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X The Unknown (c) 2017 by Anthony Durrant "All rise for Judge Leland McCarthy!" the bailiff shouted, and we all stood bolt upright as the judge entered the courtroom and sat down. The defendant, Dick DeMarko, sat quietly back in his chair at his table beside his attorney, Randolph Mason junior, the nephew of the great prosecutor Randolph Mason, whose death I had exposed several years earlier with the help of my longtime nemesis, Charles Edward "Fun" Factory. "Your Honour, while searching the home belonging to the District Attorney, I stumbled upon a secret at least forty years old, or maybe more than that!" He activated his laptop, and the nearby screen blazed whote and then a row of baby handprints appeared on the screen. Mr. Mason said: "The last handprint is that of an entirely different baby and was lifted from his crib, which is still in the old nursery at the Haynes house." "Objection!" I shouted. "Relevancy!" "I'm getting to that, Mr. Haynes!" Mason replied. "It appears that as a baby, Brantford Haynes was lifted out of his crib and replaced with an entirely different baby between the age of six and seven months. Madame Justice, that baby has now grown into a man - a man who now calls himself Brantford Haynes, but isn't actually him, as his fingerprints clearly show. We believe that when Jack Madison uncovered this secret, this man killed him to protect himself from the ruination and disgrace that might come to him because he was never legally adopted and is not now and has never been the Haynes's biological son. Now he has the effrontery to be standing in front of you framing mt client here for Jack Madison's murder!" "If this is true, Madame Justice, I was wholly unaware of it until just now," I replied, "so I could never have killed Jack Madison in the first place!" "Nevertheless," the judge replied, "I am going to have to ask the bailiff to take you into custody until your true identity can be properly determined scientifically. For now, you will be listed as the 'Unknown X' and Brantford Haynes will be heretofore listed as a missing person and treated accordingly, This case is dismissed, and the court now stands adjourned!" Panicking, I fled the courtroom before the bailiff could grab me. Heading for my car, I drove straight for Fun's office downtown. Parking my car in the parking lot, I went into the building and up the stairs to the top floor, where Fun had his law office. Unwittingly, I barged into a conference he was holding. When Fun saw me , he came up to me and said, "My God, Brantford, we were just discussing you!" "We heard how Mr. Mason showed fingerprint evidence revealing you to be an unknown baby and not the actual Brantford Haynes, who apparently has been missing for years, after disappearing at the age of six to seven months.!" Fun's secretary Barbara added. "As far as I know, I am Brantford Haynes and always have been!" I replied. Barney Paxton took my hand and said quietly, "You need the kind of help Chiyoko and I just can't give. That's why I called the Thriller Detective Agency as soon as the story hit the Internet!" A woman's face appeared in the mirror before me. "I am Angelique Thriller!" she informed me. "I have heard of your problem over the Internet as well, and we would like to try and help you, if we can!" "I believe I am Brantford Haynes, but young Mason today, in open court, revealed fingerprint evidence that showed clearly that - that Brantford Haynes was removed from his crib and secretly replaced with me! If the fingerprint evidence does prove to be correct, Madame Thriller, then I am not Haynes at all, and the real Brantford Haynes has been missing for over forty years!" "I cannot change Mr. Mason's evidence," she said, "but I believe I can help you rebuild your life anew. You have been branded as the Unknown X until your actual identity is uncovered. Ironically enough, that was the name assumed by Jay Garson junior, a celebrated reporter and mystery writer of his day, when he faked his death and began a new career waging war on all criminals!" "it's just a damned coincidence!" I replied. "A coincidence we can exploit!" she replied. "Since the police are looking for you and your IDS are no good to you anymore, you will have no choice but to use an entirely new identity unless and until we can establish your real one, Monsieur Unknown X!" "Have I got a choice?" I asked Madame Thriller as I shrugged my shoulders, and then allowed her to lead me to her personal car. As soon as I was in the seat beside the driver - none other than the famous detective who called himself the Tiger Man - he started the car and we were off. "Now we go to our home!" he told me, and within half an hour, we'd arrived at the Thriller Mansion. The mansion took up a whole city block, and as we drove up to the door, it silently opened all by itself. The Tiger Man parked the car in the garage, and then the two of us entered the house. I was stunned not only by the beauty of the interior but also by its grandeur. There were several ornate lamps lining the main hallway alone, and when I walked into Madame