The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (3 page)

“She had promised you her good clothes?” Gibby asked and his face was a mask of the most sober interest. “Had she been planning something where she wouldn’t need them any more?”

I was asking myself what she could have been planning unless it had been suicide and I’ve already been into that. When it’s manual strangulation, it just can’t be suicide. Gibby, however, was asking the question, and Gibby doesn’t ask questions just to hear the sound of his own voice. In a situation like this, more than ever, I have yet to hear him ask a completely idle question. I tried to figure him and I came up with a beaut. Could it have been a suicide pact?

Suicide pacts aren’t too common, but they do happen and a large proportion of them never get done all the way. He kills her, by agreement, and he is to kill himself immediately afterward. He means to do it, of course, but his nerve runs out. We’ve had them like that. Also it wouldn’t even have to be like that. He killed her and he went off somewhere else to dispose of himself. He would have to have used some other method on himself in any event. He could have gone down to the river and in. He could have thrown himself under a subway train or a truck. He could just have gone home to his own place and shot himself or hanged himself. There were all sorts of possibilities.

I was doing all this thinking but it wasn’t taking me any time to speak of. The thought hit me and the possibilities just whizzed through my mind. Immediately they whizzed out again. The woman was answering and her answer took care of the suicide angle quite to my satisfaction.

“No,” she said, “Not like that. She was always giving me her nice stuff, real nice stuff, and it was still brand-new. When she would get through with something, it was not like some they give you things is only fit to wear cleaning house or like that. It’s had every last bit of good worn out of it. Miss Bell, she wasn’t like that. She always had to have the latest, whatever it was. She’d go shopping and she’d buy herself a dress, say. She’d bring it home and hang it in the closet. She wasn’t going to crowd her stuff up it should get crushed just hanging. She’d take out some dress she had from before and she wore it maybe ten times, maybe not even that, and she’d give it to me. It was like that all the time.”

“I see,” Gibby said. “You felt that all her nice things she would be passing on to you one day.”

“She promised me. She always said when she was through with a thing, nobody got it but me. My Gloria—Gloria, she’s my daughter—my Gloria, she’s so much like Miss Bell they could even be sisters. She’s a size twelve and a perfect figure. Something it fits Miss Bell, it’s a dream on Gloria. The things they look better even on Gloria than they ever looked on Miss Bell, because my Gloria, she’s got more style. Miss Bell, she’d bring home a new evening dress, real gorgeous, and she’d tell me like it’s now September I should tell Gloria about it because Gloria can figure on it for the Firemen’s Ball New Year’s Eve. That was just the way Miss Bell talked because my Gloria, she don’t go with firemen or like that. Who wants a fireman? They’re never home when you need them. When you’ve got him, where is he? He’s playing pinochle over to the firehouse. Then he falls off a ladder or something and you’re still young and what have you got? A pension?”

Gibby had to nudge her back on the track again, because once she got going on her daughter Gloria, her talk began running very thin on items that were at all germane to any preoccupations of ours. Slicing Gloria out of the harangue, I can reduce it considerably. Sydney Bell was constantly buying clothes. What she bought was of the glamorous persuasion and it was costly. She never wore anything for more than perhaps four months and often for less time than that and the stuff was still in prime condition when she would give it to her cleaning woman for daughter Gloria.

This procedure, furthermore, covered everything she wore. It wasn’t only the dresses. The pursuit of the
dernier cri
was equally relentless in all departments—undergarments, shoes, sleepwear, everything.

“Even nylons sometimes,” the woman said. “She has drawers full of nylons, some of them she never even wore, and then they come out with something new like it’s a new shade and the stockings so thin all you can see is their seams. You can’t tell one shade from another once they’re on, but Miss Bell, she has to have the new shade or the shell soles or the heels high and pointy in back or whatever it is, and she gives me all the nylons out of her drawer, some she ain’t never even had on at all.”

“And everything’s gone?” Gibby asked. “Even her nylons?”

