Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

Detective Dokes worshiped his younger sister and believed that the man she adored would lead her, like a lamb, to slaughter.

Chapter I Preliminaries to a Wedding

I was detailed to the Blaney case at the time; that’s how I happened to stick my nose in the modus operandi file so much. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean I’m that good that they just dropped the Blaney case in my lap and said: “Here, Dokes, this is all yours; just take your time, and when you get around to it, tell us who creased Mrs. Blaney with an axe six weeks ago out on the front porch of her house.” If I should try to give that impression in print, I’d be lynched by every man — jack in the squad-room, the minute they read it!

No, it was just that this Blaney ease had us all by the short-hairs, and we were all of us on it at once, you might say — and getting nowhere rapidly. Everybody on the squad, to the best of my knowledge, had had a crack at it by this time, and there had even been a big shake-up a while before which had practically turned us inside out. It was one of those damned clueless things, with not even enough traces left to be doled out as assignments. It was six weeks old already, and much further from solution than it had been the day after it happened. It was, we were all agreed, that most dangerous type of “perfect crime” a haphazard one, probably not even premeditated, certainly not even intended for a “perfect crime,” which just happens to jell that way without any help from the participant. In other words, a natural.

I had been at the file so much by now, hoping all the time I’d come across someone who had once hacked some other woman with an axe on the front porch of her house, or the back porch, or anywhere at all, that I was getting to know whole sections of it backward and forward, by way of automatic reading as I flipped the cards up and down — whole slews of stuff that had nothing to do with what I was looking for. For instance, “Morrison, Harold,” would flash by up in the upper left-hand corner, and I’d be able to say, without reading anything further, “Yeah, that was that prowler that went around shooting people through their open windows all one summer, kept all suburban Indianapolis in an uproar until he climbed up in a tree to get at a second-story window and fell down and busted his leg.” A wire had come back to Leftwich, I think it was, a couple of weeks ago, somewhat tartly answering one of his own, to the effect that Morrison had been safely in jail there ever since and to query them ten years hence. So neither Leftwich nor I had much use for Harold Morrison.

Then there was another one that used to keep getting in my way too, I called it “the one with the ink-spot” because somebody years before had gotten a drop of ink right in the middle of it from holding a fountain-pen poised over it. It was as old as the hills, must have been one of the first ones in when the file was first started — and that had been before my time. Its color stood out against some of the newer ones, it had faded yellow instead of being white any more. I was always tripping over it on my way backward or forward to some hot lead (which promptly fizzled when I got there) and many a time I’d felt like ripping it out and pitching it away.

“Garvey, James,” was the tag, and a lot of other pleasant information followed, to wit: “Recurrent homicidal mania, directed solely against women—” That, of course, had brought me up short almost the first time I hit the file — me and about six of the other fellows. Not for long; it was as much of a dud as Leftwich’s Morrison. You only had to read a couple more lines on the card to know that it was no good for the Blaney case, or any other case any more either.

“—whom he has married; inoffensive toward all others.” Mrs. Blaney had had a perfectly good husband of her own for ten years past. “Method is to strangle with bare hands; unable to touch weapons, particularly of steel or objects with sharp cutting-edges during crises, as though subconsciously aware of what will result. Unable to shave himself, at such times, for the same reason. Growth of beard a good indication of approaching danger-period—” And so on. But Mrs. Blaney had been cleft barbarously by a razor-keen axe. “Congenitally unable to bear the sight of blood.” I needn’t dwell on the condition Mrs. Blaney had been found in from that axe...

There was a lot of other dope on this loveable character, but you didn’t have to be drawing my wages to see, if you’d gotten that far down the card, why he was out of the running as far as the Blaney case was concerned. “Impulse only recurs at lengthy intervals of six months to a year, and comes on slowly; normal in between times, likable, pleasing personality. Well-educated, neat dresser, able to earn good money at various white-collar jobs as long as his condition permits him to retain them—” And then it went on into a physical description of him.

The whole thing dated way back to the Twenties, and wound up with this brief summary, which just about clinched the matter anyway, as far as our present purposes were concerned:

The first, and only, time I had gotten down that far, all the way to the bottom, I wondered what the card was still doing, in the file under the circumstances; it should have been chucked but, or at least transferred. But at the very end there was this notation, penciled-in, probably by some long-forgotten predecessor of mine on the squad:

“Retain. N.B. — Identification never fully verified.”

And then something further after that, so blurred as to be all but illegible. Which explained why it was still in there, if nothing else. As for being of any use in the Blaney case, that was another matter. It was just that it kept getting in my way constantly, until I’d taken almost a hatred to it. There were dozens in there along with it, still on the active list, that had better possibilities; I would have liked to have them all out, separate, where I could put my fingers on them in a hurry when I wanted to, I suppose.

I was at it again, going after some poor punk named Montaigne, just because he had carved quite a bad name for himself with an axe up in a number of lumber-camps in the Northwest, when the Blaney case suddenly blew up by itself without any help from any of us. I slammed the damn file-case shut the minute the rumor first percolated out from the Chief’s office, and barged in without being sent for to find out if it was true, and so did everyone else around me. The Chief looked plenty relieved, if not particularly pleased, for which you couldn’t blame him. It had had us up a tree, and no mistake!

“Yeah,” he sighed without being asked, “it’s over — and no credit due to us, either! I’m not blaming you lads, but the damn breaks we got! It wound up as screwy as it began, it was a jinx all the way through. Just listen to this, will ye? I got a long-distance a few minutes ago from a little one-horse town down in Virginia — never heard of it before. Some farmer down there yesterday afternoon set his dog on a tramp he caught mooching his fruit. The tramp picked up a rock and knocked the dog’s brains out. So the farmer grabs him, hauls him along with him, and presses charges. The constable sets a fine, the tramp can’t pay it, and he’s thrown into the coop. The tramp is full of interesting stories. His crime isn’t a particularly heinous one, and the first thing you know this hick constable and his prisoner have cracked a bottle of corn together and are chewing the rag until all hours of the night, both of them higher than blimps. Murray and Leftwich, you go down there and bring him back with you. He killed Mrs. Blaney six weeks ago up here. Hardcastle’s the name of the place, they’re holding him for us. Take an Atlanta train and change at Richmond—”

“How was the constable able to remember, if he got tanked along with him?” somebody asked.

“He didn’t, from what I gathered, although he hated to admit it. But the tramp did, and tried to commit suicide this morning when he realized what he’d done, they just stopped him in the nick of time. Then when the constable asked him what he’d tried it for, he told him, thinking the constable knew all along.”

“Nuts!” somebody said. “It’s enough to make a guy want to resign!”

“Don’t worry, I’m keeping it from the press if I possibly can,” he agreed. He gave out a couple of petty-larceny assignments, then turned and asked me: “Well, Dokes, you got any eyesight left after the way you’ve been going after that modus operandi file?”

I grinned shamefacedly and asked him if he had anything in line for me.

“Not right this minute,” he said.

“Okay if I chase over to St. Thomas’ Church, then, Chief?” I asked. “It’s my kid sister’s wedding-day, she’s getting married at five, and I’m supposed to stand up for the guy.”

“By all means,” he said heartily. “Give her my best, and see that you bring us back a piece of the cake.”

They all laughed and Leftwich, putting on his hat to start out after the Blaney murderer, said: “I’ll take mine inside of a bottle!”

Chapter II Terror in the Files

I beat it home to put on a stiff collar and my best blue serge, and found the place turned upside-down with all kinds of female goings-on, just like before any wedding. The kid was standing there in the middle of our parlor with about six miles of cheesecloth around her, looking pretty as an angel, and the old lady was down on her knees with a mouthful of pins — but able to talk just the same! — and the old man was pie-eyed in the kitchen, having a lone-wolf celebration. They shooed me out ahead to go over and wait at the church with the groom, and I shoved a flat bottle of rye into my back pocket and took it with me to see us both through.

