“His ears were pink,” explained Jamison, his tone indicating the ultimate of boredom. “His ears were nice and pink. That gave him away.”
Craig was huddled in a chair in the police-station. The big policeman stood guard beside him and the desk-sergeant listened sympathetically to Jamison’s tale of woe.
“My Gawd,” said Jamison disgustedly. “I haven’t seen a really neat job in so long you’d think everybody with brains had turned honest. Look at him, now. He passed through here once a month for six months or so, carrying stuff from New Orleans to New York and back. He was a regular at the hotel, and the clerk always gave him the same room, and he saw it had one o’ these cheap made-by-the-million bureaus in it. And he set to work from that!”
He flung away his perpetual cigarette and grunted.
“He took some measurements of the inside, an’ got a piece of veneer to fit the bottom of one of the drawers. Then, today, he climbed off the train, went to the hotel, took his bonds and laid ’em, neat, in the drawer, trimmed up his veneer to fit exactly, and glued it down on top of ’em. To look at it, it was a perfectly empty drawer, and nobody looks for secret compartments in hotel furniture, particularly of the made-by-the-million kind. He wandered downstairs, ate his dinner while the glue dried, smoked a cigar, and went back up to his room and yelled bloody murder. He thought he’d get away with the story that his room had been robbed while he was out!”
The desk-sergeant shook his head sympathetically.
“Tst! Tst!...” he said commiseratingly.
“He had a good make-up on” commented Jamison morosely. “He looked like the wrath o’ Gawd, and he played his part pretty well, but he overdid it, of course. Showed me a notebook to check up his movements by—and he’d made an entry in it while there was a bit of glue on his finger. The smudge told a lot, since I’d already made up my mind he was tryin’ to steal from himself. Say”—he addressed the prisoner—“were you thinkin’ maybe your firm would prosecute you for the theft and be unable to get a conviction for lack of evidence?”
The prisoner seemed to shrink a little farther into himself, but did not reply.
“That was it,” said Jamison gloomily. “Once he’d been tried, you know, they couldn’t have done a thing no matter how much proof they got that he had recovered and was selling the bonds later.”