“Came right away.”
“Then listen here,” said Fanny in a steely voice, “it don’t seem to me that your times add up right. You say he made you this offer two seconds after he heard your name. Well, why did it take you a quarter of an hour to get back to this kitchen? If you want to know what I think, it wasn’t a red-faced man with grey hair at all—it was one of these Washington Square vamps and you were flirting with her.”
“Fanny!”
“Well, I’ve read Gingery Stories, and I know what it’s like down here in Bohemia with all these artists and models and everything.”
Mullett drew himself up.
“Your suspicions pain me, Fanny. If you care to step out on to the roof, you can peek in at the sitting-room window and see him for yourself. He’s waiting there for me to bring him a drink. The reason I was so long coming back was that it took him ten minutes before he asked my name. Up till then he just sat and spluttered.”
“All right. Take me out on the roof.”
“There!” said Mullett, a moment later. “Now perhaps you’ll believe me.”
Through the French windows of the sitting-room there was undeniably visible a man of precisely the appearance described. Fanny was remorseful.
“Did I wrong my poor little Freddy, then?” she said.
“Yes, you did.”
“I’m sorry. There!”
She kissed him. Mullett melted immediately.
“I must go back and get that drink,” he said.
“And I must be getting along.”
“Oh, not yet,” begged Mullett.
“Yes, I must. I’ve got to look in at one or two of the stores.”
“Fanny!”
“Well, a girl’s got to have her trousseau, hasn’t she?”
Mullett sighed.
“You’ll be very careful, precious?” he said anxiously.
“I’m always careful. Don’t you worry about me.”
Mullett retired, and Fanny, blowing a parting kiss from her pretty fingers, passed through the door leading to the stairs.
It was perhaps five minutes later, while Mullett sat dreaming golden dreams in the kitchen and Sigsbee H. Waddington sat sipping his whisky-and-soda in the sitting-room, that a sudden tap on the French window caused the latter to give a convulsive leap and spill most of the liquid down the front of his waistcoat.
He looked up. A girl was standing outside the window, and from her gestures he gathered that she was requesting him to open it.
V
It was some time before Sigsbee H. Waddington could bring himself to do so. There exist, no doubt, married men of the baser sort who would have enjoyed the prospect of a tête-à-tête chat with a girl with snapping black eyes who gesticulated at them through windows: but Sigsbee Waddington was not one of them. By nature and training he was circumspect to a degree. So for awhile he merely stood and stared at Fanny. It was not until her eyes became so imperative as to be practically hypnotic that he brought himself to undo the latch.
“And about time, too,” said Fanny, with annoyance, stepping softly into the room.
“What do you want?”
“I want a little talk with you. What’s all this I hear about you asking people to perpetrate crimes for you?”
Sigsbee Waddington’s conscience was in such a feverish condition by now that this speech affected him as deeply as the explosion of a pound of dynamite would have done. His vivid imagination leaped immediately to the supposition that this girl who seemed so intimate with his private affairs was one of those Secret Service investigation agents who do so much to mar the comfort of the amateur in crime.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he croaked.
“Oh, shucks!” said Fanny impatiently. She was a business girl and disliked this beating about the bush. “Freddy Mullett told me all about it. You want someone to do a job for you and he turned you down. Well, take a look at the understudy. I’m here, and, if the job’s in my line, lead me to it.”
Mr. Waddington continued to eye her warily. He had now decided that she was trying to trap him into a damaging admission. He said nothing, but breathed stertorously.
Fanny, a sensitive girl, misunderstood his silence. She interpreted the look in his eye to indicate distrust of the ability of a woman worker to deputise for the male.
“If it’s anything Freddy Mullett could do, I can do it,” she said. She seemed to Mr. Waddington to flicker for a moment. “See here!” she said.
Before Mr. Waddington’s fascinated gaze she held up between her delicate fingers a watch and chain.
“What’s that?” he gasped.
“What does it look like?”
Mr. Waddington knew exactly what it looked like. He felt his waistcoat dazedly.
“I didn’t see you take it.”
“Nobody don’t ever see me take it,” said Fanny proudly, stating a profound truth. “Well, then, now you’ve witnessed the demonstration, perhaps you’ll believe me when I say that I’m not so worse. If Freddy can do it, I can do it.”
A cool, healing wave of relief poured over Sigsbee H. Waddington’s harassed soul. He perceived that he had wronged his visitor. She was not a detective, after all, but a sweet, womanly woman who went about lifting things out of people’s pockets so deftly that they never saw them go. Just the sort of girl he had been wanting to meet.
“I am sure you can,” he said fervently.
“Well, what’s the job?”
“I want someone to steal a pearl necklace.”
“Where is it?”
“In the strongroom at the bank.”
Fanny’s mobile features expressed disappointment and annoyance.
“Then what’s the use of talking about it? I’m not a safe-smasher. I’m a delicately nurtured girl that never used an oxyacetylene blowpipe in her life.”
“Ah, but you don’t understand,” said Mr. Waddington hastily. “When I say that the necklace is in the strongroom, I mean that it is there just now. Eventually it will be taken out and placed among the other wedding-presents.”
“This begins to look more like it.”
“I can mention no names, of course. …”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“Then I will simply say that A, to whom the necklace belongs, is shortly about to be
