That was as far as Gibby got and then things went crazy. Cops or no cops, Bannerman did charge out of his chair and go for Jellicoe. The cops grabbed Bannerman and he dragged them with him. They were so busy with him that they didn’t even notice that Jellicoe was breaking for the door, or possibly they just thought he was afraid of Bannerman. Anyhow it fell to Gibby and me to bring him down. I came out of it all right, but a couple of the stitches in Gibby’s ear pulled open. He was bleeding again when he had to answer to Milton Bannerman and the girl. They wanted to know why he had frightened them by building the whole case against Milton when he had known even before we had ever come to Mabel Sylvester’s house that Jellicoe was our man.
“I was teaching you what it meant to fool around with murder,” Gibby said.
It was enough answer for them since they were who they were and they had such a strong belief in being punished for their transgressions. I knew Gibby better than that. I could look back over the whole session and see how he had built it to get out of them every last shred of their story, however soiled and however sordid. He needed that story to fill out the chinks in the case against Jellicoe and he had done the job.
The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Page 20
