The man submitted to our search, his face expressionless until Mr. Barnable exclaimed, “But the stones? Where are my stones?”
Brennan sneered nastily. “I hope you hold your breath till you find ’em,” he said.
“Mr. Strong, will you kindly search the two men you have handcuffed together?” I requested.
He did so, finding, as I expected, nothing of importance on their persons.
“Thank you, Mr. Strong,” I said, crossing to the corner in which Mrs. Dolan was standing. “Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?”
Mrs. Dolan’s humorous brown eyes went blank.
“Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?” I repeated, extending a hand toward it.
She made a little smothered laughing sound in her throat, and handed me the bag, which I carried to a flat-topped showcase on the other side of the room. The bag’s contents were the celery and lettuce I have already mentioned, a package of sliced bacon, a box of soap chips, and a paper sack of spinach, among the green leaves of which glowed, when I emptied them out on the showcase, the hard crystal facets of unset diamonds. Less conspicuous among the leaves were some banknotes.
Mrs. Dolan was, I have said, a woman who impressed me as being capable, and that adjective seemed especially apt now: she behaved herself, I must say, in the manner of one who would be capable of anything. Fortunately, Detective Strong had followed her across the store; he was now in a position to seize her arms from behind, and thus incapacitate her, except vocally — a remaining freedom of which she availed herself to the utmost, indulging in a stream of vituperation which it is by no means necessary for me to repeat.
It was a few minutes past two o’clock when I returned to our offices.
“Well, what?” Papa ceased dictating his mail to Miss Queenan to challenge me. “I’ve been waiting for you to phone!”
“It was not necessary,” I said, not without some satisfaction. “The operation has been successfully concluded.”
“Cleaned up?”
“Yes, sir. The thieves, three men and a woman, are in the city prison, and the stolen property has been completely recovered. In the detective bureau we were able to identify two of the men, ‘Reader’ Keely, who seems to have been the principal, and a Harry McMeehan, who seems to be well-known to the police in the East. The other man and the woman, who gave their names as George Glenn and Mrs. Mary Dolan, will doubtless be identified later.”
Papa bit the end off a cigar and blew the end across the office.
“What do you think of our little sleuth, Florence?” he fairly beamed on her, for all the world as if I were a child of three who had done something precocious.
“Spiffy!” Miss Queenan replied. “I think we’ll do something with the lad yet.”
“Sit down, Robin, and tell us about it,” Papa invited. “The mail can wait.”
“The woman secured a position as manager of a small apartment house on Ellis Street,” I explained, though without sitting down. “She used that as reference to open an account with Barnable, buying a watch, for which she paid in small weekly installments. Keely, whose teeth were no doubt drawn while he was serving his last sentence in Walla Walla, removed his false teeth, painted a scar on his cheek, put on an ill-fitting cap, and, threatening Barnable and his assistant with a pistol, took the unset stones and money that were in the safe.
“As he left the store he collided with Mrs. Dolan, dropping the plunder into a bag of spinach which, with other groceries, was in her shopping-bag. McMeehan, pretending to come to the woman’s assistance, handed Keely a hat and coat, and perhaps his false teeth and a handkerchief with which to wipe off the scar, and took Keely’s pistol.
“Keely, now scarless, and with his appearance altered by teeth and hat, hurried to a barber shop two doors away, while McMeehan, after firing a shot indoors to discourage curiosity on the part of Barnable, dropped the pistol beside the cap and pretended to chase the bandit up toward Powell Street. At Powell Street another accomplice was stationed to pretend he had seen the bandit drive away in an automobile. These three confederates attempted to mislead us further by adding fictitious details to Barnable’s description of the robber.”
“Neat!” Papa’s appreciation was, I need hardly point out, purely academic — a professional interest in the cunning the thieves had shown and not in any way an approval of their dishonest plan as a whole. “How’d you knock it off?”
“That man on the corner couldn’t have seen the scar unless the bandit had turned his head, which the man denied. McMeehan wore gloves to avoid leaving prints on the pistol when he fired it, and his hands are quite sunburned, as if he does not ordinarily wear gloves. Both men and the woman told stories that fitted together in every detail, which, as you know, would be little less than a miracle in the case of honest witnesses. But since I knew Glenn, the man on the corner, had prevaricated, it was obvious that if the others’ stories agreed with his, then they too were deviating from the truth.”
I thought it best not to mention to Papa that immediately prior to going to Barnable’s, and perhaps subconsciously during my investigation, my mind had been occupied with finding another couplet to replace the one the editor of The Jongleur had disliked; incongruity, therefore, being uppermost in my brain, Mrs. Dolan’s shopping-bag had seemed a quite plausible hiding place for the diamonds and money.
“Good shooting!” Papa was saying. “Pull it by yourself?”
“I cooperated with Detectives Hooley and Strong. I am sure the subterfuge was as obvious to them as to me.”
But even as I spoke a doubt arose in my mind. There was, it seemed to me, a possibility, however slight, that the police detectives had not seen the solution as clearly as I had. At the time I had assumed that Sergeant Hooley was attempting to conceal his knowledge from me; but now, viewing the situation in retrospect, I suspected that what the sergeant had been concealing was his lack of knowledge.
However, that was not important. What was important was that, in the image of jewels among vegetables, I had found a figure of incongruity for my sonnet.
Excusing myself, I left Papa’s office for my own, where, with rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and carbon copy on my desk again, I lost myself in the business of clothing my new simile with suitable words, thankful indeed that the sonnet had been written in the Shakespearean rather than the Italian form, so that a change in the rhyme of the last two lines would not necessitate similar alterations in other lines.
Time passed, and then I was leaning back in my chair, experiencing that unique satisfaction that Papa felt when he had apprehended some especially elusive criminal. I could not help smiling when I reread my new concluding couplet.
That, I fancied, would satisfy the editor of The Jongleur.
The Advertising Man Writes a Love Letter
Judge, February 26, 1927
Dear Maggie:
I LOVE YOU!
What is love? It is all in all, said Rossetti; it is the salt of life, said Sheffield; it is more than riches, said Lucas; it is like the measles, said Jerome. Send for leaflet telling what these and other great men of all times have said about love! It is FREE!
WILL YOU MARRY ME?
Will you be the grandmother of my grandchildren? Or will you, as thousands of others have done, put it off until too late — until you are doomed to the penalty of a lonely old age? Do not delay. Grandchildren are permanent investments in companionship!