The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (21 page)

Then had come the worst thing she had to do. She had to get Ellie out of that sinful, sheer red nightgown. She had made herself do it. She had taken the nylon and lace off the body and had put the body into a nightdress out of her own luggage, the cute and demure job that had been on the body when the cleaning woman had found it. She had buttoned the thing all the way up to the throat. That made Ellie look so much better. It covered the horror of the welts on her throat and it also avoided the indecency of even one undone button. She had made the bed up fresh and had arranged the body primly in it.

The closets and the drawers looked unnaturally empty and she had helped that with the prayer book and the tracts and a few of her own prim things that she had been buying for her trousseau. Somewhere in the course of all this, she had been sick. She had leaned over the washstand in the bathroom and had hung on for dear life while her stomach gave back everything that had been in it. She had cleaned up after herself but she had not been too knowing in her clean-up. It had never occurred to her to remove fingerprints.

When she had left the apartment, she had turned off the television and had taken with her her parcel of the liquor and tobacco things and, crammed into her own luggage, she had carried off all the seductive lovelies that had been in Ellie’s wardrobe. The job had been done and, so far as she knew, she hadn’t been seen or heard.

“But you weren’t quite finished,” Gibby told her. “You were in a spot. The easiest thing would have been to dump everything of hers down the incinerator as you had dumped the liquor and the glasses and the cigarettes and the ash trays and all that. You would have liked to dump the clothes as well but you couldn’t. You had to have a hotel room. You had to have money to carry you along till Milton would come. You had put your nightdress on the body and your underwear in the drawer. You had bought the nightdress and those underclothes up in Boston and your cousin up there knew you had shopped them. You had to have something to show for that shopping and you had no money. You could have taken the money out of Ellie’s purse. She had more than enough there for your day’s needs, but you couldn’t make yourself do that. It would have been stealing. Taking the clothes wasn’t stealing. That was protecting Milton. Since they had to be gotten rid of somehow and you had to get a bit of money somehow without stealing it…”

At that point the girl did interrupt him, but not to deny any of these acts he was charging her with.

“I did see the money in her purse,” she said. “I saw it when I was taking her cigarettes and matches out to dispose of them with the ash trays and liquor and all that stuff, but I wasn’t thinking about money then. I was only thinking about what I had to do in the apartment. When I had everything done and I had crowded her clothes into my suitcases along with my own, I had the other things—the liquor and the cigarettes—in a paper bag. I turned off the television and the lights and I went out to the hall and dumped the paper bag down the incinerator. I wanted to put her clothes down there, too, but I couldn’t. If anyone had come along, it would have looked too strange. The other things could just have been a bag of rubbish, but to open my cases and take out the clothes and feed them into the incinerator would have been different. I knew I had to get rid of them but I thought I could dump them somewhere. I went down to the street and looked for a cab. When I checked in my purse for the cab fare, it came to me that I had to have money now for a hotel and to get me through the day and to buy things to replace what I had left in Ellie’s place, the things I’d bought in Boston and that my cousin up there had seen. I had seen the same things in New York but more expensive. I knew just where to go to find them, but I didn’t have nearly enough money for all that and I couldn’t make myself go back up there to take Ellie’s money.”

“That was when you saw the secondhand-clothes shop,” Gibby said, “and that saved you from having to go back to the apartment. As soon as it opened in the morning, you went around there and sold all of Ellie’s clothes. You sold them cheap and the woman in the shop thought she was getting a terrific bargain and she was asking no questions. It wasn’t the first time she had bought stolen goods and she knew how to behave. Even though she gave you only a fraction of even secondhand value, it was enough. You were able to go to the hotel. You were able to eat yesterday and to shop all day and pick up replacements for the things you had left as camouflage at Ellie’s.” He stopped and waited for her to speak. She said nothing. “Do you want to correct any of that?” he asked. “Have I got it wrong at any point?”

“It’s as though you’d been there all the time watching me,” the girl said. “I was an idiot.”