I found this guy Hilton pacing back and forth in his room and just about as nervous as any guy would be before his marriage. “Gee!” he groaned, “I thought you were going to stand me up!” His collar had melted, and I helped him on with a new one, and we each had two-fingers of, his own liquor, so I didn’t have to open the bottle I’d brought over. I didn’t tell him about the Blaney case cracking, and that otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to show up, because it didn’t seem right to talk about a thing like that on his wedding-day.

I didn’t know him very well at all; he’d only started coming to the house the past month or so, although the kid had first met him six months before. She was dippy about him, naturally, and the old man and woman seemed to think pretty highly of him too, so that was good enough for me. He seemed to be a decent enough sort — “a perfect gentleman” was the way the old lady put it — and he was apparently drawing good wages at some kind of white-collar job or other. I’d been meaning to ask him what line he was in, and hadn’t gotten around to it somehow. I hadn’t had much time off, hadn’t been home much, since that damn Blaney thing had started up — but I took it for granted the old folks knew all there was to know about him. Leave it to the old lady when it came to getting information out of anybody! So I slapped him on the back, said “Buck up, Hilton, it can only happen to you once!” and we started out for the church. He kind of laughed as we got in the cab and said, “I guess you may a well start calling me Frank from today on.”

It was a very touching sight, to see that pretty little kid and him kneeling there side by side in front of the altar, with soft light falling on them through a strained-glass window from above, and tapers gleaming, and the scent of flowers in the air, and the holy father murmuring “—until death do ye part,” and a gold ring twinkling and a soft kiss being exchanged. My own lousy racket seemed to belong in another world; crime seemed very far away from here.

After it was over I went up and pecked at her, and her eyes were wet and she said, “You’ll come and see me real soon, won’t you, Ritchie?” Then they all crowded around her, like they do, and Hilton was left out of it for a minute. So I grabbed him by the arm and said, “Come on, let’s duck into one of the side-rooms here and have a quick bracer before you leave — I’ve got a bottle with me.” A few of the other fellows came with us, old beaux of the kid’s, but none of his own friends; matter of fact, none of them seemed to be at the church at all, but that didn’t occur to me at the time.

We all ducked into a little place banked with flowers, and I took out the bottle and tried to dig the foil off the neck with my nails. “Who’s got a knife?” I asked, and one of the guys opened a penknife and passed it to me. I sliced the foil off all right, but went too heavy on it and opened the ball of my thumb. It wasn’t anything to speak of, but it flooded red right away—

Somebody said “Hey!” and I looked up, and they were holding Hilton up by the shoulders, and his face was all green. He closed his eyes and shook his head, and then he seemed to get over it. “Cover your finger up, will you?” he said sort of shakily. “I can’t stand the sight of blood; never could—”

Somebody passed me a handkerchief and I tied it around it. “You’re just shaky from the strain,” I tried to buck him up, “I know how it is. Here, wrap yourself around this, you’ll feel better!” And I passed the bottle to him, but I was still holding the open penknife with that same hand, and the gesture pointed the blade at him. He backed away so sudden that the precious bottle nearly landed on the floor between us. He reared away, you might say. “Gee, close that knife!” he whimpered, “before somebody else gets hurt with it!”

This time I stopped and gave him a look, still holding the bottle at him, and all at once I could feel myself getting absent-minded, right standing there like I was. I seemed to be trying to remember something awfully hard, and couldn’t. But neither could I quit trying to. It was as though somebody had once made that same remark to me before, that he had just now. But no, that wasn’t it. Or as though I had once heard of somebody who—

Then just as I was going to connect with it, whatever it was, the old lady stuck her pan in at us and bawled me out, and that knocked it clean out of me. “Here, you Ritchie, what’re you doing? Don’t you know he has to make a train? You’re as bad as your father!”

I folded the knife, popped the cork, he took a quick swig from the neck, we all banged him on the back, and he scrammed out. And then didn’t she tiptoe in, give a look over her shoulder, and say: “Lemme just smell the cork, I need a whiff myself. And if I catch a grin on any of your faces—!”

They had a big blowout at our place afterwards, but I didn’t stay for it. I wolfed a couple hunks of cake and went back to Headquarters, feeling like a lost sheep with that much time on my hands. The Chief asked me how it had gone off. “Fine,” I told him. Then I laughed and went on to tell him how nervous the groom had been. Then I stopped right in the middle of it and got awfully white, and the room went sailing around me.

“Dokes!” he hollered. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

I hadn’t. What I’d seen just then, in my mind’s eye, was a yellowed card in our modus operandi file, and the writing that was on it. I knew then what it was had been trying to come through to me in that anteroom at the church. Crime had seemed very far away there, the file hadn’t been able to work through the flowers and the organ musk. But here in these more familiar surroundings it had clicked right away.

“—better take the rest of the night off and get some sleep,” he was saying.

“I’m all right,” I said. “I’ll be inside there, if you want me for anything.”

I went m and snapped on the light and opened the file. I was scared sick, trying to talk myself out of it. “No,” I said, “No! I’ve been working too hard, that’s what’s the matter with me! I’ve been soaking that damned filthy card in day by day without knowing it, until it’s gotten the better of me. I’m seeing things, looking for trouble! There are plenty of guys that can’t stand the sight of blood, everybody knows that — there’s one right on this squad with us—” Then I almost laughed out loud with relief when I remembered what was at the bottom of the card. “Why, his body was fished out of Lake Erie in December, 1928, he’s been dead eight years—” And I couldn’t help adding, “Thank God.” But there were three little words added to that that I remembered just as well, it was no use kidding myself: “Identification never verified.”

I detached the card and took it out by itself. “Unable to touch... objects with sharp cutting-edges.” The open penknife! The way he’d reared back, nearly letting the bottle drop between us. I went and got a magnifying-glass and went to work on the blurred pencil-notation I’ve already mentioned way down at the bottom. The friction of the flapping cards through the years had rubbed it well beyond the point of illegibility to the naked eye. I finally got it, not so much by the help of the glass itself as by retracing it on a piece of scratch-paper with a pencil of my own — the way kids have to do when they’re learning penmanship. After I had each curve and loop down pat, I bore down heavy on it and it came out “See Lansing.” There wasn’t any Lansing in the file when I looked, but there was a Lanning, Joseph, so I decided that was it. I only had to glance down his card to be convinced I was right.

They were birds of a feather. Lanning seemed to have taken up where Garvey had left off.

If I’d been scared sick before I began, I don’t know how to describe myself by the time I was through digesting the Lanning data. I was like a kid that thinks he’s seeing goblins in the dark.

I kept muttering to myself, “Garvey didn’t die! No, Garvey didn’t die! This is him right here,” and mopping off my forehead, which was all damp and cold. But whether he had or hadn’t, that wasn’t what was making me sweat. He could be Lanning, and welcome; he could be alive, and welcome. The thought that had me frightened to death was: were there two of them, or were there not, still, a third person?

Chapter III Evidence

I tried to steady myself, I clutched at straws in every direction. And to tell the truth, there were plenty of them and they weren’t just straws. I soon saw what I would have seen much sooner, hadn’t the image of a pretty little kid swathed in cheesecloth blurred my vision: that the evidence against far outweighed the evidence for. That for that matter there was none of the latter to speak of. It lined up like this: A bridegroom is nervous on his wedding-day. Well, who wouldn’t be? Cancel. He nearly folds when he sees some blood accidentally shed. There are hundreds of people with that same quirk, even if not carried to quite such a pitch. That fact, plus the one just before — cancel. He shies from the open blade of a penknife pointed his way. This last, alone of the three, won’t cancel out. But on the other hand neither will it stand up against the tremendous amount of evidence against that even the cards themselves offer. Take Garvey’s physical description, for instance. Sandy hair. Hilton’s was a flaming red (one of the kid’s pet raves). Blue eyes. Well, Hilton’s were too, but so were my own, and I wasn’t Garvey. Large, outthrust ears. Hilton’s may have been large, I was hazy on that point, but they were close to his head, that much I recalled because I’d been present one night when the kid playfully pinched one of them and he’d jumped back and we’d all laughed. Of Lanning there was unfortunately no description available.

