The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Slippery Fingers

Originally published under the pseudonym Peter Collinson

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, 15 October 1923

“You are already familiar, of course, with the particulars of my father’s — ah — death?”

“The papers are full of it, and have been for three days,” I said, “and I’ve read them; but I’ll have to have the whole story first-hand.”

“There isn’t very much to tell.”

This Frederick Grover was a short, slender man of something under thirty years, and dressed like a picture out of Vanity Fair. His almost girlish features and voice did nothing to make him more impressive, but I began to forget these things after a few minutes. He wasn’t a sap. I knew that downtown, where he was rapidly building up a large and lively business in stocks and bonds without calling for too much help from his father’s millions, he was considered a shrewd article; and I wasn’t surprised later when Benny Forman, who ought to know, told me that Frederick Grover was the best poker player west of Chicago. He was a cool, well-balanced, quick-thinking little man.

“Father has lived here alone with the servants since mother’s death, two years ago,” he went on. “I am married, you know, and live in town. Last Saturday evening he dismissed Barton — Barton was his butler-valet, and had been with father for quite a few years — at a little after nine, saying that he did not want to be disturbed during the evening.

“Father was here in the library at the time, looking through some papers. The servants’ rooms are in the rear, and none of the servants seem to have heard anything during the night.

“At seven-thirty the following morning — Sunday — Barton found father lying on the floor, just to the right of where you are sitting, dead, stabbed in the throat with the brass paper-knife that was always kept on the table here. The front door was ajar.

“The police found bloody finger-prints on the knife, the table, and the front door; but so far they have not found the man who left the prints, which is why I am employing your agency. The physician who came with the police placed the time of father’s death at between eleven o’clock and midnight.

“Later, on Monday, we learned that father had drawn $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills from the bank Saturday morning. No trace of the money has been found. My finger-prints, as well as the servants’, were compared with the ones found by the police, but there was no similarity. I think that is all.”

“Do you know of any enemies your father had?”

He shook his head.

“I know of none, though he may have had them. You see, I really didn’t know my father very well. He was a very reticent man and, until his retirement, about five years ago, he spent most of his time in South America, where most of his mining interests were. He may have had dozens of enemies, though Barton — who probably knew more about him than anyone — seems to know of no one who hated father enough to kill him.”

“How about relatives?”

“I was his heir and only child, if that is what you are getting at. So far as I know he had no other living relatives.”

“I’ll talk to the servants,” I said.

The maid and the cook could tell me nothing, and I learned very little more from Barton. He had been with Henry Grover since 1912, had been with him in Yunnan, Peru, Mexico, and Central America, but apparently he knew little or nothing of his master’s business or acquaintances.

He said that Grover had not seemed excited or worried on the night of the murder, and that nearly every night Grover dismissed him at about the same time, with orders that he be not disturbed; so no importance was to be attached to that part of it. He knew of no one with whom Grover had communicated during the day, and he had not seen the money Grover had drawn from the bank.

I made a quick inspection of the house and grounds, not expecting to find anything; and I didn’t. Half the jobs that come to a private detective are like this one: three or four days — and often as many weeks — have passed since the crime was committed. The police work on the job until they are stumped; then the injured party calls in a private sleuth, dumps him down on a trail that is old and cold and badly trampled, and expects — Oh, well! I picked out this way of making a living, so...

I looked through Grover’s papers — he had a safe and a desk full of them — but didn’t find anything to get excited about. They were mostly columns of figures.

“I’m going to send an accountant out here to go over your father’s books,” I told Frederick Grover. “Give him everything he asks for, and fix it up with the bank so they’ll help him.”

I caught a street-car and went back to town, called at Ned Root’s office, and headed him out toward Grover’s. Ned is a human adding machine with educated eyes, ears, and nose. He can spot a kink in a set of books farther than I can see the covers.

“Keep digging until you find something, Ned, and you can charge Grover whatever you like. Give me something to work on — quick!”

The murder had all the earmarks of one that had grown out of blackmail, though there was — there always is — a chance that it might have been something else. But it didn’t look like the work of an enemy or a burglar: either of them would have packed his weapon with him, would not have trusted to finding it on the grounds. Of course, if Frederick Grover, or one of the servants, had killed Henry Grover... but the finger-prints said “No.”

