The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (6 page)

“Also,” Gibby said, “you’ll be helping us and the more you give us to go on the easier it’s going to be for us to help you. Let’s start with Joan Loomis. Do you have a picture of her on you?”

He had one and he fished it out of his billfold for us. It was a bathing-suit picture but don’t get ideas. It wasn’t any bikini. It wasn’t even one of those halter and bare midriff deals. It was a cover-up sort of bathing suit and by that I don’t mean one of the elasticized jobs that covers a gal but close like an extra skin. It had a skirt and it had a top with fairly broad straps going over the shoulders. If it wasn’t the sort of thing Grandma wore in the nineties, it was quite the sort of thing that Grandma might pick out as a decent sort of suit for Granddaughter to wear today. Legs it showed about to the knees. Arms it showed completely. Neck and shoulders it showed a lot less than your stenographer is likely to show at her typewriter any day.

All the same it was a cute suit and a cute girl inside it. The legs were very nice indeed and the figure plenty good enough so you knew that it wasn’t for any cosmetic reasons that she wasn’t showing more of it. I couldn’t tell about hair because there was a bathing cap but the face was nice. Beach pictures being what they are, you couldn’t see too much, but I had the idea that Joan Loomis was by no means the lovely thing that Sydney Bell had been but that she would be quite pretty enough in a wholesome, country-girl fashion.

In the description department Bannerman did all right. Height five foot five. Weight 130 pounds. Light brown hair. Fair complexion. Blue eyes. He said her hair was long and she wore it up in one of these knobs at the back of her head. When it came to what she might be wearing he couldn’t give us nearly so much. He knew what she had been wearing when he had seen her off to New York. It was a dark gray suit and a pink blouse with a little round white collar that came outside over the collar of her coat.

“She was buying clothes here,” he said. “I don’t know whether she’ll be wearing something she brought from home or something she’s bought. Anyhow it’s likely to have one of those little round white collars she wears outside. She likes those. She wears them on mostly everything.”

I thought I knew what he meant and I thought it sounded something like a school uniform.

“How old is she?” Gibby asked.

It’s a routine question. I didn’t know whether the school-girlish note had struck him or not.

“Twenty-one,” Bannerman answered. “Just a year younger than Ellie.”

Gibby called the description in. Missing persons could start routine on it in any case. He didn’t relax, though. He came right back at the questioning. I have never known a session of this sort to have more of an appearance of going well. Bannerman seemed to be in a mild state of shock, as well he might have been; but, if anything, that appeared to have loosened him up a bit, released some inhibitions he might otherwise have exhibited.

Gibby suggested that we might go out and get him a drink and he was a little prim about that.

“No, thanks,” he said. “I don’t drink.”

The real impact of it was in the tone he used. That tone didn’t leave anything unsaid. Here was a boy who had convictions on the subject. He was horrified by the suggestion that he might even have wanted a drink but it was a situation he had faced up to before he had made the journey into the big city. He had known the sort of place New York was. He had known that people did drink there. He had made up his mind, however, to stick to his guns. No when-in-Rome-do-as-the-Romans-do for him, but he would be polite about it. He would say nothing. He would just be firm in his refusal.

It was all there. I could even guess where he had learned it. That would have come in the army. He would be out on pass with his buddies. The other boys would be tying one on or at least stopping for a couple of beers. I could just see this one going around to the USO for a coke.

Gibby acted as though he had missed the “I don’t drink” part of it and caught nothing of the tone which made it so clear that in this young man’s way of thinking nobody else should drink either.

“There’s nothing up here,” Gibby said, “but we don’t have to stay right here.”

Bannerman gave him an indulgent little sad-eyed smile.

“Of course, there wouldn’t be anything up here,” he said. “This was Ellie’s place.”

Gibby fished his cigarettes out of his pocket and offered Bannerman a smoke.

“Thank you, no,” Bannerman said.

The fingerprint man went to the kitchenette and came back with a saucer.

“Not an ash tray anywhere in the place,” he said. “I’ve been using this.”

