"Right", said the fingerprint man.
"Also, if you're going to believe those prints, you'll have to look for a killer who's a top-grade piano player".

He demonstrated by playing an imaginary piano, doing a staccato passage with a broadly exaggerated attack.
To make it clearer he shifted to acting out, but with no change of manner, the killing of Rose Mallory.
His hands snatched at an imaginary bucket, swooping down hard to grab it and coming away with equal snap like a ball that's been bounced hard.
In the same way he pantomimed grasping a mantel and bouncing cleanly off that, pressing his hands against the floor and bouncing cleanly off that.
He was moving like a ballet dancer, playing for laughs.
If Rose Mallory's killer acted this way, catching up with him was going to be a cinch.
We'd know him by his stretch pants and the flowers he'd wear twined in his hair.

Perhaps if Felix had first come upon us when this boy was not cavorting so gaily up and down the hall outside the murdered woman's apartment, we might have had less trouble convincing Felix of our seriousness.
This, you will remember, was still New Year's Day.
By the time Felix turned up it was early afternoon, which, one would think, would be late enough so that by then, except for small children and a few hardy souls who had not yet sobered up, it could have been expected that people would no longer be having any sort of active interest in the previous night's noisemakers and paper hats.

Felix was the exception.
He had retained his hat and his horn, and, whatever fun might still be going, he was ready to join it.
That, incidentally, might give you some idea of what Felix was like.
After all, he hadn't happened upon us in that second-floor hall without warning.

The M.E.'s boys had finished their on-the-spot examination and the body had been removed for autopsy.
The meat wagon, therefore, was not out in front of the house any more, but the cluster of squad cars was still there and there was a cop on the door downstairs to screen any comings and goings.
There was, furthermore, the crowd of curious onlookers gathered in the street and a couple more cops to hold them at a decent distance.

Just put yourself in Felix's place for a moment.
You're a taxpayer, householder, landlord.
You've been away from home for the New Year festivities, but now the party is over and you come home.
Defining sobriety in the limited sense of being free from the clinical symptoms of the effects of alcohol ingested and not yet eliminated from the system, you are sober.

You still have your paper hat and you're wearing it, but then, it is an extraordinary paper hat and, in addition to anything else you may be, you are also the sculptor who created that most peculiar dame out in the back yard.
It's not too much to assume that you will have a more lasting interest in paper hats than will Mr. Average Citizen.

You have your paper horn clutched in your big, craggy fist, and for your entrance you have planned a noisy, colorful and exuberant greeting to your friends and tenants.
You find your house a focus of public and police attention.
Can you imagine yourself forgetting under the circumstances that you are approaching this startling and unexpected situation so unsuitably hatted and armed with a paper horn?

Maybe one could be startled into forgetfulness.
You shoulder your way through the cluster of the curious and you barge up to the cop on the door.
You identify yourself and ask him what's going on.
Instead of answering you, he sticks his head in the door and shouts up the stairs.

"Got the upstairs guy", he bellows.
"The owner.
Do I send him up"?
Then he turns back to you.
"Go on in", he says.
"They'll tell you what's cooking".

Even then, as you go into the house oppressed by the knowledge that something is cooking and that your house has passed under this unaccountable, official control, could you go on forgetting that you still had that ridiculous hat on your head and you were still carrying that childish horn in your hand?

What I'm getting at is that we were fully prepared for Felix's being an odd one.
We'd seen his handiwork out in the back yard, and the little his tenants had told us of him did make him sound a little special.
We were not, however, prepared for anything like the apparition that confronted us as Felix came up the stairs.
He, of course, must have been equally unprepared for what confronted him, but, nonetheless, I did find his reaction startling.

If Felix was still wearing the hat and carrying the horn because he'd forgotten about them, he now remembered.
He came bounding up the stairs and joined the dance.
He adjusted the hat, lifted the horn to his lips as though it were a flute, and fell in alongside our fingerprint expert to cavort with him.

Our man stopped dead and glowered at Felix.
Felix threw his head back and laughed a laugh that shook the timbers of even that solidly built old house.
This was a bull of a man.
He was big-chested, big-shouldered and heavy-armed.
His face was ruddy and heavy and unlined, and when he laughed he showed his teeth, which were big and white and strong and unquestionably home-grown.
I don't remember ever seeing teeth that were quite so white and at the same time quite so emphatically not dentures.
His hair had receded most of the way to the back of his neck.
He had only a fringe of hair and he wore it cropped short.
It was almost as white as his teeth.
For a man of his mass he was curiously short.
He wasn't a dwarf but he was a bit of a comic figure.
A man with so big and so staggeringly developed a torso and such long and powerful arms is expected to stand taller than five feet five.
For Felix it was a bit of a stretch to make even that measurement.
The man was just this side of being a freak.

