The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead

Hampton Stone

The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead

SHE was pretty, prettier than average. She was young. Estimates put her age at about twenty. Eventually we did get the exact figure. It was twenty-two. She lived alone. There were indications that we’d been expected to think that she died alone, but we never thought that. By the time we came into it, that much was already known, the way the girl had died. It was manual strangulation, and that’s a field of endeavor that the do-it-yourself fad is just never going to reach. A girl simply can’t put her own two hands around her own lovely throat and choke the life out of herself. It’s like wrestling or making love, something that can’t be done with less than two people.

Her name was Sydney Bell, except that it wasn’t; but we’ll come to that later. Let’s start with the simple and easy things like who I am and how I got into this business of the girl who kept knocking them dead. That was the way Gibby came to describe it and I’ll tell you about Gibby. I can’t get far telling you about me without telling you about him.

I am an assistant on the staff of the New York County District Attorney and so is Gibby. You can call me Mac, which is what everybody calls me except in court where things go too formal for that. Since this is anything but a formal report, Mac will do for me. Gibby is Assistant District Attorney Jeremiah X. Gibson, who had once been Patrolman Gibson and later Detective Gibson. That’s the way he worked his way through law school. He was on the cops. I didn’t know him in those days, but I can tell you he was a good cop. Though I can’t speak for the patrolman part of it, on the detective bit nobody knows better. It’s in the boy’s blood.

Brilliant is the word for Gibby. Sober is the word for me. That’s why the DA has set us up as a team. If Gibby has a fault, it’s enthusiasm. He’ll go out on limbs. I try to see he doesn’t go too far out or doesn’t get sawed off; but let’s face it. He does better than I do. I swear he won’t do it to me, but every time it happens. He gets me out on that limb with him. One of these days we’ll both be sawed off.

Murder is Gibby’s specialty—on the detection end, of course. There aren’t many murders happening in our jurisdiction that Gibby doesn’t get to work on and, when Gibby’s on it, I’m on it with him. The Sydney Bell bit was murder and it happened in New York County. That made it our baby.

It happened in a nice little flat in the West Fifties. One room and bath and kitchenette, but the room was big and bright. It was pleasantly furnished, not spectacularly lush, not austere, but comfortably cheerful. The house had a decent look to it, but in a big city, of course, one never knows. There is nothing anywhere quite so impersonal as one of these apartment buildings. It happens again and again that the people who live in them go on for years without knowing the first thing about their neighbors and it’s not until something happens that they even begin to wonder whether the tenant in 5F had been exactly what she seemed to be.

Even then this thing that happens has to be something pretty big. What did happen to the tenant of 5F was quite big enough, of course, since it was murder; but it was evident that it was only when the police started asking questions that any of Sydney Bell’s neighbors gave her more than the most passing of thoughts. This one remembered her from meetings in the self-service elevator. Another remembered visitors who came and went. She had many friends, but nobody could describe them closely or tell us anything much about them.

Among the neighbors a rather tart young woman who taught school and lived in 5E, which put her next door to Sydney Bell, came closest to telling us something we could use. Her name was Nora McGuire. Gibby questioned her. It wasn’t easy. She went all out to impress us with how broad-minded she was and what a high value she placed on privacy, both her own and that of her neighbors. She didn’t want to answer questions. She wanted to mind her own business.

It didn’t take Gibby long to break that down. A girl had been murdered in her bed and there was only the apartment wall between that bed and Nora McGuire’s place. She could hardly call anything that had come as close as that none of her business. Nora McGuire conceded the point but she argued that she hadn’t known that her neighbor was going to be murdered. If she had known, she might have taken a greater interest in her and in the comings and goings of her visitors.

Even without taking any interest, however, she had noticed a few items and, after he’d worked at it awhile, Gibby drew those out of her. She had noticed a woman who had visited Sydney Bell at least twice. She might have seen this woman oftener but of the two occasions she was certain. The reason she was so certain was the fact-that this woman owned two mink coats. She had worn a mink of one color on one visit and a mink of quite a different color on a second visit.

