Everyone looked at everyone else. No one spoke but the irrepressible Bubber. ‘Not tonight,’ murmured he, ‘nor las’ night, either.’
‘Very well, then. I shall have to ask you all to submit to what you may consider an indignity, but it’s quite necessary. And any who objects will have to be arrested on suspicion and for withholding of evidence, and will then have to submit anyhow. You will please come forward to this table in turn, one by one, beginning with Mrs Crouch on that end, and allow Officer Tynes to take your prints. These prints will not be held as police records unless you are arrested in connection with this case.’
‘Wait a minute.’ It was Dr Archer who spoke. ‘Better take mine first, hadn’t you? I’m a suspect, too.’
Dart agreed. ‘Right you are, doc. Go ahead.’
Tynes had prepared his flat slab meanwhile by touching to it a dab of thick special ink from a flexible tube, then rolling this to a thin smooth even film which covered the rectangular surface. Dr Archer submitted his hand. Tynes grasped the physician’s right thumb, laid its outer edge upon the inky surface, rolled it skillfully over with a light even pressure till its inner edge rested as had its outer, lifted it, and repeated the manoeuvre within a labelled space on a prepared paper blank. The result was a perfectly rolled thumb print.
‘I’m pretty sure it’s a thumb on the club,’ Tynes said, ‘but I’ll take the others, too, for safety.’
‘By all means,’ said the tall physician gravely. And in a few minutes Tynes had filled all ten of the spaces on the blank. Then he produced a small bottle of gasoline and a bit of cheese cloth. ‘That’ll take it off,’ he said. He looked at the prints. ‘Your left thumb’s blurred. Must have been dirty.’
‘Yes. It was, now that you mention it. Gummy furniture polish or something on the arm of that chair I was sitting in.’
‘Never mind, it’ll do. Next.’
‘Mrs Crouch—if you don’t mind,’ said Dart.
Martha Crouch stepped forward without hesitation. The others followed in turn. The dexterous Tynes required only a minute for each person: Mrs Snead, highly disgruntled, but silent save for an occasional disgusted grunt, Spider Webb, sullen, Easley Jones, grinning, Doty Hicks, trembling, and Jinx Jenkins scowling. Bubber’s turn came last. Jinx’s paper with his name across the head lay in plain view among those scattered out to dry on the table. Bubber cocked his head sidewise and peered at it as he submitted his digits to Tynes.
‘Listen, brother—ain’t you made a mistake?’ he asked.
‘How?’ said Tynes, working on.
‘Honest now, them ain’t Jinx’s finger prints, is they?’
‘Sure, they are.’
‘Go on, man. You done took the boy’s foot prints. Ain’ no fingers made look like that.’
‘They’re his, though.’
‘Tell me, mistuh, does apes have finger prints?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, listen. When you get time, see if them there don’t belong to a gorilla or sump’m. I’ve had my doubts about Jinx Jenkins for quite a long time.’
Tynes gathered the papers indiscriminately, so that they were not in any known order, faced them up in a neat pile, and procured a large hand-glass from his bag. He was the centre of attention—even the officers in the corners of the room drew unconsciously a bit nearer. The doctor insisted on his sitting in one of the two chairs, he and the detective both being now on their feet. Tynes complied, sitting at the end of the table toward the hall with his back to the door. The physician stood so that he could direct his flashlight from the side upon the objects of Tynes’ observations.
The latter now removed from the cigarette case one of the two photographs of the print which he had found on the club. This he kept in his left hand, the hand-glass in his right, and holding the original so that it was beside each labelled space in turn, methodically began to compare under the glass, the freshly made prints with the photograph.
Intently, silently, almost breathlessly, the onlookers stood watching the bent shoulders, the sleek black head, the expressionless tan face of Tynes. The whole room seemed to shift a little each time he passed from one comparison to the next, to hang suspended a moment, then shift with him again. So complete was the silence that the sound of a fire-siren on the Avenue a quarter-mile away came clearly into the room, and so absorbed was everyone in this important procedure that occasional odd sounds below were completely ignored.