We waited till he had finished laughing, and that gave us a few moments for taking stock of him.
He was dressed in a manner Esquire might suggest for the outdoor man's country weekend.
Dark gray sports jacket, lighter gray slacks, pink flannel shirt, black silk necktie.
His eyes were clear.
He was freshly shaved, and if there had been any alcohol in him we could never have missed detecting some scent of it on the massive gusts of his laughter.
Not even a whiff.
Eventually he subsided.

"Felix"?
Gibby said.

"Me", he said merrily.
"Me, the happy one".

"That much Latin we remember", Gibby said dryly.
"You always live up to your name, always like this, always making happy"?

"I try", Felix said blithely.
"The world is full of blokes who put their hearts into making the tragic scene.
I've never noticed that it improves things any".

"Bully for you", Gibby said.
"What's the rest of your name"?

"No rest of it.
Felix is all there is".

"All there ever was"?

"The past I leave to historians", Felix intoned, demonstrating that he could be pompous as well as happy.

"You live in the present"?

"In the present", Felix proclaimed.
"For the future.
Is there any other time in which a man can live"?

"We", Gibby announced, "are not philosophers.
We are Assistant District Attorneys.
This gentleman is a police officer.
He is a fingerprint specialist.
Could your future, your immediate future, be made to include taking us upstairs, giving us a bit of space in which our friend can work, and making available to him your finger tips"?

The happy one could never have looked happier.
This was more than joy.
It was ecstasy.

"Those lovely whorls", he chortled.
"So intricate, so beautiful.
Come right along.
I love fingerprints".

He was prancing along the hall, heading for the next flight of stairs.

Gibby called him back.
"We're here because of what happened last night", he said.
"Past, yes, but important.
Since it is important, for the record let's have the full name".

"That important"?
Felix asked.

"That important".

"Grubb", Felix whispered.

"Felix Grubb"?
Gibby asked, not bothering to whisper.

"Shh", Felix implored.
"I can't see what would make it necessary for you to know.
Nothing could make it necessary to proclaim it to the whole world".

Obligingly Gibby lowered his voice.
"Felix Grubb"?
He repeated.
"No.
Edmund, but not for years.
For years it's been just Felix.
First thing I did after my twenty-first birthday was go into court and have it officially changed, and this is something I don't tell everybody.
That was almost forty years ago".

Having volunteered that he was a man of about sixty, he bounded up the stairs and with each leap rendered the number less credible.
This was a broth of a boy, our Felix, and nothing was more obvious than the joy he took in demonstrating how agile he was and how full of juice and spirit.
We followed him up the stairs.
The cops would gather up Connor and the foursome on the third floor and bring us those of them who would voluntarily submit to fingerprinting.

You may think we didn't need Nancy and Jean, but you always get what you can when you can, and we had no guarantee that a fingerprint record on them couldn't be useful before we were through with this case.
Also, if we had excluded the ladies we would have to that extent let the whole world know at least that much of where we stood.
The killer, if in our present group, would certainly be interested in knowing that much, and even though with the fingerprint evidence what it was I could see no way he could use this bit of information to improve on his situation, there might always be some way.
If you can possibly avoid it, you don't hand out any extra chances.

Felix took us into his studio.
It was that oddly shaped space at the very top of the house, where ceiling heights had to accommodate themselves to the varying angles of roof slope.
At each angle of its pitch a big skylight had been fitted into the roof and all these skylights were fitted with systems of multiple screens and shades.

When Felix first opened the door on it, all these shades were tightly drawn and the whole studio was as dark as night.
He quickly fixed that, rolling back the shades on some of the skylights and adjusting screens on the others.
He flew about the place making these adjustments and it was obvious that what he was doing was the fruit of long experience.
None of his movements was tentative.
There was no process of trial and error.
Starting with the room completely blacked out, as it was when we came in, he unerringly fixed things so that the whole place was bathed in the maximum of light without at any point admitting even so much as a crack of glare.

Expecting something more-than-average wacky, I was surprised by what we found.
There was no display of either works in progress or of finished work.
Here and there on work table or pedestal stood a shape with a sheet or a tarpaulin draped over it.
These shapes might have been mad, but there was no telling.
They were all completely shrouded.
The equipment was solid and heavy and in good condition.
Everything was orderly and it seemed to be arranged for the workman's comfort, convenience and efficiency.
There were tools about but they were neatly kept.
There was no confusion and no litter.
Supplies of sheet metal were neatly stacked in bins.