“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 Toplins. Second: the Toplins 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 explains 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 favour?”
“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.”
“It doesn’t irritate me any either,” I agreed. “The way it stands the insurance company can welsh 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 Toplin 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 Toplins’ 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 bartered 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 Toplins’ apartment without ringing the bell, and found everybody in Frank Toplin’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 Toplins 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 in.
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-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, pre-war untrustworthiness, it can’t come within gunshot of human testimony. Take any man you like – unless he is the one in a hundred thousand with a mind trained to keep things straight, and not always even then – get him excited, show him something, give him a few hours to think it over and talk it over, and then ask him about it. It’s dollars to doughnuts that you’ll have a hard time finding any connection between what he saw and what he says he saw. Like this McBirney – another hour and he’d be ready to gamble his life on Jack Wagener’s being the robber.
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 a while,” 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 Frank Toplin. 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 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 jewellery 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 push-over out of the stick-up, 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.”
Frank Toplin, 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 Toplin was looking at me with a contemptuous sort of pity for my feeble-mindedness.
Bill 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 Toplin 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.” Frank Toplin 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 bull-headed sort of bird when it comes to going where the evidence leads. I spun to face Blanche Eveleth.