Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 10, No. 48, November 1947

Fingerprints Don’t Lie by Stuart Palmer

About the author: Stuart Palmer, creator of Hildegarde Withers, has been an iceman, supercargo, publicity man, newspaper reporter, special feature writer, apple-picker, advertising copy writer, taxi driver, literary ghost, poet, editor, and Hollywood script writer — and all his varied vocations and avocations have exerted strong influences on his work. He was born in the little town of Baraboo on June 21, 1905, the youngest son of Jay Sherman Palmer, a prominent Wisconsin fruit grower; Baraboo is otherwise famous as the birthplace of two circuses, Ringling Brothers and Gollmar’s. He was educated at local schools, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin. One year he was awarded the Lewis Prize for the best prose composition and with this feather in his cap, he left the University without a degree to become supercargo aboard the Alaska Steamship Company’s “Victoria,” which brought back Amundsen and Ellsworth after their flight over the Pole in the “Norge.” A long series of different jobs prepared him for the typewriting trade, but it is interesting to note that he was dismissed as a publicity writer for Samuel Insull, the public utility magnate, for daring to contribute to “The American Mercury,” and that he replaced Thorne Smith, the creator of Topper, as the chief copy writer for the advertising agency of Doremus & Company. Mr. Palmer’s chief hobby is collecting statuettes of penguins — his collection is second only to that of Roland Young, the movie actor. Stu (as most of his friends call him) is six-feet-two, owns one of the readiest smiles this side of paradise, and can read faster than anyone except the late Theodore Roosevelt. His first Hildegarde Withers novel in six years was published in May 1947 as the Crime Club Selection of the Month — it is called MISS WITHERS REGRETS: and in case you missed it (which would be a pity) we published his first book of Hildy short stories in February 1947 under the title THE RIDDLES OF HILDEGARDE WITHERS. As one of the great female detectives of fiction, Hildegarde Withers will not perish from the earth...

The trap — though the policemen who were setting it would have called it a “stake-out” — was set around noon. It was a little before two in the afternoon when a soft knock came at the front door of the little adobe cottage, and then another.

Before either of the two detectives could make up his mind about answering, the knob started to turn — hopefully but without result. Then there was the sound of footsteps scrunching around through the bedraggled little cactus garden to the rear of the place.

Young Rankin snorted. “This is going to be good!” He was a beefy man who bulged his blue serge, and he had a way of speaking faster than he thought. “It says in the book—”

Detective Tom Macy had been on the Las Vegas force for twenty-one years, and for his money nothing was any good except keeping out of trouble, getting off duty, and going home for supper. “All right, all right. So it says in the book they always return to the scene of the crime. Relax, eager-beaver.”

Yet he too was alert, his gnarled red hand hovering near his holster, as there came the soft sound of scratching at the lock of the kitchen door. He caught Rankin’s arm and drew him into the hall closet. They listened as the kitchen door opened and closed. There was the creak of light, cautious steps on the linoleum, then tinware rattled and cupboard doors opened. After a while the footsteps came past the breakfast nook and into the living room, and then stopped.

“Now!” Macy said, and they pounced. Rankin had his lead-heavy sap in the air, and narrowly managed to bring it down without damaging their prisoner, who turned out to be an angular spinster of uncertain years. She had no other weapon than her tongue, and needed none.

“I am Miss Hildegarde Withers!” she announced. “Take your big clumsy hands off me at once! What if I did enter this place? I have as much right in this cottage as you have, and perhaps more.”

Rankin said that they would see about that. But Macy elbowed him firmly aside. “Lady, we’re listening. But give it straight. We’re Las Vegas police.”

“In that case,” Miss Withers said acidly, “I shall try to speak clearly and in words of one syllable. I am here, having interrupted a train journey from New York to Los Angeles, because a girl named Eileen Travis is supposed to be living here. For more than five weeks she has been establishing residence for a Nevada divorce. Her family back East has considerable influence with the powers that be, and they called on the New York police at Centre Street. You see, they were very worried about her—”

“Oh, so you claim to be a policewoman?” Rankin cut in.