“You were an idiot,” Gibby agreed. “You would have been the world’s worst idiot to do all that, put yourself through that ordeal, run those fantastic risks for nothing more than to save poor, pure Milton from ever knowing about his sister’s life. You can’t expect us to believe that you were that much of an idiot. You made yourself do it to protect him from the consequences of murder, because it was murder and you didn’t have the first doubt that he had done it.”

“I was an idiot. I know better now. It wasn’t Milt.”

I looked at Milton Bannerman crouched in his chair between the two watchful cops and I pitied this girl. It was as though Bannerman hadn’t even heard a word of the ordeal she had been through. It was as though it hadn’t mattered a bit to him that she had endured everything and risked everything in her effort to save him. He wasn’t sparing her so much as a glance. His eyes never moved. They were fixed on K. R. E. Jellicoe and I have never seen a hotter blaze of hate in any man’s eyes.

Gibby was talking again. He was still reconstructing, telling Joan Loomis the full story that she hadn’t had the strength to tell him. As she had gone through her day, she had become aware of the fact that most of the day a man or a couple of men had been following her. She had noticed them and she had been annoyed by them, but she hadn’t thought that it was anything more than New York’s sinful ways, nothing more than the sort of thing that had brought Ellie Bannerman from her pure beginnings to her dreadful death. In the course of the afternoon she had gone back to the neighborhood of Ellie’s apartment. She hadn’t gone in but she had seen the police about and she knew then that the body had been found. Somewhere about that time she had lost the men who had been following her.

Joan looked up at Gibby. “What I did in the apartment,” she said. “I can understand that. I did leave my fingerprints on everything. You would know how to see through every move I made. But this? How could you know about the men and how could you know just where I lost them and when?”

I was glad she asked the question. I didn’t have to save it to ask Gibby later.

His answer couldn’t have been simpler. That part of it had been luck. The men who had been following her had been procurers and blackmailers. They had been to Sydney Bell’s apartment before Joan had gone there. They had known that Sydney was dead. Sydney alive had been a source of profit to them. They had not been men who would give up easily on a chance of profit. They had hoped that Sydney dead might continue to be a source of profit. They had been watching the apartment. They had seen Joan come to it. They had known how long she had been there. They had seen her go. They had followed her. They had seen her sell the clothes. We knew how easily one could see through the window into that shop.

“They were keeping an eye on you,” Gibby said. “Mr. Jellicoe says he saw you once on Broadway with this woman you knew as Ellie Bannerman, the girl they called Sydney Bell. It is a cinch that they’d seen you with her some time or another. They would know who you were. They would be waiting for you to lead them to Sydney Bell’s brother. They were looking for profit.”

“But I did lose them for a while, for the rest of the afternoon and until I went to the station. Why did they leave me then? How did they know where and when to pick me up again?”

“Your boy friend’s wages of sin seem to have put me in the mood for proverbs,” Gibby said. “‘A bird in the hand.’ You know that one. That was a matter of accident. They were following you and you took them past the shop where you had sold Ellie’s things. Mr. Jellicoe happened to be in the shop just then. He had taken a few drinks and was in a sentimental mood. He had spotted a very special red nylon and lace nightgown in the window and it was a nightgown he knew too well. He went in and bought it as a souvenir. Your men saw him do it and they left you. They knew your hotel. They knew when Milton’s train was due. They would have known that from his sister. She would have told them that her puritanical brother was coming in from Ohio and she didn’t want any procurers around while he was in town. Any deal they had in mind to make with you and Milton could wait. If necessary they could even go out to River Forks and pick that bit of business up again. But here was Mr. Jellicoe and he was more immediate. He was a valued client. He would be good for a lot of future business. He would be in the market for a replacement for the late Sydney Bell and more immediately he was always profitably grateful when they rescued him from driving when drunk. More than that, he was in that shop buying a dangerous souvenir. They could protect him from involving himself with the Sydney Bell killing and when he came to his senses he would be all the more grateful and, therefore, all the more profitable. They left you for Mr. Jellicoe, and since we were also interested in Sydney Bell’s sinful clothes, we were right outside the shop in time to see them pick Mr. Jellicoe up.”

