Max Collins - Carnal Hours

This was good, to say the least: all I had to do now was talk to Colonel Lindop, which I intended to do later this afternoon. If Lindop confirmed Freddie’s time, we would not only cast doubt on that Chinese-screen fingerprint, but on Barker and Melchen themselves.

Wearing a Western shirt with a string tie, Gardner had sauntered up to me like a pudgy pint-sized gunfighter, surrounded by his three wholesomely pretty secretaries, the fresh-scrubbed trio of sisters to whom he dictated his daily columns as well as radio scripts and chapters in his current novel, in a suite over at the Royal Victoria. They were taking a lunch break, and I was alone in the booth, now.

“Girls, this is the dimestore detective I’ve been telling you about,” he growled good-naturedly. “Still ducking me, eh, Heller? Don’t you know every good Sherlock needs a Watson?”

“Which role do you see as yours?”

He had laughed in his gargling-razor-blades way, and I asked them to join me for lunch-I was already having the pub’s specialty, the Welsh rarebit.

“Thank you, son,” Gardner said, sliding into the booth next to me; the trio of smiling curly-haired girls squeezed in across from us, without a word. They were like mute Andrews Sisters.

After some food and chitchat, Gardner finally said, “Come on, Heller-give an old man a break.”

He probably had all of seven years on me.

But he pressed on: “Like the used-car salesman says, you can trust me…. Anything you say or do that you don’t want me to put in my articles, all you got to do is say so. Just don’t exclude me from the fun.”

“All right,” I said, pushing my plate of mostly eaten food aside. “How would you like to meet the inventor of the lie detector?”

His pop-eyed grin reminded me of a kid being offered his first peek behind the hootchy-kootchy show curtain.

And now Gardner-minus his “girls”-was spending the afternoon with me at Shangri La, as I got my first in-depth appraisal from Len Keeler on the evidence he’d been going over and the tests he’d been making.

Despite his relative youth, Keeler had indeed invented the polygraph, an improvement on a German device that measured changes in a suspect’s blood pressure; Len’s device also monitored respiration rate, pulse and the skin’s electrical conductivity during questioning.

“Do you know what mastoiditis is?” Keeler asked us.

Gardner and I were seated at the wrought-iron table, on which were a pitcher of limeade with glasses, the splintered picket, the coconut, and various death-scene photos, fanned out like a hand of cards. In Sir Harry’s case, a losing hand.

An old friend of mine via Eliot, Keeler-Director of the Chicago Crime Detection Lab at Northwestern University Law School-was more than just the top polygraph man in the country; he was also an authority on scientific crime detection in general. Including fingerprints….

But the subject now was the cluster of four wounds, which the prosecution claimed had been produced by a “blunt instrument.”

“To treat mastoiditis, a surgeon has to take a hammer and chisel to break through the thickness of bone,” Len told us, “and even then, the thinner bones around the mastoid would tend to shatter with the impact.”

“Then what could have produced those holes?”

He pushed his glasses up again. “A small-caliber gun…at the very largest, a.38, but not a.38 Special; more likely a.32.”

“Were there powder burns?” Gardner asked.

“Somebody played tic-tac-toe on the corpse with a blowtorch,” I said, “and you’re wondering if anybody noticed powder burns?”

“You can’t tell from these photos,” Keeler said, fanning them out some more. “Even so, smokeless powder doesn’t leave burns. As for these triangular entry wounds, bullets fired at close range tend to make larger, irregular holes because of escaping gases.”

I tapped a photo of Sir Harry and the four holes in his head. “Then these are gunshot wounds-no question?”

“No question,” Keeler said flatly.

Eyes narrowing with thought and Bahamian sunshine, Gardner said, “Might this old shyster offer the defense a piece of free legal advice?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll pass it along to Godfrey Higgs.”

“Don’t introduce this evidence,” Gardner said somberly. “If you do, the prosecution will shrug it off somehow, explain it away.”

“What do you suggest?” Keeler asked.

Gardner shrugged. “Let them try to convict your client for bludgeoning the deceased. If they get their guilty verdict, you’ll have this new evidence in your pocket, to help get you a new trial.”

Keeler was smiling, nodding. “That’s a Perry Mason stunt, all right-but I agree with you. I see no advantage in contradicting their ridiculous assertion that four holes in the toughest part of the skull, an inch apart, are stab wounds.”

“You’ve had a chance to go over the fingerprint evidence,” I said. “What do you think?”

Keeler smirked. “I think as a fingerprint expert, Captain Barker would make a swell traffic cop. Whole sections of the room were never checked for prints-that infamous Chinese screen was carried out into the hall by three cops before it was even dusted! God knows how many grimy paws clutched that thing before Barker got around to it a day later.”

“Not to mention those bloody handprints being washed off the wall,” I said, “because they seemed too small to be de Marigny’s-mustn’t have facts muddying up the case, after all.”

Keeler was shaking his head. “Unbelievable. Barker did dust some of the bloody fingerprints, you know- before they were dry , ruining ’em forever.” He looked toward Gardner. “And do you gentlemen of the press realize that these Miami geniuses didn’t even have any of the blood in the room analyzed, to see if it was Oakes’ type?”

Shaking his head in amazement, Gardner muttered, “It’s a goddamn botch.”

“No,” I said. “It’s a goddamn frame.”

Gardner gave me a doubtful look.

“Consider this,” Keeler said, eyes bright. “Barker was called in as a fingerprint expert, but all he brought with him was a small portable kit-and no fingerprint camera.”

A special camera was required for fingerprint shots, with a lens you held flush with the surface of the dusted print, almost touching.

“No fingerprint camera?” Gardner said. “Didn’t the local boys have one he could borrow?”

“No,” I said. “Of course, he could have got one from the RAF….”

“But he didn’t,” Keeler said ominously. “He just dusted the prints, lifted ’em and filed ’em away.”

“Destroying the sons of bitches,” Gardner said, wide-eyed.

Keeler shrugged. “In some cases, lifting ’em with Scotch tape might leave enough of the print behind to dust again and take a photograph…but Barker was out of Scotch tape, too.”

“What?” Gardner said.

“He used rubber,” I said. “And that does remove the print from its original surface-destroying it in the act of its supposed preservation.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter where Barker says it came from,” Keeler said, picking up the photo blowup of the fingerprint. “There’s not one chance in ten million this came from that screen-I’d swear to that on a stack of Bibles.”

“Just one Bible will do,” I said.

“How can you be so certain?” Gardner asked him.

Keeler stood. “See for yourself.”

He led us into the ballroom, where on the same parquet floor on which the Duke and Duchess had waltzed last weekend, a cream-color six-panel Chinese screen stood.

“But isn’t that…” Gardner began. “No, it can’t be-it isn’t scorched….”