A WORTHWHILE CRIME

Originally published in Detective Story Magazine, August 19, 1922.

“It looks to me like a very ordi­nary sort of case,” declared T. Ashley, tilting back his desk chair in the little office-and-laboratory place of his, whereof the door showed the sign in gold letters:

T. ASHLEY

Investigations

“Ordinary!” echoed Scanlon. “You call it ordinary when ‘Big Boss’ Hanrahan himself gets touched for seventeen thousand? I call it most extraor­dinary, I do. Hanged if I don’t!”

“Oh, I don’t mean that part of it,” T. Ashley disclaimed, a trace of a smile curving his austere lips. “That particu­lar angle of the affair possesses no in­terest for me. The personality of the victim, his affiliations, his control of the city’s political machine are matters wholly beside the point, so far as I’m concerned. All I’m looking at, from the standpoint of my profession, is the technique of the crook. And this case presents no original factors there.”

The September sunshine through his office window that overlooked the un­ending come-and-go of Albermarle Ave­nue, showed amused lines about the in­vestigator’s shrewd, keen gray eyes. Evidently he found Scanlon’s agitation diverting.

“It’s all quite a routine sort of thing,” he added.

“Maybe ’tis,” admitted Scanlon. “But there’ll be somethin’ infernally out o’ the routine happen if that quick-touch artist ain’t rounded up, P.D.Q.!”

“Indeed? Well, why did Hanrahan send you to me, then? I’m not what is known as a fast worker. I pro­ceed with rather marked deliberation. Why didn’t the boss turn this matter over to the bureau of criminal investi­gation?”

“And have every double-blanked pa­per in town full of it? Have every cop in the burg wise to it? Have the whole city laughin’ up its sleeve at the boss? What’s this here practical psychology I’m hearin’ about, these days?”

“Of course,” said T. Ashley. “I see. Ridicule can certainly kill a man, where all the ‘uplift’ attacks in the world would rattle off like peas from a rhinoceros. Yes, yes, I understand.” Contempla­tively he tapped the cover of an an­thropological society’s report. “So I’m to ‘get’ this malefactor for you in a pri­vate and inconspicuous manner. I’m to round up this genius, who’s been clever enough to rob a—er—”

“A robber,” Scanlon finished the phrase. “Say it, if you want to! That’s what most o’ the papers in town have been printin’ for years. You got the idea, an’ got it right. How much you want for the job?”

“The investigation,” said T. Ashley, correcting him. “Well, Mr. Scanlon, my fee varies according to the interest I take in a case. Big interest, small fee. Enough interest, no fee at all. Slight interest, large fee. No interest at all—”

“You’re frank, ain’t you?” inter­rupted the boss’s henchman. “That’s somethin’. I figger, judgin’ from the sympathy you feel for the boss, you’ll want about five hundred bucks for tacklin’ this case.”

“A thousand,” said T. Ashley dryly.

“Whew!” And Scanlon rubbed a shaven chin. “Well, if that’s the best you can say—”

“It is. And not a contingent fee, either. I shall collect that thousand whether I succeed or not. Though in justice to myself I must say that I have still to record a failure. Agreed? Thank you. Now then, let us get back to the evidence. You say there was a window broken in Hanrahan’s house by the crook?”

“Yep. A pane was busted out in the room where the safe is. The crook get in over the porch, there.”

“Does anybody know about that broken pane?”

“Only the boss’s boss.”

“You refer to Mrs. Hanrahan?”

“Sure. And the fact that there’s a playground nex’ door, where the kids play baseball, makes that busted win­dow a cinch to explain. Nobody knows about the ‘touch’ but me and the boss. He’s havin’ the pane reset today.”

“The robbery,” asked T. Ashley, “took place last night, while Mr. and Mrs. Hanrahan were at the theater?”

“That’s what.”

“You saved the broken pieces of glass, naturally?”

“Surest little thing you know! I han­dled ’em with gloves, too, an’ brought ’em along with me.”

“Good! And then—”

“Well, the crook just opened the gopher, that’s all, an’ cleaned it like he’d had a vacuum cleaner.”

“He didn’t use force, I believe you said? No ‘soup’ or thermite. No tools.”

“Nope. He just juggled the knob, that’s all.”

“I see. Well,” and T. Ashley pon­dered a moment, pencil, in hand, “I’ll take a run out and look the ground over this afternoon. But—let’s see the glass, first.”

