The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (19 page)

“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.

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 went 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.”

“Then what?”

“They came here and they went inside. I waited in the street a while and I couldn’t stand it. I went up and rang the bell. She let me in, Miss Sylvester, I mean. That’s all.”

“Not by a long shot,” Gibby said.

“How I got here. Why I came.”

“And everything that happened. Miss Sylvester was presumably alive when she let you in. When we came along and rang the bell, nobody let us in. Not Miss Sylvester, not Miss Loomis, not you. Miss Sylvester was dead by then and that lets her out of explaining her actions. Nothing lets Miss Loomis out and nothing lets you out.”

“All right,” Bannerman said sulkily. “Not that we know anything except the kind of woman she was. We were here upstairs, talking to her. The bell rang. She left us and went down to answer the bell. She didn’t come back. We waited and waited and after a while we went down to look for her. She was down in the hall where you found her. She’d been killed like Ellie. Then you rang the bell. We didn’t want any part of this. It wasn’t any of our business except maybe the way it hooked up with Ellie and not even that way now because now I know and I’m not having any part of Ellie either. Alive or dead, she’s not my sister any more. She hasn’t been all these last years. I’ve washed my hands of her.”

“Which makes them clean enough to suit you perhaps,” Gibby told him. “They’re going to have to be clean enough to suit the law before any of this can stop being your business, Milton.”

“I have nothing to hide and nothing to fear,” Bannerman said, striking an attitude.

“That’s a help,” Gibby said. “Since you have nothing to hide, stop hiding it. A man who had nothing to hide would have opened the door to us.”

Joan took a hand. “We had no way of knowing it was you,” she said. “It could have been this—this killer—coming back.”

“So you tiptoed downstairs and waited till you heard us in the house up here. Then you tried to sneak away by the basement entrance.”

“All right,” Bannerman said defiantly. “So we did. Is that so terrible? We were through with all of this. We’re leaving this town and we’re never coming back. Waiting till I can take Ellie home and bury her—that’s out. I wouldn’t put her beside decent people and make no mistake about that. Our parents, they were decent people. I knew what it would mean if we got involved with you on this woman’s death. It would mean questions and delays and more questions and delays. We’d been through all that. We’d had enough.”

“And you were washing your hands of all of it,” Gibby said. “We knew Miss Loomis’ passion for cleanliness, but now you’ve got it, too. You were quite a while upstairs after you found the body. You took all the time you needed to wipe everything you might have touched in this house. There were going to be no fingerprints for us to find, neither yours nor Miss Loomis’.”

“That isn’t so,” Bannerman growled.

“Milton, please,” Joan Loomis protested.

“‘Milton, please,’” Gibby said, echoing her again. “You both had your handkerchiefs wrapped around your hands. That was so you wouldn’t be leaving any fingerprints on the gate downstairs when you went out. You can be contemptuous as you like about the local moral standards. Don’t be too contemptuous of our intelligence.”

“So we didn’t want to be involved,” Bannerman said. “Show me one decent man or woman who wouldn’t recoil from the very thought of being involved with people like that.”

“You’re slipping back into moral judgments,” Gibby said. “We’re still on facts.”

“You have all the facts.”

“You were here a long time talking with Miss Sylvester. What were you talking about?”

“Ellie, and that’s a closed book.”

“We haven’t closed it. We don’t close them till the killer has been tried and convicted and executed.”

“That’s your affair. I’m not interested.”

“Then you’re going to be bored. You have no choice. This woman told you that your sister wasn’t what she’d pretended to be. If she was a model at all, she had used her modeling only as a cover for her real profession of call girl.”

“She told me that my sister was a whore,” Bannerman said.

He preferred not to discuss this at all, but if he was to speak of it, he wouldn’t shelter behind any euphemisms. If the word was in Scriptures, it was good enough for Milton Bannerman.

“This was the first you knew it?”

Bannerman turned on Gibby a look of withering contempt. “Of course it was the first I knew it,” he said. “You saw how I was mourning her. When you took me down to see her body, if I had known it then, I wouldn’t have cried for her. I would have spit on her.”

“Milton,” Joan Loomis gasped.

“That’s the truth. He wanted the truth. All right, he has it.”

“And,” Gibby added, “if you had known it earlier, you would have killed her yourself. You would have killed her with your own two hands.”

“I would,” Bannerman said. “I would have killed her for what she had become, for lying to me the way she did, for daring to bring Joan into that harlot’s den of hers. I would have enjoyed killing her.”

Joan rose out of her chair, walked across to her fiancé and planted on his cheek a slap that was the resoundingly lusty mate to the one she had given him in Grand Central Station.

“That’s quite enough of that,” she said firmly. “I’m not excusing Ellie. I’m not excusing anyone, but I’m not excusing myself either. Most of this is my fault. I’ve been the world’s worst fool, but I’ve learned better. I’ve seen what a fool I’ve been, and I’m quite over that. There will be no more foolishness.”

“We observed that you learn fast,” Gibby told her. “After Ellie’s killing you quite forgot about removing your fingerprints. You remembered everything else but you forgot that, but you don’t make the same mistake twice. Here, after Miss Sylvester’s killing, you were careful about fingerprints.”