The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues

by Ellen Raskin

  “I see you’ve begun the Cookie Panzpresser portrait, Mr. Fetlock,” Dickory said to his crooked back.

  The bent man straightened. “How did you know it was me?”

  “The tremor in your right hand.”

  Garson banged his cane against the wall and stormed up the stairs as best he could in the uneven boots.

  It was no longer just a game. What was it then, she wondered as she slowly climbed the stairs. Why was Garson testing disguises?

  Again the doorbell rang.

  “Hello, Chief Quinn,” Dickory announced loudly toward the crack in Mallomar’s door.

  “Hello, Hickory. Garson in?”

  “Come on up, Chief,” Garson called. Disguise discarded, he looked like the portrait painter again, except for his bare feet. He had not had time to find his loafers. “Did you find the horrible hairdresser?”

  “Sure did,” Quinn replied cheerfully, sitting on the desktop next to the telephone. “Frances was ensconced in the premises of her new beauty parlor.”

  “Her?”

  “All right, I thank you and pat you on the back. The hairdresser is a woman with a mole on her left cheek. The only place you went wrong is her last name: Ocher.”

  “Ocher is a color,” Dickory insisted.

  “An earth color,” Garson said. “Tell me, did the widows get their money back?”

  “Not yet, but they’re happy with the arrangement. Frances Ocher bought a beauty shop with their money, so the widows settled for a percentage of the profits and free hair sets in perpetuity. Of course, the formula will be destroyed.” The chief sighed. “Victims of their own vanity.” He shook his head philosophically and removed the cigar for his next serious pronouncement. “Vanity, greed, jealousy, hatred—eliminate them and you eliminate three-quarters of all offenses. Vanity. Greed. Jealousy. Hatred. The four horsemen of modern crime.”

  A phone call interrupted the Quinn theory of the criminal mind. “Yeah, he’s here,” the chief mumbled angrily, cigar back in his mouth. Dickory thought she heard the caller whine something about one entrance and Jim. Quinn’s cigar danced crazily. “Okay, come on back; but you lose him once more and you’ll be directing traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel.” He slammed the receiver, eased himself into the wing chair, and stared at Dickory. The smile returned to his ruddy face.

  “Hickory Dickory Dock,

  The mouse ran up the clock,

  The clock struck three,

  The mouse did flee,

  Hickory Dickory Dock.”

  Dickory turned away.

  “Come on, Hickory Dickory Dock, don’t be sore,” Quinn said. “Not everyone can make people happy just by telling them their name.”

  Dickory Dock was a name for a tap-dancing, curlyhaired tot, she thought. And it certainly did not make her happy.

  “After all, it’s not really a funny name.” Chief Quinn would not give up. “It’s not a funny name like Wyatt Earp. I always thought Wyatt Earp sounded more like a belch than a name. You’ve got to be tough with a name like that one.”

  Dickory thought of her tough brother Donald, who beat up anyone who dared quack at him.

  “Speaking of names,” Quinn said, “what do you make of this one: Eldon F. Zyzyskczuk?”

  Dickory shrugged. It was an unusual name, but not especially funny. “How do you spell it?”

  “Exactly the way it sounds.” The chief burst out laughing at his little joke.

  “You know what I think about that name?” Garson had returned wearing shoes. “I think there must be one, and only one, Eldon F. Zyzyskczuk.”

  “I knew you’d say that, Garson, but this time you are wrong. There happens to be not one, but two Eldon F. Zyzyskczuks. Two Eldon Feodor Zyzyskczuks,” the chief repeated. “One’s an importer, who lives at 734 West 84th Street; the other’s an exporter, who lives at 743 East 84th Street. A few years back the importer lost his wallet and sent away for a new Social Security card; now both Eldon F. Zyzyskczuks have the same Social Security number.” Quinn chuckled over the unhappy plight of the tax authorities, two banks, five department stores, and six credit-card companies, none of whom could collect on their mixed-up bills.

  “I hope you’re not asking me to paint a double portrait of the two Eldon F. Zyzyskczuks,” Garson said.