Up to this point Jellicoe, to all appearances, had been completely concentrated on Bannerman. He never wilted under the man’s baleful gaze. He sat there looking at Bannerman in mingled sympathy and bewilderment. As I read him, here was that good kid’s brother and now the good kid was dead. He was sorry for her brother. He would have been more than ready to grieve with him, but the brother wasn’t grieving. Instead he was calling that good kid unpleasant names, and that was something K. R. E. Jellicoe just couldn’t begin to understand. I would have guessed that he was hardly listening to this story Gibby was building up with the girl, but he must have had some attention for it because he did rise to the bit about his buying the dangerous souvenir.

“It looked just like hers,” he said. “If it wasn’t hers it was one just like it. You know I was a little drunk anyhow and I never even thought that maybe it wasn’t hers. I wanted it.”

“And your friends didn’t want you to have it,” Gibby said. “They had to beat the daylights out of you to get it away from you and they did get it, all but a small piece of the lace.”

Jellicoe shook his head. “It wasn’t George and Harry gave me this,” he said, touching lightly the square of gauze that was fixed to his face with the Scotch tape. “That was something else I got into later when I was even drunker. They just tried to take the nightgown away from me and I was hanging on to it and it tore and I was left with just the piece of it.” With every word he was looking more and more pouty. “I haven’t even got that now,” he said sadly. “I got mad at George and Harry and I went off on my own. I got a lot drunker and I got in this fight somewhere where I did get beat up. Not that it’s anything. The thing that burns me I was rolled or something. I haven’t even got the piece of lace any more.”

“You had a bad night,” Gibby said sympathetically.

“Some nights, they’re like that.” Jellicoe gave it the philosophically resigned touch.

Gibby returned to Joan Loomis. He went through all the lying she had done, all that business about phoning Ellie’s apartment and getting no answer, her little device about the wrong number; The girl denied nothing. She had done all that Gibby was charging against her, but she had done it for Milton. It may have been foolish, she conceded, but she insisted that it hadn’t been wrong. Milton, she said, was good, and it was Milton’s goodness that had made everything right. The one point she did labor was Milton’s innocence. He hadn’t killed his sister. He hadn’t killed anyone. Only in that had she been really wrong, in thinking even for a moment that he might have killed Ellie. Now she had only one regret and that was that she had failed in her efforts to keep from him the knowledge of what his sister had been.

She told us about going to the station to meet Bannerman’s train. While waiting, she had spotted one of the men who had been following her around for so much of the day, but she’d had no thought beyond the assumption that this was a masher and that it was bad luck that she had run into him again. Gibby did question that a bit. He wondered at her being all that ready to accept a coincidence of this sort in a city like New York with all its millions of men. They kicked it around for a while and Gibby was satisfied. Joan Loomis had learned her bitter lessons on the subject of how different New York was from River Forks but this was a difference that hadn’t been in the area of her learning. At home one was always running into the same people all over town. She should have known that it wouldn’t be like that here, but she had just not thought of it.

“But even on the assumption that the man was only a masher,” Gibby said, “he did make you nervous. When Milton came up behind you and covered your eyes, you didn’t hesitate for a moment. You were certain that it would be this man who had been following you all over town. You whirled around and let him have it.”

“What else was I to think? Milton’s train hadn’t come in yet. There was no one I knew in New York.”

“Exactly,” Gibby said. “And what followed was just as automatic. You saw that it wasn’t the man who had been following you. It was Milton—and Milton’s train hadn’t come in yet. The very thing you had been trying all day not to believe was right there before your eyes. Milton had come earlier than expected. He had gone to Ellie’s apartment and had caught her in the act or so soon after the act that he couldn’t possibly be deceived. The shock of it had knocked him over. He had fastened his hands around her throat and had choked the life out of her. He had killed her with those very hands which a moment before he had playfully put over your eyes. You fainted. What else would a girl do at a moment like that?”