# The Glove of Guilt

Extracted from Detective Story Magazine, 1921 Jan 15, pp. 27–38. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted. A locked-room mystery.
The Glove of Guilt
$^{by}$ Harrington Strong Author of “The Demon,” etc.
For the three thousand six hundred and fortieth time Night Watchman Murphy patrolled the corner in front of the First National Bank of Dayville. On the other three thousand six hundred and thirty-nine times nothing had happened. This time Night Watchman Murphy heard a shot.
More than ten years Murphy had walked this little space of sidewalk at the corner, his cap tilted to one side, his stick swung jauntily. In those ten years there had been little to disturb the tranquility of Dayville's main business corner. Once there had been shooting a block or so away, but Murphy had not been lured from his corner.
Murphy, who was paid by the bank, walked first on the fifty-foot frontage on Franklin Avenue, and then around to the eighty feet on Main Street. At times he stood on the well-lighted corner where his vigilant eye could command both sides of the bank. Here at the corner was the main entrance of the building. All the side windows and the entrance on Franklin Avenue were heavily barred.
Thieves wishing to enter that bank would have to put the watchman out of the way first, and Murphy was not to be caught off guard. After nine o'clock at night all the streets of Dayville were quiet. There was no diversion to tempt the watchman even so far as across the street.
On this night the usual quiet prevailed up to ten o'clock. Once or twice Murphy had peered through the barred glass of the windows. As usual the night lights inside the building were burning brightly, and there was no one in sight.
A few minutes after the hour of ten had struck a cold wind swept up with the inrushing fog from the bay. Murphy walked into the broad front doorway, buttoning his heavy coat about him. Ten years on the job had taught him the chill that could be in one of those fogs.
And then he heard the shot, and the surprise of it seemed to stun him, but only for a moment. He ran down the steps of the entrance to look down Main Street, then down Franklin Avenue. He had not believed for a moment that the sound had come from inside the bank.
But there was nobody in sight in either street, no indication of trouble. In an instant Murphy was at the nearest window and was surveying the interior of the bank. The lights were undisturbed, and he saw nobody. Yet Murphy knew that he had not been deceived about the shot. His ears were good, and he recognized the report of a gun when he heard it.
As he blew his whistle he touched the concealed button beneath the stone window ledge that started all the burglar alarms ringing. Almost immediately the lone policeman who had been patrolling the central part of the town was on the scene. Five other officers came dashing down Main Street in the police department's one automobile to answer the alarm. The bank was surrounded, and if the shot had been fired inside the building, the man who had fired it was trapped there.
“Sure that you heard a shot?” one of the policeman asked Murphy.
“I am that! I haven't lost my hearin',” Murphy snapped in reply.
“Anybody been hanging around the bank to-night?'
“Not with me on the job at the corner,” Murphy said.
“You've boasted a million times, Murphy, that nobody could get into the bank at night without you seeing them.”
“A man is a fool to boast,” Murphy said. “Suppose we go inside and look things over.”
“Can you get inside?”
“I can,” said Murphy. “I have keys to the big front doors to be used in case of emergency such as is this.”
Two officers were assigned to remain outside and guard all possible avenues of escape while the other three with the night watchman entered the building. Whoever had fired the shot must be hiding beneath one of the long marble counters on which were placed the windows of the cashier and the tellers.
Murphy cautiously unlocked the heavy front doors. Police Captain Hoyt, with whom Murphy had been talking, gently thrust the watchman aside and led the way. Murphy and the two policemen, their weapons held ready for instant use, followed at the captain's heels.
Through the lobby they went and around to the little gateway that led to the interior. There was no one in sight. Carefully they searched every possible hiding place. There were few corners into which a man might creep. It took the officers less than five minutes to make sure that there was nobody there. They went back to the entrance again.
No one had left the building; the two policemen outside were sure of that. Murphy still declared that he had heard a shot.
“Sounds fishy,” Captain Hoyt declared. “If there's anybody in the bank building he must be in one of the vaults. He couldn't hide anywhere else. Who is the nearest official who can open the vaults?”
