“I guess so,” said Fergus, taking another gulp of tomato juice. “This and the coffee make the typewriter episode seem pretty unlikely. But no O’Breen’s gone in for second sight since great-great-grandfather Seamus. I’ll expect the family leprechaun next.”
“Tell him these shoes need resoling,” said Lieutenant Jackson.
For twenty-four hours the affair rested at that. Suicide of Unknown. Nothing to identify him, not even laundry marks. Checkup on fingerprints fruitless. One odd thing that bothered Jackson a little: the man’s trousers had no cuffs.
Sergeant Marcus, whose uncle was in cloaks and suits, had an idea on that. “If we get into this war and run into a shortage of material, we’ll all be wearing ’em like that. Maybe he’s setting next year’s styles.”
When Fergus heard this, he laughed. And then he stopped laughing and sat down and began thinking. He thought through half a pack of Camels in a chain before he gave up. There was a hint there. Something that was teasing him. Something that reminded him of the Partridge case and yet not quite.
The notion was still nibbling at the back of his mind when Jackson called him the next day. “Something might interest you, Fergus. Either a pretty farfetched coincidence or part of a pattern.”
“My pattern?”
“Your pattern maybe. Another old man with long hair and no identification. Found in a rooming house out on Adams in a room that was supposed to be vacant. But this one was shot.”
Fergus frowned. “Could be. But is long hair enough to make it a coincidence?”
“Not by itself. But he hasn’t any cuffs on his pants either.”
Fergus lost no time in getting to the West Adams address. Onetime mansion fallen on evil days, reduced to transient cubicles. The landlady was still incoherently horrified.
“I went into the room to fix it up like I always do between tenants and there on the bed—”
Jackson shooed her out. The photographing and fingerprinting squads had come and gone, but the basket hadn’t arrived yet. He and Fergus stood alone and looked at the man. He was even older than the other—somewhere in his late seventies, at a guess. A hard, cruel face, with a dark hole centered in its forehead.
“Shot at close range,” Jackson was commenting. “Powder burns. Gun left here— clear prints on it.” There was a knock on the door. “That’ll be the basket.”
Fergus looked at the trousers. The cuffs hadn’t been taken off. They were clearly tailored without cuffs. Two old men with cuffless trousers—
Jackson had gone to open the door. Now he started back with a gasp. Fergus turned. Gasps aren’t easily extorted from a police lieutenant, but this one was justified. Coming in the door was the exact twin of Fergus’ typing corpse, and walking with that same carefully learned awkwardness.
He seemed not to notice the corpse on the bed, but he turned to Jackson when the officer demanded, “And who are you?” To be exact, he seemed to turn a moment before Jackson spoke.
He said something. Or at least he made vocal noises. It was a gibberish not remotely approximating any language that either detective had ever heard. And there followed a minute of complete cross-purposes, a cross-examination in which neither party understood a syllable of the other’s speech.
Then Fergus had an idea. He took out his notebook and pencil and handed them over. The old man wrote rapidly and most peculiarly. He began in the lower right hand corner of the page and wrote straight on to the upper left. But the message, when he handed it back, was in normal order.
Fergus whistled. “With that act on a blackboard, you could pack ’em in.” Then he read the message:
I see that I will have succeeded, and because of the idea that has just come to my mind I imagine that you already understand this hell as much as it is possible for one to understand who has not gone through it and know that it is impossible to arrest me. But if it will simplify your files, you may consider this a confession.
Jonathan Hull
Jackson drew his automatic and moved toward the door. Fergus took out one of his cards with business and home address and penciled on it:
Look me up if you need help straightening this out.
An idea seemed to strike the man as he accepted the card. Then his features widened in a sort of astonished gratification and he looked at the bed. Then with that same rapid awkwardness he was walking out of the room.
Detective Lieutenant Jackson called a warning to him. He tried to grab him. But the man went right on past him. It isn’t easy to fire a close-range bullet into a gray-haired old man. He was out of the room and on the stairs before Jackson’s finger could move, and then the bullet went wild.
Jackson was starting out of the room when he felt Fergus’ restraining hand on his arm. He tried to shake it off, but it was firm. “You’ll never catch him, Andy,” said Fergus gently. “Never in God’s green eternity. Because you see you can’t have caught him or he couldn’t have typed—’’
Jackson exploded. “Fergus! You don’t think this trick-writing expert is another wraith for your second sight, do you? I saw him, too. He’s real. And he must be your corpse’s twin. If we find him, we can have the answer to both deaths. We can—”
“Telephone for you, Lieutenant,” the landlady called.
When Jackson returned, his chagrin over Jonathan Hull’s escape was forgotten. “All right,” he said wearily. “Have it your way, Fergus. Ghosts we have yet. Do I care?”
“What happened?”
“Anything can happen. Everything probably will. There’s no more sense and order in the world. Nothing a man can trust.”
“But what is it?”
“Fingerprints. They don’t mean a thing any more.”
“The prints on the gun?” Fergus said eagerly. “They belong to my corpse?”
Jackson nodded shamefacedly. “So a cuffless ghost came back and— But it’s worse
