THE LIEUTENANT

     AT NIGHTFALL, THE TWO TINY BLACK LEOPARD CUBS nuzzled close to their mother for warmth and nourishment that cool spring night in Griffith Park Zoo. The next morning they had vanished as completely as though a hawk had scooped them up with his talons.
     The gates and fences of the leopard cage were secure, the adjoining tiger cage seemed undisturbed. Except for the whining of the mother, there was nothing to indicate that the furry little mites had existed at all.
     Quickly the zoo launched an investigation. A set of the rare cubs, one male, one female, would bring $1,500 and no questions asked. If they were hidden out a few months, it would then be impossible to identify them.
     The regular attendant reported that he fed the leopards at the usual hour and all had been secure when he left.
     There was no reason to doubt him. But very probably, the zoo suspected, one of its new employees, a surly fellow with a hangdog look, had sneaked up to the cage afterward and stolen them. It would be simple to smuggle them out of the park in a small sack.
     LAPD was called in, and detectives attacked the case with the solemnity of any missing persons report. What did the victims look like? When and where were they last seen? By whom? Any reason to suspect foul play?
     To the police, the tigers next door looked like the obvious suspects. Perhaps the cubs had strayed close to the dividing fence and the tigers had grabbed them.
     Patiently the zoo officials explained that this would have been all but impossible. The openings in the fence were extremely small, even for tiny cubs, and besides they had already examined the tigers’ run. There was no blood on the ground, no bones, no leopard hair.
     First, the detectives said, just as routine, they would like to send a specimen of tiger dung to the Crime Lab for analysis. Resignedly the zoo agreed.
     When the specimen arrived, the Crime Lab was having one of those days. An unidentified naked male body had been found in a remote canyon near the desert. The hands had been immersed in acid to erase the fingerprints, and the elements had done their work on the body. Now a Crime Lab technician would have to process the fingers with chemicals in order to restore the prints and then photograph them with appropriate side-lighting.
     In addition, the day’s work sheet at SID called for the processing of about a thousand sets of fingerprints, thirty photo enlargements, handwriting examination of some eight questioned documents, several Intoximeter tests of the breath of suspected drunken drivers, two gun identifications, nine analyses of narcotics to determine composition and identification for court purposes, one lie detector test.
     During the day there would also be the usual two to three hundred phone calls, and in a dozen courtrooms technicians from SID would be waiting to offer evidence. When the detective explained his problem of the missing cubs, the Lab man, with great self-control, merely said, “Who?”
     However, this also being police work, the technician went over to a corner of the chemistry lab and compounded a special solution. He placed the liquid and the dung into a large pan which he slid into a glassed-in cabinet. He told the detective he would know the results in mid-afternoon.
     Then he moved on to more pressing problems: a ballistics test; the examination of toothmarks on a bar of candy bitten by a suspect; a detailed study of the pinch of dirt, the shred of clothing, and the broken headlight lens left behind in a hit-run accident.
     When he got back to the dung, the chemical solution had prepared it sufficiently for probing. With tweezers, he put aside several patches of matted black hair. Just possibly this could be the tigers’ own hair.
     Next he found numerous tiny claws, but he was still dissatisfied. A thief might have wrapped the claws in some meat which he threw to the tigers, hoping to thus mislead the investigators. He examined the tiny claws more closely. Many were still in their sheaths.
     In a way, the Lab man was relieved. It had taken considerable effort, but he had at least proved that tigers are no better than people. And all the rest of that day’s work sheet was dedicated to proving that people, given the opportunity, are no better than tigers.
      
     LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division is the finest police laboratory in the nation, differing from the superb FBI lab only in the volume of work. It is also the oldest, antedating the FBI’s by seven years.
     Back in 1923 when the night stick and billy still were the chief instruments of police work, the great August Vollmer strode onto the Los Angeles scene. The giant from Berkeley had come to reorganize the shaky LAPD.
     If Vollmer knew anything, he knew the quick, short routes to solution of police problems. One of his pets was a bawling babe known as “scientific investigation.” A lot of policemen had never heard of it. Most of the others scorned it.
     But Vollmer, in one of the major changes he brought to LAPD as interim Police Chief, assigned young Rex Welsh to work as research chemist in the department.
     He gave Welsh an antiquated microscope and a cubbyhole lab in a corner of a two-story building. A little later, a figurative handful of chemicals and a smattering of glassware were added.
