The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead

by Hampton Stone

  “Or else,” he said softly, “I’ll have to find me a lawyer. I don’t know where I stand here, but I do know there’s something wrong with all this…” He paused searching for the words. After a moment he came up with them. “There’s something awfully wrong with all this highhanded nonsense,” he said.

  It was one of those situations. You may think Gibby was just playing the man, but there isn’t any easy way of handling it. Of course, you have to come out with the bad news sooner or later, but if you can get as much information as possible before you break it, it’s likely to be a big help. Once the word’s been spoken, once a relative has heard the word death, you can be a long time before you’ll get another question asked and a longer time before you’ll get one answered. Gibby hadn’t gotten much but he decided it was no use trying any longer. Milton Bannerman had dug in his heels. We had to give him some answers.

  “Your fiancée,” Gibby began. “We don’t know anything about her…”

  Bannerman broke in on him. “Don’t give me that, brother,” he said. “She’s been living right here with Ellie. She’s been here a whole week. Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about her.”

  “We haven’t been here a whole week, Mr. Bannerman,” Gibby said patiently. “We came in only today and as far as we know there’s been only the one girl living here, the girl who called herself Sydney Bell.”

  “Yes, that’s Ellie. Sydney Bell, that’s the name she uses on her job.” He stopped short. Something had gone a bit wrong with his breathing. He swallowed hard and spoke again. “You said ‘called herself Sydney Bell,’” he muttered. “What do you mean ‘called herself’?”

  “Sydney Bell is dead,” Gibby said gently. “The woman who cleaned for her came in early this afternoon and found her dead.”

  He stood quite still for a moment, stunned. Then he shook himself, just as a dog does coming out of water.

  “Is this some kind of a gag or something?” he asked. “It isn’t funny. It isn’t a bit funny.”

  “It isn’t funny,” Gibby said. “She was killed. Murdered, Mr. Bannerman.”

  “Ellie? You’re crazy. Who’d kill Ellie? What would anyone want to kill a kid like her for?”

  “We’re going to have to find that out.”

  Bannerman charged toward Gibby. He grabbed up a big fistful of the front of Gibby’s coat.

  “Joanie,” he said. “Was Joanie here? What’s happened to Joanie?”

  Gibby made no move to push him off.

  “I know this is rough,” he said, “But you must see that we’re not giving you a hard time. It’s the facts about your sister that are rough. There’s nothing we can do about those right now, but there may be something we can do about your fiancée.”

  Bannerman shook Gibby a little. “You leave Joanie alone,” he stormed. “You hear me? You leave her alone.”

  Gibby backed him toward a chair and pushed him down into it.

  “Now look,” he said. “I’m laying it on the line. We don’t know the first thing about Joanie. We hadn’t the first idea that she was supposed to be here. Just try to remember we’re on your side. You want to find her and we want to help you find her. We can’t even get started unless we know her name. We’ll try to find her for you, but give us her name. Give us a description. Answer some questions, man.”

  Bannerman spoke but the words were coming through tight, stiff lips. We had to strain to hear them.

  “She came here last week,” he said. “She wanted to shop and Ellie invited her to come stay with her. Ellie was helping Joanie with her shopping, Ellie knowing the stores here and all. I was supposed to be coming in tonight and the way we had it fixed I’d go to the hotel and wash up and come right over here. They were going to be here waiting for me. I got an earlier train and I thought I’d surprise them. Now this.”

  “Your fiancée?” Gibby asked. “Does she know anyone else in New York? Anyone she could have gone to?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody here in New York,” he said. “Nobody at all in the East except some cousins she’s got in Boston. She was…” He broke off and beat his fists against his forehead.

  “Come on,” Gibby urged. “Come on. Don’t stop to think.”

  Bannerman sighed. “No,” he said. “That’s no good. She wouldn’t be up there now, expecting me here tonight.”

