“Of course. Well, you’d better tell that to the spirits.”
“Don’t know any. Where are they?”
“Never mind.”
“McDonald — he’s made a slip-up, that’s all. He got them prints doped wrong.”
“McDonald never gets anything wrong!” And T. Ashley thumped the desk again. “The modern science of fingerprinting never makes a mistake. Out of all the millions of prints in the world, there are no —”
“Oh, yes, I know all about that. I’m hep. You don’t have to flash no lecture on fingerprints on me! All I’m sayin’ is that if Mac ‘made’ them prints as a guy’s that croaked six months ago, either he’s made a misplay or you’re wrong.”
“Wrong about what?”
“About this here Dutch Pete bein’ dead.”
T. Ashley jerked open a drawer of his desk, took out a letter, shoved it at Scanlon.
“How about that?” demanded he.
Scanlon glanced at the signature. “From Warden Hotchkiss, eh?” said he. “Prestonville pen?”
“Yes. If you want proof —”
“‘Murder, first degree — ’” read Scanlon. “‘Electrocuted, February 17th, 1922.’ Well, that’s official, all O.K.”
“Rather!”
“So then there’s only one answer.”
“You mean,” demanded T. Ashley, “two men had the same name?”
“Looks like it.”
“Nothing of the kind happened in this case. When I got that word from Hotchkiss, I made another set of microphotographs and sent them to him. He wasn’t long in reporting. I just today got this letter from him.”
“What’s he say?”
“Read it for yourself!” And T. Ashley handed over another letter. Amazed, Scanlon read:
*
The prints submitted have been carefully verified by comparison with our records. They are those of the man you refer to, viz.: Peter W. Blau.
*
For a moment Scanlon paused, his brow knit. A dry smile curved the lips of T. Ashley.
“Ye gods, I — I don’t get this at all!” admitted Scanlon, beginning to weaken.
“Oh, I see you’re waking up to the situation, at last,” declared T. Ashley. “You understand, don’t you, that this report absolutely eliminates the double-identity hypothesis?”
“Sure, sure. Well, then, the only flash I can take at it is that some fresh guy — but, no, that couldn’t be!”
“You mean, somebody may have given you some prints of this Dutch Pete’s, made before his execution?”
“Nobody could of,” insisted Scanlon, his mind a daze. “Why, I picked up them pieces of glass myself at the boss’s house!”
“Well, then,” concluded T. Ashley, “those pieces were ‘planted’ there by somebody, for some purpose that, frankly, is beyond me.”
“Not a-tall! Some o’ them prints was on pieces o’ glass that still stuck in the window sash. I put on a pair o’ gloves, careful, an’ worked ’em loose, myself. Wrapped ’em up, never touchin’ ’em with my own bare fingers, and brought ’em to you, without ever openin’ ’em.”
“Then that package was changed somewhere on the way.”
Scanlon laughed, with tense nerves. “You’re pretty good now an’ then, Ashley,” said he, “but once in a while you don’t even hit the outside ring. That there package never left my pocket from the time I shoved it in there till I laid it on this here desk!”
“I tell you there must have been some substitution, somewhere along the line.”
“And I tell you there wasn’t! Say, I even remember the shape of some o’ them pieces. I’ll go on any stand in this country an’ swear I give you the very identical pieces I started with.”
“But in that case —”
“Well, what?”
“Hang it, Scanlon, we’re confronted by an insoluble mystery! A set of circumstances contrary to reason — a staring impossibility!”
“Impossibilities has always been your specialty,” uttered Scanlon, not without malice. “At least, anybody’d think so, the way you count yourself in on the Get There Club. D’you mean to say you’re ready to quit?”
“Quit?” demanded T. Ashley. “I haven’t begun yet!”
IV.
T. ASHLEY HAD NO success whatever with his investigation. No train of reasoning could lead him beyond what seemed a blank wall barring the path of deduction. Putting aside the supernatural as a factor in which he had no faith, he found himself confronted by a sphinx to whose question there was no Oedipus to bring an answer.