Scanlon drew a flat package from his pocket, undid a string, opened the pack­age, and spread out various bits of broken glass on the desk. He took good care not to touch them with his fingers, but poked them with a penholder to sep­arate them.

“Very good, indeed,” said T. Ash­ley. He took pincers from a tray, with which he seized the pieces one by one and examined them. Putting a jewel­er’s loupe into his eye, he gave them a more detailed inspection, turning them a little this way and that to vary the light across their surfaces.

“H’m!” he said at last, while Scanlon watched him with keen attention, his full-lidded blue eyes squinting a little. “This is altogether too easy. Yes, yes, indeed. Why, there are prints enough here to convict a regiment!”

“That’s how I jiggered it’d be.”

“Too bad you couldn’t have turned this case over to the bureau. The whole thing is simplicity itself. You could have saved the boss a clean thousand, and he needs the money. That’s his motto, isn’t it—‘I need the money!’”

“We all need the money these days,” returned Scanlon. “But other things has got to be reckoned, too. We don’t want no public officials a-tall to get hep to this. Some way it’d leak if I was to give any of ’em a crack at these prints. All the boss wants now is to nab this bird, see, an’ do it without makin’ no roar. The boss is a bearcat for gettin’ back at any guy that passes him the dinkum oil. Oh, he’s a wise old kick, all right, the boss is!”

“So I understand,” said T. Ashley. “But he can’t get back at this bird, as you call the malefactor, without expos­ing the break and bring­ing down ridi­cule on himself. The minute that the bird is arrested—”

“Arrested? Who said anythin’ about arrestin’ him?” And Scan­lon laughed twistedly. “He ain’t goin’ to be ar­rested! There’s better ways to get a bird than by arrestin’ him, an’ you can pin that in your lid!”

“I suppose so. Well, that’s none of my affair. My undertaking is just to earn my fee by locating the bird. After that, what happens to him is none of my affair.”

“I see you’ve got me cold. You can locate him, can’t you, with fingerprints like those?”

T. Ashley laughed a little scornfully. “By the way,” he added, “now that I’ve looked these over, I don’t think it will be necessary for me to visit Mr. Hanrahan’s house. That would be ‘gilding the lily,’ you understand.”

“Doing what to the which?”

“Pardon me. I mean, taking too much pains. I must say this so-called bird has been unusually liberal about leaving us his calling cards. I repeat that this affair is most ordinary. It’s so easy as to possess hardly the inter­est of an ordinary, common or garden variety of murder. Still, as I’ve agreed to take it on, I’ll go through with it.”

“And you’ll call me up?”

“As soon,” promised T. Ashley, “as I have this predatory person’s name, age, description, record, and present address. After that—”

“We’ll look out for the ‘after that’ part of it!” exclaimed Scanlon grimly.

“Quite so. But I tell you now, you’re gunning for small game. A modern ‘house prowler’ who doesn’t know enough to wear gloves must be deficient, indeed. Poor game!”

“All the more reason why the boss can’t afford to let such a guy run round loose an’ get away with it,” said Scanlon. “Supposin’ it should leak that a third-rater had—”

“Of course. Well, I’ll let you know. I’ll phone you at your office. Let’s see, now—Scanlon Paving and Contracting Co., isn’t it?”

“That’s me. Well, thanks!” Scan­lon stood up and extended his hand. But T. Ashley, already once more bending over the fragments of glass, apparently did not see it. “Well—good day.”

“Oh, good-day!”

When Scanlon was gone, and the door closed, T. Ashley leaned back and smiled.

“Vanity,” said he, “thy name is man!”

II.

The message Scanlon received over the wire several days later vastly aston­ished him.

“Hello there! Scanlon? . . . Yes, T. Ashley speaking. I say, Scanlon, what the deuce do you mean by trying to amuse yourself at my expense? . . . Don’t understand, eh? The devil you don’t! Practical jokes are all very well, but—what’s that you say? . . . Oh, yes, I’ll tell you, all right enough. . . . Yes, any time you like; the sooner the better. Have I what? . . . Found out? Good-by!”

The slam of the receiver onto the hook left Scanlon vastly amazed.

“Well, what d’you know about that?” he asked himself. “What’s he vaporin’ about now, I’d like to know? Can you beat it? Has that bird gone cuckoo all of a sudden, or what?”

