Besides he and I in the room that first time, there were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart little Jewess of the popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blonde girl in apron and cap.
I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.
“I want a list of the stuff you lost,” I told Coplin; “but first—”
“Stuff?” Coplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed of the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling: “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!”
Mrs. Coplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.
“Now, Jakie, don’d ged excited,” she soothed him.
Phylis Coplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked one of them at me.
The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shamefacedly, and chuckled.
“Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand.”
“So it adds up to a hundred thousand?” I asked.
“Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren’t insured at all.”
That was very usual. I don’t remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt—always it was half, or, at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.
“Suppose you tell me exactly what happened,” I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes: “I know you’ve already told the police the whole thing, but I’ll have to have it from you.”
“Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers’ last night. I brought my wife’s and daughter’s jewelry—the valuable pieces—home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on, and had called to them to hurry up with their dressing when the doorbell rang.”
“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 blonde maid—“came walking into the room, backwards. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backwards, 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. Coplin was, and he shot Mr. Coplin, and—”
“When I saw him and the revolver in his hand,” Coplin 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 don’t say a word all this time, not a word—just makes 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,” Coplin 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,” Phylis objected; “he was thirty, or near it!”
“What do you think?” I asked Mrs. Coplin.
“Twendy-five, I’ll say.”
“And you?” to the maid.
“I don’t know exactly, sir; but he wasn’t very old.”
“Light or dark?”
“He was light,” Coplin said. “He needed a shave, and his beard was yellowish.”
“More of a light brown,” Phylis amended.
“Maybe, but it was light.”
“What color 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 turned 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