“Mr. Emery, the cashier,” Murphy said. “He lives on Maple Street about six blocks out. He can open the vaults where they keep books and papers and such, and the one where some of the money is kept to be used first thing in the mornin'. But even Mr. Emery can't open the big vault where the real stuff is piled in rows. There's a time lock on that one.”
“We'll get Emery,” the captain said.
The police car sped away for the cashier, and the officers guarded the entrance of the building where the front door still remained unlocked. A small crowd had gathered, but the officers forced them away from the corner. Twenty minutes later the cashier was on the scene.
Emery smiled. when the situation was explained to him in detail by Captain Hoyt.
“Murphy, you have been hearing things,” he said. “How could anybody be inside the bank? How would they get in without you seeing them? And you have already searched the building, and found no one. If you heard a shot it must have been in some other building around the corner. Since I am here it wouldn't do any harm to investigate the vaults.”
Cashier Emery opened the first vault, and they found it empty except for piles of dusty ledgers and records. Another was opened, but nobody was found inside. The cashier went to the one remaining vault that could be opened at that hour.
“How could a man crawl in here, lock himself in from the outside, and then fire a shot that could be heard away out in the street?” Emery wanted to know, smiling at Murphy again.
“I heard that shot, sir,” Murphy declared. “And I'm bettin' that it was inside the bank.”
The cashier smiled again as he began working the combination. Captain Hoyt, Murphy, and another officer stood behind him, their weapons held ready. It did appear ridiculous to them now. If there was somebody in that vault who had locked him in? All the employees of the bank had checked out the evening before as usual.
Emery opened the door. An incandescent light inside the vault flashed into life. Those at the door saw a man stretched on the floor of the vault.
The officers sprang aside instinctively and thrust their guns toward the vault. The form on the floor did not stir. Cautiously, wondering what it might mean, fearing a trick of some sort, Captain Hoyt bent and touched the man on the shoulder. There was no response.
“Dead!” Hoyt said. “Shot through the head. Look at the red pool on the floor—that tells the story.”
“And take a look at this!” Night Watchman Murphy added.
Near the body was a small black bag containing a kit of burglar tools. The dead man wore rubber gloves. In his hip pocket was an undischarged revolver, the only weapon the man had.
“Couldn't have been suicide,” Hoyt declared. “He's a robber, and I'll bet we find he has a record. But how did he come inside this vault? Did some other man kill him and then lock him in here? But what became of the other man. He never left the bank—Murphy would have seen him. And he isn't inside now.”
The cashier had been making a further investigation.
“Fifty thousand dollars for the pay roll of the Dayville Ink Company is gone,” he said. “I placed it in the vault myself the last thing yesterday afternoon. The company always gets its pay roll money as soon as the bank opens.”
II.
Detective Billy Shannon, of the San Francisco Police Department, was on the ground in Dayville at eight o'clock in the morning. There was a special reason why Detective Shannon had been sent down by the chief of the bureau in the city. The baffling case in Dayville gave promise of solving some of the recent cases about San Francisco, provided this latest crime could be explained.
Shannon himself had suggested that he be sent to Dayville. For some time he had been conducting a campaign against a band of clever criminals known as the Grayson gang, and he believed that the gang might have had a hand in this.
Dayville's chief of police was only too glad to turn everything over to competent Billy Shannon. And Shannon had not been in Dayville for more than half an hour before he arrived at the conclusion that this bank robbery and murder eclipsed anything that yet had occurred about the bay.
Shannon decided that if the Grayson gang was responsible for the Dayville crime they had outdone themselves. The Graysons were three brothers who had been operating almost in open defiance of the police. They were noted for courage and skill. But even the Graysons did not make a practice of taking fifty thousand dollars out of a vault without opening it, to say nothing of killing a man, locking his body in the vault, and then escaping from the building without going out of it.
