“Oh. Thank you.” She vanished again.
The police arrived in five minutes or so. An excited elder man with many stripes on his arms strode up to them excitedly as they stood among the shredded ruins of the dresses. “Where’d they go?” he demanded. “Didja see what they looked like?”
“We’re them. We three. We tore these dresses up. You’d better take them along for evidence.”
“Oh,” the cop said. “Okay. Go on into the wagon. And no funny business, hear me?”
They offered no funny business. In the wagon Ross expounded on his theme that there must be directing intelligences and that they must be at the top. Helena was horribly depressed because she had never been arrested before and Bernie was almost jaunty. Something about him suggested that he felt at home in a patrol wagon.
It stopped and the elderly stripe-wearer opened the door for them. Ross looked on the busy street for anything resembling a station house and found none.
The cop said, “Okay, you people. Get going. An’ let’s don’t have no trouble or I’ll run you in.”
Ross yelled in outrage, “This is a frame-up! You have no right to turn us loose. We demand to be arrested and tried!”
“Wise guy,” sneered the cop, climbed into the wagon and drove off.
They stood forlornly as the crowd eddied and swirled around them. “There was a plate of sandwiches at that party,” Helena recalled wistfully. “And a ladies’ room.” She began to cry. “If only you hadn’t acted so darn superior, Ross! I’ll bet they would have let us have all the sandwiches we wanted.”