It appeared that Tynes was making two separate piles, one of which, presumably, contained cases dismissed as out of the question, the other of which contained cases to be further studied and narrowed down. The long moments hung unrelaxed; the observers stared with the same fascinated expectancy that might have characterized their watching of a burning fuse, whose spark too slowly, too surely, approached some fatal explosive.
Yet Tynes’ work was proceeding very rapidly, facilitated by the fortunate accident that the original print belonged to one of the simpler categories. In an apparent eternity which was actually but a few minutes, he had reduced the final number to two papers. One of these he laid decisively aside after a short reinspection. The other he examined at one point long and carefully. He nodded his head affirmatively once or twice, drew a deep breath, put down his hand-glass, and straightened up. He handed the paper to Detective Perry Dart, standing behind the table.
‘This is it, Perry. Right thumb. Exactly like the photograph.’
Dart took the paper, held it up, looked at it, lowered it again. His bright black eyes swept the waiting circle, halted.
‘Jenkins,’ he said quietly, ‘you’re under arrest.’
CHAPTER XIV
‘YOU, Hicks,’ Dart continued, ‘will be held also on your own testimony, as a possible accessory. The rest of you be ready to be called at any time as witnesses. For the present, however—’
At this moment a newcomer pressed into the room, a large, bluff, red-faced man carrying a physician’s bag, and puffing with the exertion of having climbed the stairs.
‘Hello, Dart. Got you working, hey?’
‘Hello, Dr Winkler. How long’ve you been here?’
‘Long enough to examine your case.’
‘Really? I heard some noises downstairs, but I didn’t realize it was you. Shake hands with Dr Archer here. He was called in, pronounced the case, and notified us. And he’s a better detective than I am—missed his calling, I think.’
‘Howdy, doctor,’ said the florid medical examiner pleasantly. ‘This case puzzles me somewhat.’
‘I should think it would,’ said Dr Archer. ‘We have the advantage over you.’
‘Can’t figure out,’ went on Dr Winkler, ‘just what evidence of violence there was to make you call in the police. Couldn’t find any myself—looked pretty carefully, too.’
‘You mean you didn’t see a scalp wound over the right ear?’
‘Scalp wound? I should say I couldn’t. There isn’t any.’
‘No?’ Dr Archer turned to Dart. ‘Did you see that, Dart, or was it an optical illusion?’
‘I saw it,’ admitted Dart.
‘And unless I’m having hallucinations,’ the local physician went on, ‘it contained a fresh blood clot which I removed with a gauze dressing that now rests in my bag.’ He stooped deliberately, procured and displayed the soiled dressing, while the medical examiner looked first at him, then at Dart, as if he was not sure whether to doubt their sanity or his own. Dr Archer dropped the dressing back into his bag. ‘Then I probed it for a fracture,’ he concluded.
‘Well,’ said Winkler, ‘I don’t see how I could’ve missed anything like that. I went over her from head to foot, and if she wasn’t a cardiorenal I never saw one—’
‘You went—where?’
‘I went over her from head to foot—every inch—’
‘Her?’ burst from Dart.
‘Yes—her. She’s been dead for hours—’
‘Wait a minute. Doctor Winkler,’ said Dr Archer, ‘we aren’t discu
ssing the same subject. I’m talking about the victim of this crime, a man known as Frimbo.’
‘A man! Well, if that corpse downstairs is a man, somebody played an awful dirty trick on him.’
‘Stand fast, everybody!’ ordered Dart. ‘Tynes, take charge here till I get back. Come on, you medicos. Let’s get this thing straight.’
Out of the room and down the stairs they hurried, Archer, Dart, and Winkler. The door of Crouch’s front room was open, but the couch on which the dead man had been placed was in a position that could not be seen from the hall. So far did Dr Archer out-distance the others that by the time they got inside the room, he was already standing in the middle of the floor, staring dumbfoundedly at an unquestionably unoccupied couch.
‘The elusive corpse,’ he murmured, as the other two came up. ‘First a man, then a woman, then—a memory.’
‘He was on that couch!’ Dart said. ‘Where’s Day? The cop covering the front? Day! Come here!’
