“Cerdainly!” Mrs. Coplin said, looking at the ring. “Id belongs to my Phylis, and the robber—” Her mouth dropped open as she began to understand. “How could Mr. Wagener—?”
“Yes, how?” Bill repeated.
The girl stepped between Garren and me, turning her back on him to face me.
“I can explain everything,” she announced.
That sounded too much like a movie subtitle to be very promising, but—
“Go ahead,” I encouraged her.
“I found that ring in the passageway near the front door after the exciement was over. The robber must have dropped it. I didn’t say anything to Papa and Mama about it, because I thought nobody would ever know the difference, and it was insured, so I thought I might as well sell it and be that much money in. I asked Jack last night if he could sell it for me, and he said he knew just how to go about it. He didn’t have anything to do with it outside of that; but I did think he’d have sense enough not to try to pawn it right away!”
She looked scornfully at her accomplice.
“See what you’ve done!” she accused him.
He fidgeted and pouted at his feet.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Bill Garren said sourly. “That’s a nifty! Did you ever hear the one about the two Irishmen that got in the Y.W.C.A. by mistake?”
She didn’t say whether she had heard it or not.
“Mrs. Coplin,” I asked; “making allowances for the different clothes, and the unshaven face, could this lad have been the robber?”
She shook her head with emphasis.
“No! He could nod be id!”
“Set your prize down, Bil,” I suggested; “and let’s go over in a corner and whisper things at each other.”
“Right.”
He dragged a heavy chair to the center of the floor, sat Wagener on it, anchored him there with handcuffs—not exactly necessary, but Bill was grouchy at not getting his prisoner identified as the robber—and then he and I stepped out into the pasageway. We could keep an eye on the sitting-room from there without having our low-voiced conversation overheard.
“This is simple!” I whispered into his big red ear. “There are only five ways to figure the lay. First: Wagener stole the stuff for the Coplins. Second: the Coplins framed the robbery themselves, and got Wagener to peddle it. Third: Wagener and the girl engineered the deal without the old folks being in on it. Fourth: Wagener pulled it on his own hook and the girl is covering him up. Fifth: she told us the truth. None of them explain why your little playmate should have been dumb enough to flash the ring downtown this morning; but that can’t be explained by any system. Which of the five do you favor?”
“I like ’em all,” he grumbled. “But what I like most is that I’ve got this baby right—got him trying to pass a hot ring. That suits me fine. You do the guessing. I don’t ask for any more than I’ve got.”
That wasn’t so foolish.
“It doesn’t irritate me any either,” I agreed. “The way it stands the insurance company can welch on the policies; but I’d like to smoke it out a little further, far enough to put away anybody who has been trying to run a hooligan on the North American. We’ll clean up all we can on this kid, stow him in the can, and then see what further damage we can do.”
“All right,” Garren said. “Suppose you get hold of the janitor and that Eveleth woman while I’m showing the boy to old man Coplin, and getting the maid’s opinion.”
I nodded and went out into the corridor, leaving the door unlocked behind me. I took the elevator to the seventh floor, and told Ambrose to get hold of McBirney and send him to the Coplins’ apartment. Then I rang Blanche Eveleth’s bell.
“Can you come downstairs for a minute or two?” I asked her. “We’ve a prize who might be your friend of last night.”
“Will I?” She started toward the stairs with me. “And if he’s the right one, can I pay him back for my battered beauty?”
“You can,” I promised. “Go as far as you like, so you don’t maul him too badly to stand trial.”
I took her into the Coplins’ apartment without ringing the bell, and found everybody in Jacob Coplin’s bedroom. A look at Garren’s glum face told me that neither the old man nor the maid had given him a nod on the prisoner.
I put the finger on Jack Wagener. Disappointment came into Blanche Eveleth’s eyes.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “That’s not he.”
Garren scowled at her. It was a pipe that if the Coplins were tied up with young Wagener, they wouldn’t identify him as the robber. Bill had been counting on that identification coming from the two outsiders—Blanche Eveleth and the janitor—and now one of them had flopped.
The other one rang the bell just then, and the maid brought him into the room.
I pointed at Jack Wagener, who stood beside Garren, staring sullenly at the floor.
“Know him, McBirney?”
“Yeah. Mr. Wagener’s son Jack.”
“Is he the man who shooed you away with a gun last night?”
McBirney’s watery eyes popped in surprise.
“No,” he said with decision, and began to look doubtful.
“In an old suit, cap pulled down, needing a shave—could it have been him?”
“No‑o‑o,” the janitor drawled; “I don’t think so, though it—You know, now that I come to think about it, there was something familiar about that fella, an’ maybe—By cracky, I think maybe you’re right—though I couldn’t exactly say for sure.”
“That’ll do!” Garren grunted in disgust.
An identification of the sort the janitor was giving isn’t worth a damn one way or the other. Even positive and immediate identifications aren’t always the goods. A lot of people who don’t know any better—and some who do, or should—have given circumstantial evidence a bad name. It is misleading sometimes. But for genuine, undiluted, prewar untrustworthiness, it can’t come within
