The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (12 page)

Assuming that Gibby would be through with his examination of her hands, Joan started to put them back in her lap. Gibby reached across the table and took hold of them.

“We’ll be needing your fingerprints,” he said. “Have you ever had your prints taken?”

Bannerman came in angrily. “She hasn’t,” he said. “And she’s not going to have it done now. We’ve had more than enough of this. I can’t see that it’s getting anywhere and I don’t like it.”

Joan wasn’t belligerent, but she was hurt. “I’m not a criminal, Mr. Gibson,” she said.

Gibby grinned at her. “Millions of men in the armed forces have had theirs taken,” he said. “They weren’t criminals.” He turned to Bannerman. “Did you kick up a fuss when the army took yours?” he asked.

“That was different,” Bannerman answered.

“It was,” Gibby agreed, “but not as different as you think. The army takes prints just in case they’ll ever be needed for identification. We take prints for a variety of reasons. We need Miss Loomis’ for identification. She spent three days in that apartment with your sister. She can’t have been there all that time without leaving some prints around the place. Every inch of that apartment has been searched for prints. We find your sister’s prints. We eliminate those. They are meaningless, normal expectancy since she lived in the place. We find the prints of her cleaning woman. Those can also be eliminated. She worked there. We have other prints and they can be equally meaningless. They will be if they happen to be Miss Loomis’ because we know she was a visitor there. Beyond that we know of no one who could have been in there legitimately. We’ve already eliminated your sister’s prints and those of her cleaning woman. If we can have Miss Loomis’ to match up, we can eliminate hers. Then we’ll know what residue we have to work on. In that residue can be the prints of all manner of people who left prints there legitimately but there may also be the prints of one person who should never have been there because, if he hadn’t, your sister would be alive now.”

Joan made an effort and got over looking hurt. Bannerman was less ready to relinquish his belligerence.

“That does sound reasonable,” she said. “I did stay there and I did touch things and, even though it is none of my business, that woman Ellie had coming in to clean didn’t clean too well. She could have been a lot more thorough from the look of the place. It’s more than likely that my fingerprints are still on every last thing I touched over at Ellie’s.”

Bannerman was on the spot. Joan Loomis had seen the point. She was taking the completely reasonable view of it. He could hardly do less, but for some reason acquiescence was going against the grain. He still didn’t like it. I wondered whether in some way or another he could have had some inkling of the fact that Gibby in his explanations had been far more reasonable than he had been candid, that it wasn’t a question of a wide variety of prints out of which innocent ones had to be eliminated, that the truth of the matter was that there had been found in the apartment a fine collection of prints and that with the exception of the already eliminated prints left by the cleaning woman they had every last one of them been the prints of one single person. Asking for fingerprints in this case wasn’t just the routine it usually is. This was special.

“I don’t know what she’d want a cleaning woman for anyhow,” Bannerman said. He had to find some channel down which he could run his annoyance since he had obviously lost the engagement over the girl’s fingerprints. “She used to keep the whole house clean back home and that was a big house and stairs and everything. That little bit of a place, it wouldn’t be anything for her to clean.”

“Of course, it wouldn’t,” Joan agreed. “But you’re forgetting, dear. Ellie couldn’t do any of those things. She had to be very careful of her hands. If they got the least bit red or rough, that would be the end of her job.”

Bannerman nodded. “It’s crazy,” he said. “It’s all crazy—the way she lived, the way she died, her job, everything.”

I was inclined to agree, but not so Gibby. Gibby’s the sanguine type.

“It will make perfectly good sense before we’re through,” he said.

We had long since finished eating. We didn’t have to take the girl all the way downtown for fingerprinting. We got it done over at Homicide West because that was much nearer. We also got some mug shots of her while we were at it and I think we got away with those only because Bannerman was waiting outside and he didn’t know what we were doing.