Thriller's office, the desk whirled round to face me, and I seated myself in the client's chair. "It's hard to believe I was once the city's district attorney!" I said to Madame Thriller as soon as her face appeared in the air before me, and then I related to her for the first time what had happened in the courtroom: how Randolph Mason junior had stumbled across fingerprint evidence showing that I had been switched for the real Brantford Haynes as a baby, and how he claimed that Jack Madison had died by my hand as a result of having himself uncovered this "dark" family secret. "If what Mr. Mason said about me was true, and I am not Brantford Haynes, then who the hell am I, Madame Thriller - a nobody? A ghost?" A cup of green tea suddenly appeared from behind a jewel bos on the table and I grabbed it and took a sip, thankful instantly for Madame Thriller's generosity. "You are every bit as real as I am, Mr. X, and I will prove that in court if absolutely necessary!" she told me. "It is likely that - although he may have been very wrong in believing you to be the murderer - Mr. Mason was correct in thinking you were switched with Brantford Haynes as a baby, Monsieur Unknown X!" she told me. "I hope we can find out who I really am before young Mason has me arrested and charged with the murder of Jack Madison!" I replied. "We will search Mr. Mason's house tonight!" Madame Thriller replied. "Mr. X, you will dress in the costume of the original Unknown X." A closet door opened near by, and at her request I changed into the tattered original costume of the Golden Age Unknown X. Patched carefully together on the inside by Madame Thriller's clothes cleaner specifically for me, his costume and tattered Fedora hat hopefully would be enough to protect my identity. "Let's roll!" I cried, and Madame Thriller replied. "Oui, Monsieur X, let us rock and roll!" *** Randolph Mason junior lived in a town house that had belonged to his late uncle before him. After the Tiger Man had parked his car in front of the house, we waited until Mr. Mason had left the house itself - presumably to celebrate his courtroom victory, since he was wearing a tuxedo - before we got out of the car. Using suction cups provided by Madame Thriller, we c;imbed right up to the second floor of the house. Using an emergency hammer, the Tiger Man broke open the window of Mr. Mason;s study. As soon as we'd entered the study, we began searching through Randolph's files for clues to who might have committed Jack's murder. As it turned out, Randolph Mason junior's files were very extensive, and we found a record of him defending a client from a murder that was identical in all respects to the murder of Jack Madison. "This man was also strangled to death at his house while he was lying asleep in bed!" I told the Tiger Man. "Could Madme Thriller have used her powers to created this evidence from scratch?" "She couldn't and wouldn't," the Tiger Man replied, "because she is under contract to the Mayor himself as an investigator and hence is not allowed to do such a thing, even though she can actually do so!" "Thank Goodness for that!" I replied as I used my Blueberry to photograph the documents pertaining to the earlier murder and email them to Madame Thriller's office. Then, we went painstakingly through Mr. Mason's other records. It turned out he'd defended Dick DeMarko before in another case. Those documents too were turned over to Madame Thriller. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" the Tiger Man asked, and I replied, "Yes, that Dick Demarko somehow 'owns' Mr. Mason, and that was why Mr. Mason has never charged Mr. DeMarko a dime for his services!" "I am quite sure we can turn up something that we can use against him, but for now we have to leave the building before any alarm can be triggered!" the Tiger Man replied. "Right you are!" I repliedd, and using the suction cups, we descended back to ground lever and returned to the Tiger Man's vehicle. Soon we were off on the road back to the Thriller estate. *** "How did things go at the Mason home?" Lady Fairplay, another operative, asked as we reentered the Thriller mansion. "Oh,.fine, fine!" I replied with a smile, and the Tiger Man added, "We found records of not only an identical earlier murder, but also a previous court case involving Dick DeMarko. This was enough to make us suspect that Mr. Mason was long ago 'bought' by Mr. DeMarko in some way I have yet to determine." "The last time I encountered such a thing in my life was when I was tracking Frankie Moritz, the terrible gangster!" she replied. "To get him arrested, I first had to put away his shyster lawyer!" "Who was the earlier victim?" a man whom I recognized as the Sea Wolf, an underwater detective, asked the Tiger Man, and he quietly replied, "His name was Harald Diddlebock, and he was the brother of Harold Diddlebock, a clerk for an advertising concern who vanished several years ago today, and who turned up in a remote village in Japan, transformed into a superwoman named Dana Diddlebock. I'll have Madame Thriller learn her current phone number in Japan and inform her of Harald's death. Harald Diddlebock