“No,” the woman said grudgingly. “Not the nylons. They’re still there and there’s one set of underwear—old lady stuff like maybe I’d buy for myself except it’s her size and in the closet nothing but her suits and her coat. They’re in there and two dresses, real plain, but nothing really nice, not even a nightgown except that flannel thing she was wearing and the good Lord only knows how she came to have that. She never had nothing like that long as I’ve known her or that one set of underwear in the empty drawer.”

She went on about how she didn’t even know whether Gloria would want to wear any of the things that were left, except the suits and the coat and the nylons. They were nice. She was bitterly contemptuous of the underwear and the red flannel nightgown.

“Flannel,” she said, and her voice dripped contempt. “Since when is she wearing flannel to bed? Red, yes, but it’s sheer red nylon with lace set in it here. That was her style.”

She indicated the location of
here
by patting her own too ample middle, but we got the idea. Sydney Bell, however sweet, had been the flaming seductress. We had what amounted to a stitch by stitch description of the sheer red nylon nightgowns with the lace set into them. The woman wanted to know what a girl who was wont to cover her fair white body with loveliness of that ilk would be doing with only one set of underwear in her drawer, and that old-ladyish. She also wanted to know what could make a girl who was accustomed to red nylon and lace let herself be caught dead in unglamorous flannel.

“You had a good look around,” Gibby said. “When did you manage that?”

The woman took the question in her stride. She was too much outraged over all the treasure that had slipped out of her Gloria’s grasp to have a thought for anything else.

“I seen she was dead,” she said, “and I yelled. Then I was up there with her and waiting for the cop to come. What was I to do? Stand there looking at her that way, dead and all? I thought of all her lovely things and I thought I’d look at them for the couple of minutes while the cop was coming up. I opened the closet and I come near fainting. Then I looked in her drawers. I seen enough by the time that cop rang the bell.”

We took her into the apartment. The body had long since been removed and the police lab boys were in there. They were giving the place the works—fingerprints, dust samples, the full scientific detection routine we have done on any murder scene. While we had her in there, the boys fingerprinted her. She didn’t like that much but Gibby’s explanation satisfied her. She had been in there cleaning. She had touched things. She had herself volunteered that she had opened the closet and various drawers. As fingerprints turned up in the place, the freshest ones were likely to be hers.

“That don’t mean I done anything,” she protested. “I done just like I told you.”

Gibby reassured her, explaining that we could hardly eliminate from the picture such obviously innocent fingerprints as hers unless we had hers for identification. She was a bit restive about having them taken but she submitted with not too much fuss.

With her guidance we went through the drawers and the closet. It was quite as she had said—no low-cut gorgeousness, no nylon transparencies, no black lace seductions. There was only the sparsest of sparse wardrobes. Not a spare nightdress, only one solitary set of underthings, and nothing anywhere that Nora McGuire next door might not have primly worn for her school-teaching.

“Even her laundry,” the outraged cleaning woman said. “She’d drop things in the hamper I should rinse them out for her when I come in. Even them things, her dirty things, they’ve been swiped, too.”

We covered the whole place. The bottle of Scotch was gone. Nothing left in that department but the soda. Gibby wondered about papers. There were no letters or papers of any kind and the cleaning woman dismissed those quickly. There never had been any. She had seen Miss Bell when she would go down for her mail. She would read a letter and throw it away. She wasn’t one to keep stuff, the woman said.

We did find her purse. It was in one of her drawers along with a handsome assortment of other purses and a collection of smart-looking gloves. This one purse was evidently the one she had carried last. It contained the usual cosmetic items but it also contained money, $250 in bills plus a couple of dollars in silver. The cleaning woman took that discovery as the crowning outrage. This had been the meanest kind of burglary, she felt. Nothing had been taken except the things that would ordinarily have passed on to her for her Gloria, nothing except the Scotch and the cigarettes. Gloria was a good girl. She had never tasted a drop in her life. She didn’t smoke either.

We made another discovery and that also outraged Gloria’s mamma. In the drawer with that one set of demure underthings we found a prayer book and a couple of tracts. The tracts were those Jehovah’s Witnesses sell on street corners.

“Them,” the cleaning woman sneered. “None of them was ever around here before. Who wants them?”

