“We were married and I brought my bride home to the farm at Macomb. We were happy as ever any married couple had been — at least, I was happy. Then Mildred began to grow tired of country life, and talked about the city and the bright lights. I told her I must stay on the farm, but she became more dissatisfied every day. One night when I came into the house after a hard day’s work I learned she had packed her bag and had gone away.
“That broke me up for a long time, but I knew it was useless to try to follow her and persuade her to come back. I never saw her again — until now!”
After establishing that Rexroat and his father and two neighbors had spent the evening of September 26th in the farm house, Halpin sent detectives to search Allison’s home. They found a trunk marked with Mildred’s name and containing her personal effects. Apparently it had been brought there very recently.
Halpin was interested in that peculiar circumstance and searched the trunk thoroughly. He found many letters, some in German, some voicing vague threats against the dancer. But the captain vainly sought a name and address that would give him a lead.
Other loose ends of the investigation had to be picked up. He sent a squad to the Michigan Avenue hotel in a new quest for the writer of the mysterious note found near the railroad tracks.
The detectives found Harron.
“Mildred Allison?” the man said. “I know nothing about her, except what I have read in newspapers.”
The pasted note was shown to him.
“I can explain that easily. I wrote that note to a friend of mine who lives at Wayne, alluding to an attempt of some swindlers to get me in on a scheme which, I am sure, would have defrauded both of us. It just happens that he tore the note up out there.”
The statement was verified quickly by the police. Another promising lead had failed, and the killer, still unnamed, remained at large.
While Captain Halpin went to the Eggleston Avenue house to locate and question the woman from whom Mildred Allison had rented her room, a strange physical clue was discovered.
A hair switch, of the type used in that day to give woman’s crowning glory a more abundant appearance, was found in the freight yards of the Burlington Railroad, south of downtown Chicago.
The switch was taken to Captain Halpin as he was questioning the victim’s landlady. “That is Mildred’s. I’m sure,” the woman said. “It is made of her hair! That is exactly the shade of hers.”
She stared at the grim reminder of the dead dancer.
“Mildred put that into her rattan suitcase when she left here that evening. She said she was going to Wheaton to arrange about forming a tango class there.” Wheaton was only a few miles away from Wayne, the scene of the crime.
“She had talked with a man, often, about the class,” the landlady continued. “I think she was to meet him that night. Did you find her diamond ring? She had a valuable one.”
“That was not either of her husbands?”
“No, he was a young fellow she met recently when dancing, probably at Felecita. I think it was Mr. Spencer.”
“Tell me all you know about this Spencer,” Halpin asked.
“I saw him one evening when he came to call for Mildred. I think he may have been the man who telephoned to her the afternoon before she started for Wheaton. The voice was like Mr. Spencer’s, a low drawl.”
“Do you think that was his real name?”
“I don’t know that he ever used another. He was rather short and stocky. He had strong, thick shoulders. I would say he was between twenty-eight and thirty-two years old. His hair was brown and he had blue eyes, and his face was ruddy. He wore gold eyeglasses. His clothes were like a minister’s — black suit and high collar.”
“His weight and height?”
“About five feet, six inches tall, I think, and he must have weighed about a hundred and forty-five pounds.”
The description fitted a man who Oleson said had danced the tango with Mildred at the Felecita!
Sheriff Kuhn received the report at Wheaton and sought sponsors of a tango class there. Hours of inquiry resulted only in word that no one had heard of plans for such a class.
But there were two men named Spencer in Wheaton!
Kuhn hurried to one, a merchant. He did not answer the description of the mystery man, and he promptly accounted for all his movements on the night of September 26th.
The second, a younger man, denied he had ever been interested in the tango or in any dancer. Mildred’s landlady looked at him and said he was not the admirer of Mildred.
The merchant then recalled that a salesman named Spencer often came to Wheaton on business. Detectives rushed eagerly to the salesman’s employers in Chicago.
That young man, records and correspondence proved, had been in southern Illinois the night of the crime. While the detectives were in the office the salesman came in. He did not fit the description of the hunted man given by the victim’s landlady.
“Three Spencers!” Halpin groaned, “and not the man we want. I hope we don’t have to sift out all the Spencers in Illinois.”
Halpin rechecked the descriptions given of the man who had been seen on the train.
The train attendants and the farm manager’s wife agreed that he had been stocky, short and brown-haired, and had worn a dark suit.
Sheriff Kuhn telephoned his report to Halpin then. He had ordered with results, a wide search of the area along the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern tracks. A deputy had found, hidden in a marshy spot near the tracks, a heavy hammer wrapped in a towel, and a newspaper dated September 23rd. The hammer bore the imprint of a Chicago hardware dealer. It weighed three pounds.
Halpin dispatched detectives to the store. It was hard to figure out what part the hammer had played in the case. The dancer had been shot and, apparently, had not been struck on the head. Had the killer planned the murder long in advance, planned to kill with the hammer — and secreted it there on September 23rd?
Halpin was eager for the report from the store. But the new clue failed. The store had sold many such hammers to mechanics, and there were no records kept of such sales.
“This murderer has all Chicago to hide in,” Halpin told his men. “But we’ve got to dig him out, quick. It’s an even chance he thinks that he is safe and that the city is the best place for him to keep under cover. Maybe he has used the name of Spencer only in his contacts with the girl he killed. He may think he’s perfectly safe under another name.
“But I have a hunch this fellow will show up again around the dance halls. I don’t believe he will stay away from girls very long. We’re going to cover such places, and we’re going to get a lead on him, or find him, in one of them.”
Halpin mapped an amazing campaign of vigilance over dance halls, schools and clubs, concentrating on those of the South Side. District captains were instructed to have plainclothes on the watch for the mysterious Spencer, described fully in communications to the captains. And Halpin sent his best men to the halls to mingle with the dancers, to be attentive to the girls, and to talk about the tango murder case with them, while watching always for the appearance of a short, thick-shouldered man wearing gold eyeglasses.
Surely, Halpin reasoned, the slayer would come forth from wherever he had been hiding, harassed mentally by his guilt to find a measure of relief in the satisfaction of his craving for companionship with women. The tango, newly imported from the Latin countries, had won many to its seductive grace. Perhaps the man of gun and hammer was an addict and would be unable to resist the lure of the Spanish music and the exhilaration of embraces of young girls to its fascinating rhythm.