Dutch Shoe Mystery (29 page)

“It’s a little difficult to know where to begin. … I suppose the same unbelieving thought has crossed all your minds—how it was possible for Lucille Price, whose presence in the Anteroom was attested by a number of reliable witnesses—Dr. Byers, Grace Obermann the nurse, and the doubtful gentleman known as ‘Big Mike’—witnesses who at the same time vouched for the presence of Dr. Janney’s impersonator—I say, how it was
possible
for Lucille Price to have been two distinct personalities at apparently the identical moment.”

There was a vigorous nodding of heads.

“That she was, you now know,” continued Ellery; “how she accomplished this spiritistic feat I’ll tell you by analysis.

“Consider the amazing situation. Lucille Price was Lucille Price, the trained nurse, dutifully watching over Abby Doorn’s unconscious body in the Anteroom. Yet she was also the seemingly masculine figure of Dr. Janney’s impersonator in the same period. Unimpeachable witnesses swore that two people occupied the Anteroom (I mean omitting Mrs. Doorn)—a nurse and a doctor. The nurse was heard talking. The doctor was seen going in and coming out. How could any one dream that both nurse and doctor were one, that Lucille Price’s original story concerning herself as the nurse, and the impostor as the doctor, was anything but the absolute truth? Now that it’s all over, and we know what actually happened, we can put our finger on the significant feature which makes a seemingly impossible series of circumstances not only possible but plausible—that is, that while the nurse was heard
she was not seen;
and that while the impostor was seen,
he was not heard.
”

Ellery sipped at a glass of water. “But this is beginning the wrong way. Before telling you how Lucille Price accomplished this apparent miracle of duality, let me go back to the inception of the case and describe the deductive steps by which we finally arrived at that blissful state in which
vincit omnia veritas.

“When the clothing of the impostor was found on the floor of the telephone booth the face-gag, gown and surgical cap proved unproductive of clews. They were ordinary samples of such wear, without interesting characteristics.

“But three items—the trousers and the two shoes—were rather startlingly illuminating.

“Let’s dissect—if I may use a laboratory word—the shoes. On one of them a scrap of adhesive had been wrapped about a torn shoelace. What did this mean? We went to work.

“In the first place, it was patent after a little thought that the lace must have broken
during
the crime-period. Why?

“This was a carefully schemed murder. We had ample evidence of that. Now, if the lace had snapped during the
preparatory
period—that is to say, some time before the crime-period, when the clothes were being assembled by the criminal at some place other than the Hospital—would a piece of adhesive have been used to patch up the tear? Hardly. For it would have been more in keeping with the general method of the murderer to procure a new, unbroken lace and insert it in the shoe, in order to
prevent
another breaking during the crime-period to come, when seconds were precious and any delay would be fatal.

“Of course, the natural question arose: Why didn’t the criminal
knot
the broken ends instead of using the peculiar method of
pasting
them together? Examination of the lace revealed the reason: If the lace had been knotted, so much of its length would have been consumed that it would have been literally impossible to tie up the ends.

“There was another indication that tended to show that the lace had broken and had been repaired some time during the crime-period: the adhesive was still slightly moist when I removed it from the lace. Obviously it had been applied not long before.

“From the very use of the adhesive, then, and its moist condition, it was virtually a certainty that the lace had broken during the crime-period. Now—
when
during the crime-period had it broken? Before the murder, or after? Reply: Before the murder. And why? Because if the lace had snapped as the impostor was taking the shoe off, he wouldn’t have been put to the necessity of repairing it at all! Time was precious; what harm in leaving a broken lace when the shoe had already served its purpose? That’s clear, I hope?”

Heads bobbed in unison. Ellery lit a cigarette and sat down on the edge of the Inspector’s desk.

“I knew, then, that the lace had torn while the criminal was dressing in his impostor’s clothing, just before the murder.

“But where did this lead?” Ellery smiled reminiscently. “Not very far at the time. So I tucked it away in a corner of my brain and tackled the most curious problem of the adhesive tape itself.

