The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (15 page)

“It was hanging out from under his fingernail,” the lab man said, “and it was quite dry. It isn’t likely that he could have been under the shower with it without its washing away, but if it only washed loose, it wouldn’t have been dry. It’s a cinch he picked it up after he came out from under the shower.”

Gibby gave it the works. He had every cop in town alerted to pick up on sight Milton Bannerman, Joan Loomis, K. R. E. Jellicoe, and the late Harry’s friend, George. We already had the Connecticut police co-operating on a lookout for K. R. E., but Gibby wasn’t satisfied.

“There’s too much happening,” he grumbled, “and we’re not making enough of it happen. Too much of this is not under control.”

“We’re not making any of it happen,” I interpolated hastily. “We don’t even know that this second murder is connected with our case.”

Actually I didn’t want it connected. You have a murder investigation going and before you’ve even gone to first base with it, another murder pops at you. That isn’t good. It’s likely to draw some pretty serious criticism. There are always the wise boys who’ll be ready to say that if the DA’s office had gotten off its tail faster or acted more effectively, they could have held it down to only the one killing.

If this second strangling were to turn out to be linked to our first one, we’d be wide open to that sort of criticism, however unfair it might be. That was bad enough, but Gibby seemed to be wanting it worse than that. He seemed to be disgruntled over the fact that it hadn’t been some move of ours that had precipitated the second killing.

“That much we do know,” he insisted. “This one comes right out of the other one. It may only be a hunch but it’s the best hunch we’ve got to ride.”

“Look,” I said. “We’ve been assigned to the Bell killing. Let’s stay with that one. The Old Man can give this one to somebody else.”

“What good is that?”

“Working on one at a time is enough. We don’t have to be greedy.”

“Don’t be silly. The only person we’ve got really linked to the Bell killing sneaks off to pick up with George, and George’s buddy or partner or what have you turns up strangled. Where does the one case stop and the other start?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we ought to get to the Old Man, tell him what we know, and let him decide whether he wants us to work this killing or not. It is his office. Remember?”

“We haven’t the time for that,” Gibby said.

“What are we going to rush off and do now?” I asked.

I couldn’t see that there was a thing we could do just then. It was clearly a matter of waiting till one or more of the people we wanted were turned up for us by the police. It wasn’t that I didn’t know Gibby well enough to realize that he would be itching to get out and look for them himself. It was rather that I couldn’t see that there was any reasonable place we could go to start looking.

“Connecticut,” Gibby said, answering me in a word.

It was a word I couldn’t make much of.

“Jellicoe?” I asked.

“Jellicoe,” Gibby said. “Harry here, according to his own story and to George’s story, stowed Jellicoe’s car away somewhere in a garage. He should have had on him a ticket for the car or a receipt or something. You were the one who was pushing the burglary angle and you may not have been too far wrong. I’ve been through all his pockets. No ticket, no receipt.”

“So what do we do in Connecticut?” I asked.

“We see if Jellicoe’s recovered his car and gone home. We have a talk with him.”

“Now, look,” I argued. “It’s his car. There are lots of easier ways he could get it back. He wouldn’t have to murder Harry for it. It’s not as though there were any signs of a fracas. Harry was taken by surprise.”

“Uhhuh,” Gibby muttered noncommittally.

“Before we go hightailing off to Connecticut,” I insisted, “we can call Jellicoe’s doctor and lawyer. They pulled him out of Bellevue. He’s probably with one or both of them right now.”

“Okay,” Gibby said. “You phone them. You just want to talk to him about his stolen car.”

It was easy. I got on the phone and I made the calls. I got on to the lawyer first. He was much interested in the stolen car. He was more than interested. He was distressed about it. You may not know this big Wall Street attorney type, but we’ve tangled with them often enough to know them well. They’re always dealing in millions, handling the affairs of people who own fleets of cars. You might think that this type would take the loss of one single car in his stride. It would be small stuff, but that isn’t the way their minds work. It is property, client’s property, and nothing is more important than client’s property. He made no bones about it. Jellicoe’s property losses were one of his major worries. K. R. E. was so careless. He didn’t know what he was going to do about the boy.

