“Okay,” promised the young man. With the telephone and instruments under one arm he went out of the room, leaving Maguire dubiously testing the strength of the upturned box by pressing on it with one of his size thirteen feet.
Finding himself unable to place any confidence in the box and there being no chair in sight Shamus commenced striding restlessly up and down the room. The taciturn young man was absent for a quarter of an hour.
He then stepped into the room silently, placed a disconnected desk telephone on a table and his case of tools on the floor. Maguire sprang towards the telephone and lifted the receiver by its cord.
“You didn’t touch it?”
The young man shook his head and with a pair of shears cut through the wire connecting the receiver to the rest of the instrument.
“You wanta step on it,” the young man said gravely. “This guy is packin’ up to leave.”
“Hey! What guy?”
“The guy in eleven-twenty.”
Maguire seized a page of soiled newspaper. As he barged out through the door he wrapped the receiver carefully about with the newspaper and stuffed the thing into his pocket.
He delayed his headlong progress through the rotunda long enough to bark a couple of questions at the dignitary in charge of the porter’s desk.
“Handlin’ any baggage out of eleven-twenty?”
“Trunk and two bags.”
“What train?”
“Ten o’clock for Syracuse.”
Maguire glanced up at the big clock over the registration desk and got himself into motion again.
“Police headquarters,” he ordered, diving into a taxi at the door. “And step on it, baby.”
Pulling up before the big, gray police building he dismissed the driver and sped into a labyrinth of deserted corridors towards the identification bureau.
There, after impressing the officer in charge with the need for haste, he sat down to await the photographing of the telephone receiver and the development of the pictures thereon.
“Couldn’t be better,” he crowed some minutes later when a damp sheet containing perfect replicas of the thumb and finger tips of Bunt’s right hand was laid before him.
“And now, kid, if you’ll dig up the set that Flynn and Schultz brought in from that Beard suicide I’ll show you something that’ll make your eyes pop. Not Beard’s prints, you understand, but the other, unidentified set.”
VIII
The identification officer began rummaging through a filing cabinet. Shamus leaned back in his chair, placed a “Little Policeman” between his teeth and viewed with much satisfaction the results of a heavy day’s work.
These fingerprints would clinch the case against Bunt. They would constitute irrefutable proof that Bunt had been a visitor to the room of J. Wesley Beard just previous to the “suicide.” And behind this stood the three bottles of whisky Bunt had taken from Beard’s room.
“Well, well, well. If it ain’t the big sleuth from uptown.” These words, uttered in the horsy tones of Sergeant Detective Schultz, brought Shamus around with a jerk.
Schultz, wearing an expression far from affable, stood accusingly in the doorway. Looking over his shoulder was Sergeant Detective Flynn.
“So what?” Flynn demanded suspiciously, pushing into the office.
Rainbow-tinted visions of beating the police to another big pinch turned slightly foggy, but Shamus rallied bravely. He smiled beatifically and proffered a cigar.
“What’s this?” demanded Schultz, looking down at the damp photo of Bunt’s fingerprints.
“Yeah,” said Flynn grimly, disdaining the cigar. “What is it?”
“I was lookin’ for you boys,” said Maguire quickly. Seizing their arms he drew them towards him intimately. “Let’s get out of here and go somewheres where we can talk private.”
Reluctantly Flynn and Schultz yielded to the pressure on their arms and moved towards the door.
“But them prints...” Schultz protested.
“Belong to one of the waiters,” lied Shamus glibly. “He’s been swipin’ the silver.”
They were almost through the door now, close to safety. And then Maguire chilled as he heard the voice of the identification officer.
“Hey there! Where yuh goin’? Don’t you want to see them prints from the Beard case?”
“The Beard job, hey?” Flynn jerked away angrily. “You two-timin’ old gorilla.”
For once in his career Maguire was wordless.
“Where,” demanded Schultz truculently, “did you get them prints?”
“He brought in a telephone receiver,” volunteered the identification officer. “I took them offa that.”
“See what he’s got.” Flynn was coldly angry.
The fingerprint man laid the unidentified prints from the drinking glass alongside the set from Bunt’s telephone. He shook his head.
“Wrong,” he said. “They ain’t the same at all. You been stung, Maguire.”
“Well, who claimed they were the same? I told you they belonged to a waiter we figure has been grabbin’ the silverware. And the reason I wanted to look at the set off the glass was to see if there was a scar across the thumb tip. A hunch I had.”
Flynn and Schultz registered disbelief.
“I come down here,” continued Shamus sorrowfully, “to talk to you boys about a hot lead. But if this is the kind of cooperation I get you can both go to hell. I’ll do my own cooperatin’.”
So saying and having assumed an expression of righteous indignation, Shamus picked up the wet photograph and the receiver and stalked out.
When he was alone, however, dejection enveloped him like a black cloud. With a feeling of complete discouragement he regarded the wreck of his theory. He was not now even sure that there had been a murder.
According to the rules of common sense the fingerprints of H. W. Bunt should have turned out to be the same as those of J. Wesley Beard’s unknown murderer. But fingerprints cannot lie. Mr. Bunt was not this person and Maguire’s reasoning was wrong.
So wrong, in fact, that Shamus lacked the heart to review it in a search for flaws. He was past caring now whether the criminal was ever found or not. He climbed wearily into a taxi and returned to the hotel.
There, plunged in gloom, he propped himself against a pillar in the rotunda and resolved to forget the whole heartbreaking business. He was still there and still as gloomy when at nine-fifteen sharp he noted that the object of his late activities was walking, briskly across his line of vision.
IX
H. W. Bunt was preparing to check out of the hotel. Behind him trailed a bellhop carrying a large club bag. Bunt stepped up to a wicket marked “Bill Clerk” and gazed through the grille.
“My bill, please,” Shamus heard him say. “H. W. Bunt. Room eleven hundred and twenty.”
The bill was slid through the wicket. Bunt picked it up, turned around to the light and gazed at it puzzledly. From where Shamus stood there seemed to be something about the bill the man couldn’t understand.
His brow wrinkled in a frown. The puzzle seemed to deepen. He stepped, closer to the light, holding the bill so it caught the full force of the beams. Finally, exclaiming impatiently, he gave up the attempt and swung round on his heel.
Shamus, watching with an interest that was fully revived, saw him march to the cashier’s wicket. Shoving the bill through the aperture he bent clown to speak.
“What is the amount of this bill, please? I can’t quite—”
Maguire did not linger to hear more. He galloped to the front door and out into the night. Once more he was in a taxi, leaning far forward in his seat to shout promises and imprecations into the ear of the chauffeur.
Due to his consistent disregard of metropolitan traffic regulations the driver was able, at the conclusion of a trip that normally took twenty minutes, to deposit Shamus Maguire before the doors of the County morgue in ten.