We strolled off after them. A handful of the crowd she had gathered was also strolling that way. The rest of the people were reluctantly taking off to meet those trains they had come to meet.
“How did we do with brown hat?” I asked.
“You can’t win all the time,” Gibby said.
“We lost on that one?”
“Gave as much as we got.”
Going through the big main rotunda of the station we made a small detour before going into the waiting room to join Bannerman and his girl. Gibby stopped at the information desk to pick up the New Haven timetable, the big one that lists all the line’s trains in and out of New York. Dropping it into his pocket, he made for the waiting room.
The minute we came up to the bench where Bannerman and the cop had settled the white-faced Miss Loomis, Bannerman rounded on us angrily. It seemed to me that we had done just about as well in this quarter as we had with Jellicoe’s self-appointed bodyguard. Here too, I thought, we had given as much as we got. Gibby could be as pleased as he liked with the bits of information he had drawn out of that little drama he had staged, but for those bits it looked as though we were going to have to pay the price of Bannerman’s hostility. Any further co-operation we might need from that lad I was ready to write off as a dead loss. He had done all the co-operating we could expect of him. He said as much.
“That was a dandy idea of yours,” he snarled. “It was one jim-dandy.”
Of course, the original expectation had been that if he did follow instructions he would end up resentful of us because of the burden that would have been laid on his conscience by Gibby’s requirement that he lie to his Joanie. Now, of course, that part of it was quite all right. He had had no time to tell her anything, whether true or false. Her faint had taken care of that part of it. That faint, however, I hadn’t foreseen any more than I had foreseen the slap in the jaw, and now it was for those we were being blamed. Actually it was because of the girl’s fainting that Bannerman was angry with us even though moment by moment she was making a better recovery from that than he was making from the slap. Even as he harangued us, the color was coming back into her face. The mark of her hand on his face wasn’t fading that fast. She had really let him have it.
Gibby let Bannerman blow off his steam. He said nothing until Bannerman had paused for breath and even then Gibby made no direct answer. Bypassing Bannerman, Gibby spoke to the girl. He introduced himself and he introduced me. He explained that we were from the DA’s office.
“Did you know that you were being followed?” he asked.
“Followed? What do you mean followed?”
“A man was following you.”
She shuddered. “Oh, that,” she said. “Everywhere I go in this horrible town it happens. Men follow me or they look at me as though they were trying to hypnotize me or something or they come right up to me and ask me where I’m going and can’t they help me find it. Don’t New York men have anything else to do? Do they have their whole day free for bothering women?”
“Some make a career of it,” Gibby said. “Then you knew that a man followed you into the station, that you were being watched all the time?”
“If it wasn’t one man it was another. I didn’t notice that there was a man just then but they’ve got me so jumpy, all of them, that when Milton came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes, it never occurred to me that it could be anything but another one. That’s why I slapped him, I didn’t care who it was. I wanted to tear his eyes out.”
“Yes,” Gibby said. “We saw you. I must apologize. It was my idea. I wanted to make that fellow who had been following you commit himself. I am sorry, particularly since it didn’t work. He didn’t commit himself at all.”
“Commit himself how?”
“Any way at all. I’m afraid you have been in danger, Miss Loomis, and I can’t be certain that you are not still in danger. The more we know about the nature of this danger, the better we can head it off.”
She reached out her hand to Bannerman. He took it and held it.
“I’ve been in danger,” she said, “and I can tell you exactly what the danger is. I’m with Milton now. I’ll be all right.”
“We have to be certain of that,” Gibby insisted. “We can’t take any chances with your safety. What was the danger, Miss Loomis?”
“N-e-w Y-o-r-k,” she said, spelling it out for him letter by letter. “New York. This is a terrible place. Maybe if a girl knows it, she can learn how to cope with it—all those awful men—but I don’t think I could ever learn to cope and I can tell you I’m mighty glad I don’t have to try. Milton’s with me now and we’re going home to River Forks just as fast as ever we can. If I never see this place again, it will be too soon.”
Gibby turned to Bannerman. “Fainting the way she did,” he said, “she’s probably hungry. Do you know? Has she had any dinner?”
Bannerman turned to the girl.
“Of course, I had dinner,” she said. “I found a place. It isn’t far from here, as a matter of fact, and it’s clean and quite expensive enough. It was almost two o’clock before I found that because I didn’t know where to go. The places Ellie goes, Milt, they’re simply awful. When I tried to find something for myself, all the places I looked at were bad enough till I found this one.”
There was a small misunderstanding there but it wasn’t of any consequence. River Forks, of course, dined at midday, but Gibby passed that by. He was more interested in these places Ellie went, the awful ones. He asked about them.
“They all had bars in them,” Miss Loomis explained. “Drinking places. Of course, we didn’t drink, but still. No matter when you went in, there would be people drinking, women and men, women just by themselves even, drinking. But it’s the prices. The prices are simply scandalous. There’s a thing they call chef’s salad Ellie’s always eating and it’s nothing but a lot of lettuce and stuff like that and it has a little bit of cut-up chicken in it. They cut it up fine and spread it around to make it look as though there were really a decent lot of chicken, but if they have twenty-five cents’ worth of chicken in the whole thing, that’s a lot, and do you know what they charge for it? Just guess.”