  He explained that Joanie had planned to go up to Boston for a couple of days during her week in New York. She had promised to visit these cousins of hers but he felt certain that she would have done that earlier. She couldn’t possibly have planned it so that she wouldn’t be in town for his arrival.

  “Do you know the name of these cousins?” Gibby asked.

  “Hale. Mrs. Stephen Hale. They live on something I think it’s called Fenway. Is there a street called Fenway up in Boston?”

  “I hope there is,” Gibby said. “We’ll try it. Is that Joanie’s second name, Hale?”

  “No. Mrs. Hale’s her cousin. It’s Loomis—Joan Loomis.”

  I picked up the phone and dialed long distance. I got Boston Information and had them dig for the number.

  “There is a Fenway,” I said. “They’re looking up Hales.”

  “Thanks,” Bannerman murmured. He turned back to Gibby. “Tell me about Ellie,” he said. “How did it happen? You’re sure she’s dead. Not just missing or anything like that? Dead?”

  “She was strangled,” Gibby told him. “Killed. It’s murder. I’m going to have to ask you to identify the body, since you’re the next of kin.”

  It occurred to me that it had hardly been established that he was the next of kin. All we had was his own word for it that he was the dead girl’s brother. I put the thought aside. It didn’t matter too much at that point. If he was lying to us, confronting him with the body could do no harm and there might be a lot of use in it.

  There wasn’t any recoil from the idea of seeing the body.

  “I want to see her, poor kid,” he said. “I want to take her home to bury her, of course. Ellie, murdered. How does a thing like that happen to a little kid like Ellie?”

  Information came up with the number.

  “They’re ringing the Hales,” I said.

  Gibby dropped his hand on Bannerman’s shoulder. “Do you suppose you could talk to them?” he asked. “There’s no use telling them anything and throwing a scare into them if we don’t have to. Just ask if she’s up there or been up there. She could be on a train coming down right now, not expecting you till later tonight.”

  Bannerman nodded. He got out of the chair, came over and took the phone from my hand. He was shaking.

  After a couple of moments he spoke into the phone.

  “Mrs. Hale?” he said. “Gert?… You don’t know me. I’m Milton Bannerman.”

  That produced one of those joyous cries at the other end. There’s a certain pitch the voice of an excited woman can reach at the telephone that makes it carry like nobody’s business. It’s only certain types of voices that will do it and this was one of those voices. Bannerman must have caught the zing of it against his eardrum because involuntarily he moved the receiver about an inch away from his ear and held it there. It was coming over like a public address system. We could all hear it.

  “Joanie’s Milton Bannerman? We’ve been hearing all about you. You have to come up and see us. We’re dying to meet you, but Joanie’s already told you that. Is she with you now?”

  “No, she isn’t, Gert. As a matter of fact that’s why I called. You see we’ve got crossed wires or something down here. I got into New York a little early and went around to my sister’s thinking I’d surprise the girls. Well, they’re not here, not either of them, and I just thought maybe Joanie was with you and would be coming down on a train that would get her in just before I was supposed to turn up.”

  “Oh, no, Milton. She was up here. She told you she would be coming up for a couple of days. Well, she did. We had a lovely visit and she left last night. It was later than I liked but ther
e are these friends I did so want her to meet and I couldn’t get them over before last evening and Joanie said it wasn’t as though she hadn’t already been in New York and didn’t know the way. She was sure she could get a cab at Grand Central and go right over to your sister’s even though it was going to be all of three in the morning when she got in. I wanted her to stay and take an early train this morning, but she said you were coming today and she didn’t want to take any chances on not being there when you arrived.”

  Bannerman had been white when he first took up the phone. Now he had turned the color of wet ashes.

  “You say her train got in at three o’clock this morning?” he moaned.

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Hale laughed. “Don’t sound so tragic. The porters in Grand Central are the sweetest things. They’re like somebody’s grandfather, really. And cab drivers are so reliable, especially the ones that work out of the railway stations. You just wait. They’re out shopping. After all, they aren’t expecting you this early. Now when are you bringing Joanie back to visit us?”

