For a moment, there was a shocked, frozen stillness in the lecture
room. Dr. Ormond's hand began to move out quietly towards the checks
lying on the table before him. Reuben Jeffries' big hand got there
first.
"I'll take care of these for now, Dr. Al," Jeffries said with a
friendly smile. "The lieutenant thinks he wants them."
* * * * *
Not much more than thirty minutes later, Cavender unlocked the door to
Dr. Ormond's private office, went inside, leaving the door open behind
him, and sat down at Ormond's desk. He rubbed his aching eyes, yawned,
lit a cigarette, looked about in vain for an ashtray, finally emptied
a small dish of paper clips on the desk and placed the dish
conveniently close to him.
There had been an indignant uproar about Dr. Al's arrest for a while,
but it ended abruptly when uniformed policemen appeared in the two
exit doors and the sobering thought struck the students that any
publicity given the matter could make them look personally ridiculous
and do damage to their business and social standing.
Cavender had calmed their fears. It was conceivable, he said, that the
district attorney's office would wish to confer with some of them
privately, in connection with charges to be brought against William
Fitzgerald Grady--which, so far as the police had been able to
establish, was Dr. Ormond's real name. However, their association with
the Institute of Insight would not be made public, and any proceedings
would be carried out with the discretion that could be fully expected
by blameless citizens of their status in the community.
They were fortunate, Cavender went on, in another respect. Probably
none of them had been aware of just how much Grady had milked from the
group chiefly through quiet private contributions and donations during
the two years he was running the Institute. The sum came to better
than two hundred thousand dollars. Grady naturally had wasted none of
this in "research" and he was not a spendthrift in other ways.
Cavender was, therefore, happy to say that around two thirds of this
money was known to be still intact in various bank accounts, and that
it would be restored eventually to the generous but misled donors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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