“Nothing of the kind. My I.Q. is much too high, for one thing. I am a schoolteacher. But once in a while I fall heir to problems which are too far off the beaten track for Centre Street to bother with. Some friends of mine at Headquarters knew that I was en route to California for a vacation, so after Eileen’s mother put the pressure on, she was told to telegraph me, and—”

Macy cleared his throat noisily. “Just why was the girl’s mother worried about her?”

“I don’t quite know. It was about some threats that George Travis, the girl’s husband, was supposed to have made. The King’s County Grand Jury recently indicted him for violation of OPA rules — some sort of Black Market practices — and he felt that his wife was rushing through the divorce so that she would be able legally to testify against him at his forthcoming trial. On top of that, Eileen’s mother phoned her long distance last week, and the girl acted strangely — she refused to talk.” Miss Withers sniffed again. “Now you know as much as I do. By the way, where is the body?”

“Ah, ha!” cried Rankin jubilantly. “How’d you know about that?”

“I didn’t, until you told me. But I suspected it. There’s an odor of perfume, stale alcohol, tobacco, and cordite in this room. Besides, why should there be two detectives lurking in the house?”

Macy sighed, and indicated the bedroom door. “She’s in there. Around midnight last night, close as we can figure, somebody let her have it with a shotgun, right smack in her pretty face. We’re waiting for the ambulance now — only two in town, and both pretty busy.” He gestured. “Sorry, but you’ll have to come down to the station.

“Illegal, but to be expected. Meanwhile, of course, the real murderer is making tracks out of town. Never fear, I shall go quietly.”

“I wish!” Rankin muttered fervently.

“But first,” insisted the schoolteacher, “I think I ought to look at the body. Or has it been identified?”

Macy hesitated, and then said “Come on.”

In the bedroom there was the grotesquely pitiful remains of a plump, tanned girl in a black negligee, sprawled all akimbo on a white goatskin rug. A lightweight shotgun lay nearby.

“That her?” Macy demanded. “I mean as far as you can tell, without any face.”

Miss Withers knelt over the body. “New nylons. Shoes from I. Miller, New York. Negligee from Altman’s — the expensive kind that you can draw through a ring. And speaking of rings—”

“We want to know, is that her or isn’t it?” Rankin cut in.

“She must have been pretty,” Miss Withers said. “Once.”

Rankin sighed. “Sure musta. Don’t see a figure like that once in a coon’s age, even in this town.”

“He’s an expert,” Macy said dryly. “These bachelors! Sure you never were out with her, Rank?”

“No such luck.” Rankin was oddly blushing. “Well, ma’am?”

“I don’t know if it’s Eileen Travis or not,” the schoolteacher admitted. “I never saw the girl. I just wanted to find out if there were any clues you’d missed.”

Rankin looked angry, but Macy almost laughed. “And were there?”

“Only that her ring is missing.” Miss Withers pointed to the narrow pale line around the ring-finger of the dead girl’s left hand.

“Pretty sharp,” Macy said. “Only there was a ring there when we found her. This one.” From his pocket he produced a heavy white-gold wedding ring. “It says ‘From G T to E H Jan 20 ’44’.”

“From George Travis to Eileen Hampton,” Miss Withers said. “He gave himself top-billing, as they used to say in vaudeville. That tells us something about George, does it not?”

“You mean because he put his own initials first?” Macy looked at her with a new respect.

“Uh hmmm.” The schoolteacher had opened the closet door and was looking at the rows of expensive clothes, the big leather bag of golf clubs — everything well cared-for and expensive.

“Nothing in here,” Macy said, “but the shotgun. And that’s just an ordinary 16-gauge, not new, not old.”

“Everybody around here has one,” Rankin put in. “We use ’em for shooting doves and prairie jacks. Jack-rabbits, that is.”

They went back into the living room, and Macy showed Miss Withers the bottle of Scotch, part-full, which had been found on the coffee table, beside two glasses. There was also an ashtray with some cigarette butts and ashes, and a half-smoked perfecto, unchewed and still bearing the band decorated with the head and plump bust of a senorita.

“A fifty-center,” Rankin said. “Boy, could I go for a box of those!”

“We figure,” Macy explained, “that the girl had a caller. She gave him a drink—”

“The cigar means it was a man. A man she knew, or she wouldn’t have had a drink with him dressed in that flimsy nightie,” Rankin said.

