“What sort of gun?”
Phylis Coplin put in her word ahead of her father.
“Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic—a .38.”
“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 sheet of 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 as I reached for my hat.
“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 outdoor athletics written all over her.
“Miss Eveleth?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from the insurance company that insured the Coplin’s jewelry, 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 here. As soon as I got the door open 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 male 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 Coplin 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 clothes, with black cloth gloves.”
“How old?”
“Not very. His beard was thin, patchy, and he had a boyish face.”
“Notice his eyes?”
“Blue. His hair, where it showed under the edge of his cap was a very light yellow, almost white.”
“What sort of voice?”
“Very deep bass, though he may have been putting that on.”
“Know him if you’d see him again?”
“Yes, indeed!” She put a gentle finger on her bandaged nose. “My nose would know, as the ads say, anyway!”
From Miss Eveleth’s apartment I went down to the office on the first floor, where I found McBirney, the janitor, and his wife, who managed the apartment building. She was a scrawny little woman with the angular mouth and nose of a nagger; he was big, broad-shouldered; with sandy hair and mustache; good-humored, shiftless red face; and genial eyes of a pale and watery blue.
He drawled out what he knew of the looting.
“I was a-fixin’ a spigot on the fourth floor when I heard the shot. I went up to see what was the matter, an’ just as I got far enough up the front stairs to see the Coplins’ door, the fella came out. We seen each other at the same time, an’ he aims his gun at me. There’s a lot o’ things I might of done, but what I did do was to duck down an’ get my head out o’ range. I heard him run upstairs, an’ I got up just in time to see him make the turn between the fifth and sixth floors.
“I didn’t go after him. I didn’t have a gun or nothin’, an’ I figured we had him cooped. A man could get out o’ this buildin’ to the roof of the next from the fourth floor, an’ maybe from the fifth, but not from any above that; an’ the Coplins’ apartment is on the fifth. I figured we had this fella. I could stand in front of the elevator an’ watch both the front an’ back stairs; an’ I rang for the elevator, an’ told Ambrose, the elevator-boy, to give the alarm an’ run outside an’ keep his eye on the fire-escape until the police came.
“The missus came up with my gun in a minute or two, an’ told me that Martinez—Ambrose’s brother, who takes care of the switchboard an’ the front door—was callin’ the police. I could see both stairs plain, an’ the fella didn’t come down them; an’ it wasn’t more’n a few minutes before the police—a whole pack of ’em—came from the Richmond Station. Then we let the Coplins out of the closet where they were, an’ started to search the buildin’. An’ then Miss Eveleth came runnin’ down the stairs, her face an’ dress all bloody an’ told about him bein’ in her apartment; so we were pretty sure we’d land him. But we
