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 fingerprints. That gave me a jolt! I didn’t know nothing about fingerprints, 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 fingerprint 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 fingerprints 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 photoengraving 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.
It
“Now listen, Mr. Zumwalt, you’re holding out on me; and it won’t do! If I’m going to work on this for you I’ve got to have the whole story.”
He looked thoughtfully at me for a moment through screwed-up blue eyes. Then he got up and went to the door of the outer office, opening it. Past him I could see the bookkeeper and the stenographer sitting at their desks. Zumwalt closed the door and returned to his desk, leaning across it to speak in a husky undertone.
“You are right, I suppose. But what I am going to tell you must be held in the strictest confidence.”
I nodded, and he went on:
“About two months ago one of our clients, Stanley Gorham, turned $100,000 worth of Liberty bonds over to us. He had to go to the Orient on business, and he had an idea that the bonds might go to par during his absence; so he left them with us to be sold if they did. Yesterday I had occasion to go to the safe deposit box where the bonds had been put—in the Golden Gate Trust Company’s vault—and they were gone!”
“Anybody except you
