Читать книгу Murder Points a Finger - David Alexander - Страница 5

MURDER WALKED softly down the cold, dark street where old trees reached out pleading arms like bony beggars.

Murder walked slowly.

There was no need for haste. The man who was about to die was just ahead.

Despite the frost-crisp air that sighed up from the black river, the man who was about to die moved leisurely, as if long, contented years were yet to be enjoyed. But there would be no years for him to savor, nor even hours. Now there were only minutes left.

Across the river, on the Jersey Palisades, an enormous, illuminated clock outshone the pale full moon of winter. The clock was a familiar sight to the man who was about to die. He had read widely in history and biography and the clock made him think of the Grosse Horloge which had given its name to a square in Rouen. He imagined that the clock across the Hudson, the clock the Mad Hatter had constructed, was far larger than the clock in the square where Joan of Arc had perished on a pile of faggots.

The man did not know it, of course, but the great bright clock was ticking away the final moments of his life. Behind him in the shadows, Murder was twenty feet away, walking softly.

The lights of the clock’s dial danced and sparkled on the dark river, like diamond slivers on fluid velvet. The clock’s huge hand would shiver, then jerk forward, and another minute of the night, of the man’s life, of eternity would be gone. The great arrow was moving down from 12 to 6, from top to bottom. The sands were running out.

Each time the hand jerked, lights would flash a word:

TIC

then:

TOC

then:

TIC TOC HATS

ALWAYS UP TO THE MINUTE IN STYLE

The street on which the man walked—and Murder followed—was one of the few in Manhattan bordered by trees. It was one of the few in the city where houses were built of wood and brick instead of steel and concrete. It wound up from Broadway to the top of a bluff that overlooked the river. At the very summit of the bluff there was a castle.

The end—or the top—of this quiet street, with its small houses built early in the century, was a strange place for a medieval castle with turrets and battlements and sentry towers. Frank Tocci, “The Mad Hatter of Manhattan,” had built the castle as his home. It was deserted now. Tocci was the man who had constructed the clock across the river to advertise the merchandise that made his millions.

The little houses that sprawled at the foot of the castle were very much alike. In the darkness, beside the sky-shadowing bulk of the medieval pile, they might well have been mistaken for serf dwellings on a feudal lord’s estate. But these were no peasant hovels. The houses were comfortable middle-class homes, their façades somewhat overdecorated in the naively ornate gingerbread style of the Teddy Roosevelt era. At this time of night, when the hand of the big clock jerked spasmodically toward the half hour before midnight, the windows of the little houses glowed warm and friendly, though the street itself was chill and dark.

The man who was about to die was small and wiry-tough. Though he walked slowly, his movements were decisive, purposeful. There was an air of suppressed energy, abundant vitality about him. He was Lieutenant (Retired) Philip Linton of the New York Police Department. He had retired from the force after thirty-five years of service, many of them spent in the Identification Bureau. He was regarded as one of the outstanding fingerprint experts of his time by those who studied the esoteric patterns of whorls and arches and loops that nature engraves upon the end joints of the human hand—and never duplicates.

Linton’s expert testimony had helped send nineteen murderers to the electric chair.

Linton pushed open the iron gate of a little house at the top of the hill, directly across from the towering castle. He crossed the short walk and mounted the three steps of the porch. The man who was about to die turned the key of a familiar lock for the last time, and entered his home.

Murder drew back into the shadows and waited beneath the gaunt old trees.

The hand of the clock across the river jerked:

TIC

The hand of the clock quivered forward again:

TOC

The man inside the house now had few precious minutes left. Murder was pushing the iron gate open.

A night light was burning in the hall of the little house. In its dim radiance the hall tree sprawled a gallows shadow on the wall. In the parlor to the right only one shaded lamp was lighted. Pat isn’t home yet, Linton thought. Well, his granddaughter was out with young Detective Allan Walters that evening and she had an important thing to say to him. Perhaps the most important thing a girl her age ever has to say. Young Walters was very much in love with Pat. It was only natural that this evening should be a long one for the two of them.

Linton hung his hat and coat upon the hall tree. Pat, he thought, had never liked the hall tree. She called it ugly, and said he should hang his clothes in the closet at the back of the hall. But that closet was filled to overflowing with his fingerprinting paraphernalia. Mostly, he pampered Pat. He’d let her give the old leather sofa to the Salvation Army, and paint the walls of the parlor French gray, and take down his pictures of Sir Francis Galton and Sir William Herschel and Dr. Henry Faulds and Sergeant William Faurot and other pioneers of fingerprinting and put up pretty colored etchings instead. But the hall tree remained. It had always been there. Pat was all he had left in the way of relatives. His wife had died years before and his only son, Pat’s father, had received the Department’s medal when he was killed in the line of duty.