The girl, so far as I could see, just didn’t know anything. She took a wan sort of interest in the whole proceedings, but she asked no questions. I was about to say that I’ve never seen a woman with less curiosity, but actually I don’t think that was precisely it. I had the feeling that she was as curious as anyone might have been under the circumstances but that she was suppressing it as she would suppress an impulse to sin. I could just see it. She was reminding herself that she was a good girl and good in the fullest sense of the word. This experience she was having was a brush with evil, and even as she went through it, she was holding herself inwardly aloof in an effort to come out of it unsullied.

We didn’t keep her long and when we rejoined Bannerman he seemed to be holding his breath while his eyes ran over Joan Loomis in searching appraisal. Whatever it was he saw in that moment of probing examination of her person appeared to satisfy him. He relaxed. He even vouchsafed us something that was almost a smile.

Gibby told them that we wouldn’t be needing them any more that night and he promised that we would be in touch with them as the investigation went forward. He asked them to hold themselves available, not to leave town before we gave them the word and, in the event that they moved out of the President Polk, to keep us apprised of their addresses.

Bannerman’s almost-smile faded. He didn’t seem happy about these instructions. The girl was out-and-out rebellious. She had had all of New York she wanted, all of that and far more. She was very sorry, but if Milton wanted to please her, they would be on the very next train that might be headed in the direction of River Forks.

“That’s the way I feel myself,” Bannerman said. “Anything you find out about what happened to Ellie you can write and tell us. I’m waiting here for only one thing.”

“Let’s not wait for anything, darling, please,” the girl said.

“We’ll have to wait,” he said gently. “We’ll have to wait till we can take Ellie home. You understand that.”

She caught her lip between her teeth. “Of course,” she murmured, and it was more a moan than a murmur. “But it can’t take long to arrange that.”

Bannerman turned back to us. “May I ask you to help me with the arrangements?” he said. “I don’t know anything about undertakers here in New York and won’t there be some papers I’ll have to have?”

Gibby nodded curtly. “You’ll have to have papers,” he said. “We’ll see that you get those and we’ll help you with everything, but it’s much too soon for any of that. It’s no good trying to begin on that until we are ready to release the body.”

That they didn’t understand, Bannerman reminded us that he had said from the first that he wanted Ellie out of the morgue as quickly as possible. It was going to take him a long time to forget that she had been there at all, but he wasn’t unreasonable. He realized that nobody could be blamed for that. It was most disagreeable but it was the place people did go to await identification, but now he had identified her. That finished it. He wanted her out of there. He wanted to take her home where she belonged. He wanted to lay her to rest in the churchyard beside their parents.

Gibby was sympathetic but he was also firm. He was also way out in left field, but they didn’t know it. He didn’t actually say that the body had to remain in the morgue until we had established the identity of her killer and had apprehended that killer, but he did indicate as much. He said categorically that it could not be released until such time as we had no further need of it for evidence.

Even that made me nervous. Bannerman earlier that evening had threatened us with an “or else” and, on being asked, had explained that the “or else” meant he would get himself a lawyer. He didn’t make that threat now but there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t again come down with the idea and I didn’t even want to think of what a lawyer might do with the way Gibby had been handling this pair.

Bannerman said nothing. He let it go at seeming baffled, frustrated, and wearily resigned. It was Joanie who kicked up the fuss, but I had the feeling that it wasn’t quite the fuss she would have liked to make. She was treading lightly now. She insisted on nothing and she asked for nothing. She merely complained. This was a terrible city. It was a terrible thing for a girl to have to stay in such an awful place even for a day and there was no telling how many days it might still be. She was sorry for herself and she was sorry for Ellie. She made it quite clear that our great city was no fit place for the pure in heart, whether alive or dead.

Satisfied that whether they liked it or not, they knew what was expected of them and were ready to bow to his demands, Gibby turned them loose. We pulled out ourselves a couple of minutes later, taking with us Joanie’s fingerprint record and some quick prints of her mug shots.

