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

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.