Gibby shrugged. “A way of life,” he said. “Sending laundry out is thinking ahead to next week when you are going to need a clean shirt. You’re in a line of business where next week you’ll just as likely as not be in jail, you live for today. It’s particularly characteristic of these boys. Their arrest rate is high and their conviction rate is also high. Sentences, on the other hand, are short. A couple of months and they’re back in circulation. Another couple of months and they’re picked up again. It’s in and out all the time for them, so while they’re out they live from day to day. If you see much of them, you get so you can spot it. The day they’re holding, they’ll be the well-dressed man, everything the very latest wrinkle. Hit them when they’ve had a run of thin days and they don’t look shabby. They look dirty. No clean shirt to change into and no dough for buying a clean shirt so they go on wearing it while the rim at the edge of the collar gets darker and darker.”
While Gibby talked, he was going through all that fancy raiment the dead man had hung on the chair when he had gone to take his shower. He seemed to be looking for something and, whatever it was, he wasn’t finding it. He talked to the cops who were working the place and told them to watch especially for any papers—receipts, storage checks. Anything of that nature they turned up he would be wanting.
Jim Harrity came bouncing in and interrupted him.
“They’re all on the move,” he said. “Maybe you can figure it.”
“Bannerman and the girl gone from the hotel?” Gibby asked.
“They came in. They sat in the lobby together awhile and talked. Then they went up to their rooms. Then almost immediately they went out again, but fancy.”
“How fancy?”
“He came right back down to the lobby and hung around. You know, trying to look like a potted palm. A minute or two later she came down and tore out to the street. He didn’t join her. He followed her. The bellhops enjoyed the show. The way those hellbops have it, he was hanging around the lobby waiting for her to come down and go out. She did and he tailed her.”
“That’s two on the move,” Gibby said. “What about George?”
“Full report,” Harrity said. “The station cops know George and they know his record. He hangs around their station and gives a gal the eye, they watch him.”
As Harrity repeated to us the full report, it became evident that the station cops had been keeping a good watch. They had given him the full deal on the part of it we had ourselves witnessed except that they did add an interesting detail even to that chunk of it. They had first spotted George when he had been watching the Incoming Trains bulletin board.
“Knowing the business he’s always been in,” Harrity said, “they naturally wondered if maybe he wasn’t there to pick up a flesh shipment due in from the hinterland. Nothing much they could have done about it if he was, but you can’t blame them for being curious.”
“He was just watching the board?” Gibby asked. “Not trying to make any girl?”
“The girl came later. He had been there several minutes just watching the board when the girl turned up. She was watching the board, too, except that then George gave up on the board and took to watching her instead.”
He went on from there to give us what we already had. The man who had come along behind the girl and put his hands over her eyes, the slap, the faint, the men from the DA’s office who had talked to George, the whole continuity. Gibby hurried him through that part of it and asked him for anything they’d given him on George after that. They had given him plenty.
George had left the Incoming Train board and had sauntered over to a vantage point from where he could see through the glass doors into the waiting room. He had watched us until we had left the station, taking the girl and Bannerman with us. Then he had returned to his old place, but now he had been turned the other way, watching the ramp down to the suburban-trains level.
Periodically he had gone down to the lower level and waited at the gate of one of the Connecticut trains. He would wait there while the train loaded to go out and as soon as it had departed he would go back to his old post and watch the ramp again.
At this point Gibby had another question.
“This,” he asked, “didn’t happen until after we’d talked to him? He had shown no interest in the ramp or in the Connecticut trains before that?”
“Only in the Incoming board and the girl,” Harrity said.
“Good,” Gibby said. “He still in the station?”
“No, he’s gone off with the girl.”
At that point I had a question. This was going a bit fast for me.
“What girl?” I asked.
“Your girl,” Harrity said. “The saint and flap dame.”
“The what?” I yowled. Despite the hellbops of only a few moments before, I had completely forgotten about Harrity’s spoonerisms.
“Faint and slap,” Gibby growled. “Joan Loomis.”
“I was guessing Joan Loomis,” Harrity said smugly. “George was back watching the ramp. Your babe returned to the station and walked right up to George and engaged him in conversation. If it had been the other way around, maybe the station cops would have taken a hand, but the way it was they just watched. In fact, they had it figured that everything was under control because the girl talked to George and there was this guy who had followed her into the station. They knew him, too. He was the one who had soaked up the slap. He was right in there watching and they made the not-too-unnatural mistake of thinking he was one of your boys tailing her. So, when she left the station with George, and this man—he’ll be Bannerman, of course—soft-shoed after them at a discreet distance, they told themselves it was all safely in the hands of the DA’s office and they kept their own mitts off it.”
Gibby sighed. “That leaves us only one,” he said. “Jellicoe. What do they report on him?”
Harrity shook his head. “I exaggerated,” he said. “I have nothing on Jellicoe. Nobody reports seeing him or anything that answers his description.”