was an insurance investigator trying to settle a claim involving a missing pearl necklace." The next morning, after I had rested up in a guest room on the top floor of the Thriller mansion. I went downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast. There, I again encountered Angelique Thriller's face. "According to the city files, Harald Diddleblock was killed in his bedroom by strangulation while he was still asleep,, not long after his brother Harold disappeared!" "Good morning, Madame Thriller!" I replied. Oh! Bien bon jour, Monsieur Unknown X! Dana Diddlebock's Japanese phone number is 555-7777!" I used my Blueberry to contact Mr. Diddlebock about her brother's death, and was amazed when she answered the call herself, saying, "Yes, Mr. Unknown X, not only am I aware of your legal problem, but I have been aware for the last couple of years how my brother died: he was investigating the theft of the Ptarmigan Necklace, which was owned by Anna Drexelle, and had informed me that he'd found a lead in the investigation. The next day my brother Harald was murdered, and his file on the theft went missing!" "What exactly was the lead?" I asked her. "He told me that he'd found proof that the jewels had been taken by a cat burglar named Eddie DeMarko, and that he knew where they were!" "Dick DeMarko's little brother?" I asked her, and the Tiger Man asked, "You know about him?" "I sent him to jail once for an earlier theft," I replied, "and he swore he'd never return to prison!" "That, very frankly, is what I had expected," the Tiger Man said, "because, although he wasn't the person Mr. Mason defended for the Ptarmigan Necklace theft, he was the actual burglar and would have found it necessary to flee, perhaps even go to the airport to reach that remote Japanese village!" Then, I looked at the items we'd brought from Randolph Mason junior's house and said, "Since there were no cigars or cigarettes there, our friend is neither a smoker, and as he wasn't carrying a snifter when we saw him leave the house, he's not a drinker, either. These glasses from his desk have a phony plastic tortoiseshell frame and have a serial number." When I went to the manufacturer's database online and inputted that serial number, I discovered that the glasses had been sent to a Shopper's Drug Mart in Mississippi - the exact same state where Harald Diddlebock had lived up until he moved to Centre City to work at the insurance office. "And that means, Dana, that you can tell us a lot about how your brother Harald lived and worked at tje time of his untimely demise!" "He was the best insurance investigator Camberwell Insurance ever had!" she replied. "He used the money he earned from the company from his first big case to put me through high school, and then a couple of years after I graduated, he helped me move when I got the job in Connecticut, where I worked for years as a clerk before my transformation into an Amazon. Now, I work as part of the Amazon Detective Agency here in our quiet little village in Japan!" "Thank you for your time, Dana!" I replied. "Oh, you're welcome, Mr. Unknown X!" she replied. And then she signed off, leaving me with the new information that I gave to the Tiger Man. "Now, that is interesting!" he told me. "That necklace was stolen five years ago, and if it is true that Eddie DeMarko was the thief, then Mr. Mason sent the wrong person to prison for that crime deliberately, at his brother Dick's request. In fact, I suggest that Dick DeMarko paid Mason to do so 'under the table' so that nobody would suspect him of being in league with this guy. That further suggests that Dick DeMarko owns Mason in some unknown way!" "Yes, but untill we know how he owns Mason," I replied, "I could never put a case into court - it would be thrown out by the judge and jury immediately!" "Therefore," Madame Thriller replied, "you must go out to the medical examiner's office and get the medical report on Harald Diddlebock's murder!" "Will do!" both the Tiger Man and I chorussed. *** We were able to acquire a copy of the report on Harald Diddleblock from the city's website by using a Freedom of Information Act request. The report confirmed that Harald Diddlebock had been strangled to death by the intruder who had taken his file on the Ptarmigan Necklace's theft. Now what we had to do was find the missing case file on the jewel theft. Things were certainly looking pretty bad for Randolph Mason junior, so we travelled to Mason's law office after he'd gone home for the day, and again used the suction cups to climb up to the floor where Mr, Mason's law offuce was situated. As before, the Tiger Man used his emergency hammer to break open the window. Lifiting it our of the frame, he threw it away, and we climbed into the office. There, on a laptop on his desk, we found Mr. Mason's case files. Unfortunately, they were password protected, and it took me several tries to figure out the password, before I realized what it was. "It's 'Vic DeMorra,' the name of Mr. Mason's very first client!" I told the Tiger Man. "I was the Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted Vic DeMorra for his