I said to myself impatiently, “Well, the hell with all this! Why do I sit here going at it this way? It’s a rotten accusation to bring against anyone, even in my own mind, but as long as I have, why not go about it right and get it out of my system once and for all? He was brought to trial in Cleveland and found guilty, this Garvey, and Hilton hasn’t given up his flat yet here. It’s simple enough to find out what I want to know.”

So I picked up the phone and sent a wire to Cleveland Police Headquarters, asking them to send on a copy of James Garvey’s fingerprints, and then I went around to Hilton’s flat and had the superintendant let me in — and felt pretty ashamed of myself in the act, too. It was rented furnished, and he’d already given it up effective that afternoon, they were holding the greater part of his personal belongings for him in the basement, but the rooms themselves hadn’t been cleaned yet. “I just want to get a glass,” I mumbled. He knew I was now his brother-in-law and raised no objection, stood waiting just inside the door for me.

The two we’d used just before we’d left for the church were still there, sticky, where we’d put them down. I remembered standing my own on the window-sill, so I picked up the other one that was below it on the table and wrapped it in a dean handkerchief, and also that wilted collar he’d jerked off at the last moment, which was still lying where he’d dropped it on the floor. I didn’t want to go any further. I was fighting myself even by doing what I had already. But while I was there I stepped into the bathroom for a minute.

And in there on the floor I noticed a toothbrush he’d discarded. It was the peculiar color the bristles were stained that made me pick it up. I thought, “Looks as though he had pyorrhea.” But it wasn’t blood that gave its bristles that peculiar rusty discoloration. There was too much orange in it for that. It wasn’t big enough to have been used for a shoebrush. I held it up to the light and the single hair caught in its bristles showed me how and why it had been used. The empty bottle was there in the medicine-chest when I opened it. “Egyptian Henna Hair Tint. Directions: rinse the hair thoroughly in warm water, apply Tint with a small nail, or tooth-brush—”

Garvey had sandy hair. Hilton’s was a flaming red.

I bunked my head rather painfully on the open door of the medicine-chest as I reared back from peering at that bottle.

There was something else in there too, a mere scrap of something else. A strip of flesh-colored adhesive-tape. I put it on the back of my hand and looked at it, first at close range, then further away. At arm’s length it was all but invisible, it blended so with the color of my skin. Then I put it up against my face, hygiene to the contrary, and studied it there. It hadn’t apparently been used, was a remnant; the gum was still strong enough to make it adhere of its own accord. To cover up a pimple on boil, perhaps? He was a fastidious, dresser, but he hadn’t struck me as that conceited that he’d care whether it showed or not. Why not just the ordinary white kind? My eyes, in the cabinet-mirror, traveled up my jaw-line to my ear — and stopped there. I didn’t need to ask any more questions after that.

I remembered how Betty had playfully reached out to pinch his ear one night at the house, and how he’d swerved his head back. I wouldn’t dodge if a pretty girl tried to do that to me. I’d let her get at both my ears and only wish I had two more. But then mine weren’t pinned back close to my head by flesh-colored adhesive-tape in such a way that it wouldn’t show. I closed my eyes briefly; God, how fast this thing was building up!

Notwithstanding all that, the tape was something you might expect to find in a bathroom-cabinet, anyone’s. But there was something else that should have been there, and wasn’t. That my own at home, and any other man’s invariably has at least two or three, of. Used razor-blades. There wasn’t one in sight. The mirror in front of me was streaked and filmed by splashes of soapy water leaping up from the washbasin under it. It was all right to see by, but not to shave by. It hadn’t been cleaned in at least two weeks. He didn’t shave himself.

I’d only been in the place about five minutes, all told. The superintendent hadn’t even gotten impatient yet waiting for me. I didn’t stay any longer after that. What was there to stay for? Did I have to have blueprints, to feel satisfied? Wasn’t what I had just seen enough? I came out of there so suddenly the super forgot to lock up after me for a minute, just stood there staring down the stair-well after me. I kept thinking, “I’ve got to find out where they went—! I’ve got to get hold of her—!” All the way back to Headquarters.

The fingerprint-man thought it could wait, when I paged him at his house from there over the phone. I told him it couldn’t, that I’d go over there and get him if he wouldn’t come of his own accord. He quit beefing after he’d shown up and found me pacing back and forth there like a caged bear. “For Pete’s sake,” I pleaded, “do this thing for me, will you, and don’t ask why or what it’s about! Can’t you see by looking at me—?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, “I can!”

“This glass, then, and this collar — will you see what you can do with ’em right away? Especially the collar, it came out of a cellophane wrapper, and there oughtn’t to be more than one set of prints on it. There’s a set coming in from Cleveland, telephoto, ought to be here any minute, for purposes of comparison — but get started on these while we’re waiting—”

I was at the cards again when he came out, as though I didn’t know them both by heart already! But I was checking them on the time-element this time. “Impulse only recurs at lengthy intervals of six months to a year,” Garvey’s card said. There was eight months between the first and second marriages, and a little more than a year between the second and third. On the Lanning card, the timing was slower. A year-and-a-half and then a year and nine months; he’d had to be more careful. But that wasn’t what interested me chiefly; it was the length of time between each marriage and the ensuing death. I was trying to figure out whether she had any margin of safety at all. It stood like this: The first victim had lived one calendar month. The second, six. The third, five. The fourth, two. The fifth, disappeared within two weeks’ time. The sixth, found murdered on the third day after she’d married him! There was an increase of tempo there that couldn’t be ignored. Lanning’s horrid record ended December 25th, 1935, with the finding of the last of them in a Pullman berth (obviously something had forewarned her and she’d tried to escape from him). Ten months had now gone by since that date; it was about due again, no margin of safety could be counted on — even if I’d been foolhardy enough to rely on such an uncertain thing. It might be a matter of weeks, it might be a matter of days, or — it might be a matter of only hours.

I pressed my head with my hands and groaned aloud. “Why didn’t I find this all out yesterday at this time!”

The fingerprint-man had come outside again, was standing there looking at me. “I asked you whether that other set you spoke of came in from Cleveland yet? I can’t get anything off either of those two things you gave me, to match up with them. They’ve both been handled by someone who’s had the skin taken off the ends of his fingers by acid or something. All I can get is blurs, deposits left by the body-oil. Are the others going to be like that too—?”

So he’d done that too! “Never mind,” I said, “I don’t need fingerprints, I need a lucky star!”

I beat it back to the house. The celebration was over and they’d all gone. The old lady was cleaning up the mess; the old man had been put to bed. I came in on her like a cannonball. “Where’d they go?” I panted, snaking the dishcloth out of her hand.

“Why, they went home where they Wong—”

“No! I mean Betty and — and him!”

“Why, that’s not our business,” she tried to stall playfully. “They’re on their honeymoon, no one’s supposed to know, a thing like that’s always kept a secret—”

I took her by the shoulders and tried to shake some commonsense into her, without being too rough about it. “You’ve got to tell me! I’ve got to know!”

Chapter IV Safeguards

She got sort of frightened just by looking at my face, so I tried to put the soft-pedal on. After all, what was the good of telling her? Why put her through hell? The shock alone might be enough to kill her, at her age. “Nothing’s the matter, Mom,” I quieted her in answer to her frightened questions. “Only, if you got any idea where they went, I want you to tell me—”

“Atlantic, that’s all I know,” she protested. “They didn’t tell me where they were going to stop down there—”

“Atlantic City?”