The last of it was we had to get her out of the apartment. Gloria could use the suits and the coat and the nylons and the bags and the gloves and, since they would have been hers anyhow when Miss Bell would have been through with them and nobody could say she wasn’t through with them now, Gloria’s mamma came down with the idea that she might just as well pack up anything her Gloria could use and take it right off with her.

Gibby had to explain about the possibility of a next of kin. He did the best anyone could with it, but Gloria’s mamma wasn’t convinced.

The things had been promised to her. It was injustice. That’s what it was.

HER cries of injustice were by no means the whole of it. She was also a theorist. She wasn’t content with simply yelling burglary. She insisted that we look for a burglar who was also a ghoul. Miss Bell was dead. She had known Miss Bell well. Miss Bell would never have been caught dead in a flannel nightgown. Therefore it followed inevitably that Miss Bell had not been wearing that red flannel when she had died. The burglar had stopped at nothing in collecting the loot. He had even stripped off the poor girl’s body one of those glamorous red nylon-and-lace jobs and substituted for it that detestable flannel.

We had Nora McGuire in from next door. The high-value-on-privacy girl could go on indefinitely making all her nicely turned points to the effect that she had never had the slightest interest in her neighbor’s habits, but she had already confessed to us that she was enough a woman to have taken some considerable notice of her neighbor’s clothes. We asked Nora to look over the things in the drawers and the closet. Nora was appalled. She remembered a pink satin evening coat. She remembered several dazzling dresses. She was by no means as letter perfect in the late Sydney Bell’s wardrobe as was Gloria’s mamma, but she remembered enough. None of the party clothes she had been seeing on her neighbor’s back were now to be found in her neighbor’s apartment.

She had, of course, no knowledge of the lingerie or the nightdresses, but she did give it as her opinion that the items in that department, as described by Gloria’s mamma, would have been the sort of thing she would have expected. Sydney Bell had not been the flannel nightgown type. They were agreed on that.

They left us with something to think about. I turned to Gibby.

“What now?” I asked. “Do we go hunting the ghoulish burglar?”

“That,” Gibby said. “Or else we concentrate on the religious tracts. I don’t know that they aren’t worse.”

I didn’t quite follow him there but he sketched enough of it in and I was able to take it from there to fill out the whole picture. Party girl murdered. Every last physical trace of her party-girl life removed. Girl left looking like the complete Miss Prim in death. Prayer book and religious tracts among her things. Start reconstructing from that and see where you come out.

It’s all too easy. Sydney Bell has been leading the gay life. She goes out partying. Men call on her, even at strange hours. She has fun. Then she meets a man and this man is different. He’s a serious type who talks religion at her. Would Sydney Bell have had any time for a type like that? One never knows. The wilder forms of religiosity do have a way of turning up in extraordinarily virile and ardent people at times.

You must understand that this isn’t religion we’re talking about. It’s insanity, the kind of insanity that comes of guilt feelings gone out of hand, the sense of sin run amok. This type sets out to save the girl’s soul. He calls it that in his twisted thinking and he believes it. She goes for him. She’s saved. She makes the clean sweep of all her fripperies, all the trappings of that sinful life she used to lead. Next stop the Kingdom of Heaven, but the poor girl hadn’t dreamed it could be that quick. This crazy type she’s fallen for does one of those quick twists you have to look for in people who have set up housekeeping in a fantasy world. Abruptly the whole picture turns itself inside out for him. He hasn’t saved her soul at all. She has led him into corruption instead. He rears up out of her sinful bed, puts his hands around her fair, white throat and chokes the life out of her. Then he buttons her up neatly to the chin. It’s in character. His sense of propriety has been satisfied, and he goes his crazy way.

In any murder case, as soon as the surrounding circumstances begin to take on a peculiar look, somebody is bound to come up with the easy out, a mad killer. The thought is, of course, that, having a collection of evidence which you cannot make add up into any rational pattern, you can just stop trying, tick it off as the work of a madman, and call it one that cannot be expected to make sense. Actually it is never quite that simple. The mad killing is not without pattern. It may follow a mad pattern but within its own crazy frame it will be rational enough.