     With this, Welsh could but tug at the curtain concealing the mysteries of science from police eyes. He worked in the only way open to him, the painful and sometimes floundering method of trial-and-error.
     But Rex Welsh was in business. And so was police scientific investigation in Los Angeles.
     For the nation’s handful of police crime scientists, there were then no books, no precedents, no courses in scientific investigation. Even fingerprinting was haphazard. The great FBI file had not yet been built up to its present eminence, and there was a tug-of-war between various lobby groups over control of a centralized identification of criminals.
     A few private investigators—notably Arthur Waite, Edward B. Crossman, and Calvin Goddard—were doing some work in analyses of guns and ballistics, but for all practical purposes, this was an unknown science to the city policeman. Worse, popular skepticism about “lab cops” was bolstered by the courtroom antics of pseudo criminal experts and unblushing quacks. A hod carrier, for example, received $50 a day as an “expert” witness on physical evidence in a criminal trial.
     Welsh, too, made mistakes. In an early Hollywood rape case, he predicted that he could identify the man by age from an examination of spermatozoa.
     Since a prominent film figure was involved, the case had achieved wide publicity, and Welsh was sticking his neck out. He had no scientific precedent for his experiment, and less ebullient scientists cautioned him against going ahead with the test. But he persisted, the chemical analysis was futile, and both Welsh and his microscope blushed with failure.
     In 1929, the Crime Lab received strong scientific buttressing with the addition of civilian Ray Pinker, a thoroughly trained technician. Pinker had studied chemical engineering for two years at the University of California at Los Angeles and had graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor of science degree in pharmacy.
     Thereafter, Pinker took over the more technical work of sifting physical evidence in crime cases, while Welsh, until his tragic death by drowning in the early 1930’s, concentrated chiefly on narcotics analyses.
     To replace the pioneer, Lee Jones, an inquisitive young officer who had been dabbling in fingerprints, was assigned to the Scientific Investigation Division. He was of pioneer stuff himself: a grandmother of his had walked from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1850; and a grandfather had ridden west with Brigham Young. Now he teamed up with Ray Pinker in a new, intellectual kind of pioneering, the completion of Welsh’s work; and through the years, till Lieutenant Lee Jones’ recent retirement at the age of sixty-one, Pinker and Jones were the most formidable pair of scientific policemen in America.
     Against the stubborn skepticism of the old-time detectives, plus a few horse laughs at their creaky microscope and smelly chemicals, Pinker and Jones proved that their evidence—a speck of dirt or a tiny seed caught on shoe or trouser leg—would incriminate or eliminate a suspect.
     It was hard for the policeman to understand, but they patiently demonstrated that no dirt is the same and every seed in the world is different. Hence, if a suspect carried scrapings which were similar to those found at the scene of the crime, he must have been there.
     Nothing in this world, they taught, is found in exact duplication—not even two billiard balls. Why, if you could blow up a billiard ball to the size of the earth, there would be the same great peaks and valleys, mountains higher than Everest and depths greater than the seven-mile Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. No indeed, no two objects are alike. Not even your own two front teeth.
     The chances of fingerprint duplication, they preached, are one in a billion, and though there are more than two and a half billion persons on this earth, no one person has ever been found to duplicate another person in all physical characteristics. Or take two guns, the same calibre, the same shape, the same manufacturer, and yet the striatums on the bullets will be distinguishable.
     From being a dabbler in fingerprints, Lieutenant Jones made himself into one of the world’s master criminalists. With a scientific third degree, he made the physical evidence talk and wrung confessions from blood, guns, narcotics, hair, fibers, metal slivers, tire marks, tool marks, bullets.
     From the two-man team of Pinker and Jones, the Scientific Investigation Division grew into a sixty-seven technician operation. From a cubbyhole equipped with little more than a boy’s chemistry set, it expanded into a million-dollar laboratory which occupies an entire floor in the new LAPD Administration Building. Here are ovens, furnaces, steam baths, balances, centrifuges, autoclaves, and electronic measuring devices.
     As science has progressed, SID has kept pace, making new applications of new discoveries to its specialized field. In ballistics, it devised a better test mechanism, a water-filled steel tank, to improve the quality of the striations. From simple photography at the scene of the crime, SID went on to use three-dimensional film and later motion picture photography for reenactments. The spectrograph was trained on the study of specimens of soil, glass, paints; and then SID delved deeper into the spectrum with the use of ultraviolet and infrared spectrophotometers for refined identification of organic substances.
