said, “I insist there is some other explanation for the meaning of these cards.”
“Suppose you give us a better one!” challenged the inspector.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” said Dab. “Not right now. Not at just a glance. I’ll have to study them. I suppose they’ve been photographed. Could I have a set of prints?”
“Of course,” Romano answered. “We’ll send them to your hotel first thing in the morning.”
“Why the devil are you trying to make a Chinese puzzle out of this, Mr. Dab?” Inspector Sansone asked irritably. “Why try to do it the hard way? Inside of five minutes or less the dumbest cop here saw what Phil Linton was trying to tell us, saw that those cards meant one thing and one thing only—a nine-fingered man, a man with the middle finger of his right hand amputated.”
“That’s just the point,” declared Dab. “It’s too simple. If Phil had had anything like that in mind, he would have known you cops could read the message. But the message wasn’t directed to you. It was specifically pointed out to me by that envelope that’s standing against the table leg. Phil tried to teach me the more advanced phases of fingerprinting, but he gave up. I couldn’t get beyond the elementary stuff. He often said that I’d never make a fingerprint expert even though I was a crackerjack at puzzles. He knew I was good at puzzles, so he left a puzzle for me to figure out. He wouldn’t have left me a problem in fingerprinting. He’d have left that for you fellows. I contend that these cards constitute a puzzle and that it’s pure freak coincidence that considered as fingerprint patterns they point out a man with an amputation. I claim the symbols on those cards are ideographs, forms meant to convey an idea to me, and that they have nothing whatsoever to do with fingers or the science of fingerprinting.”
“I say you’re nuts,” said the inspector.
Captain Haas said, “Look, Mr. Dab. We can all understand why you’re so anxious to find a different meaning. We know how close you were to Abner Ellison. But I’m afraid you can’t come up with anything that’s more convincing than the evidence that’s right before our eyes.”
Dab turned to young Detective Allan Walters. “Allan,” he said, “you’re a neighborhood boy. You grew up with Ab and Patricia. Do you believe that Ab killed Phil Linton and made off with Pat?”
“No,” said Walters. “I don’t. I don’t believe it for a minute. He just couldn’t have.”
Inspector Sansone snorted. “You’re letting personalities affect your judgment, Walters,” he said. “You’re not talking like a cop.”
“I’m not through arguing,” persisted Dab. “Not by a long shot. I don’t pretend to know much about fingerprinting except a few things Phil told me. But I know this. On fingerprint cards, the impressions of the fingers are arranged in two rows, with the prints of the right hand at the top and the prints of the left hand at the bottom. If Phil had meant to convey something about fingers or fingerprinting to us, he’d have arranged these cards in two rows. He didn’t. They’re spread out in a single row.”
“The answer to that one’s easy, honey boy,” said Romano. “Linton had a gut wound and he was bleeding to death. The slightest unnecessary movement of his body would have made the hemorrhage worse. He would have had to shove back on the floor to make room for another row of cards between his own body and the coffee table.”
“There’s another thing,” the old actor continued. “Why did he use certain cards and discard others? There are several he didn’t include scattered about on the floor. Why, for the last card, he went to another pile entirely! He had plenty of the cards with patterns on them left, but he reached for one showing a characteristic, that snaky looking symbol called the ridge fragment.”
“Are you trying to tell us that Linton died from snake bite?” Inspector Sansone asked.
“The answer, of course,” said Romano, “is that he simply picked up the first cards he touched. He needed nine cards with fingerprint symbols on them. It didn’t make any difference whether they were symbols for patterns or characteristics and it didn’t make any difference what the symbols looked like.”
Dab fingered the waxed ends of his mustache nervously. He decided to try another tack. “Let’s forget these cards on the floor for a minute,” he said. “I maintain that you can present only the flimsiest sort of motive for Ab killing his foster father. Ab’s father, James Ellison, was fired from his job. Rightly or wrongly, he believed he was done a great injustice, that he had been fired solely to make room for one of his employer’s relatives. He was deprived of the means of supporting not only himself, but his child, and Ab became a charge of the city. One night, when he was drunk and desperate, James Ellison went to his employer’s home and killed him. It was a clumsy and an amateurish crime. Ellison left fingerprints all over the place. Phil Linton was the fingerprint man on the case. His evidence convicted Ellison. But because of the man’s psychotic addiction to alcohol and his unbalanced, desperate state of mind, the D.A. allowed him to take a second-degree plea. He was sent up for life to Dannemora with the worst, most hardened criminals of the state. He died there of cirrhosis of the liver while his son was fighting overseas.”
“I don’t give a hang what these modern criminologists and psychologists and so forth say,” put in the old inspector. “I believe in blood. Bad blood and good blood. Like father like son. Crime runs in families. I’ve seen it happen too often.”
“Nonsense, man!” snapped Dab. “I’m very proud of my blood. The Ashton family is rated F.F.V. But one of my remote ancestors was a Louisiana pirate under Jean Lafitte. Do you think that means I’m likely to board the Queen Mary some night brandishing a cutlass?”
“Abner Ellison’s disappeared,” said Romano. “We’ve had men in his hotel room. Clerk says he took off right after Linton was chilled.”
“There’s probably some perfectly rational explanation for that,” insisted Dab. “But to continue. Phil did what he could. He adopted James Ellison’s son, brought him up. Ab and Phil Linton were devoted. I’ve been very close to this family and I know that. Ab held no grudge against Phil because of his father. Why, Phil often took the boy up to Dannemora on visiting days. Ab lived in this house for some twenty years. Do you suppose that all of a sudden, years after his father’s death, Ab is going to kill Phil because he identified his father’s fingerprints once in the line of duty? Such a notion is plain absurd.”
The inspector said, “He lived here for twenty years, but he moved out two months ago. Don’t you think that might mean he and Phil didn’t get along as well as they used to?”
“Ab lived here and paid board after the war while he was going to law school under the G.I. Bill of Rights,” said Dab. “He continued to live here and to pay more board when he graduated and got a job with a law firm. His moving out was purely a matter of old-fashioned propriety. About three months ago Phil Linton signed up with a lecture bureau to give talks on the history and practice of fingerprinting. Some of those lectures were in other towns and he had to stay away overnight. That left no one in the house but Ab and Pat. So Ab moved into a little family hotel not more than ten blocks from here.”
Dab saw the policemen exchange glances. They were holding something back from him, he knew. They had a trump card. But he felt compelled to go on, to state his case, to press every possible point that might be to the advantage of the young man he loved as a son.
“Now,” he continued, “of course I know that Ab was in love with Patricia. He’s about four years older than she. She was a baby when he came here as a
