“Look here, Mr. Mason, I think Marcia was going to see John. I think she was... was planning on spending the night with him.”
“Who’s Marcia?” Alden Leeds asked.
“A girl John was going to marry,” Emily Milicant said. “I opposed the match, not because I thought she wasn’t good enough for John, but because I knew John wasn’t good enough for her. I knew it was a passing infatuation with John, and that he’d break her heart. I couldn’t tell Marcia all I knew about John, so I had to pretend that I was opposing the match because I was prejudiced against her. Why, John would have broken her heart inside two months. He’d have dragged her down and down and down. That’s what he’s done to all of his women.”
“He’s dead,” Mason pointed out.
“I don’t care whether he’s dead or not,” she blazed indignantly. “John Milicant was a mental defective. He couldn’t differentiate between right and wrong, and he didn’t even try.”
“Ever been in prison?” Mason asked.
“Of course, he’s been in prison. He served five years in the penitentiary at Waupun, Wisconsin. That was years ago.”
“Then they’ll have his fingerprint record,” Mason said.
She shook her head. “He became a trusty in the prison office and was shrewd enough to get hold of his own fingerprints and substitute them,” she said. “He got ten convicts to each donate a fingerprint. That confused his record so nothing could be done about it. It was before the days of a central fingerprint filing system...”
Mason frowned thoughtfully. “Before he’d lost his toes?” he asked.