The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (7 page)

“Ellie was just hands?” Gibby asked.

“Just hands. She sent me a flock of clippings of the ads. Gloves, nail polish, rings, cuticle remover, stuff like that. Sometimes it wasn’t anything that had to do with hands really except that they used hands, like a perfume ad where the picture was just Ellie’s hands holding up a crystal ball. The perfume was called Oriental Magic.”

He wasn’t saying that he hadn’t worried. She was still alone in the big city. As time went on, however, and Ellie continued writing and everything seemed to be going splendidly, he had grown to believe that little sister could really take care of herself and he had worried less. Her move to Manhattan had been a good example. She had explained about Queens being quite far away from things and how she had a long walk to either the subway or the bus through quiet and lonely streets. She had been most particular to make him understand that quiet in New York was not like quiet at home in River Forks. New York was a city of strangers and some of these strangers were sinister. It was better to live in a part of town where there would always be lots of people around, especially for a young girl alone.

The first New York apartment had come while he was still in Korea. Since then there had been a couple of further moves but always in Manhattan. Each time she had explained that the neighborhood had gone down a bit and, being a girl alone, she felt it was best that she should live in only the most respectable neighborhoods.

“It sounded wonderful,” he said. “She was being so careful and all. I suppose I forgot that in a town like this you can be as careful as careful and still it mightn’t be enough, but I can’t understand it. I’ll never understand it.” Gibby nudged him back to the track of his narrative. The Korean War was a long time over and he had told us he had never been in New York before.

He explained that. It had been his first idea that he would ask for his discharge at a camp somewhere near New York so he could see Ellie as soon as he came home, but he had applied for college admission back in River Forks. He told us about the college. It was one of those little denominational institutions that are so numerous out there. The timing worked out badly. The army was going to be turning him loose just in time to start school and coming to New York would have meant losing a whole semester. He had already delayed this higher education of his for many years but he had been ready to delay it again. He had been that concerned about Ellie.

It had been little sister again who had been the practical one. She was hungry for a sight of him and for River Forks and home. She could take the time. She had told him to get his discharge near home and she had gone to River Forks to be there to meet him. She had done more than that. She had arranged with the people who were renting the house so that they let him have his old room. It had been a fine arrangement. He’d had room and board with a fine family and right in his own home and it had just come off the rent they were paying for the house.

So that had been it. She had come home to River Forks, and New York hadn’t changed her at all. She was as pretty and as sweet and as obviously a nice girl as she had always been. She had, of course, grown up. She knew how to handle money and she was so smart and practical that she made him feel like the child. He had stopped worrying about Ellie and had buckled down to the job of getting his degree.

She had wanted to help him with money but he had insisted on standing on his own feet. It hadn’t been hard even though he had made her take half the rent money on the house every month because it was half hers. He had done all right what with the GI Bill and a part-time job and all the money she had saved for him out of his army pay. It had been fine. Vacations he had always had a job and Ellie had come home to River Forks on visits a couple of times a year. There had been no reason for him to take the time off from school or work and to spend the money on coming to New York.

The past June he bad been graduated and he had a teaching job coming up right there at the old school. He had already started on his Master’s in summer school and he had had a summer job, and there was Joanie. They were to be married just before the fall semester opened and they were going to live in his room at the old house. Ellie had wanted him to take the whole house and let her help him for the year or so before he would be earning enough with his teaching really to swing it, but he had refused that.

“We were still arguing about it,” he said sadly. “We’d reached the place where she said anyhow she wouldn’t take her half of the rent money any more. She was giving us her half of the house for a wedding present. I hadn’t agreed to take it. It was too much, but that was one of the things I was going to do while I was here, really find out how she was fixed for money, make sure she was all right. She was going to go back to River Forks with Joanie and me for the wedding. We had it all planned.”

