Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove down to the hotel for the twenty-seven years of service banquet, because the board was flying in and because I have never once in my life failed to be where I said I would be.
I did not go there to make anybody uncomfortable. I went because they had my name on a place card.
What I did before that was call Milt Rasco in the camera room.
The lobby has four cameras and one of them looks straight down the front desk at the drawer. That is not an accident, it was put there in 2011 after a different mess, and I was on the committee that picked the spot.
Thirty days of recording sit on that server. The new security manager did not pull one minute of it. He never touched the system, and I know because the system logs who reviews what, and his name is not on it anywhere in that week.
The money went between 3:00 and 3:40 in the morning. At 3:04 I am on camera two crossing the lobby toward the east wing. At 3:39 I come back through. In between there is thirty-five minutes of me not being there, and there is somebody else there, in scrubs that are not scrubs, at the drawer, for about nine seconds.
Milt burned it to a disc and put it in his coat pocket and came to that banquet in a tie I had never seen.
They gave me the plaque. Twenty-seven years, and the chairman read out the sentence about the man who watched over the sick and the sleeping, and everybody clapped, and I said thank you and sat down.
Then Milt asked whether the board would care to see nine seconds of video.
They rolled it on the screen they had brought for the slideshow. Nobody said one word for the length of it.
The chairman asked the security manager, in that room, whether he had reviewed the footage before he threatened a twenty-seven-year employee with handcuffs in front of the night staff.
He had not. He said so out loud, which I will give him credit for, because he could have lied and the room would not have known.
The fellow on the camera was a contract transporter from an outside agency, three weeks on the job, and the police did handle that one, and I did not have any say in it and did not want any.
They gave me my post back with my years whole and paid me for the week. I did another eighteen months and retired at Christmas.
The security manager stayed, which surprised me. He came and found me on my second night back and apologized standing up, in the hallway, in front of the same crew that had watched him take my radio.
That mattered more than the banquet did. A man who does it in the same place he did the other thing is trying.
The plaque is over my workbench. The disc is in the drawer under it, and I have never once played it at home.