LITMIR.BIZ

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before the Women’s Civic Club. Slides were a great help in explaining the elementary aspects of fingerprinting. People were fascinated by fingerprinting symbols, just as old Dab was fascinated by puzzles. Making the public conscious of the science of fingerprinting had been the chief aim of Linton’s life since his retirement from the force. He believed that every citizen of the country should be fingerprinted and that his prints should be classified and filed in a central agency. The advantages of such a scheme were so obvious that Linton had been appalled at the resistance to the idea. Aside from the fact that it might act as a great deterrent to crime, such a system would mean there would be no more unidentified dead, no more unidentified injured, no more unidentified amnesia victims. But liberal elements—“radicals,” Linton called them—had opposed the suggestion on the grounds that it was the first step in a police state. And powerful labor unions, whose bosses had prison records, had got the bill killed in congressional committee.

      Linton heard a noise. It was a very small noise, and not at all ominous. It was a rather pleasant, tinkling little noise. He turned toward the French window of the porch. A leaded pane near the window catch had been splintered. A gloved hand was lifting the latch.

      Instinctively Linton’s right hand groped toward the left armpit, reached for the gun he had not carried now for years.

      The French window opened.

      Philip Linton faced his murderer, and recognized him.

      “You!” said Linton.

      There was no fright in his voice. There was only amazement. He had never thought this man would kill him.

      Linton’s mind was very clear, as it had always been in emergencies. He saw that the gun was a .45. He knew that it would make a large hole. He knew the impact of the bullet would knock him off his feet. The murderer was no more than ten feet away. It was virtually impossible that he could miss.

      The murderer was quite businesslike. He wasted no time. He did not speak. He simply aimed the gun with a steady hand. He aimed it very carefully.

      He’s aiming for the belly, Linton thought. I wonder why? Does he hate me so much? I never knew he did. When the hole is through the belly, it takes a little while to die. You bleed a lot and dying hurts.

      He watched the gloved finger squeeze the trigger.

      The explosion filled the room. The tremendous noise was followed by an absurdly tiny tinkling sound. The reverberation had knocked one of Pat’s small glass animals off the mantelpiece.

      Linton was on the floor, a foot or two from where he had stood when the bullet hit him, before the echo of the shot died. He thought of a time, more than thirty years ago, when he had been a rookie cop walking a beat in Yorkville. There had been a moronic tough called Butter Billy who had delighted in ramming his hard head into the midriffs of policemen. In those days, many officers had bulging stomachs. Linton had been slim, but Butter Billy had given him the treatment just the same. One day he’d come leaping out at Linton from an alley. The impact of the heavy bullet and the jolt of Butter Billy’s head were much the same. There was no real pain at first. Just an empty sense of breathlessness. But the pain would come, he knew, and it would be unbearable.

      Before the fog of shock cleared from Linton’s eyes, the murderer was gone. The French window with the broken pane had been closed.

      Linton grasped his belly with his left hand. As he expected, there was already a thick flow of blood. He had, perhaps, ten minutes to live and suffer. If he tried to move about, to rise, that brief life expectancy would be cut considerably.

      Linton rejoiced that his head seemed quite clear, although the awful pain already had begun. He was contemptuous of the pain. It can’t last long, he thought.

      He took stock of his chances. He knew he was going to die, of course. He knew that, and accepted it. But he was still a cop and he had a job to do. There was one more murderer he must convict. There was, of course, some hope that the shot had been heard. In that case the murderer might be seen by a person who would live to identify him. Or someone might rush to his side in time for him to breathe the killer’s name. A neighbor might have heard. Old Groscz, the watchman at the castle, might possibly be making his rounds. Or Bellinger, the cop on the beat, might just be passing by. But he could depend upon none of these fortuitous circumstances. His own house was at the very top of the hill and there was no neighbor to his west. His other neighbors, the Ferrises, were skiing enthusiasts and were at Bear Mountain for the winter sports. Old Groscz was a poor excuse for a watchman at best, and he was usually drunk. And Linton had passed Bellinger, the cop, when he’d gone out for his bedtime walk. The officer would not be back for another hour or so.

      Besides, a loud noise was likely to attract little notice on this street. Cars coughed their way up from Broadway to the Drive and the bridge approaches, and they often backfired.

      Linton could not delude himself with false hopes. Time was too short. The obvious thing was to write down the murderer’s name. But even as his right hand groped toward his breast, Linton knew that it was hopeless. His fountain pen and his mechanical pencil were in the pocket of his vest, and his vest was hanging on the hall tree. And he would never make the hall. There had been a writing desk in the parlor once, with pen and ink inside it, but when Pat had redecorated the room she had moved that into the hall. The telephone was on the desk. The only thing that he could reach was the coffee table, just above his head. He must use what was at hand. He lay on the floor, grasping his belly, thinking hard, as the pain increased to scalding intensity.

      “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think it can be done.” He thought he spoke aloud, but he could not be sure.

      All he had to work with were the cards with the fingerprint symbols drawn on them and the unmailed letter addressed to J. Dabney Ashton. His right hand fumbled for them, pulled them from the table to the floor. As he sorted the cards, sought to examine them, his eyes glazed over and for the first time he knew stark fear. I mustn’t go blind, he thought. I can’t become unconscious until the thing is done.

      The mist swam away and the cards came into focus. He shuffled through them, then, oddly, he chuckled. A thought had gone through his mind and it amused him: “The corpse was playing solitaire.” Old Dab would have liked that.

      At last he selected a card and laid it face up on the floor. “A plain arch,” he said to himself, giving the symbol on the card a name. “It will do very nicely.” Next he found a card with a simple loop pattern on it and placed it on the floor next to the other. Then he left a space. The space is most important, he thought. I mustn’t forget the space. There were black spots in front of his eyes and he had some trouble in deciding upon the third card. There must be no mistake, he thought. Old Dab has got to understand. He drew out a card on which the designation for a whorl was drawn and laid it down, making sure the space was there between the second and the third cards. “I’ve given him the major patterns now,” he muttered to himself. “The arch, the loop, the whorl. The rest won’t be so easy.”

      Now he had to go into the composite patterns. The first he found was the irregular, bastard pattern known as the accidental. It will serve, he thought, and placed it beside the others. He found another composite, a central pocket loop, and looked at it closely for a moment. He cast it aside in favor of a lateral pocket. “Five,” he gasped. The pain had become excruciating beyond belief. Even such simple movements were sheer agony. He needed two more arch patterns. Luckily, he found them together in the pile. He placed an arch of the tented type on the floor, an arch of the exceptional type beside it. He was almost done. Seven cards were on the floor. He counted to make sure. Seven cards, with a space between the second and the third. Now for another loop, marked and tilted in such a manner that it would be distinguished as a radial loop that pointed toward the thumb, not an ulnar loop that pointed toward the little finger. At first he had a hard time making his eyes and his mind select between the two cards, the one with the ulnar loop and the one with the radial. At last he was sure and he chose the card with a hand that was trembling almost beyond control. One more card, the ninth and the most difficult. He had found eight cards that he could use among the set that showed fingerprint patterns. Now he must look elsewhere.

      He riffled through

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