“How many cards do you see on the floor?” asked Haas. Dab pretended to count. “Nine,” he answered.
“How many fingers do most people have?” asked Haas.
“Ten, of course,” said Dab.
“You see a space between the cards?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Between the second and third cards.”
“Assuming that a fingerprint man arranged those cards, he would begin with the right hand. So the card for what finger would be missing?”
“The middle finger of the right hand,” Dab answered miserably.
“Exactly,” said Haas. “In fingerprinting that missing card would be called an amp. Meaning an amputation, of course. What we have are cards that point out a nine-fingered man, a man with the middle finger of his right hand amputated. Do you know such a man, Mr. Dab?”
Dab wiped his brow with a linen handkerchief. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, of course I do.”
“And his name?”
“Abner Ellison,” said Dab. “He lost the middle finger of his right hand in the war.”
“See what I mean about a deathbed statement, honey boy?” asked Romano.
“Convinced, Mr. Dab?” the inspector asked. “We’re lucky in a way. Most of us were Phil Linton’s friends. Had been for years. We’d visited his house, knew his family well. That’s why he was able to leave evidence he was sure we’d understand. That’s why we’ve been able to clear this thing up in a matter of minutes insteads of days or weeks.”
“We’ve still got to find the girl,” Romano reminded him. “Finding the girl’s what counts. We can’t save Linton now, but we can save the girl—maybe.”
“We’ll find her.” The old inspector wagged his big head. “When we find Ellison we’ll find the girl and pray to the Almighty that she’s still alive. Questioning suspects is supposed to be a lot of psychological rot, these days. But me, I’m an old-time cop. Just find Ellison and leave me alone with him in a locked room.” The inspector held out his two enormous, hair-spiked hands. “When I get these meat-hooks of mine on him, he’ll talk.”
Oh, God, thought Dab, they’re talking about my boy. Yes, he was my boy, almost as much as he was Phil’s. I remember when they first brought him here. He was such a little fellow with such big eyes and so much terror in them. We used to walk together then when I came up here, and sometimes when we were coming up the hill he’d put his hand in mine. Phil used to laugh at us. “Dab and Ab,” he’d say. “You remind me of Mike and Ike, They Look Alike.” We’d sit out on the front steps in the summer and I’d make up stories for him about the Mad Hatter’s Castle and the beautiful princess in the tower. Was it his tenth birthday or his eleventh that I gave him the baseball uniform and the Louisville Slugger bat? He always had a front-row seat for the Wednesday matinée when I was in a play, and I’d look down and wink at him. Then there was the first night of the Lonsdale play, he was about sixteen then, and he wore his first tuxedo, the one charged to my account at Brooks Brothers, and Pat was beside him, no more than a child of twelve wearing a frilly dress, and Allan Walters, wearing his first tux, too, and looking scrawny and all Adam’s apple. And then the news from the War Department when Rundstedt struck back in the Ardennes and we didn’t know if he’d lost a leg or an arm or his eyes and how relieved we were when we found it was only a finger.
Only a finger!
A damnable, obscene, amputated finger that points to him and calls him “Murderer!”
Dab thought a long while before he spoke. He had to read these lines right. He couldn’t afford to muff them. These were the most important lines he’d ever read and he’d been an actor nearly forty years.
Dab 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,”