180K or so these days. He didn't prosecute her, partly I suppose because he was one of those nice guys that didn't like unpleasantness and the bank paid him the money he had lost. Whether the bank wanted to prosecute I don't know - probably they did but their insurance may have covered it. I knew the president of the bank - he was an old country boy like me. He had a brother that wasn't near as prosperous, he worked for a farmer. Regular farm hands like him did all right - a lot of times the farmer would furnish a house rent-free and some of them would give out a good-sized bonus every year. Lot of times farm hand would buy a new truck with the money and have some left over. I'm digressing here but stay with me. The brother had, lessee, three of four kids. BJ, Joey, Sandy, and Jack. Yeah, four kids. Joey was my age and he and I used to pal around with the kid whose daddy was a rich farmer but not the one that died in the garden. That was because Rick (that was his name) and Joey went to school together at a different school that the one I went to. BJ was a good bit older than Joey, something like six or seven years. Then it was Joey, Sandy and Jack at about three year intervals as was common in those days. Rick and Joey and I hung out together in high school and up until I went off the the Air Force, drinking and smoking dope and chasing girls and occasionally catching one. We went to titty bars some, over in Memphis. They had cheap drinks and the women were damn good looking but Joey and I just drank and watched the dancers and stuck a bill in the g-string occasionally. Rick seemed to really like nekkid women but we laughed it off as we did the peccadillos of the guys we hung with if they didn't get too annoying. Lemme digress from the digression for a minute... For some reason after a while it was Rick and me a lot with Joey distracted by something, still going to titty bars occasionally. There was this outfit in Memphis that had three or four, I forget which, and we went to a couple of them. So it got to where tha manager at one of them recognized us as regulars and we'd sit in the back and talk, the dancers would come over and wiggle their titties - kind of like free table dances. So we hit the place a few times, being in Memphis a lot we'd stop by regularly, because titties. One night we went in and he wasn't around, Rick asked one of the girls and she said "Oh, he's dead. Got in a fight and a guy shot him." That was about the last time we went to a titty bar. Okey-dokey, back to the original digression. Joey was about as cool as they come. Had a beard at sixteen and could buy liquor without getting carded. Had what the ZFG attitude as some say these days. He didn't brag about anything, wasn't as obsessed with sex as most and didn't talk trash about women, altogether a pretty cool dude. His kid sister looked a lot like her cousin who was in my class in high school. Not quite but close and they were seriosly beautiful girls. And the cousin being a bank president's daughter had the advantage of being able to enhance her natural good looks. Nice for a rich kid, he brother not so much but karma got him eventually. Don't remember if he went to prison or just had to spend a lot of money so avoid it. Joey's kid sister got knocked up early, sixteen or so and eventually had another or two without having gotten married. Anyway that should do it for the bank president's country cousins. He may or may have not told me what they did about the Exxon distributor's bookkeeper. We talked about everything else that went on but that was after I had gone to work for the software company, on account of both banks used their product. What happened to the bookkeeper I have no idea. She had a good bit of money to start over with.
She did work at a bank though. The little bank that moved in a few years back and went broke and was sold to a bigger bank. It was pretty small compared to the other two but a decent size for a small town. We used to joke about a particular method that could be used to rob a bank from the inside - aside from grabbing a few bundles of c-notes of small-scale embezzlement. It required you to be one of the employees that locked the vault on Friday evening. Bank vaults have special locks that can be set to open only after a specific time, say a little before 8 AM on weekdays. Since the bank was closed on Saturday and Sunday the lock was set for Monday morning. Two employees were required to perform the task so that it was done right and that on Friday the time didn't get set for Saturday morning. Most likely they would have to be in cahoots but it was possible that one might do it and get away with it if the other one wasn'a paying attention. Back then the bank would have several hundred thousand in cash in the vault - to cash checks for people getting paid and big deposits being brought in by the stores - and I remember their being six hundred thousand or so on Fridays. Employees could go into the bank any time when it was closed as most all had keys and knew the code to deactivate the alarm so the police wouldn't come. All that would be necessary was to get into the vault. Go in on Saturday morning and clean out the vault and you had a two day head start. It was years later when some silly girl did it at the new bank. It seems not to have been planned in such detail but rather improvisation as she was already under suspicion for theft. She had a boyfriend in Kentucky and called him and told him if he would come to Twin Falls they could get a lot of money. Apparently he wasn't doing too well as she had to wire him a couple hundred to make the trip. He gets to Twin Falls and they go to the bank early. It seems in this case the vault lock was set to 0500 and the first employees wouldn't arrive before 0700. They got in and packed up $147,000 according to police reports. They didn't have much time to run but they got away for a while. A couple of weeks later they were apprehended in Oregon on account of a traffic violation. Someone I knew used say it's a good thing most criminals aren't very smart $128K of the money was recovered. The bank could have avoided it by changing the alarm code once she was under suspicion. The chick could have avoided going to prison by not ripping off the bank. If one of us had done that twenty years earlier and got the half million that would have been there and got away clean it would have been a pretty good deal, except you't have to look over your shoulder the rest of your life. The chick's parents owned a mobile home sales operation there, I guess it had only been there a year or two. It went away eventually but not because their kid robbed a bank. Mobile home selling can be a precarious living for small operators. Wesley could have told them that.
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