“As a matter of fact, there is.” He took hold of the tip of the lace edging at the upper right corner of the slip and turned it back a little. Just below the reverse of the lace Jessie saw a small stain, rusty brown in color. “That’s a bloodstain, probably from a scratched finger. However, remember that Humffrey didn’t get a look at the back of our forgery. We had it face up on Abe’s desk under glass.” He flipped the corner back. “You still don’t see where we went wrong?”
Jessie stared and stared. “No.”
“Take another look at that handprint, Jessie. A real look this time.”
And then she saw it, and her mind leaped back to that August night in the nursery and her brief glimpse of the pillow over the baby’s face. And for the first time since that moment Jessie Sherwood saw the pillow as she had seen it then.
What she had forgotten until now was that the little finger of the handprint was a whole finger.
There was no missing fingertip.
“That’s how Humffrey knew the slip we showed him was a fake,” Inspector Queen shrugged. “We showed him a handprint with the tip of the pinkie gone. He knew that the original pillowcase had a handprint showing five full fingers.”
“But I don’t understand,” Jessie cried. “Alton Humffrey’s pinkie does have the tip missing. How could his right hand possibly have made this print?”
“It couldn’t.”
“But—”
“It couldn’t. Therefore it didn’t.”
Jessie gaped at him. The silence became so intense that Borcher looked up from his Plato uneasily and Tinny opened one eye.
“But Richard...”
“Humffrey didn’t murder the baby, Jessie. I guess they knew what they were doing when they retired me.” The old man sighed. “I was so sure Humffrey knocked off Finner and the Coy girl that I had to wrap it up in one neat package. One killer. But it wasn’t one killer, Jessie. Humffrey murdered Finner and Connie Coy, all right, but someone else murdered the baby.”
Jessie squeezed her forehead with both hands, trying to force some order into her thoughts.
“Humffrey never doubted for a minute that the baby was his — I was wrong about that, too. He knew it was his. That was the whole point. And when he spotted the pillowcase that night he knew his baby had been murdered, and he knew who’d murdered it. That’s when he got rid of the pillowcase. He was determined to make the death look like an accident. That’s what made him say he had put the ladder there, when he hadn’t touched the ladder. It was the baby’s killer who’d put the ladder there, thinking to make the murder look like the nephew’s work.
“And when Finner got in touch with Humffrey and told him to meet us in Finner’s office, Humffrey realized that unless he shut Finner’s mouth the story of Michael’s real parentage might come out and lead right back to Michael’s death. So he killed Finner and removed all the evidence from the file. And when we got to Connie Coy in spite of everything and she was about to name Humffrey as the real father of Michael, he killed Connie Coy.
“It was all cover-up, Jessie. Cover-up to keep us from learning the true reason for the baby’s murder. To keep the whole nasty story out of the papers. To protect the sacred name of Humffrey.”
“Someone else,” Jessie said, clinging to the thought. “What someone else, Richard? Who?”
“Jessie,” Richard Queen said. “Who had the best reason to hate Alton Humffrey’s illegitimate child? Who’s the only one in the world Humffrey would have a guilt feeling about, a compulsion to cover up? Whose exposure as an infant-killer would smear as much muck on the Humffrey name as if he himself were tagged for it? Who’s the one who kept hysterically insisting — until Humffrey got her out of the way and kept her out of the way — that she’d been ‘responsible’ for little Mike’s death?... only we all misunderstood her?”
He shook his head. “There’s only one possible candidate for the baby’s murder, Jessie. It’s Sarah Humffrey’s handprint on this pillowcase.”
Chief Pearl stuck his big head into the room. “Hi, Jessie. You okay now? Dick, he’s fully conscious and ready to make a statement. You’d better come.”
Jessie went as far as the doorway of the master bedroom. The room was full of men. Taugus police. The State’s Attorney’s man, Merrick, tieless again. Dr. Wicks. A lot of state troopers. Wes Polonsky and Johnny Kripps.
And Alton Humffrey.
Humffrey was lying on the great bed, propped on pillows, his right arm swathed in bandages. His skin was not sallow now. It was colorless. The narrow wedge of face was without expression or movement, a face in a coffin. Only the eyes were alive, two prisoners struggling to escape.
Jessie said faintly, “I’ll wait with Beck Pearl, Richard,” and she stumbled away.
“That,” Richard Queen remarked, leaning back in happy surfeit, “was the best darned Sunday dinner I’ve ever surrounded.”
“Delicious, Jessie!” Beck Pearl said, not without a slight mental reservation about the wine in the sauce. “She’s really a wonderful cook, Dick. Imagine being a trained nurse and having a talent like this, too!”
“It’s just a veal roast,” Jessie said deprecatingly, as if she were in the habit of standing over a hot oven every Sunday for hours and hours basting with an experimental sauce of garlic salad dressing, lemon juice, sauterne, bouillon, and Parmesan cheese, and praying that the result would be edible.
“But as I was saying,” Abe Pearl said, and he belched.
“Abe!” his wife said.
“Beg pardon,” Abe Pearl said.
It was Sunday, October 9th, a brisk and winy day, a day for being alive. Jessie had planned and slaved for this day, when Richard Queen’s two friends should sit in her little dining alcove in Rowayton and tell her — and him — what a marvelous cook she was. Only Abe Pearl insisted on talking about what Jessie had hoped and hoped would not be talked about.
“Wonderful,” Richard Queen beamed. “Just wonderful, Jessie.”
“Thank you,” Jessie murmured.
“—she’s as cold turkey as any killer I ever heard of,” Abe Pearl went on. “Match that big mitt of hers to the handprint on the pillowcase — a perfect fit. Analyze her perspiration — it gives the same lab result as the sweat traces in the slip. Analyze her blood — it’s just like the blood in the stain on the back of the slip, which got on there when she scratched her hand on the ladder. Dust on ladder same as dust on slip. And, by God, when they work over the slip and bring out some fingerprints left by the mixed dust and perspiration, they’re her prints!” Chief Pearl pressed his paws to his abdomen to discourage another belch. “And yet,” he thundered solemnly, “I tell you Sarah Humffrey will never go to the Chair. If she wasn’t as nutty as a fruit cake — I mean after they got the baby, when she overheard Humffrey talking to Finner over the phone and realized her saintly husband had palmed off his own bastard on her — if she wasn’t as nutty as a fruit cake then, she sure is now. She’ll get sent to a bughouse on an insanity verdict, and I don’t see how the State can stop it.”
“Abe,” Beck Pearl said.
“What?”
“Wouldn’t you like to walk off your dinner?”
So finally they were alone in Jessie’s little garden. Abe Pearl was wandering in Coventry somewhere along the waterfront, and his wife was in Jessie’s kitchen banging dishes around to show that she wasn’t listening through the kitchen window.
And now that they were alone together, there seemed to be nothing to say. That same peculiar silence dropped between them.
So Jessie picked some dwarf zinnias, and Richard Queen sat in the white basket chair under the dogwood tree watching the sun on her hair.