Just to play safe, I put in a few hours getting a line on Frederick. He had been at a ball on the night of the murder; he had never, so far as I could learn, quarreled with his father; his father was liberal with him, giving him everything he wanted; and Frederick was taking in more money in his brokerage office than he was spending. No motive for a murder appeared on the surface there.

At the city detective bureau I hunted up the police sleuths who had been assigned to the murder; Marty O’Hara and George Dean. It didn’t take them long to tell me what they knew about it. Whoever had made the bloody finger-prints was not known to the police here: they had not found the prints in their files. The classifications had been broadcast to every large city in the country, but with no results so far.

A house four blocks from Grover’s had been robbed on the night of the murder, and there was a slim chance that the same man might have been responsible for both jobs. But the burglary had occurred after one o’clock in the morning, which made the connection look not so good. A burglar who had killed a man, and perhaps picked up $10,000 in the bargain, wouldn’t be likely to turn his hand to another job right away.

I looked at the paper-knife with which Grover had been killed, and at the photographs of the bloody prints, but they couldn’t help me much just now. There seemed to be nothing to do but get out and dig around until I turned up something somewhere.

Then the door opened, and Joseph Clane was ushered into the room where O’Hara, Dean and I were talking.

Clane was a hard-bitten citizen, for all his prosperous look; fifty or fifty-five, I’d say, with eyes, mouth and jaw that held plenty of humor but none of what is sometimes called the milk of human kindness.

He was a big man, beefy, and all dressed up in a tight-fitting checkered suit, fawn-colored hat, patent-leather shoes with buff uppers, and the rest of the things that go with that sort of combination. He had a harsh voice that was as empty of expression as his hard red face, and he held his body stiffly, as if he was afraid the buttons on his too-tight clothes were about to pop off. Even his arms hung woodenly at his sides, with thick fingers that were lifelessly motionless.

He came right to the point. He had been a friend of the murdered man’s, and thought that perhaps what he could tell us would be of value.

He had met Henry Grover — he called him “Henny” — in 1894, in Ontario, where Grover was working a claim: the gold mine that had started the murdered man along the road to wealth. Clane had been employed by Grover as foreman, and the two men had become close friends. A man named Denis Waldeman had a claim adjoining Grover’s and a dispute had arisen over their boundaries. The dispute ran on for some time — the men coming to blows once or twice — but finally Grover seems to have triumphed, for Waldeman suddenly left the country.

Clane’s idea was that if we could find Waldeman we might find Grover’s murderer, for considerable money had been involved in the dispute, and Waldeman was “a mean cuss, for a fact,” and not likely to have forgotten his defeat.

Clane and Grover had kept in touch with each other, corresponding or meeting at irregular intervals, but the murdered man had never said or written anything that would throw a light on his death. Clane, too, had given up mining, and now had a small string of race-horses which occupied all his time.

He was in the city for a rest between racing-meets, had arrived two days before the murder, but had been too busy with his own affairs — he had discharged his trainer and was trying to find another — to call upon his friend. Clane was staying at the Marquis hotel, and would be in the city for a week or ten days longer.

“How come you’ve waited three days before coming to tell us all this?” Dean asked him.

“I wasn’t noways sure I had ought to do it. I wasn’t never sure in my mind but what maybe Henny done for that fellow Waldeman — he disappeared sudden-like. And I didn’t want to do nothing to dirty Henny’s name. But finally I decided to do the right thing. And then there’s another thing: you found some finger-prints in Henny’s house, didn’t you? The newspapers said so.”

“We did.”

“Well, I want you to take mine and match them up. I was out with a girl the night of the murder” — he leered suddenly, boastingly — “all night! And she’s a good girl, got a husband and a lot of folks; and it wouldn’t be right to drag her into this to prove that I wasn’t in Henny’s house when he was killed, in case you’d maybe think I killed him. So I thought I better come down here, tell you all about it, and get you to take my finger-prints, and have it all over with.”

We went up to the identification bureau and had Clane’s prints taken. They were not at all like the murderer’s.

After we pumped Clane dry I went out and sent a telegram to our Toronto office, asking them to get a line on the Waldeman angle. Then I hunted up a couple of boys who eat, sleep, and breathe horse racing. They told me that Clane was well known in racing circles as the owner of a small string of near-horses that ran as irregularly as the stewards would permit.