“Yeh? Some of the tomatoes you run around with on your off time would—” Macy gestured broadly. “Sorry, ma’am. Anyway, we figure that this visitor puffs on his cigar and drinks his drink and then—”

“And then he pulls the shotgun out of his vest pocket and shoots his hostess smack in the face, is that it?” Miss Withers sniffed very dubiously. “Obliging of him to leave fingerprints. By the way, you’re welcome to take mine, although I don’t drink, smoke cigars, or shoot shotguns.”

Rankin guffawed. “Oh, they’re not women’s prints. Mostly just fragments, but we got a complete thumbprint on one of the glasses, and it was a big one, even for a man. Too bad that dame’s husband is in jail back East, or this would be duck soup.”

“A man with Black Market connections,” pointed out Miss Withers, “could arrange to have someone commit murder for him.”

Macy shrugged. “Well, ma’am, we’ll look into all that at the proper time. Let’s go downtown.” He led the way out through the back door, then stopped short. “What were you doing here in the kitchen when you came in?” he demanded.

“Looking for clues. You can tell a lot about a person by her garbage can, and her shelves. Notice the ham, and biscuit dough, and cans of black-eyed peas? A hearty eater, that girl. And if you’ll look in her garbage—”

“I don’t see any sense in pawing through old orange rinds and coffee grounds,” Macy protested.

“That’s the point. There weren’t—”

But he hurried her along to the battered sedan which had been parked in the alley. Macy drove around to the front and down the street, while Officer Rankin looked after them wistfully from a front window. “Guess this is the first time Rankin’s been squeamish about being left alone with a blonde,” Macy said as they drove.

The schoolteacher was staring back toward the lonely cottage. “If I were you I shouldn’t worry to much about his solitude,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I just saw a man step out from behind a billboard across the street heading for the cottage.”

Macy drove on automatically for half a block, and then made a quick U-turn which bumped Miss Withers severely against the door. They roared up the street again, brakes screeching as they stopped. “If you’re playing tricks—” Macy warned.

But then he saw the cottage door open. They hurried in, Miss Withers no more than three feet behind, and found Rankin rolling on the floor in an undignified but very realistic wrestling match. His opponent turned out to be a pale, unshaven gentleman of about thirty, dressed in a neat, dark, pin-stripe suit which had mopped up a great deal of dust from Eileen Travis’s floor.

Seeing that the odds were now three to one against him, he stopped wrestling. But he wasn’t talking.

“I do believe it’s Mr. George Travis!” Miss Withers exclaimed. And as they all stared at her, she continued: “Elementary. The pallor of his face is the typical night-club tan of Manhattan. The clothing suggests Brooks Brothers. Besides, if you will notice the signet ring on his finger, you’ll see the initials ‘G T’.”

The stranger didn’t deny it. “I want to see my wife... alone. That’s why I waited until I thought you’d gone. Where’s Eileen?”

“In here,” Macy said softly, and showed him. “This is just the way the cleaning woman found her this morning. Not pretty, huh?”

Travis came out of the bedroom looking pale around the gills. “I... I flew out here to see her,” he admitted. “I walked in and this hot-head jumped me. I didn’t know she was dead.”

“You know it now,” Macy said. “Let’s go. All of us.”

“You’re not going to leave her alone like that?” Travis protested.

“She won’t mind,” Rankin told him. “You worry about yourself.”

The house was locked up tight, with a note on the door to the coroner which read “Back in twenty minutes” and they all rode downtown in the police car. Nobody did any talking, although Miss Withers wished that she could be alone with Travis for a moment. He looked like a sulky schoolboy, and she knew how to handle them. Once at the station a mousy but excited little secretary was called in to take down his statement that he had just got off the Los Angeles plane, that he had come out here in an effort to get his wife to postpone the divorce until after his trial, and that he knew nothing about her murder.

“I risked forfeiting my bond just to talk to her,” he went on. “Not that it would have done much good. She was bitter because I made her sell most of her jewels to raise cash so I could hang on to my property. She figured this was her chance to get even. Eileen had a rotten temper — no maid ever stayed with her more than a month, and she even went after one of them with a riding crop.”

“Okay, okay,” Macy said. “We’re holding you. Not for murder, not yet. But if you’re wanted in New York—” They took him away.

