The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (10 page)
Read The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Online
Authors: Hampton Stone
“We didn’t know where you had gotten off to,” he said. “Milton, here, called your cousin in Boston and she said you left there last night and should have arrived here about three this morning. That scared us all the more.”
The girl sighed. “Poor Milt,” she said. “I can just imagine. It was terribly silly of me insisting on taking that late train last night. I know that now, but I couldn’t even dream that I’d get to Ellie’s and she wouldn’t be there. I can’t think where she’s gone and I do think it isn’t very nice of her either, Milt.”
Bannerman started to explain but Gibby cut him off.
“You went around to her apartment when the train came in?” Gibby asked quickly.
“Of course. Where else would I go? I was staying there with her, and it wasn’t as though she didn’t know I was coming back from Boston. She knew I was coming and she told me it didn’t matter what train I came down on. She was going to be at the apartment and any time at all she’d be there to let me in and then she wasn’t and it was after three in the morning.”
“Hadn’t she given you a key?” Gibby asked.
“No, she hadn’t and even if she was called away overnight, she did know that Milt was coming in this evening and it had been planned that he would go directly to her place. I should think that she would have managed to get back there by this afternoon, at least. I can’t understand her being so inconsiderate.”
Gibby was right in there with his next question but Bannerman was in there, too. There hadn’t been any hope of keeping him shut up indefinitely.
“Ellie’s dead, Joanie,” he said.
The girl clutched at him. “Dead,” she moaned. “Oh, no, Milty, she can’t be. It’s only a couple of days since I left her to go to Boston and she was perfectly well. What happened to her?”
“She died suddenly,” Gibby said, while Bannerman was casting around for words.
“Accident? This awful traffic, the taxis and the buses and the trucks and the cars. It frightens me half to death.”
Bannerman found his words. There wasn’t anything we could do about it.
“She was killed,” he said. “A burglar came in while she was asleep and strangled her.”
The girl rallied. Abruptly she wasn’t thinking of herself at all. She was all concern for Bannerman. “Darling,” she murmured, stroking his hand. “Poor, poor darling. How awful for you. How incredibly awful for you.”
Gibby stepped into it and tried to put the thing back under control.
“Now you can understand why we were so worried about you,” he said. “As I understand it, you went to her place straight from your train last night and you rang her bell.”
“Yes,” she said and turned back to Bannerman. “I know that sounds a very strange thing to do. You know, I’d never do anything like that back home, but you can’t imagine how different things are here in New York. Ellie often sleeps right through to noon or even into the afternoon. That’s the way it is here. Night’s like day and day’s like night. Why, her friends think nothing of telephoning her at the craziest hours. Three in the morning. Four in the morning. And it’s not only her friends. It’s her job, too. One night while I was with her, the phone rang way after two. Ellie just sat up in bed and answered it. If the phone rings in the night that way back home people get frightened half to death. They can’t think anything but that there’s been an accident or something like that, but Ellie never seemed to mind in the least. Sometimes she’d talk awhile and then go back to sleep. This one time though and it was almost three, she made an appointment and she got up and dressed and went out. She told me to go back to sleep and not worry about her. She had to go to work. At that time of night, imagine. It was something about sunrise pictures. They were photographing her hands against the sunrise. I think it was for a perfume, something that used some slogan about lovely as a morning sunrise. It seemed crazy to me but there’s so much that happens here that is just beyond understanding.”
Bannerman was snaking his head. It was evidently as much beyond his understanding as it was beyond hers. Gibby played along, pretending that it was somewhat beyond his understanding as well.
“Particularly,” he said dryly, “since they could have gotten the same effect at sunset if they did it standing on their heads.”
“Of course,” Miss Loomis continued, “they were paying her fantastic amounts for posing for these pictures but after I’d been here a couple of days, I began to think she earned it, getting up out of a deep sleep to have her hands photographed against the sunrise. It’s really too silly.”