Going over the ground carefully with Captain Hoyt and Night Watchman Murphy, Shannon was unable to adduce any facts which did not add to the puzzling features of the case. Murphy declared that nobody had entered the bank. He explained how he had heard the shot, had given the alarm, and how he had watched both sides of the building carefully until the police reached the scene.
The arrival of the police, the search of the interior, the calling of the cashier, the opening of the vault and the finding of the body and the kit of burglar tools—all were recounted with extreme detail. Detective Shannon asked many questions, but could make no headway in establishing what he had hoped to establish—that somebody had escaped from the building after the shot had been fired. Murphy had watched the two sides of the building, and the other two sides were fire walls innocent of door or window.
If nobody had left the building there were but three possible answers to the puzzle. The dead man might have committed suicide or shot himself accidentally, the murderer might have left by way of the ceiling to the roof, or he might still be in the bank building.
These conjectures Shannon proceeded to eliminate in order. If the man had shot himself, he would have been unable to close the vault afterward, and the sharpness of the report that Murphy had heard meant that the door of the vault had been open when the shot was fired. Furthermore the revolver of the dead man did not show that it had been discharged.
The detective examined the ceiling and found it was solid, glazed plaster. Again the interior of the bank was searched, and even the walls back of the radiators were examined. No man could be hiding in the building.
There was but one tangible clew upon which Detective Shannon could work—the slain man. Prints were taken of the dead man's fingers, but they were not duplicated by anything on record in the San Francisco bureau, as Shannon soon learned by telegraphing the formula. Shannon's next step was to wire to Leavenworth, the national finger-print clearing house. If there were no duplicates in Leavenworth the slain man was not a criminal of record anywhere in the country.
The vault itself yielded no prints of value, although all possible traces were developed and photographed. These turned out to be marks left by regular employees of the bank, and by some of the officers at the time the vault was opened the night before. Obviously the robbers had taken precautions with gloves to leave no prints.
It was not until the finger-print work had been concluded that Shannon gave the word to the bank officials to have the vault cleaned up and the red stains removed. Sydney Butler, president of the bank, arrived as this work was in progress. In the confusion he had not been informed of the robbery and murder. The head of the institution betrayed much astonishment at the news of what had happened.
One of the few positive facts of the case was the escape of the robber and murderer. Of this fact there could be no doubt, for the fifty thousand dollars was gone, and the man found in the vault was dead. Billy Shannon began to feel that he had run up against a wall of solid stone.
The detective walked to the lobby and strolled back and forth, his keen eyes alert for anything, anywhere, that might be slightly unusual. Then he returned to the vault where the red pool had been cleaned away. He examined the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Finally his eyes rested on a spot in one corner of the vault. He hurried to President Butler, whose office was at the other end of the building.
“I would like the name of the contractors who built this bank,” Shannon requested.
“Snell & Frane,” the banker informed him. “We have been using this new building only a little more than a year, you know.”
“Thank you, sir,” Shannon said.
He hurried to a telephone and talked with the office of the contracting firm. In half an hour a little man in working togs entered and asked for Shannon.
“I guess that I'm the man you want, sir,” he said. “I'm the man who bossed the tile job in this building.”
“You're the man,” Shannon said, leading him into the vault. “Now tell me something. Why did you make that center group of tile figures open at the left, when all the other groups in the floor open to the right?”
“My men never laid those tile that way!” the foreman declared. “Think that I'd stand for a job like that? That's been tampered with, some way.”
“Tear it up!” Detective Shannon ordered. There was a new ring in his voice and a new light in his eyes.
The foreman obtained a chisel, inserted it between two of the tile patterns, and lifted one of the plates off its concrete base. He put the end of the chisel under the next square, and the chisel struck wood instead of cement.
“Off with it, man!” Shannon ordered.
The man bent to his work. A trap door, topped with patterns of tile, was lifted out of the floor of the vault!
III.
“That was a mighty good piece of work laying the pattern on a wooden base,” the mason declared. “The thing they didn't figure on was that there are two tile patterns that look exactly alike and are really exactly different. I'll say you have a good eye, Detective Shannon.”