We headed downtown to the office. The various lab reports had been accumulating for us there. We went into a huddle with the fingerprint man. He set up the comparisons and we didn’t have to wait for his expert opinion. There was no missing it. Those prints the boys had turned up so lavishly disposed about the apartment, the prints that had all been left by a single person and which, but for the already explained prints of the cleaning woman, were the only prints to be found anywhere in the place—those prints were the prints of Joan Loomis.

The set they had taken off the bathroom washstand was, as we had been told, perfect and complete. They were every bit as good as the set that had been taken from her for identification and you didn’t have to be any sort of an expert to match those up. It did take some closer looking to determine that all the other prints, including the smudged ones and the partial ones, also matched, but our experts were definite on that and we could take their word for it.

I found myself looking back on Joanie’s eagerness to be away from us and our city of evil and wondering whether she really thought it might be all that dangerous to the pure in heart or dangerous merely to a young woman who, on the evidence, had been in the wrong place at the wrongest of times and had, furthermore, lied to us about it.

The thing had begun to look open-and-shut to me. Sydney Bell, nee Ellie Bannerman, had been murdered in her bed. Some time after her death, her apartment had with the greatest thoroughness been wiped clean of all fingerprints and some time after that fingerprints had been sprinkled all over the place by Joan Loomis. I wasn’t too astonished that Gibby was making no move to go straight up to the President Polk to place Joan Loomis under arrest. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as all that, but in its own weird fashion it was straightforward enough to make me expect that we would be hightailing up there to subject the young woman to further questioning.

When you get a woman murdered that way in her own place and you have evidence that the place has been cleaned of all fingerprints, there is one inevitable conclusion to be drawn. The killer, afraid of having left a readable print, wipes everything to make certain and in so doing has eradicated all other prints along with his own. That makes sense. For Joan Loomis to have gone through that process and then later to have put her prints all over everything made no such ready sense.

It was like a message written on a freshly cleaned blackboard. It was emphatic and I was wondering what it could ever have been intended to tell us. Sifting it down in my mind, I found that it was telling me nothing beyond the fact that pure little Joanie had lied to us. I had not the first doubt that she had been in the apartment after Ellie Bannerman had been murdered and I was confronted with the inevitable question. Could Joan Loomis be the killer? She did have a corroborated alibi for the time of the killing. She had been in Boston with her cousin. That cleared her on that count, but even without her alibi, there was a second question that demanded answering. If she had been the killer, why would she wipe the place clean before she handled everything in sight and not after?

I asked Gibby that one. It gave him not a moment’s pause.

“I wish it could be that easy,” he said. “If that was the only thing that stood in the way of a clear picture of this thing, we’d be packed up and out of the ball park right now. Let’s say she’s the killer. She murders her future sister-in-law. She does everything she can think of to cover her traces, including the complete wipe-up of the place. She’s ready to leave and she takes a last look around to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything. She spots something right out in plain sight. She’d thought she was being super-careful and here she’s missed the obvious. She panics. She snatches it up, whatever it might have been, and then she goes all over the place again, looking everywhere just in case she’s left something else that isn’t in plain sight. She had been ready to leave. The ordeal of being in there with the body of the woman she had strangled had been over and now she’s afraid to leave. She keeps searching and searching and her nerves grow more and more tense. Finally she is certain that she has looked everywhere. She is convinced that she has left nothing we can find and tie to her but she is in full panic and she tears out of there, forgetting completely that she should have repeated the wipe-up. She has left us the most damaging evidence of all, and she has not only left it. She has pinpointed it for us. We have her fingerprints deposited on a blank page.”

I don’t say Gibby was giving me the full treatment on this. He wasn’t painting the picture for me in quite as much vividly circumstantial detail as he would have put into it if I had been a jury, but he is one persuasive boy. He had me ready to write off the fingerprint deal as finished business. I dropped it to tackle him on the other loose ends.