A visit to Hanrahan’s house and an examination of the safe itself yielded nothing but more prints, all made by the man who six months before had paid the extreme penalty of the law in Prestonville penitentiary.
“Well, I’m hanged!” exclaimed T. Ashley to himself, and when he, always loath to give up, had been forced to such a statement, matters had reached a desperate pitch.
They became more desperate still, however, when, ten days later, Scanlon returned to the laboratory office with this petrifying news: “Sam Levitsky’s apartment, out in Maplewold, has been touched to the tune of thirty-three thousand!”
“So?” demanded T. Ashley. “Well now, this is getting interesting, I must say!”
“Too interesting!” said Scanlon. “It’s another crack at the boss, you see.”
“Yes, yes, I suppose so. It’s practically the same as a direct attack on Hanrahan — for what belongs to the boss is the boss’s, and what belongs to Levitsky is the boss’s, too. At least, so runs popular rumor.”
“Cor-rect,” Scanlon agreed. “Though that’s just between you an’ I. All part of the same job, what? Prob’ly same guy?”
“I’ll have to look the ground over, before expressing any opinion as to that. But I should say it was all part of the original campaign. I’ll be liberal with you, for the sake of science, and consider this as part of the same case, at the same fee. The fact is,” added T. Ashley, “my professional interest is aroused. I’d like to know who has public spirit enough to direct an attack against Hanrahan & Co.”
“I judge you ain’t strong for the boss, yourself.”
“Not perceptibly — especially since he killed that appropriation for the orthopedic hospital, and —”
“Now look here,” interrupted Scanlon, “he had to do that. If he hadn’t, that silk-stockin’ gang of goo-goos would of —”
“I’m not arguing municipal politics with you,” disclaimed T. Ashley, raising his hand. “All I’m doing is expressing an opinion. That opinion won’t interfere with my professional duties. I propose that we take a run out to Maplewold and look over the ground. Were there any traces left — that is, traces visible to you?”
“No. Nothin’ broken this time. A slicker job than the other.”
“Practice makes perfect,” said T. Ashley, “even for a dead man.” He took his hat. “Well, let’s get along.”
“The quicker — an’ the quieter — the better!” Scanlon declared.
*****
At the scene of the second robbery, T. Ashley carefully examined the premises, while Levitsky poured out invective and Scanlon adjured him to hold his peace. Levitsky’s third-floor apartment was in “The Rosalind,” facing Grosvenor Park. Entrance had been effected through the dining-room window that gave upon a fire escape overlooking the alley. Nothing had been broken. The window catch had been pushed back with a slender blade, and the sash raised.
Fingerprints were plentiful on the combination of the wall safe, which had been closed again after the touch, but these prints impinged upon each other and were confused to such an extent that even though T. Ashley brought them up with developing powder and then studied them attentively under his best glass, he could make little of them.
“I’ve got to have something more definite than those,” said he, and instituted a painstaking search. After a few minutes, during which Scanlon and Levitsky partly drowned thei
r chagrin in certain strong waters, T. Ashley exclaimed, “Ah!”
“Got a lead, have you?” demanded Scanlon.
T. Ashley’s only answer was: “Have you got a keyhole saw, a hammer, and a chisel?”
“I can get ’em for you,” said Levitsky. “What’s de idea?”
“Get them, then.”
When they had been brought from janitorial regions, T. Ashley cut a section from the varnished window sill. This he wrapped in clean paper.
“That’s all I need,” said he. “Let’s get back to the office, now.”
Together, T. Ashley and Scanlon returned to town, leaving the Big Boss’s henchman under injunctions of strictest secrecy.
V.
“THIS IS POSITIVELY the most amazing thing I was ever confronted with!” exclaimed the investigator, after he had subjected the piece of window sill to exhaustive comparison with his microphotographs.
“What d’you mean, most amazin’ thing?” demanded Scanlon, chewing on an extinct cigar. He spoke a little thickly now, by reason of Levitsky’s good cheer.
“Our old friend, Blau — Dutch Pete — is back on the job again.”
