The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead

by Hampton Stone

  She shuddered and he took her hand in his and stroked it gently.

  Gibby came back to the table and sat down.

  “On all these calls you made,” he said, “you never got an answer? Not a wrong number answering or anything like that? Just no answer at all?”

  “No answer ever.”

  “Funny,” Gibby said. “I just called 0913. I got a Mrs. Hastings who stood on a chair last week to reach something down from a high shelf. She fell and broke her leg. She’s been home all week with her leg in a cast and she always answers her telephone because she’s so lonely and bored that even a wrong number is a diversion. She said her phone rang only twice in the last twenty-four hours. Once it was her brother calling and the other time her best friend.”

  Joan Loomis giggled nervously. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said. “I wasn’t even dialing the wrong number right. I suppose I’ve been more nervous and confused than I realized. How very silly.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS silly and it got sillier. We could have been working two completely different murders. We had formed our picture of the dead girl, a picture compounded from what we’d had from Nora McGuire and what the cleaning woman had given us. I can’t say that there weren’t the odd bits which would not fit in with that picture. There was the prayer book. There were the religious tracts. There was the relatively austere red flannel nightgown and there were the relatively sexless underthings. Odd as they had been, however, that had not been too disquieting. There were conceivable patterns into which they could have been fitted and we could hope that the very process of finding the proper fit for them could easily lead to breaking the case.

  Milton Bannerman’s picture of the dead girl, however, had at every point been at odds with our original idea of her. His description of his sister fitted with nothing but what had previously been our odd bits—the prayer book, the tracts, the red flannel nightgown, those underclothes which the cleaning woman’s daughter wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. That discrepancy, however, had not been too difficult to explain. Milton Bannerman had never been in New York before. The Ellie he had known had been a River Forks girl, and the River Forks’ Ellie Bannerman had been quite unlike New York’s Sydney Bell. Ellie had changed but she had never wanted her brother to know anything of the change. Each time she had gone back to River Forks to visit him she had for the occasion resumed her River Forks ways and her River Forks personality. How could he have known what Sydney Bell was really like? So far as he had been allowed to know, that had been the whole extent of the change. His sister had assumed a professional name for her modeling. Otherwise she had continued to be the little Ellie he had always known.

  Joan Loomis, on the other hand, was very much something else again. She had come to New York. She had stayed with Milt’s sister, had shared the one-room apartment, shared the double bed. In the face of all that, nevertheless, she seemed to be quite as deluded about Sydney Bell as was brother Milton. She knew the red flannel nightdress well. She thought it was sweet. It was the one Ellie had been using when Joan had been with her.

  Gibby hauled out of his pocket the torn hunk of lace he had taken over from the policeman at Bellevue. He laid it on the table in front of the girl. She looked at it, studying it as though she had never seen lace before.

  “Isn’t that pretty?” she said politely.

  “Too bad it’s torn,” Gibby murmured.

  She nodded and turned to Bannerman. “You find lace all over things in the stores here,” she said, “and it’s shocking the prices they charge for it, especially since it’s so impractical.”

  Bannerman gave her an approving smile. Beyond that, however, he behaved as though he couldn’t have cared less.

  “Was that hers?” Gibby asked.

  “Whose?” Joanie said.

  “Sydney Bell’s, Ellie Bannerman’s, your future sister-in-law’s.”

  “I don’t know. She may have had a dress or a blouse with lace on it. You know, a lace collar or something like that. But it wouldn’t be like this. She wouldn’t have red lace.”

  “This probably came off underwear,” Gibby said. “Pants or a nightgown, one of those things. You’ll know better about them than we can.”

  The girl blushed a pretty pink. “Oh, no,” she said. “I do know about those things. I’ve seen them in the stores, but Ellie never wore anything like that. Ellie has very nice things.”

  With Gibby in there pushing, she gave us a description of Ellie’s “nice things.” Believe it or not, I actually recognized some of the stuff from her descriptions, suits and a coat that had been hanging in the closet back at the apartment, nothing like the garments the cleaning woman had shown us, nothing like the pretties that had caught Nora McGuire’s eye.

  “Did you ever see her pink satin evening coat?” Gibby asked.

  “Pink satin?” She gave it careful thought. “I know I never saw anything like that,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve seen all her things but I doubt very much that she would have owned a pink satin coat. It wouldn’t have been at all like Ellie.” She turned to Bannerman for corroboration. “You know how she dressed, Milt,” she said. “She did have nice things but nothing showy or vulgar. Pink satin, why, that sounds—it sounds…” She paused, fumbling for the word.

  Bannerman came up with it for her. “It sounds chorus-girly,” he said. “I’ve been telling you Ellie wasn’t anything like that.”

  Gibby scooped the red lace up off the table and stowed it away. He seemed to be changing the subject. Knowing the score as well as I did, I realized that he wasn’t. He asked the Loomis girl when she had first arrived in town, how long she had been with Ellie before she left for Boston, whether she had ever seen Ellie’s cleaning woman or the girl who lived in 5E.

