“That don’t mean I done anything,” she protested. “I done just like I told you.”
Gibby reassured her, explaining that we could hardly eliminate from the picture such obviously innocent fingerprints as hers unless we had hers for identification. She was a bit restive about having them taken but she submitted with not too much fuss.
With her guidance we went through the drawers and the closet. It was quite as she had said—no low-cut gorgeousness, no nylon transparencies, no black lace seductions. There was only the sparsest of sparse wardrobes. Not a spare nightdress, only one solitary set of underthings, and nothing anywhere that Nora McGuire next door might not have primly worn for her school-teaching.
“Even her laundry,” the outraged cleaning woman said. “She’d drop things in the hamper I should rinse them out for her when I come in. Even them things, her dirty things, they’ve been swiped, too.”
We covered the whole place. The bottle of Scotch was gone. Nothing left in that department but the soda. Gibby wondered about papers. There were no letters or papers of any kind and the cleaning woman dismissed those quickly. There never had been any. She had seen Miss Bell when she would go down for her mail. She would read a letter and throw it away. She wasn’t one to keep stuff, the woman said.
We did find her purse. It was in one of her drawers along with a handsome assortment of other purses and a collection of smart-looking gloves. This one purse was evidently the one she had carried last. It contained the usual cosmetic items but it also contained money, $250 in bills plus a couple of dollars in silver. The cleaning woman took that discovery as the crowning outrage. This had been the meanest kind of burglary, she felt. Nothing had been taken except the things that would ordinarily have passed on to her for her Gloria, nothing except the Scotch and the cigarettes. Gloria was a good girl. She had never tasted a drop in her life. She didn’t smoke either.
We made another discovery and that also outraged Gloria’s mamma. In the drawer with that one set of demure underthings we found a prayer book and a couple of tracts. The tracts were those Jehovah’s Witnesses sell on street corners.
“Them,” the cleaning woman sneered. “None of them was ever around here before. Who wants them?”
The last of it was we had to get her out of the apartment. Gloria could use the suits and the coat and the nylons and the bags and the gloves and, since they would have been hers anyhow when Miss Bell would have been through with them and nobody could say she wasn’t through with them now, Gloria’s mamma came down with the idea that she might just as well pack up anything her Gloria could use and take it right off with her.
Gibby had to explain about the possibility of a next of kin. He did the best anyone could with it, but Gloria’s mamma wasn’t convinced.
The things had been promised to her. It was injustice. That’s what it was.
CHAPTER TWO
HER cries of injustice were by no means the whole of it. She was also a theorist. She wasn’t content with simply yelling burglary. She insisted that we look for a burglar who was also a ghoul. Miss Bell was dead. She had known Miss Bell well. Miss Bell would never have been caught dead in a flannel nightgown. Therefore it followed inevitably that Miss Bell had not been wearing that red flannel when she had died. The burglar had stopped at nothing in collecting the loot. He had even stripped off the poor girl’s body one of those glamorous red nylon-and-lace jobs and substituted for it that detestable flannel.
We had Nora McGuire in from next door. The high-value-on-privacy girl could go on indefinitely making all her nicely turned points to the effect that she had never had the slightest interest in her neighbor’s habits, but she had already confessed to us that she was enough a woman to have taken some considerable notice of her neighbor’s clothes. We asked Nora to look over the things in the drawers and the closet. Nora was appalled. She remembered a pink satin evening coat. She remembered several dazzling dresses. She was by no means as letter perfect in the late Sydney Bell’s wardrobe as was Gloria’s mamma, but she remembered enough. None of the party clothes she had been seeing on her neighbor’s back were now to be found in her neighbor’s apartment.
She had, of course, no knowledge of the lingerie or the nightdresses, but she did give it as her opinion that the items in that department, as described by Gloria’s mamma, would have been the sort of thing she would have expected. Sydney Bell had not been the flannel nightgown type. They were agreed on that.