But Shannon did not care to waste time discussing the process of tile laying. He stepped into the opening, convinced that the trap-door job was a marvel in many ways, the tile fitting so snugly that scarcely anybody would have noticed it.
Shannon found that for a distance of five feet the hole beneath the trapdoor went straight down and was about three feet in diameter. Then it branched off into a narrow passageway large enough for a man to crawl through.
In this dark, underground tunnel, Detective Shannon worked his way cautiously, deciding against a light, and taking the chance of encountering one or more criminals in hiding. For thirty feet he wormed his way through the damp earth. Another few feet and the passageway ended suddenly against a boarded wall.
His ear close to what resembled a wooden door. Detective Billy Shannon waited for a sound. For fully ten minutes he listened, but not the faintest sound did he hear. Feeling along the edge of the boards Shannon's fingers rested on a small hinge. He hunted for a latch on the other side, but there was none. Then he pushed carefully against the partition. It did not yield. Once more he shoved at it, and when he let go the door sprang back toward him on a rebound. The door was unlocked and opened on the tunnel side.
Against the wooden partition stood a large piano box. A faint ray of light trickled in at the edge. Pushing against this obstacle Detective Shannon found that it yielded. He squeezed himself silently out along the side of the box and found himself in a small warehouse.
It was rather dark there, but not so dark as it had been in the tunnel. A door opening into a store room of some kind in front was securely locked and evidently bolted. Forcing up a boarded window in the rear of the room Shannon fixed the location of the door from the areaway adjoining the bank building. Then he started back.
Replacing the piano box Shannon closed the wooden door and left it exactly as he had found it. Next he crawled back through the damp tunnel and out into the bank vault, where President Butler, Cashier Emery, and the tileman were waiting. Giving orders that the vault should be closed until further notice, Shannon took Captain Hoyt and two of his men to the building adjoining the bank, to which the tunnel had led.
This building, which faced on Frankline Avenue, was a long, three-story brick structure, with several stores on the ground floor. But the particular storeroom that Shannon wanted to see was a small, narrow room on the first floor, immediately adjacent to the bank. It was occupied by a coffee-and-tea establishment, but, although it was still early in the afternoon, there was no sign of life about the place.
Trying the door Detective Shannon found that it was locked. The tea-and-coffee house evidently was not open for business. The four officers forced the door and entered, prepared for an attack.
“Gone!” Shannon said a few minutes later. “This store was only a blind. And since they got away with fifty thousand dollars and killed one of their pals we may have a long chase.”
The detective, leaving two men on guard, hurried to the office of the agents for the building, where he got descriptions of the two men who had rented the storeroom. These descriptions tallied perfectly with two of the three men for whom the San Francisco police had been looking for months. They were the Grayson brothers.
From tenants of other storerooms in the building Shannon learned that the tea-and-coffee house had been opened about three weeks before. Nothing unusual had been noticed about the place until it had been closed so mysteriously two days before. It had not been opened since.
Further questions brought forth the fact that more bags of coffee were hauled away from the store than had been seen going into it. Detective Shannon knew then how the earth from the tunnel had been removed.
“It has all the marks of a fancy Grayson job,” he told Captain Hoyt, as he walked with the latter down the street toward the telegraph office.
He wanted his reply from Leavenworth, and he found it waiting for him. The finger prints of the slain man found in the vault were on record. They were those of a certain Simon Lurch, a notorious criminal of Boston who had served two terms for burglary, and who had finally escaped from prison. The Leavenworth authorities gave the further information that Lurch had escaped with another man, a youth named John Hayes, a first-time offender. A description of Hayes had been sent.
Shannon read this description carefully.
“John Hayes,” he reflected. “I think I know him as Jimmy Herman.”
He telephoned San Franscico to ask that the dragnet be thrown out for his man. But the dragnet was unnecessary. To Shannon came one of those accidents that happen at times, and often are puzzling. At the depot, ready to return to San Franscico and take up the chase of the Grayson gang, the officer met John Hayes face to face.
