As he turned toward the study she put a hand on his arm. “Has he — has he told you anything about your child?”
“No, not yet. Say a prayer, okay?”
“Yes — okay.”
At FBI headquarters in downtown New York, Roth and Inspector West were watching a copy of the film that had been shot in Thirty-first Street that afternoon. Alerted by Crowley’s call, they were studying a certain section of it with new and sharper interest.
Roth was in shirt-sleeves, perspiring in the small, close projection room. Without his jacket he looked even more formidable; the damp fabric of his shirt was molded to the heavy muscles of his arms and shoulders. “Crowley’s got a good pair of eyes,” he said, frowning at the screen. “Or maybe I’m getting old.”
“We both missed it,” the Inspector said. “Thank God Crowley didn’t.”
“What do you make of it?” Roth said, when the operator switched off the machine.
“A man being cautious, that’s all. But why should he be cautious? That’s what interests me. Let’s go upstairs.”
They left the projection room and took an elevator to West’s office on the seventh floor. Roth lit a cigarette as they sat down in front of the big cardboard map of Thirty-first Street. Around them typewriters and teletypes clattered, and half a dozen agents were studying reports or talking on telephones. The FBI’s nets were being cast in ever-widening circles. Business associates of Ellie and Dick Bradley, Mrs. Jarrod’s friends and relatives, the service record of Bill Delancey. the army lieutenant who had dated Kate Reilly, clerks and delivery men in the shops and stores patronized by the Bradleys — all of these people were being brought under a close, discreet surveillance.
But so far the nets had come up empty...
The Inspector was studying the map of Thirty-first Street. He put his finger on the building that faced the Bradleys’.
“Who lives in that front room, Jerry?”
Roth picked up a file card in his seemingly clumsy fingers. “Howard Creasy, age fifty-five. He worked last as a locker room attendant at the Manhattan Athletic Club. No police record. We got this information from a personal loan company.”
“How long has he lived there?”
“We don’t know exactly. But he was living there when he got the loan and that was six months ago.”
“The loan was paid off?”
“Yes. He settled in cash. Three hundred dollars. That was four months ago. He left the club then, and hasn’t worked since.”
“What I want to know is this: are Howard Creasy and the little chap who turned down the cab — are they the same person?”
Roth looked at him and nodded. “I’ll find out.”
West turned to the agent who was covering the line to Washington. “Anything come in while I was downstairs?” It was an unnecessary question, he knew; if there was anything the agent wouldn’t have to be asked for it. But West’s patience was short; the waiting had worn his nerves down to a fine edge.
“Nothing, sir,” the agent said.
Nothing, West thought. And this was Monday night. The baby had been gone since Friday night. Seventy-two hours. And they had nothing yet. Washington had been working all day on the print Crowley had found in the Bradleys’ study. So far, no luck. And no leads had developed from the Bradleys’ friends and business associates, nothing from the tradespeople in the neighborhood. Blanks everywhere, he thought. But in spite of this, he was developing a feeling about the case — a bad one. They couldn’t hope that the kidnapers would bring the baby back home. Because that wasn’t the kidnapers’ plan...
In Washington, fifteen fingerprint examiners had been working ten hours on the print Crowley had lifted from the Bradleys’ study. They had a frame of reference in which to work — their hypothesis being that the print belonged to a man whose nickname was Duke. Photographic enlargements had been made of the latent print, and from the criminal file jackets had been pulled on every individual nicknamed “Duke”; there were 1603 such individuals, and each of their cards had to be checked against the print found in Bradley’s study. There was some elimination; the latent print was a loop category, and so it wasn’t necessary to examine minutely all the whorls and arches. The job was, nevertheless, immense, and there were no short cuts. Fingerprints are counted and coded in sets of ten fingers — and such a set can be traced in a matter of minutes. But tracing a single print to its mate would mean examining each of the one hundred and twenty million prints in the bureau’s files — a job as difficult as tracing a leaf back to the twig it had blown from during a storm.
There was the chance that an identification could be made on the first card — but it might as easily be the last. Examiners worked steadily through the afternoon and evening, turning down card after card after failing to match them with the photographic enlargements which were propped up before their desks. Occasionally they stopped to rest their eyes, or take a quick drag on a cigarette, and then they resumed the patient, dogged search.
Finally a slender man with graying hair stood quickly and walked down the aisle to the supervisor who was in charge of the detail. “Here it is,” he said quietly. “Age thirty-one at time of last arrest. Served four years in Joliet for armed robbery and assault. Edward John Farrel, nicknamed ‘Duke.’ ”
The supervisor looked at the dark, bold front face and profile shots of Duke Farrel. Then he nodded and said, “I’ll call Inspector West. Get this card over to him by wire photo. I hope this does it...”
Seventeen
On spring evenings darkness settled with disquieting suddenness about the lodge. There was no softly shadowed dusk to foretell the end of day; reflections from the tidal river preserved the illusion of daylight for a time, but when they disappeared, winking out abruptly, the night rushed in to rill up the vacuum.
Duke stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, and Grant was at the fire, looking through a newspaper. A single lamp and the leaping flames provided the only illumination in the room. The comers were dark, and giant shadows moved on the white ceiling as Grant flipped over the pages of his paper.
Hank sat at the piano, occasionally brushing the keys with his left hand. The pain had started again in his right, and a heavy pulse beat like a hammer against the shattered bone.
There had been very little conversation since dinner. The mood in the house was tense and wary; as the climax approached, nerves were tightening painfully. And there was still a day to go, a full twenty-four hours, Hank thought.
He touched a key and Grant looked over his paper at him. “You play that thing?”
Hank shook his head. “Just pick out the tunes.”
“Then what’s it here for?”
“The owner threw it in with the deal when I bought the place.”
Without turning Duke said dryly, “He’d have to throw in a band and a chorus line to get me interested.”
Hank began picking out Swanee River with one finger and Grant shook his head and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling.
“Too jazzy?” Hank said.
“No, it’s just great,” Grant said with heavy sarcasm.
“How’s the wood situation?” Duke said.
“It looks all right.”
“Looks all right? I see three logs.”
“That should get us by.”
“And if it doesn’t I can always lug in some more, I guess.”