She laid a finger alongside her nose. “But if you want to find out that bad, I’ll ask her. She promised to call me up from there after they got in. She won’t forget her old mother. What’re you thinking of doing, playing some trick on them, Ritchie? Is that why you want to know?”

“No,” I said almost inaudibly, “the joke’s on me.” I flung myself down limply in a chair. They’d taken the six o’clock train; they were down there already by now. I said to myself: “I’ll wait half-an-hour. If she hasn’t called up by then, I’m going to start down there myself, if I have to hunt for them in every hotel in Atlantic City!”

What’s the use painting that half-hour for you? The tension, the knowledge that I ought to be doing something, and yet the inability to do anything but just sit there and wait. The thought: “Maybe it’s too late already, maybe right while I’m sitting here—” I couldn’t bear to have the old lady see what I was going through, I stayed off in another room by myself.

Then when the brring finally came from out in the hall, it lifted me a good two inches above the seat of my chair, as if a spring had been released under me. The old lady had stayed up waiting for it, and she came out of the kitchen drying her hands. “See, wha’d I tell you?” she said happily.

“Don’t let her get off,” I warned, “I’ve gotta talk to her!” Then I let her go to it first. When she was all through cooing and billing, she said, “Wait a minute, Ritchie wants to say a word to you—”

I took the receiver and muffled it against my chest. “You go upstairs and go to bed, now,” I said to the old lady. I waited until she was out of earshot, then I said: “Betty.” Just that one word, quietly.

Her voice was a song. “Oh, Ritch, I’m so happy! You’ll never know—”

I was shaking all over, like a man with the ague. I thought, “Am I sure enough, even now? Can I take the risk of smashing her life for her? Suppose, suppose I find out afterward that I was wrong? Isn’t what I am about to do to her only a degree less terrible than what I am trying to save her from? ‘Sure enough’ isn’t enough, all the modus operandi files in the world aren’t enough, nor all the toothbrushes, nor all the effaced fingerprints; I’ve got to be positive — and yet how can I be that until it is already too late, the thing has already happened?” An unheard cry that should never have come from a detective, welled up inside me. “God, tell me what to do!”

You understand, don’t you? It wasn’t the detective in me that was holding me back; the detective had enough to go by, more than enough. But I wasn’t a detective in this, I was this girl’s brother. For twenty years now she’d been my weakness, my one soft spot, since they’d first let me hold her in my arms, a kid of seven. Was I ready to pour filth and insanity all over her, tear her heart out with my own hands, blot out the sun from her for years to come, maybe forever? I was, if it meant saving from sudden death in the depths of night. But that if, that biggest, longest, strongest word in the language! If Hilton wasn’t the man, if I had my wires crossed—!

Something — Someone — must have answered that cry of mine for guidance after all, without my knowing it. The course of action that was the only safe one for me to follow unraveled itself of its own accord from the tangled skein of the predicament I was in, right while I stood there, and pointed the way. I saw that there was no choice; whether he was Garvey or not I could not afford to tell her, for her own sake, while I was still at this distance away from her. If he wasn’t, then all the above reasons entered into it. If he was, then I was simply bringing her eventual doom down on her twice as quickly — before I could get there. She would give herself away, in her terror and revulsion, and meet her end almost instantly at his hands. Or she would attempt to escape, and the same fate would overtake her that had undoubtedly overtaken the last woman “Lanning” had married. By warning her over a telephone-wire from a hundred miles away I was simply condemning her to death.

There was only one thing for me to do, until I could get down there. Keep her in ignorance of the horrible trap she was in. Safeguard her as far as I was able to, without letting her know I was doing it. And, outweighing the grim realization that such safeguards would be worse than useless if the crisis should come on suddenly, there was the indisputable fact that her present ignorance and trustfulness, while they were allowed to continue undisturbed, formed her chief margin of safety. Would lull him to procrastination instead of whipping him to instant frenzy.

All this in a matter of seconds, though it seemed years, while she was babbling blithely at the other end. Then, “Well, I must say you’re not very talkative, Ritchie. This is costing my Frank money, so I guess I’d better say ta-ta.” And, a modern-girl streak which she sometimes affected — but which really wasn’t like her at all — cropping out in her just then, she giggled and said: “Zero-hour approaches; I think I just heard the elevator come up out in the corridor.”

There wasn’t very much time. “Where’re you registered?” I said tensely.

“The St. Charles.”

That was good. That or any other well-staffed hotel — the surroundings, set-up, would be in her favor as long as they stayed there; it was when he got her off in some house or flat by themselves... Even so, I couldn’t just pin everything on that, there was no certainty in this case, in any shape, form* or manner. “You’ve got a nail-file with you?”

“Of course—!” she said in surprise.

“I’ve just heard of an old superstition, it’s supposed to bring you luck. Slip it under your pillow, without letting him see you do it.” The way he’d reared away from that penknife, such a thing might just save her, give her a moment’s time, if anything happened in the middle of the night. Arguing that she’d have presence of mind enough to reach for it, which was unlikely unless she knew what it was for. And to most people a nail-file isn’t a weapon of defense. “It’s like a charm. If you have a bad dream, or anything happens — take it out and hold it with the point away from you. Don’t tell him about it; or it won’t work.” Something like a sob caught in my throat. “Be sure you do this for me, Betty. I’ll tell you why someday — soon.”

So she didn’t laugh the way she would have otherwise.

Further than that, I couldn’t go, and there was nothing else I could do at the moment. There was obviously a telephone right in the room with her, the one she was using right now. “Tell me something,” I couldn’t resist asking, “you’ve unpacked already, I suppose?”

“Yes, I unpacked for both of us, like a good wife.”

“Set out all his shaving things for him—?”

“No, I meant to ask him about that!” she said. “He must have left them all behind in his hurry, he came away without a razor or blades or shaving-cream or anything—”

“Don’t!” I said, “Please don’t mention that subject to him at all—” And then lamely, “That’s supposed to bring bad luck too.”

But she wasn’t listening any more. “Here he is now,” she said. “Well, goodbye, old-timer,” and hung up. What’s a mere brother, even when he is trying to save your life without your knowledge, compared to a brand-new, adored husband?

I got the hotel right back again, and got the hotel-detective and identified myself. It was easier going with him, the ice wasn’t quite so thin. “Now this is a personal matter and I’m not in a position to give you the low-down. You can check up on me by getting in touch with Headquarters up here—”

“That’s perfectly all right, Dokes,” he assured me. “Anything we can do to cooperate with you, we’re at your service.”

“You have a Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hilton in tonight, room—?”

“Just a sec. Yes, Suite 22-G, that’s right.”

“I want you, or somebody working with you, stationed within earshot of the door of that suite tonight — all night long-with orders to break in there at the first unnatural or alarming sounds they hear. This is important, there must be no delay; whoever you give the post to must be provided with a passkey ahead of time and authorized to act at a moment’s notice, whether summoned by the occupants or not. Is that clear?”

“It’s unusual, to say the least, but I’ll see that it’s done. You wouldn’t care to enlighten us any furth—?”

“I would, but it’s out of the question just at present. This is a preventive measure, not a coercive one, you understand? And it’s essential that it be done without attracting the attention of the people in question; they must not know they are under surveillance. That’s vital!”

“You can count on us,” he said.

