The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead

by Hampton Stone

  “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.

  We expected that would be all, but Bannerman came up with a surprise.

  “Joanie,” he said in a small and sickeningly tentative voice. “If something’s happened to Joanie and she hasn’t been identified, she might be here right now, wouldn’t she?”

  Gibby admitted that it was a possibility.

  Bannerman squared his shoulders and stiffened into grim, military bearing. He could have been posing for a recruiting poster.

  “If there are any girls who haven’t been identified,” he said firmly, “I had better see them.”

  “Perhaps you had better,” Gibby said dryly.

  We took him out with us while we checked. There was only one unidentified body of a young woman and we went back in to have a look at that. It was a redhead with freckles who had been hit by a truck in a traffic accident. She wasn’t Bannerman’s Joanie, not by a good forty pounds of fatty tissue and a flock of other details.

  “That leaves us hope,” Gibby told Bannerman. “It leaves us a lot of hope.”

  “Yes,” Bannerman said.

  That is, he tried to say it but it was no great success. We had to hurry him off to a place where he could be sick, which he was, spectacularly and protractedly. When he was through we knew it wasn’t any good offering him the drink he so obviously needed. It was equally not any good expecting him to carry on as white and shaken as he was.

  We just had to give him a bit of time to rest and pull himself together by whatever means of his own he might have. We did that and his means seemed to be prayer. Watching him, I had every expectation that it was going to work, but actually it wasn’t tested out. Gibby used the time to get on the phone. He called in to check on how well Missing Persons might be doing on the hunt for Joan Loomis. They were doing all right.

  The boys didn’t actually have Joan Loomis on hand for us but they did have an encouraging lead toward a Joan Loomis who answered the description Bannerman had given us. As we already knew, she wasn’t in the morgue. A check of the hospitals had produced nothing. The next step, however, a check of hotels, had been helpful. A Joan Loomis, registered from River Forks, Ohio, had been turned up at the President Polk. Miss Loomis was not in her room and she had not responded to paging, but there was one of the bellhops who remembered her. He had taken her up to her room at 9:30 that morning when she had checked in, and it was evident that he had studied the young woman with that appraising eye which a bellhop will inevitably turn on the ten-cent tipper.

  The description he had given the cops who had talked to him had included the fact that she had tipped him only a dime. As they relayed it to Gibby, he had described her as a young chick with the makings of a dish except that she was already a young old maid. He remembered a gray suit, a gray hat, and a white collar like one his sister used to wear when she had been going to some convent school.

  The boys had asked the desk and they got the same check-in time, 9:30 that morning. The clerk further remembered that Miss Loomis had come down from her room not more than fifteen minutes after checking in and had left her key at the desk. She had been out most of the day but had returned at the end of the afternoon well loaded down with parcels. Another bellhop had tried to take them from her but she had stubbornly insisted on carrying them herself. It was the opinion of the President Polk staff that she had been saving a second dime tip. This time she had spent perhaps a half hour in her room and then had gone out again, again leaving her key at the desk. The boys from Missing Persons had come along only a few minutes later. They were now settled in there waiting for her to return.

  Gibby asked them to keep on it. He was ready to hang up when the headquarters operator cut in and said they had something else for us. Gibby had turned in earlier the registration numbers on the two cars that had been parked outside the secondhand-clothes store. The Connecticut registration that was Jerk spelled backwards belonged to a man named Jellicoe, Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe. They were rushing this news to Gibby because th
ey now had something else on a Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe. A patrolman had picked up a beaten-up drunk on Madison Avenue and the man had given the officer that sesquipedalian name. The officer had taken the man down to Bellevue for treatment. They thought we might want to know since Gibby had put through the query on the car registration. Gibby said we were happy to know, particularly happy since we were at the morgue and, the morgue being an adjunct of Bellevue Hospital, it could hardly have been handier. He went over to Bannerman.

  “Looks like we’ve located Joanie,” he said.

  Bannerman leaped to his feet. “Where is she?” he asked.

