This would allow friends to send someone posing as her brother to give her a vial of poison. These elaborate plans come to naught, however. Givney, after learning King's story, feels he has the upper hand and balks at opening the safe. Givney, however, did not overhear the conversation with Steenburg and suspects that it is a trick. Meanwhile, the hour of Cobb's execution is drawing closer.
King calls up a late-news service of the newspaper.
Penton, a journalist fired by the morning newspaper, broke into the Minneapolis Telephone Exchange and tapped into an experimental service that allows authorities to call and address every phone in the Minneapolis area simultaneously in time of emergency. Penton used this service to call every man in Minneapolis and tell them that they would be named as Jemimah Cobb's husband in the next issue of the Morning Bugle. This was the anonymous phone call that King received earlier. Mulkovitch was actually a circus bearded lady, Theodosia Brianza, twin of Cobb's French prostitute Theodora. Anxious to see her sister, Theodosia got a passport under a man's name so that she could travel without having to shave her beard.