I asked him where we could find the boy that night and he referred me to the doctor. He had left K. R. E. in the doctor’s hands. I was just dialing the doctor’s number when Gibby came over to the phone. He had a little card in his hand.

“No burglary,” he said. “Here’s the ticket for the jerk’s little painted wagon.”

“Where did you find it?” I asked.

“In one of Harry’s shoes,” Gibby answered. “He put it there to keep it specially safe, but I don’t know whether it was because he took his responsibility for the car so seriously or because he had made a couple of important notes on the back of it.”

He turned the card so I could see the back. There were two names written on it. One was Milton Bannerman. The other was Joan Loomis.

I sighed. “All right,” I said. “You win. This one does belong to us.”

“How are you doing with their eminences?” Gibby asked.

“Just finished with the attorney. He’s unhappy. The jerk is congenitally careless with his property and the fact that he can afford to be cuts no ice.”

“He know where we can find his client?”

“He suggested I try the doctor. He left him in the doctor’s care, but now that we have the receipt that angle’s out.”

“Murder’s still in,” Gibby said. “Let’s try the doctor.”

I dialed the number and got the doctor. He was easier to talk to than the attorney. He didn’t have Jellicoe with him. He had seen him earlier in the evening, but he wouldn’t have the first idea of where his patient might be now. I explained that we had seen him at Bellevue and had heard that he had left the hospital in the company of his attorney and his physician.

“That’s right,” the doc said. “If you want him badly, I’d suggest that you keep trying Bellevue. He should be turning up there again before the night is out.”

“Bellevue?”

“He wasn’t ready for the alcoholic ward when I saw him but he was on his way—on the way and eager. I had a time making him sit still even long enough for me to check over his dressings. Even when I told him that a Bellevue patch-up job is always adequate but that you can’t expect a youngster who’s working emergencies to be too much concerned over the possibility of leaving a few permanent facial scars, he was raring to go. I had to talk fast to get him to sit still long enough for me to take the dressings off and check them over. Actually he was all right. It was a nice clean job they did for him down there. The dressings were a little larger than necessary but all I did was fix him up with some fresh ones that looked a little less spectacular.”

“Then you would guess that he didn’t go on home after he left you?”

“Any place but home. I’ve known the boy all his life. He graduated to me out of the hands of his pediatrician. He was full of steam while I was working on him. That fight he was in must have interrupted his drinking and he was in a full spate of eagerness to go back and get on with it again.”

“The fight?” I asked.

“No, the drinking. He’ll be ready for the alcoholic ward before morning.”

It was evident that the man wasn’t quite as much resigned as he tried to sound. He did go into considerable detail in his explanation of the efforts he had made to quiet the jerk down. He had tried to give him a sedative, offering it on the ground that changing the dressings was going to hurt, but Jellicoe had fought off both needle and tablet. The night had been young and the jerk had been raring to go.

I hung up and gave Gibby a full report on the conversation. So far as I could see, Gibby was in something of the same frame of mind as the doctor had just been describing to me in his discussion of K. R. E. Jellicoe. Gibby was also raring to go and there wasn’t going to be anything to dampen him down. He did give me an attentive hearing, but it seemed to me that he was enjoying this intelligence I’d had from Jellicoe’s physician far more than its content warranted. He appeared to be finding it quite as stimulating as he had found the notes written on the back of the garage receipt.

“This adds up,” he said, when I had finished. “It adds up to the craziest sort of totals, but it does add up. I’ve had a check on where the jerk lives in Connecticut and I’ve been looking at the timetable. He lives in Westport and a train was leaving for Westport right at the time we were fixing it up with Bannerman to pull the guess-who routine on his girl friend. The station cops tell us that George didn’t start keeping an eye on any New England trains till after we’d had our talk with him and now we have exactly the same thing on our own observation. You have to hand it to George. He had all the answers for us. He thinks on his feet.”

“The way I add it,” I said, “all this means he was in the station because of Joan Loomis and not because of Jellicoe. That’s what every bit of evidence is screaming at us, isn’t it?”