The three of us lit cigarettes and used the saucer. Bannerman was wearing that little sad-eyed smile again. He was being real big, forgiving us for having made the mistake of thinking his sister might have had an ash tray around the place.

Then Gibby was back to working at him with the questions and he answered readily, as though it might have been some sort of relief for him to talk, particularly a relief to turn backward to areas where he felt he knew all the answers, where there were no terrible uncertainties to clutch at his heart.

There had been only the two of them, his sister Ellie and himself, ever since he had been fifteen and she ten. Their parents had been killed in a bus accident and they had had no other relatives. There had been insurance, not much of it but enough to carry them along for two years while he finished high school and kept them going with after-school and vacation jobs. He had wanted to go on to college but that was out. He had left school at seventeen and taken on the full-time job of supporting himself and his twelve-year-old sister.

He was modest in his telling of it, but the picture emerged. It was a picture of a hard-working youngster who had taken on a man’s job and not done badly with it. He had earned their way, had kept kid sister in school, and had been both father and mother to her. He had a feeling of accomplishment and it came through the cover of his modesty. It was evident that not the least of his pride was that he had been able to guide his sister through those difficult years from ten to seventeen and to keep her from the pitfalls of temptation.

She had just finished high school and she had her first job, typist-stenographer in a real estate office, when the deferments on his army service ran out.

“I didn’t get called up when I was eighteen like other people,” he explained. “I had to support Ellie and they deferred me for that, but when Ellie was out of school and she had a job, they couldn’t defer me any more. I had to go then. I didn’t feel good about it—not that I wanted to dodge serving or anything like that—but Ellie was only seventeen and nobody to look after her, nobody even to tell her about things. The night before I left, I had to tell her myself. You know, about men and babies and all that Mom would have taken care of.”

He didn’t labor it. In fact, it seemed to me that he was happy enough to touch on it lightly and sheer away from the thought of the worries he had had for her when she had been only seventeen.

The way he told it, he had certainly been a level-headed kid. He had foreseen this moment when he would have to go, and so far as he had been able to manage it, he had prepared for it. He had put by all the savings he could and he was able to leave his sister so that with her earnings, the allotment out of his army pay, and a monthly pittance he sent her out of these savings, she would be having no financial difficulties. Then the Korean trouble had come and he had known he would be shipping overseas. At that point he had sent her all that remained of his savings along with careful instructions for banking it and drawing on it only as she needed it.

He had shipped and there had been that unavoidable space of time during which no letters could reach him. The first letter he had had in Korea had been a shocker. Ellie had rented their house, given up her job, and moved to New York.

“She wasn’t eighteen yet and she’d never been anywhere but River Forks all her life and alone in New York,” he said. “I thought I’d go crazy.”

“River Forks?” Gibby asked. “Where’s that?”

“Ohio. River Forks, Ohio. That’s our home. It was bad enough leaving her alone that way in River Forks but we’d lived there all our lives. People knew us. We knew people. She wasn’t among strangers. The man she worked for, for instance, Frank Hamilton, he’d been a friend of Pop’s. He’d known her from a baby. He was like an uncle to us, or something. See what I mean?”

“What made her come to New York?”

“A girl she had known at high school had been in a beauty contest and had been Miss Ohio. This girl had gone to New York and was working as a model. She had invited Ellie to spend her vacation in New York. More than that she had urged her to pack and come. Modeling was wonderful and she was sure Ellie could get a job and even if she couldn’t, she could certainly get a job as a typist-stenographer and in a job like that she would be making three times what she made in River Forks.

“That’s what sold Ellie,” Bannerman said. “She wrote me all about it, a real grown-up letter. It didn’t make sense for her to stay in River Forks working for so little and using up my savings when I could use them after I got back home. We owned the house free and clear. Pop had left it to us that way and there was this housing shortage and she was getting a wonderful rent for it. So with that and the money she could make in New York she wouldn’t have to touch any of my savings and she didn’t think she would even have to use any of my allotment money. She was going to try to save that up for me too. She had it all figured out just as though she was some fifty-year-old banker or something.”

