“What is it?” she asked, when he emerged.
“I think you’d better come with me,” he said. “It seems to concern you fully as much as it does me.”
“Will it take long?” she asked. “Can we get back to finish out the bill on the second show?”
“I don’t know,” he told her. “We have to go to the police station.”
Driving down to the police station, she waited at first for him to break his silence. When it appeared that he had no intention of doing so, she said, “What is it, Frank?”
“The police have made an arrest.”
“Well, I hope you’re going to get that murder case cleaned up now.”
“Oh, it’s not an arrest in the murder case. It’s one of those female impersonators.”
“Frank!”
“That’s right.”
“But will you kindly tell me why we should be dragged out of a movie you’ve been wanting to see all week, to go to the police station because they’ve arrested a female impersonator?”
Duryea pulled his car up in front of the city police station. “I think you’ll appreciate the reason in a very few moments,” he said.
He escorted her into the chief’s office. The chief of police, a twinkle in his eyes, said, “I’m sorry I disturbed you, Mr. Duryea, but this is such an unusual case, and he won’t say a thing about...”
“It’s all right,” Duryea said. “Bring him in.”
The chief nodded to a uniformed officer. A moment later, there were the sounds of shuffling in the corridor, then a figure clothed in a blanket was thrust into the room, and as the officer gave him the final push, peeled back the blanket.
Gramps Wiggins, for once in his life looking completely embarrassed, stood before them, clad only in a woman’s bathing suit of rubber, a very scanty and decidedly feminine costume consisting of one piece. Over the bathing suit a never-ending procession of pelicans skimmed the surface of breakers or dived into the blue depths of the ocean, while seals regarded the performance with cynical smiles.
Duryea said, “I’ll be damned!”
“Make it double,” Milred observed.
Gramps looked at them with agony in his face. “Somebody stole my clothes,” he said.
“He’d evidently undressed on the beach, put this thing on, and gone in for a swim,” the chief said. “When he came out, his clothes were gone. The officer found him wandering along the beach. In fact, he was quite a center of attraction. You know him?”
“I’m acquainted with him,” Duryea said.
“He insisted he was related to Mrs. Duryea, and...”
“We’ll borrow the blanket,” Duryea interrupted, “and take him along.”
“I didn’t give ’em no name,” Gramps said.
“It’s all right,” Duryea said. “Come on.”
They bustled him into the automobile, and Duryea started for home. Gramps, swathed in the blanket in the rear seat, leaned forward eagerly, the blanket oozing forth the sickly sweet odor of jail disinfectant as he moved. “Now listen, son,” he said, “I got this thing figgered out. I...”
Duryea, keeping his eyes on the road, said, “If it’s all the same to you, Gramps, just save it.”
“But listen, son, this thing makes sense. This all fits together now...”
“I think,” Duryea told him, “that hereafter the investigation will proceed along more conventional lines. I’d hate to play dirty pool with you, Gramps, but unless we reach an understanding right now, I’m going to call up the chief of police, tell him that you haven’t made any satisfactory explanation of your conduct, and have you put back in jail for impersonating a woman in public.”
Gramps shrilled, “All right, make a damned fool out o’ yourself if you want to! I’m tryin’ to tell you.”
“I know you are.”
“Well, damn it, I’m goin’ to tell you. If you hadn’t been so dumb, an’ let that girl get you so flustered and embarrassed, you’d have known that bathin’ suit o’ hers had never been in the water.”
For a moment, the effect of what Gramps Wiggins was saying didn’t dawn on the district attorney, then, when it did, he suddenly swerved the car over to the curb and slowed. “What’s that?” he asked.
Gramps said, “She had your goat so bad you couldn’t see anythin’, but I looked her over carefully.”
“I’ll say you did,” Milred said. “What with that rubber bathing suit and your inspection, Gramps, if she has any hidden charms...”
“You don’t get me,” Gramps said. “I hated like hell to do it, but I kept my eyes off those things. I was Iookin’ at the margins of the bathin’ suit. There’s kind of a hem around the top, sort of a thing that keeps the rubber from startin’ to tear, an’ if you’d noticed right smart, you’d have seen there was some figures written on that hem, up in the back of the hoot-nanny that goes around the...”
“The shoulder straps,” Milred said to her husband.
“Go ahead,” Duryea said.
“Well, those figgers looked like stock numbers to me, an’ I wondered if anyone’d sell a bathing suit with stock numbers written on it that wouldn’t come off. You wouldn’t think that’d be good sales policy because a person who buys a smart suit like that...”
“Go ahead,” Duryea said.
“So I went uptown. Sure enough, there was some of these same suits in the biggest department store. They’re a branch of a Los Angeles outfit, you know, an’ they said these suits had only been in about a week. I asked them if a woman had been in recently and bought one, an’ the woman in charge of the bathin’ suit department said she’d sold one that afternoon. The description fit that Harpler girl. Well, I didn’t say too much, but I bought myself a bathin’ suit that would fit me, then I decided I’d go down on the beach an’ try it out in salt water, just to see what would happen from one swim. You remember when Ted Shale saw that girl on the boat, she’d been swimming, an’ right afterwards she jumped in the water an’...”
“Yes, yes,” Duryea interrupted. “What happened? What happened to the figures on the margin?”
“I’ll be gol-darned if I know,” Gramps said indignantly. “Somebody stole my clothes, and while I was wanderin’ around lookin’ for them, everybody started givin’ me the merry ha-ha. Then a cop came up an’ took me to jail. I ain’t had a chance to get the damn thing off to take a look at it. The figures are on the back.”
Milred beamed across at her husband. “Home, James.” she said, “and don’t spare the horses. Drive right through the main part of town.”
Duryea slammed the car into speed.
“Us Wigginses always come through in a pinch,” Milred stated.
Duryea swung through the residential district at high speed, slid his car to a stop in front of his house. “Come on, Gramps,” he said, bundling the spare figure in the blanket and rushing him across the curb to the house.
The maid, hearing the sound of Duryea’s latchkey in the door, came bustling forward, only to stop in horrified amazement at the sight that greeted her eyes. The district attorney, standing in the hallway, stripped the blanket from Gramps’ bony shoulders. Gramps turned around, twisted his head, trying in vain to see down between his own shoulder blades. Duryea said, “Hold still... Here... My gosh, you’re right, Gramps! The figures were here, weren’t they?”
“Uh huh.”
“They’ve all run together now — just a little blur of ink. That’s an ink which dissolves in water, and...”
“There you are,” Gramps said triumphantly to Milred. “I knew that girl was concealin’ somethin’. She didn’t want Frank to make a close examination of that suit, an’ that was why she was puttin’ on that snooty act.”
Milred said, “But why, Gramps? Why’s the bathing suit so important?”