The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues (8 page)

“Well, one thumbprint isn’t much help,” Dickory said. “The police need a complete set of fingerprints, and and even those can’t be traced unless they have a record of original prints for comparison.”

“I was quite aware of that, Sergeant,” the inspector replied huffily.

You were not, thought Sergeant Kod.

Resuming his chair, Inspector Noserag puffed on his pipe and closed his eyes to show that he was thinking. The portrait painting postponed, Dickory took up her notebook and awaited the results of the great detective’s deliberations.

At last he spoke. “The red smudged thumbprints tell us two things about my counterfeiter. One: he passed his bills face down, therefore he is cautious. Two: he is in working contact with some sort of red stain.”

“Printer’s ink?” Dickory guessed.

Noserag shook his head. “The bills are printed in black and green.”

“He wasn’t printing the bills when he was passing them. Maybe he was working on another job.”

“Good thinking, Sergeant, but my counterfeiter has been passing these bills for months. If he had ink on his thumbs, why was it always red ink, and why only his thumbs? No, I propound that this is a stain of another origin.”

Dickory knew better than to suggest to the proud inspector that they ask the police crime lab for help. She studied the red stain more closely. It looked familiar. She had seen a similar stain somewhere else.

“Pistachio nuts,” she announced. Her brother Donald ate pistachio nuts while watching baseball games on television. Blanche was always yelling at him for missing the refuse bowl. By the time the game was over, the carpet would be strewn with shells, and Donald’s thumbs would be red.

“Pistachio nuts,” Noserag repeated, examining the thumbprints under his glass. “By gad, you’re right; we are dealing with a pistachio-nut addict. Congratulations, Sergeant Kod.”

“Elementary, my dear Noserag, elementary.”

“Hmmm.”

For a few uncomfortable minutes Garson stared at Dickory through narrowed slits. She turned away wondering if he was angered by her mockery or whether his eyes were irritated by the pipe smoke.

“Speaking of red, what happened to your nose?”

Dickory looked at herself in the tall mirror. Her nose was red, all right. “I ran into a door.”

“A fat door wearing a white suit, I would surmise,” he replied.

Dickory spun around, wondering how he had guessed.

“Rudimentary, my dear Kod, rudimentary.”

The following afternoon Dickory discovered the reason for the large mirror in the artist’s studio. Rigid as a frozen pork chop, Cookie Panzpresser sat posed before the mirror, hypnotized by her reflected image as a lady about to pour tea. Garson stood before his easel, a paintbrush in his hand, an eye patch over one eye.

“That will be all for today, Cookie,” he said, taking the Rose Medallion teacup from her hand and breaking the spell.

A laughing, chattering Cookie came to life. “Oh, hello there, Dickory Dock, I didn’t hear you come in. Isn’t that clever, that eye patch? I never knew until Garson explained it to me that you need two eyes to see in three dimensions, and one eye for two dimensions. Garson is painting me with one eye in two dimensions, flat like Gauguin. Isn’t that right?”

Garson did not respond. The nearly completed painting was highlighted and shadowed in three dimensions. It looked just like any other Garson portrait of a non-aging woman, the face smoothed of wrinkles, each hair in its shining place.

“Garson can also paint in one dimension,” Dickory said, thinking of the hairdresser’s one-dot portrait.

“Really? How clever. Well, I’ve got to get going or I’ll be late for some committee meeting or other, I forget which. So long, Garson. And toodle-oo Miss Longface with the Cheery Name.” Mrs. Panzpresser patted Dickory on the cheek and bounced out.

“Don’t bother with that mess,” Garson said.

Dickory was cleaning the cluttered taboret, capping tubes of Mars violet and vermilion—the colors of the drum majorette’s costume. Garson lifted his eye patch, revealing a blackened eye. He must have protested Mallomar’s nose-tweaking and run into the same fat, white door. “Thanks, Garson,” Dickory said gratefully.

“Inspector Noserag to you,” he replied, donning the deerstalker. “Now, let us resume our deliberations on The Case of the Face on the Five-Dollar Bill.”

Garson rolled the mirror from the Cookie Panzpresser painting to the Noserag easel. Reaching with difficulty into the pocket of his tight jeans, he extracted an authentic five-dollar bill and tacked it to one corner of the blank canvas next to its counterfeit. “Read me what you got so far, kid.” His voice was hard and tough, in keeping with his black eye.