Of course he still had good friends. Many of them were on the force. And there was old Dab, his best friend of all. J. Dabney Ashton, the Broadway and television actor who spent most of his spare time playing chess and working puzzles. Linton snapped his fingers with annoyance. He must be growing old. He’d forgotten to mail the note to Dab when he went out for his walk. Well, he could call him in the morning instead. You could nearly always catch old Dab in the morning. Dab didn’t like getting up early.

Linton started to enter the parlor, changed his mind, turned back into the hall. He found the house uncomfortably warm. Women always wanted houses too warm, even Pat who was a healthy outdoors girl. Linton glanced at the thermostat and lowered the gauge. He took off his jacket and his vest and hung them on the hall tree beside his coat and hat. He thought he heard an iron gate close. Probably a neighbor’s.

He entered the parlor and turned on more light. The four-by-five cards with fingerprinting symbols drawn on them were scattered over Pat’s new coffee table. On top of them was the note to Dab, addressed and stamped. For a second he thought of going out again to mail the letter. Had he done so he might possibly have saved his life. But the mail had probably already been picked up from the corner box and a call tomorrow would do as well. He rather relished the idea of waking old Dab before his accustomed hour.

I’ll have to clean up this litter before Pat gets home, Linton thought. She’d give me what for if she found it on her brand-new table. He’d sorted out the cards for use in his projection machine the next evening when he was to make a talk before the Women’s Civic Club. Slides were a great help in explaining the elementary aspects of fingerprinting. People were fascinated by fingerprinting symbols, just as old Dab was fascinated by puzzles. Making the public conscious of the science of fingerprinting had been the chief aim of Linton’s life since his retirement from the force. He believed that every citizen of the country should be fingerprinted and that his prints should be classified and filed in a central agency. The advantages of such a scheme were so obvious that Linton had been appalled at the resistance to the idea. Aside from the fact that it might act as a great deterrent to crime, such a system would mean there would be no more unidentified dead, no more unidentified injured, no more unidentified amnesia victims. But liberal elements—“radicals,” Linton called them—had opposed the suggestion on the grounds that it was the first step in a police state. And powerful labor unions, whose bosses had prison records, had got the bill killed in congressional committee.

Linton heard a noise. It was a very small noise, and not at all ominous. It was a rather pleasant, tinkling little noise. He turned toward the French window of the porch. A leaded pane near the window catch had been splintered. A gloved hand was lifting the latch.

Instinctively Linton’s right hand groped toward the left armpit, reached for the gun he had not carried now for years.

The French window opened.

Philip Linton faced his murderer, and recognized him.

“You!” said Linton.

There was no fright in his voice. There was only amazement. He had never thought this man would kill him.

Linton’s mind was very clear, as it had always been in emergencies. He saw that the gun was a .45. He knew that it would make a large hole. He knew the impact of the bullet would knock him off his feet. The murderer was no more than ten feet away. It was virtually impossible that he could miss.

The murderer was quite businesslike. He wasted no time. He did not speak. He simply aimed the gun with a steady hand. He aimed it very carefully.

He’s aiming for the belly, Linton thought. I wonder why? Does he hate me so much? I never knew he did. When the hole is through the belly, it takes a little while to die. You bleed a lot and dying hurts.

He watched the gloved finger squeeze the trigger.

The explosion filled the room. The tremendous noise was followed by an absurdly tiny tinkling sound. The reverberation had knocked one of Pat’s small glass animals off the mantelpiece.

Linton was on the floor, a foot or two from where he had stood when the bullet hit him, before the echo of the shot died. He thought of a time, more than thirty years ago, when he had been a rookie cop walking a beat in Yorkville. There had been a moronic tough called Butter Billy who had delighted in ramming his hard head into the midriffs of policemen. In those days, many officers had bulging stomachs. Linton had been slim, but Butter Billy had given him the treatment just the same. One day he’d come leaping out at Linton from an alley. The impact of the heavy bullet and the jolt of Butter Billy’s head were much the same. There was no real pain at first. Just an empty sense of breathlessness. But the pain would come, he knew, and it would be unbearable.

Before the fog of shock cleared from Linton’s eyes, the murderer was gone. The French window with the broken pane had been closed.

Linton grasped his belly with his left hand. As he expected, there was already a thick flow of blood. He had, perhaps, ten minutes to live and suffer. If he tried to move about, to rise, that brief life expectancy would be cut considerably.

Linton rejoiced that his head seemed quite clear, although the awful pain already had begun. He was contemptuous of the pain. It can’t last long, he thought.