They left us with something to think about. I turned to Gibby.
“What now?” I asked. “Do we go hunting the ghoulish burglar?”
“That,” Gibby said. “Or else we concentrate on the religious tracts. I don’t know that they aren’t worse.”
I didn’t quite follow him there but he sketched enough of it in and I was able to take it from there to fill out the whole picture. Party girl murdered. Every last physical trace of her party-girl life removed. Girl left looking like the complete Miss Prim in death. Prayer book and religious tracts among her things. Start reconstructing from that and see where you come out.
It’s all too easy. Sydney Bell has been leading the gay life. She goes out partying. Men call on her, even at strange hours. She has fun. Then she meets a man and this man is different. He’s a serious type who talks religion at her. Would Sydney Bell have had any time for a type like that? One never knows. The wilder forms of religiosity do have a way of turning up in extraordinarily virile and ardent people at times.
You must understand that this isn’t religion we’re talking about. It’s insanity, the kind of insanity that comes of guilt feelings gone out of hand, the sense of sin run amok. This type sets out to save the girl’s soul. He calls it that in his twisted thinking and he believes it. She goes for him. She’s saved. She makes the clean sweep of all her fripperies, all the trappings of that sinful life she used to lead. Next stop the Kingdom of Heaven, but the poor girl hadn’t dreamed it could be that quick. This crazy type she’s fallen for does one of those quick twists you have to look for in people who have set up housekeeping in a fantasy world. Abruptly the whole picture turns itself inside out for him. He hasn’t saved her soul at all. She has led him into corruption instead. He rears up out of her sinful bed, puts his hands around her fair, white throat and chokes the life out of her. Then he buttons her up neatly to the chin. It’s in character. His sense of propriety has been satisfied, and he goes his crazy way.
In any murder case, as soon as the surrounding circumstances begin to take on a peculiar look, somebody is bound to come up with the easy out, a mad killer. The thought is, of course, that, having a collection of evidence which you cannot make add up into any rational pattern, you can just stop trying, tick it off as the work of a madman, and call it one that cannot be expected to make sense. Actually it is never quite that simple. The mad killing is not without pattern. It may follow a mad pattern but within its own crazy frame it will be rational enough.
The possibility of a madman in the Sydney Bell killing was not one of those things that popped into our heads because we were feeling baffled and defeated. The evidence had begun to form and it was giving sharp indication that it might be shaping in that special direction. It wasn’t the easy out. It was a conclusion to which we might very possibly be forced, however reluctantly, because when they are like that they can be awfully tough.
Meanwhile, of course, Gibby was quite right. It was no good trying to forget the possibility of the madly righteous loon but it was also no good settling for anything that definite, at least until we had done all the available digging along all the lines that presented themselves.
We had just gone into a huddle with the lab boys to see whether they might have something that could be a lead for us, when the cleaning woman came pounding back in a fever of excitement. She knew where all Miss Bell’s lovely things had gone. She could take us there and show us.
“It’s only around the corner,” she said. “Secondhand clothes it is and never a thing in the window that is
n’t from five years ago and nobody, they’re anybody, is wearing it any more until just now I went past and I seen it right away. One of Miss Bell’s beautiful red nightgowns—nylon and lace and all sheer like she had made special for her all the time—one of them is in the window and inside I can see hanging the pink coat and the new evening dress with the harem skirt.”
We let her show us the way. It was, as she said, just around the corner, and the shop looked as unprepossessing as she had described it. A sign in the window said they bought and sold used clothing and the stuff on display could hardly have looked more used. It was a crowded window except for a space in the center of it. That space was empty.
Gloria’s mamma gasped. She pointed at the empty space.
“It was there only a minute ago,” she said. “Right there.”
We could see through the window into the shop. A rather frowzy woman who unmistakably had the secondhand look was in there with a man. She was holding up for his inspection something that was so red and so filmily transparent that it looked like a tongue of flame. It had lace on it and the lace appeared to be in just that area that Gloria’s mamma had described to us as here.