Miss Withers confidently expected the same fate, but the officers only took her fingerprints, made a few notes, and let her go. “Don’t leave town, though,” Rankin warned her.

Macy smiled. “Try the Mesa — it’s a pretty fair hotel.”

Miss Withers nodded, and went to La Mesa. In a little corner room, ornamented with a spittoon and a reproduction of The End of the Trail showing a dejected redskin on a more dejected cayuse, she sat herself down and thought her own thoughts. Finally there came a knock at the door.

She opened it, facing a slick-haired young man who introduced himself as “Larry Koontz — I work down at the Wheel of Fortune.” Miss Withers told him that she had not come to town to gamble—

The young man winked at her, lighted a cigarette, and said that he knew very well why she had come to town. “You’re out here on this Travis case,” he said. “You represent her family—”

“Do I?”

“Sure, I know. I got connections. You want to know the real lowdown?”

“Curiosity,” admitted Miss Withers, “is my besetting sin.”

“Huh? Well, anyway, I got the dope. I met Eileen down at the place I work. I’m a sort of shill — that means I play the dice games with the house money whenever there’s a lull at the table. I can tell you all you want to know—” here he licked his thin lips — “if I get mine. I figure two grand would be about right.”

Miss Withers had to admit that she was not in a position to lay any such honorarium on the line. He smiled. “You could get it from her folks, couldn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to have some idea—”

Mr. Koontz pondered. Then he opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the telephone interrupted. The schoolteacher answered it, to hear the voice of the desk clerk. “Two gentlemen to see you.”

“Sorry, but I’m busy at the moment,” she said.

“They’re on their way up. It’s the police.”

“Police? But—”

Miss Withers heard the door close, and when she looked around Mr. Koontz had disappeared. She had barely time to adjust her hair and assume an innocent expression, when Detectives Macy and Rankin came into the room. They looked grimly unpleasant. “Now don’t tell me you found that my fingerprints matched those on the murder gun!”

They didn’t tell her anything. “We want to know why you got into town yesterday and only went out to the Travis girl’s apartment this afternoon,” Rankin demanded.

“Very simple. I hadn’t her address, only the phone number. It took some time to get any information out of the telephone company.” She sniffed. “If you gentlemen would turn your suspicions upon Mr. George Travis — after all, he could have committed the murder last night, driven back to Los Angeles, and then flown in on the first plane this morning.”

“We thought of that,” Macy said wearily.

“But his prints didn’t match the ones on the gun and glasses,” Rankin finished.

“Fingerprints!” retorted Miss Withers scornfully. “Police put so much faith in technicalities like that that they forget to study motives and personalities. Not to speak of wedding rings.”

They both stared at her. “Come, come!” Miss Withers chided, “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice that the ring you took from the dead girl’s finger was too wide for the mark it was supposed to have left!”

“Go on,” Macy said.

“You might start wondering why somebody took a narrow wedding ring off Eileen’s finger and put on a wide one,” the schoolteacher snapped. “In my opinion the girl wasn’t wearing her own wedding ring while she was here waiting for her divorce. Or else—” Here she stopped short. “If it’s not asking too much, could you tell me whether or not you’ve officially announced the murder of Eileen Travis?”

They shook their heads.

“Then,” continued Miss Withers, “I suggest that you don’t. Give out the story that the body has tentatively been identified as somebody else — any girl on your list of missing persons. You can always issue a corrected statement later.”

Macy nodded. “So the killer will think he got the wrong girl maybe?”

Miss Withers smiled. “Sometimes it helps to toss a monkey wrench into the machinery.”

“Could be, if Sheriff Kehoe will go for the idea.” Macy seemed friendlier now. “You know, ma’am, we phoned New York about you, and they said at Centre Street that once in a while you made a lucky guess.”

“Bless Inspector Piper’s black Irish heart,” murmured Miss Withers. Then she shrugged. “Well, here’s another guess. Do you know a man named Larry Koontz, who is a shill at the Wheel of Fortune?”

Macy frowned and shook his head, but Rankin brightened. “Sure we do, Tom. That’s Molly’s husband — the girl who works in the sheriff’s office. They busted up over some dame, and she’s been crying her eyes out.”