And that was his whole story. Gibby dug hard for more but he got nothing. He very much wanted some sort of a lead to who her associates in New York might have been—friends, business acquaintances. Bannerman, aside from being confident that she had had many friends, insisted that he knew no names, had no clues. He didn’t even know what modeling agency she had worked with. For that matter he didn’t even know what a modeling agency was.

“Men friends?” Gibby asked. “Marriage plans? Anything like that? She must have confided in you.”

“Ellie,” Bannerman said, “Ellie always told me everything. She never had any secrets from me. She said it was crazy the way some girls were in a hurry to marry and took anyone who came along, boys with all sorts of vices and everything. She said she was waiting for Mr. Right to come along. She knew he would find her some day.”

“I suppose she couldn’t have known that Mr. Wrong would find her first,” Gibby murmured sympathetically.

If Gibby had stuck a pin into him he couldn’t have brought on a more startled reflex than he drew from Bannerman with those words. The man’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.

He gasped. “You think it could have been a man?” he exploded the question at Gibby. “I mean someone she knew, someone she had visiting her?”

“It looks very much like it,” Gibby said.

“A burglar,” Bannerman said. He was babbling now. “Some kind of maniac.”

“She was in bed,” Gibby told him. “She was strangled, possibly even in her sleep.”

Bannerman shuddered but, when he spoke, he sounded almost a little relieved. “Then it was a burglar,” he said stoutly. “Or some lunatic who got in here. Ellie wouldn’t have any man in here and she in bed. Come to think of it, she wouldn’t have had any men visiting her here anyhow, not living this way in one room with the bed right here in the one room she had. I tell you she knew about things. She wouldn’t entertain a man in a room with a bed in it.”

“I wonder,” Gibby began. The look on Bannerman’s face made it all too clear that he wasn’t in a mood to brook even a bit of wondering on any such theme. Gibby made a fresh start. “I wonder,” he said, “if she mightn’t have been married.” That wasn’t what he was wondering at all but if he had come any closer at that point, it was obvious that Bannerman would have exploded in such a hysteria of outrage that we couldn’t have hoped to have anything coherent out of the man ever again.

“Without telling me?” There was quite enough outrage in Bannerman’s voice at even that suggestion.

“She could have been keeping it for a surprise,” Gibby said.

Bannerman looked at him. He was evidently wondering whether Gibby had gone quite insane or if this would be an example of the sort of horribly sinful thinking that was current in New York.

“How could she have been married?” he asked scornfully. “She invited Joanie to stay here with her. Joanie was here with her till she went to Boston. You can see there isn’t another room. There isn’t even another bed.”

“There sure isn’t,” Gibby agreed, but he left it at that. We took Bannerman out of there. We had the car parked out in the street and I waited with Bannerman in the car while Gibby went to a phone booth to get through to the Medical Examiner. That last bit was obviously on Bannerman’s mind. He asked me whether in New York girls, nice girls, entertained men in their apartments alone. I told him they did.

“Aren’t they afraid of what people will think?” he asked.

“I suppose some are,” I said. “In a house like this one for instance, people pay not the slightest attention to what their neighbors are doing.”

“But what about the risk? A girl might make a mistake. The wrong sort of man.”

“That’s another side of living in one of these apartments,” I said. “You’re alone and you’re not alone: Scream and there are a million neighbors to come running.”

I put that out on a venture, to see how he would react. He shuddered. “A burglar,” he said. “A burglar, who killed Ellie in her sleep. Ellie never got to scream.”

Gibby came back to the car and he was looking most thoughtful.

One of the lab boys came out of the house and came to the car. He had a little something for us. They had been into the incinerator and had found some fused glass.

“Could be nothing,” he said. “People throw empty bottles down those things all the time but it’s all that’s recognizable except for the usual unburned bits of quite ordinary garbage.”

“Anything that could have been clothing among those bits?” Gibby asked.

“Nothing. We’ve checked most particularly.”