At the Marquis hotel I got hold of the house detective, who is a helpful chap so long as his hand is kept greased. He verified my information about Clane’s status in the sporting world, and told me that Clane had stayed at the hotel for several days at a time, off and on, within the past couple years.

He tried to trace Clane’s telephone calls for me but — as usual when you want them — the records were jumbled. I arranged to have the girls on the switchboard listen in on any talking he did during the next few days.

Ned Root was waiting for me when I got down to the office the next morning. He had worked on Grover’s accounts all night, and had found enough to give me a start. Within the past year — that was as far back as Ned had gone — Grover had drawn out of his bank-accounts nearly fifty thousand dollars that couldn’t be accounted for; nearly fifty thousand exclusive of the ten thousand he had drawn the day of the murder. Ned gave me the amounts and the dates:

Forty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars! Somebody was getting fat off him!

The local managers of the telegraph companies raised the usual howl about respecting their patrons’ privacy, but I got an order from the Prosecuting Attorney and put a clerk at work on the files of each office.

Then I went back to the Marquis hotel and looked at the old registers. Clane had been there from May 4th to 7th, and from October 8th to 15th last year. That checked off two of the dates upon which Grover had made his withdrawals.

I had to wait until nearly six o’clock for my information from the telegraph companies, but it was worth waiting for. On the third of last January Henry Grover had telegraphed $12,500 to Joseph Clane in San Diego. The clerks hadn’t found anything on the other dates I had given them, but I wasn’t at all dissatisfied. I had Joseph Clane fixed as the man who had been getting fat off Grover.

I sent Dick Foley — he is the Agency’s shadow-ace — and Bob Teal — a youngster who will be a world-beater some day — over to Clane’s hotel.

“Plant yourselves in the lobby,” I told them. “I’ll be over in a few minutes to talk to Clane, and I’ll try to bring him down in the lobby where you can get a good look at him. Then I want him shadowed until he shows up at police headquarters tomorrow. I want to know where he goes and who he talks to. And if he spends much time talking to any one person, or their conversation seems very important, I want one of you boys to trail the other man, to see who he is and what he does. If Clane tries to blow town, grab him and have him thrown in the can, but I don’t think he will.”

I gave Dick and Bob time enough to get themselves placed, and then went to the hotel. Clane was out, so I waited. He came in a little after eleven and I went up to his room with him. I didn’t hem-and-haw, but came out cold-turkey:

“All the signs point to Grover’s having been blackmailed. Do you know anything about it?”

“No,” he said.

“Grover drew a lot of money out of his banks at different times. You got some of it, I know, and I suppose you got most of it. What about it?”

He didn’t pretend to be insulted, or even surprised by my talk. He smiled a little grimly, maybe, but as if he thought it the most natural thing in the world — and it was, at that — for me to suspect him.

“I told you that me and Henny were pretty chummy, didn’t I? Well, you ought to know that all us fellows that fool with the bang-tails have our streaks of bad luck. Whenever I’d get up against it I’d hit Henny up for a stake; like at Tiajuana last winter where I got into a flock of bad breaks. Henny lent me twelve or fifteen thousand and I got back on my feet again. I’ve done that often. He ought to have some of my letters and wires in his stuff. If you look through his things you’ll find them.”

I didn’t pretend that I believed him.

“Suppose you drop into police headquarters at nine in the morning and we’ll go over everything with the city dicks,” I told him.

And then, to make my play stronger:

“I wouldn’t make it much later than nine — they might be out looking for you.”

“Uh-huh,” was all the answer I got.

I went back to the Agency and planted myself within reach of a telephone, waiting for word from Dick and Bob. I thought I was sitting pretty. Clane had been blackmailing Grover — I didn’t have a single doubt of that — and I didn’t think he had been very far away when Grover was killed. That woman alibi of his sounded all wrong!

But the bloody finger-prints were not Clane’s — unless the police identification bureau had pulled an awful boner — and the man who had left the prints was the bird I was setting my cap for. Clane had let three days pass between the murder and his appearance at headquarters. The natural explanation for that would be that his partner, the actual murderer, had needed nearly that much time to put himself in the clear.

