Last Dance, Last Chance

but found nothing connected to the murder.
    A nearby business owner walked over to tell them that he and Bertha were friends, and that he’d tried to watch out for her. “She hasn’t driven that car for a long time,” he said.
    “I noticed two guys outside her place Saturday night,” he said. “They were jittery-acting.”
    “What did they look like?” Benny DePalmo asked.
    “I’d say they were both in their 50s—and one was short and the other one was really tall.”
    Two more suspects in an already crowded investigation.
    As the news of Bertha Lush’s murder flooded the media, the detectives began to get phone calls from other people who knew Bertha. One reported that he knew her well from her days at Boeing and that he’d often ridden the bus with her.
    “I visited with Bertha on Saturday, the 18th, from 1 P.M. until 3:30. I went over to her place to buy a tool that I needed at work. Bertha had one she didn’t need anymore,” he said. “Well, the funny thing is—she showed me this blue-green suitcase and a shaving kit or something. She said she was holding them for some guy who couldn’t pay rent. She said she was kind of afraid of him. Some girl had dropped him off at her place to stay, and then he couldn’t pay her. She said he tried to borrow money from friends but he couldn’t get any.”
    So Bertha had been afraid on the afternoon before she died, and specifically fearful of the man who owned the blue suitcase. Unfortunately, she hadn’t mentioned the name to her friend, or anything else that might help to identify the stranger.
    Bertha’s sister in Denver called to say that she’d talked with her between 9:00 and 9:30 (Seattle time) on Saturday night and that they’d had a perfectly ordinary conversation. “Bertha didn’t say a thing about being scared.”
    They were shaving minutes off the vital time period. Bertha Lush was alive at 9:30 and dead at 10:15, yet no one had heard a scream or the sounds of a struggle.
    When they’d opened the suitcase, they knew they were looking for an “invisible man” who was medium-sized and who wore Brut men’s cologne. He’d fled without the possessions in his suitcase. He hadn’t had enough money, apparently, to pay the seven dollars to rent a room at the Eldorado—but he’d had five dollars to buy a hammer.
    Wayne Dorman and Benny DePalmo began a frustrating canvass of Ernst Hardware stores, looking for someone who could recall selling a 42-ounce Stanley brand ball peen hammer on the afternoon of May 18. The sales tally didn’t match the Northgate store, but it did seem close to the number of sales made at the 6th and Pike store in downtown Seattle. Made at Register #1, it was the 256th of 277 sales that day.
    Since the store closed at 6:30 P.M. , store officials estimated that the hammer had been purchased at about 4:00 in the afternoon.
    Dorman and DePalmo interviewed the clerk at Register #1, but they were disappointed again to find that she had no recollection of selling the hammer. Nor did any other Ernst clerks. It was only one sale among 277. Evidently the killer-to-be had looked and acted average enough to maintain a low profile.
    Criminalists reported that they had been unable to lift any legible prints from the hammer. Nor had they found usable prints on the toilet paper roll. “What if you cut through the roll to the cardboard in the center?” Benny DePalmo asked Criminalist Ann Beaman. “Could the killer have grasped the roll with his fingers inside the core and left a print there?”
    After Beaman made the cut, they found that he had done just that. One perfect print surfaced with the Ninhydrin process. It was the first break in an ultimately frustrating case. But this investigation occurred years before the computerized AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Analysis System) technique was established. The print would do them no good unless there was a suspect print to compare with it. The FBI kept single prints only for the ten most wanted fugitives in America.
    Although Bertha Lush had lived a moderate life, neither smoking nor drinking, obeying the law and minding her own business, some of her male relatives had had runins with the police. Now the Seattle detectives attempted to locate those men. The family knew that Bertha was financially secure and that she always had cash in the motel office to make change. That might have been tempting to a few of them who always seemed to need money.
    An active warrant was out for