We ran Bannerman down to the morgue and we left him in the waiting room while we went in for a preliminary look at the corpse. I couldn’t quite see the point of that since we had already seen Eleanor Bannerman’s remains and I couldn’t see that it made any difference that at the time we had still been calling her Sydney Bell.

As soon as we were away from Bannerman, however, Gibby explained. The ME had told him that he had finished with her. There were the visceral samples that were going through laboratory analysis and we were going to have to wait for those analyses before we would know whether she had been drugged or anything like that; but the rest of the post-mortem examination had been done and the results were quite as indicated, death by manual strangulation.

“There’s one thing I wanted to look at before we took him in,” Gibby said.

“What thing?” I asked.

“Do you remember her fingernails?”

I did remember. The fingernails had gone with the red flannel nightgown and those other simplicities the cleaning woman had so emphatically insisted were uncharacteristic. They had been without polish and clipped very short. When we had seen the body they had seemed to me quite in keeping. The fact that they had been by no means in keeping with the picture we’d had of the dead girl from her maid and her neighbor had not come to my mind. There could be no question that they were in keeping with Eleanor Bannerman’s brother’s picture of her. I said as much.

Gibby gave me a look of blank incredulity. “How do they fit with his story of what she’s been doing?” he asked. “Modeling hands. Do you think she was doing some stop-biting-your-nails ads?”

I had been too much absorbed in the nice-girl side of brother Milton’s story. I had completely missed out on the staggering discrepancy. I suggested that Gibby kick me from slab to slab.

The attendant pulled her out for us. “This whole fingernail angle has been nagging at me,” Gibby said. “I was wondering about it from the first, and when brother said she had been modeling hands, it got much too peculiar. I asked the ME if he had looked at them and he had. He can’t be certain but he says it isn’t a bad bet that possibly they were clipped after she was dead.”

We examined the hands and Gibby pointed out to me a couple of fingers the ME had mentioned specifically. It was the doc’s opinion that on those fingers the nails were clipped so very close that it would have been an agonizingly painful operation unless the girl had already been dead or at least unconscious.

I thought of the young man we had left waiting outside. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. Calendar art horrified him. He put great emphasis on a girl’s being a nice girl. Before he had even come on the scene the thought of religion and righteousness gone astray had inevitably suggested itself. Abruptly it was something far stronger than a suggestion. His sister had deceived him all these years. He had come to New York and made the horrible discovery. In his righteous wrath he had killed her and had erased all the symbols of her sinful life. Could this erasing of symbols have included that savage job of nail clipping?

I had done my thinking aloud and Gibby concurred with it at least in part.

“One possibility,” he said. “There is also another. Suppose the girl struggled. Women in the process of being strangled have a way of clawing and scratching. It’s been publicized almost as much as fingerprint evidence. You know, the microscopic fragments of skin and hair found under the victim’s fingernails indicate that her assailant was a man fifty years of age, four foot tall, weighing five hundred pounds and with a strawberry mark just above his right nostril.”

The attendant, who had been listening wide-eyed, interrupted at this point.

“Nobody who is four foot tall could weigh five hundred pounds,” he said.

“The height and weight,” Gibby said, carrying it off completely dead-pan, “are only estimates. They can be off an inch or two or a pound or two either way.”

That took care of the attendant. He subsided into mumbling softly to himself and Gibby turned back to me.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. You wipe up everything to erase fingerprints and you clip the fingernails so close that there can’t be any microscopic bits of you left under them. Nothing there for the microscopic bits to be under.”

We went back outside and brought Bannerman in. He hadn’t been a soldier for nothing. It’s no good saying he took it like a man because there are plenty of men—and it’s no reflection on their manhood—who when they have to make one of those morgue identifications, can’t take it at all. He made the identification and he said a short prayer over her. He asked whether he couldn’t get started on the arrangements for her funeral. He would have liked to have her out of the morgue as quickly as possible. Gibby promised to expedite that for him.