My present game was simple: I had stirred Clane up with the knowledge that he was still suspected, hoping that he would have to repeat whatever precautions were necessary to protect his accomplice in the first place.

He had taken three days then. I was giving him about nine hours now: time enough to do something, but not too much time, hoping that he would have to hurry things along and that in his haste he would give Dick and Bob a chance to turn up his partner: the owner of the fingers that had smeared blood on the knife, the table, and the door.

At a quarter to one in the morning Dick telephoned that Clane had left the hotel a few minutes behind me, had gone to an apartment house on Polk Street, and was still there.

I went up to Polk Street and joined Dick and Bob. They told me that Clane had gone in apartment number 27, and that the directory in the vestibule showed this apartment was occupied by George Farr. I stuck around with the boys until about two o’clock, when I went home for some sleep.

At seven I was with them again, and was told that our man had not appeared yet. It was a little after eight when he came out and turned down Geary Street, with the boys trailing him, while I went into the apartment house for a talk with the manager. She told me that Farr had been living there for four or five months, lived alone, and was a photographer by trade, with a studio on Market Street.

I went up and rang his bell. He was a husky of thirty or thirty-two with bleary eyes that looked as if they hadn’t had much sleep that night. I didn’t waste any time with him.

“I’m from the Continental Detective Agency and I am interested in Joseph Clane. What do you know about him?”

He was wide awake now.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No,” sullenly.

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

What can you do with a bird like that?

“Farr,” I said, “I want you to go down to headquarters with me.”

He moved like a streak and his sullen manner had me a little off my guard; but I turned my head in time to take the punch above my ear instead of on the chin. At that, it carried me off my feet and I wouldn’t have bet a nickel that my skull wasn’t dented; but luck was with me and I fell across the doorway, holding the door open, and managed to scramble up, stumble through some rooms, and catch one of his feet as it was going through the bathroom window to join its mate on the fire-escape. I got a split lip and a kicked shoulder in the scuffle, but he behaved after a while.

I didn’t stop to look at his stuff — that could be done more regularly later — but put him in a taxicab and took him to the Hall of Justice. I was afraid that if I waited too long Clane would take a run-out on me.

Clane’s mouth fell open when he saw Farr, but neither of them said anything.

I was feeling pretty chirp in spite of my bruises.

“Let’s get this bird’s finger-prints and get it over with,” I said to O’Hara.

Dean was not in.

“And keep an eye on Clane. I think maybe he’ll have another story to tell us in a few minutes.”

We got in the elevator and took our men up to the identification bureau, where we put Farr’s fingers on the pad. Phels — he is the department’s expert — took one look at the results and turned to me.

“Well, what of it?”

“What of what?” I asked.

“This isn’t the man who killed Henry Grover!”

Clane laughed, Farr laughed, O’Hara laughed, and Phels laughed. I didn’t! I stood there and pretended to be thinking, trying to get myself in hand.

“Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake?” I blurted, my face a nice, rosy red.

You can tell how badly upset I was by that: it’s plain suicide to say a thing like that to a finger-print expert!

Phels didn’t answer; just looked me up and down.

Clane laughed again, like a crow cawing, and turned his ugly face to me.

“Do you want to take my prints again, Mr. Slick Private Detective?”

“Yeah,” I said, “just that!”

I had to say something.

Clane held his hands out to Phels, who ignored them, speaking to me with heavy sarcasm.

“Better take them yourself this time, so you’ll be sure it’s been done right.”

I was mad clean through — of course it was my own fault — but I was pig-headed enough to go through with anything, particularly anything that would hurt somebody’s feelings; so I said:

“That’s not a bad idea!”

I walked over and took hold of one of Clane’s hands. I’d never taken a finger-print before, but I had seen it done often enough to throw a bluff. I started to ink Clane’s fingers and found that I was holding them wrong — my own fingers were in the way.

Then I came back to earth. The balls of Clane’s fingers were too smooth — or rather, too slick — without the slight clinging feeling that belongs to flesh. I turned his hand over so fast that I nearly upset him and looked at the fingers. I don’t know what I had expected to find but I didn’t find anything — not anything that I could name.

“Phels,” I called, “look here!”

He forgot his injured feelings and bent to look at Clane’s hand.

“I’ll be—” he began, and then the two of us were busy for a few minutes taking Clane down and sitting on him, while O’Hara quieted Farr, who had also gone suddenly into action.