crime and won the case! Since then, Randolph junior and I have been at loggerheads in court - till yesterday morning, that is, when he uncovered a family secret I didn't even know about because anyone connected to it had passed away. My Goodness, what can Randolph Mason do to me that he hasn't done already?" I then accessed Mr. Mason's computer system and went through his files, most of which were scanned copies of the one's we'd found in Mason's home. However, one of them was not a scan, it was a Word file, and I was easily able to open and print it out. It was a file on 'the Doc,' a doctor who specialized in aiding criminals by treating their wounds and providing them with new faces once they reached his offices (in other words, a "croaker," the underworld slang for a doctor). Mr. Mason's file was extensive and, after we had returned to Thriller Mansion, I perused the hardcopy. As it turned out, Mason had done a very thorough investigation of the Doc; even listing his name and address in his file. "Dr. Walter Miller, 1616 Mean Street!" I mused. "I think we'd better pay him a visit!" Lady Fairplay said after I had shown her the file. I replied, "And that's just what we're going to do! Half of this city's crooks have been able to leave town safely because this man has operated on them and altered their faces - I mean to get the Doc this time!" *** Dr. Miller lived and worked in a quiet suburb of Central City, and when we pulled up next to his house in the car, we saw a light on on the ground floor. Realizing the Doc must be up to something, we faxed the contents of Mason's file on he Doc to the police department before leaving the car, then we got out of it and walked over to the window. The area turned out to be a recovery room, with all the amenities. I realized Doc's surgery must be down he basement. In the bed was a man who had just had plastic surgery' his face was wrapped in white surgical gauze. Dr, Miller quietly entered the room and handed the man a bottle of orange juice with a straw in it. The man drank from the straw as Dr. Miller said, "Now, when the bandages are off, it will be just as if you are in Charles Custer's own skin!" Realzing we had to act, Tiger Man went back to his car, detached one of the seats, and hurled it through the window, breaking the glass. After placing a call to the police, he led me through that broken window and entered the recovery room. The bandaged man leaped to his feet and fled through the broken window. Tiger Man pursued him while I held the Doc at gunpoint. By the time the police arrived, however, the bandaged man had gotten away in Doc Miller's Jaguar before Tiger Man could reach him, leaving the famous sleuth empty-handed. As soon as the Doc was arrested and taken away, however, a search of his files revealed that his last patient had been none other than - Eddie DeMarko! There was a clear photograph of him taken pre-surgery, but no record of how he would appear when the gauze was taken off his face. The Doc had destroyed that photograph. "Unfortunately for him however," I told Madame Thriller after we got back to the mansion, "Eddie left behind a memento o his childhood: a portrait of his childgood playmate, Charlie Custer!" "And he used that picture as the basis for his new face, oui?" she asked, and the Tiger Man said, "Yes, Ma'am, he did. The Doc admits it - and he says that Eddie still has the Ptarmigan Necklace!" "Unfortunately, that picture was taken when Charlie Custer wt as 15, so we don'r know what Charlie now looks like - his own physical appearance might have changed." "And to think everyone thought Eddie was in Japan all this time!" Lady Fairplay marvelled. "He must have been hiding out at his brother's place until he could get away to the Doc's surgery. Now we'll have to wait until he makes his move before we can have him arrested!" "And wait we must!" Madame Thriller replied. *** About a week after he had made his getaway, Eddie DeMarko was cutting off the surgical gauze on his face, the incisions on it having been completely healed. Afer this onerous task had been completed, he stood facing the living image of his old photograph. "Not only am I a newcomer to Wileyville," Eddie said to himself, "but with the new I.D. the Doc procided me with, and with my new face, nobody could possible recognize me as Edward DeMarko!" After carefully combing his hair and washing his face in the sink, Eddie dressed in his brand new suit that he'd bought from a Sears outlet on the way out of Central City, and then left his hotel room, locked it with his keycard, and then went into the hotel's restaurant for breakfast, saying as he did so, "Hey, fellas, what's all the shoutin' about?" "It's about you, Charlie," a tall man wearing a white suit replied, "and how you ran out of town after you shot your old man dead as a doornail. Goodness, we hadn't seen you in over 20 years, but you look just as you did the very day you ran outta town!" Eddie ran from the room, but a younger man with the white suited man ran after him, tackled him, and forced him into submission, then - at the white suited man's command - placed Eddie securely under