“No!”
“Fact. Prints don’t lie.”
“You mean — that dead man’s prints are on that piece o’ sill?”
“That’s exactly what I mean!”
Silence followed. From below, on Albermarle Avenue, rose the confused but cheerful rumble of the city’s traffic, the hymn of life; but in the office something cold and numbing seemed to weigh and settle — the spirit of death that would not die.
All at once Scanlon, now completely sobered, exclaimed: “Le’ me have a look at them prints!”
“Oh, you wouldn’t know! All prints look alike to the untrained man. But to the expert every whorl, volute, and ridge is as distinctive under the glass as a human face — more so, because even the best man now and then is fooled by a chance resemblance. Even the Bertillon itself now and then goes wrong. But no two prints, from infancy to old age, are ever alike — and they never change. I have here,” T. Ashley added, tapping the piece of window sill with a metal probe, “excellent prints of the fore and middle fingers of the Levitsky burglar’s right hand.”
“And they’re the same as on the glass I took from the boss’s?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, I will be darned!”
“It looks as if we’d both be darned,” said T. Ashley cynically. “Your job and my reputation are both at stake, and — barring an admission that spiritualists and all that ilk are right — we seem to have come to the end of our tether.”
Again he applied his lens to a set of microphotographs of the prints left on the smooth-varnished Levitsky window sill, and fell to studying them intently. For a moment he made no sign, but all at once his attention tautened. He bent closer, adjusting the glass.
“H’m!”
“What’s up, now?” asked Scanlon, forgetting even to chew on the extinct cigar.
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Well, le’ me look, anyhow. I guess the boss is payin’ enough for this job, so I’m entitled to at least a flash!”
“By all means,” admitted T. Ashley, giving place to Scanlon.
“Some map!” commented Scanlon. “Looks like a plan o’ Boston, or some place. Who’d ever think a man ever had all them lines on the ends o’ his fingers?”
“Nobody, except an intelligent person,” replied the investigator with caustic emphasis. “And by the way, you know, apes have just the same kind of lines, too, thus proving our relationship with our backward cousins.”
“Can the deep stuff!” said Scanlon. “All I’m interested in, now, is these here lines belongin’ to Dutch Pete. So a dead man made them prints, did he?”
“He did, unless the whole modern science of fingerprinting is fallible.”
“Come again?”
“I mean, unless it can make mistakes, which it never has been known to do, yet. That’s its whole value, its absolute accuracy. And what it says, now, is that the prints left in both robberies were produced by a man who went to the electric chair — and was killed there — the seventeenth of last February.”
“Well, I am hanged!”
“So you’ve already said, and I think it quite likely. Seen enough, have you?”
“Yep.” And Scanlon left the instrument. “Looks like we was up against the cushion, hard, an’ no way to bounce.”
T. Ashley rubbed his chin, saying nothing. His thoughts, however, were: “There’s no such thing as an inexplicable phenomenon. Facts leave traces, and traces can’t lie. At the bottom of every ‘hopeless’ problem there’s some simple, obvious explanation. So then, all I’ve got to do is —”
“Don’t strain yourself with thinkin’ too much,” Scanlon interrupted his cogitation with sarcasm. He reached for his hat. “When you figger it out how a dead one can blow back an’ go to work as a boxman, let me know.”
“I’ll let you know, all right. And meantime, warn your fat friend, Levitsky, to keep quiet.”
“No danger of his belchin’. He’ll be mum as the boss himself. But the quicker you get some goods to show, the better. The boss ain’t noted much for patience.”
“He may have to acquire one virtue, at least,” remarked T. Ashley. “Good-day!”
Alone, the investigator resumed his study through the lens. For a long time he sat there, examining the newly discovered factor which, at first glimpse, had caused him to give utterance to that “H’m!” of slight wonder.
After a while he got up, went to his bookcase, and brought back to his desk a heavy volume in French — Henri de Brissac’s Traité de la Peau, Humaine et Animale.
