“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 to 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.
ROUGH TOSS
Originally published in Complete Stories, May 15th, 1932.
The telegram arrived just as Tim Spurling, diver, was at breakfast with his wife in the kitchen. A leisurely, skimpy breakfast. When a fellow’s out of work, been out of work for more than six months, why hurry? The wire said:
CAN YOU COME IMMEDIATELY CRYSTAL LAKE RECOVER BODY STOP WIRE DECISION COLLECT URGENT
DR SW OLIVIER
Spurling’s lip tightened as he shoved the message over to his wife.
�
��Well, job at last!” he grunted. “And we need it, somethin’ fierce!”
“Yes, but going down after a body ain’t—”
“Tain’t what I like, Blanche, that’s a bet. Allus gives me the crawls, handlin’ a stiff. But beggars can’t be choosers. And then, too, case like this—”
“Well?”
“So much a day. Tain’t like a contract job, or salvagin’ stuff that the position of it’s known. Carcasses drift round on the bottom. Ain’t nobody can tell how long it’ll take to locate one, and so—”
Blanche Spurling shot him a quick glance. She asked:
“You mean, even if you found a body, you could let on you hadn’t and get more pay?”
“Well, why not?”
“Wouldn’t that be cheating, or stealing, or getting money under false pretenses? Couldn’t they jail you for that, if it was found out?”
“Who’s to find out anythin’, underwater?” he retorted defiantly. “And besides, the way times is— Then, too, what we just found out about Bill—”
The diver’s wife sat brooding a moment. Not even the shaft of July sunlight slanting in through the window could make the table and kitchen other than drear and ugly. With an abstracted air the woman smoothed the hair back and away from her forehead, revealing deeper wrinkles than her thirty-six years should have graven there. Her brown eyes, studying the telegram, appeared to see through and beyond it; perhaps even away to the Arizona desert which alone, so their family doctor told them, could yet save the life of Bill, their only son.
“Yes, it’s T.B.,” the doctor had bluntly affirmed. “But it’s only beginning. Send the boy out West, and you can still save him. But if he stays here—”
“Us, send the kid West?” Spurling had queried. “Where would we get the jack to do that? Us, with our rent three months overdue, and a grocery bill with whiskers on it! Where would we get the dough?”
“Sorry. That part of it is beyond me, Spurling. All I can do is tell you what’s wrong with the boy, and recommend the treatment. He’s positively got to have a change of climate, or—well—”
And the case had stood right there. T.B. No cash to be had, no job, nothing to borrow on. And Bill, hardly sixteen, and their only child.
“Judas!” Spurling had cried. “What a hell of a rough toss!”
His fist, hard clenched, had seemed knotted against whatever gods there be.
And now, this job! Incredible, yet true. Things, after all, sometimes happened like that. Tim Spurling and his wife, silent a moment in the untidy dreariness of their little kitchen, eyed each other and felt hope reborn. This new job; did it not mean a chance for Bill?
“There, there, Blanche old kid! Don’t cry!”
Spurling went round the table and clumsily patted her shoulder.
“What’s there to cry for now, baby? Things is beginnin’ to come right for us, now, ain’t they? We’re beginnin’ to get the breaks at last, ain’t we?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But say, Timmy, how’d you happen to get this here job, anyhow, I wonder?”
The diver scratched his unshaven chin; a square chin and a hard one.
“Search me! Reckon maybe it’s ’cause I’m the nearest diver to Crystal Lake they could get hold of.”
“Yes, that’s prob’ly the reason.”
“Here, what you cryin’ for, now?”
“I’m not crying, Tim! That’s just something that got in my eye.”
Blanche dried her eyes on her apron, then reached for Tim’s hand a moment, and held it clasped in both her own hands, roughened by dishwater and the washtub. Her caress was awkward. Lack of practice, in the matter of caresses, had made it so.
Silence fell. Through that silence a muffled cough echoed from the next room—an ominous, deadly sound.
“But we’ll soon fix all that now, kid,” Spurling growled. “Job like this will bring a hell of a lot o’ dough.”
“How much, Timmy?”
“Hundred a day, at the very least. Maybe more. Depends on how much the stiff’s family’s got. Even though I got to pay my helper ten or twelve bucks per, there’ll be a swell clean-up.”
“Who you going to take along for a helper?”
“Jim McTaggart. He’s ’bout the only guy I’ll trust to handle the pump and hose for me. When you’re down on the bottom and your life depends on another guy bein’ steady and reliable, the best ain’t none too good!”
“That’s right, too,” Blanche agreed. “Oh, if anything was to happen to you— But tell me, how many days’ll you need, to find—it?”
“How do I know? Depends on a lot o’ things. Size o’ the lake, how deep, and the like o’ that. This here job—if I have any kind o’ luck—might run into thick kale.”
Silence again. Blanche broke in.
“That there telegraph boy, out at the front door. He’s waiting.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Gotta send an answer, ain’t I?”
