Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out there at six-thirty and asked Denise Kalb in the office to walk down to the break room with me and open that locker in front of two witnesses, and to bring a pen and write down what we found.
Nobody had opened it. That is the whole thing. A man got walked out of a building over what was in a locker that not one soul had thought to look inside.
Here’s the reason that locker comes up short, and I have known it since about 2004.
It’s Delbert Yingling’s locker. He is seventy-one years old and he has worked in that plant since 1974 and he keeps a cigar box on the top shelf with cash in it, and every man on second and third shift knows it, and it is not a secret and it never was.
You come up short for gas on a Thursday, you take a twenty out of Delbert’s box and you write it on a slip and put the slip in the box. You pay it back on payday. That is how it has worked for twenty-some years and there has never been one dollar go missing out of it in all that time, because a man who would steal from Delbert would have to work beside forty men who know it.
We opened it at ten till seven. Denise wrote it all down.
Two hundred and forty dollars in the box. Sixty-one slips in the bottom of it, some going back to 2006, on scrap paper and torn-off timecards and one on the back of a lottery ticket, all of them dated and initialed. And on top, folded once, a slip from that Monday.
Took 60. Wife’s car needed a battery to get her to dialysis. Back Friday. Sorry Delbert. — R.T.
R.T. is Randy Toops, a young hire, twenty-six years old, whose wife is on dialysis three days a week and who did exactly what men in that plant have done for twenty years, and who put it back on Friday like he said he would, and who was standing there in the break room when Denise read it out loud and who came apart.
Nobody stole one thing. Nobody ever has.
The floor manager had counted a cigar box he’d never seen before, decided it was short, and had a guard in his office inside two hours.
They read all sixty-one slips into a report. The plant manager called the shift together on Friday and said it plain, and he said the words twenty-eight years should have bought one question, and the floor manager was gone by the end of the month.
They gave me nine days of back pay and my keys.
Delbert’s box is still on the top shelf of that locker. There is a laminated card taped inside the door now, and it was Denise’s idea, and it says: THIS IS NOT A CASH DRAWER. IT IS A LOAN FUND RUN BY D. YINGLING SINCE 1998. ASK BEFORE YOU ACCUSE.