The possibility of a madman in the Sydney Bell killing was not one of those things that popped into our heads because we were feeling baffled and defeated. The evidence had begun to form and it was giving sharp indication that it might be shaping in that special direction. It wasn’t the easy out. It was a conclusion to which we might very possibly be forced, however reluctantly, because when they are like that they can be awfully tough.

Meanwhile, of course, Gibby was quite right. It was no good trying to forget the possibility of the madly righteous loon but it was also no good settling for anything that definite, at least until we had done all the available digging along all the lines that presented themselves.

We had just gone into a huddle with the lab boys to see whether they might have something that could be a lead for us, when the cleaning woman came pounding back in a fever of excitement. She knew where all Miss Bell’s lovely things had gone. She could take us there and show us.

“It’s only around the corner,” she said. “Secondhand clothes it is and never a thing in the window that isn’t from five years ago and nobody, they’re anybody, is wearing it any more until just now I went past and I seen it right away. One of Miss Bell’s beautiful red nightgowns—nylon and lace and all sheer like she had made special for her all the time—one of them is in the window and inside I can see hanging the pink coat and the new evening dress with the harem skirt.”

We let her show us the way. It was, as she said, just around the corner, and the shop looked as unprepossessing as she had described it. A sign in the window said they bought and sold used clothing and the stuff on display could hardly have looked more used. It was a crowded window except for a space in the center of it. That space was empty.

Gloria’s mamma gasped. She pointed at the empty space.

“It was there only a minute ago,” she said. “Right there.”

We could see through the window into the shop. A rather frowzy woman who unmistakably had the secondhand look was in there with a man. She was holding up for his inspection something that was so red and so filmily transparent that it looked like a tongue of flame. It had lace on it and the lace appeared to be in just that area that Gloria’s mamma had described to us as
here.

The cleaning woman dug Gibby in the ribs and pointed. Gibby nodded. He made no move. He just watched through the window. We made quite an audience at that window. So much so, that I began to feel a bit crowded. There were the three of us but there were two men as well and they all but had their noses pressed to the windowpane. I glanced at them and dismissed them as not worth a second look. I may have wondered a bit at their being interested in this window, but I also dismissed that.

They could see that red nightgown the woman was showing to the man inside. No man who is a man can look at one of those things without immediately dreaming up a picture that would put some dame into it and it wouldn’t be just any dame either. It would be something luscious, but necessarily. Tossing off the pair who were outside looking in as a couple of idle dreamers, I concentrated on that more enterprising character inside who appeared to be on the road toward implementing his dream.

That was one big hunk of man. He had a very yellow look, but it was the look of the outdoors type who happens to be having a spot of ill health. You know how a really dark suntan looks when the healthy, red blood isn’t coursing under it. This lad had been out in the sun plenty, but under the bronzing he was carrying an unhealthy pallor.

His clothes didn’t help. He was wearing a reddish brown suit and a reddish brown shirt and a yellow tie, colors calculated to make a sick man look sicker. The shop’s show window had been modernized with a surrounding trim of mirror glass and I noticed that this gent’s color scheme seemed to be repeated in the glass. I turned my head to have a look at what was reflecting in such splendid combinations of brown and yellow.

It was an enormous convertible, parked at the curb, a very special-looking job of bronze paint and yellow leather upholstery. It was an easy guess that the convertible belonged to the man in the shop. He was dressed to match it. Another car, far less spectacular, was double-parked just outside the big bronze and yellow job.

I turned back to the show window and a new detail caught my eye. The mirror glass reflected the convertible’s license plate. It was a Connecticut license—one of those that is all letters and no numerals—and in the glass it read JERK. That seemed too comic and I turned back for another look at the car. Of course, the plate read KREJ.

Meanwhile inside the shop the man, whom I was now in my own mind calling Krej spelled backwards, dug in his pocket and brought out a couple of bills which he gave the woman. She put the luscious red nightgown in a bag for him. The two men who had been watching with us moved. They didn’t move far, only to the shop door. There they waited; and when the big boy came out with his package, they fell in on either side of him.

“Hi,” they said.

“Hi,” he answered in a husky whisper. “What brings you over here?”