I wasn’t so sure that I could at that, it was a half-measure at best, but at least it was better than none; she wasn’t quite alone and at his mercy now, with just a fingernail-file and a room-phone to fall back on in case of a sudden attack in the dark. But I wasn’t being lulled into any false security, just the same. The room-door might be solid enough to muffle anything short of a full-bodied shriek. The man posted outside it might doze off. And if he was a person without much judgment, how would he know what constituted a danger-signal and what didn’t? By deliberately withholding the key to the situation from them I’d rendered them enormously liable to error. A death-rattle might seem no more to them than the sound of a restless sleeper clearing her throat. The whole thing was porous with pitfalls.

Chapter V Disbelief

She wasn’t glad to see me. That was as obvious as the nose on your face. She’d already passed back and forth in front of me an even half-dozen times in the wheel-chair — with him — without spotting me watching her. I’d taken good care of that. It was when I finally saw the Negro wheeling her back alone in the chair, that I stepped out from the cool, shady pergola where I’d stationed myself into the glare of the Boardwalk and strolled up to meet her. The colored man had turned her chair aside and parked it against the railing, looking toward the sea. I didn’t know how soon he’d be back, he might have stopped off just for cigarettes, but the opportunity mightn’t recur again for the rest of the day, so I had to grab it while I could.

Her mouth just opened when she saw me, then closed again, rather firmly too. “What are you doing down here?”

I said to the darky, “We’ll call you back when we want you.” Then I perched on the rail, facing her, so I could keep my eye on the Boardwalk. “I’m down here to get a guy,” I said tersely.

She didn’t try to conceal her repugnance. “That rotten business of yours! Hounding people—”

I said morosely, “Did it ever occur to you what kind of a world this would be, if it weren’t for that rotten business of mine?” But her reaction even to a casual remark like that, that seemingly had nothing to do with her, only showed me how she would have taken it had I told her the real McCoy over the phone. It would have killed her, or unbalanced her. “Even now,” I said to myself, “I’ve got to watch my step how I go about it, I can see that. She’s hipped on the guy. I’ve got to break it to her little by little. If I just drag him away from her, there’s no telling what it’ll do to her!”

“Look at that sea, look at that sun and that blue sky over us,” she was saying. “Oh, Ritchie, is that the only purpose you can find in life, to spread fright and darkness around you, to send people to their deaths or to living deaths shut up in clammy cells? Today — for the first time in my life — I’m not so proud of you!”

Which was a swell example of feminine logic for you, if there ever was one. Even so, I couldn’t rig up much of an answer to it. “There has to be a garbage-man,” I said, “there has to be a street-cleaner, there has to be a detective. They spoil the pretty picture for you I know, little sister. But it wouldn’t be so very pretty without them, either!”

We were working on each other, irritating each other, like only two people who think a hell of a lot of each other can do.

“I’m glad, now, that I haven’t told Frank what you are. I suppose he’ll find out anyway sooner or later—”

“Sooner — or later,” I agreed.

Why, the kid was actually ashamed of me! Because I was no Romeo, because I didn’t blend well with the golden daydreams of her honeymoon. My head went down a little lower between my shoulders, perched there on the topmost rail, and I closed my eyes thoughtfully for a minute. A Boardwalk cop came along just then and motioned me off, so I palmed my badge at him and snarled “Scram!” with unnecessary roughness.

“Where is His Nibs?” I said to her.

“He dropped in at the hotel barbershop to get a shave.”

“Doesn’t shave himself, does he?” I commented.

She didn’t answer. Instead she flared, “I have a very peculiar hunch that it’s more than a coincidence, your being down here at the same time we are! What was all that rigamarole about a file last night on the phone? What have you got in the back of your head, what are you trying to do to us anyway? There was whispering going on outside our door all night last night, as though — as though we were being watched! Frank’s already informed them we’re leaving before tonight, and you can’t blame him. We’re going out of there right today!”

I tensed a little without, I hope, showing it. “Where’s he taking you, got any idea?”

“He’s rented the cutest little two-family house out in Ventnor — furnished.” She began to thaw out again. “He took me over to look at it this morning. Solidly built, such thick doors and windows, no one can get in—”

I thought, “And no one can get out either — in a hurry — maybe that’s the idea.”

“We’re staying down here, you know. Frank’s had an offer of a better job, and he’s sent for his things—”

“This house.” That was all that interested me. “Two-family, you say?”

“The other half isn’t occupied. Most of the summer-people have left already. It’s off by itself, absolute privacy. We got it dirt-cheap, too—”

“It has a telephone, of course?”

“No, what would we need one for? We don’t know anyone down here.”

I took a deep breath and said to myself, “Well, here goes! I’ve wasted enough time.” I looked her square in the eyes and said, slowly, “I haven’t told you, have I, about this guy I’m down here after?”

“Must you?” she said coldly.

“He’s a woman-strangler. Normal part of the time, a dangerous homicidal maniac at certain other times. He always marries them before he— He’s married six already. The name of the last one was Linda Regan.”

“Ritchie, shut up!” she said horrified. I went right on.

“He can’t stand the sight of sharp implements, with cutting edges. He can’t stand the sight of blood. Are you listening? He doesn’t shave himself.” I gave her a mild sort of third-degree, went back and started the whole thing over, like a phonograph-record. Beating it in, pounding it in. “The name of the last one was Linda Regan. Linda Regan. He can’t stand the sight of sharp implements. Sharp implements. He doesn’t shave himself. Doesn’t shave himself.” I stopped a minute, then I said: “We don’t know what he looks like. He’s at large down here. Mom’s not well, Betty, not at all well. I think you better come back to town with me—” I could tell her the rest on the train, or after we got home. “She wants to see you.” And I reached out my hand to help her out.

I expected anything — but not what I got. She reared up in the chair all right — but not with the help of my hand. She stood up in it full-length, and her face was white — but not with fear or shock — with rage, almost with loathing. She swung her own hand back and slapped me with all her might across the face. It stung like a whip. Then again, and then once more. Three times, with every ounce of energy in her. The crowd around stopped to look, and then to listen.

“You lying, filthy-minded — flat-foot! There’s not a spark of manhood in you! Coming to me when his back is turned like this, with your slimy hints and insinuations! You meant him just now, didn’t you, only you didn’t have the courage to come right out and say so! And you call yourself a brother! The rotten profession you’re in has gone to your head, you’re sick in your own mind, you can’t see good in anyone any more! You’re not worth the little finger of the man I’m married to! And you expect me to listen to you, yet; doing this to me the very day of my wed—!” She was having her hands full keeping the tears back, but she was managing to.

She sat down again in the chair and motioned the attendant. Everyone was standing around in a big half-circle taking it all in. “Take me to my husband—” she said, and lifted up her head proudly for me to see what she thought of him.

I could have stopped her by using force; that was the only way. Dragged her back with me to the city against her will, turned it into a sort of legal kidnaping. What was the use? She would have only beat it right back to him again, probably, the first chance she got. I couldn’t arrest him, while she was right with him, without dragging her name into it, spreading her all over the papers, making a hash out of her future.

So I just stayed there hunched on the railing, with my face tingling, while the darky pivoted her chair around to start back with her. “I’ll be at the St. Charles, Betty,” I muttered hoarsely, “and you’ll find a telephone installed in that house of yours when you move in tonight, whether you like it or not.”

The last thing she said was, “I don’t want to see you or hear from you again, you’re going to apologize to me on your bended knees first, before I have anything more to do with you—!”

“I’ll be at the St. Charles, Betty,” I said again, more loudly than before, “remember that, when you feel his hands closing around your throat. It’ll be too late, then!”

And as the darky guiding her chair lost himself in the throng moving along the Boardwalk, I didn’t give a damn about the people standing there watching me, I hid my face in my two hands.