Officer Day, large, cheese-coloured, and bovine, loomed in the doorway. ‘Yas, suh.’
‘Day, where’s the body that was on this couch?’
‘Body? On that couch?’ Day’s face was blank as an egg.
‘Are you on duty down here—or are you in a trance?’
‘’Deed, I ain’ seen no body on that couch, chief. The only body down here is back yonder in the room where the telephone is. On a table under a sheet.’
‘He’s right there,’ said Winkler.
‘Day, don’t repeat this question, please: When did you first come into this room?’
‘When the medical examiner come. I took him in and showed him back yonder, but I didn’ stay to look—I come right back here to my post.’
‘When you first came here tonight, didn’t you see the corpse on this couch?’
‘No ’ndeed. I was the last one in. You and the doc went in there and left the rest of us here in the hall. I couldn’t see ’round the door. And when you come out, yo’ orders to me was “cover the front.” And I been coverin’ it.’ Officer Day was a little resentful of Detective Dart’s implied censure. ‘When the medical examiner got here I took him in. And they sho’ wasn’t no corpse on no couch then. Only corpse in here was back yonder, under the sheet. Natchelly I figured that was it.’
‘You would. Doc—’
But Dr Archer was already returning from a quick trip to the rear room. ‘It’s a woman all right,’ he said. ‘Frimbo is apparently A.W.O.L. Inconsiderate of him, isn’t it?’
‘Listen, Day,’ Dart said, refraining with difficulty from explosive language. ‘Has anyone come through this door since you came down here?’
‘No ’ndeed. Nobody but him.’ He pointed to Dr Winkler. ‘The undertaker started in, but when I told him what had happened he asked where y’all was, and I told him upstairs yonder, so he went straight up. Then, when he come down again, he went on out. Asked me to turn out the lights and slam this door when we was through, that’s all.’
‘All right, Day. That’s all. You keep on covering the front. Don’t let it get away from you. Doc, you and the M. E. wait here and keep your eyes open. I’ll tear this shack loose if necessary—nobody’s going to get away with a stunt like that.’
‘Wait a second,’ said Dr Archer. ‘How long has it been since we were down here?’
‘Damn!’ exploded Dart, looking at his watch. ‘Over an hour.’
‘Well,’ the local physician said, ‘whoever removed that stiff has had plenty of time to get it off the premises long before now. Just a hasty harum-scarum search won’t dig up a thing, do you think?’
‘I can’t help it,’ Dart replied impatiently. ‘I’ve got to look, haven’t I?’ And out of the door he sped and bounded up the stairs.
The tall, pale, bespectacled Dr Archer summarized the situation for the medical examiner’s benefit while they waited. He described how they had found the strange instrument of death and later the club, devised of a human femur, which must have delivered the blow. He gave the evidence in support of his estimate of the period during which death had occurred, the medical examiner readily approving its probability.
‘Testimony indicated,’ the local physician went on, ‘and Dart checked each witness against the others, that the two women and one of the six men present were very unlikely as suspects. Any one of the other five men, four of them visitors and one the assistant or servant, could have committed the crime. One of them, an obvious drug addict, even admitted having a hand in it—rather convincingly, too; although the person who voluntarily comes forward with an admission is usually ignored—’
‘Some day,’ the medical examiner grinned, ‘that sort of suspect is going to be ignored once too often—he’ll turn out guilty in spite of his admission.’
‘Well, there’s more to this chap’s admission than just an admission. He had a good motive—believed that Frimbo was slowly killing his brother by some mystic spell, which only Frimbo’s own death could break. And he indicated, too, that he had a paid accomplice. That, plus his obvious belief in the superstition, was what really lent a little credibility to his admission. But there was another motive brought out by Dart: One of the other men was a policy-runner. He said Frimbo had a winning system that was being used to break his boss’s rival, and that the rival might have found it out and eliminated Frimbo in self-defence. Even so, of course, the actual murderer would have to be one of those five men present. Because one of them had to take that club from the front room back to the middle room where we found it—it couldn’t move by itself, even if it was a thigh-bone once. Of course, the same thing applies to the handkerchief. There was the servant too, who managed to disappear completely just before the murder was discovered. He’d hardly kill the goose that laid his golden eggs, though.’