We let Bannerman guess. He guessed a dollar.
Miss Loomis laughed bitterly. “Two dollars and fifty cents,” she said. “And that isn’t all. They charge separately for bread and butter and Ellie never eats any. She doesn’t touch it but she pays for it all the same, bread and butter she doesn’t even eat. It’s really too awful.”
“It sure is,” Gibby said, “but people do have to eat. I know what’s wrong with you, young woman. Even though you did find this place at two o’clock, you didn’t eat nearly enough and now it’s long past your supper time. You’re starved. That’s your trouble.”
I’m not going to go into all the to-do we had about getting them out of the station and over to a restaurant where we could both eat and talk. This place she had found that didn’t shock her too much was the Automat, and even the medium-priced place Gibby selected scandalized both her and Milton. They didn’t like being in a place with a bar and the prices were against their principles even though we were paying.
We finally got them to order something and Gibby was able to settle in to asking questions. He started out by telling the girl that we had been very much worried about her.
“We didn’t know where you had gotten off to,” he said. “Milton, here, called your cousin in Boston and she said you left there last night and should have arrived here about three this morning. That scared us all the more.”
The girl sighed. “Poor Milt,” she said. “I can just imagine. It was terribly silly of me insisting on taking that late train last night. I know that now, but I couldn’t even dream that I’d get to Ellie’s and she wouldn’t be there. I can’t think where she’s gone and I do think it isn’t very nice of her either, Milt.”
Bannerman started to explain but Gibby cut him off.
“You went around to her apartment
when the train came in?” Gibby asked quickly.
“Of course. Where else would I go? I was staying there with her, and it wasn’t as though she didn’t know I was coming back from Boston. She knew I was coming and she told me it didn’t matter what train I came down on. She was going to be at the apartment and any time at all she’d be there to let me in and then she wasn’t and it was after three in the morning.”
“Hadn’t she given you a key?” Gibby asked.
“No, she hadn’t and even if she was called away overnight, she did know that Milt was coming in this evening and it had been planned that he would go directly to her place. I should think that she would have managed to get back there by this afternoon, at least. I can’t understand her being so inconsiderate.”
Gibby was right in there with his next question but Bannerman was in there, too. There hadn’t been any hope of keeping him shut up indefinitely.
“Ellie’s dead, Joanie,” he said.
The girl clutched at him. “Dead,” she moaned. “Oh, no, Milty, she can’t be. It’s only a couple of days since I left her to go to Boston and she was perfectly well. What happened to her?”
“She died suddenly,” Gibby said, while Bannerman was casting around for words.
“Accident? This awful traffic, the taxis and the buses and the trucks and the cars. It frightens me half to death.”
Bannerman found his words. There wasn’t anything we could do about it.
“She was killed,” he said. “A burglar came in while she was asleep and strangled her.”
The girl rallied. Abruptly she wasn’t thinking of herself at all. She was all concern for Bannerman. “Darling,” she murmured, stroking his hand. “Poor, poor darling. How awful for you. How incredibly awful for you.”
Gibby stepped into it and tried to put the thing back under control.
“Now you can understand why we were so worried about you,” he said. “As I understand it, you went to her place straight from your train last night and you rang her bell.”
“Yes,” she said and turned back to Bannerman. “I know that sounds a very strange thing to do. You know, I’d never do anything like that back home, but you can’t imagine how different things are here in New York. Ellie often sleeps right through to noon or even into the afternoon. That’s the way it is here. Night’s like day and day’s like night. Why, her friends think nothing of telephoning her at the craziest hours. Three in the morning. Four in the morning. And it’s not only her friends. It’s her job, too. One night while I was with her, the phone rang way after two. Ellie just sat up in bed and answered it. If the phone rings in the night that way back home people get frightened half to death. They can’t think anything but that there’s been an accident or something like that, but Ellie never seemed to mind in the least. Sometimes she’d talk awhile and then go back to sleep. This one time though and it was almost three, she made an appointment and she got up and dressed and went out. She told me to go back to sleep and not worry about her. She had to go to work. At that time of night, imagine. It was something about sunrise pictures. They were photographing her hands against the sunrise. I think it was for a perfume, something that used some slogan about lovely as a morning sunrise. It seemed crazy to me but there’s so much that happens here that is just beyond understanding.”
Bannerman was snaking his head. It was evidently as much beyond his understanding as it was beyond hers. Gibby played along, pretending that it was somewhat beyond his understanding as well.
“Particularly,” he said dryly, “since they could have gotten the same effect at sunset if they did it standing on their heads.”
“Of course,” Miss Loomis continued, “they were paying her fantastic amounts for posing for these pictures but after I’d been here a couple of days, I began to think she earned it, getting up out of a deep sleep to have her hands photographed against the sunrise. It’s really too silly.”
“You said she made an appointment,” Gibby asked. “Could you by any chance remember anything of the conversation, where she was going for these pictures, who called her, anything like that?”
