Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

The husband of Mrs. Rodgers was then considered a possibility, as was the wife of Cornish, both divorced; but these two people were absolved upon the most trifling investigation.

Then detectives decided that the deed had been done by a woman in revenge. For some time they concentrated in finding this woman. She remained unfound. Gradually they relinquished the idea — and began to look about more generally for some one who might have hated Cornish.

The investigation here proved more fruitful, for the trainer had always been a man of warm friendships and bitter enmities. But they could settle on no definite person among them.

In the matter of clews they had, of course, several on hand. There was, first of all, the blue box from Tiffany’s. Just a box — such as was sent out of the shop by the hundreds, and which could not possibly aid in tracking their man.

The silver bottle holder within, however, proved more interesting. It had not been purchased at Tiffany’s at all, but belonged to a lot made by a firm called F. A. Lebkeneker & Co., manufacturing jewelers of Newark.

As luck would have it, there had been but twenty-three of these holders made — and only one had been sold in New York. This was immediately traced to a source which could be none other than innocent.

On the holder in question a reporter discovered a mark 814. This immediately identified it as one sold to the retail firm of Hartdegan & Co., also of Newark.

The article, Hartdegan & Co. told the men, was not a bottle holder at all, but was designed to carry toothpicks, or suggested itself possibly as a candlestick; the idea of the bottle originated with the purchaser.

The bookkeeper of the shop, Miss Emma Miller, had been impressed into sales service the few days before Christmas, and she recalled selling this particular bottle — to a gentleman of about thirty-five or forty, harsh voice, pleasing manner, reddish Vandyke beard, rather anxious to make quick work of the purchase. He was, she recalled, about five feet eight in height, well bred and well born.

Detectives decided that the purchaser was some one who normally divided his time between Newark and New York — assuming, of course, that the purchaser and the sender were the same person, since the trinket had been bought in one place and mailed in the other at an hour when a commuter would logically return.

A Rare Poison

So far, so good. Then they turned to the bromo seltzer to see what clew this might present. They found, instead of anything to aid them, that bottles like this were sold by the hundreds and thousands all over the country each year. Then some one brought in an important finding; this bottle, though it closely resembled one, was not an original bromo-seltzer container at all, but a bottle used for cyanide of mercury.

“If it had been a bromo bottle,” a druggist told them, “the trade-mark would have been blown into the glass.”

Then they tried to discover the source of the cyanide of mercury. Here they had a difficult time of it, for they found that the drug was so rare that druggists of wide experience could live out a lifetime without laying eyes upon it. Yet, once known, it was one of the easiest substances in the world to detect.

It had been discovered by a druggist named Scheele, who had come across the drug accidentally while concocting a certain color later named Prussian blue in his color laboratory. It was used in chemical and analytical laboratories, and up to that time there had been only three reported cases of poisoning by it in the entire world.

The Red Beard

Power and Wightman, called by the district attorneys “the princes of manufacturers of chemicals,” who made more, probably, than any one else in the entire country, had sold but thirty ounces of cyanide in the whole year, and this in thirty one-ounce bottles.

The bottle sent to Cornish was one of the thirty bottles sold by this firm. Ten of the thirty had been sold in Newark, the wholesalers retaining six of them, the other four traced to innocuous sources, such as the laboratory of the high school. Then the wholesalers recalled selling a loose ounce over the counter for cash

This complicated matters somewhat, and they were further involved by the professor of chemistry at the high school, who rushed into the district attorney’s office to state that, after all, he had not purchased his cyanide from Power and Wightman, and that therefore two bottles were still unaccounted for by the police.

Sixty thousand orders in the files were painstakingly gone over, but the two missing bottles never were traced.

While this was going on a handwriting expert W. J. Kinsley, who had been studying the address on the poison package, reported that he believed it to have been written by a man between the ages of twenty-five and forty — a person who wrote much, probably a business man.

To whose advantage was it to have killed Cornish?