The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead

by Hampton Stone

  “Joanie wouldn’t know any of those people,” he said firmly. “Joanie doesn’t know anybody here except Ellie, and Ellie…”

  His voice trailed away from finishing his statement about Ellie.

  “She had been here several days before she went up to Boston,” Gibby said. “Your sister had many friends. She had probably gotten to know some of your sister’s friends.”

  Bannerman didn’t even want to think about the possibility that his Joanie might have spent those evil hours in this evil city with anyone, however friendly. He came up with a new idea, presenting it hopefully.

  “Trains down from Boston?” he asked. “Aren’t they ever late?”

  “Often,” Gibby said and it was that soothing tone again. “Often late. I’ve known them to be as much as a whole hour late.”

  If it had been anybody else I might have been wondering whether he knew that he was driving the needle into this worried young man. It was Gibby, however, and since it was Gibby, I couldn’t have the first doubt. He not only knew he was giving Bannerman the needle. He knew precisely which nerve he was probing and precisely how far the needle point was going.

  We got up to the station and found a place to park and all the time that needle of Gibby’s was busy. We didn’t go right around to the Incoming Train board to find out on what track they would be bringing in the train from River Forks. We went around to the station master’s office instead and checked on the arrival time that morning of the Boston train that had been scheduled for arrival around three o’clock. The information was available and they gave it to us pridefully. That would be the train that had been due in at 2:58. It had been on time.

  “Of course,” Gibby said, as we were leaving the office, “it does take a bit of time to get off a train and find a cab and all that. It would have been at least 3:15 before she could have been out of the station.”

  “There will be some perfectly reasonable explanation,” Bannerman repeated. This time the statement was made with considerable heat.

  “There will have to be,” Gibby said.

  We were crossing the station to that section at the far end where they post up incoming trains. We had Bannerman walking between us and he wasn’t cooling down any. He strode along in a simmering silence.

  That bulletin board where they post the trains is at the far end of a large room. As we approached the broad entrance to that room, we saw the man. He was standing in profile to us and both Gibby and I had had a good look at him in profile before he had come out from behind the wheel of his car to talk with us. The recognition hit us both at the same time and automatically we both stopped short. Bannerman, of course, was charging right ahead, but Gibby reached out and pulled him back.

  “What’s the matter now?” he growled.

  “Hold it a sec,” Gibby said. “You can see the whole area from here. Is Miss Loomis there?”

  Bannerman was straining at the leash but he stood under Gibby’s restraining hand and looked carefully over the knot of people collected before the board. There was a shift in the crowd and he jumped forward again.

  “There she is,” he shouted trying to shake Gibby off. “Right there in front of the board. Let me go.”

  “In a minute,” Gibby said, holding him. “A man right by the entrance. He could be watching her. A man in a brown hat, light brown suit. See him?”

  “I don’t care about any man,” Bannerman growled. I thought for a minute he was about to swing on Gibby.

  “She’s there,” Gibby snapped. “She’s okay. You can see she’s okay. You’ll get to her soon enough, but first I want you to look at that man. See the one I mean?”

  “I see him,” Bannerman fumed. “Brown hat, tan suit. What about him?”

  “Ever seen him before?”

  “How would I have seen him? I don’t know a soul in New York.”

  “You’re sure you don’t know him?”

  “I’m sure. What’s all this about?”

  “Your sister Ellie. Remember your sister Ellie?”

  Bannerman’s jaw dropped. “That man?” he gasped.

  “Damn it all, Bannerman,” Gibby said. “Some man. Look at him. Is he watching the board? Is he looking around as though he were waiting here to meet somebody, or is he just watching Miss Loomis?”

  “Who is he?”

  Gibby didn’t answer the question. “He’s our job,” Gibby said. “I’m giving you a job, Bannerman, and you’re going to have to do this exactly according to instructions. You’re going to think I’ve gone crazy, but take my word for it, I haven’t. You’re going in there to Miss Loomis. Go in and come up behind her. Don’t say a word. Just reach around her from behind and put your hands over her eyes. You know, surprise her.”