     But always you come back to crime—and conviction.
      
     At 9 a.m. one day, the body of Jane Doe, head crushed by a blunt instrument, was deposited in the Los Angeles County morgue. The body had been found lying in blood-soaked grass near a tree in a lover’s lane, and the superficial evidence indicated that she had been taken to the lonely spot, possibly by force, then raped and bludgeoned. Almost the only hard evidence was a cardboard strip under the body on which a man’s heelprint had been imprinted in blood.
     That night, Paul Degley, a shipyard worker, reported that his wife, Charlene, was missing. At 7 a.m., he explained, she had driven him to the job, but when he got home, she was missing, and that just wasn’t like Charlene. Police took him to the morgue, and he identified Jane Doe as his wife.
     In the hopes of getting some lead on the killer, detectives sympathetically questioned the widower at the Degleys’ little frame house. But as they talked, their eyes took in several things which made them feel considerably less sympathetic.
     On the back door, they noticed, there were curtain rods but no curtains, and Lieutenant Jones had earlier removed a curtain strand from the dead woman’s hair. On a radiator he spotted a wisp of female hair, and he noticed a large patch of floor near the back door which seemed to have been mopped recently. When it was tested for bloodstains, the reaction was positive. There was dried blood on the legs of a table, bloodstains in the kitchen sink, on a light switch, and on a towel which had apparently been used to mop up blood.
     The woman obviously had been killed in her own home, but had her husband done it?
     Next, Degley’s car was examined, and the tread of one tire matched a track near the spot where the body had been found. Wild oats similar to those growing at the scene were caught in one of the car doors. Degley’s car obviously had been used to transport the body, but had he been the driver?
     The circumstantial evidence against him mounted. Neighbors told detectives of his quick temper. The night before, one of them said, she had heard screams about eleven o’clock and had looked out her bathroom window. She saw the lights go out suddenly in the Degley house.
     When Degley’s clothing was tested, one of his shoes gave a slight reaction indicating bloodstains. When the Coroner examined the body, he estimated the woman had been already dead for nine hours at the time it was found. Hence, she could not have driven him to the shipyard that morning, as he claimed.
     But even though he was arrested for murder, Degley stubbornly denied any knowledge of his wife’s death. Homicide detectives were certain that he had killed her in the house, taken her body to the lover’s lane in his car and there arranged it to indicate she had been raped. But they couldn’t put him at the scene. All their evidence, hard and circumstantial, stopped just short of this convincer.
     In court, Degley’s lawyer conceded one important point. The heelprint on the piece of cardboard found under the victim’s body had been left by the killer. He conceded that much, but he challenged the prosecution to prove that the print had been made by Degley’s shoe.
     It looked like a safe challenge. The heel had picked up only a little blood from the stained grass, and only part of the heel was imprinted on the cardboard. Besides, the cardboard had been creased, and this crease mark, too, would have to be matched into the print.
     In the next three days, working against a courtroom deadline, Lieutenant Jones made many exemplars of the heels on Degley’s shoes. Then he recreated everything: the amount of blood, the precise weight of the cardboard, even the pressure applied by the heel to the paper.
     Under magnification, he spotted the damning bit of evidence. On the heel of Degley’s shoe and on the cardboard print, there was one minute chip. He made a three-dimensional photograph of heel and print which was submitted as evidence in court. No other heel in the world could have stamped that particular mark on the cardboard, Jones testified.
     The minute chip convicted Degley, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment for second degree murder.
      
     When Jo-Jo met the flaming redhead in the green slacks, and he met her only once in his life, there was a touch of mocking predestination in the encounter. It seemed almost as if some irresponsible pagan god had deliberately thrown them together, saying to himself, “Let’s see what these poor human fools do now.”
     In the first place, there was only that one night in the year when Jo-Jo could have met her. For ten years, Irene Beach had been happily married; and, by agreement with her husband, there was just one day, out of all 365 days, that she left home alone for fun and freedom.
     But it wasn’t quite what it sounded. At thirty, Irene was discreet, and she spent her twenty-four-hour holiday each year with the same girl friend. They drank a little, danced a lot, had some laughs and then went home.