He spent an hour over this monumental work on human and animal skins, carefully examining the colored plates and here or there dipping into the text.
At last he put up the book, lighted a cigar, and locked his office door. From now on, till such time as pleased him, T. Ashley had become invisible, inaccessible.
He lay down on his broad couch in the laboratory office, smoked, studied the ceiling, pondered. At last, after two cigars had become lamentable butts, he reached for the phone, called Warden Hotchkiss at the Prestonville penitentiary, and by long distance made an appointment for next morning. “Dutch Pete,” said he to himself, after he had hung up the receiver again, “I rather think I’ll have to find out a little more about you!”
VI.
TWO DAYS LATER T. Ashley called on Doctor Holden K. Dillingham, at the doctor’s office in the Monadnock Building, on Franchot Street. The doctor, T. Ashley noted, was smallish, trim, shaven, going a bit bald, and possessed of keen blue eyes, a trifle prominent, also a chin that promised: “What I undertake, I do.”
“Well, sir?” asked Dillingham when he was alone with his caller — a new patient, doubtless, thought he.
“I believe you’re the physician who has been interested in getting the new orthopedic hospital for children started out in the Sheridan Boulevard district?” asked T. Ashley.
“Why, yes. In fact,” added the doctor, “I’m chairman of the organization board.”
“I might,” said T. Ashley, “have a contribution to make to that enterprise, under certain circumstances.”
“That’s good news,” said Dillingham. “We can certainly use a little help. This town’s in crying need of such an institution.”
“So I understand. Too bad the city wouldn’t meet the board’s proposition as stated some time ago in the papers.”
“You mean our offer to put up one hundred thousand dollars, if the city would contribute fifty thousand dollars, and make it a semi-public institution?”
“Exactly. But what else can anybody expect,” asked T. Ashley, “with men like Hanrahan and Levitsky pulling the puppet strings and working for their own pockets instead of the public welfare?”
“What else, indeed?”
“Men like that can always be counte
d on to block any forward-looking move. They’re not merely content with throwing sticks in the wheel of progress, but they rob the taxpayers right and left.”
“Correct,” agreed the doctor.
“By the way,” said T. Ashley, changing the subject, “what do you think of this?”
He drew from his inside coat pocket a sheet of paper and spread it on the doctor’s desk. Dillingham put on his glasses, looked at it a moment, and then, with the slightest suggestion of a frown, replied: “I don’t quite understand you. Are you asking for my opinion of this rather highly magnified fingerprint?”
T. Ashley bent forward, pointing with the tip of a pencil. “What do you make of that?” asked he.
“Of what?”
“This mark, here, a little to the left of the middle of the print.”
“It — well, it looks like a scar, to me.”
“Yes, so it does — superficially. Have you no other opinion, doctor?”
“I don’t understand you,” said Dillingham. “Are you here to talk hospital or fingerprints?”
“A little of both, maybe.”
“I mean, is this a professional or a nonprofessional call?”
“Oh, highly professional on both sides, I assure you!”
“You’re talking in riddles, I must say,” said the doctor. “Well, I’m used to riddles. I get lots of them in my practice. Every doctor does.”
“But few,” declared T. Ashley, “solve their riddles with the proverbial ‘neatness and dispatch’ that characterize you. Let us now return to the matter of this fingerprint. Would you say, doctor, that this mark — here, on the print — was made by a scar?”
“Looks like it,” said the doctor. His fingers began to drum a bit nervously on his chair arm, but quickly stopped.
“Ah, but look closer.”
“Well, then?”
“Study the print with a magnifying glass, if you have one handy.”
The doctor, seeming altogether mystified, opened a drawer of his desk, took out a glass, and examined the print.
“That mark certainly looks like a scar to me,” he declared.
“In a scar, however,” objected T. Ashley, “the edges would be smoothly healed. Here, you see, they are rough. And, moreover, there are several marks — in the scar itself — that look like tiny, wandering chains. Concatenated markings, to be technical.”
THE SUPREME GETAWAY AND OTHER TALES FROM THE PULPS Page 18