  She hadn’t seen the cleaning woman but she had heard about her. She knew that Ellie had been having her twice a week and what her days were. The woman had been in the day before Joanie arrived and had been due again the day Joanie had left for Boston, but Joanie had been out to catch her morning train before the woman had turned up. Joanie had never run into the girl in 5E.

  I could see what Gibby was after. He was trying to close the loopholes, to make quite certain that we were indeed faced with a contradiction. We couldn’t ignore the possibility that Sydney Bell had been every bit the party girl her neighbor and her cleaning woman thought her to be and that, being what she was, she had nevertheless done the complete job of keeping any knowledge of it from her brother, even to getting out of sight before Joanie arrived any of the things that might have given the people from River Forks a clue—all her clothing except for the few suitably austere items, her liquor, her cigarettes, her ash trays, her New York friends and acquaintances.

  It did seem as though she had done exactly that. There was only one small detail which loomed as an obstacle to believing it. Joan Loomis had been three days with Ellie in New York and then three days in Boston. On the very day when she had taken off for Boston the cleaning woman had later been in the apartment and had on that day seen all the fripperies which one day would have been Gloria’s. In other words we either had to make a choice between believing such evidence as we had from our New York witnesses and the testimony of our River Forks witnesses, or else we had to believe that Sydney Bell had removed all evidence of the gay life before Joan Loomis arrived on her visit, had brought it all back the first moment Joan was out of the apartment and had then whisked it away again in preparation for Joan’s return and Milton Bannerman’s arrival.

  Since the Bell girl had been dead more than twenty-four hours before her body had been discovered and since she had been found dressed in that red flannel deal and with her place stripped of all the fripperies, there arose an important question. Why would she bring back all that stuff for such a very brief time? She would have had to be extraordinarily quick in bringing it back before her cleaning woman came that day the Loomis girl had taken off for Boston, but then it did look as though she might have been
extraordinarily previous in getting it out of the apartment again.

  I had known all along that Gibby was working along those lines and his next question did demonstrate that for this particular stretch of the course we had been thinking with one mind. He asked little Loomis whether she had told Ellie exactly when to expect her back from Boston.

  “Not exactly,” Joan answered. “We knew Milt would be in tonight and I said I would come back the day before because I wanted another day for shopping here. I said I would take an afternoon train and she said I could come in any time. She would be home. She said it would be all right if I wanted to stay in Boston a little longer. I could come in any time, no matter how late. That’s what encouraged me to take that late train.”

  Part of it was answering Gibby and part of it was addressed more to Bannerman. Ellie had urged her not to hurry her Boston visit, had told her that she could come down from Boston even on the day when Milton was expected since he wasn’t to be in before evening. Joan explained that she would have planned it that way in the first place except that she had wanted that day for shopping, but then in Boston she had found this store where the basement shop had all the things she wanted and such very good values that she had actually done all her shopping in Boston and could easily have stayed over the extra night, coming down on a daytime train, except that she had been so emphatic with Ellie in telling her that she was coming back to shop that she had thought Ellie might worry about her if she did spend the extra night.

  “That was part of the reason I was angry with poor Ellie when she didn’t answer the bell,” she said. “I had worn myself out on that horrid night train only because I hadn’t wanted her to worry about me and then it did seem to me as though she had been so little concerned that she had gone out without even giving a thought to where I would sleep the night.”

  Gibby waited patiently till she had quite finished. She had subsided into silence and she was just sitting there wearing a faintly rueful look. It was the look of a girl who was blaming herself for having entertained harsh thoughts unjustly. Bannerman recognized the look for that. He patted her hand and murmured at her comfortingly.

  When Gibby spoke, he was also murmuring. “You had finished your shopping in that Boston bargain basement,” he said. “What were you buying all day today?”

  The girl flushed and dropped her eyes. She stole a sidelong glance at Bannerman and was fetched up short by the look of puzzled distress Gibby’s words had brought into his face. She dropped her eyes again. Gibby didn’t have to prod her. Bannerman did it for him.

  “That’s right, Joanie,” he said, speaking with the gentle severity of a father who is bent on leading an erring child back to the path of righteousness. “You were shopping today. They said at the hotel that you were out all day and came back with your arms full of parcels.”

  The girl rallied. She turned on him a really enchanting look of mingled guilt and mischief.

  “I do try so hard to be sensible,” she said. “And most of the time I am, but I am a girl and we are about to be married and I don’t know if I’ll ever be any place again where there are so many stores and so many things to buy. I did lose my head a little, having the whole day and Ellie not home and nothing to do until you came. I went out just to look. Ellie used to call it window-shopping, but then I just couldn’t resist things and I did buy some things I had never planned to buy and I really don’t need. It’s awful, I know, but it is such fun just once being foolish about money.”

  The severity faded out of Bannerman’s expression, and he was left with a look that had in it nothing but gentle indulgence. There was, after all, no other way he could look. The girl was being as cute as a button. I shot a glance at Gibby. He’s no less prey than the rest of us to most of the charming feminine attributes, but he has never gone for cuteness. A very little cuteness lasts Gibby a long time. He was looking sour. Quickly he changed over to looking dead-pan.