“I asked myself this question: What two complementary groups of the most general nature could be said to have committed the murder? Any number of arbitrary
genera
might have been set up.” Ellery chuckled. “As for instance—smokers and non-smokers, Wets and Drys, Caucasians and Negroes. Any irrelevant and ludicrous divisions like these.

“Seriously, however. Since we were considering a murder in a hospital, the answer naturally fell into the following elementary, relevant classification: that is, the murder was committed either by an unprofessionally minded person or by a professionally minded person. Surely a pertinent generalization.

“Let me define my terms. By ‘professionally minded persons’ I meant persons with trained or acquired knowledge of hospitals and medical routine—knowledge in its least detailed sense.

“Very well! I considered the possibilities in the light of the fact that adhesive tape was used to repair the shoelace. I reached a conclusion—that the impostor-murderer was a
professionally
minded person.

“How did I attain this mental resolution? Well, the shoelace break was an accident—an accident that, as I’ve shown, couldn’t have been foreseen. In other words, the impostor had no inkling, in the period before he donned the prepared surgical clothing prior to the murder, that one of his shoelaces was going to snap as he put on the shoes. Therefore he could not have provided against such a contingency. Therefore whatever he did to repair such a break in an emergency was unplanned and quite instinctive under the pressure of haste. But the impostor in this emergency used adhesive to mend his broken lace! I ask you: Would an unprofessionally minded person—in the sense I postulated a moment ago—carry adhesive tape about with him?
No.
Would an unprofessionally minded person even
think
of carrying such a professional article about with him?
No.
Not carrying it about with him, would an unprofessionally minded person think of
looking for
adhesive if he needed something to repair a break?
No.

“So
THAT
,” and Ellery tapped the desk with his forefinger, “the fact that adhesive
was
thought of, the fact that adhesive
was
used in the emergency, indicated clearly some one on terms of familiarity with such an article. In other words,
a professionally minded person.

“To digress for the merest moment. This classification must be held to include not only nurses, doctors and internes, but also non-medical persons so accustomed to hospital routine that for all logical purposes they fall into the professionally minded class.

“But if a piece of adhesive tape could have presented itself—thereby suggesting its use—to the impostor at the very instant he discovered his need of an article of repair, all my reasoning would be invalidated. For such accessibility would have permitted
any one,
professionally minded or not, to have taken advantage of the lucky availability of the tape. In other words, if the impostor saw a piece of adhesive lying before his eyes at the moment his lace snapped, his use of the tape to mend the lace would have indicated, not instinct or a professional cast of mind, but merely a taking advantage of a circumstance which
forced itself
on his attention.

“Fortunately for the strict progression of my argument, however,” continued Ellery as he puffed at his cigarette steadily, “I had learned from a talk and little inspection tour with Dr. Minchen even before the murder that the Dutch Memorial Hospital has most rigid rules about medical supplies—of which adhesive is necessarily an adjunct. Supplies are kept in special cabinets. They are not scattered about on tables or in easily penetrated supply rooms. They’re quite out of sight—and ken—of the uninitiate. Only a Hospital employee or some one accepted in the same sense would know where to lay hands on the adhesive on the split-minute notice necessitated by the murderer’s time-schedule. The adhesive wasn’t under the impostor’s eye; he had to
know
where to get it before he could use it.

“To put it more directly—not only was my conclusion about a professionally minded criminal substantiated, but I was now able to limit my first generalization even further: that is, my criminal was
a professionally minded person connected with the Dutch Memorial Hospital!

“I had hurdled a high obstacle, therefore. I knew quite a bit from my deductive attack upon the facts about the impostor-murderer. Let me sum up once more, so that my reasoning may be utterly crystal in your minds: The murderer, to have thought of and used the adhesive, must have been professionally minded. The murderer, to have known where to procure the adhesive on a moment’s notice, must have been connected in some way with, not just any hospital, but the Dutch Memorial Hospital itself.”

Ellery lit another cigarette. “It narrowed the field, but not to the limit of satisfaction. For from these conclusions I could not exclude such people as Edith Dunning, Hulda Doorn, Moritz Kneisel, Sarah Fuller, Gatekeeper Isaac Cobb, Superintendent James Paradise, elevator-men, mop-women—all of whom were regularly on the Hospital premises and knew its layout and regulations, either as employees or as constant visitors with special privileges. So they had to be classed for my purpose with the Dutch Memorial’s medical personnel as professionally minded persons.