“Really? Things like that make me resigned to my state of single blessedness. Do you know where Mr. Koontz lives?”

They didn’t, but said that they could easily find out. “We’ll give you a ring,” Macy promised.

Alone again, Miss Withers went down to dinner, came back again, and finally was in the midst of giving her hair its requisite hundred strokes preparatory for bed when the call came.

“Hello? Hello, Detective Rankin? Well, did you find Mr. Koontz’s address?”

“Why, yes, ma’am, we did.” There was an unpleasant overtone in the voice of Detective Rankin. “He was living out at the Iris Apartments. But he moved — a few minutes ago. Or rather, they moved him. Over to Callahan’s Mortuary.”

“What?”

“Acting on your tip, Macy and I went out there. The door was open, the lights were all on, and there was Koontz in the kitchenette with an ice-pick between his shoulder blades.”

There was a moment of silence. “Oh, dear!” said Miss Withers.

“Oh dear is right. You can say the rest at the station. We’re downstairs, so get a move on.”

Miss Withers moved, getting into her dress again and taking two aspirins, fancying that this might be a hectic night. Neither Macy nor Rankin had much to say on the way to the station. “It seems odd to me that none of the neighbors heard or noticed anything,” the schoolteacher finally offered.

“Lady, nobody in this town is ever home between ten o’clock and two or three in the morning. The visitors are playing, and the natives are working in the joints.” Rankin pulled the car up outside police headquarters. In spite of all the haste Miss Withers found herself cooling her heels in a shabby outer office for some time.

At last the inner door opened and she was beckoned inside, where she faced Detectives Macy and Rankin, a beak-nosed sexagenarian with a sheriff’s star pinned to the front of his Stetson, and a thin, freckled woman with red eyes whom she recognized as the one who had transcribed her statement earlier that day. “This is Molly Koontz,” the sheriff said. “Ma’am, suppose you tell us why you were so interested in her late husband just before he got stabbed.”

“Gladly,” answered the schoolteacher, “If you’ll answer a question for me, or have Mrs. Koontz answer it.” Taking silence for consent, she told of her brief meeting with the shill who worked at the Wheel of Fortune, and who had had so little good fortune himself. “He knew the answer to all this, or he thought he did,” she concluded.

The sheriff nodded noncomittally. “Now,” said Miss Withers, “it’s my turn. Forgive me, Mrs. Koontz, for prying into your family troubles but I understand that you and your husband separated over another girl.”

“Girl! You mean girls. Larry played the field.”

“Was one of those women Eileen Travis?”

Molly Koontz shrugged. “I dunno. We broke up a couple of months ago. Only we stayed in touch, sort of. Larry used to take me to dinner now and then, or borrow a few dollars when he got to gambling.”

“Well, can you name any girl he was interested in?”

“No — only there was one little number who kept phoning him — one of those southern girls who say ‘honey-chile’ and ’lil ol’ me’. Her name was Thelma something.”

“Thelma Pringle,” Detective Rankin put in. “She’s on our Missing Persons list.”

“Maybe,” Molly said. “I can tell you one thing. Any girl Larry went for was on the zoftig side — you know, plump. And well-dressed. Larry went for the dressy ones.”

Sheriff Kehoe yawned and stood up, signaling that the session was concluded. “By the way,” pressed Miss Withers, “did anyone happen to check Koontz’s fingerprints with those on the murder gun?”

“We did,” Macy said. “And they weren’t. But the prints on the icepick matched the prints on the shotgun and glasses.”

“Of course!” Miss Withers cried. “Then—” But the sheriff gestured, and she found herself propelled toward the door by Macy.

“Thanks for trying to help,” he said, as he led her down the hall, unlocking the door of another office. “You better spend the night here. That couch in the corner isn’t too bad.”

“But you can’t—”

“Lady, whenever a cop hears anybody say anything about ‘you can’t do this to me!’ he just laughs. Now take it easy. Maybe you’ll go to sleep and dream up a solution to this case.” He started out, then came back to remove a spare .38 pistol and a pair of handcuffs from the desk drawer. He indicated the door of the washroom, and went out, locking the door firmly from the outside.

Miss Hildegarde Withers sat herself down indignantly upon the rickety couch, and then caught sight of the telephone on the desk. She lifted the receiver and said, “I want to call New York City, collect!”