Dickory read: “Counterfeiter: Male, Caucasian.”

“Not bad, Sergeant. I hadn’t thought of that. Go on.”

“Ordinary features. Vain. Cautious. Addicted to pistachio nuts (red) .”

Noserag dictated as he compared the five-dollar bills through his magnifying glass. “Professional engraver. Poor artist—no, change that to excellent draftsman. Here, Sergeant, look at the finely drawn lines on the borders. Not only are these lines not traced, but my man added some flourishes of his own.”

“But the portrait is out of drawing,” Dickory commented.

“You have a good eye, Sergeant. One of the features is most definitely not in proportion to the rest of the face; and that is our biggest clue yet.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Which is why I am an inspector and you are still a sergeant,” was the only explanation Garson had to offer. “And here’s another clue. Look at the lines on the jacket over the second
n
in Lincoln. Compare them with these lines on the bogus bill.”

Dickory had to hold Garson’s hand to keep the magnifying glass from shaking. “The lines are angled in opposite directions,” she said.

“Correct. Now, take the pen, dip it in the ink, and draw the lines as they appear on the real fiver, these lines here on Lincoln’s jacket.” Dickory stood before the blank canvas. Now her hand shook. “Go ahead, draw,” he insisted.

Dickory drew three short, shy hatches slanting downward from left to right as they appeared on the authentic bill.

“Having trouble?” Garson asked.

“I’m not used to pen and ink.”

Garson shook his head. “The trouble is that you are right-handed. A right-handed artist ordinarily hatches in the other direction, downward from right to left. Try copying the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci some day; you will have the same difficulty, for Leonardo was also left-handed.”

“You mean the government artist, the one who drew these lines on the real money, was left-handed?” Dickory asked.

“Not at all. Remember, this is a printed engraving, not a drawing. Look at your lines in the mirror; that’s how they were engraved. When the engraved plates are inked and printed, they appear in reverse on the paper —on the printed bill. Therefore, the government engraver was the one who is right-handed.”

“Maybe the counterfeiter didn’t know that engravings print in reverse.”

“My counterfeiter knew very well that a plate must be engraved in reverse,” Noserag said confidently, “otherwise the number 5’s would be backward.” Dickory understood. “The counterfeiter is left-handed.”

“And the case is solved, Sergeant Kod. Solved!”

“Is that you, Chief?” Inspector Noserag muttered into the telephone. “I got the real dope on the counterfeiter; all it takes is some leg work at your end.”

“Who is this?” a baffled Quinn asked. “It sounds like a bad imitation of Humphrey Bogart.”

Inspector Noserag cleared his throat and threw down his hat. “It’s me, Garson. Just wanted to see if you were on your toes. I thought you might want to hear an artist’s humble opinion of the face on the five-dollar bill.”

“Go ahead.”

“He is an engraver, a professional engraver; so I’d check out the engravers’ union, if I were you, and printing plants.”

“Thanks a lot, Garson, we’ve already done that.”

“Not with my description, you haven’t. Listen carefully, Quinn; show the portrait on the phony bill and say: ‘Imagine this man, perhaps older and with a bigger nose.’ Check out plastic surgeons, too. He’s a flashy dresser; he’s left-handed; and he has red thumbs with broken nails. He is a pistachio-nut freak.”

“What?”

“Pistachio nuts.”

“Good-bye.” Quinn hung up abruptly.

“Have you ever encountered a person whose face was out of drawing, Sergeant Kod?” The hats were on again. “Plastic surgery, usually. Sometimes an entire face has been redone, due to an accident or a fire; but mostly it is the result of a simple nose job. Consider, if you will, the nose in my counterfeiter’s self-portrait. That short, insignificant blob does not fit into the lines and planes of a face that had molded itself around a former nose of more interesting proportions. There is no doubt in my mind, whatever, that my vain counterfeiter has had his nose bobbed,” Inspector Noserag declared.

“Maybe it was just wishful thinking.”

“No. My vain engraver fudged the portrait to make himself younger, more handsome; but he was too competent an artist to give himself a nose like that. That blob is the work of a bungling plastic surgeon who gave no thought to the underlying facial structure.”

Dickory studied the portrait and agreed, but there was still one clue she couldn’t fathom: flashy dresser.