  “At the moment I don’t know. At 9:30 this morning she checked in to a hotel. She was all right then. She went out and she was gone all day but she came in for half an hour not very long ago and then went out again. Anyhow we have that much. She was on her feet and evidently in perfectly good shape late this afternoon. No reason to expect she won’t be the same way when we find her.”

  Bannerman looked as though he wanted to believe it. He wanted to be happy but he was afraid to believe anything.

  “How do you know it’s she?” he asked.

  “She’s registered as Joan Loomis of River Forks, Ohio,” Gibby told him. “She also answers the description you gave us.”

  “I’d better go to the hotel and wait for her,” Bannerman said, starting for the door.

  Gibby caught his arm and held him. “Rather do that than meet your train?” Gibby asked him.

  Bannerman looked at his watch. “Yes,” he said. “The station first. She must be there right now waiting for my train.”

  “We’ll run you up there,” Gibby said. “There’s still time. We’ll take off as soon as we’ve gone around the corner to the hospital and had one of the doctors give you something.”

  Bannerman had lost all interest in medical assistance. He had even forgotten about prayer.

  “I don’t need anything now,” he said. “I’m fine now with this news of Joanie. That was better than any medicine.”

  He wasn’t just saying it. He looked it. He looked, in fact, every inch the eager bridegroom except for one thing he did have to bother him and that was some inner necessity to look less happy than he seemed to be feeling, since such a look would be suitable for a young man whose little sister had so recently been done to death by manual strangulation.

  Gibby didn’t tell him we had other business in the hospital. He just stood pat on his insistence that Bannerman had to be seen by a doctor. We went around the corner and Bannerman, chafing with impatience, came along.

  When we hit the receiving room, the doctor in attendance was busy. A cop was in the outer room writing in his notebook. It was no cop either of us knew but he had evidently seen us around. He recognized us and said hello. Gibby asked him if the doc was going to be long.

  “Nah,” he said. “He’s in there with a beat-up drunk I picked up. I found this guy staggering along Madison Avenue and, boy, had he taken a shellacking! Says he got in a fight in a bar somewheres and he don’t know what bar or where. Of course, he’s lying.”

  “It does happen in bars once in a while,” I said.

  The cop laughed. “Not the way I got it figured,” he said. “He had this in his hand.” He dug in his pocket and brought out a small piece of red lace. “What’s that if it ain’t a hunk ripped off of some dame’s panties? He knows where he was and what he was doing when her husband came home and caught him at it. And you should see the size of him. I’d like to see what that husband looks like.”

  Gibby took the bit of red stuff out of the cop’s hand.

  “Watch our boy for a minute, will you?” he said. “He’s just been to the morgue on an identification. You know what to do if he faints. We won’t be long.”

  The cop sobered and a look of sympathetic concern came over his ordinarily cheerful face.

  “Tough,” he murmured. “Relative?”

  “Kid sister,” Gibby said.

  “Gee, tough,” said the cop.

  We left Bannerman to the officer’s tender mercies and went on into the next room. The doctor was in there going like a house afire. He had a man on the table and the man was stripped to the waist. Large areas of him—and this was a man of large areas—were already neatly punctuated with surgical dressings and the doctor was zipping along over this big boy’s acreage, cleaning up cuts and abrasions, slapping dressings on them, and making the dressings fast with his neat, white criss-crosses of adhesive tape. The patient lay on the table with his eyes closed. The alcohol on his breath was doing battle with the antiseptic odors of the room and it was almost winning out. Of course, it was the man whose license plate read JERK backwards.

  Gibby whispered to the doctor and the doc stepped out of the room with us. We didn’t go back to the anteroom where Bannerman was waiting. We went on into another examining room, an empty one.

  “Did you say DA’s office?” the doc asked.

  Gibby gave him the full identification. “How drunk is the big boy?” he asked.

  “Not very. He has been drinking. I suppose you could smell it. When they stagger and they smell like that, the police assume it’s drunkenness. With him it’s more that he’s groggy from that pasting he took.”