Chapter VI Trapped Related by Betty

He was as good as his word; I was alone in the house, unpacking Frank’s things, which had been sent on from the city, when a man came to install the phone. Frank, who had come over with me when we checked out of the hotel, had gone out again only a short while before, to the station to get a refund on our round-trip tickets, he’d said. Now that we were staying down here, there was no reason the railroad company shouldn’t return our fares, he’d remarked. Personally I thought it could have waited; it was only a matter of fourteen-odd dollars, the tickets had been good for sixty days, and one or both of us might have found occasion to use them within that time. But I didn’t argue the point with him. It never occurred to me that, since brides usually don’t carry their own money with them on their honeymoon, I hadn’t fourteen cents with me to get back on, much less fourteen dollars; I was stranded away from home down here. But why should such a thing have occurred to me? One isn’t stranded with one’s own husband; wherever he is, is home. He’d said he’d be back in about an hour.

If he’d been there with me when this phone-man came, I’d undoubtedly have Lad my way; there wouldn’t have been any phone put in. The idea of Ritchie butting into our personal affairs this way! I was still humiliated and furious at the beastly way he’d behaved on the Boardwalk, but a good deal of the edge had already been taken off my resentment. However, I was there alone, and this phone-man was one of these roughnecks who just barged in without so much as a “by your leave” and paid no more attention to me than if I were a stick of furniture!

I went chasing after him. “Here!” I said, “Where are you going with all those tools? We’ve made no application for a phone!”

“Oh, yes, you have, lady!” he grunted. “Paid your deposit and everything! I’ve got my orders, and it’s a rush-job!” And he went right ahead. This was Ritchie’s work, of course; he and that badge of his!

The wiring was still there from the phone the last people had had in the house; the whole thing only took him about ten minutes. He simply detached the sound-box from the baseboard where it was clamped and screwed it on again inside the clothes-closet opening of the hall. “Here!” I gasped, “Who ever heard of a telephone inside a clothes-closet!”

“I’ve got my orders,” he repeated stubbornly, and took out a pencil-diagram of the lay-out to show me. I recognized Ritchie’s handwriting on the margin; he’d evidently copied a floor-plan of our house from the real-estate office. I was nearly speechless for a minute, but in Frank’s absence there didn’t seem to be anything I could do, short of running out and getting a policeman. And our house was situated in such an isolated spot...

“You can install it,” I said, “but we’re not paying a cent—”

“That’s all right,” he said. “All charges have been paid up thirty days in advance.” And he ran the wiring very cleverly under the closet-door, hooked-up the instrument to it that he’d brought with him, put it down on the floor in the dark, tested it by calling the central office, brushed his hands, and departed. I followed him to the door. “Just wait’ll my husband hears about this!” I called after him helplessly.

“That reminds me,” he grinned, and handed me a sealed note. I gave him a dirty look, tore it open and read it.

This only kindled my anger all over again, even if only temporarily. I crumpled it up and threw it away. This persecution had to stop! If it didn’t, I really would tell Frank the whole story, and then the breach would never be healed. I hadn’t, so far, breathed a word to him, not even that Ritchie was down here and that I’d run into him. My better judgment warned me not to. It was no augury for a happy marriage, to create bad blood between my husband and brother right at the very beginning. This spat between Ritchie and myself would be forgotten eventually, but Frank would never forgive him for holding such a barbarous, mistaken opinion about him. In the end, I’d be the chief sufferer. Women usually are.

I cooled down again gradually, and then it dawned on me that phone could serve a very useful purpose after all, apart from that hallucination of Ritchie’s. I picked it up — you could hardly see it there at the bottom of that dark closet — and gave it its baptism by calling the grocer and butcher and ordering some things sent over. I’d surprise Frank by cooking my first meal for him, and see how he liked it! The house was furnished, even down to silverware and dishes. I set the table, slipped a nice juicy tenderloin in the oven, and then beat it in the bedroom to doll up for him. He’d be back any minute now.

That silver dress idea of Ritchie’s wasn’t so bad at that, I had to admit. I got it out and tried it on. It looked swell, burnished all over just as though it was really made of metal instead of only silver-cloth. I kept it on. Then I turned around and I noticed that I hadn’t finished hanging up his suits in the bedroom-closet. I’d been at it when that phone-man came. Several of them were still lying spread out on the bed. I picked each one up, smoothed it out, and put it on a hanger.

The little notebook dropped out of the last one. He must have forgotten he’d left it in the breast-pocket. It was just a tiny little address-book, two by four, the kind you can pick up at any five-and-ten. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even have anything written in it, except just on one page, near the back. He must have forgotten to use it after buying it. But it was because he had pressed that one page down in writing on it, opened it more widely than the others, that it fell open right there in dropping tent-shaped to the floor. And when my eye, in picking it up, came to rest upon a woman’s name, I stopped and looked more closely. I’m only human after all; some former sweetheart, possibly?

There were seven, not just one.

Barbara Newton

Rose Lawton

Sylvia King

Bertha Heilman

Esther Miller

Linda Regan

Betty Dokes

And every one but the last one, my own, was crossed off by a red line! Horrible mists from nowhere suddenly seemed to swirl around me, blotting out the room. I couldn’t see a thing. But I could hear — I could hear Ritchie’s voice coming through them! Vibrant, remorseless, inexorable: “The name of the last one was Linda Regan. Linda Regan. Linda Regan.” Booming like a fog-horn.

It was only when I was struggling to my feet again, picking myself up from the floor, that I realized I must have fallen to it without knowing it. But the mists were gone now, there was a diamond-like clarity to the air, that had invaded my faculties too. The faint, if it was a faint, had refreshed me; nature is kind that way. Not a shadow of a doubt remained. I knew the one, the only thing there was for me to do — and I knew how quickly it had to be done! I was whimpering aloud, “I’ve got to get out of here! Oh, let me out of here!” but that was only the nervous reaction to the shock, not helplessness. I knew enough not to waste a moment, a precious fraction of a second. Even though it meant tramping the sand-dunes in a silver evening-dress and high heels, even though the steak was already filling the kitchen with black smoke. No time, no time, no time! I had to get out of this house of death, back to where life was.

I fled from that room like one possessed, turned the corner into the hall, scampered down its dark length to the solid, oak-paneled front door, and as my face came flush with the diamond-shaped inset of thick glass set in the upper half of that — there he was out there, coming up toward the house in a straight line from the beach! Too late.

I screamed shrilly, unheard behind that thick door, and doubled back, like some silver-smooth little wild animal caught in a trap. There was no back door — I knew now that was one of his many reasons for selecting this house — but there were windows there I might climb out of, we were on the ground floor. Even as the thought occurred to me, I knew how futile it would be. There was nothing around the house to hide me, only sand. I could never reach the next house to ours in time, it was too far away. Even if I did, I might find it vacant. Or if it wasn’t, the people might refuse to interfere; he was my husband, how could I get them to take any stock in my story? No, he’d see me from where he was, in that flashing silver dress of mine, and only come after me, overtake me, drag me back inside again.

The clothes-closet door, standing ajar as I streaked past it, showed me where my only hope lay! I doubled back a second time, skidded and all but fell on the waxed floor, tore it open, snatched at the phone, and on my knees there, like someone saying their prayers, pleaded: “The St. Charles Hotel! The St. Charles Hotel! Life-and-death, no time for Information — you must know the number!”

Chapter VII End of the Chase

The crack of the closet-door, which now stood out at right-angles to the wall, gave me a threadlike view of the front door. The diamond-shaped pane in that was already darkened by his looming head and shoulders, blotting out the twilight from outside. He was standing there on the other side of it, getting out his key.

She did know the number; I heard her say it to herself, and a second voice cut in: “Good evening, St. Cha—”

“Richard Dokes, quick, Richard Dokes!” I yammered. I was almost incoherent with terror by now. I had no presence of mind just when I needed it most. I should have relayed the message to the exchange operator while I still had time, instead of waiting on the line as though this was an ordinary call. Four words would have done it, “His sister wants him!” But his very nearness had robbed me of all reasoning power; in my panic, it didn’t seem enough to give a message to some anonymous girl, I wanted the sound of my brother’s voice.