  “No, no, there’s no crime involved here. It’s just one big, beautiful mess, and thank heavens the police are not involved.” Quinn rose and withdrew an envelope thick with money from his pocket. “But I would like your help on another case. The feds are in on this one, and I’d like to wrap it up before they do.” He handed a bill to Garson. “And here’s one for you, Hickory. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  Dickory studied the Lincoln Memorial on her bill. The color looked right; the paper felt right; the engraving looked right; but the police would not be passing real money around. She turned over the counterfeit bill and gasped at what she saw.

  A car horn honked twice.

  “Let me know what you make of that portrait, Garson. By telephone this time, if you please.” The chief headed for the door. “Oh, by the way, I call this one: The Case of the Face on the Five-Dollar Bill.”

  3

  “Has he gone?” Garson asked, examining the counterfeiter’s portrait on the five-dollar bill.

  Dickory checked the window. Quinn seemed to be warning the derelict, rather angrily, it seemed. His words were obviously wasted, for as soon as the chief’s car disappeared around the bend, the drunk returned to his stoop and went to sleep.

  Out came the hats. Inspector Noserag lit his pipe and leaned back in his chair. “A most intriguing case, Sergeant Kod, most intriguing. What is your learned opinion of my fellow-artist who usurped Lincoln’s oval?”

  Dickory tried to forget about the derelict and concentrate on the counterfeiter’s face on her counterfeit bill. “He must want to get caught.”

  “Not necessarily, Sargeant. Examine the face carefully and describe it to me.”

  There was little to describe. “Ordinary,” Dickory replied with a shrug.

  “Handsome?”

  “Maybe. In an ordinary sort of way.”

  “Precisely. My counterfeiter could pass these bills for a lifetime without being apprehended. Cashiers cannot examine each and every five-dollar bill that passes through their hands. By the time they discover that the bill is counterfeit, they cannot remember who passed it. And if some of them did remember, ‘Ordinary,’ they would say. And if they saw him again, would they recognize him? ‘I doubt it,’ they would say. ‘He looked just like anybody else. Ordinary.’ ”

  “But the counterfeiter’s face is right here,” Dickory argued. “Anyone can see exactly what he looks like.”

  “Remember, Sergeant Kod, this is a portrait, not a photograph. Would you recognize my lawyer in the flesh from the man in the portrait? I think not. We are dealing here with one of Quinn’s four horsemen: vanity.” Garson, aware of Inspector Noserag’s lapse in character, coughed and changed his British to Bogart. “Any guy who plasters his mug on a phony five-spot has got to be vain. Get the palette ready, kid. Inspector Noserag is going to paint from handsome to real.”

  “Your palette, Inspector.” Dickory placed a pen and a bottle of India ink on the taboret top and smirked.

  Eyebrows raised, Noserag looked from the “palette” to the black-and-white portrait on the engraved bill. “Quite right, Sergeant, I shall draw this likeness in pen and ink. But what is this? Can it be possible? Eureka!” The bill fluttered in his shaking hand. “Quick, Sergeant Kod, my glass.”

  Dickory hastened to the kitchen counter to pour him a drink.

  “Not a drinking glass, a glass!” the inspector shouted. “My magnifying lens. In the desk. Never mind, I’ll get it myself. Look at your bill, Sergeant. Does it also have a thumbprint on it—a red, smudged thumbprint?”

  It did.

  “Aha,” he exclaimed, examining both bills under the lens. “Unquestionably this is the thumbprint of my counterfeiter.”r />
  “How do you know it belongs to the counterfeiter?”

  “Elementary, my dear Kod. The exact print appears on two different bills. I dare say, the police would not leave their own thumbprints on the evidence, at least not red ones.”

  “Well, one thumbprint isn’t much help,” Dickory said. “The police need a complete set of fingerprints, and and even those can’t be traced unless they have a record of original prints for comparison.”

  “I was quite aware of that, Sergeant,” the inspector replied huffily.

  You were not, thought Sergeant Kod.

  Resuming his chair, Inspector Noserag puffed on his pipe and closed his eyes to show that he was thinking. The portrait painting postponed, Dickory took up her notebook and awaited the results of the great detective’s deliberations.

  At last he spoke. “The red smudged thumbprints tell us two things about my counterfeiter. One: he passed his bills face down, therefore he is cautious. Two: he is in working contact with some sort of red stain.”

