Swiftly she pulled up the skirt and with precise movements exchanged the phony packets for those containing genuine bills.

When she stepped out of the vault and smiled a good evening to the assistant vice President as he nodded her out a side door, she couldn't believe she'd actually gotten away with it.

Seconds after entering her apartment, she shed the skirt, stripped the money packets from her legs and counted them. The tally came to $51,000.

Not nearly enough.

Disappointment burned within her. She would need at least twice that sum to leave the country and maintain a minimal level of comfort while increasing the lion's share through investments.

The ease of the operation had made her heady. did she dare make another foray into the vault? she wondered. The Federal Reserve Bank money was already counted and wouldn't be distributed to the branch banks until Wednesday. Tomorrow was Tuesday. She still had another chance to strike again before the loss was discovered.

Why not?

The thought of ripping off the same bank twice in two days excited her. Perhaps Arta Casilighio lacked the guts for it, but Estelle Wallace required no coaxing at all.

That evening she bought a large old-fashioned suitcase at a secondhand store and made a false bottom in it. She packed the money along with her clothes and took a cab to the Los Angeles International Airport, where she stored the suitcase overnight in a locker and purchased a ticket to San Francisco on an early-evening Tuesday flight.

Wrapping her unused Monday night ticket in a newspaper, she dropped it in a trash receptacle. With nothing remaining to be done, she went home and slept like a rock.

The second robbery went as smoothly as the first. Three hours after leaving the Beverly-Wilshire Bank for the last time, she was re-counting the money in a San Francisco hotel. The combined total came to $128,000. Not a staggering prize by inflationary standards, but more than ample for her needs.

The next step was relatively simple. She checked through the newspapers for ship departures and found the San Marino, a cargo freighter bound for Auckland, New Zealand, at six-thirty the following morning.

An hour before sailing time, she mounted the gangplank. The captain claimed he seldom took passengers, but kindly consented to take her on board for a mutually agreed fare-which Estelle suspected went into his wallet instead of the steamship company's coffers.

Estelle stepped across the threshold of the officers' dining saloon and paused uncertainly for a moment, facing the appraising stares of six men sitting in the room.

Her coppery-tinted hair fell past her shoulders and nearly matched her tan. She wore a long, sleek pink T-shirt dress that clung in all the right places. A white bone bracelet was her only accessory. To the officers rising to their feet the simple elegance of her appearance created a sensation.