     Any other night, Jo-Jo would have looked in vain for a redhead in green slacks. As it was, he almost missed her. In his amiable, not very bright way, he was looking for a pickup and usually when he was on the petticoat prowl, he hit one downtown bar after another. This night, he stayed five minutes too long at one place, and then Irene came in.
     Probably he amused her. Jo-Jo, listed on his Social Security card as Joseph Anthony Gowder, labored faithfully days as a factory hand. What concentration his slow mind could muster was dedicated to the pursuit and capture of acquiescent girls, and he fancied himself as a bit of a poor man’s boulevardier. He was dark, handsome, curly-haired and hard-muscled, a veteran of many cheap conquests—till he met Irene. She may have done the unforgivable. She may have laughed at him.
     At any rate, as it was remembered later, they were together at the jukebox and later calling each other “Irene” and “Jo-Jo.” And that was all anybody could remember.
     The next morning, a white collar worker hurrying to the office saw Irene Beach’s body in her car parked down a side street in the industrial section of the city. She had been brutally beaten and then strangled sometime between midnight and two a.m.
     Through the car ownership, she was quickly identified; and, when the story appeared in the newspapers, an informant telephoned police to give them the name of the bar she had visited. There, the owner remembered her having been with Jo-Jo and supplied his name.
     On the blood-drenched front seat of the car, where the body was found, the Crime Lab technicians isolated Type A blood. On the back seat, so tiny they might have been missed, were several spots of Type B blood. Hence, the investigators deduced, Irene and her killer had first been in the rear seat, and there she had probably cut or scratched her molester. Then she had been dragged up front where her blood, Type A, was so plentifully spilled.
     Of all the principals in the mystery, only Jo-Jo proved to have Type B blood, and in addition his left arm was raked with deep and ragged teeth marks. He insisted he had received them a week previously at a beach party, but doctors judged they had been inflicted not more than forty-eight hours earlier.
     In the face of Jo-Jo’s dogged denials that he knew anything about Irene’s murder, the strong circumstantial case didn’t seem quite strong enough. Then Lieutenant Lee Jones’ photographic crew photographed the bite marks on Jo-Jo’s arm and the teeth of the dead woman. Blowups of the photographs disclosed that the teeth perfectly matched the wounds.
     Jo-Jo was sentenced to life imprisonment for second degree murder.
      
     The way tragedy strikes, it happened and was over in half a minute. The young waitress was late for a date that spring afternoon and hurried carelessly across the street. The motorist was in a hurry, too. When the girl saw the car bearing down on her, she leaned forward as though to ward off the blow. The car struck her and sped off, leaving her crumpled in agony in the gutter. She died that night.
     Depending on which eyewitness they talked to, detectives established that the car was blue or green; a sedan or a coupe; traveling at either twenty or sixty miles an hour. No one had obtained the license number, and there was not a tire mark or headlamp splinter at the scene. The car had simply vanished.
     Somewhere in Los Angeles, the detectives guessed, there must be a car with a dented fender. Undoubtedly thousands of them. But it was the only lead they had, so the AID cars in all districts distributed bulletins on the case to body and fender shops.
     Late that same day, a garage in East Los Angeles reported back to Headquarters. A green sedan with a dented left fender had just come in. The owner was insistent on a quick repair job because, he said, he had to leave town the same night on business.
     With the detectives, Lieutenant Lee Jones rolled immediately to the garage. He picked the sedan clean, then went over it a second time. There was nothing: no hair, no torn bit of clothing, no bloodstains. Then he studied the dented fender with microscopic care. Almost concealed in the dent itself was the perfect imprint of a woman’s lip.
     Jones called for a latent print expert, dispatched a second expert to the morgue—and set a criminological precedent. The lip impressions were taken both from the fender and from the body in the morgue, photographed, and blown up for comparison.
     On the two sets, Jones found fourteen common, identifying marks in the form of creases, and the little waitress’ pathetic kiss of death was sufficiently strong to support a felony manslaughter complaint against the hit-run driver. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced.
     “It was the first time I had ever seen a lip print on a car in a hit-run case,” Jones says. “And it was the first time we had ever tried to get a lip impression from a body. But each set of lips has its own characteristics, which are as identifiable as fingerprints.”
      
     Since justice is a two-way street, SID is just as satisfied with the exoneration of the innocent as the conviction of the guilty.