‘But he did disappear?’
‘To the naked eye.’
‘What about the undertaker who came in and went out?’
‘He didn’t enter the front room at any time. You see, both the handkerchief and the club were unquestionably in the front room before Frimbo was killed with them. The undertaker, or anybody else, would have had to be in that room at some time—and so be seen by the others—to have got possession of those two objects.—And the undertaker had every apparent reason to want Frimbo to stay alive. Frimbo paid him outrageously high rent—and always on time.’
‘So who did it?’
‘Well, I’ll give you a list—if I don’t forget somebody—in the order of their probable guilt. First is Jenkins, against whom both the clues point. It’s his handkerchief, as two others testify. What makes it look worse for him is that he denies it’s his. It may be just apprehension or perversity that makes him deny it—he’s a hard-boiled, grouchy sort of person; but it looks on the face of it, more like he’s covering up. But worse still, his right thumb print was identified on the club—which, again, he’d denied touching.’
‘Dart’s holding him then?’
‘Has to. And that’s evidence that even a smart lawyer—which Jenkins probably can’t afford—couldn’t easily explain away. Then next, I should say, is Doty Hicks, the drug-addict, about whom I just told you. Possibly the accomplice he admits paying is Jenkins. Then—let’s see—then would come Spencer—the number-king mentioned by the runner, Spider Webb. Not Spencer himself, of course, but some one of those present, paid by Spencer. That again suggests Jenkins, who might be in Spencer’s employ. Or the railroad porter, Jones—Easley Jones. He might be Spencer’s agent, though he tells a simple, straightforward story which can easily be checked; and there isn’t a scrap of evidence against him. In fact he went in to see Frimbo first and Frimbo talked to him, as well as to three others following him. Obviously even an African mystic couldn’t tell fortunes through a throat plugged up as tightly as Frimbo’s was.’
‘Not unless he used sign language,’ commented the medical examiner.
‘Which he couldn’t in the dark,’ answered Dr Archer. ‘Well next—the servant, against whom the only charge i
s his disappearance. He could figure as somebody’s agent too, I suppose. But it wasn’t his thumb print on the club, nor his handkerchief. Then there was Brown, a likable sort of Harlem roustabout, who, however, did not leave the front room till after the attack on Frimbo. And finally the two women, who didn’t even know the man had been killed till we told them, some time after examining him.’
‘Well, you know how the books tell it. It’s always the least likely person.’
‘In that case, evidence or no evidence, the guilty party is Mrs Aramintha Snead, devout church-member and long-suffering housewife.’
‘Oh, no. You’ve very adroitly neglected to mention the really most unlikely person. I’m thinking of the physician on the case. Dr Archer is the name, I believe?’
‘Quite possible,’ Dr Archer returned gravely. ‘Motive—professional jealousy.’
‘If that theory applied here,’ the medical examiner laughed, ‘I’d have to clear out myself. I’m obviously the murderer: I was ten miles away when it happened.’
‘Of course. You put Jenkins’ thumb print on that club by telephoto, and the handkerchief—’
‘I blew the handkerchief out of Jenkins’ pocket and down Frimbo’s throat by means of a special electric fan!’
‘Some day I’m going to write a murder mystery,’ mused Dr Archer, ‘that will baffle and astound the world. The murderer will turn out to be the most likely suspect.’
‘You’d never write another,’ said the medical examiner.
For half an hour, Perry Dart and three of the more experienced bluecoats searched the house. They prowled from roof to cellar in vain. At one moment, Dart thought he had discovered an adequate hiding-place beneath the laboratory bench, which stretched across the posterior wall of the rear on the second floor; for the doors to the cabinets under the bench were locked. But he soon saw that this was an impossible lead: the two doors were not adjacent; an easily opened compartment was between them filled with mechanical bric-a-brac; and the size of this and all the other unlocked compartments indicated that the locked ones were far too small to accommodate a full sized cadaver.
The Conjure-Man Dies Page 12