One of the lab boys who had been working the body had come over and was standing by waiting to talk to us. We took a break from Harrity and listened. What he had for us was one of those tiny fragments those boys so dearly love. It had come from under one of the dead man’s fingernails. It wasn’t of the order of those fine scrapings that sometimes yield up information under microscopic examination. This was big enough to be seen with the naked eye and enough bigger than that to be readily identifiable. It was a bit of colorless, transparent Scotch tape about an eighth of an inch wide and perhaps three-eighths of an inch long.
“It was hanging out from under his fingernail,” the lab man said, “and it was quite dry. It isn’t likely that he could have been under the shower with it without its washing away, but if it only washed loose, it wouldn’t have been dry. It’s a cinch he picked it up after he came out from under the shower.”
Gibby gave it the works. He had every cop in town alerted to pick up on sight Milton Bannerman, Joan Loomis, K. R. E. Jellicoe, and the late Harry’s friend, George. We already had the Connecticut police co-operating on a lookout for K. R. E., but Gibby wasn’t satisfied.
“There’s too much happening,” he grumbled, “and we’re not making enough of it happen. Too much of this is not under control.”
“We’re not making any of it happen,” I interpolated hastily. “We don’t even know that this second murder is connected with our case.”
Actually I didn’t want it connected. You have a murder investigation going and before you’ve even gone to first base with it, another murder pops at you. That isn’t good. It’s likely to draw some pretty serious criticism. There are always the wise boys who’ll be ready to say that if the DA’s office had gotten off its tail faster or acted more effectively, they could have held it down to only the one killing.
If this second strangling were to turn out to be linked to our first one, we’d be wide open to that sort of criticism, however unfair it might be. That was bad enoug
h, but Gibby seemed to be wanting it worse than that. He seemed to be disgruntled over the fact that it hadn’t been some move of ours that had precipitated the second killing.
“That much we do know,” he insisted. “This one comes right out of the other one. It may only be a hunch but it’s the best hunch we’ve got to ride.”
“Look,” I said. “We’ve been assigned to the Bell killing. Let’s stay with that one. The Old Man can give this one to somebody else.”
“What good is that?”
“Working on one at a time is enough. We don’t have to be greedy.”
“Don’t be silly. The only person we’ve got really linked to the Bell killing sneaks off to pick up with George, and George’s buddy or partner or what have you turns up strangled. Where does the one case stop and the other start?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we ought to get to the Old Man, tell him what we know, and let him decide whether he wants us to work this killing or not. It is his office. Remember?”
“We haven’t the time for that,” Gibby said.
“What are we going to rush off and do now?” I asked.
I couldn’t see that there was a thing we could do just then. It was clearly a matter of waiting till one or more of the people we wanted were turned up for us by the police. It wasn’t that I didn’t know Gibby well enough to realize that he would be itching to get out and look for them himself. It was rather that I couldn’t see that there was any reasonable place we could go to start looking.
“Connecticut,” Gibby said, answering me in a word.
It was a word I couldn’t make much of.
“Jellicoe?” I asked.
“Jellicoe,” Gibby said. “Harry here, according to his own story and to George’s story, stowed Jellicoe’s car away somewhere in a garage. He should have had on him a ticket for the car or a receipt or something. You were the one who was pushing the burglary angle and you may not have been too far wrong. I’ve been through all his pockets. No ticket, no receipt.”
“So what do we do in Connecticut?” I asked.
“We see if Jellicoe’s recovered his car and gone home. We have a talk with him.”
“Now, look,” I argued. “It’s his car. There are lots of easier ways he could get it back. He wouldn’t have to murder Harry for it. It’s not as though there were any signs of a fracas. Harry was taken by surprise.”
“Uhhuh,” Gibby muttered noncommittally.
“Before we go hightailing off to Connecticut,” I insisted, “we can call Jellicoe’s doctor and lawyer. They pulled him out of Bellevue. He’s probably with one or both of them right now.”
“Okay,” Gibby said. “You phone them. You just want to talk to him about his stolen car.”
It was easy. I got on the phone and I made the calls. I got on to the lawyer first. He was much interested in the stolen car. He was more than interested. He was distressed about it. You may not know this big Wall Street attorney type, but we’ve tangled with them often enough to know them well. They’re always dealing in millions, handling the affairs of people who own fleets of cars. You might think that this type would take the loss of one single car in his stride. It would be small stuff, but that isn’t the way their minds work. It is property, client’s property, and nothing is more important than client’s property. He made no bones about it. Jellicoe’s property losses were one of his major worries. K. R. E. was so careless. He didn’t know what he was going to do about the boy.
I asked him where we could find the boy that night and he referred me to the doctor. He had left K. R. E. in the doctor’s hands. I was just dialing the doctor’s number when Gibby came over to the phone. He had a little card in his hand.
“No burglary,” he said. “Here’s the ticket for the jerk’s little painted wagon.”
“Where did you find it?” I asked.
“In one of Harry’s shoes,” Gibby answered. “He put it there to keep it specially safe, but I don’t know whether it was because he took his responsibility for the car so seriously or because he had made a couple of important notes on the back of it.”