  He mumbled something and got off the wire. He turned to us and began to repeat it.

  “We could hear,” Gibby said.

  Bannerman swayed on his feet. He shut his eyes tight and breathed hard for a moment, getting a grip on himself.

  “Oh, God,” he groaned. “Ellie and now Joanie, too. Three o’clock this morning.”

  “Hold it,” Gibby said. “It’s bad enough as it is. Don’t build it. Does Miss Loomis know the train you were supposed to be coming in on?”

  “Yes, but they weren’t going to go to meet me. Ellie said you can miss people so easy in stations. She said for me to come over here. They’d be here.”

  “All right. Miss Loomis got here at three in the morning. Your sister had been dead for quite a while by then. She rang the bell and got no answer. She’s gone to a hotel and she’ll be back here in time to be here for when you were expected or else she’ll go to meet the train she’s expecting you on. We’ll cover both. We’ll have someone waiting here in case she comes. We’ll go with you to meet the train. One way or the other we’ll find her.”

  It sounded all right to me but it wasn’t my sister who had been strangled and it wasn’t my fiancée who was missing. Bannerman took more convincing than that.

  “You don’t know Joanie,” he said. “I do. She wouldn’t come turning up here at three in the morning to ring bells. It would have to be that she had a key and could come in without disturbing Ellie. She would have a key, staying here with Ellie, Ellie would certainly have given her one so she could come and go. She came in here and Ellie was dead but there was someone here. It’s the both of them. I know it’s the both of them.”

  The point wasn’t too badly taken. I couldn’t see any such complete certainty of it as he was proclaiming, but it certainly had to rate as a disquieting possibility. Gibby, however, made a good stab at pulling him together.

  “If we want to start imagining things,” he said, “we can imagine it any way at all. There’s nothing to go on. For one thing; how certain are you that she was staying here with your sister at all? Just look around. There’s only the one bed. It’s a double bed, but there’s only the one. If she stayed here, they shared the bed. There’s nothing else like a sofa or anything that could be made up into a bed. If you’re going to argue that she had to have a key because she would be too considerate to ring bells at three in the morning, can’t you argue on exactly the same basis that she wouldn’t come here at all at three in the morning when it would mean coming into this one room, getting into the one bed? Wouldn’t that be just as disturbing as ringing the bell?”

  “I don’t know. Gosh, I don’t know. When Ellie said she should come and stay here, I thought sure Ellie had an extra bed. I don’t know what to think about anything now.”

  It was an opening for Gibby. He suggested that Bannerman try not to think at all. There was still a great deal we were going to have to know. We were going to have to ask many questions. If he would try to keep his mind on that, it would help him with the waiting.

  “Also,” Gibby said, “you’ll be helping us and the more you give us to go on the easier it’s going to be for us to help you. Let’s start with Joan Loomis. Do you have a picture of her on you?”

  He had one and he fished it out of his billfold for us. It was a bathing-suit picture but don’t get ideas. It wasn’t any bikini. It wasn’t even one of those halter and bare midriff deals. It was a cover-up sort of bathing suit and by that I don’t mean one of the elasticized jobs that covers a gal but close like an extra skin. It had a skirt and it had a top with fairly broad straps going over the shoulders. If it wasn’t the sort of thing Grandma wore in the nineties, it was quite the sort of thing that Grandma might pick out as a decent sort of suit for Granddaughter to wear today. Legs it showed about to the knees. Arms it showed completely. Neck and shoulders it showed a lot less than your stenographer is likely to show at her typewriter any day.

  All the same it was a cute suit and a cute girl inside it. The legs were very nice indeed and the figure plenty good enough so you knew that it wasn’t for any cosmetic reasons that she wasn’t showing more of it. I couldn’t tell about hair because there was a bathing cap but the face was nice. Beach pictures being what they are, you couldn’t see too much, but I had the idea that Joan Loomis was by no means the lovely thing that Sydney Bell had been but that she would be quite pretty enough in a wholesome, country-girl fashion.

