I don’t know whether Jacob Coplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head—naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the color and texture of Manila paper—propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.
Besides he and I in the room that first time, there were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart little Jewess of the popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blonde girl in apron and cap.
I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.
“I want a list of the stuff you lost,” I told Coplin; “but first—”
“Stuff?” Coplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed of the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling: “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff !”
Mrs. Coplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.
“Now, Jakie, don’d ged excited,” she soothed him.
Phylis Coplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked one of them at me.