     On one occasion, a suspect was waiting trial for four wanton murders in a series of cocktail bar stickups. The case against him had been nailed tight by six eyewitnesses who had heard him speak and seen him shoot. In build and dress even to his hat, they swore, they knew this was the man.
     Shortly before his trial, a lone holdup man knocked over a service station in south Los Angeles, shooting one employee and escaping with a batch of pay checks. A police alarm alerted all banks and check-cashing agencies.
     Two days later, when a man presented one of the checks at a cashing establishment, the teller managed to stall him till the cops arrived. A quick search disclosed that he was toting a .38-calibre pistol in a paper bag, and the gun was turned over to the Crime Lab for routine analysis.
     Sergeant Russ Camp fired several rounds into the Lab’s water-filled ballistics tank, obtaining slugs with clear, strong striations.
     Then the constant every-hour routine of check and crosscheck. He compared them under the microscope with the slugs taken from the bodies of the murder victims. He straightened up hurriedly and called Lee Jones on the intercom.
     Jones studied the comparative specimens. “It’s a make,” he told Camp. “All the bullets are from the same gun—the one that killed the bar victims.”
     “I know that,” Camp protested. “But we already have that guy!”
     “Have we?” Jones asked quietly.
     The new suspect denied any knowledge of the four murders. Why, he said, he had bought this gun legitimately in Temple City through a newspaper advertisement. Detectives located the seller, and he recalled the sale had been before the first murder. Thereafter, police proved, the buyer had kept possession of the gun, never lending it to anyone.
     It was one of those flukes of mistaken identity which happen so rarely in real-life police work. Both suspects had the same builds and same facial features, the same taste in clothing even to hats. But the second man was the killer, and the original suspect was freed.
      
     Suppose you are in that nightmarish situation beloved by detective fiction writers. The net of circumstantial evidence has closed around you. Nobody believes your rather improbable story, so you demand the lie detector test. What happens then?
     For twenty-four hours beforehand, almost as though you were being prepared for a major operation, you must get a normal amount of food and sleep. You should not be under the influence of alcohol, or suffering any physical pain. Severe respiratory trouble such as asthma or even a bad cold will disqualify you.
     Once you pass your physical, you are placed in a chair and the measuring apparatus is fastened around your midsection and one arm and on the tip of two fingers. Thereafter, unless you are mentally deficient or extremely phlegmatic, the lie detector will record tell-tale changes in your blood pressure, the tempo of your heartbeat, your breathing and your skin resistance set up by sweat gland activity. These changes, which indicate your reaction to key questions, will be translated into squiggly lines on a chart by a moving recording pen.
     You are accused of having pulled a holdup at a downtown Los Angeles jewelry store, and the detectives who have arrested you are standing silent near the polygraph, or lie-detector machine. Lieutenant George Puddy, an expert, is conducting the interrogation.
     “Do you know if a .32-calibre gun was used?” he asks.
     “No,” you say. There is no reaction on the polygraph chart.
     “Do you know if a .38-calibre gun was used?”
     “No.” Again there is no reaction.
     “Do you know if a .45-calibre gun was used?”
     “No.”
     But this time the needle swerves sharply on the polygraph, and you have given yourself away. You are lying! After the holdup, the detectives had found a .45-calibre Colt outside the store. Despite all your denials, you must have guilty knowledge of the holdup.
     No one ever is compelled to take the lie detector test. Though an experienced operator like Lieutenant Puddy will achieve remarkable accuracy in his findings, SID admits the polygraph has its limitations. In fact, a memo to departmental personnel on its use warns:
     “Lie detector tests are not a substitute for a thorough preliminary investigation. Such examinations should be regarded as a supplement to a thorough and complete investigation.”
     But, in confirming police hunches, in sometimes obtaining confessions which could be corroborated by independent evidence, in subjecting the guilty to a new mental hazard, the polygraph has been an invaluable tool. Sometimes, for clarification, victims and witnesses as well as suspects are subjected to the tests with their permission. These are always done with the knowledge of the Detective Bureau commander.
     In LAPD, the lie detector was originally accepted with considerable scientific reserve. Its findings were not admissible as court evidence, and the Crime Lab admired its potentialities rather than its immediate prospects. Then at the end of World War II, Lieutenant Puddy returned to the department after making an outstanding record as an Air Force Combat Intelligence officer in the South Pacific. He had become an expert in the use of the he detector and was immediately assigned to LAPD’s polygraph detail.