“I want you,” Shannon said. “The bank job, you know.”
“What bank job?” Hayes asked.
“And for murder,” Shannon added, watching his man carefully.
He expected some move from Hayes as he spoke, but none came. The youth looked at him sullenly, and then hung his head.
“Old stuff!” he said. “I might as well admit you've got me, but not for murder. I've been double-crossed, that's all. I'm sore. Take me along. I'm ready to squeal. But you'll never hang a murder on me.”
“We'll go up to police headquarters, where you can talk as long as you please,” Shannon said. “And the straighter you talk the better it will be for you.”
“I'll begin now,” said his prisoner as they walked up the street. “I've been double-crossed by men who said they were my pals. I've been in some tight places with Simon Lurch, but I never doped him that he'd turn out a welcher.”
“So Lurch was a welcher, was he?”
“He was,” the prisoner said. “I got wise to this little job of the Grayson gang by accident. Lurch and I had a room on Mission Street in San Francisco. Two weeks ago we got wise to the fact that the Graysons were bunked in the same hole in the next room.”
“That's interesting,” said Shannon. “Go on with your tale.”
“I've known Sam Grayson for about three years, knew him in Buffalo—but he never would work with me—said I was too much of a kid. He and his brothers always worked together and didn't care to take in outsiders. And as soon as these fancy bank jobs began to be pulled around the bay, I guessed the Graysons were handling them. I could have turned them up at any time—but I ain't that kind.
“Lurch and me knew the Graysons wouldn't let us in on anything, and we decided to get the lay of the land, get a line on some of their fancy stuff. Night after night Lurch and me took turns laying flat on our faces by the door between the two rooms. And finally one night one of the Graysons dropped something about their coffee store down here in Dayville. The next day Lurch and me came down here.
“We found the coffee house, all right, and we saw Sam Grayson dealing out a little coffee for a few customers that happened in. And then we found out about the tunnel job. Those sacks of alleged coffee didn't fool me any at all.
“Back in San Francisco that night and the next Lurch and me took turns again listening at the door. We got only a word or two; the Graysons were not loud talkers, but it was enough to tell us that the tunned was ready. We decided to beat the Graysons to it and grab off the coin in the bank for ourselves. So we came back to Dayville.
“We managed to get into that coffee store right after dark. We figured that we could get through with the job and be gone before the Graysons came, because it was sure they would wait until after midnight. We found the tunnel, and Lurch took the lead. I stood on guard at the store end.
“After exploring things Lurch came back and said that it was the prettiest job he ever had seen. The tunnel went right into the cash vault through a trapdoor all laid in tile. The way things had been done showed that the Graysons intended to make more than one visit to the bank. I told Lurch to hustle back and grab everything in the money line that he could carry, and I would stand guard at the other end of the tunnel.
“He went back, and he wasn't gone more than five minutes when I heard a shot, muffled like, at the vault end. I knew Lurch must have run into some guy in the bank and plugged him. I hurried through the tunnel to the other end to help out if he needed me.
“Just as I got by the trapdoor Lurch dropped down from the vault in the dark with a bundle that I supposed was coin. 'Beat it quick,' I told him, 'and I'll shove back the trapdoor to keep anybody from following. You wait for me in the coffee store.'
“I shoved the door up into place, put the posts under it, and crawled back through the tunnel to the coffee house. I was just in time to see Lurch leave the place, and when I whistled to him he kept right on going. As he rounded the corner he broke into a run and gave me the slip in a dark alley. That's how I was double-crossed if you want to know it.”
Detective Shannon chewed at his cigar.
“Pretty good story,” he remarked.
“It's the truth, all right.”
Shannon sensed that it was. His man was telling the truth as far as he knew it. But he was far off on one point—it had not been Simon Lurch who had dropped down from the vault and had hurried away with the money.
“Before I take you the rest of the way to headquarters I want to show you something,” Shannon said. He had stopped before an undertaking establishment. “I want you to look at the man who was shot last night.”
