Inspector Queen’s Own Case

“Well, it wasn’t really sharp, as I recall it. Sort of blurry — a little smudged. But it couldn’t be mistaken for anything but what it was. The print of a hand.” Jessie shut her eyes. She could see it with awful clarity. “The print was indented. I mean... there had been pressure exerted. Considerable downward pressure.” She opened her eyes, and something happened to her voice. “I mean someone with a filthy hand had pressed that pillow hard over the baby’s face, and kept pressing till he stopped breathing. That’s why I told Mr. and Mrs. Humffrey that Michael had been murdered. At first, as I say, it didn’t register. I saw it, and my brain must have tucked it away, but I wasn’t conscious of it till later. Then I told them to call the police. Why are you asking me these questions? Why don’t you just examine the pillow and see for yourselves?”

“Stand up, Miss Sherwood,” Chief Pearl growled. “Can you stand?”

“Oh, I’m all right.” Jessie got to her feet impatiently.

“Go over to the crib. Don’t touch it. Just take a look at the pillow.”

Jessie was convinced now that it was the treacherous kind of dream where you thought you’d waked up but even that thought was part of the dream. Look at the pillow! Couldn’t they look at it themselves?

Suddenly she felt a reluctance to go to the crib. That was queer, because she had seen death regularly for many years, in a thousand forms. Jessie had feared death only three times in her life, when her parents died and when she received the telegram from the War Department about Clem. So it was love, perhaps, that made the difference... because it was she who had tended his unhealed navel... because it was on her face that he had kept his bright new eyes fixed with such absolute trust while she fed him.

Let him not be there, she prayed.

“It’s all right, Jessie,” Richard Queen’s voice murmured close to her. “The little boy’s been taken away.”

He knew, God bless him.

She walked over to the crib blindly. But then she shook her head clear and looked.

The expensive pillow was at the foot of the crib, one corner doubled over where it lay against the footboard.

The lace-edged pillowcase was spotless.

Jessie frowned. “It must have flipped over when I tossed it aside.”

“Borcher, turn it over for Miss Sherwood,” Chief Pearl said.

The Taugus detective took the lace between thumb and forefinger at one corner and turned the pillow carefully over.

The other side was spotless, too.

“But I don’t understand,” Jessie said. “I saw it with my own eyes. I couldn’t possibly have been mistaken.”

“Miss Sherwood.” The voice of the man from the State’s Attorney’s office was unpleasantly polite. “You would have us believe that you had your attention fixed on this pillow for no more than a second or two, in a room illuminated only by a dim baseboard nightlight, and not only saw a handprint on the pillow, but saw it clearly enough to be able to say that it seemed made by a human hand filthy with dust?”

“I can’t help what you believe,” Jessie said. “That’s what I saw.”

“It would be a feat of observation even if we found the handprint to back it up,” the tieless man said. “But as you see, Miss Sherwood, there’s not a mark on either side of the pillow. Isn’t it possible, in your shock and excitement — and the feeble light in the room — that it was an optical illusion? Something you imagined you saw that never was here?”

“I’ve never had an optical illusion in my life. I saw it just as I’ve described it.”

“You stick to that? You don’t want to reconsider your recollection?”

“I most certainly do not.”

The tieless man seemed displeased. He and Chief Pearl conferred. The old man caught Jessie’s eye and smiled.

Then they went to the window overlooking the driveway, where a man was doing something with some bottles and a brush, and the tieless man looked out and down while the chief said something about an aluminum extension ladder.

“Ladder?” Jessie blinked over at Richard Queen.

He came quickly to her. “Just like that night last month, Jessie. The same ladder, in fact. Didn’t you notice it standing against the wall when you drove into the driveway?”

“I didn’t drive into the driveway. I left my car on the road.”

“Oh, that was your car.” His face said nothing at all.

“Then that’s how that — that monster’s hand got all dirty! The dust on the ladder while he was climbing up.” Jessie was staring at the pillow. “Why didn’t I notice that before?”

“Notice what, Jessie?” He was instantly alert.

“This isn’t the same pillow slip!”

“Isn’t the same as what?”

“As the one I saw that had the handprint on it. Inspector Queen, this is a different slip.”

The old man looked at her. Then he called his friend and the State’s Attorney’s man over.

“Miss Sherwood says she now notices that this isn’t the same pillowcase that had the handprint on it.”

“It isn’t?” Chief Pearl glanced at the tieless man. “That’s an interesting addition to the story, Merrick.”

The tieless man said to Jessie, “How can you tell?”