With the gentlest care we lowered him to the bed. The Connecticut cop started on his shirt buttons while I tackled shoelaces. The laces were still wet and that made the knots hard to handle. I hadn’t made any headway with handling them when Gibby kicked me lightly in the chin, slapped the cop’s hand away from the first shirt button, sat up in bed, and reached for the phone.
“Thanks for carrying me,” he said. “I enjoyed every moment of it, but enough’s enough. The gay round of pleasure stops right here. We have to get back to work.”
“If you want to do your own phoning,” I said, “it’s all right with me. Call Sam. Tell him we want him over here on the double.”
Sam, of course, was that medic whose opinion I wanted.
Gibby grinned at me. “You don’t need Sam,” he said. “You’ve never been better in your life. Your hand is as steady as a pickpocket’s and your strength is as the strength of ten. You didn’t drop me even once.”
He had been playing possum all the time. I ignored it.
“I want Sam to look at your head,” I insisted.
“He’s seen it lots of times.”
Gibby spun the dial. He wasn’t calling Sam. He called Homicide and got himself put through to Harrity. There was an extension out in the living room and I went out and picked it up. It wasn’t that I had any ideas of letting Gibby carry the ball again that night, not if I could prevent it. I took the phone with exactly that purpose of prevention in mind. I wanted to hear anything Harrity had for us because I was dead set on finding all the arguments I could for letting further action go till morning.
It started out well enough.
“I have news for you,” he said. “You and Connecticut both asking for a bright red sedan with much much chromium, brightest star in the Jellicoe fleet. We’ve got that baby.”
“Complete with driver?” Gibby asked eagerly.
I started rehearsing the routine I would give him about letting the man stew in a cell till morning. Harrity answered and I quit rehearsing.
“No driver,” he said. “Just the car. It’s nicely parked and all locked up. It’s on Jerome Avenue up in the Bronx, right by the end of the subway line. We have it staked out. If anybody comes to drive it away, we’ll have him, and you and Connecticut can toss him up for grabs.”
Gibby sighed. “Nobody will be coming to drive it away,” he said. “It’s a waste of manpower staking it out.”
“Connecticut’s request,” Harrity said.
“It’s not their manpower,” Gibby muttered. “They can afford to waste it. What else? What about that New York car I asked for?”
“Registration you phoned in from up there?” Harrity said. “We’ve got that. Car belongs to a dame. Mabel Sylvester, lives in the East Fifties.” He reeled off the address.
Have you ever been on the phone and had the bird at the other end suddenly decide he’s through talking and that he can let you know as much by slamming the telephone down in the cradle. It’s a sound that makes your eardrum jump. Mine jumped and I was rubbing my ear when Gibby came charging out of the bedroom with that Connecticut cop who had driven us down from Westport thundering at his heels. I caught at Gibby as he whizzed past.
“Where are you going?” I shouted. “You’re off your head.”
The best I could do was hang on to him and let him carry me along. There wasn’t any stopping him. We did have a pause out at the elevator. It took a moment or two for the car to come up even though Gibby never took his thumb off the bell button.
“Four murders is enough,” he growled. “With luck we might still make it to stop a fifth, but even now it will only be with luck.”
“Couldn’t Harrity go?”
“There isn’t that much luck, not nearly enough to cover all the time it would take to fill Harrity in.”
We piled into the car and Gibby gave the directions. That kid from Westport was one terrific driver. He never took a corner on more than two wheels and he zipped through the straightaway bits so fast that we never did settle back to all four. He handled that car as though it were a five-passenger motorcycle. When Gibby told him to pull up it was in front of one of a row of white-painted brick houses. Dawn was something between pink and yellow at the end of the street and the whole row of houses—blank and decently asleep, of course, at that hour—looked as though they were made of old ivory touched with water color. These were fine old houses and it was a good street.
Gibby catapulted out of the car and ran up the steps to lean on the doorbell with that same insistence he had used on the elevator call button back at his own place. Nothing happened. He kept his finger on the bell, but he began eying the neat, black-painted wood of the door.
“I think we can make it by that window on the left,” he said. “If we can’t we’ll break down the door.”
The window on the left looked all too easy. This house was one of those old-fashioned English basement jobs that you used to find all over town. Most of them were brown-stones but the older ones were brick and the brick jobs have been back in fashion for several years. Breaking down doors and going in windows doesn’t rate as standard operating procedure for our office under any conditions. In this sort of street and this sort of house it is always the better part of wisdom to tread lightly and cautiously. People who live in these houses are people who retain the kind of legal talent that can make an Assistant DA wish he’d never been born. I’ve seen them do it on lesser provocation than a job of illegal entry.
“Give people time to wake up and climb out of bed and come downstairs,” I said.
“A woman can be strangled quicker than that,” Gibby growled and came away from the bell.
He was measuring the distance to the window.
“You’re not going in that window,” I said.
“I can make it easily,” Gibby answered. “You just have to give me a leg up.”
“I’m not giving you any leg up.”
He turned away from me in disgust. “Just a quick boost,” he said to our Westport lad.
The boy was a cop and he wasn’t a complete fool. He looked from Gibby to me and back to Gibby again.