arrest for the murder of Nahan Custer, Charlie's father, then read hm his legal righs before taking him into custody/ The man told Eddie, "My name's Willuam 'Buffalo Bill junior' Naismith, and I'm the Marshal of Wileyville. You were a fool to come back here, Charlie, and now you'll pay for being a fool by spending your life in prison!" He then wen to a nearby wall phone to notify the Centre City Police that "Charlie" had been arrested, unaware that Madame Thriller was quietly watching him, having beaten Eddie to Wileyville. *** We ourselves heatf of the above events from the Marshal himself, and after Eddie had been brought nack to Central City, the police verified his story by tracing the Doc's Jaguar's license number. The Tiger Man and I visited Eddie at the prison where he was being held for qurstioning. "I had no idea Charlie was a murderer!" he cried when I asked him about Charlie. "We traded pictures of ourselves not long before he left Central City with his family, and Charlie's picture is very precious to me - I gave it to the Doc as a 'thank you' present!" "And now," I replied, "your stupidity has done you in for good! As soon as we can find the Ptarmigan Necklace, you'll be sent to prison for its theft. For now, you will be held as a material witness to the murders of Jack Madison and Harald Diddlebock!" Dick DeMarko entered the room and cried, "Eddie, what could've gone wrong?" "Eddie chose the wrong face, Dick!" I replied. "I guess he didn't realize Charlie Custer was wanted for the murder of his father in Wileyville! He was very lucky that DNA identification proved he was not Charlie at all, the stupid idiot! As for yosgu, Dickie boy, once I prove I am Brantford Haynes, I'll prosecute you and see to it you rot in prison yourself!" "But you won't!" Dick said, and then he laughed out loud. "Randolph Mason junior uncovered your little secret and was able to prove it to the satisfaction of the court: the fingerprints he uncovered are very real, even if you did not realize you weren't Brantford Haynes. Now I will, after we part, go to the bail bondsman and pay my little brother's bail for him!" He then walked away toward the bail bondsman's office. Madame Thriller's face then appeared in the shiny floor tiles. \She looked sad, and said, "I'm afraid he's right, Unknown X! I've checked the fingerprint evidence myself, and there is no way Randolph Mason could have faked it at all. Whoever put you in that cradle evidently knew what they were doing when they switched you with the real Haynes!" "Damn it!" I cried. "Will I ever know who I really am?" "You will!" Angelique Thriller replied. "I can at least assure tou that much for your pains!" I then returned to Thriller Mansion with the Tiger Man. There, Lady Fairplay greeted us happily, and Madame Thriller appeared in a mirror nearby. "We need to see your footprints, Unknown X, and compare them to the hospital's records!" "You'll get them!" I replied, and Lady Fairplay ushered her into a lab, where I took off my socks and shoes, and the bottoms of my feet were scanned. "Now to send the scans to the database!" the lab technician, who introduced himself as Dr. Abraham Lovelace, said. A few minutes later, the results came back: it turned out I was actually Jason Garson IV, the blood grandson of Jason "Jay" Garson junior, known first as "the Ragman" and then as the "Unknown X." "Thank goodness for that!" I replied, and Lady Fairplay replied, "You should. You are very lucky to be one of Madame Thriller's clients!" She then led me into the dining room, where Madame Thriller had set down a wonderful tortellni dinner. Over Dinner, Madame Thriller explained that she'd followed Dick DeMarko to his home and seen a hastily arranged conference between him and Randolph Mason. Mason had assured Dick that everthing would "be okay" and that Eddie would still be protected. "Whatever they're up to," I said, "the Ptarmigan necklace is still missing, and Eddie DeMarko is back under his brother's wing. Somehow, we must leaarn what Mason and his friends are about to do!" *** And so Lady Fairplay and I drove to the townhouse where Dick DeMarko lived, and parked her car behind the bushes at the back of the house. As we approached the side wall of the house, we could hear Dick and Eddie arguing their hearts out. "You fouled up big time, Eddie!" Dick cried, and Eddie shouted, "It was my idea to take me to the Doc for a new face in the first place! Soon, when I sell my swag, I'll have enough money to go wherever I damn well please and do whatever I damn well choose. Then, I'm getting out of here for good!" "Listen to me Eddie!" Dick cried. "That swag is so hot, you'll never get it near a fence, let alone find a buyer for the damn thing. Eddie, you're screwed if you don't lie low here with me!" As the two of them continued to argue, we use the ivy to climb to the top floor of Dick''s hacienda/ Using her own safety hammer, Lady Fairplay shattered the window, then pulled the glass out of its frame with one hand. As we entered the house, Randolph Mason junior himself entered the library with a book. Realizing he may have spotted us, Lady Fairplay zoomed