Tim fished out a pencil from his pocket. Bending over the disordered table, he scrawled on the yellow blank: Leaving at once. T.H. Spurling.
Three hours later Tim Spurling and Jim McTaggart stepped onto the platform of the little station at Crystal Lake. He and Jim helped unload the diving gear from the baggage car, also the air pump. Two huge boxes contained this equipment, at which a duly impressed little knot of people gazed with silent wonder.
“Take you out to the lake, four miles,” said a loose-lipped man with a small truck. “Mr. Eccles—him that had his son drownded—told me to git you out there.”
“Oh, all right,” Spurling agreed. “Gimme a hand and we’ll load the stuff.”
When he and McTaggart and the truckman had loaded the equipment they got aboard, McTaggart sitting on the boxes in the truck body. Out of the village they jolted and away into the hills.
“Terrible thing to happen, ain’t it?” asked Spurling.
“Sure is,” the truckman agreed. “Havin’ millions, like old man Eccles, don’t pervent trouble. Only kid he’s got, too.”
“Yeah, I heard about it on the train. Only sixteen years old, they was tellin’ me. Yest’day p.m. They say he was a good swimmer. Quite a champ. He dove off a raft and never come up. Must of got a cramp or somethin’.”
“I reckon so,” assented the truckman. “Say, buddy.” His voice lowered. “I got a few words fer you before we git out to the lake. Can I talk to you confidential-like?”
“Why, sure. What’s on your chest?” Spurling’s blue eye showed surprise. “What’s the idea?”
“This here is just fer you, see? Not him!” The driver’s tone was below the hearing of McTaggart, on those boxes in the rear of the jolting, rattling truck. “How’d you like to clean up a nice little bundle o’ jack?”
“Jack? What you mean, jack?”
“A real bundle, that’s what I mean.”
“Sure I’d like it,” Spurling asserted. “That’s what I’m here for—big wages.”
“Ah, I don’t mean wages!” scornfully said the truckman, as they struck into a pine-arched road through forested hills. “How much they goin’ to slip you fer this here job?”
“Well, four, five hundred bucks, maybe, dependin’ on how long it takes me to bring up the stiff. They ain’t easy to locate.”
“Hell, that ain’t a bundle! That’s jest chicken feed. S’posin’ you seen a way to grab off ten times that—five G’s. How ’bout that?”
“Five G’s! Holy cripes, man! What’re you talkin’ about?”
“Pipe down!” the truckman warned. “If he gets wise,” and the truckman nodded backward, “it’s all off. This has got to be a man-to-man deal, ’tween me and you. Say, buddy, can I talk cold turkey and be sure you won’t blow it?”
“Sure you can—though I ain’t agreein’ to nothin’ till I know what’s what.”
“And not to blame, neither. Well, anyhow, it’s like this. If you go down and make all the motions of tryin’ to find the body, but don’t find it, don’t let it never be found a
t—”
“You mean,” cut in Spurling, his heart beginning to pound, “you mean you’ll slide me five grand?”
“Yeah. That is, not me, exactly. But somebody’ll hand it to me to hand you. It’ll be worth that, to ’em, and a good bit more. Git me?”
“No, damn ’f I do!” the diver asserted, careful to keep McTaggart from overhearing. “Why the hell would it be worth thick money to anybody to keep a kid’s carcass from bein’ brung up?”
“Well, I ain’t exactly sayin’, buddy. But if I was to tell a fairy story, kind of, I might say as how once upon a time there was a lady, and she had a weak heart and her health was awful poorly. And she had a whale of a lot o’ coin. Well, she made a will, leavin’ a big wad to a certain relation. But then her son got drownded and she said she was goin’ to change that will and leave the money for a memorial library to remember him by. And the fact that she couldn’t git the boy’s body was drivin’ her crazy, or mebbe killin’ her. If she got it—”
“If she got it she’d prob’ly pull through and not die or go nuts. And she’d change the will and the relative would lose the dough?”
“Say, you got a headpiece on you, mister, as is a headpiece!” The truckman nodded warm approval. “You don’t hafta be told to come in outta the rain. And if you make a good job of it, why, mebbe that five grand might be stretched a bit, too. Savvy? Well, what say, buddy?”
“Hunh! Gee, I dunno!” And Spurling scratched his unshaven chin. His hand trembled slightly. In his throat, rapid pulses were beating “Five grand or even a bit more, eh?”
“That’s right. Think it over, bo, but think fast. We’ll be to the lake now, almost right off. Well?”
Spurling’s head swam. His senses blurred. Money! Thick money! It all jumbled up with Blanche, Arizona, Bill and a dry cough, unpaid rent, debts, misery, and despair. And then, out of it all, he heard the voice of Blanche:
“You mean, even if you found a body, you could let on you hadn’t and get more pay?”
“Well, why not?” echoed his own answer.
“Wouldn’t that be cheating, or stealing, or getting money under false pretenses?”
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