He forced his prisoner to go inside, and they followed an attendant into the morgue. The prisoner gave a cry of surprise while Shannon watched him closely.
“Lurch!” he said. “They got Simon Lurch! And I been thinking he double-crossed me! Who was the guy that croaked him? Who shot my pal?”
“That is what I am eager to learn,” Shannon said. “Instead of Lurch and you beating the Graysons to it, it seems that they beat you to it.”
A live clew at last, Shannon thought. The Graysons had robbed the bank, and catching Simon Lurch there had murdered him for his attempt at underworld treachery.
Shannon put his man in jail, and then called San Francisco over the telephone to say that he had caught his man in Dayville. And then got a shock, and saw his clew disappear into thin air.
“You can count the Graysons out of it,” the San Francisco office told him. “Evidently they didn't intend to pull off that Dayville job until later. All three of the Grayson brothers were caught last night trying to crack a safe in a little town two hundred miles north. A town constable nabbed them. What do you think of that? No, there is no mistake, Shannon. The men have been brought here for safe keeping, and I've talked to them.”
IV.
Detective Shannon spent a sleepless night in his room. Behind the drawn curtains he sat propped up in a chair, heedless of the fact that the steam in the radiators long before had been turned off, and consuming a fresh cigar every half hour; at other times he paced the floor, trying to solve the perplexing riddle with which he found himself confronted.
Long before midnight Shannon had confessed to himself that he was about where he had started. The Graysons now were eliminated, though they had constructed the tunnel and had intended to rob the bank. Being jailed by a country officer two hundred miles away at the time the Dayville crime was committed was alibi enough even for the notorious Graysons.
And all other clews except one were eliminated likewise, including the finger prints of the dead man, which had served only to lead to John Hayes. And Hayes merely laid bare as deep a puzzle about the murder as the original find in the vault. The one clew that remained might develop in the morning with an expected telegram, but Detective Shannon was not leaning on it.
And now he was staying awake to figure out some other method of approach to the problem. But he failed even in this. No valuable deductions were possible with the conflicting material at hand. He decided to get new material by hunting over the whole ground again. There was a chance that something had been missed. He would summon together those who had participated in the events immediately following the crime.
When he met Captain Hoyt, Night Watchman Murphy, and the other police officers early the following morning, he went over the whole thing again with them. Lachman's recital was exactly as he had given on the day previous. President Butler seemed to be greatly agitated over the loss of the fifty thousand dollars, Shannon learned nothing new.
The detective spent several hours in going over the reports of financial conditions in Dayville, and heard rumors of an expected run on the banking institution. President Butler could give him nothing new upon which he might work.
“Of course, I am no detective,” the president said, “but it seems to me that you have all the clew you need. You found a tunnel to the vault, found one dead burglar, caught his confederate, and have the latter in jail. It looks to me like a plain case of one crook slaying another, possibly in a quarrel over a division of the spoils.”
“Possibly,” Shannon replied, “you do not know crooks as well as I. I have had a talk with the man in jail. Long experience enables me to read the mind of a crook pretty well and to weigh what he says for truth or fiction. John Hayes did not kill his pal in the vault—of that I am sure.”
The banker laughed. “It is a funny world,” he remarked, “when the word of a bank robber outweighs the obvious trend of the evidence in the case.”
“We'll not waste our time with that sort of evidence any longer, Mr. Butler,” Detective Shannon said good-naturedly. “I am looking for the murderer in a different direction.”
“Then you have another clew?” the banker asked, evidently much interested.
“Scarcely a clew,” the detective replied. “Perhaps it might be called a part of a clew. It might develop into a real one if other parts of it were forthcoming. Has anything at all happened since I saw you last night that might throw light on the case?”
“Not a thing.”
“Then I'll be moving along—you are a busy man. By the way, if you are going to be here about four o'clock I'll drop in on you and we'll consider this part of a clew of which I spoke.”
“Very well, Mr. Shannon. I'll be here at four o'clock to-day.”
