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

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—”