“This robbery was pulled off by two heavy-set men of dark complexion. They made a fruitless attempt to locate the balance of the money by going to an office in the basement. Had a squad call gone through they might have been caught. The cutting of those wires saved them.”
“The man with the hole in his hand and old Mask Face are their men!” Johnny exclaimed impetuously.
“Not so fast.” The sergeant held up a hand. “There was another case. A fur store was robbed. More than ten thousand dollars in furs is gone. They jimmied the back door and hauled the stuff off in a truck.
“A watchman in the building adjoining saw them working. Suspecting something crooked, he called the police station. Had a squad call gone through, these men, too, would have been caught. They were not.
“There you have it!” He leaned back in his chair. “What do you say? Does our friend Hole-in-His-Hand belong to the holdup gang, or the fur store robbers?”
“Well,” said Drew thoughtfully, “you’ve got to go back to that other night when the radio station was wrecked and Johnny was beaten up. There were three cases that night, weren’t there?”
“Three. A robbery by two boys in an empty apartment, a stickup of a theatre and the dynamiting of a safe.
“I think,” the sergeant went on, “that we may drop the two boy robbers. They don’t seem to fit into the picture. But how about the others?”
“They go in pairs,” Drew spoke again. “Two theatre stickups go together. Men who dynamite safes are likely to rob a fur store. Those go together. Two and two.”
“Sounds like sense.” The sergeant pinned two cards together. “We’ll play ’em that way. But after all, the question is, where do the radio station wreckers belong?”