“But that wasn’t all. The shoes were bearers of still another tale. In examining them, we encountered a most unusual phenomenon—the tongues in both were found pressed against the upper insides of the toe-box, quite flatly. What could be the explanation of this?

“The shoes had been used by the impostor—the adhesive showed that. The murderer’s feet had been inside. And yet the tongues were—as they were!

“Have you ever put on your shoes when the tongue was pushed back by your toes as you slipped your feet in? It happens to every one occasionally. You knew the difference at once, didn’t you? You couldn’t help but feel that the tongues were out of position. … Well, certainly the impostor didn’t put on those shoes, no matter how much of a sweat he was in, and deliberately leave the tongues to crush his toes. Then the impostor was unaware of what happened to the tongues, or was not made uncomfortable as he put the shoes on. …

“But how in God’s name was this possible? Only by one explanation: the impostor’s feet were considerably smaller than the shoes he was putting on—the shoes we later found in the booth. But the shoes we found were ridiculously small themselves—they were size 6! Do you realize what this means? Size 6 is quite the smallest ordinary man’s size in shoes. What sort of masculine monstrosity in the adult stage could have worn those shoes? A Chinese whose honored sire had mistaken him for a girl-child and stunted his infant feet? After all, the man whose feet could have slipped into those shoes, pushing the tongues back, without feeling the difference, must have been the user of much smaller shoes! Size 4 or 5? There’s no such size in men’s shoes!

“So the analysis resolved itself into this: the only kind of feet which would have been so much smaller as to permit the tongues to be pressed back without discomfort or inconvenience would be—one, the feet of a child (palpably ridiculous from the testified height of the impostor); two, the feet of an unnaturally small man (untenable for the same reason); and three, the feet of a medium-sized woman!”

Ellery pounded the desk. “I said, gentlemen, several times during the past week’s investigation that those shoes told me an important—an all-important—story. They did. From the adhesive on the lace I conjured a professionally minded person connected with the Dutch Memorial Hospital; from the tongues I conjured a woman.

“It was the first indication that the impersonator was not only posing as another individual but also as an individual of the opposite sex.
Id est,
a woman made up as a man!”

Some one sighed. Sampson muttered, “Evidence …” and the Police Commissioner’s eyes gleamed with appreciation. Dr. Minchen stared at his friend as if he were viewing him for the first time. The Inspector said nothing, sunk in reflection.

Ellery shrugged his shoulders. “Before I leave the shoes to tackle another angle of the problem, it might be interesting to point out the lack of discrepancy between the heights of the two heels. Both were worn down to approximately the same degree. If they had been Dr. Janney’s shoes one heel would have been worn away considerably more than another—Janney limped heavily on one foot, as you know.

“The shoes, then, weren’t Janney’s; and while this did not prove that Janney wasn’t the murderer, since he could have left some one else’s shoes in the telephone booth for us to find, or worn the equal-heeled shoes, still not his own, these equal-heeled shoes made a good corroborative assumption that Dr. Janney was innocent; that is, that he was actually impersonated. For of course the thought crossed more than one mind that Janney might have impersonated himself—pretended that some one else was using his identity, while in reality it was he himself all the time.

“I didn’t believe this from the first. Look: If Janney himself was the person we have nominated as the ‘impostor,’ he could have done the whole bloody job in his own surgical clothes, the ones he wore that morning. That would mean that the clothing we found in the booth was a ‘plant’—not used while he committed the crime, merely left to give a false impression. But how about the adhesive and tongues in the shoes? Those shoes were certainly used, as I’ve proved. And how about the basted trousers—the second essential point about the clothes? I’ll take them up in a moment. … But as for impersonating himself—why didn’t he produce Swanson to substantiate his alibi that he was in his office during the crime-period? That would be the inevitable thing for him to do. But he stubbornly refused to produce Swanson, thereby with his full realization of the results putting his head into the noose of police suspicion. No, his actions as well as the clothes cleared him in my mind of the possibility that he impersonated himself.