  He did look at Gibby as though he thought Gibby had gone crazy.

  “I’ll scare her to death,” he protested. “Look, she’s alone here. She doesn’t know anybody. She thinks I won’t be here till that train gets in.”

  “You took that earlier train so you could surprise her,” Gibby said, implacably giving Bannerman his orders. “Now you are going to surprise her. You are going to have to follow instructions exactly.”

  Bannerman moved as though he were trying to break away from Gibby but it was an ineffective try. He seemed to be as curious as he was rebellious.

  “I’m not going to do anything of the sort,” he said. “I don’t have to follow anybody’s instructions.”

  Gibby fixed him with a withering look. “And then when you’re up to your ears in trouble,” he asked, “where do you plan to turn for help? Your sister’s been murdered. You’ve been half crazy with worry about your girl. Now you see her. She’s okay, so you think school’s out. Just because nothing’s happened to her yet, don’t push your luck too far.”

  Bannerman tried to laugh it off. “I don’t know why you’re trying to scare me,” he said. “I was frightened for Joanie because I thought she had been in the apartment with Ellie and if she had been there, something horrible could have happened to her. It did happen to Ellie, didn’t it?”

  “Don’t bother to remind me,” Gibby snapped. “I’m reminding you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. Luckily Joanie wasn’t there, so that’s that.”

  “This man who’s watching her doesn’t seem to think that’s that. We have to know what he’s doing here, what he’s up to.”

  “Why don’t you ask him? You’ve asked me plenty of questions. What makes him immune?”

  “We’ll take care of him, but you’re going to set it up for us. We’ve got the job of catching up with your sister’s killer. I can see that you don’t care a damn about that.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “You can convince me by co-operating and you had better also remember that it’s our job to prevent any further killings if we can. Protecting Miss Loomis is at least as important as any other part of this thing.”

  “Joanie will be all right now. I’ll take care of protecting her.”

  Gibby shook his head sadly. “And then we’ll end up protecting you, too,” he said. “Can’t you just assume that we know what we’re doing and play along?”

  “When you ask me to play a silly practical joke…”

  “Stop thinking,” Gibby snapped, “and do as you’re told. You go up quietly behind her and put your hands over her eyes. That’s all you have to do. After that just take her over there where it says Waiting Room. Go in there with her and wait till we come and get you. While you’re waiting, you tell her nothing. Your story is that you came in early to surprise the girls. You went around to your sister’s and there was no answer to the bell. You’ve been trying over there ever since and no answer, so, as train time approached, you came over here just on the chance that she would be here. If she wasn’t you were going back to your sister’s and try again, figuring that they would certainly be home by then since it was the time they would have been expecting you. Now that isn’t difficult. You can do that, can’t you?”

  Sc
owling, Bannerman shook his head in emphatic refusal. “I do not tell lies,” he said and he couldn’t have summoned up more indignation if Gibby had tried to suborn him to perjury. “I don’t know what you’re after or how important it may be to you, but this is important to me. Joanie and I have a lifetime ahead of us. I don’t blemish it now by lying to her.”

  “Okay,” Gibby growled. “Have it your own way. I was going to give you a break, let you have a couple of moments alone with your girl. You don’t want it that way, so you can have your couple of moments alone with her and a police officer.”

  “You can’t do that,” Bannerman protested.

  “Unless I have your oath that you will follow my instructions,” Gibby said coldly, “I’ll do exactly that.”

  Bannerman hesitated. He studied Gibby’s face for a moment. It was absolutely stony. He turned to me. I put everything I had into making mine as granitic as Gibby’s. I must have succeeded. Bannerman caved in. He did bargain a bit, but we had him.

  “I make one condition,” he said. “If I am to lie to Joanie, I’ll be doing it under duress. You will tell her that. You forced me to lie to her.”

