The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (18 page)

By the time the medics had finished with us, the whole mass of cops was milling around and swapping ideas on how they could handle a matter of a stolen car when they had no way of knowing which car had been stolen or even if any had been stolen. My first guess was that they were talking about the car in the gully and I thought that they were being excruciatingly irrelevant and blatantly idiotic. I was about to tell them as much when Gibby spoke up.

“You’ve looked at the garage?” he asked.

They had looked at the garage. They reported that the doors had been broken open and that there was only one car in there, a station wagon.

“How many would there be if it was full?” Gibby asked.

“Three.”

“Station wagon,” Gibby said, ticking them off, “a bronze Cadillac and what?”

“Another Caddy. Red and chromium sedan. People keep mistaking it for a fire engine.”

“The bronze job’s in a New York garage,” Gibby said.

We went around to have a fresh look at Jellicoe’s garage. The doors were standing open now and it took no great feat of sleuthing to spot the damage to the lock. It had been hit a smashing blow that had knocked it completely askew. The heavy tongue of the lock didn’t come within inches of meeting the socket. It had been driven downward from the horizontal to an angle of about forty-five degrees.

Gibby did a thorough job of examining the smashed lock and the splintered wood of that part of the door which was just below the lock tongue, and then he suggested to the cops that it could do no harm if they were to put out a stolen car alarm for the red and chromium job. They could get all the registration material on it out of their records. It was worth doing just on the chance.

“What about the car down in the brook?” he asked. “It has New York plates. I didn’t get the number.”

I hadn’t even noticed that it had New York plates, much less thinking that I should have looked for the number. They gave Gibby the number and we went back to the house so he could phone New York and have our boys look that one up. He came away from the phone full of the old stuff. There was nothing more for us to do in Westport. We were driving back to town.

“Who’s driving?” I asked.

“You are,” Gibby said blithely. “I have moments of double vision. Every time I get cracked on the head, I come down with it. It will go away after a while.”

I wasn’t too sure about myself but I knew better than to mention it. Double vision or no, Gibby would have taken the wheel. I know the boy. If forced to it, he would even attempt to drive two cars along two roads. I didn’t want any part of that. Happily the doctors were on my side and they had the State cops with them. They set us down as a menace to highway safety and assigned a man to do our driving for us till we were back across the state line. As a courtesy, they offered us his services the rest of the way as well but, so far as Connecticut roads were concerned, they gave us no choice.

It was a happy arrangement. Once we were in the car and on the road, shock and brandy added up together for the inevitable effect. Both Gibby and I corked off and we slept all the way back to town. We were already down into Manhattan when I woke, and since Gibby showed no sign of waking, it fell to me to tell our chauffeur where we wanted to go. I directed him to Gibby’s place. I even enlisted his assistance for a project of parrying Gibby out of the car and up to his apartment and his bed.

I thought I had the rest of the night all taped out. Not that there was too much of it left, as nights go, but then I had just come awake and I wasn’t up to too much planning either. The way it went was that we would get Gibby up to his place and put him to bed. Then I would call a doctor who was a pal of ours, just for a New York opinion on Gibby’s head. I planned only one more call. That one would be to the Homicide boys down at Police Headquarters. I was going to tell them what I knew and let them take it from there till morning.

It was a sensible program and the part I’d thought would be trickiest went sensibly enough. I remembered to fish the keys to Gibby’s apartment out of his pocket before we lifted him out of the car. He didn’t stir or even mumble while we were carrying him and I didn’t know whether to be thankful that it was going so well or to worry about the possibility that he had dropped into some form of unconsciousness more drastic than sleep. With every step we carried the totally inert, dead weight of that big lug, I was attaching greater and greater importance to having that New York medical opinion on the damage to his head.

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 window 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.”