“And she wasn’t quite eighteen,” Gibby said.

Not quite eighteen. He repeated it after Gibby and there was the little sad-eyed smile again. He had worried himself half-crazy about her but the letters had kept coming regularly, at least as regularly as letters did come to combat units in Korea. She had stayed with the beauty contest winner for a couple of weeks and had found a stenographer’s job right away. After the first two weeks she had gotten herself a room at the YWCA. Then a couple of months later she had found a little apartment for herself.

“Not this one,” he said. “It was some place called Queens.”

“Yes,” Gibby said. “Probably cost a lot less than anything over here.”

Bannerman looked at the one room with its kitchenette and bathroom appendages.

“This can’t cost much,” he said. “There’s little enough of it.”

Gibby had no intention of letting the thing channel off into a discussion of New York rentals.

“The friend that got her to come to New York,” he said. “Do you know her name?”

“Williams,” Bannerman answered. “Grace Williams. That isn’t her name now. She married somebody. It was just about the time Ellie got that first apartment. I don’t know his name. Anyhow she married him. He was here in the navy, I think. He shipped to the West Coast and she followed him out there. Ellie wrote me all about it.”

“I thought if we could find some of the people who knew her here in New York,” Gibby said, “they could help us.”

“She had a lot of friends,” Bannerman said.

“Any you know?”

“No. I’ve never been here before, but from her letters I could understand she had a lot of friends. Ellie would. People always liked Ellie. She was so pretty and sweet. You just looked at her and you could see what a nice girl she was.”

He had still been in Korea when she had begun sending him money. She had given up the typing and she was working as a model. There was far more money in modeling and she was doing wonderfully. She didn’t even need the money that came in every month from the house out in River Forks and she was banking all the allotment money for him. He had always wanted to go to college and it had only been because of her that he hadn’t gone. Now he would have his chance. When he got back he could go on the GI Bill and it wouldn’t even be hard going because he’d find quite a lot of savings she was piling up for him and if he needed more, she would always be able to help him. Meanwhile she didn’t want him going without things out there. She wanted him to have everything all the other boys had. She’d be sending him money from time to time and any time he needed any, he was to just write to her. She could send more.

“Modeling,” Gibby said. “Didn’t that worry you? You were in the army. You were seeing pin-ups and calendars.”

Bannerman crimsoned. For a moment he looked as though he were going to fly into a rage and wade into Gibby, but he quickly took a fresh hold on himself and then it was the sad smile again. This time it was definitely a pitying smile.

“You never knew Ellie,” he said. “We’d been through all that when she first came to New York. I’d written and told her I didn’t like the idea of New York and I didn’t like the idea of her being with anyone who worked as a model. I knew Ellie wouldn’t do anything like that but after all what did Ellie know? The way I saw it this Grace Williams was probably doing just that, posing for those calendar pictures and Ellie not having the first idea of anything like that. I felt I had to explain it to her and I did.”

Little sister had answered that letter and her answer had been reassuring. In the first place, it had demonstrated to him that time hadn’t been standing still while he had been away. Little sister knew all that there was to be known about modeling. There were the models he had in mind. She knew about them, but no nice girl would do that sort of work. Her friend Grace had marvelous hair and that was all anyone ever photographed of Grace, her hair. She posed for shampoo ads and home permanent ads and hair tint ads. It was always hair. Ellie had sent him a sheaf of magazine clippings and there hadn’t been one in the lot that would have brought even the faintest whistle from even the most lupine of his buddies. It had all been Grace’s crowning glory.

“Of course,” he said, his face freezing a bit with disapproval, “it was all different colors in all the different ads, but I realized that would be part of the job. Still when Ellie wrote me that she was modeling herself I was mighty glad it was hands and not hair. I wouldn’t have liked it if Ellie had to dye her hair different colors all the time, especially some of those colors like strawberry or that very white blonde.”