“I am that feminine,” Nora McGuire said. “I would remember that. I shall probably never even have one mink coat. I could hardly help noticing a woman who had them in assorted colors.”

While she was talking to us about mink, a radio was turned on in one of the other apartments in the building. It had come on loud but had quickly been turned down to a civilized volume. Even then, however, it was faintly audible. Gibby waited a bit, listening to the murmur of the radio.

“It’s a limited sort of privacy any of us has living in an apartment,” he said, after he had given it time to register. “Ever hear anything through the wall?”

“I might have if I had thought to stand with my ear against it or if I’d been equipped with listening devices. Must we go on with this, Mr. Gibson?”

“No ear to the wall, no listening devices. I hear a radio. Don’t you?”

“I hear a radio.”

She crossed the room, going toward the wall beyond which lay 5F. For a moment I thought she was going to put her ear against the wall, but she didn’t. She went to her record player and started some music going. It was Chopin, not notably loud. She walked away from it.

“What’s that for?” Gibby asked.

“I don’t hear the radio any more,” she said. “I like music and when I’m here alone I have it going practically all my waking time. Even when I have visitors there’s likely to be music, and if there isn’t, it’s because I’m that much interested in my guest’s talk. Either way I’m not hearing sounds from next door. They’re blotted out by the sounds I have right here or possibly I blot them out because I am more interested in these sounds than in those. In any case I don’t hear them.”

“The volume of that radio when it first came on, you would have heard that.”

“I have normal hearing. The point is that there never were any loud sounds from 5F.”

Gibby smiled at her. “See,” he said. “You can be helpful when you try.”

“Is that helpful?”

“It gives us something. We know now that if there ever was a wild party the other side of that wall or a screaming quarrel, it happened when you weren’t home. In other words, she led a quiet life or a stealthy life.”

“A quiet life,” Miss McGuire said firmly.

“Except that quiet lives don’t often end in murder,” Gibby said. “But you don’t have to worry about that. Let’s get back to the people who visited her.”

Nora McGuire wasn’t quite ready to go back to that.

“I did hear something,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing I imagine would interest you, but it was something.”

“Everything interests us,” Gibby told her. “We know so little about this neighbor of yours that anything at all is an item for us even if it helps only in the smallest possible way toward learning what sort of a person she was.”

“I think she had a new job or something was going on the last couple of days that changed her habits,” Miss McGuire murmured.

She seemed to be thinking the thing out as she went along.

Gibby cut in on it. “Don’t think on it,” he said. “The trick is to tell us just what you know, not the conclusions you might draw from it. Conclusions can come later.”

“It was this morning,” she said, “but this morning was the second time. Yesterday morning was the first.”

“You heard something yesterday morning and you heard it again this morning?”

“Yes. Not anything that means anything. It was just her radio. Both mornings when I woke up I could hear it playing the other side of the wall. She didn’t have it on loud, not blasting or anything like that. I got up and started my records going and then I didn’t hear it any more. It wasn’t any louder than the radio you heard from somewhere in the building, but it was on. I did hear it both mornings.”

“When you woke? You have a regular waking time?”

“I set my alarm for seven.”

“And she was up before seven and playing the radio?”

“Not loud enough to wake me. My alarm woke me and I just heard it over there while I was getting up and before I put my records on.”

“You’re sure it was a radio you heard in there?”

“Oh, yes. That early morning sort of music and an announcer’s voice. One of those singing commercials about detergents.”

“The same both mornings?”

She frowned. “Yes,” she said. “I’m certain of it, the same singing commercial both mornings. The same announcer’s voice. The other music, the bit I heard of it, was different, a different tune.”

“And it was radio and not television?”

