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

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.