The cleaning woman dug Gibby in the ribs and pointed. Gibby nodded. He made no move. He just watched through the window. We made quite an audience at that window. So much so, that I began to feel a bit crowded. There were the three of us but there were two men as well and they all but had their noses pressed to the windowpane. I glanced at them and dismissed them as not worth a second look. I may have wondered a bit at their being interested in this window, but I also dismissed that.
They could see that red nightgown the woman was showing to the man inside. No man who is a man can look at one of those things without immediately dreaming up a picture that would put some dame into it and it wouldn’t be just any dame either. It would be something luscious, but necessarily. Tossing off the pair who were outside looking in as a couple of idle dreamers, I concentrated on that more enterprising character inside who appeared to be on the road toward implementing his dream.
That was one big hunk of man. He had a very yellow look, but it was the look of the outdoors type who happens to be having a spot of ill health. You know how a really dark suntan looks when the healthy, red blood isn’t coursing under it. This lad had been out in the sun plenty, but under the bronzing he was carrying an unhealthy pallor.
His clothes didn’t help. He was wearing a reddish brown suit and a reddish brown shirt and a yellow tie, colors calculated to make a sick man look sicker. The shop’s show window had been modernized with a surrounding trim of mirror glass and I noticed that this gent’s color scheme seemed to be repeated in the glass. I turned my head to have a look at what was reflecting in such splendid combinations of brown and yellow.
It was an enormous convertible, parked at the curb, a very special-looking job of bronze paint and yellow leather upholstery. It was an easy guess that the convertible belonged to the man in the shop. He was dressed to match it. Another car, far less spectacular, was double-parked just outside the big bronze and yellow job.
I turned back to the show window and a new detail caught my eye. The mirror glass reflected the convertible’s license plate. It was a Connecticut license—one of those that is all letters and no numerals—and in the glass it read JERK. That seemed too comic and I turned back for another look at the car. Of course, the plate read KREJ.
Meanwhile inside the shop the man, whom I was now in my own mind calling Krej spelled backwards, dug in his pocket and brought out a couple of bills which he gave the woman. She put the luscious red nightgown in a bag for him. The two men who had been watching with us moved. They didn’t move far, only to the shop door. There they waited; and when the big boy came out with his package, they fell in on either side of him.
“Hi,” they said.
“Hi,” he answered in a husky whisper. “What brings you over here?”
He started toward his car and then he turned back to his two friends, scowling. He had seen how the car double-parked outside him had him boxed in.
One of the men laughed and they both came in beside him again and very close.
“We’ve been chasing you, stupid,” the one who was laughing told him. “Mae’s got a party going and she asked me to bring you. Seeing as how we’ve been watching you buy that red thing, you can’t pretend to us you won’t be in the mood for the Mae bit tonight.”
The big fellow didn’t relax the scowl. “If you move so I can get out,” he said, “I’ll see you over at Mae’s later.” It was still the husky whisper. He sounded as though he had lost his voice, was trying to get it back, and wasn’t making it.
They moved over as far as the convertible where they held a whispered huddle. After a moment, the huddle at the curb broke up. More exactly it moved around the Cadillac to the car that was double-parked outside it. They went in that same formation they had held in crossing to the curb. The big man was in the middle. The two others were beside him, one on either side, and they walked close. The one who had done all the laughing and talking got in the car and big boy got in beside him. He was still clutching his parcel in his massive mitt. With his free hand he was passing over a ring with keys on it to the remaining man. That third one hadn’t gotten into the car.
Gibby made a quick dash out into the street. I went with him. We met the one with the key ring just as he was turning toward the Cadillac. It was close quarters there between the parked cars and Gibby kept going almost as though the man wasn’t there. Gibby rammed right into him and pushed him backwards. When Gibby came to a standstill, he had the man backed, tight against the car and there was no question that he was holding him there.