“Please, sir,” he said. “It’s not like you had a warrant or like that, sir. And me. I’m not even in my own territory. I don’t know if I even ought to be here at all. My orders was to drive you to the state line or home if you wanted, that’s all.”
Gibby didn’t take the time for further argument. He charged up the steps and back to the front door. With a running lunge he drove his shoulder against the wood. It was a good door. It didn’t even rattle. He pulled back for another drive at it. I looked at his face. Even in that early light that was putting a pink glow on everything, his face looked ghastly. It was that grainy sort of white you’ll see in the ash of a good cigar. On a cigar it looks good. On Gibby it looked frightening.
I know when I’m licked. I took his arm and pulled him down the steps.
“We’ll go in the window,” I said.
Gibby forced a smile. “Just a leg up and I’ll come around and open the door,” he said.
I wasn’t that licked. I went to work on Westport. I didn’t try to kid him that this was legal or anything like that. I just told him nobody would ever know he had even been with us. All he had to do was give first me and then Gibby a boost up to the window and then he was to take off and forget he had ever been with us beyond driving us home. Between us, Gibby and I chivvied the poor boy into position by the iron gate that served as the basement entrance. That put him directly under the window.
I thought I should have trouble with Gibby at that point about who was going in first, but I might have known better. Gibby has a perfect sense of just how far he can push me. He stood by while the cop boosted me up. I caught the window ledge and pulled myself over it. One glance told me I was in an empty room. I began feeling better. I told myself it would be an empty house. Well-heeled householders not yet returned from their summer holidaying. The house was that quiet. I turned back to the windo
w in time to help Gibby over the sill.
We stood together in that quiet house and caught our breaths. The morning light was still too thin to see the room anything but most dimly. You didn’t have to see it at all clearly, however, to know that it was all delicacy and elegance. I had the impression of silk and of perfume and of things that were soft and finely wrought. There was only one door to the room and that was closed.
Gibby moved toward it. He wasn’t making a sound. I crept along with him. We reached the door and opened it. It brought us to the entrance hall—cool, austere, all black and white. The floor was tiled in big squares that alternated the black with the white, but just inside the entrance door lay something that was all black. Gibby reached out and touched a light switch. A soft glow materialized from somewhere. It was one of those extra fancy jobs of concealed and diffused lighting. If you are setting a thing like this up for yourself, you may prefer a sharper light, but the glow was enough for then.
The something that was all black was a woman. She was wearing a black suit that looked like one of those treasures Sydney Bell’s cleaning woman had described so knowingly, and the contrast of the color of her skin to the black of her suit was at least as dramatic as was the contrast in the black and white tiling on which she lay. Even though the light was hardly adequate for police work, it was enough to show her face and that was white with the special whiteness of death, and on her bare throat stood the blue and purplish bruises, the marks of manual strangulation.
Running to her side, we clattered across the tile. Gibby bent to touch her.
“I was hoping against hope,” he said, “but I should have known we would be much too late. We never had a chance of getting here in time.”
“Gone cold?” I asked.
“Dead a good hour,” Gibby answered.
I had so many questions that I was trying to fasten on which I should ask first. Who was this woman? How had Gibby known she was slated to be the next strangling? Where in the crowded happenings of that day and night had he found a timetable for all this?
I might have started on one of the questions or another. I don’t know, because at just that moment the silent house was shaken with a resounding, metallic clash.
Gibby dodged around the woman’s body and wrenched the front door open. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t any idea of how I reached the door. I may have gone around the body or I may have vaulted across it. I don’t even know that just then I was even remembering that it lay there. Gibby and I erupted into the street.
In the little basement area where the Westport cop had stood to give us a leg up to the window he was still standing, but now he stood embattled. It was a resoundingly noisy battle because the heavy, wrought-iron basement gate now stood ajar and the struggle kept throwing the combatants against it to slam it again and again.
Locked in combat with Westport was Milton Bannerman, and that was pretty even. Outside forces, however, were tipping the odds in Bannerman’s favor, but only slightly. These outside forces were Joan Loomis’ fists. She was pounding, the officer’s head and shoulders with them and her right fist was wrapped in a white handkerchief. Just before we dove in to break it up, Bannerman shifted his hands for a better hold on Westport and I noticed that around his right he had wrapped the torn rags of a white handkerchief.
CHAPTER EIGHT
UP TO this point, of course, our ally from across the state line had had every reason for wanting to bow out and as quickly as possible. By the time we had disengaged the poor fellow from his entanglement with the River Forks love birds, however, every last one of his worst fears had been realized and he had nothing more to lose.
As Westport saw it, we were dangerous company. He had come through thus far unscathed—his wrestling with Bannerman hadn’t gone beyond rumpling his uniform and the blows Joan Loomis had rained upon him had bounced off harmlessly enough—but he was laying it all to luck and he had no wish to strain his luck further. He left us. We went back into the house, taking our captives with us. They were a rather soiled and rumpled pair, but that was nothing to the way Gibby and I looked. We were still half-wet from our sojourn in the brook up at Westport.
