The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (13 page)

“Then the next step is to determine how good her Boston alibi is,” I said. “Crack that and we’ve got her.”

Gibby nodded, but without enthusiasm. “We’ll have Boston check it for us,” he said. “They can question the cousin for what that might be worth.”

“You sound as though you think the alibi is going to stand up,” I said. “I don’t see how it can unless her cousin will lie all the way for her.”

“No,” Gibby said. “It’s going to check out for a Swiss cheese alibi. It will have holes well distributed through the substance. Remember that the chick found this wonderful bargain basement up there. Did the cousin shop with her or did she shop alone? If she shopped alone and was gone a full shopping day for it, that would be plenty long enough for her to have flown down here, done her job on this gal whose hands were her fortune and flown back again with a tale of all the bargains she’d seen.”

“Seen and not bought?” I asked. “She could hardly have had time to do all her buying as well.”

“She didn’t have time to do all her buying,” Gibby said. “She was at it all day today again. She hadn’t wanted any New York merchandise. It was too sinfully expensive. That was the first tune she sang. It was a quick switch to the girlish bit about what fun it was to be foolish with money just once. If that babe was ever foolish with money it would have to have been confederate dough. Don’t you see it? She comes back and tells her cousin that she’s seen all manner of wonderful bargains but she hasn’t bought any. She doesn’t spend her money that way. She’s going to sleep on it first and tomorrow she’ll go back and buy what she decides she wants. She could have come back to her cousin’s the day she flew to New York and she needn’t have bought even a pin. The story would have been that it had been her research day and the next day she shopped. It would work but it did tighten her for shopping time.”

“Tightened her enough,” I agreed, “so that she had to finish her shopping today here in New York, despite the high prices.”

“She’s going to be Mrs. Bannerman and now she can afford it,” Gibby said. “We don’t begin to know what brother Milty will be inheriting beyond his sister’s half of the house rent. Unless a will turns up somewhere that cuts him out, he’ll inherit as next of kin and there could be considerable assets like bank accounts or brokerage accounts.”

I sighed. “But at worst,” I said, “there is half the house.”

“At worst,” Gibby agreed.

At this point we were interrupted. A detective came banging into the office to see us. It was a fellow named Harrity, Jim Harrity. We knew him well. I knew him because he had been transferred over to Homicide from Vice about a year back and we get to know all the cops who work Homicide. For Gibby it had been something like a reunion when Jim had come over from Vice. They had known each other way back. They had been at the Police Academy together.

Jim’s a good detective, but he is also an inveterate comic. I could see right off that the antic mood was upon him. He came in, confronted Gibby, and silently bowed low three times. Gibby yawned.

“The next time he gives you that angle, Mac,” he said, “kick him in the pants.”

“And stand charges for assaulting an officer?” Jim said. “You know better than that, oh, Master.”

“What’s the ‘oh, Master’ bit?” Gibby asked.

“Some people detect murders. You, oh, Master, read them in the stars.”

“It’s been overcast all evening,” Gibby said.

“Tea leaves?” Jim asked. “Gypsy cards? The entrails of sacrificial birds? Crystal balls?”

“Balls to you,” Gibby said. “If you’ve got anything, let me have it.”

“It isn’t much, oh, Master, but you didn’t ask for much. One death by manual strangulation. This one’s male.”

“Who?” Gibby asked.

“You may not know him by name since you asked for him by motor vehicle registration number.”

That brought me out of my chair. “Jerk,” I exclaimed.

Jim looked plaintive. “Everybody calls me names,” he said. “I get insulted at every turn.”

“Spelled backwards,” Gibby explained. “KREJ, Connecticut.”

Jim shook his head. “Not that one,” he said. “That’s K. R. E. Jellicoe, scion of those Jellicoes whose genius was superior to their genes. The genius converted light metals into gold, much gold and most of it inherited by K. R. E., who is the marrying Jellicoe. At the moment he’s got more millions than he’s had wives, but he’s a Jellicoe with all the Jellicoe efficiency and Jellicoe persistence and he’s working at adjusting the balance. Give the boy time and the wives will top the millions. Have you ever seen him? He’s built like a retired wrestler, two hundred and fifty pounds of moan and bustle.”