The detective left the office. A moment later President Butler's secretary opened the door suddenly, and the banker started.
“Oh, it is you, Miss Crawford,” he said. “The loss of that money has made me nervous. I don't seem to be able to get down to business.”
The secretary smiled and put some letters before him. The banker reached for them, and the girl turned toward the door.
“Miss Crawford,” Butler called after her, “have you taken my letter opener?”
“No, Mr. Butler.”
“That's strange. I cannot find it anywhere,” he said.
He hunted with the secretary, but without success. The girl went to her own office, and President Butler attended to his mail. He was a busy man until Detective Shannon appeared at four o'clock.
“Mr. Butler, I've been trying to patch up that half clew I said that I had,” Shannon reported. “And I am here now to say that I have discovered the identity of the robber and murderer.”
“You have?” Butler cried.
“Yes,” Shannon replied, taking the chair at the end of the desk. “Want to hear about it?”
“Naturally,” the president said.
“Very well. I have been waiting for a telegram on the chance that I might have what we call a live clew. I received the message soon after leaving you. To start at the beginning, John Hayes, the man I have in jail, told a circumstantial story about planning the robbery with a confederate, Simon Lurch, the man found dead in the vault. He told a true story of what happened as far as he knew. But he failed to throw light on the identity of the real murderer, because the man who committed the crime and got away with the money was as much a mystery to him as to me. John Hayes, you see, let him slip through the tunnel under the impression that he was Simon Lurch.
“Now what I have told nobody in town is this—that I found a glove in that tunnel the first time I went through it.”
“A glove!” Butler exclaimed.
“Yes, sir. This glove I packed carefully in cotton and had sent to the identification bureau in San Francisco on the chance that something might come of it. On my suggestion the fingers of the glove were turned inside out. The material being leather, I assumed that there was a slight chance of there being enough of a finger print on the inside of one of the fingers to give me a clew.”
The banker laughed dryly. “That sounds like some wild dream of a fiction detective.”
“I'll admit that it does,” said Shannon. “But it has turned out better than I expected. On the left ring finger of the leather glove the identification bureau found a trace of oily secretion from the pores of the murderer's finger, and by developing it with powder they discovered a pattern with a clearly defined core and delta. It was the only one of all the fingers that showed anything at all. But it was enough.”
“You interest me,” the banker said.
“I wired the formula to Leavenworth after finding no record of a duplicate in the San Francisco bureau,” Shannon continued. “On the reply received from Leavenworth depended my chance of identifying the man who wore the glove—the robber and murderer. That is the telegram for which I have been waiting. And it brought news that the man's print was on record, and gave me his name.”
“Who is he?” the banker demanded.
“His name is Ben Lorigan, formerly of Hell's Half Acre, Fort Worth, Texas.”
“Lorigan,” the banker repeated. “Lorigan?”
“Lorigan,” said Detective Shannon.
“But, supposing that this strange story is true, what good is it unless you find this Lorigan and arrest him for the crime?”
“That is one part of the clew that I patched up since I left you,” Shannon said. “As you say, the thing now is to capture Lorigan.”
The banker's secretary tapped on the door, entered, and announced that Captain Hoyt was waiting.
“Just in time, captain,” Detective Shannon said. “I am about to tell the story of what happened in the bank the night of the robbery. In the first place a sharp, distinct report of a gun was heard by the night watchman. That means only one thing—the shot must have been fired either in the big room, or the open vault. In either event the vault was open, because the shot could not have been fired through the vault door. And it couldn't have been fired in the closed vault and the report been so distinct. Since it is not customary for banks, even in small towns, to allow their vaults to stand open after business hours it is evident that the vault was opened during the evening, undoubtedly just before the robbery.”
“Of course!” President Butler exclaimed. “The two crooks opened it.”
“But there were more than two crooks,” Shannon declared. “And the vault, as we all know, was opened without the use of explosives or tools of any kind.”
President Butler began to show some excitement. “You mean——”
“I mean,” Detective Shannon continued, “that the vault was not opened from the inside by either Simon Lurch or John Hayes. The door was opened from the outside, and by somebody in the bank.”