  In the description department Bannerman did all right. Height five foot five. Weight 130 pounds. Light brown hair. Fair complexion. Blue eyes. He said her hair was long and she wore it up in one of these knobs at the back of her head. When it came to what she might be wearing he couldn’t give us nearly so much. He knew what she had been wearing when he had seen her off to New York. It was a dark gray suit and a pink blouse with a little round white collar that came outside over the collar of her coat.

  “She was buying clothes here,” he said. “I don’t know whether she’ll be wearing something she brought from home or something she’s bought. Anyhow it’s likely to have one of those little round white collars she wears outside. She likes those. She wears them on mostly everything.”

  I thought I knew what he meant and I thought it sounded something like a school uniform.

  “How old is she?” Gibby asked.

  It’s a routine question. I didn’t know whether the school-girlish note had struck him or not.

  “Twenty-one,” Bannerman answered. “Just a year younger than Ellie.”

  Gibby called the description in. Missing persons could start routine on it in any case. He didn’t relax, though. He came right back at the questioning. I have never known a session of this sort to have more of an appearance of going well. Bannerman seemed to be in a mild state of shock, as well he might have been; but, if anything, that appeared to have loosened him up a bit, released some inhibitions he might otherwise have exhibited.

  Gibby suggested that we might go out and get him a drink and he was a little prim about that.

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I don’t drink.”

  The real impact of it was in the tone he used. That tone didn’t leave anything unsaid. Here was a boy who had convictions on the subject. He was horrified by the suggestion that he might even have wanted a drink but it was a situation he had faced up to before he had made the journey into the big city. He had known the sort of place New York was. He had known that people did drink there. He had made up his mind, however, to stick to his guns. No when-in-Rome-do-as-the-Romans-do for him, but he would be polite about it. He would say nothing. He would just be firm in his refusal.

  It was all there. I could even guess where he had learned it. That would have come in the army. He would be out on pass with his buddies. The other boys would be tying one on or at least stopping for a couple of beers. I could just see this one going around to the USO for a coke.

  Gibby acted as though he had missed the “I don’t drink” pa
rt of it and caught nothing of the tone which made it so clear that in this young man’s way of thinking nobody else should drink either.

  “There’s nothing up here,” Gibby said, “but we don’t have to stay right here.”

  Bannerman gave him an indulgent little sad-eyed smile.

  “Of course, there wouldn’t be anything up here,” he said. “This was Ellie’s place.”

  Gibby fished his cigarettes out of his pocket and offered Bannerman a smoke.

  “Thank you, no,” Bannerman said.

  The fingerprint man went to the kitchenette and came back with a saucer.

  “Not an ash tray anywhere in the place,” he said. “I’ve been using this.”

  The three of us lit cigarettes and used the saucer. Bannerman was wearing that little sad-eyed smile again. He was being real big, forgiving us for having made the mistake of thinking his sister might have had an ash tray around the place.

  Then Gibby was back to working at him with the questions and he answered readily, as though it might have been some sort of relief for him to talk, particularly a relief to turn backward to areas where he felt he knew all the answers, where there were no terrible uncertainties to clutch at his heart.

  There had been only the two of them, his sister Ellie and himself, ever since he had been fifteen and she ten. Their parents had been killed in a bus accident and they had had no other relatives. There had been insurance, not much of it but enough to carry them along for two years while he finished high school and kept them going with after-school and vacation jobs. He had wanted to go on to college but that was out. He had left school at seventeen and taken on the full-time job of supporting himself and his twelve-year-old sister.

  He was modest in his telling of it, but the picture emerged. It was a picture of a hard-working youngster who had taken on a man’s job and not done badly with it. He had earned their way, had kept kid sister in school, and had been both father and mother to her. He had a feeling of accomplishment and it came through the cover of his modesty. It was evident that not the least of his pride was that he had been able to guide his sister through those difficult years from ten to seventeen and to keep her from the pitfalls of temptation.