“What time was this?”
“Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda” – nodding at the blond maid – “came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He -“
“Just a moment.” I turned to the maid. “What happened when you answered the bell?”
“Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my – my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and -“
“When I saw him and the revolver in his hand” – Toplin took the story away from his servant – “it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again – no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed – he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis’s room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn’t say a word all the time, not a word – just made motions with his gun and his left hand.”
“How bad did he bang your leg?”
“Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!”
“Did he say anything when you opened the door?” I asked the maid.
“No, sir.”
“Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?”
None of them had.
“What happened after he locked you in the closet?”
“Nothing that we knew about,” Toplin said, “until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out.”
“Who’s McBirney?”
“The janitor.”
“How’d he happen along with a policeman?”
“He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there – keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver – until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and – and that’s all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good.”
“How long were you in the closet?”
“Ten minutes – maybe fifteen.”
“What sort of looking man was the robber?”
“Short and thin and -“
“How short?”
“About your height, or maybe shorter.”
“About five feet five or six, say? What would he weigh?”
“Oh, I don’t know – maybe a hundred and fifteen or twenty. He was kind of puny.”
“How old?”
“Not more than twenty-two or -three.”
“Oh, Papa,” Phyllis objected, “he was thirty, or near it!”
“What do you think?” I asked Mrs. Toplin.
“Twenty-five, I’d say.”
“And you?” to the maid.
“I don’t know exactly, sir, but he wasn’t very old.”
“Light or dark?”
“He was light,” Toplin said. “He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish.”
“More of a light brown,” Phyllis amended.
“Maybe, but it was light.”
“What colour eyes?”
“I don’t know. He had a cap pulled down over them. They looked dark, but that might have been because they were in the shadow.”
“How would you describe the part of his face you could see?”
“Pale, and kind of weak-looking – small chin. But you couldn’t see much of his face; he had his coat collar up and his cap pulled down.”
“How was he dressed?”
“A blue cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue suit, black shoes, and black gloves – silk ones.”
“Shabby or neat?”
“Kind of cheap-looking clothes, awfully wrinkled.”
“What sort of gun?”
Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.
“Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic a thirty-eight.”
“Would you folks know him if you saw him again?”
“Yes,” they agreed.
I cleared a space on the bedside table and got out a pencil and paper.
“I want a list of what he got, with as thorough a description of each piece as possible, and the price you paid for it, where you bought it, and when.” I got the list half an hour later.
“Do you know the number of Miss Eveleth’s apartment?” I asked.
“702, two floors above.”
I went up there and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl of twenty-something, whose nose was hidden under adhesive tape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, dark hair, and athletics written all over her.
“Miss Eveleth?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewellery, and I’m looking for information about the robbery.”
She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.
“This is some of my information.”
“How did it happen?”
“A penalty of femininity. I forgot to mind my own business. But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night and when I opened the door he was there. As soon as I got the door opened he jabbed a pistol at me and said, ‘Inside, kid!’
“I let him in with no hesitancy at all; I was quite instantaneous about it and he kicked the door to behind him.
“’Where’s the fire escape?’ he asked.
“The fire escape doesn’t come to any of my windows, and I told him so, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He drove me ahead of him to each of the windows; but of course he didn’t find his fire escape, and he got peevish about it, as if it were my fault. I didn’t like some of the things he called me, and he was such a little half-portion of a man so I tried to take him in hand. But – well, man is still the dominant animal so far as I’m concerned. In plain American, he busted me in the nose and left me where I fell. I was dazed, though not quite all the way out, and when I got up he had gone. I ran out into the corridor then, and found some policemen on the stairs. I sobbed out my pathetic little tale to them and they told me of the Toplin robbery. Two of them came back here with me and searched the apartment. I hadn’t seen him actually leave, and they thought he might be foxy enough or desperate enough to jump into a closet and stay there until the coast was clear. But they didn’t find him here.”
“How long do you think it was after he knocked you down that you ran out into the corridor?”
“Oh, it couldn’t have been five minutes. Perhaps only half that time.”
“What did Mr. Robber look like?”
“Small, not quite so large as I; with a couple of days’ growth of light hair on his face; dressed in shabby blue