     In the years since, Puddy has refined the techniques for processing Polygraph subjects, improved the methods of interrogation and established more accurate standards for weighing the results. He has found that some individuals are not “reactors,” that the best tests are made early during the police investigation, that prolonged questioning may exhaust or embitter the subject. Curiously, he has also discovered, the more intelligent the subject the less his chance of beating the machine.
     Most curious of all, the guilty who are struggling with their consciences sometimes demand the test, subconsciously recognizing that this is a convenient preliminary toward facing up to confession. Perhaps that is why you insisted on the lie detector when you were being questioned about the jewelry store holdup.
      
     Neighbors who heard the children crying discovered the murder. In the living room, the body of the young mother clad in a housecoat was slumped in an easy chair, a butcher knife through her chest. The three-year-old was trying to rouse her.
     Obviously, someone who knew her must have taken her by surprise. There were no signs of a struggle, and the ash tray had not even been knocked off the arm of the chair in which the dead woman sat. But after four months of investigation, the sheriff’s deputies of Kern County were at a standstill.
     The victim’s husband, an Air Force sergeant based near Sacramento, had been cleared through a lie detector test. Various neighbors in the little town of Oildale where the murder took place had been investigated without result.
     Then the wife of Vinal Paul Carl reported to the authorities that in recent weeks he had been acting peculiarly. Carl had been among the neighbors who were interrogated and had produced a seemingly ironclad alibi. The authorities were skeptical of his wife’s story, especially when she added that she had found a book of matches with the victim’s name written inside.
     “When did you find the matches?” a deputy asked.
     “About a week after the murder,” she said.
     “Why did you wait so long, almost four months?”
     “It crossed my mind, but at first I didn’t think much about it. I knew Paul knew where she lived. Then there was the investigation and, I guess, in the excitement I forgot. But lately he’s been talking a lot about a he detector test. He was wondering whether, if they found out he was lying, that could be used in a trial.”
     The Kern County men picked up Carl and decided to give him what he apparently most dreaded—a polygraph examination. Lieutenant Puddy, who handled the interrogation for the sheriff’s deputies, was convinced that the lie detector test showed Carl’s guilt. But on Puddy’s advice, the suspect was allowed to return home for the weekend on his agreement to return for additional tests the following Monday.
     “You either know who caused the death, or you caused it yourself,” he was told bluntly as he departed. Puddy wanted the delay so Carl’s fears would work on him. And, sure enough, first thing the next Monday, he blurted: “I know who did it. My conscience has been bothering me terribly.”
     It was his own father-in-law, he said. By chance, he had followed the older man on the night of the murder and seen him go into the victim’s house. Puddy was dissatisfied. He got the father-in-law to consent to the polygraph test, and it was immediately obvious that he knew nothing of the slaying.
     Carl was then re-tested, and the shaking polygraph needle made it clearer than ever that he was guilty. When police suggested a confrontation with the father-in-law, he broke and admitted the killing. But he was still lying. He tried to put the blame on the dead woman, saying that she had threatened to expose his infidelity, and that in a struggle, she had been accidentally stabbed. A re-enactment showed that this story, too, was fiction. He finally admitted he had killed the housewife when she rejected his advances.*
     *Vinal Paul Carl pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
     Despite his many evasions, Lieutenant Puddy is convinced that Carl had wanted to be caught and had welcomed the lie detector tests. “There is an inner writhing that must be quieted,” the lieutenant explains. “We want to quiet it for them. At this stage, it’s about all we can do to help them.”
     There was one occasion when Puddy was rather worried about his beloved machine.
     A Los Angeles jewelry firm had been robbed of $20,000; and, since entry had been made without tripping the burglar alarm, the owner was convinced it was an inside job.
     One after another, Puddy patiently interrogated all forty employees without once making his needle jump. The only conclusion was that an outsider had beaten the alarm system, which seemed impossible, or that one of the forty had beaten the polygraph.
     To Puddy, this also seemed impossible, but for two weeks the lie detector was under a cloud as far as everyone else in LAPD was concerned. And then in Arizona the thieves were seized with the loot. It turned out that one was a former employee of the firm and thus had known how to slip in through a skylight without setting off the alarm.
     Although he hadn’t cracked it, that case gave Lieutenant Puddy a great deal of satisfaction.