He started toward his car and then he turned back to his two friends, scowling. He had seen how the car double-parked outside him had him boxed in.

One of the men laughed and they both came in beside him again and very close.

“We’ve been chasing you, stupid,” the one who was laughing told him. “Mae’s got a party going and she asked me to bring you. Seeing as how we’ve been watching you buy that red thing, you can’t pretend to us you won’t be in the mood for the Mae bit tonight.”

The big fellow didn’t relax the scowl. “If you move so I can get out,” he said, “I’ll see you over at Mae’s later.” It was still the husky whisper. He sounded as though he had lost his voice, was trying to get it back, and wasn’t making it.

They moved over as far as the convertible where they held a whispered huddle. After a moment, the huddle at the curb broke up. More exactly it moved around the Cadillac to the car that was double-parked outside it. They went in that same formation they had held in crossing to the curb. The big man was in the middle. The two others were beside him, one on either side, and they walked close. The one who had done all the laughing and talking got in the car and big boy got in beside him. He was still clutching his parcel in his massive mitt. With his free hand he was passing over a ring with keys on it to the remaining man. That third one hadn’t gotten into the car.

Gibby made a quick dash out into the street. I went with him. We met the one with the key ring just as he was turning toward the Cadillac. It was close quarters there between the parked cars and Gibby kept going almost as though the man wasn’t there. Gibby rammed right into him and pushed him backwards. When Gibby came to a standstill, he had the man backed, tight against the car and there was no question that he was holding him there.

“What the hell?” the man said, clawing ineffectually at Gibby’s arm.

Gibby ignored him and talked past him to the big boy with the yellow face.

“Anything we can do for you, mister?” he asked. “It looks as though you’re in trouble.”

The big boy went some shades yellower. “Trouble?” he repeated, stupidly echoing Gibby’s word.

“These two ganging up on you?” Gibby asked.

The vocal one of the pair had had his foot on the starter. Now he took it off and laughed again.

“Us gang up on him?” he said. “He could whip the two of us with one hand tied behind his back.”

“How about taking him with both hands tied behind his back?” Gibby asked. “You could handle him then, couldn’t you? Especially with a gun.”

The man stopped laughing. “Look, mister,” he growled, “maybe you’re drunk or something. Maybe you’ll go away now and bother someone else.”

“Your buddy here hasn’t the gun,” Gibby said. “He’s clean.”

As though he were demonstrating the fact on the man he had crowded against the side of the car, Gibby slapped him smartly in all the standard, concealed-weapons places.

“You’re not drunk,” the man behind the wheel said. “I can see that. What’s with you anyway? You take it in the arm?”

“District Attorney’s Office,” Gibby said and brought out his credentials.

None of the three even bothered to look at them. I’ve never seen people more easily convinced.

The man who had been doing the talking climbed out from behind the wheel.

He was talking as he came. “I suppose I could start yelling,” he said. “I have a hunch there’s all kinds of rights I have in a thing like this, but what the hell, you want to feel me up, mister, go ahead. Have your fun. Only look out you don’t tickle. People tickle me, I get the hiccups and when I get them I go on forever.”

He came around into that narrow space between the cars and he put his arms up at his sides. Gibby ran him over.

I don’t know whether I had been expecting a gun or just hoping for one. This was one of those limbs Gibby goes out on and when you’re out that far, brother, look out. You had better be right. This character did have all kinds of rights and Gibby was walking over every last one of them. He didn’t find a gun. He didn’t yield an inch. He wasn’t letting them see it was bothering him. I hoped vaguely that I was managing to play it as deadpan. I had a feeling anyone could have seen how much it was bothering me.

“No gun,” Gibby said. “What’s the setup?”

“Setup? We’re friends. We spot his car in traffic. You’ll give us that. It’s no trouble to spot. We want him on a party we’re having, so we pick him up. I know we’re double-parked, but it’s only for a minute and since when is the DA’s office handing out the traffic tickets?”

Gibby looked to the big boy. He was still hanging on to his package and he hadn’t found his voice. He had to try twice before he made even the husky whisper come.

“They’re my friends,” he said. “We’re going to be late for the party. The dames, they’ll get sore we keep them waiting.”