For a moment I thought it was Jim who was clairvoyant because it wasn’t too bad a description of Jellicoe as we had seen him on the table at Bellevue, when he was having the adhesive tape slapped on him; but then I remembered that Jim was an old hand at spoonerisms. I transposed it back to bone and muscle.

“We’ve seen him,” Gibby said. “Twice and both times in trouble.”

Jim was interested. “Murder kind of trouble?” he asked.

“Could be,” Gibby said. “Meanwhile which one was killed?”

“Henry Camplin, also known as Henry Cameron, also known as Harry Cane. Less politely known as Harry the Pimp.”

“Owner of the car I was checking on?”

“Registered to him,” Jim said. “Owner of a nice little smelly record. When they switched me from Vice to Homicide I wondered how many of the old customers would move with me just because they were used to giving me their business. I was beginning to think I had no following at all, but things are looking up. Harry is the first.”

“Procurer?”

“Was when I knew him last,” Jim said. “I’ve checked with the boys over at my old shop. They say they haven’t had a thing on him since I left and I remember on my own that there wasn’t a thing on him for some time before that. It adds up to two years of retirement for Harry or two years during which he’s been smarter than us.”

“Getting strangled is smart?” Gibby asked.

“The old brain can’t be working all the time,” Jim answered.

“Where did the body turn up?”

“His apartment. Two-roomer in the West Thirties. He had a broken window and he’d been yelling for the super to get a fresh pane of glass in it. The super didn’t have any panes of glass. He had to buy one and he couldn’t buy one without the authorization of the owner. That took time but he finally got it and he went up to put it in. He found the apartment door open and no answer to the bell, so he went in. He found Harry, warm as toast but dead as a herring.”

“Been moved yet?” Gibby asked.

“Not yet. You can still see him in
situ.”

Gibby nodded. He reached for the phone and called Bellevue. He asked for the doc who had put K. R. E. Jellicoe on ice for us. He had to wait a bit while they located our boy. He was just checking on whether they still had him for us. They didn’t have him. Within an hour after Jellicoe had gone up to the alcoholic ward his lawyer—and it was one of those legal names you conjure with—arrived on the scene with K. R. E.’s personal physician, also eminent. They’d had him out of there in what our spoonerizing friend, Jim, called three lakes of a sham’s tail. Our Bellevue friend knew all about it. He’d been having a grim time over it. He asked only one thing of us. We were to go elsewhere for our favors thereafter.

Gibby didn’t go after the grimy details. He had, after all, been cutting a corner on the thing and it hadn’t worked out. If you want to be in a position to pull the big virtuous indignation act, you can’t cut corners. It’s nice to be able to wrap the law around yourself and take a firm stand. There wasn’t any law Gibby could wrap around himself.

How it had been worked was obvious enough. The fact that neither Gibby nor I had recognized Jellicoe on sight didn’t mean that anyone that rich and so much the darling of the tabloids would go unrecognized indefinitely. Some ward attendant or perhaps an ambulatory patient who could get to a telephone had come down with the idea our friend in Grand Central Station had laid before us. It could be a nice piece of change, Jellicoe’s gratitude. K. R. E. asks this character to put a call through to his lawyer and tell the lawyer where he is and what’s being done to him. After that it unfolds itself automatically. K. R. E., of course, wouldn’t have had any piece of change on him just then but it could be worth obliging him just on the chance that he would remember later.

We pulled out of the office and headed for Harry’s place. We had Jim Harrity with us. Gibby had a couple of chores for Jim to do. One was easy. He wanted a call put through to the President Polk to check on just what time Joan Loomis and Milton Bannerman had returned to the hotel and on whether they had remained there.

The other promised to be rather more difficult. He wanted to know whether our man in the brown hat was still waiting around Grand Central Station. The station police could have a look around for him but it had to be done on description alone. We had no name for him. Gibby worked at filling Jim in on the description.