The other’s key was scraping into the keyhole; I could hear the intermittent humming over the wire that showed they were ringing his room — unsuccessfully. It kept breaking off, but it went right on again each time. I shook the phone in despair, as though that would bring him on any quicker!

The key turned, clashed, the ponderous door heaved inward. He was a black silhouette against the dying day, and a long ominous shadow fell before him down the hall, almost to where I crouched half-concealed.

The door closed behind him. He was in, now. He could have heard me, now, even if Ritchie had answered; could make an end to me, now, long before Ritchie could get here. Too late for this too, now! I was doomed—

I breathed his name twice over, “Ritchie! Ritchie!” and then I put it down softly on the floor, just the way it was, and bit the back of my own hand, to keep back the scream that was pleading to burst from me.

“Betty,” he called in a honeyed voice, which only made my skin crawl and struck fresh terror to my heart, and then he whistled playfully for me. “Phzveet, hoo. Where are you?”

I was doomed, yes. I was cut off, both from escape and from any means of summoning help. The old Victorian phrase they used to use came to me, I was in his power, but I didn’t laugh. Would you have, in my place?

But there was just one dim ray of hope left for me. It pointed, not toward immunity but toward delay, postponement. If I didn’t let him see how frightened I was, it mightn’t happen right away, I might be able to gain a little time. But I saw clearly what this depended upon: he must not know that I already knew. If he found me cowering there in the closet, eyes dilated, he’d probably finish me off then and there. If I seemed to be still the same happy-go-lucky little sap he’d left in the house an hour ago, he might just possibly wait awhile, take his time. Might even let me live the night through, and in that case, in the morning maybe—

He put his key in the door a second time, on the inside, and locked it. Then I heard it hit a coin as it fell into the depths of his pocket. But hands clenched, steeling myself, fighting myself at every nerve, I was already rising shakily to my feet, like a ghost reborn from the shriveling terror that had consumed my former self. I was panting like something that has run for miles, nature trying to get enough air to my ticking heart. I knew just what sort of an ordeal I faced; this was going to be worse by far than any sudden physical onslaught from him could possibly have been. Just one slip, one momentary lowering of my guard, and — goodbye. But life is sweet. It seemed cheap even at the price I was willing to pay for just one hour more of it.

He took a step away from the door. I tottered around to the outside of the open closet-door, showed myself to him, swayed there briefly — then all at once was moving toward him erect, firm-footed, a gash on my face for a smile, arms out to meet his embrace. The closet-door folded shut behind him, with the slight backward push I’d given it, lest he look in and discover the telephone.

“Oh, there you are!” he beamed. “Didn’t you hear me come in?”

He meant — had I heard him lock the door on the inside?

“No,” I said, “I was hanging up some things in there—”

I stepped in between his arms; I felt them fold around my back like boa constrictors. My heart stopped, then went on again. “I must, I must,” I told myself, “I did this same thing when he left, didn’t I?” Our lips met; then he lifted me from the floor, held me there helpless in the air. I saw a funny light kindle in his eyes, not love or passion, something that distended the irises, like a tiger’s eyes in the dark. I never knew until then how much it could hurt to keep a steady smile on your face, looking down into twin pools of death from above. I could feel his breath hot on my throat, like invisible steam. The vise he was holding me in began to tighten—

“Frank,” I said, “the steak’s burning! Imph, imph! Smell it? I meant to surprise you—”

Nothing happened for a minute that seemed a year. Then the floor came up slowly and hit the soles of my feet again, and his arms dropped away. I was afraid to move away too quickly, even with the excuse I’d just given him. I reached out and lightly patted the side of his face, as though to hold him there where he was, then turned and started for the kitchen, expecting any minute to feel his hands close around my throat from behind.

I made it all right, he didn’t come after me, but as I collapsed to a squatting position in front of the reeking stove, I said to myself: “I must never do that again, after this. I must never turn my back to him like that any more, I’ve got to keep facing him at all costs!”

The steak was just smouldering charcoal; when I turned to look he was standing in the doorway, looking in at me. I thought: This may give me an out—

“Look, isn’t that a shame?” I mourned. “Looks like we’ll have to eat out.” If I could only get as far as some restaurant with him, I could scream my peril in the middle of everyone—

He turned nasty all at once, almost as though he had guessed what was in my mind. Not dangerous, but just nasty.

“No,” he barked, “we’re going to eat in! We’re going to stay here where we belong! Whaddya suppose I married you for? Take off that damned silver dress, it hurts my eyes! Put on something soft, that don’t look like a suit of armor!”

I didn’t dare disobey; I edged past him sideways, with that same moronic grin still on my face, and got into the bedroom. If I locked myself in there, I wondered, could I hold him off until help came? But who’d hear my screams? It might be hours, days, before anyone happened to come out this way. And then when I looked, there was no key in the door, and a second later he had followed me in there. I pulled the shimmering dress down off my shoulders, keeping my eyes dead-center in the mirror, afraid even a look might provoke him.

I had dropped the notebook a second time when I fainted and it was still lying there. He saw it before I did. I only saw it when it was already in his hand, and saw him glance craftily from it to me, and back to it again. Ice went down my spine like quicksilver in a thermometer, and I quickly beat him to the ominous, unasked question — the wrong answer to which was death.

“Oh, what’s that?” I said naively. “Where’d you get it?” Meaning, I haven’t seen it before, I haven’t seen it before. The looped dress was down at my feet now, safely below the danger-point of my elbows. I’d been afraid an attack would come while it held my arms pinned to my sides.

“It was lying right here in front of you,” he said. There was more of a question in that than a statement.

“It was?” I gasped. “Why, where’d it come from, I didn’t see it!”

I pulled open a drawer in front of me and got out my shroud: a frilly little frock with flowers all over it, the dress I was going to my death in.

There was another danger-point while it dropped over my head and blinded me; I held my breath, but I was still alive when it settled further down around my figure.

He was still holding the book in his hand, open at the page where those names were. Then, in the mirror, I saw him take a pencil out of his inner pocket. It was red-barreled, so something told me the lead must be red too. He poised it, drew a swift line across something on that open page, and then he looked at me heavy-lidded, and put it away.

That had been my death-sentence, just then. Mine had been the only name of the seven without a line through it. This meant, tonight! Tonight, not another day to live! My knees dipped a little, but I caught the edge of the bureau with the heel of my hand and stayed upright against it — a white face, all eyes, staring into a mirror.

He purred, “Gee, Betty, you’ve got the loveliest little neck — so soft and white!” and his eyes hardly seemed to be open any more as he took a step toward me.

I was afraid to turn and afraid not to. I got the upper drawer open in front of me, dipped into it and out again, and as I swiftly pivoted to get his hot breath in my face, I was fumbling at my nails, prodding them with a long steel file. Using it the wrong way, point turned toward him. My bent hand came up until it was at face-level.

He blinked and grimaced and went back a little, while the file slowly swept its arc at him, like the needle of a compass. I said: “I’m starved, Frank, aren’t you? Let me go in and see what I can get for you, outside of that steak.” And I backed out into the dining room, smiling, doing my nails—

I put something on the table, I don’t know what, and we sat down opposite each other. We neither of us knew what we were eating, he wanted to kill, and I wanted to go on living. I could already feel myself beginning to crack up here and there, especially around the face, where I was having to smile so much.

I wondered, “Does it hurt much when you’re strangled to death?” Ritchie must have been the means of causing that to be done to many men — no, they used a chair in our state. I kept grinding pineapple-cubes with my teeth, and they wouldn’t go down at all.

