Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936
Bluebeard’s Seventh Wife
by Cornell Woolrich
Detective Dokes worshiped his younger sister and believed that the man she adored would lead her, like a lamb, to slaughter.
Chapter I
Preliminaries to a Wedding
I was detailed to the Blaney case at the time; that’s how I happened to stick my nose in the modus operandi file so much. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean I’m that good that they just dropped the Blaney case in my lap and said: “Here, Dokes, this is all yours; just take your time, and when you get around to it, tell us who creased Mrs. Blaney with an axe six weeks ago out on the front porch of her house.” If I should try to give that impression in print, I’d be lynched by every man — jack in the squad-room, the minute they read it!
No, it was just that this Blaney ease had us all by the short-hairs, and we were all of us on it at once, you might say — and getting nowhere rapidly. Everybody on the squad, to the best of my knowledge, had had a crack at it by this time, and there had even been a big shake-up a while before which had practically turned us inside out. It was one of those damned clueless things, with not even enough traces left to be doled out as assignments. It was six weeks old already, and much further from solution than it had been the day after it happened. It was, we were all agreed, that most dangerous type of “perfect crime” a haphazard one, probably not even premeditated, certainly not even intended for a “perfect crime,” which just happens to jell that way without any help from the participant. In other words, a natural.
I had been at the file so much by now, hoping all the time I’d come across someone who had once hacked some other woman with an axe on the front porch of her house, or the back porch, or anywhere at all, that I was getting to know whole sections of it backward and forward, by way of automatic reading as I flipped the cards up and down — whole slews of stuff that had nothing to do with what I was looking for. For instance, “Morrison, Harold,” would flash by up in the upper left-hand corner, and I’d be able to say, without reading anything further, “Yeah, that was that prowler that went around shooting people through their open windows all one summer, kept all suburban Indianapolis in an uproar until he climbed up in a tree to get at a second-story window and fell down and busted his leg.” A wire had come back to Leftwich, I think it was, a couple of weeks ago, somewhat tartly answering one of his own, to the effect that Morrison had been safely in jail there ever since and to query them ten years hence. So neither Leftwich nor I had much use for Harold Morrison.
Then there was another one that used to keep getting in my way too, I called it “the one with the ink-spot” because somebody years before had gotten a drop of ink right in the middle of it from holding a fountain-pen poised over it. It was as old as the hills, must have been one of the first ones in when the file was first started — and that had been before my time. Its color stood out against some of the newer ones, it had faded yellow instead of being white any more. I was always tripping over it on my way backward or forward to some hot lead (which promptly fizzled when I got there) and many a time I’d felt like ripping it out and pitching it away.
“Garvey, James,” was the tag, and a lot of other pleasant information followed, to wit: “Recurrent homicidal mania, directed solely against women—” That, of course, had brought me up short almost the first time I hit the file — me and about six of the other fellows. Not for long; it was as much of a dud as Leftwich’s Morrison. You only had to read a couple more lines on the card to know that it was no good for the Blaney case, or any other case any more either.
“—whom he has married; inoffensive toward all others.” Mrs. Blaney had had a perfectly good husband of her own for ten years past. “Method is to strangle with bare hands; unable to touch weapons, particularly of steel or objects with sharp cutting-edges during crises, as though subconsciously aware of what will result. Unable to shave himself, at such times, for the same reason. Growth of beard a good indication of approaching danger-period—” And so on. But Mrs. Blaney had been cleft barbarously by a razor-keen axe. “Congenitally unable to bear the sight of blood.” I needn’t dwell on the condition Mrs. Blaney had been found in from that axe...
There was a lot of other dope on this loveable character, but you didn’t have to be drawing my wages to see, if you’d gotten that far down the card, why he was out of the running as far as the Blaney case was concerned. “Impulse only recurs at lengthy intervals of six months to a year, and comes on slowly; normal in between times, likable, pleasing personality. Well-educated, neat dresser, able to earn good money at various white-collar jobs as long as his condition permits him to retain them—” And then it went on into a physical description of him.
The whole thing dated way back to the Twenties, and wound up with this brief summary, which just about clinched the matter anyway, as far as our present purposes were concerned:
Married Barbara Newton, Buffalo, N. Y., April 15, 1923. Newton woman met death May 12th, same year, during his absence. Verdict of coroner’s inquest: death by strangulation, assailant unknown.
Married Rose Lawton, New York City, December 10, 1923. Arrested charged with causing her death by strangulation, June 5, 1924. Brought to trial September 24th; acquitted.
Married Sylvia King, Toronto, Canada, February, 1925 under name of “Spencer White.” Bride found dead by strangulation July same year, Cleveland, Ohio. Brought to triad and admitted identity as Garvey. Adjudged insane and committed to State Institute May 31st.
Escaped October, 1928. Body recovered from Lake Erie, December 14, 1928.
The first, and only, time I had gotten down that far, all the way to the bottom, I wondered what the card was still doing, in the file under the circumstances; it should have been chucked but, or at least transferred. But at the very end there was this notation, penciled-in, probably by some long-forgotten predecessor of mine on the squad:
“Retain. N.B. — Identification never fully verified.”
And then something further after that, so blurred as to be all but illegible. Which explained why it was still in there, if nothing else. As for being of any use in the Blaney case, that was another matter. It was just that it kept getting in my way constantly, until I’d taken almost a hatred to it. There were dozens in there along with it, still on the active list, that had better possibilities; I would have liked to have them all out, separate, where I could put my fingers on them in a hurry when I wanted to, I suppose.
I was at it again, going after some poor punk named Montaigne, just because he had carved quite a bad name for himself with an axe up in a number of lumber-camps in the Northwest, when the Blaney case suddenly blew up by itself without any help from any of us. I slammed the damn file-case shut the minute the rumor first percolated out from the Chief’s office, and barged in without being sent for to find out if it was true, and so did everyone else around me. The Chief looked plenty relieved, if not particularly pleased, for which you couldn’t blame him. It had had us up a tree, and no mistake!
“Yeah,” he sighed without being asked, “it’s over — and no credit due to us, either! I’m not blaming you lads, but the damn breaks we got! It wound up as screwy as it began, it was a jinx all the way through. Just listen to this, will ye? I got a long-distance a few minutes ago from a little one-horse town down in Virginia — never heard of it before. Some farmer down there yesterday afternoon set his dog on a tramp he caught mooching his fruit. The tramp picked up a rock and knocked the dog’s brains out. So the farmer grabs him, hauls him along with him, and presses charges. The constable sets a fine, the tramp can’t pay it, and he’s thrown into the coop. The tramp is full of interesting stories. His crime isn’t a particularly heinous one, and the first thing you know this hick constable and his prisoner have cracked a bottle of corn together and are chewing the rag until all hours of the night, both of them higher than blimps. Murray and Leftwich, you go down there and bring him back with you. He killed Mrs. Blaney six weeks ago up here. Hardcastle’s the name of the place, they’re holding him for us. Take an Atlanta train and change at Richmond—”