But the operator, stationed at a switchboard somewhere in the building, said genially but firmly, “Take it easy, ma’am. Tomorrow is another day.”

“Really!” Miss Withers slammed down the phone. Leaving the harsh overhead light burning, she flung herself down on the couch, closing her eyes in order to concentrate better.

In her mind’s eye she saw the partially-smoked cigar which had left no ashes in the tray, the thin white line around the dead girl’s finger. She saw the two whiskey-stained glasses, the Scotch bottle, the shotgun, the icepick planted between the dapper shoulders of the man who thought he knew two thousand dollars worth about the crime. But these clues kept mixing themselves up with other things that didn’t matter, like the dead cactus around the adobe cottage, the black-eyed peas in the kitchen, the garbage can without any orange rinds, the golf clubs with the heads in their neat socks, the nylon hose, and the wedding ring...

Then she jerked awake at the sound of rapping at the door. She realized that she had a stiff neck and that daylight surprisingly filled the room. But the puzzle was all neatly solved. She knew the name of the murderer — and why. It was as easy as that. She was smiling pleasantly when she opened the door to Detective Macy.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” he said. “After you get fixed up a little, could you join us in the sheriff’s office, please? Somebody we want you to meet.” He waited patiently while Miss Withers washed her face and did what she could to straighten her hair. Then he led the way down the hall.

“When did the Travis woman give herself up?” the schoolteacher asked.

Macy stopped dead in his tracks. “How’d you know that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It was clear from the beginning that it was not her body in the bedroom, in spite of the New York clothes. The girl who lived in that cottage had stocked the kitchen with the makings of meals preferred south of the Mason-Dixon line. New Yorkers breakfast on coffee and orange juice, and there was no sign of an orange or an orange peel in the place.”

Macy nodded. “I get it. Well, Eileen Travis read about the murder in the Los Angeles papers last night, and she hopped in her car and drove up here. She confessed—”

“Not to the murders?”

Macy laughed jovially. “No, ma’am. But here we are. Come in.”

Sheriff Kehoe still sat at his desk, with his Stetson on the back of his head. Officer Rankin leaned against the window, and in the one comfortable chair sat a lovely, lush girl in a bright purple jacket and flannel slacks.

“Mrs. Travis,” said the sheriff, half-arising, “this is the lady your mother hired to look you up and see if you were all right.”

Eileen said coolly, “You may tell mother that I’m fine.”

“Are you?” asked Miss Hildegarde Withers. “I wonder.”

“We’re sorry, Miss Withers, that we had to keep you here all night,” the sheriff went on. “But we didn’t want any more killings, and the New York police asked us to take special care of you.”

“Thank you so much. And now, what is all this about Mrs. Travis’s confession?” Miss Withers beamed brightly at them all.

“I simply admitted,” Eileen burst forth, “that I’d taken a cottage here to establish legal residence, and then hired a girl I met in a gambling house to live there in my name.”

“A girl with a southern accent, named Thelma Pringle?”

Eileen nodded. “I knew it wasn’t strictly legal, but I didn’t want to be stuck here when I could be in Los Angeles. And besides, I had good reason to believe that George would stop at nothing to keep me from getting my decree — to keep me from being able to testify against him legally later on.”

“You said ‘stuck here’?” questioned the sheriff ominously.

“I didn’t mean that.” Eileen flashed her soft dark eyes at him. “It’s just that I don’t gamble, and I love ocean swimming...”

“We got pools,” the sheriff said glumly. He looked at Detective Macy. “Better get George Travis up here, right away.”

Eileen was open-mouthed. “You mean my husband is actually in town? Then that proves—”

Sheriff Kehoe wasn’t listening to her. “And ask Molly to come in with her notebook,” he called after the departing detective. There was a long, tense period of waiting, during which Miss Withers saw that Officer Rankin was having difficulty in keeping his eyes off Eileen’s slim, bare, brown ankles.

Finally George Travis, even more disheveled and unshaven than before, was ushered into the room. He glared at his wife.

“Hello, George,” she said, in a low voice that dripped with acid. “Isn’t it a shame that your hired hoodlum shot the wrong girl?”

