Inspector Queen’s Own Case

He whirled and whipped the paper off the glass.

“Miss Sherwood,” he said swiftly, “for the record I want you to identify this pillowslip. Is this the pillowslip you saw lying over Michael Stiles Humffrey’s face and torso on the night of August 4th, when you found the baby dead of suffocation?”

Jessie stepped up to the desk.

“It is,” she said in a stiff voice, and stepped back.

Humffrey quivered. His pallor was yellowish now. He moved toward Abe Pearl’s desk in a jerky way, slowly, and stared down at the pillowslip under the glass.

“You never thought we’d find it, did you?” Inspector Queen said softly. “There’s the dirty handprint — the dirty print of a right hand, just as Miss Sherwood said. But it’s not just the dirty print of a right hand, Mr. Humffrey, as you can see. It’s the dirty print of a right hand that has the tip of the little finger missing to the first joint!”

Abe Pearl reached over suddenly and seized the millionaire’s right hand in his big paw. He uncurled the little finger as if it were a child’s, exposing its deformity.

“You murdering louse,” Abe Pearl said. “A man who’d kill a two-month old baby, a kid he’d given his own name to, for God’s sake!... You won’t bull or buy your way out of this one, Humffrey. You’re through. With this pillowslip as evidence, you haven’t got a chance. The best thing you can do is sit down in that chair and start talking. I want a full confession, and I want it now.”

He flung the hand from him contemptuously and pointed to the straight-backed chair. Then he turned away.

“Congratulations, Chief, on a superb performance.”

“What?”

Abe Pearl swung about. Alton Humffrey was smiling. There was nothing uncertain in his smile. It was a smile without humor, angry and cruel.

“What did you say?” Abe Pearl said.

“I should have warned you about Queen, Mr. Pearl. Apparently his lunacy is contagious.” He began to stroll about the police chief’s office, glancing here and there with fastidious distaste, as if he were slumming. He ignored Richard Queen and Jessie Sherwood utterly. “Beautifully staged, I’ll grant you that. The meaningless raid on my property. The repetitious phone calls. The menacing summons. The policemen sitting about, waiting to pounce on the big bad wolf and cart him off to the pound. And finally” — the millionaire’s glance shriveled Richard Queen and Jessie Sherwood, shattered the glass-protected pillowslip — “finally, these two mountebanks, and the production of this work of art. Who manufactured it, Chief, you or Queen? I suppose it was you, Queen, and your West 87th Street Irregulars. It has the metropolitan touch. Unfortunately, you slipped. The moment I glanced at this I knew it was a fake. But you couldn’t have known that, could you? And so it’s all gone to waste. All this loving labor, the stage designing, the suspense, the superb acting, the extras in the wings...”

Alton K. Humffrey suddenly strode over to the hall door and yanked it open.

The two detectives looked around, startled.

Humffrey laughed.

“Do we haul him in now, Chief?” one of the detectives asked.

“Oh, get out of my way, you fool,” Alton Humffrey snapped; and he walked out.

“I don’t understand it,” Inspector Queen said. “I don’t, I don’t.”

Abe Pearl said nothing. Patrolman Harris was gone; the three were alone in the office.

“I never should have involved you in this, Abe. Or you, Jessie.”

“Please, Richard.”

“Up to a certain point he was our fish,” the old man muttered to the pillowslip on the desk. “He was hooked. Right through the gills. Then he takes one look at the slip and he knows it’s a frame-up. What did we do wrong? Could it be the pillowslip itself, Jessie? The wrong material, wrong lace, wrong size or something?”

“It can’t have been that, Richard. This is an exact duplicate of the one that disappeared. I’d seen the slip many times, told Mrs. Humffrey how lovely I thought it was.”

“Then it’s what we did with it. The position of the print?”

“To the best of my recollection, it was just about where I told Mr. Kuntzman to put it.”

“Maybe it’s what we didn’t do with it,” he said suddenly. “After all, Jessie, you did see it in a dim light for only a couple of seconds. Suppose there was some other mark on it, a mark you missed? Maybe a dirt streak, a smudge, a tear. Something you just didn’t notice.”

“I suppose that’s it,” Jessie said lifelessly. “You see how misguided you were to put any confidence in me. Look what I’ve got you into.”

“Let’s not talk about who got whom into what.” Richard Queen grimaced. “Here’s Abe, ready to strangle me—”

“You didn’t hold any gun to my head, Dick,” Abe Pearl said heavily. “I’m just trying to figure out what gives now. Think he’s going to make an issue of this?”

“Not a chance.”

“He could make it pretty hot for us.”