everything.” “What is an ‘inside job’?” asked Creede. “It sounds familiar. But—” “An inside job is a job the police can’t find a clue to,” explained Chase. “So they leave the rest of the work to the detectives. That’s the climax. When a policeman blows out his brains[94] and survives, they make a detective of him. Why, Thax, don’t you remember when the Conant house was robbed and the—” [94] “Yes,” answered Vail, grinning at the memory. “I remember. That was the time Chief Quimby’s box of safety matches got afire in his hip pocket while he was on his hands and knees looking for clues. And you tried to extinguish the blaze by kicking him. I remember he wanted to jail you for ‘kicking an officer in pursuit of his duty.’ You said his hip pocket wasn’t ‘out yet but seemed to be under control.’” While they had been talking, Miss Gregg and Doris had come quietly into the room. Both were a trifle paler than usual, but otherwise were unruffled. A moment later Mosely returned from his telephone colloquy with the police. “The chief says he’ll be right over,” he reported. “He asked if any other rooms had been robbed. And I felt like a fool, to have to tell him we hadn’t even looked.” “If you had waited a minute longer, before leaving the telephone,” spoke up Miss Gregg, “you could have told him that at least one more room had been ransacked. My niece and I stopped in our suite, on the way down, just now.[95] Her little jewel case and the chamois bag I kept my rings and things in—both of them are gone.” [95] “Miss Gregg!” exclaimed Vail. “Not really? Oh, I’m so sorry! So—” A babel of other sympathetic voices drowned his stammered condolences. Out of the babel emerged Willis Chase’s query. “Were they locked up?” “Yes, and no,” returned Miss Gregg. “We locked them in the second drawer of the dresser and hid the key. But being only normal women and not Sherlockettes, of course we quite overlooked locking the top drawer. The top drawer has been carefully taken out and laid on the bed. And the case and the chamois bag have been painlessly extracted from the second drawer. It was so simple! I quite envy the brain of that thief. It is a lesson worth the price of the things he took—if only they had
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