Travis said nothing, but sank down quickly on a hard chair, his head in his hands. A moment later Detective Macy came in with Molly, who was still puffy-eyed. But she had her pencil and notebook.

“Now that we are all here, nice and cosy-like,” began the sheriff, “we’ll start at the beginning and see if we can straighten this out.”

“I suggest,” Miss Withers interrupted pleasantly but firmly, “that we start at the end instead. It will save a lot of time. You see, I know who the murderer is.”

She met their blank stares with a bright smile. “It all came to me when I was asleep.”

“Dreams, yet!” Detective Rankin muttered softly.

But the schoolteacher had the floor. “It’s obvious that Mr. Koontz was killed to cover up the first murder, so when we solve the killing of Thelma Pringle we solve them both. Shall we take up the most important clue — the cigar?”

Rankin moved as if to silence her, but Detective Macy was nodding slowly, and the sheriff made no move. “The cigar,” went on Miss Withers, “was obviously a plant. It was left as a false clue, having been smoked beforehand. Moreover, the killer was not used to cigars, for he forgot to remove the band and he held it in his lips, like a cigarette, leaving no teeth marks as real cigar smokers do. I’ve watched Inspector Piper, back home, mangle a cigar so that I didn’t know if he was chewing or smoking it.”

The sheriff nodded, looking at his own well-filled ashtray. “Moreover,” Miss Withers continued, “Thelma Pringle was not killed by mistake, in place of Eileen here. She was killed by somebody who knew her and who wanted her dead. She was shot in the face with a shotgun, either by someone who wanted to spoil her looks or who wanted to prevent identification, at least temporarily—”

There was a brief period of silence, broken when Molly Koontz dropped her pencil and had to grope for it on the floor.

“Now look here,” the sheriff said, “you’re trying to tell us that the killer walked in with a shotgun, had a drink with the girl, and then—”

“The drinks could have been set up afterward,” Miss Withers pointed out. “There was a distinct reek of whiskey in the garbage.”

“But the girl would have yelled for help if she saw somebody come at her with a shotgun,” Detective Rankin put in.

“Who would have heard her? The murder was committed at an hour when almost everybody in Las Vegas is away from home. I have my own theory as to how the gun came into the house. It could have been butt-down in a golf bag, with a golf-club stocking over the muzzle. But never mind that for a moment. The point is — the murderer of Thelma Pringle was a woman!”

“A woman who left a man’s full-size fingerprints?” Rankin argued.

“Some women have large hands.” Miss Withers looked at Molly Koontz, who had forgotten to take notes. The woman suddenly jumped to her feet.

“I didn’t do it, I didn’t! You can take my prints—”

“Relax, Molly,” the sheriff said. “We already got ’em off the compact in your desk, and you didn’t do it.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that she did,” Miss Withers said, “even though her husband had been mixed up with Thelma Pringle. However, I think that they got the idea of blackmail separately. You see, the murder was well planned — designed to throw an even heavier weight of guilt on George Travis. The killer did not know that Travis was out on bond, but she did know that if a body identified as that of his wife was found in Las Vegas, he would be suspected of having instigated the murder. Even if the identity of the corpse came to light, it would still appear that his agents had merely struck down the wrong woman. Only one person had a motive to involve George Travis in more trouble than he was already in — and that person came into the cottage with a shotgun and killed the girl who was trying to blackmail her, thus killing two birds with one stone.”

“Very neat,” the sheriff said. “But it you’re—”

“I certainly am,” Miss Withers cried breathlessly. “Eileen Travis, I accuse you of a double murder.”

It should have been a rousing climax, but it fell flat as a pancake. Eileen was shaking her head, almost pityingly. Macy’s expression was sorrowful, and Rankin was almost laughing. The sheriff smiled a weary, patient smile. “All done, ma’am?”

“Isn’t... isn’t that enough?”

“Plenty. Very ingenious, too. Only I think that you ought to know, ma’am, that when she came in Mr. Travis insisted we take her fingerprints, and they don’t match the ones on the gun, glasses, or ice-pick!”

Miss Withers felt slightly faint. “But they have to!”

“Officer Rankin here is our fingerprint expert,” the sheriff said. “He’s read all the books.”

Rankin beamed.

“But there must be some mistake!” cried Miss Withers.