He took his Panama and departed from the office of the Scanlon Paving and Contracting Co. in more of a hurry than he had been for weeks.

“I tell you, I don’t get you a-tall,” he insisted, when he and T. Ashley were alone together in the little laboratory office overlooking Albermarle Avenue. “Anybody’d think, from what you just now shot over the wire at me, that I’d been tryin’ to feed you some phony stuff!”

“And anybody would be quite correct in that assumption,” returned T. Ashley. His jaw looked tight, his eye hostile. “I suppose, from your point of view, it’s an excellent witticism, trying to make sport of a private investigator.”

“What d’you mean? Come across!”

“Of course, the department is out to knife a man who’s proved them lunk­heads half a dozen times. That’s quite comprehensible. But I hardly thought the Big Boss himself—and you—would be quite so childish. Another thing: you forget that in trying to bring me into ridicule,” and T. Ashley struck the desk a blow with his fist, “you two may get involved worse than I am! That would be a horse of another color!”

“What d’you mean, horse? All the horse I see, round here, is on me!”

And Scanlon shook a puzzled head. He let both hands fall, palms outward.

“Who instigated this, anyhow?” de­manded T. Ashley.

“Here’s where I quit!” said Scanlon. “I’d better beat it while my shoes are good. Maybe you know what you’re talkin’ about, but darned if I do!”

“You—you mean to say you really don’t understand?”

“Well, you heard me the first time!”

“You don’t know what kind of a wild-goose chase you’ve been putting me up against?”

“How many more times d’you want me to say it? Bring a stack o’ Bibles, or something and—”

“But, what the deuce?” exclaimed T. Ashley. “Whoever in the world gave you those fingerprints?”

“Nobody! Get that straight, now. I rounded up them prints myself. The boss called me out to his house and told me about the break, and I—”

“Do you mean to tell me,” and T. Ashley’s eyes narrowed, “that those prints, to the best of your knowledge and belief, were really made by the man who robbed Mr. Hanrahan’s safe?”

“That’s the way it rides, s’help me! Why?”

“Why? Oh, by the Lord Harry, now, that’s flogging it! Look at that, will you?”

And T. Ashley with a flirt of the wrist tossed over a letter on his desk for Scanlon to read. He added, in a tone vastly far from his usual suavity:

“See what McDonald, of the Federal identification bureau at Leavenworth has to say about it. Somebody has been having a devil of a joke with somebody. Now then, who is it—and why?”

Scanlon caught up the letter.

Dear Mr. Ashley:

Reporting on the microphotographs of the prints, let me say they have been identified as those of Peter W. Blau, alias Dutch Pete, alias The Grayback. His number on our records is 143,297. Will send Bertillon if desired.

Very truly yours,

M. S. McDonald.

Scanlon reread the letter before look­ing up. Then he asked, puzzled. “Well, that’s all right, ain’t it? That’s straight dope. What’s all the roar you’re sendin’ across?”

“What’s it about? Oh, I say, now!”

“I don’t see nothin’ phony about this! All it looks like, from where I stand, is the first move toward landin’ this here Dutch Pete guy in the big house, and—”

“Is that all it looks like, to you?” de­manded T. Ashley, with mordant scorn. “Well, now, where do you suppose I’d have to look to find that man?”

“How the devil should I know? That’s your job!”

“My job, eh? A job for sextons, you mean! And I’m not in the pick-and-shovel brigade—not just yet.”

Scanlon regarded him with eyes of astonishment.

“Come on, come on!” he exclaimed. “Shoot it across, clean, and get it off your chest! What d’you mean, pick-and-shovel brigade?”

“I mean,” answered T. Ashley with emphasis on every word, “that this Peter W. Blau, alias Dutch Pete, alias The Grayback, was electrocuted nearly six months ago!”

III.

NOW IT WAS Scanlon’s turn to flush with anger.

“You must be bats!” he exclaimed. “What kind of a gag are you tryin’ to slip over on me, anyhow?”

“No gag at all, to quote your own choice language! And as for being ‘bats,’ I’m not so crazy as to assert that a dead man can get up out of his grave and go gallivanting round the country robbing safes!”

“I never said nothin’ like that!”

“The deuce you didn’t! You brought me a dead man’s fingerprints, with the preposterous assertion that—”

“I brought you the prints that was on that there pane out to the boss’s house. The man that made them prints cleaned that gopher!”

“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 their 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 counted 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.”

“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 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.