THE SUPREME GETAWAY AND OTHER TALES FROM THE PULPS

by George Allan England

  “Well, what of it?” demanded Dillingham. He seemed a bit impatient.

  “As a physician, you know that scar tissue presents no such markings.”

  “True enough. But what in the world are you driving at, Mr. Ashley? This is all very puzzling, I must say.” The doctor frowned. “First you talk hos­pital, and speak of a donation. Then you catechize me about fingerprints, and now — well, what are you coming at, anyhow?”

  “At the obvious conclusion that this mark, here on this fingerprint, was not produced by a scar at all, but by another kind of skin altogether from human skin.”

  “I don’t seem to follow you,” said the doctor, laying down his magnifying glass.

  “To state it still more plainly,” ex­pounded T. Ashley, “when the original fingerprint was made, from which this microphotograph was taken, there was another piece of skin — a nonhuman skin — under the skin that made the print.”

  “Oh, a graft, perhaps?” said Dillingham, as if an idea had occurred to him.

  “No — though this whole matter is connected with one, to pardon a collo­quialism. There are no signs of growths, adhesions, or anything of that kind. In fact, both skins from which this print was made were dead skins.”

  “Dead?”

  “Quite so. And, as I have said be­fore, the smaller piece of skin was not human at all.”

  “But I don’t understand. If not hu­man, what then?”

  “The skin of an animal. To be more accurate, a dog.”

  VII.

  DOCTOR DILLINGHAM’S eyes fell. A slight moisture covered his forehead; but then, the day was very warm.

  “This is all quite beyond my compre­hension,” said he. “And, moreover, why are you telling me these details? What do you want of me?”

  “Ah, that,” said T. Ashley, “will de­velop later. For the moment, let me tell you a little story. A simple, unvarnished tale. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all. I’ll join you.”

  T. Ashley lighted a cigar; the doctor, a pipe. T. Ashley by no means failed to note the tremor of Doctor Dilling­ham’s hand as the match hung above the pipe bowl, but the doctor smiled and said: “A good story is always accept­able, though I must confess you’ve got me mystified. This is certainly an odd consultation.”

  “It’s an odd case,” declared T. Ash­ley. “The story is even more so — but a capital one. It begins with the elec­trocution of a notorious stickup man and murderer, Peter W. Blau, alias Dutch Pete, and so forth, last February, at Prestonville.”

  “Well?” asked the doctor, trying to look at T. Ashley.

  “Well, Dutch Pete’s body remained unclaimed, and was handed over for dissection to a certain medical school, which I won’t name. So much I know. From this point on I shall fill in, with deduc­tions, certain gaps which occur between the established facts. You see, I am quite frank with you. I’m showing you my whole box of tricks.”

  “This is certainly mystifying!” mur­mured the doctor.

  “Is it not? But vastly instructive. Let us, however, not go into side issues. Let us stick to the fate and fortunes of Dutch Pete, who in death has been des­tined to carry on his chosen profession in a most extraordinary manner, though perhaps to quite a different end than any he himself would have chosen.”

  “I’m sure,” said Dillingham, “this is all most incomprehensible.”

  “You’ll soon understand. A certain physician and surgeon connected with the above-unmentioned medical school got possession of Dutch Pete’s hands — possibly in connection with some re­search work regarding the character­istics of criminal types.”

  “Interesting!” commented the doctor, blowing much smoke.

  “Is it not?”

  “And what part of the story are you telling me now?” asked Dillingham. “Fact or inference?”

  “Inference. Deduction, I should say. You’ll soon see where the deduction hitches on to solid fact again. Now, it so happened that this same physician was a leading spirit in a proposed public improvement, the carrying out of which was blocked by a couple of sinister, predatory individuals. The doctor con­ceived the idea — very intelligent idea, indeed, and showing real imagination as well as a sense of poetic justice — of enlisting the help of a dead crook to beat a couple of live crooks.”

  “Just how could that be?” asked Dill­ingham.

  “Let me explain. This doctor must at some previous period of his career have had considerable mechanical ex­perience. He certainly knew much about the mechanism of safes. Also he realized that his profession was an ex­cellent shield. A doctor, you know, can go almost anywhere without exciting suspicion. He can carry tools in his medical bag. He can leave his car standing anywhere. In a good many ways he enjoys rather an unusual free­dom of movement, coming and going as he will, especially at night, without any one thinking ill of it. So far, so good.”

  “And what then?” asked Dillingham, relighting his pipe which had gone out.

  “This particular physician I have in mind,” continued T. Ashley, “chose di­rect action as his means of punishing the crooked and ­sinister forces in ques­tion, and also of forwarding the public im­provement in which he was inter­ested. You see I am speaking in non­specific terms. No names mentioned, of course. Being a cautious and very brainy man, he evolved the idea of cov­ering his tracks in a manner that seemed absolutely beyond the reach of analyti­cal rea­son.”

  “Nothing,” murmured Dillingham, “seems beyond the reach of such ana­lytical reason as you practice.”

  “Thank you. Never mind about that, however. You understand there are no personalities, on either side, in anything I’m telling you now.”

  “Certainly! Well, then?”

  “The physician so arranged matters that, unless he were really caught in the act, his safety seemed assured.”

  “How very prescient of him!” com­mented Dillingham, forcing a smile.

  “His idea,” resumed T. Ashley, “was something like Robin Hood’s — taking from thieves to give to the needy. Only he used modern science to help him, in­stead of a good crossbow and ­cloth­yard shafts. Unfortunately, however, he overlooked a trifling detail.”