“There is, and you’ve made it.” The sheriff looked at a big silver watch the size of a teacup. “Miss Withers, there’s a plane out of here at nine o’clock, which gives you just half an hour. Macy you see that she gets packed and on that plane and out of my hair!”

Sheriff Kehoe was standing up now, his voice rising to a deep baritone roar. Miss Withers, the bitter taste of defeat in her mouth, backed hastily out of the door.

There was a long silence. The sheriff sat down again, lighted a cigar, and mopped his forehead. “Now, like I said, we’ll start at the beginning, and see if we can straighten this out. You first, Mrs. Travis. We’ll take your statement, and Molly will type it out so you can sign it and go.”

Eileen spoke carefully and slowly, for some time. Her statement was in the typewriter when the telephone on the sheriff’s desk rang shrilly. He picked it up. “Kehoe. What? Oh, Macy. What’s the matter, did you let her miss the plane?”

There was a short pause, and then the sheriff heaved a deep sigh of relief. “Good, good. I’m glad you reported — it’s a load off my mind.” He started to hang up, and then jammed the instrument against his ear “What? What final request?”

The others in the room all strained their ears, but they could hear only a jumble of sounds from the other end of the line. At last the sheriff put down the phone, and said, “Rankin!”

“Yes, sheriff?”

“You’re supposed to be our fingerprint expert. This case is at a dead end because we can’t find any suspect whose prints fit those on the murder weapons and the drinking glass. Tell me, is there any way a person could deliberately leave false prints?”

The burly young detective swallowed. “There... there’s a photographic process on gelatin, but it’s easy to detect because it doesn’t leave pore marks...”

But the sheriff wasn’t listening. He turned slowly toward Eileen Travis, who still leaned back in the one easy chair, her bare brown ankles crossed, a cigarette dangling from her full lush mouth. She stared back at him, letting the ashes fall to the floor.

“Mrs. Travis,” he asked with ceremonious politeness, “would you mind very much if I asked you to take off your shoes?”

She opened her mouth, but no words came.

“It’s been suggested by the lady who just left,” continued Sheriff Kehoe, “that fingers are not the only portions of the human body that have distinctive skin patterns. With your permission — or without it — we’d like to take your toeprints!”

About the story: Your Editor’s first reaction on finishing Stuart Palmer’s “Fingerprints Don’t Lie” was one of sheer disbelief. If a criminal leaves impressions of her toes on a shotgun, an ice-pick, and a drinking glass, is it possible that the police, trained observers, would assume the prints to be fingerprints? — big ones, even for a man. We sat and thought about it, and the more we stewed in the juice of our own thoughts, the more incredible it seemed. Yet we realized that the entire validity of the story stood or fell on this vital point.

Being realistic, and blessed with a passionate curiosity, we took off one of our shoes and socks and tried to examine the underparts of our own toes. Not being a contortionist, the results of our investigation were inconclusive. So we decided to send out an S.O.S. (Save Our Story): we telephoned the one person in whose expert knowledge of practical police procedure we have complete confidence — the dean of true crime writers, Ed Radin, whose latest book is TWELVE AGAINST THE LAW and who is currently doing a weekly series for King Features Syndicate called “Secrets from the Archives of Crime.”

We posed the problem to Ed.

Ed said: Boy, that’s hard to swallow.

We said: Well, here’s your golden opportunity. You beep preaching that truth is stranger than fiction. Is it? Can the print of a toe be mistaken for an unusually large print of a thumb?

We could feel Ed scratching his head: I don’t know. Wait a minute—

We interrupted: Don’t look at your own toe — we’ve already tried that. How about checking with the police lab?

Ed said: I’ll do that little thing.

And what do you know? It could!

Yes, unbelievable as it may seem at first shock, a toeprint looks exactly like a large finger- or thumbprint. A toeprint has all the proper characteristics — pattern, ridges, whorls.

Your Editor goes on record here and now that never again will we be skeptical: truth is stranger than fiction — that’s why fiction only seems stranger than truth. And all detective-story writers and detective-story readers should doff their collective hats to Stuart Palmer for thinking up a factually accurate and brand-new wrinkle on the old fingerprint chestnut — a neoclassic clue, and “one for the books”...