“It is wise, sometimes, to appear to suspect the innocent. Do you remember I asked for the checks this morning? A moment later I knew you were not the man. As soon as you said you had telephoned Hesset a significant thing happened. Albert left the room. He went to a telephone. My guess is he went there to warn Tessie not to tell anybody she had spoken to him about the Hesset settlement.”
The cashier lifted a white face. “How did you know that?”
“Deduction. One person could have heard what Pelle said to Hesset—the central operator through whom the call passed. When I left here Albert took me to the door. I made a point of shaking hands with him. A cashier who had just paid a forged check, it is only natural to suppose, would be nervous and upset. Albert’s hand was hard and strained, his grip that of a man steeled to see something through.... What?
“I stopped at the telephone office and asked what girls had been on duty at seven o’clock Monday evening. Tessie had been on duty alone. I did not mention her name; and yet, before I had gone one hundred feet, she was out in the street after me, badly shaken, demanding to know why I had inquired about her. That end of the picture was complete. Tessie and Albert were sweethearts; she had told him of the Pelle call in confidential gossip. I knew then who the guilty man was, but I could not prove it.
“This afternoon the tailor delivered me another man’s suit by mistake. I found it was Albert’s. This was in one of the pockets.” The doctor pushed across the desk the paper covered with the canner’s signature. “Probably every other paper on which Albert had practiced the signature had been destroyed—this one had been overlooked. As he could not have practiced forgery at the bank he must have done it at home. And as the same pen had written the signatures on this paper and the signature on the forged check, they must have been written, not with a bank pen, but with a pen that Albert carried with him. I wanted to have him use that pen before witnesses.
“So I had Captain Tucker prepare statements and bring you here. I had Bryan clear the desk so that Albert would have no other pen to use but his own. Once he signed that statement he had damned himself.”
Bryan Smith, examining the two checks, shook his head. “Doctor, you cannot see. How could you tell that?”
“Have you a magnifying glass?” the blind man asked.
The bank president took one from a drawer.
“Examine the check Pelle signed and the statement he signed. Both signatures are smooth. Look at the forged check. There are three l’s in Paul Pelle. On each of the three upstrokes on the l’s the pen gouged the paper a bit. Here’s the paper that was in the suit. The same gouge on the upstrokes. Now the statement Albert Wall signed. There are also three l’s in his name, and the same gouge on the upstrokes. All made by the same pen.”