“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 Wagoner. 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 Wagoner, 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 Wagoner, who stood beside Garren staring sullenly at the floor.
“Know him, McBirney?”
“Yeah, Mr. Wagoner’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 Wagoner’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 jewelry 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 Wagoner, 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.
“Can you add anything to the occasion?” I asked her.
She smiled very sweetly at me and shook her head.
“All right, bum,” I said. “You’re pinched. Let’s go.”
Then it seemed she could add something to the occasion. She had something to say, quite a few things to say, and they were all about me. They weren’t nice things. In anger her voice was shrill, and just now she was madder than you’d think anybody could get on short notice. I was sorry for that. This job had run along peacefully and gently so far, hadn’t been marred by any rough stuff, had been almost ladylike in every particular; and I had hoped it would go that way to the end. But the more she screamed at me the nastier she got. She didn’t have any words I hadn’t heard before, but she fitted them together in combinations that were new to me. I stood as much of it as I could.
Then I knocked her over with a punch in the mouth.
“Here! Here!” Bill Garren yelled, grabbing my arm.
“Save your strength, Bill,” I advised him, shaking his hand off and going over to yank the Eveleth person up from the floor. “Your gallantry does you credit, but I think you’ll find Blanche’s real name is Mike, Alec, or Rufus.”
I hauled her (or him, whichever you like) to his or her feet and asked it: “Feel like telling us about it?”
For answer I got a snarl.
“All right,” I said to the others, “in the absence of authoritative information I’ll give you my dope. If Blanche Eveleth could have been the robber except for the beard and the difficulty of a woman passing for a man, why couldn’t the robber have been Blanche Eveleth before and after the robbery by using a — what do you call it? — strong depilatory on his face, and a wig? It’s hard for a woman to masquerade as a man, but there are lots of men who can get away with the feminine role. Couldn’t this bird, after renting his apartment as Blanche Eveleth and getting everything lined up, have stayed in his apartment for a couple of days letting his beard grow? Come down and knock the job over? Beat it upstairs, get the hair off his face, and get into his female rig in, say, fifteen minutes? My guess is that he could. And he had fifteen minutes. I don’t know about the smashed nose. Maybe he stumbled going up the stairs and had to twist his plans to account for it — or maybe he smacked himself intentionally.”