up to him and said, "Hi ya, sugar plum! Buy a gal a drink?" "You? Never!" he replied. "You're not even one of Madame Thriller's best operatives, Lady Fairplay!" "I may not be one of her best operatives," her Ladyship replied, "but as the Goddess of Chastisement, I am unquestionably the heavy hitter among them!" She then knocked him out - with a whango, no less! - and then hit one of Dick's bodyguards when she came running into the room. Lady Fairplay gestured for me to follow her, which I did. We soon arrived in Dick DeMarko's office, and I opened Dick's laptop. Seating myself behind the desk, I tried several passwords and ended up with the word 'Fluffy,' an odd choice for a hardened man like dick, until I remembered this was the name of his pet poodle, who had had to be put to sleep when Dick was ten.After I inputted the password, I was able to gain entry into Dick's computer system. From there, I located the files pertaining to the Ptarmigan Necklace, which I forwarded both to the police and to Madame Thriller's own laptop computer system. Just as I forwarded the last of them, Dick came running into the office and shouted.\ "What the hell is going on here, Mr. X?" "The name is Jay Garson!" I replied. "And I am trying to clear myself of a certain murder charge! The Goddess of Chastisement herself will keep you busy while I forward this final email to the police!" As I forwarded that last email, Lady Fairplay held Dick off with the most amazing ease. She was not just superface, she was superstrong, which confirmed her sstory ofr having received unlimited energetic powers, as she had always claimed. She then rendered Dick unconscious, and we fled from the office, only to encounter Mason himself on the stairway. I let out a banshee howl as the man ran up the stairs toward us, and he and I wrestled for the thumb drive he was holding. Ultimately, Mason won, but unfortunately for him, an older gentleman in the Ragman costume appeared and hit him over the head with a vase. The vase shattered on impact with his head, and he sagged to the ground, unconscous. "You're Jay number three, aren't you?" I asked him. "In other words, my true father?" "That's right, kiddo!" he replied. "When I read on the Internet that you'd been switched with Brantford Haynes, I knew you were my boy, and so I came out of retirement to try and look for you!" "Mason should be taken to the police!" I replied. "And that's what we'll do after you take that thumb drive and we get out of here!" The three of us bolted down the stairs after I had taken the thumb drive, and ran out the back door. Heading as quietly as we could to Lady Fairplay's car, the three of us drove back to Thriller Mansion, where we opened the contents of the thumb drive using Madame Thriller's home computer system. Just like I thought, the thumb drive contained files that we copied and sent to the Central City Police Department for safekeeping. *** Afer Mason was taken into custody, he made a full confession to the murder of Jack Madison, the insurance investigator. Apparently Dick had paid Mason's way through law school and had then set him up in private practise, ready to be called upon whenever the DeMarkos needed him. "I could hardly believe my good luck when the plastic surgeon assigned to repair my uncle's face after his accident gave him a facial transplantation from a John Doe, and he died as a direct result!" he admitted when I questioned him about his famous uncle. "You know, of course, that he was replaced by an impostor?" I asked Mason, who nodded ans said, "Yeah, I did. I don't know how the doctor did it, bu he altered his assistant's face to resemble my uncle's and then sent him out into the world. From what I read in the papers, he was exposed by none other than you old nemesis, 'Fun' Factory!" He went on to say that Jack had been investigating an insurance claim against a policy established for a man named Octavius Courtly, who had appaently taken his own life, but had actually been murdered by Dick after fudging his accounts! Having figured out the whole scheme, Jack approached him and confronted him personally. Terrified of being exposed as an owned man, Mason had strangled Jack in his skeep and then used the fingerprint evidence to make it appear that I'd killed Jack because he had uncovered my own family secret. The final question was, what had happened to the real Brantford? Jay Garson III provided the answer to this one. He admitted, to our surprise, that when an old enemy of his broke into the Haynes house for the baby, his wife had placed me in Brantford Haynes's crib and had then taken Brantford and hurled herself and him out the hursery window, to make it look as if I'd been killed in the fall. "All this time, in fact," he admitted, "I thought it was you who died in that death plunge. After all, a dangerous man is a man with an axe to grind with an axe, and this particular enemy of mine would have killed both you and your mom, even if she hadn't sacrificed herself!" And the next day, Jay Garson's old column read, "Randolph Mason junior and Richard DeMarko will be sent to prison for life for Jack's murder!" THE END