He took stock of his chances. He knew he was going to die, of course. He knew that, and accepted it. But he was still a cop and he had a job to do. There was one more murderer he must convict. There was, of course, some hope that the shot had been heard. In that case the murderer might be seen by a person who would live to identify him. Or someone might rush to his side in time for him to breathe the killer’s name. A neighbor might have heard. Old Groscz, the watchman at the castle, might possibly be making his rounds. Or Bellinger, the cop on the beat, might just be passing by. But he could depend upon none of these fortuitous circumstances. His own house was at the very top of the hill and there was no neighbor to his west. His other neighbors, the Ferrises, were skiing enthusiasts and were at Bear Mountain for the winter sports. Old Groscz was a poor excuse for a watchman at best, and he was usually drunk. And Linton had passed Bellinger, the cop, when he’d gone out for his bedtime walk. The officer would not be back for another hour or so.

Besides, a loud noise was likely to attract little notice on this street. Cars coughed their way up from Broadway to the Drive and the bridge approaches, and they often backfired.

Linton could not delude himself with false hopes. Time was too short. The obvious thing was to write down the murderer’s name. But even as his right hand groped toward his breast, Linton knew that it was hopeless. His fountain pen and his mechanical pencil were in the pocket of his vest, and his vest was hanging on the hall tree. And he would never make the hall. There had been a writing desk in the parlor once, with pen and ink inside it, but when Pat had redecorated the room she had moved that into the hall. The telephone was on the desk. The only thing that he could reach was the coffee table, just above his head. He must use what was at hand. He lay on the floor, grasping his belly, thinking hard, as the pain increased to scalding intensity.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think it can be done.” He thought he spoke aloud, but he could not be sure.

All he had to work with were the cards with the fingerprint symbols drawn on them and the unmailed letter addressed to J. Dabney Ashton. His right hand fumbled for them, pulled them from the table to the floor. As he sorted the cards, sought to examine them, his eyes glazed over and for the first time he knew stark fear. I mustn’t go blind, he thought. I can’t become unconscious until the thing is done.

The mist swam away and the cards came into focus. He shuffled through them, then, oddly, he chuckled. A thought had gone through his mind and it amused him: “The corpse was playing solitaire.” Old Dab would have liked that.

At last he selected a card and laid it face up on the floor. “A plain arch,” he said to himself, giving the symbol on the card a name. “It will do very nicely.” Next he found a card with a simple loop pattern on it and placed it on the floor next to the other. Then he left a space. The space is most important, he thought. I mustn’t forget the space. There were black spots in front of his eyes and he had some trouble in deciding upon the third card. There must be no mistake, he thought. Old Dab has got to understand. He drew out a card on which the designation for a whorl was drawn and laid it down, making sure the space was there between the second and the third cards. “I’ve given him the major patterns now,” he muttered to himself. “The arch, the loop, the whorl. The rest won’t be so easy.”

Now he had to go into the composite patterns. The first he found was the irregular, bastard pattern known as the accidental. It will serve, he thought, and placed it beside the others. He found another composite, a central pocket loop, and looked at it closely for a moment. He cast it aside in favor of a lateral pocket. “Five,” he gasped. The pain had become excruciating beyond belief. Even such simple movements were sheer agony. He needed two more arch patterns. Luckily, he found them together in the pile. He placed an arch of the tented type on the floor, an arch of the exceptional type beside it. He was almost done. Seven cards were on the floor. He counted to make sure. Seven cards, with a space between the second and the third. Now for another loop, marked and tilted in such a manner that it would be distinguished as a radial loop that pointed toward the thumb, not an ulnar loop that pointed toward the little finger. At first he had a hard time making his eyes and his mind select between the two cards, the one with the ulnar loop and the one with the radial. At last he was sure and he chose the card with a hand that was trembling almost beyond control. One more card, the ninth and the most difficult. He had found eight cards that he could use among the set that showed fingerprint patterns. Now he must look elsewhere.

He riffled through the cards that demonstrated the five characteristics of fingerprints. Characteristics were unlike the patterns, in that they were used for identification rather than classification. He had explained that often in his lectures. The five cards showed the designs of each characteristic: the dot, the ridge ending, the bifurcation, the enclosure, and the ridge fragment. Old Dab knew a little about fingerprinting. Linton himself had taught him the elements of the science. But switching from the patterns to the characteristics on the very last card might confuse him. He had to take that chance. There was nothing else to do. He took the card with a curving, snaky design representing the ridge fragment and laid it beside the others. It was complete. Nine cards were on the floor, arranged in proper order. There was nothing left to do except direct old Dab’s attention to the cards. Linton’s last act was to set the addressed letter against the leg of the coffee table beside the cards.

Just before his eyes finally clouded, Linton looked at the array of nine cards:

They were arranged correctly. Old Dab would puzzle it out.

Philip Linton, whose testimony had helped convict nineteen murderers, died in the belief that the mute testimony on the floor beside him would convict a twentieth.

He was a good cop to the very end.