The girl shook her head. “No,” she said. “She never spoke much on the telephone. Mostly she listened and said yes or no or later or tomorrow.”
Gibby nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It figures. So you went around to her place from the train and rang her bell. What happened then?”
She began talking and, warming to her story, she was off in full spate. We just sat back and listened. She had rung the bell and when there was no answer she had rung again. She had kept ringing for a long time and then she had realized that it couldn’t be that Ellie Bannerman was upstairs in bed and so tight asleep that she wasn’t hearing the bell. She always heard the telephone bell and the doorbell was just as loud. She assumed that it had been another call for sunrise photos and Ellie had been forced to leave in a hurry.
“I couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t have left me a note in the letter box or something,” she said. “But I thought she must have been too much in a hurry and had taken the chance that I wouldn’t be in till morning and that she would be home by then.”
As she went on with her story I could sense the disbelief that was growing and blossoming inside Gibby. It wasn’t merely that my own credulity was straining at the seams with the tax this little miss was putting on it. I know Gibby well enough so that I can always tell when that extra edge of alertness begins to manifest itself. He wasn’t showing it to the girl or to Bannerman, but it was there. I’ve known it to come at times when I can’t even guess what might be bringing it on but this time I didn’t have to guess. The story of that young woman’s movements after she had rung Ellie Bannerman’s bell in the wee hours of the morning defied belief. The fact that to all seeming it sounded completely reasonable to Milton Bannerman wasn’t making it ring any truer for me.
She couldn’t hang around in that vestibule until morning. She had to go somewhere and she didn’t know any place in New York that she could go that time of night. Then she remembered a place—back to the railway station. She carried her bags out to the street and hailed a late cruising cab. Back in Grand Central Station, she settled herself in the waiting room and stayed there till morning. At about half-hour intervals she telephoned the apartment, but there was never an answer.
By nine, she lost patience. Even if it had been a hands-against-the-sunrise job, Ellie should have been home from it long since. The sunrise was then hours gone. Joan Loomis gave up on trying to reach Sister Ellie. She had gone around to the hotel and taken a room.
“Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to go directly to a hotel and get some sleep instead of sitting up the rest of the night in the station?” Gibby asked.
“If I had known I was going to have to have a room anyhow,” the girl answered. “But I didn’t know and I wasn’t going to spend that kind of money for nothing.”
Bannerman nodded approvingly. This was a matter of thrift and it was obvious that thrift came in that same package with not smoking and not drinking. It was a part of decency. Gibby was not so easily satisfied. He had a dozen questions and before he was through, he had explored the young woman’s thinking exhaustively.
She had expected that Milton’s sister would certainly be returning home before nightfall, but she could explain quite to her own and Milton’s satisfaction why she had refrained from paying for a hotel room for the night when she had needed one, only to take one the next day when she had no expectation of needing it. It hadn’t been a matter of expectation. It had been a matter of immediate necessity. She had been all night in her clothes. She had to have a bath and a change. She had to have a place where later in the day she could freshen up to meet Milty. She was ashamed to admit it, now that she knew how unjust she had been to Ellie, but she had even been a little angry with her future sister-in-law, angry enough to feel that there would have to be a very good explanation indeed before she would ever want to go back to the apartment again.
“
So angry,” Gibby said, “that you even stopped phoning her. You decided you’d meet Milt’s train and let her worry awhile.”
“Oh, no,” Joanie said quickly. “I kept right on calling. I’ve been calling all day. It wasn’t more than ten minutes before you found me over there in the station that I called the last time. Just about every half hour all day I tried her phone and never an answer.”
That one gave even Bannerman pause. Gibby didn’t have to ask the question. Bannerman was in there asking it for him.
“But what number were you calling, Joanie?” he asked. “We were in the apartment for a long time this afternoon and the police had been there before I arrived.”
Joanie gave him the great big baby stare. “You were there?” she exclaimed. “And you let the telephone ring and ring? Didn’t it even occur to you that it would be me calling?”
“But it didn’t ring at all. What number were you calling?”
“Ellie’s number,” she said.
She reeled it off and Bannerman relaxed.
“You had it wrong all the time,” he said. “It isn’t 0913. It’s 0912.”
The baby stare held, but now her mouth opened to match the round astonishment of her eyes. She repeated the two numbers after him.
“You’re sure it’s 0912?” she asked.
Bannerman brought out a little address book and showed her the number.
“That’s what comes of missing a whole night’s sleep,” he said.
“Oh, dear,” she sighed. “All night and all day I’ve been calling the wrong number.”
Gibby excused himself and left the table. He crossed the restaurant to a telephone booth. He wasn’t gone long. All the time he was gone Joan Loomis went on and on about how stupid she had been, making all those calls and all to the wrong number. They could have been together so much sooner if she just hadn’t been such an idiot.
Bannerman took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. “You’ll never make a better mistake, darling,” he said. “This afternoon would have been all right. You would have gotten the police or me, but before that—I don’t even want to think who might have answered before that.”
The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Page 9