I had put the file down in front of me. He snatched at it suddenly, when I least expected it, with a napkin covering his hand, and threw it over into a corner. “A thing like that doesn’t belong at the table!” he shouted at me. “It’s disgusting!” Then he did the same with my knife and fork, and his own. “We only need spoons!” he growled.

I thought, “Here it comes. This is it now!” There was a radio in the room, in back of where I was sitting. I groped for it with one hand, without getting out of my chair, and heard the dial snap.

A voice from the outside world broke the lethal silence.

I held up my finger commandingly. “Shh!” I said, “I want to get this!” It worked once, I knew it wouldn’t work a second time. The peremptoriness of my voice, the unexpectedness of it, buffaloed him for a minute. Thumping jazz swirled around us; I had it too loud, that must have irritated him, cut its efficacy short.

“Turn it off!” he barked suddenly.

“What for?” I asked innocently.

Then it came. The last link with self-control, the last inhibition, snapped. “Because I’m going to kill you!”

“I haven’t done anything to you—!” I moaned. But he was already on his feet, coming around the table toward me. He shot his cuffs back!

There was only this left now: the table had to stay between us as long as it could. My chair went over and I slipped around to his side. It was he, when he got around there, who kicked his own chair out of the way. Then he dragged the cloth off the table, sent everything crashing to the floor, and tried to turn it over and sweep it aside, but God was good to me, it was fastened immovably to the floor. I daren’t leave the table, to get over in the corner to where he’d thrown the file and knives; he would have overtaken me instantly. My life was hanging on the four corners of that table, I was defter getting around them than he.

Suddenly he himself left the table. He went over to the door, switched the key from outside in, locked it, and put it in his pocket. Then he did that to the other door, leading in to a bathroom. The kitchen door was a swinging-door, but there was no outlet from there. “I’ll get you now!” he promised grimly.

He didn’t say anything more after that. I was nearly at the exhaustion-point already, ready to drop, stood there panting, waiting to see which side of the table he’d come around this time. He didn’t come around either side. He gave a sudden jump up on top of it with both feet, and before I had half started away, leaped down on the other side, right on top of me. He had me. My legs tried to scamper abortively, my body stayed there in his grasp.

I didn’t struggle. I said, “All right, kill me, Frank. But I’m so thirsty from all this chasing. Just let me have a drink of water first, and then you can kill me.”

It was a crazy thing to say, but maybe not a crazy thing to say to a crazy man. “All right,” he nodded coolly. But he wouldn’t let go of the back of my neck, where one of his hands had the skin gathered tight, the way you pick up a kitten. Only a kitten doesn’t feel pain.

With his free hand he filled a glass from the pitcher standing on the sideboard, thrust it into my hand. I put my lips to it. The water wouldn’t go down. It flushed the back of my mouth, came spilling out again.

He dashed the glass from my hand; it hit the tabletop and smashed into curved pieces, that rocked there without falling off. The radio was still going; a girl was singing “My Heart Goes Pitter Patter.” That was the last thing I was aware of. His other hand came up in a curve and met the first one, thumb to thumb — my neck was in between. Then at last the first scream came, the scream that couldn’t help me; my whole life seemed to go into it. The second one, that came right after it, couldn’t get past any more, his fingers held it in. Nothing could get past after that, not even air...

Chapter VIII Trail’s End Related by Dokes

It was late when I got back, after checking up on him at the hotel barbershop, and also checking with the phone company to make sure the phone had been put in and my note to her had been delivered. At the former place I’d found out just about what I’d expected to. The barber recognized him from my description. He’d only been able to shave one side of his face. He’d closed his eyes and kept shrinking from the razor. Then the next thing the barber knew, he’d jumped up, torn the apron off, slapped down some change, and lit out like a crazy man.

I asked at the desk if there’d been any messages for me. There’d been a call, the operator told me, but no name was left. I tensed right away; Betty was the only person down here that knew me. “Man’s voice or woman’s?” A woman’s. “How long ago?” Not very long ago, twenty minutes or half-an-hour. “She didn’t say anything, anything at all?” I pleaded.

Yes, she had, but not to the operator. The operator had heard her whisper “Ritchie, Ritchie,” to herself. She remembered that.

I gave her Betty’s new number. “Call this quick!” I stood, trembling.

She stopped trying finally. “I keep getting a busy signal—”

“Have the central operator cut in, can’t you?”

Next time she turned around she looked frightened herself. “The line’s not in use, the receiver’s been left off the hook, that’s what it is — they’re going to notify the police.”

“I’m the police,” I told her, and I ran out of there for all I was worth.

The taxi had picked up a motorcycle cop within five minutes, the way it was going. I flashed my badge through the window, motioned him on with a sweep of my arm. A minute later a second one had cut in behind him. The machine couldn’t take me through the sand, when it finally bogged down I had to stumble the rest of the way on foot, the two cops behind me. The house showed up black against the white sand, but one of the windows showed a light. One of the cops went around to the back. Myself and the other one took the front door, went up to it and listened. A blurred radio was audible somewhere toward the back. And then suddenly a scream topped the radio. That wasn’t blurred, it came through clear as a knife.

I fired six times into the lock. It busted to smithereens and a hot piece jumped up and opened my cheek. I kicked the door in. What was left of the lock stayed fastened to the frame. “Stick out here,” I grunted to the cop, “I’ll go it alone.”

I went stumbling down the black hall and came up against another door. Along with the music, somebody was having a coughing-fit in there and floor-boards were creaking. I pitched at the door and it held. I funneled my hands and roared: “Betty! Draw blood! Cut yourself, make yourself bleed!”

Then I went at it again, like something trying to kill itself. I nearly did, at that. It didn’t open, it ripped out and went down flat, with me on top of it like a surf-board-rider. I was stunned for a minute, couldn’t see anything.

Then when I did, I saw all that mattered, all I’ll ever want to see till the day I die. She was standing upright. She was alone. She was alive. My chin dropped down again, gratefully.

Another door, at the upper end of the room, was standing open and there were frenzied, receding footsteps coming from beyond it. Footsteps that scuffed into the wall and toppled chairs over. I went after them. They were easy to follow, I didn’t have time for light-switches. Through a bathroom, then into the blackness of the room behind. Window-glass suddenly exploded in a shattering crash, and a square of gray light showed up. And in it the silhouette of a head and shoulders, rising and dipping over the ledge.

“Stay where you are!” I bellowed, and I heard the hammer of my gun click twice, uselessly, and then the window-opening was blank.

When I got to it and looked he was a black shape growing smaller every instant along the tricky sand. There was a bang from the front door, over to my left, and the black shape spun around, turned toward the house once more as if in ghastly surprise. Then it collapsed into just a smudge on the sand.

She was still standing there in the room when I came back again a couple minutes later. Not moving, not seeing anything. The damn radio was still going. Someone was singing “Something Came and Got Me in the Spring.” I went over, snapped it off.

She was holding her arm out, bent at the elbow, the forearm up perpendicular to her face, stiff as a ramrod. There was a short gash across the top of it, with a jagged piece of glass caught between the lips of the shallow wound. Even as I looked it dropped out of its own weight.

She spoke, so then I knew she’d seen me. “Is he gone?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I tied my handkerchief around her bleeding arm. “Thank God you heard me through the door! I didn’t save you — this did. Gee, you were plucky to do it!”

“I didn’t hear you,” she said dully, “This must have happened when he bent me backwards over the table and my arm hit the broken glass—”

I led her out of the house with my arm around her. I saw the two cops standing in the middle distance looking down at something, hidden from us by a rise of ground. “Don’t look over that way,” I said to her.

“What’s he done to me?” she asked piteously. “I’ll see shadows, be afraid now, all my life.”

“No, you won’t,” I promised. “There’s still that bright sun and blue sky, and someday soon a guy’ll come along that’ll be able to tell you all about it better than your old brother can!”