“But,” the banker expostulated, “the police found no one in the bank—and no one left the building.”
“Which made the case look extremely difficult at first,' Shannon said. “It is true that there were burglar tools in the vault, but there was not a scratch on the metal anywhere. No tools were used either on the inside or outside.”
“Then——”
“Since the door of the vault was not opened forcibly, and since it was opened from the outside, it could have been opened only by some one who knew the combination.”
“That is rather a reckless deduction,” President Butler said.
“Not at all. I understand that only two men knew the combination.”
“Mr. Emery knew it,” the banker said.
“And you knew it!”
“Yes, of course.”
“Now we are getting nearer to the point,” Shannon went on. “While the burglar tools were not used to open the vault, they were brought into the bank for that purpose. The man who opened the vault came here with the intention of robbing the bank to get money to cover dishonest stock gambling and peculations. But he did not want it to appear that way, of course. He wanted it to look like a genuine robbery.”
“Isn't that rather proposterous?” Butler asked.
“And,” Shannon resumed, “this man came into the bank wearing gloves. He was an amateur, or he would have known that he should wear rubber gloves instead of leather. The leather was his undoing.
“It was his plan, I feel sure, to go inside the vault after he had opened it with the combination, and then to close the door a part of the way to hide himself and the sound from the street. Then he was going to use the tools to make it appear like a genuine job of yeggmen. He intended taking the fifty thousand dollars and slipping out the Franklin Avenue door while the watchman was on the Main Street side of the building.”
President Butler raised a hand in protest. “Mr. Shannin. this sounds like a bit of comedy deduction,” he said. “One would think that you had been in the lobby of the bank watching the affair.”
“I hardly deserve the compliment,” the detective replied coldly. “Getting back to what happened—the man opened the door of the vault as he had planned. Then he saw something that he had not anticipated—Simon Lurch had come up through the trapdoor in the tiling. The robber in the vault was as much surprised as the man on the outside. He thought that he had been caught by an officer. He reached for his gun. But the other man beat him to it—and shot him.
“And when the shot rang out it gave an alarm that the man who had opened the vault had not figured on. With the dead man at his feet and the trapdoor open he had a chance for escape. He grasped the only chance remaining for a get-away. He took the bundle of money, dropped into the hole, and went into the tunnel.
“When he went down the hole he ran into another surprise—a man waiting in the passageway. But when this man, thinking that he was Lurch, told him to keep on going, it was easy.”
“Sounds like fiction,” the banker observed.
“But it is not. Would you like to know the name of the murderer?”
“I suppose you mean Emery, my cashier?”
“No, sir,” said Detective Shannon. “The murderer and robber was Sydney Butler, alias Ben Lorigan, formerly of Hell's Half Acre, Forth Worth, Texas!”
The bank president, trembling in mingled fear and rage, sprang to his feet.
“What's the proof of all this?” he demanded.
“Do you deny it?”
“Of course I deny it. You are trying to frighten and blackmail me by making wild guesses about the entire affair.”
“In my investigations I have learned a few things about your trouble with the bank examiner, and your fliers in stocks,” Shannon said quietly. “I did not assume too much, but I did keep my eyes open. And when I talked with you a few hours ago I noticed something about one of the little buttons on the right sleeve of your coat.”
Butler jerked the sleeve quickly before him and looked down at the buttons.
“Just a little yellow clay packed into the holes of the button,” Shannon went on. “The remainder of your suit shows no trace of your escape by crawling through the tunnel.”
“So that is what you call a clew, is it?” the banker asked, trying to laugh.
“Just one of the scraps of a clew that I patched together,” Shannon replied. “Also, I borrowed your metal letter opener, and it did not take long to find that the finger-print pattern found in the glove was yours.”
The banker sprang to his feet.
“You've got me!” he said. “It is true enough. But at least give me credit for one thing, Detective Shannon—I know when I am licked.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1958, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 65 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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