“You said she made an appointment,” Gibby asked. “Could you by any chance remember anything of the conversation, where she was going for these pictures, who called her, anything like that?”
The girl shook her head. “No,” she said. “She never spoke much on the telephone. Mostly she listened and said yes or no or later or tomorrow.”
Gibby nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It figures. So you went around to her place from the train and rang her bell. What happened then?”
She began talking and, warming to her story, she was off in full spate. We just sat back and listened. She had rung the bell and when there was no answer she had rung again. She had kept ringing for a long time and then she had realized that it couldn’t be that Ellie Bannerman was upstairs in bed and so tight asleep that she wasn’t hearing the bell. She always heard the telephone bell and the doorbell was just as loud. She assumed that it had been another call for sunrise photos and Ellie had been forced to leave in a hurry.
“I couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t have left me a note in the letter box or something,” she said. “But I thought she must have been too much in a hurry and had taken the chance that I wouldn’t be in till morning and that she would be home by then.”
As she went on with her story I could sense the disbelief that was growing and blossoming inside Gibby. It wasn’t merely that my own credulity was straining at the seams with the tax this little miss was putting on it. I know Gibby well enough so that I can always tell when that extra edge of alertness begins to manifest itself. He wasn’t showing it to the girl or to Bannerman, but it was there. I’ve known it to come at times when I can’t even guess what might be bringing it on but this time I didn’t have to guess. The story of that young woman’s movements after she had rung Ellie Bannerman’s bell in the wee hours of the morning defied belief. The fact that to all seeming it sounded completely reasonable to Milton Bannerman wasn’t making it ring any truer for me.
She couldn’t hang around in that vestibule until morning. She had to go somewhere and she didn’t know any place in New York that she could go that time of night. Then she remembered a place—back to the railway station. She carried her bags out to the street and hailed a late cruising cab. Back in Grand Central Station, she settled herself in the waiting room and stayed there till morning. At about half-hour intervals she telephoned the apartment, but there was never an answer.
By nine, she lost patience. Even if it had been a hands-against-the-sunrise job, Ellie should have been home from it long since. The sunrise was then hours gone. Joan Loomis gave up on trying to reach Sister Ellie. She had gone around to the hotel and taken a room.
“Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to go directly to a hotel and get some sleep instead of sitting up the rest of the night in the station?” Gibby asked.
“If I had known I was going to have to have a room anyhow,” the girl answered. “But I didn’t know and I wasn’t going to spend that kind of money for nothing.”
Bannerman nodded approvingly. This was a matter of thrift and it was obvious that thrift came in that same package with not smoking and not drinking. It was a part of decency. Gibby was not so easily satisfied. He had a dozen questions and before he was through, he had explored the young woman’s thinking exhaustively.
She had expected that Milton’s sister would certainly be returning home before nightfall, but she could explain quite to her own and Milton’s satisfaction why she had refrained from paying for a hotel room for the night when she had needed one, only to take one the next day when she had no expectation of needing it. It hadn’t been a matter of expectation. It had been a matter of immediate necessity. She had been all night in her clothes. She had to have a bath and a change. She had to have a place where later in the day she could freshen up to meet Milty. She was ashamed to admit it, now that she knew how unjust she had been to Ellie, but she had even been a little angry with her future sister-in-law, angry enough to feel that there would have to be a very good explanation indeed before she would ever want to go back to the apartment again.
“So angry,” Gibby said, “that you even stopped phoning her. You decided you’d meet Milt’s train and let her worry awhile.”
“Oh, no,” Joanie said quickly. “I kept right on calling. I’ve been calling all day. It wasn’t more than ten minutes before you found me over there in the station that I called the last time. Just about every half hour all day I tried her phone and never an answer.”
That one gave even Bannerman pause. Gibby didn’t have to ask the question. Bannerman was in there asking it for him.
“But what number were you calling, Joanie?” he asked. “We were in the apartment for a long time this afternoon and the police had been there before I arrived.”