“Rudimentary, my dear Kod. Any man who wears a diamond stickpin in his necktie must be considered ostentatious, to say the least.”

“I didn’t see any diamond stickpin.”

“Neither did I, at first. What appeared to be an error in engraving, or a marred plate, was revealed as a diamond stickpin under my magnifying lens.”

“That’s not fair,” complained Sergeant Kod.

4

For the rest of the week Garson was Garson, and Dock was Dock. And the derelict snoozed and the blind man paced, back and forth, back and forth, just like her brother Donald.

Garson, always present, worked on the Cookie Panzpresser portrait. Dickory cleaned and recleaned the mysteriously messy taboret, and opened the door to parrotbeaked Smith, bat-eared Smith, splay-footed Smith, and chinless Jones. Once the sound of a crying woman was heard from the downstairs apartment; another time, the loud complaints of an angry and defeated man. Each time Garson poured himself another drink.

Dickory stopped to watch Garson paint in his meticulous details. She was worried about him. His black eye had healed, but he would be under Mallomar’s fat thumb for the rest of his life. What past crime, she wondered, which one of Quinn’s four horsemen was responsible for his being blackmailed—vanity or greed, jealousy or hatred? Vanity seemed the most likely, but surely Garson would have disguised that failing rather than exaggerate it.

The telephone rang. Dickory answered, hoping it would be the chief of detectives with news of the pistachio-nut addict. “Yes, Mrs. Panzpresser . . . Cookie. . . . Yes, the portrait is just about finished.” She frowned. “Good-bye!” She slammed the phone angrily.

“What’s the matter?” Garson asked. “Did she call you Hickory Dickory Dock?” He was painting a tiny figure in the tiny landscape on the tiny cup in Cookie’s long and graceful hand.

“The whole bit,” Dickory explained glumly, “with ‘the clock struck one, the mouse had fun.’ ”

“Hickory Dickory Dock.” Garson ended the rhyme to Dickory’s dismay. “I’m sorry, Dickory, I couldn’t help it. You know, Chief Quinn was right about it being a happy name. Besides, a name is just a label; it can stand for whatever a person makes of it.” He left off painting to look at his sulking apprentice. “Have you ever heard of Christina Rossetti?”

“No, and that’s not a funny name or a happy name.” Dickory was screwing and unscrewing the same cap on the same tube of paint.

“I’m talking about names being symbols for who and what you are,” Garson said, returning to his canvas. “Christina Rossetti was a poet, a wonderful poet. She was also a bit loony, but that’s not the point.”

Dickory set down the paint tube and listened.

“Christina Rossetti was a shy, a very shy creature, who had difficulty speaking to anyone but her family and a few intimate friends. Well, one evening, somehow or other, she found herself at a party. No one noticed her: small, retiring, dressed in black, she sat like a shadow against the wall while the fashionable people flirted, and flaunted their ignorance, and chattered their silly chatter. Then the subject turned to poetry. You can imagine what was said: ‘No one has time to read poetry anymore,’ or ‘All the good poets are dead,’ or ‘I don’t know much about poetry, but I know what I like.’ Whatever was said was shallow and stupid, so shallow and stupid that our timid poet stood up and walked to the center of the room. Suddenly all was quiet. All eyes were on this small nervous woman in dull black. Can you guess what she said, Dickory?”

“What?”

“Head held high, she stood tall as she could in the middle of those frightening people and said: ‘I am Christina Rossetti.’ Then she turned and sat down.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s everything. ‘I am Christina Rossetti,’ she said, which meant: ‘I am a poet, a very good poet.’ Those in the room who recognized her name realized they had been speaking rubbish; and those who did not understand were silenced by their ignorance. ‘I am Christina Rossetti’ was all she need have said. Do you understand what I’m saying, Dickory Dock? Worry less about your name, and more about who you are and who you want to be, and what Dickory Dock will stand for.”

Dickory Dock already worried about who she was and what she wanted to be. She worried enough for two Dickory Docks.

“Listen, here is something Christina Rossetti wrote.” Garson put down his brush in deference to the poet’s words:

“My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot.
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit.”

Dickory’s heart had never felt like a singing bird, but it was good poetry, better than the original Isaac Bickerstaffe’s. And Garson had told a good story—a story that would nearly cost her her life.