Ричард Деминг - Hit and Run

“How do you know that?” Kriegler asked.

“Bought some night crawlers from me. Give him two dozen. When he come in, he said I could have the rest in the can. I counted ’em. Two dozen exactly. He hadn’t used a single one.”

Kriegler finished tightening the motor clamps and sat back in the rear seat. He was beginning to be intrigued by the mystery.

“Maybe he dipped minnows,” he suggested. “You know how they swim around a boat light at night.”

“No dip net,” Jonas said promptly. “Besides, he didn’t bring in no fish. Only boat out last night that didn’t catch something. ‘Course he claimed he threw back some small perch. And joked about throwing back a five-pound northern. But how do you figure him using no bait?”

Kriegler thought it over. “You say he was all dressed up?”

“Neat as a whistle.”

“Maybe he was meeting some woman in another boat,” Kriegler hazarded.

“With his wife dropping him off and picking him up again?” the old man snorted. “Least I guess she was his wife. Beautiful woman. Got a good look at her Friday night. Feller wouldn’t be likely to go romancing some other gal with her available.”

“Hmm,” Kriegler said. “It’s certainly a provocative situation.”

“Thought you might be interested. Threw a tarp over the boat he used. To preserve fingerprints, in case it rained.”

“Fingerprints?” Kriegler asked with raised brows.

“This feller was up to no good. Smuggling, maybe. Taking dope or something out to a confederate in a boat from Canada. Or maybe picking it up.”

Kriegler smiled. “Dope smugglers don’t operate like that, Jonas. They use their own boats.”

“Well, what could he of been doing then?” the old man demanded.

Kriegler had no idea. But the mystery intrigued him more and more. It occurred to him that this was the sort of situation he had dreamed of stumbling on. Momentarily he envisioned himself unraveling some deep international plot by brilliant detective work.

He came down to earth. More probably he would make a complete fool of himself if he started investigating the behavior of a total, and probably entirely innocent stranger.

Nevertheless it might make an interesting game for his own amusement. He wouldn’t have to mention it to anyone at headquarters.

“Keep the boat covered,” he suggested. “I’ll drive back again tonight with a fingerprint kit. Happen to get this man’s license number?”

“Sure,” Jonas said. “New York 9I-3836.”

As old Jonas had predicted, the walleyes weren’t running. Kriegler picked up a few good-sized perch by chugging with a worm on the end of his flatfish lure, but perch aren’t much sport. He’d meant to make a day of it, and had brought sandwiches so he could lunch in the boat, but he came in at noon.

Back in Cleveland, after he had cleaned up and had dinner, he dropped past Police Headquarters to borrow a fingerprint kit. The sergeant he got it from accepted his explanation that he suspected his landlady of going through his dresser drawers when he was away, and that he wanted to make the pretense of checking for fingerprints in order to scare her out of the habit.

He was back at the boat livery by four P.M.

The old man watched interestedly as Kriegler used a camel’s hair brush to gently dust the top of the outboard motor with silvery powder. Several overlapping handprints appeared, showing all five fingers, where the last user of the boat had laid his left hand while pulling the starting cord with his right. Kriegler hadn’t tried to borrow a fingerprint camera because he would have had to go higher than a sergeant to get one. Instead, he lifted the prints on a special type of Scotch tape that came with the kit and pasted the tape, print side down, to a large white card. By picking the best print of each finger, he got a complete set of the left hand plus a palm print.

“Now where’ll you check those prints?” the old man asked.

“Try our own files first,” Kriegler told him. “If he’s not in there, we’ll try the FBI files in Washington. They’ve got most everybody who’s been fingerprinted. Not just criminals, but people who’ve been in military service or held civil-service jobs or applied for passports. Practically everybody who’s ever had occasion to be fingerprinted for anything.”

Jonas was suitably impressed. “Guess a criminal ain’t got much chance these days, has he?” he said. “With all this modern scientific stuff you fellers use.”

Monday morning Kriegler had the prints run through the Cleveland fingerprint files by a clerk friend of his. They weren’t on record.

This brought the game to an abrupt halt. He couldn’t ask any of his acquaintances in the Detective Bureau to send them to Washington without explaining why. And he couldn’t bring himself to explain to anyone on the force what he had been doing. To his own ears the true explanation made it sound as though he were either a snoop or given to playing childish games. And he couldn’t devise any false explanation that sounded plausible.

It occurred to him that the next time he went fishing, old Jonas was going to want a progress report. The old man might be put off for a time, but eventually he would realize nothing was going to come of the mystery, and Kriegler would drop a notch in his esteem. His reputation with Jonas as a criminal investigator was at stake.

Kriegler stewed over the matter all day. It wasn’t until late that night in his room that a possible solution hit him. He suddenly remembered that one of his old classmates at Ohio University was now teaching in the Chemistry Department at the University of Buffalo.

He got out his portable typewriter, ran a sheet of bond paper into it, and typed his address and the date in the upper righthand corner. Leaving two spaces, he typed on the lefthand side: “Professor Charles Torrington, Chemistry Department, University of Buffalo, Buffalo, N.Y.”

After a few minutes of thought, he wrote:

Dear Charlie:

You’re probably surprised to hear from me after all these years, but I have a minor problem. As you may remember, I’m with the Cleveland Crime Lab. I have a case — an unofficial one, so I can’t go through regular channels — you may be able to help me on.

There may be nothing to this. Certainly there isn’t enough at this point for me to request official action. It’s just a mysterious situation I happened to run into and decided to try to work out for my own satisfaction. You might call it a busman’s holiday. Probably I should have my head examined for worrying about it and bothering you, but I can’t get the matter out of my mind.

The owner of a boat livery where I fish put me next to it. Last Friday night a man he describes as in his early thirties, about six feet two, and over two hundred pounds, came around to engage a boat for the next night. He had a woman of perhaps thirty with him, whom the livery owner describes as a strikingly beautiful brunette. He only saw her seated in the car, so he can’t give any description of her height or weight. The car was a green Buick convertible with New York license 9I-3836.

This man dropped a couple of remarks that convinced the livery owner that he was from the Buffalo area. Specifically, he referred to a walleyed pike as a yellow and to a crappie as a calico bass, which the livery man says are terms unique to that section. But when asked if he was from Buffalo, the man denied it and said he was from Detroit. This aroused the livery man’s suspicion enough to make him observe the man closely when he returned the next night.

Saturday the man showed up dressed in clothing far too good to go fishing in. He spent nearly two hours on the lake but didn’t fish. At least he used none of the bait furnished by the livery owner, and brought in no fish, although everyone else was catching them that night.