  “A detail?”

  “Yes. He failed to notice a slight cut, or tear, in one finger of one of his gloves.”

  “What gloves?”

  “Gloves,” said T. Ashley, “unlike any others in the whole world. Gloves made of the skin of the fingers of the de­ceased Dutch Pete, dissected from the dead hands and drawn on over a pair of thin other gloves.”

  “How very extraordinary!” The doctor’s eyes blinked, narrowed.

  “Is it not?”

  “But how in the world could you ever manage to make up such a hypothetical narrative?”

  “The microscope helps to some ex­tent. That mark which shows in the print on your desk there is the mark of a cut or tear, as I have already told you. The fingerprint itself is that of Dutch Pete. The little bit of skin un­der the cut must have been dogskin. No other skin leaves just that kind of mark.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. The only answer is, double gloves. So it is all quite plain. And now,” T. Ashley added, while Dillingham’s face grew ever more and more drawn, “now I have a little proposition to make you.”

  “What — what proposition?”

  “I am willing to become a participant in crime with the owner of that amazing pair of gloves.”

  “You — you mean —”

  “In exchange for those gloves,” said T. Ashley slowly, leaning ­forward and looking square at Dillingham, “in ex­change for those gloves — which I will destroy, after having examined them — I will drop this whole investigation at once, and carry it no farther, now or at any future time.”

  “I — really, Mr. Ashley, I — don’t un­derstand you.”

  “Oh, yes you do! The thing done was legally criminal, but morally most praiseworthy. Hanrahan and Levitsky bilked you of fifty thousand. Your two ‘touches’ came t
o just that. They totaled exactly fifty. Another point I haven’t overlooked. If you’d taken an­other dollar, you’d have been a thief yourself. As it is, you’re a public bene­factor; you deserve medals! Especially as this morning’s paper carries that an­nouncement from you that the success of the orthopedic is at last assured. So —”

  “But I — I tell you —”

  “Come, come!” said T. Ashley, laying a hand on Dillingham’s arm. “Why not make a clean breast of it? Why not give me the gloves, in exchange for a Scotch verdict of ‘Not guilty but don’t do it again?’”

  Dillingham tried to moisten his lips with a dry tongue. He managed to ar­ticulate: “No man — voluntarily — runs his head into a noose.”

  T. Ashley laughed, and it was rare for him to laugh. “Tell you what I’ll do, to prove I’m on the level with you. Keep the gloves, if you want to. In fact, I rather think you’d better. There’s one su­premely good use you can make of them.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Show them to me, and then I’ll tell you.”

  The doctor hesitated a moment, smeared his sweating brow, then got up and walked to a filing cabinet at the other side of his office. T. Ashley no­ticed how his legs shook.

  “You’re making no mistake, my friend,” he assured the doctor, “to trust me. If there’s any man in this city who hates Hanrahan and Levitsky worse than you do, that man is myself.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” re­plied the doctor. He pulled out a drawer of the cabinet, reached far into the back of it, took something, and re­turned to the desk, exclaiming, “Here!”

  He thrust into T. Ashley’s hands a pair of thin dogskin gloves, the fingers of which were covered with human skin.

  “Here,” he repeated. “You win!”

  “We both win,” corrected T. Ashley, with keen interest examining the gloves. “You win immunity, and I win another triumph for my deductive methods — though it must be a secret one. But, after all, you see how very simple it all is, when one knows the method? Here, take them back.” He tossed the gloves onto the desk. “My offer still stands. I happen to have a thousand dollars soon payable to me, for which I have no personal use. Will you accept that thou­sand, for the orthopedic?”

  “Will I? Good God!”

  “Also my suggestion as to disposing of these gloves?”

  “What — what’s that?”

  “Wrap and seal them, and include them among the articles to be deposited in the metal box that goes into the cor­ner stone of the hospital. For they are its corner stone!”

  A moment the doctor stared at him. Then his hand hesitated toward that of the investigator.

  T. Ashley shook hands with him warmly. “Agreed, then?”

  But Dillingham, choking, could find no word.

  VIII.

  Next afternoon T. Ashley called Scanlon by phone. “It’s about that mat­ter, you know,” said he.

  “Oh, you got it doped out, have you?” Scanlon queried.

  “I am very sorry to say I haven’t. In fact, I have been obliged to drop the affair.”

  “The devil!”

  “Just what I said, when I discovered that my charwoman had done a little cleaning up. The fact is, Scanlon, all the evidence in the case has disap­peared.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe nothin’ like that!”

  “I expect — and require — you to be­lieve anything I choose to tell you!” T. Ashley’s voice was decisive. “I repeat that the case is closed. You can give your employers the explanation I have just given you. Between you and me, however, I don’t mind telling you it will be very much better for all parties con­cerned if things stop right where they are. I could go further — but decline. An interesting case, but circumstances have altered —”

  “Oh, that’s the way it rides, eh? Well now, by —”

  “Yes, that’s the way, Good-by!” T. Ashley hung up the receiver and smiled.

  “They’ll never dare refuse that thou­sand,” he pondered. “I know too much. And they’ll never dare try anybody else, even if they had any evidence left. I’ve got them frightened. It’s all worked out very well. Very, very well indeed.”

  He pondered a moment, then added: “Next to handing that thousand to Dillingham, I rather think I’ll enjoy the laying of that orthopedic corner stone!”

  Then T. Ashley lighted still another cigar, and as the smoke ascended, smiled wisely to himself.