Garren wrapped his fingers around the boy’s arm and started for the door.
“Where to, Bill?” I asked.
“Up to talk to his people. Coming along?”
“Stick around awhile,” I invited. “I’m going to put on a party. But first, tell me, did the coppers who came here when the alarm was turned in do a good job?”
“I didn’t see it,” the police detective said. “I didn’t get here until the fireworks were pretty well over, but I understand the boys did all that could be expected of them.”
I turned to Jacob Coplin. I did my talking to him chiefly because we—his wife and daughter, the maid, the janitor, Blanche Eveleth, Garren and his prisoner, and I—were grouped around the old man’s bed, and by looking at him I could get at least a one-eyed view of everybody else.
“Somebody has been kidding me somewhere,” I began my speech. “If all the things I’ve been told about this job are right, then so is Prohibition. Your stories don’t fit together, not even almost. Take the bird who stuck you up. He seems to have been pretty well acquainted with your affairs. It might be luck that he hit your apartment at a time when all of your jewelry was on hand, instead of another apartment, or your apartment at another time. But I don’t like luck. I’d rather figure that he knew what he was doing. He nicked you for your pretties, and then he galloped up to Miss Eveleth’s apartment. He may have been about to go downstairs when he ran into McBirney, or he may not. Anyway, he went upstairs, into Miss Eveleth’s apartment, looking for a fire-escape. Funny, huh? He knew enough about the place to make a pushover out of the stickup, but he didn’t know there were no fire-escapes on Miss Eveleth’s side of the building.
“He didn’t speak to you or to McBirney, but he talked to Miss Eveleth, in a bass voice. A very, very deep voice. Funny, huh? From Miss Eveleth’s apartment he vanished with every exit watched. The police must have been here before he left her apartment, and they would have blocked the outlets first thing, whether McBirney and Ambrose had already done that or not. But he got away. Funny, huh? He wore a wrinkled suit, which might have been taken from a bundle just before he went to work, and he was a small man. Miss Eveleth isn’t a small woman, but she would be a small man. A guy with a suspicious disposition would almost think Blanche Eveleth was the robber.”
Jacob Coplin, his wife, young Wagener, the janitor and the maid were gaping at me. Garren was sizing up the Eveleth girl with narrowed eyes, while she glared white-hot at me. Phyllis Coplin was looking at me with a contemptuous sort of pity for my feeblemindedness.
Bil Garren finished his inspection of the girl and nodded slowly.
“She could get away with it,” he gave his opinion; “indoors and if she kept her mouth shut.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Exactly my eye!” Phyllis Coplin exploded. “Do you two correspondence-school detectives think we wouldn’t know the difference between a man and a woman dressed in man’s clothes? He had a day or two’s growth of hair on his face—real hair, if you know what I mean. Do you think he could have fooled us with false whiskers? This happened, you know; it’s not in a play!”
The others stopped gaping, and heads bobbed up and down.
“Phyllis is right,” Jacob Coplin backed up his offspring; “he was a man—no woman dressed like one.”
His wife, the maid, and the janitor nodded vigorous endorsements.
But I’m a bullheaded sort of bird when comes to going where the evidence leads. I spun to face Blanche Eveleth.
“Can you add anything to the occasion?” I asked her.
She smiled very sweetly at me and shook her head.
“All right, bum,” I said. “You’re pinched. Let’s go.”
Then it seemed she could add something to the occasion. She had something to say, quite a few things to say, and they were all about me. They weren’t nice things. In anger her voice was shrill, and just now she was madder than you’d think anybody could get on short notice. I was sorry for that. This job had run along peacefully and gently so far, hadn’t been marred by any rough stuff, had been almost ladylike in every particular; and I had hoped it would go that way to the end. But the more she screamed at me the nastier she got. She didn’t have any words I hadn’t heard before, but she fitted them together in combinations that were new to me. I stood as much of it as I could.
Then I knocked her over with a punch in the mouth.
“Here! Here!” Bil Garren yelled, grabbing my arm.
“Save your strength, Bill,” I advised him, shaking his hand off and going over to yank the Eveleth person up from the floor. “Your gallantry does you credit, and all the like of that, but I think you’ll find Blanche’s real name is Mike or Alec or Rufus.”
I hauled her or him—which ever you like—to his or her feet and asked it:
“Feel like telling us about it?”
For answer I got a snarl.
“All right,” I said to the others; “in the absence of authoritative information I’ll give you my dope. If Blanche Eveleth could have been the robber except for the beard and the difficulty of a woman passing for