“Unless,” Gibby said, “he was there because of Joan
and
Jellicoe.”

“How do you make that?” I asked.

“Bannerman’s dames,” Gibby said. “It could be that his sister looked worse than she was. It could also be that he’s been working overtime at making her look better than she was. It can be the same way with his girl friend. Is Joan as good as she seems? Was it drink the jerk was thirsting for while his doctor changed his dressings? He does have a reputation for hitting the bottle, but he has an even noisier reputation for having a thing for the dames. The first time we noticed him he was buying a red nightgown. Does he want a nightgown of that kind if all he has on his mind is liquor? I haven’t known him all his life, but I can make a better guess than his doctor did at what it was he was so eager for. Add it up. He wanted it. George is in the business of providing it. How would it add up if Joan should be what George is providing tonight?”

I shrugged it off. “We can’t do anything about that till we find them,” I said.

“We can look for them. That’s why we’re heading for Westport right now.”

“You have the car receipt. That means the car is still in the garage and the station cops don’t say that George and Joan headed for any Westport train. They left the station.”

Gibby nodded. “And if George knew where Harry put the car,” he said, “there might be no need of the receipt. Jellicoe could go around to the place, identify himself, and take it out without a receipt.”

“Easy enough to find out if he did,” I said. “We call the garage and ask.”

Gibby laughed. “I’ve already had one of the boys do that,” he said. “I wasn’t telling you because I thought I could cut down the arguments. The car’s still there. Nobody’s come around for it.”

“So,” I said, “why Westport?”

“Because it’s a place to look and we have no other place. The car is no obstacle. They could have gone up there in Harry’s car. Last we saw of that one, George was driving Jellicoe away in it. As far as we know, it’s been available all along. Not to speak of George. What’s to say he doesn’t have a car of his own?”

We left Harry and his apartment to the Medical Examiner’s men and the cops. We went down to the car and headed out for Westport. I can’t say that I went kicking and screaming. I just went. Nothing Gibby had said made it seem anything but the most futile of errands; but, as I saw it, Gibby did want to be on the move and there would be no holding him down. This seemed to be as good a move as any. It would give the boy something to do until the police came through with one or more of the people we wanted to talk with. If he was going to go off half-cocked on any harebrained enterprise, it seemed a good notion to let him blow off his steam by driving out the Merritt Parkway. That was safe. He could easily have come up with some far more hazardous idea.

By the time we started up there, it was late enough so that we didn’t have any traffic to hold us down, but even at that it was a longish drive. First you have to get yourself out of the city and then you’re crossing the full width of the broad suburban encirclement. You’re well out the far side of that before you hit Westport. That much driving takes time even when you know where you’re going, but for us Westport was only the beginning. We still had the Jellicoe place to find and precious little open that time of night where we could ask.

We made a try at an all-night gas station, but the sleepy attendant was new to the neighborhood. He wasn’t so new that he didn’t know the Jellicoe reputation—his knowingly salacious smirk covered that—but he was too new to be any help to us. It was somewhere out one of the back roads. That was as close as he could come to telling us.

“Them millionaire places,” he said, “they’re all out back roads with the woods grown up around them so you’ll think maybe they’re farms been let run down or like that. In back of the woods and all that stuff they got the houses and the swimming pools, and all. It’s so they can have them orgies and nobody sees and nobody hears. That’s the way it is when you’re holding, but you got to hold the way they hold. You can’t do it with no peanuts.”

We made our second try at a lunchroom. There were two guys in there and they both knew exactly where the place was and they both told us, simultaneously. One had us turning left at the second crossroads. The other had us turning right at the third fork. When we left them, the third-fork man was offering to bet the second-crossroads guy five bucks that he didn’t even know which way was up. Purely on our own intuition, or to be more precise about it, on Gibby’s, we found our way around to the local State Police barracks. They did know the way and they showed it to us on a map. They said they didn’t have a man out there, since the local constabulary was on it, but they’d had a report from the locals. Jellicoe hadn’t come home and the place was deserted. All the servants had quit the week before and there hadn’t been any replacements.