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

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

Bluebeard’s Seventh Wife by Cornell Woolrich

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...