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.”
“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.
The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Page 6