He had known that his story would sound like a far-fetched and flimsy lie; he had a criminal record. For him to have surrendered and told the truth would have been merely to get himself laughed at.
As it turned out, Ogburn went to the gallows, Mae Landis is now serving a fifteen-year sentence, and Whitacre, in return for his testimony and restitution of the loot, was not prosecuted for his share in the land swindle.
—End—
MIKE, ALEC, OR RUFUS
I don't know whether Frank Toplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head—naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the colour and texture of Manila paper—propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.
Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond 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 Toplin, "but first—"
"Stuff?" Toplin's yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, "A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!"
Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband's head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.
"Now, Frank, don't get excited," she soothed him.
Phyllis Toplin's dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.
The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, 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 jewellery—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 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 blond maid— "came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, 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. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and—"
"When I saw him and the revolver in his hand"—Toplin 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 didn't say a word all the time, not a word—just made 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," Toplin 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," Phyllis objected, "he was thirty, or near it!"
"What do you think?" I asked Mrs. Toplin.
"Twenty-five, I'd say."
"And you?" to the maid.
"I don't know exactly, sir, but he wasn't very old."
"Light or dark?"
"He was light," Toplin said. "He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish."
"More of a light brown," Phyllis amended.
"Maybe, but it was light."
"What colour 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 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 clothes, awfully wrinkled."
"What sort of gun?"
Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.
"Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic a thirty-eight."
"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 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.
"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 athletics written all over her.
"Miss Eveleth?"
"Yes."
"I'm from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewellery, and I'm looking for information about the robbery."
She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.