  “What are you planning to do with him?”

  The doctor shrugged. “When they’re like that,” he said, “we patch them up and send them home. They always live.”

  Gibby nodded. “I don’t want to put him under arrest and I haven’t time for him right now,” he said, “but it would be handy for the DA’s office if we could have him on ice for overnight. I’ll be ready to take over on him in the morning and he can be turned loose then and no harm done. Could he seem more alcoholic than he is to the extent of a secure night’s lodging?”

  “We don’t have too many beds to spare,” the doc said, hesitating.

  “I know,” Gibby said, “but we don’t have too many citizens to spare either. We’re working a murder case and we saw him earlier today. He was in better shape then. Turn him loose now and this one just might not live.”

  “Okay,” the doc said. “I’ll take him in, but it will be only till morning. By then he’s going to look much too sober for us to keep.”

  “Any time the DA’s office can do you a favor,” Gibby said.

  “No, thanks,” the doc answered.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE doctor came out to the waiting room with us and gave Bannerman a slug of aromatic spirits of ammonia. Just in the couple of minutes we had left Bannerman alone, a lot of the zip had gone out of him. He had again begun to look as though he could use a pick-me-up. The boy had obviously been thinking and thinking had been doing him no good.

  We were in the car and headed uptown before he spoke a word. Then he started asking questions.

  “What hotel?” he asked. “I mean where Joanie’s staying. I wonder how she found a hotel.”

  “Moderate priced,” Gibby said. “Reasonably decent, very well known. A place called the President Polk.”

  Bannerman did a double-take on the name. “Did you say President Polk?” he asked.

  Gibby nodded. “That where you’re staying?” he asked.

  It was phrased as a question, but it did sound like one of those questions to which we already knew the answer.

  “Yes, but how did you know? I didn’t say.”

  Gibby shrugged. “Miss Loomis from River Forks, Ohio. She doesn’t know the town. She wouldn’t know the hotels. She has a sudden need of one. I’d expect her to pick the one you were going to be at. She knew you were going in there, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, of course, she knew.”

  “No mystery about that then,” Gibby said.

  Quite suddenly Bannerman looked troubled. “She went there at 9:30 this morning,” he said, thinking aloud.

  “That was her check-in time,” Gibby told him.

  “Do they keep a record of those times?” Bannerman asked. His happiness was dimming fast.
/>   “It may not be exact,” Gibby said, “but it will be close enough.”

  “More than six hours after her train from Boston came in. There isn’t any place she could have been those six hours. They must be wrong on the time.”

  “They couldn’t be that wrong,” Gibby said, speaking as though he were making the point only in the interest of accuracy, as though it weren’t of any consequence at all. “Some time shortly after three in the morning would have meant that a night clerk checked her in. The night shift of bellhops would have been on. By 9:30 this morning she would have been received by a completely different staff. It’s this day staff that has checked out with us on her description.”

  Bannerman had broken out in a sweat. “Six hours,” he muttered. “Six hours when everybody would be asleep, when there would be no place she could possibly have gone.”

  “She was somewhere,” Gibby said.

  “But where?” Bannerman wailed.

  I took a hand. “Wherever it was,” I said, “it’s reasonably clear that she came to no harm. She seems to have been in good shape this morning when she did turn up at the hotel. What’s to get in a sweat about?”

  Bannerman thought awhile. He was in a good deal of a sweat, but he pulled himself together. This, evidently, was going to be a private sweat.

  “There will be some perfectly reasonable explanation,” he said. “Joanie will be able to explain.”

  He was trying very hard to sound as though he were believing it, but he didn’t seem to be getting very far with convincing even himself.

  Gibby spoke to him. His tone was studiedly soothing and reassuring.

  “New York,” he said, “isn’t River Forks. Even after three in the morning you’ll find all sorts of people up and around in New York.”

  Bannerman reacted not at all to the tone. He rose sharply to the words.