  Shifting his line of questioning, he worked over the area of Sydney Bell’s friends, her acquaintances, her business associations. He had come on completely arid ground. There was that faintly rueful embarrassment again. Joan Loomis had been thinking ill of the dead and it was not at all nice to think ill of the dead even if there had been no way of knowing that death was on the way.

  Ellie, she said, did have friends. She felt quite certain that Ellie lived a very busy social life when she was alone in New York. It wasn’t only that she had always assured them that she wasn’t lonely in the big city, that she never wanted for friends. It was more than that. Her telephone rang frequently and she had been on intimate terms with all her callers.

  “Everybody that called,” Joan said, “she was always calling them darling.”

  “Men or women?” Gibby asked.

  The question took the girl aback. “Women, of course,” she said. “I told you she called them darling and she wouldn’t be saying that to a man unless she was engaged to him and we would have known if she had been engaged.” She turned to Bannerman. “She would have told you,” she asked, “wouldn’t she?”

  “She would have told me,” Bannerman said. “It was a burglar who found her there asleep.”

  Gibby ignored him. He kept after the girl. He asked if she had ever had occasion to answer the telephone. She had not.

  “I had the feeling all along that she was ashamed of me,” she said, speaking directly at Bannerman, explaining her feelings to him. “She didn’t want her New York friends to know anything about the simple country girl her brother was marrying.”

  “You know Ellie wasn’t like that,” Bannerman protested.

  “I kept telling myself she wasn’t, but I couldn’t help that feeling. She had all these friends but she never asked anyone in to meet me. She never took me any place where we met anyone she knew. Why, up in Boston, they had practically the whole city in when I was with them. That’s why I stayed over till that late train. They were heartbroken at the thought of my going off and not meeting these friends they had over last night. I couldn’t help feeling that the way they did in Boston was the more natural way. It was just what we would do at home. This down here was so strange, so different. She didn’t even want me so much as picking up the phone for her. Even if she was in her shower, she would come out the minute it rang and it wasn’t as though she didn’t want me bothered. She would definitely tell me not to pick it up. She would be out to answer it. And you know it isn’t as though she had to live here or had to associate with the people she knows here. She could always come home to River Forks. You know that. So she must like the people and she couldn’t possibly be ashamed of them. I just couldn’t understand it any other way, Milt. She was ashamed of me.”

  “No, that’s nonsense,” Bannerman insisted. “Ellie adored you.”

  “Oh, she couldn’t have been sweeter,” Joan said quickly. “She couldn’t do too much for me. When I’d price things in the stores and they were so dreadfully high and I wanted to look around some more because there would have to be some place where you could get good values, why, I almost had to fight with her because she was always arguing that I should buy myself these fantastically expensive things and let her pay for them. If I had let her do it, she would have bought out whole stores and heaped the things on me. It was just that she kept me hidden away from everybody.”

  “Since everybody included a strangler,” Gibby said, “maybe she knew what she was doing.”

  Joan sighed. “It’s all so bewildering,” she said. “It’s horrible but it’s bewildering, too.”

  “Fingernails,” Gibby said.

  Both Bannerman and the girl looked at him. It was evident that they wanted to suggest that a comment of that sort made a confusing affair no less confused.

  “What about fingernails?” Bannerman asked.

  “How did she wear hers?”

  “How would she wear them?” Bannerman asked witheringly. “Clean, of course.”

  “Was she in the habit of biting them?”

  Joa
n Loomis answered that one. “Oh, no,” she said. “That was her job, having people take pictures of her hands. She took the most extraordinary care of her hands. She had to.”

  “Let’s see yours,” Gibby said.

  Joan put her hands out. She looked like a child who had come to table and been asked if she had remembered to wash her hands. She had remembered. They were like the rest of her, a very nice pair of hands. The nails were short and neatly rounded and they were the color and texture that nature made them. There was no lacquer or polish on them.

  “Mine aren’t anything,” she said. “Ellie’s were beautiful.”

  “All polished and colored?” Gibby asked.

  Bannerman shook his head. He didn’t like the idea at all and he wanted it quickly put out of the way.

  Joan spoke. “Only when she had to,” she said. “Sometimes she did have to have them all fancied up. If it was to be an advertisement for manicure stuff, she would have to have all that gop on them, but the rest of the time she had them done like mine.”

  “As long as yours are?” Gibby asked.

  “Mine aren’t long,” the girl said with noticeable indignation.

  “Hers were longer?”

  “No. They were like mine.”

  “Shorter?”

  “Only if she had just done them and then they might be a little shorter.”

  “Never painfully short?”

  “Of course not. That would be ugly and the people who took pictures of her hands wouldn’t want them.”

  Assuming that Gibby would be through with his examination of her hands, Joan started to put them back in her lap. Gibby reached across the table and took hold of them.

  “We’ll be needing your fingerprints,” he said. “Have you ever had your prints taken?”

  Bannerman came in angrily. “She hasn’t,” he said. “And she’s not going to have it done now. We’ve had more than enough of this. I can’t see that it’s getting anywhere and I don’t like it.”