It was a small apartment, a bedroom-sitting room with a tiny kitchenette. It was painstakingly neat and rather sparse and meagre. Like Miss Dune.
A girl sat in a stiff chair; she rose as we came in. I recognized her only vaguely; she worked in the bookkeeping department of the bank, and I rarely saw her.
“I’m Muriel Evans, Mr. Wick-wire,” she said in a low voice. She was slender, dressed simply in red. She wore lipstick and matching nail polish, a custom I rather oppose in the bank, but certainly if the girls chose to wear nose rings outside the bank it was none of my business. However, she was quiet and well-behaved in a very trying and, indeed, a terrible situation.
I nodded. “This is the young lady who reported it,” I told the lieutenant. I still felt cold and rather sick.
He removed his cap. “I’ll have to ask you for a statement, Miss,” he said. “I realize it’s been a shock but—” He was sorry for her; I could see that.
She began to talk, and I glanced around the room. She had replaced the telephone in its cradle. A chair lay on its side on the floor. It accounted for the dull crash I had heard. The window, a long window, too near the floor, was still open. “Miss Dune telephoned to me about eleven,” Miss Evans was saying. “I live near here, two streets north. She said she couldn’t sleep; she was nervous and she asked me to come over. I didn’t know her well, but she was rather important, you see, at the bank, being Mr. Wickwire’s secretary. Of course I came — and she told me she’d taken the Wagstaff pearls. They were in the vault and—”
“I’ll explain that,” I told the lieutenant and did so briefly.
The lieutenant said, “Take it easy now, Miss Evans. Was she hysterical?”
“Yes! Oh, yes! I didn’t believe her. She said she had to talk — it seemed to come out in spite of herself. She was crying and — well, I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t. I thought she was ill, nervous, something wrong. Anyway, I went into the kitchen. I intended to make some coffee. I didn’t know what to do. While I was there I heard her at the telephone. She telephoned to Mr. Wickwire — I could hear her — and started to tell him what she’d done. But then she dropped the phone as if she couldn’t go on. I ran from the kitchen and — and she was pulling up the window. I caught at her and — I don’t know what I did. But I couldn’t stop her—” She put her hands over her face.
The lieutenant put a large hand kindly on her shoulder. “It’s been tough — take it easy.”
I said, “Where are the pearls?”
The girl, Muriel Evans, looked up with a start. She had light brown hair, parted in the middle and drawn up on her head. It was the kind of hair, fine and soft, that seems to make a nimbus around a girl’s face. She had blue eyes, set in finely arched hollows. It struck me that in spite of her shock she was rather attractive. “I don’t know,” she said. “She wouldn’t show them to me. That’s why I didn’t believe her.”
“We’ll find them,” the lieutenant said. “The pearls or a pawn ticket.”
I went to the telephone. “Is it all right for me to use this?”
He hesitated. “Well, the fact is, Mr. Wickwire, it’s suicide, but I have to go through some formalities — fingerprints and all that. Do you mind using another telephone?”
Miss Evans’s blue eyes leaped to sudden darkness. “But it was suicide! I saw her—”
“I understand,” the lieutenant said quickly. “Don’t get scared, Miss. It’s not a question of murder. Besides if you’d murdered her—”
“Oh—” Miss Evans gave a kind of gasp.
He patted her shoulder. “If you’d murdered her you’d have got the hell — that is, you’d have got out of here. Nobody knew you were here, did they?”
She moved her head slowly, saying, no, in a whisper.
“Well, there, you see! You’d have got out. You wouldn’t have called the police.”
A sergeant and another policeman came in from the hall as I went out. I took the elevator down and used the telephone at the switchboard in the foyer, to rout out Mr. Wazey. The boy on duty watched me, pop-eyed.
“It’s terrible,” he said. “Miss Dune was sure upset when she phoned for the lady in the red coat. But I never thought of—”
I asked him to get me a taxi.
Banks are supposed to operate through masses of red tape and in a sense they do; they have to. At the same time, in an emergency, there are ways to cut some of that red tape. Mr. Wazey met me at the bank and went into the vaults and got out the flat velvet box. When we opened it there were pearls lying on the satin lining. But the sight of those pearls shook me in a way that even Miss Dune’s tragic confession had not done — for they were not the Wagstaff pearls! They were not pearls at all, but dull and waxy fakes; they proved that the theft had been planned. And a moment of passionate impulse, and a carefully planned theft are two different things.
“I looked at them,” Mr. Wazey panted, his round face very pale. “When I replaced the box I glanced inside it. But I didn’t notice. I’m no connoisseur of pearls. Besides it was Miss Dune.”
She had never been delegated to wear the pearls before that day. I was fairly sure of that but we checked the records Mr. Wazey had kept. I could not remember when I had actually looked at the pearls myself so, for accuracy, I ran down the entire list of names.
Some of the girls whose names appeared there had married or drifted to other jobs; and many of the girls had worn the pearls twice or even three times, but practically every girl in the bank had worn the pearls at some time. Miss Busch had worn them three times; Miss Smith, twice; Miss Evans (Muriel Evans, the girl in the apartment), twice; Miss Wilkins, three times — Miss Dune, only once.
But she’d have known all about them from my Wagstaff file, so she had prepared herself for an opportunity. And she had reminded me of the date and made the opportunity. My heart was heavy as I watched Mr. Wazey lock up the vaults. Then I went back through the dismal, rainy night to Miss Dune’s apartment.
I had been gone scarcely an hour, but the search of the apartment had been so thorough that it looked as if a hurricane had struck it. Muriel Evans still sat in the armchair. She was pale, and something in the texture of her face made me think (although absently) of a magnolia. The lieutenant had unbuttoned his blue coat and was wiping his forehead. “They’re not here, Mr. Wickwire,” he said rather desperately. “No pawn ticket. Nothing.”
I have never been one to shirk my duty, even if unpleasant. I had to report not only to the insurance company but to the trustees of the estate and the officers of the bank, exactly how I had permitted this thing to happen. I made my way past the debris of cushions, books, untidy heaps of clothing to the window and looked down, so far down to the street that I felt queerly dizzy and sick again. Poor tragic Miss Dune who had paid with her life for the pearls, entrusted to me! Again I could almost see the still beautiful woman who had put her delicate old hands in mine and given the pearls into my keeping. I could almost see her smile, and hear her voice.
I stood at the window, it seemed to me, for a long time; in fact I suppose it was only a few seconds while I made up my mind to undertake the only course of action that I could determine. I turned back to the lieutenant. “Is it all right for me to go now?”
The lieutenant nodded. “I’ll report to you. We’ll get started with the pawn shops and jewelers. We’ll get the pearls back.”
I thanked him. I said to Miss Evans, “Do you mind coming to my house with me? I have to dictate a full report of this.”
The light fell fully on her magnolia face. She nodded, and picked up her coat. While she preceded me to the elevator I lingered, to speak to the lieutenant. I gave a concise word or two of directions and joined Miss Evans as the elevator came.