  “Printer’s ink?” Dickory guessed.

  Noserag shook his head. “The bills are printed in black and green.”

  “He wasn’t printing the bills when he was passing them. Maybe he was working on another job.”

  “Good thinking, Sergeant, but my counterfeiter has been passing these bills for months. If he had ink on his thumbs, why was it always red ink, and why only his thumbs? No, I propound that this is a stain of another origin.”

  Dickory knew better than to suggest to the proud inspector that they ask the police crime lab for help. She studied the red stain more closely. It looked familiar. She had seen a similar stain somewhere else.

  “Pistachio nuts,” she announced. Her brother Donald ate pistachio nuts while watching baseball games on television. Blanche was always yelling at him for missing the refuse bowl. By the time the game was over, the carpet would be strewn with shells, and Donald’s thumbs would be red.

  “Pistachio nuts,” Noserag repeated, examining the thumbprints under his glass. “By gad, you’re right; we are dealing with a pistachio-nut addict. Congratulations, Sergeant Kod.”

  “Elementary, my dear Noserag, elementary.”

  “Hmmm.”

  For a few uncomfortable minutes Garson stared at Dickory through narrowed slits. She turned away wondering if he was angered by her mockery or whether his eyes were irritated by the pipe smoke.

  “Speaking of red, what happened to your nose?”

  Dickory looked at herself in the tall mirror. Her nose was red, all right. “I ran into a door.”

  “A fat door wearing a white suit, I would surmise,” he replied.

  Dickory spun around, wondering how he had guessed.

  “Rudimentary, my dear Kod, rudimentary.”

  The following afternoon Dickory discovered the reason for the large mirror in the artist’s studio. Rigid as a frozen pork chop, Cookie Panzpresser sat posed before the mirror, hypnotized by her reflected image as a lady about to pour tea. Garson stood before his easel, a paintbrush in his hand, an eye patch over one eye.

  “That will be all for today, Cookie,” he said, taking the Rose Medallion teacup from her hand and breaking the spell.

  A laughing, chattering Cookie came to life. “Oh, hello there, Dickory Dock, I didn’t hear you come in. Isn’t that clever, that eye patch? I never knew until Garson explained it to me that you need two eyes to see in three dimensions, and one eye for two dimensions. Garson is painting me with one eye in two dimensions, flat like Gauguin. Isn’t that right?”

  Garson did not respond. The nearly completed painting was highlighted and shadowed in three dimensions. It looked just like any other Garson portrait of a non-aging woman, the face smoothed of wrinkles, each hair in its shining place.

  “Garson can also paint in one dimension,” Dickory said, thinking of the hairdresser’s one-dot portrait.

  “Really? How clever. Well, I’ve got to get going or I’ll be late for some committee meeting or other, I forget which. So long, Garson. And toodle-oo Miss Longface with the Cheery Name.” Mrs. Panzpresser patted Dickory on the cheek and bounced out.

  “Don’t bother with that mess,” Garson said.

  Dickory was cleaning the cluttered taboret, capping tubes of Mars violet and vermilion—the colors of the drum majorette’s costume. Garson lifted his eye patch, revealing a blackened eye. He must have protested Mallomar’s nose-tweaking and run into the same fat, white door. “Thanks, Garson,” Dickory said gratefully.

  “Inspector Noserag to you,” he replied, donning the deerstalker. “Now, let us resume our deliberations on The Case of the Face on the Five-Dollar Bill.”

  Garson rolled the mirror from the Cookie Panzpresser painting to the Noserag easel. Reaching with difficulty into the pocket of his tight jeans, he extracted an authentic five-dollar bill and tacked it to one corner of the blank canvas next to its counterfeit. “Read me what you got so far, kid.” His voice was hard and tough, in keeping with his black eye.

  Dickory read: “Counterfeiter: Male, Caucasian.”

  “Not bad, Sergeant. I hadn’t thought of that. Go on.”

  “Ordinary features. Vain. Cautious. Addicted to pistachio nuts (red) .”

  Noserag dictated as he compared the five-dollar bills through his magnifying glass. “Professional engraver. Poor artist—no, change that to excellent draftsman. Here, Sergeant, look at the finely drawn lines on the borders. Not only are these lines not traced, but my man added some flourishes of his own.”