When things were peaceful again Phels examined Clane’s hands carefully, scratching the fingers with a finger-nail.

He jumped up, leaving me to hold Clane, and paying no attention to my, “What is it?” got a cloth and some liquid, and washed the fingers thoroughly. We took his prints again. They matched the bloody ones taken from Grover’s house!

Then we all sat down and had a nice talk.

“I told you about the trouble Henny had with that fellow Waldeman,” Clane began, after he and Farr had decided to come clean: there was nothing else they could do. “And how he won out in the argument because Waldeman disappeared. Well, Henny done for him — shot him one night and buried him — and I saw it. Grover was one bad actor in them days, a tough hombre to tangle with, so I didn’t try to make nothing out of what I knew.

“But after he got older and richer he got soft — a lot of men go like that — and must have begun worrying over it; because when I ran into him in New York accidentally about four years ago it didn’t take me long to learn that he was pretty well tamed, and he told me that he hadn’t been able to forget the look on Waldeman’s face when he drilled him.

“So I took a chance and braced Henny for a couple thousand. I got them easy, and after that, whenever I was flat I either went to him or sent him word, and he always came across. But I was careful not to crowd him too far. I knew what a terror he was in the old days, and I didn’t want to push him into busting loose again.

“But that’s what I did in the end. I ’phoned him Friday that I needed money and he said he’d call me up and let me know where to meet him the next night. He called up around half past nine Saturday night and told me to come out to the house. So I went out there and he was waiting for me on the porch and took me upstairs and gave me the ten thousand. I told him this was the last time I’d ever bother him — I always told him that — it had a good effect on him.

“Naturally I wanted to get away as soon as I had the money but he must have felt sort of talkative for a change, because he kept me there for half an hour or so, gassing about men we used to know up in the province.

“After awhile I began to get nervous. He was getting a look in his eyes like he used to have when he was young. And then all of a sudden he flared up and tied into me. He had me by the throat and was bending me back across the table when my hand touched that brass knife. It was either me or him — so I let him have it where it would do the most good.

“I beat it then and went back to the hotel. The newspapers were full of it next day, and had a whole lot of stuff about bloody finger-prints. That gave me a jolt! I didn’t know nothing about finger-prints, and here I’d left them all over the dump.

“And then I got to worrying over the whole thing, and it seemed like Henny must have my name written down somewheres among his papers, and maybe had saved some of my letters or telegrams — though they were wrote in careful enough language. Anyway I figured the police would want to be asking me some questions sooner or later; and there I’d be with fingers that fit the bloody prints, and nothing for what Farr calls a alibi.

“That’s when I thought of Farr. I had his address and I knew he had been a finger-print sharp in the East, so I decided to take a chance on him. I went to him and told him the whole story and between us we figured out what to do.

“He said he’d dope my fingers, and I was to come here and tell the story we’d fixed up, and have my finger-prints taken, and then I’d be safe no matter what leaked out about me and Henny. So he smeared up the fingers and told me to be careful not to shake hands with anybody or touch anything, and I came down here and everything went like three of a kind.

“Then that little fat guy” — meaning me — “came around to the hotel last night and as good as told me that he thought I had done for Henny and that I better come down here this morning. I beat it for Farr’s right away to see whether I ought to run for it or sit tight, and Farr said, ‘Sit tight!’ So I stayed there all night and he fixed up my hands this morning. That’s my yarn!”

Phels turned to Farr.

“I’ve seen faked prints before, but never any this good. How’d you do it?”

These scientific birds are funny. Here was Farr looking a nice, long stretch in the face as “accessory after the fact,” and yet he brightened up under the admiration in Phel’s tone and answered with a voice that was chock-full of pride.

“It’s simple! I got hold of a man whose prints I knew weren’t in any police gallery — I didn’t want any slip up there — and took his prints and put them on a copper plate, using the ordinary photo-engraving process, but etching it pretty deep. Then I coated Clane’s fingers with gelatin — just enough to cover all his markings — and pressed them against the plates. That way I got everything, even to the pores, and...”

When I left the bureau ten minutes later Farr and Phels were still sitting knee to knee, jabbering away at each other as only a couple of birds who are cuckoo on the same subject can.