  “We’ll tell her,” Gibby promised. “We forced you to lie to her. We know more about how to handle these things than you can know or she can know, but even in the face of that you didn’t want to lie to her. You did it for the only reason that could ever have moved you, the fact that her safety and maybe her life are at stake.”

  Bannerman sighed. “I don’t know why I believe you,” he said, “but I do. I’ll follow your instructions.”

  Gibby let go his arm and slapped him on the shoulder. “Good boy,” he said. “Go to her now.”

  Bannerman took off. When he had first seen her, he had been ready to take off on the run. Now he went with dragging feet. The task Gibby had set him was evidently so distasteful that it was quite outweighing his eagerness.

  “Do you think he’s going to do as you told him?” I asked.

  “That,” Gibby said, “depends on whether he’s scared enough to go against his principles. We have to risk it.”

  As he spoke he was moving slowly off to the left. I moved with him. I could see what he was doing. He was keeping in position so that, he had the man in the tan suit and brown hat, Bannerman, and the girl all lined up in front of him. He was watching all of them at once. The man didn’t move around much, only as much as was necessary so that he could keep his eye always on Joan Loomis. I didn’t even for a moment have the thought that we might be mistaken. There was no question about it. This was the man who had driven Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe away from our encounter in front of that secondhand-clothing store.

  “You know,” I murmured, “we’re going out on so many limbs today that I’m losing count. We’ve tangled with this baby once before and got out of it luckily. We’re holding Jellicoe down at Bellevue on the phoniest of phonies and now I don’t even want to think about when the time will come around and you’ll have to explain all this to Bannerman. He’s the righteous type. If he catches you cutting corners, he’ll take it to the Old Man. That’s not a boy who believes in forgiveness for sin.”

  “I’m betting he’ll have to do his explaining first,” Gibby said. “Anyhow we can worry later. Watch this now.”

  We watched. Bannerman came quietly up behind the girl. He put his hands over her eyes. Her reaction time was the quickest I’ve ever seen. It was as though he had pulled a trigger. She whirled around and with a full swing of arm and body she slapped him. That was a slap. The crack of it echoed and re-echoed in that vast marble enclosure. Bannerman rocked on his heels and touched his hand to his reddened cheek. Then and only then, the girl screamed.

  “Milty. No, Milty, you’re not here. Your tram isn’t in yet.”

  We were in luck. We could see his face full on. Since he didn’t scream back at her we couldn’t hear but we could watch his lips and read them. Lip reading ordinarily isn’t one of Gibby’s talents nor is it one of mine but when you have a pretty good idea of what a man might say, you can make a good stab at telling whether the lip movements fit with what you think he’s saying.

  “I got away earlier than I thought I could.”

  If those weren’t the exact words, they came very close.

  Since all he said was that or something very like it, I was completely unprepared for her next move. After the violence of her immediate reaction to the shock he had given her, I was all the more unprepared for it. She swayed dizzily and reached a hand out toward him. Before she touched him, however, the hand wavered and she dropped at his feet and lay there. Joan Loomis had fainted.

  Gibby laughed. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  Practically everybody within fifty feet was now converging on Bannerman and the girl. You know how people are. Anything like that happens and in no time you have a crowd gathered around it. Our friend in the brown hat didn’t move. He did keep a sharp eye on the gathering crowd but he showed no inclination toward joining it.

  “I’m stupid,” I said. “Fill me in. What did that get us?”

  “It got us the information that Miss Loomis’ nerves are in a state where they go off like firecrackers. Her reaction to hands coming around her unexpectedly is quick and violent, but her reaction to any deviation from timetable is worse than that—catastrophic at least.”

  It was an answer of sorts. I tabled it for later consideration and tried another question.

  “Our friend in the brown hat,” I said, “is interested but it’s a most aloof interest. Do you like that, too?”

  “It has me enthralled,” Gibby said. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t quite know where we were going but Gibby moved and I moved with him. We moved in on brown hat. Coming up alongside him, Gibby gave it the jolly good-fellowship touch.

