The prisoner did not brighten to any extent under the professional flattery. His eyes closed. The cuffed wrists dropped down upon his chest. He breathed slowly as Drew took the overcoat Delaney brought, and found the photos of the finger prints which Fosdick and the expert at headquarters had both declared were not on record.
“A little ink,” Drew said to the operative. “We’ll smear this fellow’s thumb and see if his print answers to the print I found in the booth at Grand Central. I’ll venture that it does.”
Nichols extended a fountain pen which the detective opened, sponged on the corner of a handkerchief, and returned with a chuckle of satisfaction.
“Ah,” he said, gripping the prisoner’s hand and smearing a thumb with a rolling motion across the back of the print. “Ah, Delaney, see here. The same whorls and loops. The same tiny V-shaped scar. One, two, three—center right. This is the man. We have him deeper in toward the place with the little, green door. He knows what I mean!”
The prisoner’s lips closed to a thin, hard line. A tiny spot of hectic fire burned in the center of each cheek as Drew completed the searching and rose.
“Footprints, now!” he said with a snappy order. “Compare those plaster casts you took at the junction-box back of this house. Are they the same? There’s a series of four screw holes in his rubber-heels, Delaney. Do they compare with the casts. Measure them!”
“Sure and they do,” said the big operative, rising and pointing to the small projections. “This lad, Chief, was the only one around that junction-box till after the snow froze and drifted over. That’s my idea, Chief. It caught him, didn’t it, Chief?”
“Every little helps to forge the chain,” Drew said. “He’s in bad now. His only chance is to tell us what he knows about Morphy? What was said over the telephone wire? What did Frick say?”
“It was this way, Chief,” Delaney said. “I’m waiting talking with the drug-clerk when there’s a ring on the slot-booth ’phone. It’s Jack Nefe at Gramercy Hill. He says to me that Frick had just ’phoned and said that Morphy had come out of the guard room, looked around, then, after chinning with a keeper at the front gate, he had started going over a telephone book for a number. Nefe said for me to hold the wire. Then I gets a number, Chief. It’s Gramercy Hill 11,678. Nefe said that was a booth in the new Broadway Subway at Forty-first Street. I piles into a cab and arrives there just as this fellow had finished boring a hole between the two booths—11,678 and 11,679. I waits behind a slot-machine. Some one rang up when he coupled the wires, listens, then asks Gramercy Hill central for this ’phone here in Miss Stockbridge’s room. You see the game, Chief?”
“Go on!” said Drew. “Be very clear!”