The question startled her. “Now really,” she said. “I couldn’t look through the wall and see which it was. That’s a silly question. The point I was trying to make is that, for whatever it’s worth, she was up and had the thing playing these last two mornings. I’ve lived here a year and she was in her apartment before I moved in and yesterday was the very first time I heard any sort of sound over there in the morning.”

“You have heard it other times of the day though?” Gibby asked.

“I suppose I have. I can’t answer with any certainty. I may have heard it dozens of times without ever noticing. I wouldn’t notice if I had the records going or if I was busy with anything else. It was just waking to it that way set me listening for the few moments until I was out of bed and started on the day.”

“Yes, naturally. I was thinking of last thing at night. Last night and the night before, about what time did you go to bed?”

“Eleven o’clock. Why?”

“That would be another time like first waking in the morning. I should think you would have heard it then if it had been on.”

She shook her head. “I hope it doesn’t matter,” she said, “because I wouldn’t have heard it. You see I always put a stack of records on the machine when I’m getting ready for bed, the sort of thing I like to fall asleep to. It goes on playing till I’m asleep and then it plays on till it’s through the last record and it turns itself off.”

Gibby shrugged it off. “Can’t be helped,” he said. “You see it does matter because she couldn’t have been up and playing it this morning. She had already been dead a good twenty-four hours by this morning.”

Nora McGuire gasped and swallowed hard. “But I heard it,” she protested.

“I know. That means either that someone was in there playing it or that it was playing when she died and never was turned off till the body was found. You see, if you could have told us that it definitely wasn’t playing when you went to bed last night, we could have drawn conclusions from that.”

“I’m sorry. I honestly wouldn’t know.” She thought a moment. “The maid who found her,” she said. “She must know whether the thing was playing this afternoon when she went in. If it wasn’t, then you definitely know someone was in there and turned it off. It was playing this morning. I can swear to that.”

“Good,” Gibby told her. “It might be very important. Now, let’s get back to her visitors.”

She started to pull back. “Now don’t think every time she had visitors I saw them,” she said. “It was only when I met someone by accident in the elevator or the hall.”

“We understand.”

“There were men. Possibly four or five times. Once I came in after the theater—it was about a month ago, I think—I met her in the elevator with a man. We rode up together and then she gave him her key. He was opening her door for her when I went into my own place.”

“He go in with her?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t wait to see.”

“But you think he might have gone in?”

“Men have brought me home from the theater and I’ve had them in for a drink. It is done, Mr. Gibson.”

“Sure,” Gibby murmured. “See the same man more than once?”

“If I did, I didn’t notice or I don’t remember. None of them wore mink. There was nothing to make me notice.”

“But you have the impression of more than one man?”

“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “If it had been the same man every time, I think I should have noticed. Since I never did notice, I think it was probably different men.”

“And since you didn’t notice, they must have been pretty ordinary sorts.”

“No Hottentots. No turbaned Moslems.”

“No Greek gods?” Gibby asked, taking it on her own terms. “No scar-faced lugs, no seven-foot basketball players, no circus midgets?”

“Just men, except…”

She caught her lower lip between her teeth and she blushed.

“Except?” Gibby urged.

“Except one time,” she said. “Damn, this is going to sound terribly Mrs. Grundy.”

“Just let it sound McGuire,” Gibby said, keeping it light. “We know you’re broad-minded and close-mouthed. Now we’re also broad-minded. We don’t shock and we don’t titillate. We just try to catch people who choke the life out of other people.”

I’m not going to go through the direct quotes on it. She kept interrupting herself to hedge it around with explanations of how she came to see and hear it, making it just as clear as could be that she had not been spying, that what she knew was only what she couldn’t possibly have helped knowing.

What she did know was something that was a little like the episode she had already given us, the man who brought her neighbor home after the theater and who may or may not have gone in for a drink. This one, however, was different. This time Nora McGuire had again been coming home from the theater. She had met no one in the elevator. On the fifth floor, however, she had seen a man at the door to 5F.