  “What made Mae’s party go sour?” he asked.

  If Joan Loomis had demonstrated the jumpiness of her nerves, the man in the brown hat wasn’t far behind. He jumped a country mile. I think his first impulse was to cut and run but he stood fast and let us watch him take a grip on himself.

  “Oh,” he said, half strangling on the words. “It’s you again.”

  “Some days it’s like that,” Gibby said. “Even in a town as big as this, you keep bumping into the same people wherever you go.”

  “Yeah,” the man muttered. “’Specially in Grand Central Station. Great spot for meeting people, Grand Central Station.”

  “You’re meeting someone?” Gibby asked.

  “The big boy. I’ve been worrying about him.”

  “You mean Jellicoe?”

  The man laughed. “You did think I was kidnaping him,” he said. “I can see you’ve been checking up. There’s one comfort anyhow. Whatever he’s doing, the drunken bastard isn’t driving. We’ve got his car.”

  “Last we saw, you had him. How’d he get away from you?”

  The man shrugged. “I still got a lot to learn,” he said. “He tells me he’s got to go to the john. If I was smart I would have gone in with him but do you figure a drunk, he’s going to be so tricky, he’ll find a john it’s got two entrances? I wait where he went in but that ain’t where he comes out, the tricky son-of-a-bitch.”

  “And after he went to all that trouble to shake you, you’re expecting him to keep a date here?”

  “He don’t know we got a date,” the man said. “I’m probably wasting my time. Maybe he won’t go home to Connecticut at all. Maybe he’ll get in a taxi and ride that way all the way to the country. If it’s like that, there’s nothing I can do about it; but there’s just the chance. Not having his car, he might take the train. He comes here to take the train, I pick him up.”

  Gibby grinned. “How do you know he’s that drunk?” he asked. “What makes you think he’s drunk enough to go out on an incoming train?”

  I expected he would have to spell that out before he could have any answer to it, but I was wrong. The man caught it on the first bounce.

  “I che
ck every train that goes out to his neck of the woods,” the man explained. “Between trains this is as good a place to wait as any. I can’t watch all the entrances to the lower level where them commuters’ trains go out, but that over there is one way in.”

  “That over there” was an entrance to the station’s lower level, but it was a direction to which the man had kept his back steadily turned up to the time when Gibby had accosted him. So far as I could determine, he was facing that way now only because he’d had to turn to talk to us.

  “What do you want with Jellicoe?” Gibby asked.

  “I want to take him home if I can. Even Jellicoe sobers up for a while in the morning. He sobers up and you’ve been taking care of him, he’s grateful. That’s always a nice piece of change, Jellicoe’s gratitude.”

  “Better than rolling him when he’s drunk?” Gibby asked.

  The man started to take offense at that question. I was ready to predict every word he would say, all the protestations that he was being misjudged. I have a hunch that he read it in our faces that we were way ahead of him. He switched away from any pretensions to innocence.

  “A lot better,” he said. “You can roll a drunk, sure, and what have you got? A one-time shot. Gratitude can happen all the time, again and again and again. It can be as good as a meal ticket.”

  Gibby nodded. “Worth the effort,” he said. “But you have to work at it. Jellicoe could have gone by you a dozen times while you were busy giving the dame the eye.”

  “I suppose. I was trying to make up my mind. That’s a real nice-looking little tomato. I’m thinking maybe I’ll say to hell with Jellicoe and have a try at making that. If you seen me giving her the eye, you also seen what happened to the guy who did try to make her. I saw that, it put my mind back on Jellicoe, but who can blame me for thinking about it? Like they say, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

  Gibby laughed. “Okay, Jack,” he said. “We’ll be seeing you.”

  Joan Loomis had been revived. She was on her feet and Bannerman was helping her toward the waiting room. Her walking was a bit rubber-kneed but she was managing all right. She had a station policeman supporting her on the other side.