He turned the card so I could see the back. There were two names written on it. One was Milton Bannerman. The other was Joan Loomis.
I sighed. “All right,” I said. “You win. This one does belong to us.”
“How are you doing with their eminences?” Gibby asked.
“Just finished with the attorney. He’s unhappy. The jerk is congenitally careless with his property and the fact that he can afford to be cuts no ice.”
“He know where we can find his client?”
“He suggested I try the doctor. He left him in the doctor’s care, but now that we have the receipt that angle’s out.”
“Murder’s still in,” Gibby said. “Let’s try the doctor.”
I dialed the number and got the doctor. He was easier to talk to than the attorney. He didn’t have Jellicoe with him. He had seen him earlier in the evening, but he wouldn’t have the first idea of where his patient might be now. I explained that we had seen him at Bellevue and had heard that he had left the hospital in the company of his attorney and his physician.
“That’s right,” the doc said. “If you want him badly, I’d suggest that you keep trying Bellevue. He should be turning up there again before the night is out.”
“Bellevue?”
“He wasn’t ready for the alcoholic ward when I saw him but he was on his way—on the way and eager. I had a time making him sit still even long enough for me to check over his dressings. Even when I told him that a Bellevue patch-up job is always adequate but that you can’t expect a youngster who’s working emergencies to be too much concerned over the possibility of leaving a few permanent facial scars, he was raring to go. I had to talk fast to get him to sit still long enough for me to take the dressings off and check them over. Actually he was all right. It was a nice clean job they did for him down there. The dressings were a little larger than necessary but all I did was fix him up with some fresh ones that looked a little less spectacular.”
“Then you would guess that he didn’t go on home after he left you?”
“Any place but home. I’ve known the boy all his life. He graduated to me out of the hands of his pediatrician. He was full of steam while I was working on him. That fight he was in must have interrupted his drinking and he was in a full spate of eagerness to go back and get on with it again.”
“The fight?” I asked.
“No, the drinking. He’ll be ready for the alcoholic ward before morning.”
It was evident that the man wasn’t quite as much resigned as he tried to sound. He did go into considerable detail in his explanation of the efforts he had made to quiet the jerk down. He had tried to give him a sedative, offering it on the ground that changing the dressings was going to hurt, but Jellicoe had fought off both needle and tablet. The night had been young and the jerk had been raring to go.
I hung up and gave Gibby a full report on the conversation. So far as I could see, Gibby was in something of the same frame of mind as the doctor had just been describing to me in his discussion of K. R. E. Jellicoe. Gibby was also raring to go and there wasn’t going to be anything to dampen him down. He did give me an attentive hearing, but it seemed to me that he was enjoying this intelligence I’d had from Jellicoe’s physician far more than its content warranted. He appeared to be finding it quite as stimulating as he had found the notes written on the back of the garage receipt.
“This adds up,” he said, when I had finished. “It adds up to the craziest sort of totals, but it does add up. I’ve had a check on where the jerk lives in Connecticut and I’ve been looking at the timetable. He lives in Westport and a train was leaving for Westport right at the time we were fixing it up with Bannerman to pull the guess-who routine on his girl friend. The station cops tell us that George didn’t start keeping an eye on any New England trains till after we’d had our talk with him and now we have exactly the same thing on ou
r own observation. You have to hand it to George. He had all the answers for us. He thinks on his feet.”
“The way I add it,” I said, “all this means he was in the station because of Joan Loomis and not because of Jellicoe. That’s what every bit of evidence is screaming at us, isn’t it?”
“Unless,” Gibby said, “he was there because of Joan and Jellicoe.”
“How do you make that?” I asked.
“Bannerman’s dames,” Gibby said. “It could be that his sister looked worse than she was. It could also be that he’s been working overtime at making her look better than she was. It can be the same way with his girl friend. Is Joan as good as she seems? Was it drink the jerk was thirsting for while his doctor changed his dressings? He does have a reputation for hitting the bottle, but he has an even noisier reputation for having a thing for the dames. The first time we noticed him he was buying a red nightgown. Does he want a nightgown of that kind if all he has on his mind is liquor? I haven’t known him all his life, but I can make a better guess than his doctor did at what it was he was so eager for. Add it up. He wanted it. George is in the business of providing it. How would it add up if Joan should be what George is providing tonight?”
I shrugged it off. “We can’t do anything about that till we find them,” I said.
“We can look for them. That’s why we’re heading for Westport right now.”
“You have the car receipt. That means the car is still in the garage and the station cops don’t say that George and Joan headed for any Westport train. They left the station.”
Gibby nodded. “And if George knew where Harry put the car,” he said, “there might be no need of the receipt. Jellicoe could go around to the place, identify himself, and take it out without a receipt.”
“Easy enough to find out if he did,” I said. “We call the garage and ask.”
Gibby laughed. “I’ve already had one of the boys do that,” he said. “I wasn’t telling you because I thought I could cut down the arguments. The car’s still there. Nobody’s come around for it.”
The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Page 13