  “But the portrait is out of drawing,” Dickory commented.

  “You have a good eye, Sergeant. One of the features is most definitely not in proportion to the rest of the face; and that is our biggest clue yet.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Which is why I am an inspector and you are still a sergeant,” was the only explanation Garson had to offer. “And here’s another clue. Look at the lines on the jacket over the second n in Lincoln. Compare them with these lines on the bogus bill.”

  Dickory had to hold Garson’s hand to keep the magnifying glass from shaking. “The lines are angled in opposite directions,” she said.

  “Correct. Now, take the pen, dip it in the ink, and draw the lines as they appear on the real fiver, these lines here on Lincoln’s jacket.” Dickory stood before the blank canvas. Now her hand shook. “Go ahead, draw,” he insisted.

  Dickory drew three short, shy hatches slanting downward from left to right as they appeared on the authentic bill.

  “Having trouble?” Garson asked.

  “I’m not used to pen and ink.”

  Garson shook his head. “The trouble is that you are right-handed. A right-handed artist ordinarily hatches in the other direction, downward from right to left. Try copying the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci some day; you will have the same difficulty, for Leonardo was also left-handed.”

  “You mean the government artist, the one who drew these lines on the real money, was left-handed?” Dickory asked.

  “Not at all. Remember, this is a printed engraving, not a drawing. Look at your lines in the mirror; that’s how they were engraved. When the engraved plates are inked and printed, they appear in reverse on the paper —on the printed bill. Therefore, the government engraver was the one who is right-handed.”

  “Maybe the counterfeiter didn’t know that engravings print in reverse.”

  “My counterfeiter knew very well that a plate must be engraved in reverse,” Noserag said confidently, “otherwise the number 5’s would be backward.” Dickory understood. “The counterfeiter is left-handed.”

  “And the case is solved, Sergeant Kod. Solved!”

  “Is that you, Chief?” Inspector Noserag muttered into the telephone. “I got the real dope on the counterfeiter; all it takes is some leg work at your end.”

  “Who is this?” a baffled Quinn asked. “It sounds like a bad imitation of Humphrey Bogart.”

  Inspector Noserag cleared his throat and threw down h
is hat. “It’s me, Garson. Just wanted to see if you were on your toes. I thought you might want to hear an artist’s humble opinion of the face on the five-dollar bill.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “He is an engraver, a professional engraver; so I’d check out the engravers’ union, if I were you, and printing plants.”

  “Thanks a lot, Garson, we’ve already done that.”

  “Not with my description, you haven’t. Listen carefully, Quinn; show the portrait on the phony bill and say: ‘Imagine this man, perhaps older and with a bigger nose.’ Check out plastic surgeons, too. He’s a flashy dresser; he’s left-handed; and he has red thumbs with broken nails. He is a pistachio-nut freak.”

  “What?”

  “Pistachio nuts.”

  “Good-bye.” Quinn hung up abruptly.

  “Have you ever encountered a person whose face was out of drawing, Sergeant Kod?” The hats were on again. “Plastic surgery, usually. Sometimes an entire face has been redone, due to an accident or a fire; but mostly it is the result of a simple nose job. Consider, if you will, the nose in my counterfeiter’s self-portrait. That short, insignificant blob does not fit into the lines and planes of a face that had molded itself around a former nose of more interesting proportions. There is no doubt in my mind, whatever, that my vain counterfeiter has had his nose bobbed,” Inspector Noserag declared.

  “Maybe it was just wishful thinking.”

  “No. My vain engraver fudged the portrait to make himself younger, more handsome; but he was too competent an artist to give himself a nose like that. That blob is the work of a bungling plastic surgeon who gave no thought to the underlying facial structure.”

  Dickory studied the portrait and agreed, but there was still one clue she couldn’t fathom: flashy dresser.

  “Rudimentary, my dear Kod. Any man who wears a diamond stickpin in his necktie must be considered ostentatious, to say the least.”

  “I didn’t see any diamond stickpin.”

  “Neither did I, at first. What appeared to be an error in engraving, or a marred plate, was revealed as a diamond stickpin under my magnifying lens.”