that came into this area in the past year.'
'Gotcha,' Johnson said.
'Chief,' Sergeant Thomas K. Broderick said, 'look at this…'
He dangled a small, sealed plastic bag in front of Delaney. The Chief inspected it curiously. Inside the bag was a half-inch of gleaming knife blade tip. On the upper half was part of the groove designed to facilitate opening the blade with a fingernail.
'That's it?' Delaney asked.
'That's it,' Broderick said. 'Fresh from Bergdorfer's slashed throat. We got a break on this one, Chief. Most pocket knives in this country are made with blades of high-grade carbon steel. The lab says this little mother is drop-forged Swedish stainless steel. How about that!'
'Beautiful,' the Chief said. 'Did you trace it?'
Broderick took a knife from his pocket and handed it to the Chief. It had bright red plastic handles bearing the crest of Switzerland.
'Called a Swiss Army Knife,' the detective said. 'Or sometimes Swiss Army Officers' Knives. They come in at least eight different sizes. The largest is practically a pocket tool kit. This is a medium-sized one. Open the big blade.'
Obediently, Delaney folded back the largest blade. The two men bent over the knife, comparing the whole blade with the tip in the plastic bag.
'Looks like it,' the Chief said.
'Identical,' Broderick assured him. 'The lab checked it out. But where do we go from here? These knives are sold in every good cutlery and hardware store in the city. And just to make the cheese more binding, they're also sold through mail order. Dead end.'
'No,' Delaney said, 'not yet. Start with midtown Manhattan. Say from Thirty-fourth Street to Fifty-ninth Street, river to river. Make a list of every store in that area that carries this knife. The chances are good the killer will try to replace her broken knife with a new one just like it. Have your men visit every store and talk to the clerks. We want the name and address of everyone who buys a knife like this.'
'How is the clerk going to do that? If the customer pays cash?'
'Uh… the clerks should tell the customer he wants the name and address for a free mail order catalogue the store is sending out. If the customer doesn't go for that scam and refuses to give name and address, the clerk should take a good look and then call you and give the description. Leave your phone number at every store; maybe they can stall the customer long enough for you or one of your men to get there. Tell the clerks to watch especially for young women, five-five to five-seven. Got it?'
'Got it,' Broderick said. 'But what if we come up with bupkes?'
'Then we'll do the same thing in all of Manhattan,' Delaney said without humor. 'And then we'll start on Brooklyn and the Bronx.'
'It looks like a long, hot summer,' Detective Broderick said, groaning.
'Chief,' Lieutenant Wilson T. Crane said, 'we've got sixteen possibles from Records. These are women between the ages of twenty and fifty with sheets that include violent felonies. We're tracking them all down and getting their alibis for the night of the homicides. None of them used the same MO as the Hotel Ripper.'
'Too much to hope for,' Delaney said. 'I don't think our target has a sheet, but it's got to be checked out. What about prisons and asylums?'
'No recent releases or escapes that fit the profile,' Crane said. 'We're calling and writing all over the country, but nothing promising yet.'
'Have you contacted Interpol?'
The lieutenant stared at him.
'No, Chief, we haven't,' he admitted. 'The FBI, but not Interpol.'
'Send them a query,' Delaney advised. 'And Scotland Yard, too, while you're at it.'
'Will do,' Crane said.
'Chief,' Detective Daniel Bentley said, 'we went back to the bars at the Hotel Coolidge and asked if anyone remembered serving a man with scarred hands. No one did. But two of the cocktail waitresses who worked in the New Orleans Room the night Jerome Ashley was offed, don't work there anymore. We traced one. She's working in a massage parlor now-would you believe it? She doesn't remember any scarred hands. The other waitress went out to the Coast. Her mother doesn't have an address for her, but promises to ask the girl to call us if she hears from her. Don't hold your breath.'
'Keep on it,' Delaney said. 'Don't let it slide.'
'We'll keep on it,' Bentley promised.
'Chief,' Sergeant Abner Boone said, 'I think we've got this thing organized. The hotel trade magazine gave us a copy of their mailing list. We're checking out every hotel in the city that got a copy and making a list of everyone who might have had access to it. I've got men checking the Mayor's office, Chamber of Commerce, hotel associations, visitors' bureau, and so forth. As the names come in, a deskman is compiling two master lists, male and female, with names listed in alphabetical order. How does that sound?'
'You're getting the addresses, too?'
'Right. And their age, when it's available. Even approximate age. Chief, we've got more than three hundred names already. It'll probably run over a thousand before we're through, and even then I won't swear we'll have everyone in New York with prior knowledge of the convention schedule.'
'I know,' Delaney said grimly, 'but we've got to do it.'
From all these meetings with the squad commanders, he came away with the feeling that morale was high, the men were doing their jobs with no more than normal grumbling.
After three months of bewilderment and relative inaction, they had finally been turned loose on the chase, their quarry dimly glimpsed but undeniably there. No man involved in the investigation thought what he was doing was without value, no matter how dull it might be.
It was not the first time that Edward X. Delaney had been struck by the contrast between the drama of a heinous crime and the dry minutiae of the investigation. The act was (sometimes) high tragedy; the search was (sometimes) low comedy.
The reason was obvious, of course. The criminal acted in hot passion; the detective had only cold resolve. The criminal was a child of the theater, inspired, thinking the play would go on forever. But along came the detective, a lumpish, methodical fellow, seeking only to ring down the curtain.
On May 30th, all the detectives met at Midtown Precinct North. If Delaney's hypothesis was correct-and most of them now believed it was, simply because no one had suggested any other theory that encompassed all the known facts-the next Hotel Ripper slaying would take place, or be attempted, during the week of June 1-7, and probably during midweek.
It was decided to assign every available man to the role of decoy. With the aid of the hotels' beefed-up security forces, all bars and cocktail lounges in large midtown Manhattan hotels would be covered from 8:00 p.m. until closing.
The lieutenants and sergeants worked out a schedule so that a 'hot line' at Midtown North would be manned constantly during those hours. In addition, a standby squad of five men was stationed at Midtown South as backup, to be summoned as needed. The Crime Scene Unit was alerted; one of their vans took up position on West 54th Street.
Monica Delaney noted the fretfulness of her husband during the evenings of June 1-3. He picked up books and tossed them aside. Sat staring for an hour at an opened newspaper without turning a page. Stomped about the house disconsolately, head lowered, hands in his pockets.
She forbore to question the cause of his discontent; she knew. Wisely, she let him 'stew in his own juice.' But she wondered what would happen to him if events proved his precious theory wrong.
On the night of June 4th, a Wednesday, they were seated in the living room on opposite sides of the cocktail table, playing a desultory game of gin rummy. The Chief had been winning steadily, but shortly after 11:00 p.m., he threw his cards down in disgust and lurched to his feet.
'The hell with it,' he said roughly. 'I'm going to Midtown.'
'What do you think you can do?' his wife asked quietly. 'You'll just be in the way. The men will think you're checking up on them, that you don't trust them to do their jobs.'