Joanie gave him the great big baby stare. “You were there?” she exclaimed. “And you let the telephone ring and ring? Didn’t it even occur to you that it would be me calling?”
“But it didn’t ring at all. What number were you calling?”
“Ellie’s number,” she said.
She reeled it off and Bannerman relaxed.
“You had it wrong all the time,” he said. “It isn’t 0913. It’s 0912.”
The baby stare held, but now her mouth opened to match the round astonishment of her eyes. She repeated the two numbers after him.
“You’re sure it’s 0912?” she asked.
Bannerman brought out a little address book and showed her the number.
“That’s what comes of missing a whole night’s sleep,” he said.
“Oh, dear,” she sighed. “All night and all day I’ve been calling the wrong number.”
Gibby excused himself and left the table. He crossed the restaurant to a telephone booth. He wasn’t gone long. All the time he was gone Joan Loomis went on and on about how stupid she had been, making all those calls and all to the wrong number. They could have been together so much sooner if she just hadn’t been such an idiot.
Bannerman took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. “You’ll never make a better mistake, darling,” he said. “This afternoon would have been all right. You would have gotten the police or me, but before that—I don’t even want to think who might have answered before that.”
She shuddered and he took her hand in his and stroked it gently.
Gibby came back to the table and sat down.
“On all these calls you made,” he said, “you never got an answer? Not a wrong number answering or anything like that? Just no answer at all?”
“No answer ever.”
“Funny,” Gibby said. “I just called 0913. I got a Mrs. Hastings who stood on a chair last week to reach something down from a high shelf. She fell and broke her leg. She’s been home all week with her leg in a cast and she always answers her telephone because she’s so lonely and bored that even a wrong number is a diversion. She said her phone rang only twice in the last twenty-four hours. Once it was her brother calling and the other time her best friend.”
Joan Loomis giggled nervously. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said. “I wasn’t even dialing the wrong number right. I suppose I’ve been more nervous and confused than I realized. How very silly.”
IT WAS silly and it got sillier. We could have been working two completely different murders. We had formed our picture of the dead girl, a picture compounded from what we’d had from Nora McGuire and what the cleaning woman had given us. I can’t say that there weren’t the odd bits which would not fit in with that picture. There was the prayer book. There were the religious tracts. There was the relatively austere red flannel nightgown and there were the relatively sexless underthings. Odd as they had been, however, that had not been too disquieting. There were conceivable patterns into which they could have been fitted and we could hope that the very process of finding the proper fit for them could easily lead to breaking the case.
Milton Bannerman’s picture of the dead girl, however, had at every point been at odds with our original idea of her. His description of his sister fitted with nothing but what had previously been our odd bits—the prayer book, the tracts, the red flannel nightgown, those underclothes which the cleaning woman’s daughter wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. That discrepancy, however, had not been too difficult to explain. Milton Bannerman had never been in New York before. The Ellie he had known had been a River Forks girl, and the River Forks’ Ellie Bannerman had been quite unlike New York’s Sydney Bell. Ellie had changed but she had never wanted her brother to know anything of the change. Each time she had gone back to River Forks to visit him she had for the occasion resumed her River Forks ways and her River Forks personality. How could he have known what Sydney Bell was really like? So far as he had been allowed to know, that had been the whole extent of the change. His sister had assumed a professional name for her modeling. Otherwise she had continued to be the little Ellie he had always known.
Joan Loomis, on the other hand, was very much something else again. She had come to New York. She had stayed with Milt’s sister, had shared the one-room apartment, shared the double bed. In the face of all that, nevertheless, she seemed to be quite as deluded about Sydney Bell as was brother Milton. She knew the red flannel nightdress well. She thought it was sweet. It was the one Ellie had been using when Joan had been with her.
Gibby hauled out of his pocket the torn hunk of lace he had taken over from the policeman at Bellevue. He laid it on the table in front of the girl. She looked at it, studying it as though she had never seen lace before.