“What the hell?” the man said, clawing ineffectually at Gibby’s arm.
Gibby ignored him and talked past him to the big boy with the yellow face.
“Anything we can do for you, mister?” he asked. “It looks as though you’re in trouble.”
The big boy went some shades yellower. “Trouble?” he repeated, stupidly echoing Gibby’s word.
“These two ganging up on you?” Gibby asked.
The vocal one of the pair had had his foot on the starter. Now he took it off and laughed again.
“Us gang up on him?” he said. “He could whip the two of us with one hand tied behind his back.”
“How about taking him with both hands tied behind his back?” Gibby asked. “You could handle him then, couldn’t you? Especially with a gun.”
The man stopped laughing. “Look, mister,” he growled, “maybe you’re drunk or something. Maybe you’ll go away now and bother someone else.”
“Your buddy here hasn’t the gun,” Gibby said. “He’s clean.”
As though he were demonstrating the fact on the man he had crowded against the side of the car, Gibby slapped him smartly in all the standard, concealed-weapons places.
“You’re not drunk,” the man behind the wheel said. “I can see that. What’s with you anyway? You take it in the arm?”
“District Attorney’s Office,” Gibby said and brought out his credentials.
None of the three even bothered to look at them. I’ve never seen people more easily convinced.
The man who had been doing the talking climbed out from behind the wheel.
He was talking as he came. “I suppose I could start yelling,” he said. “I have a hunch there’s all kinds of rights I have in a thing like this, but what the hell, you want to feel me up, mister, go ahead. Have your fun. Only look out you don’t tickle. People tickle me, I get the hiccups and when I get them I go on forever.”
He came around into that narrow space between the cars and he put his arms up at his sides. Gibby ran him over.
I don’t know whether I had been expecting a gun or just hoping for one. This was one of those limbs Gibby goes out on and when you’re out that far, brother, look out. You had better be right. This character did have all kinds of rights and Gibby was walking over every last one
of them. He didn’t find a gun. He didn’t yield an inch. He wasn’t letting them see it was bothering him. I hoped vaguely that I was managing to play it as deadpan. I had a feeling anyone could have seen how much it was bothering me.
“No gun,” Gibby said. “What’s the setup?”
“Setup? We’re friends. We spot his car in traffic. You’ll give us that. It’s no trouble to spot. We want him on a party we’re having, so we pick him up. I know we’re double-parked, but it’s only for a minute and since when is the DA’s office handing out the traffic tickets?”
Gibby looked to the big boy. He was still hanging on to his package and he hadn’t found his voice. He had to try twice before he made even the husky whisper come.
“They’re my friends,” he said. “We’re going to be late for the party. The dames, they’ll get sore we keep them waiting.”
“Okay,” Gibby said, stepping back out of it. “Have fun.”
“We can go now?” It was the man who hadn’t bothered to yell for his rights who did the speaking.
Gibby nodded.
“Thanks,” the man murmured with only the smallest edge of sarcasm on it. He slid back behind the wheel and put his foot on the starter again. “See you,” he said to the man he was leaving with us.
With a wave of his hand, he pulled away. He was carrying New York plates. Gibby wrote down the number.
The man who had the Cadillac keys shook them and made them jingle. “Brother,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “You nearly tore that one.”
Gibby looked at him coldly. “Feel like talking?” he asked.
“Only to ask how come you didn’t smell the liquor on his breath,” the man said. “How far do you think he can drive with all that liquor in him before he’s pinched or even has an accident? This isn’t the first time we’ve talked him out from behind the wheel. You don’t know, but I do. He can be stubborn. Stubborn, and how. He’s all right now. I’ll put the Caddy in the garage for him and I don’t turn up with the keys till he’s slept it off. What did you think we were doing? Kidnaping the little fellow?”
The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Page 3