I put through the usual calls—police, Medical Examiner, the routine. I was beginning to lose count of how many times I had done this in something less than twenty-four hours but I had a feeling that the boys on the headquarters switchboard were getting to the place where they would be needing no more than the sound of my voice in their head sets to set them automatically to sending out the meat wagon.
Even in the couple of moments I was on the phone Gibby made a start on our precious pair of holier-than-thous.
“You have an awful lot to tell us,” he said.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” said Joan Loomis.
“We don’t have much,” said Milton Bannerman. “We have a lot less than you think.”
Gibby fixed him with a cold look. “Anything less than I’m thinking,” he said, “isn’t going to be enough. You need plenty. You need enough to get the two of you out from under five murders and two attempted murders. This is a massacre. Talk and talk fast.”
“Five murders?” Bannerman bleated. “Ellie and Miss Sylvester.”
“And Harry and George and a nice cop up in Connecticut,” Gibby said. “Start with Miss Sylvester.”
Bannerman’s lips set in a thin line. “She was a horrible woman,” he said savagely. “She got not half of what she deserved.”
The girl cried out. “Milton,” she protested. “Don’t. The woman’s dead.”
“I know she’s dead,” Milton stormed. “And she died just the same way Ellie died. I know that and I know there isn’t any justice in it. Think of what Ellie was and think of what she was. Ellie got no more than she deserved and, compared with this woman, even Ellie was the spotless lamb.”
“Milton,” the girl whimpered. “Please, Milton.”
“The wages of sin,” Gibby said.
Bannerman rounded on him. Gibby might have been the accused and Bannerman the accuser.
“Don’t sneer at it,” he snarled. “It’s the truth. Don’t sneer at the truth.”
“I’m not sneering at it,” Gibby said. “I’m waiting for it. When I told you to talk, I wasn’t asking for a lecture on your moral principles. I want to know how you got here. I want to know why you came. I want to know what happened, everything that happened.”
“I followed Joan. That woman brought her here.”
It was an answer, but it lacked detail. Gibby gave him an illustration of what might be a more adequate answer.
“Joan left the hotel shortly after we sent the two of you back there,” Gibby said. “You followed her. You followed her to Grand Central Station where she picked up a man named George. Joan and George left the station together and you were still following them. Take it from there. I want all of it, step by step.”
“I followed Joan and this man. I didn’t know his name. They went to a house in a part of town I’d never seen before.”
“Could you find your way back to the house or was it this house?”
“It wasn’t this house. It was on the other side of town from here. They only went as far as the outside of the place and they didn’t go in. The place was full of police. Police cars out front, officers all over. The man saw that and he pulled Joan away. He took her back to the corner and took her into a saloon.”
“I had plain ginger ale,” Joan put in defensively.
“I know you didn’t drink anything but you shouldn’t have been in that place at all. You shouldn’t have been with that man.”
“I shouldn’t have ever come to New York,” Joan said.
“I was crazy to let you come. How I could have been such a fool! I’ll never know how I could have let her deceive me all these years.”
“Milton, please.” The girl was pleading with him.
“That’s right,” Gibby put in. “‘Milton, please.’ We haven’t the time for should and shouldn’t. She wen
t into the bar with this man George. Then what? Did you go in after them?”
“No. There was a big glass front and I could watch them from outside. The man left her alone at the table for a minute or two and then he came back and they talked. He tried to take her hand a couple of times, but Joan wouldn’t let him.”
“That’s because she was drinking only ginger ale,” Gibby muttered. “Then what happened?”
“Then Miss Sylvester came.”
“She was driving a car?”
“No. No car.”
“How did she come then? Taxi?”
“No. She was walking. I would never have noticed her if she had come in a car or a taxi. I wasn’t standing there watching just any woman that came by. I don’t do that and anyhow I was watching Joan. It was Joan I was worrying about.”
“Naturally, but you did notice Miss Sylvester. Why was that? Was it because she was like Joan? Was it…”
Bannerman lowered his head and charged at Gibby.
“Don’t say that,” he bellowed. “Don’t you dare say that.”
I grabbed him and shoved him back in his chair. The bell rang and Gibby went to let the boys in and to brief them on our latest murder while I worked at telling Bannerman to behave himself.
Gibby returned and finished his question. “Did you notice Miss Sylvester,” he asked, “because she was also someone you knew, someone you had to worry about?”
“She was nobody. She was nothing to me. I had never seen her before in my life.”
“But you did notice her. Why?”
“I noticed her because she came popping out of this alley that was right alongside the saloon. She startled me. One minute there was nobody around and the next she came popping out of the alley. You don’t expect women to come popping at you out of alleys, leastways you don’t expect it of women like her, all silk and perfume and that stuff.”
“She startled you?”
“She did. She popped out of the alley and she came past me and went into the saloon. Inside she stood for a moment looking for someone and then she went right over to the table where Joan and this man were sitting. She sat down. The man left the table and went to the back of the place. He never came back. I didn’t see him again. Joan and Miss Sylvester came out and I ducked around the corner into the alley and watched them. Miss Sylvester was trying to get a taxi. I ran to the corner and got one. I waited till I saw them in a taxi and then I told my man to follow them. I followed them here.”
The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Page 16
