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

Married Bertha Heilman, Chicago, August, 1931. Latter found strangled to death in North Side flat, October, 1931, during his absence. Lanning was released by the Chicago police after questioning. Married Esther Miller, St. Louis, March, 1933. Latter disappeared two weeks later, never seen alive again. No record of any charges against Lanning.

Married Linda Regan, Baltimore, December 22, 1935. Latter found strangled to death in berth of Pullman car on which she had been traveling alone, December 25, 1935. This man is still at large.

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.