I sat back and marveled, as I always marvel. This was no new thing with us. We see someone. It may be on the job and it may be just in passing. I get as good a look at this person as Gibby does. I have 20-20 vision and everything else it takes but I lack something that Gibby has. He has 20-20 attention. Whatever he sees he registers and what he registers he remembers. If you think that isn’t remarkable, test yourself on it some time. Take somebody you see all the time. The waitress in your favorite restaurant will do. Sit down now and write out a description of her, every last thing you can remember. Put it in your pocket and the next time you go out to eat compare it with the original. You’ll find out how little you observed, how little of that you remembered, and how little of that you had seen correctly. Any time you want to give Gibby the same test, you could take what he wrote down and use it to put out a wanted flyer and it would be as good as a mug shot.

Brown hat, medium height, solid build, ruddy skin—that would have been the total I could have come up with if I’d had to do it. Gibby knew that the man had brown, curly hair and gray eyes. He also knew that the man wore short sideburns, something between a normal cut and the full sideburn deal. He even knew that on the left side the man had a hairy mole just in front of his ear and he guessed that the purpose of the sideburns was to make it less conspicuous.

Harrity grinned. “Last time I saw that one,” he said, “it was at Sing Sing. The prison barber doesn’t go for sideburns. Skinheads are his style. That mole you talk about showed up as plain as plain.”

“Also out of your old clientele?” Gibby asked.

“Harry the Pimp’s nearest and dearest,” Harrity answered. “Same line of work except with muscles.”

I told myself that it had been too good to be true. We couldn’t be getting all our identifications that easily. Brown hat was well built but he hadn’t looked to be anything that would require special mention in the muscle line.

“He runs only average for beef,” I said.

“That’s the boy,” Harrity insisted. “To look at him you’ll assume he’ll be easy to handle, but don’t take any chances off it. I know him. He’s all steel springs and cute. Mix it up with him and you’ll find that they come no cuter. As long as I’ve known them, he’s handled Harry’s rough stuff for him. No matter how big they come, George cuts them down to size.”

“George what?” Gibby asked.

“George Monroe,” Harrity answered. “That’s his right name, but he’s also gone as George Madison, George Lincoln, George Adams, and George Johnson. He has a rare taste in aliases. It’s always Presidents. One of these times he’s going to be George Washington. I’ve been waiting for it.”

“You know George and you know K. R. E. Jellicoe,” Gibby began.

“Not exactly in the same way,” Harrity interrupted to explain. “Over in Vice I used to get to arrest George now and again. K. R. E. was always the one who walked away from a raid and whose name was carefully omitted from the court proceedings.”

“You’ve seen him though?”

“I’ve even tangled with him. There was one time when he was concerned for the lady’s good name. He thought he could wrestle long enough for her to get some clothes on and get away. He didn’t last the course. He’s big enough and strong enough but he’s too clumsy and too slow and too stupid.”

“No match for George then?”

Harrity laughed. “Ever been to a bullfight?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you know how much the bull outweighs the matador and you also know which one usually gets cut up and dragged out of the arena. Jellicoe’s a bull and he’s not even a fighting bull.”

“What about Mae?” Gibby asked.

“It comes after April and before June and it has thirty-one days,” Harrity said.

“Not it, she.”

“Mae what?”

“Just Mae.”

Harrity shook his head. “Leave us not switch roles, oh, Master,” he said. “You’re the clairvoyant. I’m the cop. Maybe I sounded brilliant on old George, the Presidential range, but I wasn’t picking him out of the whole field. You gave me the mole and I was thinking along the lines of Harry’s associates. What does Mae look like? She could have been calling herself June when I knew her.”

Gibby filled him in on Mae. That is, he filled Harrity in as far as he had any filler to offer. This Mae was known to Jellicoe, George, and Harry. She might or might not have been giving a party to which George and Harry might or might not have been taking Jellicoe.

We drew a blank on Mae. Harrity did run down for us a list of dames given to party throwing, given to the delusion that K. R. E. Jellicoe would be an ornament to one of their parties, and given to commissioning Harry or George or both to handle the issuing of invitations. None of these had he ever known as Mae. Any of them might be calling herself that at the moment.

“If you ask me, though,” Harrity said, “I’m guessing that Mae will be a number I don’t know. The boys have been out of trouble for a long time and it doesn’t look as though they’ve been in retirement. The odds are they’ve been playing in some new backyard the Vice Squad has never caught up with yet. Mae is probably a new playmate.”