The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (22 page)

“All right,” Joan said defiantly. “I’ve told you this before. I did think it. I was wrong, but I did think it. I wasn’t making sense. I see that now, but all I could think of was that Milton had killed her and that he had had every right to kill her and that the only thing that was wrong about it would be that he would have to suffer for it. That’s what gave me the courage to sit with you for hours and lie and lie and lie. I never lied before in my life and I never thought I could make myself be a liar, but I could and I did and I’ll never be ashamed of it. Mistaken as I was, it wasn’t wrong.”

Gibby grinned at her. “It wasn’t particularly good either,” he said. “It didn’t convince me or Mac but we’re old hands with liars. It wouldn’t have had to be especially good to convince Milton, who’d led a sheltered life, but it wasn’t even that good. He started distrusting you. When you went back to your hotel, he went down to the lobby and hung around watching. He saw you go out and he followed you.”

“I know. I went out to see if I could find the man. You had taken my fingerprints and I had never thought of fingerprints. I knew you were going to find out all about me, everything I’d done in Ellie’s apartment. I went a little crazy, I suppose. I know I was thinking six ways at once. I couldn’t talk to Milton about it because I couldn’t even begin without telling him what Ellie was really like. There was this man who had been following me. You showed a lot of interest in this man and I began to wonder whether he was only what I had been thinking. I was wondering if he couldn’t have been someone who knew something about Ellie. I had to find him. I had to talk to him. I was desperate. I had to know more if I was going to help Milton. I could see that what I’d already done wouldn’t help at all. It was going to be no good because of the fingerprints. I had to find the man. Even if he had been just following me, even if he didn’t know anything about Ellie or about anything, I had to find him. You see, I was even thinking that if he knew nothing, I could still do something to help Milton. I could go with the man and then you would think I was the kind of girl that did those things and, since you would know about me from the fingerprints anyhow, you’d think I killed Ellie. I could help Milton that way.”

Bannerman’s eyes had turned away from Jellicoe. He was looking at the girl now and all the anger and hate were gone. Horror had taken their place.

“What made you think the man would still be in the station?” Gibby asked.

“That was where I had last seen him. I didn’t know any other place to look. He was still there and I went to him and spoke to him. At first he acted as though he knew nothing. He said he’d been watching me, trying to remember where he had met me before.”

“Treated it like an ordinary pickup?” Gibby asked.

She couldn’t quite answer that. She had never been involved in a pickup before and she had no idea of how they went. She did describe the exchanges between George and herself, however, and it was obvious that he had handled it as an ordinary pickup. He had invited her to go and have a drink with him. He had taken her as far as the house where all the police had been. It was evident that that had been Harry’s place. We probably had narrowly missed running into them there. Then he had said that he had forgotten that the place they were going to had moved but there was a good enough place back down the street. He had taken her to the bar.

In the bar he had excused himself for a few minutes and when he had returned, he had said something about thinking he remembered where they had met.

“At Sydney Bell’s place?” Gibby asked.

“Yes.”

“Had you met this man before?”

“No. I met none of her friends. She would just talk to people on the telephone, but she didn’t have me meet anyone.”

“I see,” Gibby said. “So then he went on and fed you another bit and another bit, narrowing down until he had hinted pretty strongly that he was thinking of Sydney Bell’s apartment early that morning when you had been up there rearranging the dead girl’s life for her.”

Joan nodded. “Yes,” she said. “He told me I was in trouble, terrible trouble, but I wasn’t to worry. He was going to help me. He said he had influence. He knew people. He said there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be fixed if you knew the right people. He asked me a lot of questions about Milton and he kept saying I could tell him everything. He was my friend and he was going to help us, Milton and me. He knew the right people.”

“Then Miss Sylvester came and joined you,” Gibby said. “Did he say she was the right people?”

“He said she was a friend of Ellie’s, except that he called Ellie Sydney and Miss Sylvester called her that, too. He left the table again and went to the back. Miss Sylvester said she hated bars. She said she hated them particularly when she didn’t have a man with her. Two women alone in a bar, it would be only a matter of time before some drunk would be getting fresh. She said we could go to her place. We could talk better there.”

“What about the guy who brought you?” Gibby asked. “Didn’t you think you should have waited for him?”

“He was gone so long and when I said we ought to wait for him, she said he would come around to her place. He had gone away for a while. There had been something he had to do. She said it was something he had to do for me. I asked her what, but she said I wasn’t to worry. They were taking care of everything.”

“What made you trust these people?” Gibby asked. “You hadn’t met any of them before. They were strangers, or so you say.”

“They were strangers, but they had been Ellie’s friends. There were all sorts of things they told me about Milt and myself that they couldn’t possibly have known unless Ellie had been their friend and had told them about us. It wasn’t that I really trusted them. I was desperate and I was terribly, terribly mistaken. I had no choice, I thought. Things were so bad and I hadn’t the first idea of how soon it would be that you would know about me because of the fingerprints. They said you’d been lying to me when you said you wanted my prints only for identification because I’d been staying there with Ellie. They said you could tell from where you’d find the prints just which ones were from my having stayed there and which showed what I had been doing there after Ellie was killed. I was grasping at straws. Things were so bad that I couldn’t see how they could be any worse.”

“So you went with her?”

The rest of it was as we had already had it from Bannerman. She had gone with Mabel Sylvester to this fine house in the East Fifties. The woman had let them in with her key. There had been no one about, no servants or anyone else. Miss Sylvester had talked to her and urged her to tell everything. The line had been that they had to know everything she had done and everything Milton had done if they were going to be of any help.

She had only talked a little before they were interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell. Miss Sylvester had gone down to open the door. It had been Milton and he had demanded to see Joan. Miss Sylvester had asked him in. After that she had talked to the two of them.

“That was when Milton found out,” the girl said.

It must have been quite a scene. The Sylvester woman told him flatly that it was no good lying to her. She knew that he had killed his sister. He had denied it hotly. He loved his sister. He had been both mother and father to her. He had been more than a brother. Miss Sylvester had laughed in his face. She had told him straight out what his precious Ellie had been doing, and at that point Milton had blown his top.

“At first he wouldn’t believe her,” Joan Loomis moaned. “Then he began saying all those things he’s been saying to you. He said he would have killed Ellie himself if he had known and she pounced on it and said that he had killed Ellie. She knew all about it. Heaven forgive me. I believed her.”

It had been at that point that Milton Bannerman had washed his hands of everything, including in everything his sister’s memory. He was ready to take Joan out of there and go straight back home to River Forks with her. Mabel Sylvester had stopped him in his tracks. She’d told him what choices he had. He could let her help him, and maybe she could fix everything. He could go to the police and confess or he could do as he said he was going to do and see Joan arrested for his sister’s murder. She told him what Joan had done in Ellie’s apartment.

“She told him how you were going to know because of my fingerprints,” Joan said, and now the girl was white and shaking.

It wasn’t only that scene that she was finding so hard to describe. It was more what she next had to tell us. There had been a second interruption, again the doorbell. They had been in an upstairs sitting room and Mabel Sylvester had left them up there while she went down to answer the bell. She hadn’t returned. They had waited and waited and then they had gone downstairs to look for her. They had found her. It was the same story as we had already had from Milton Bannerman except that Joan wasn’t pretending that they had only just discovered the body at the time when we had arrived. There had been some time in between. She didn’t know just how long because she had been terrified and minutes could have seemed like hours.

They had taken out their handkerchiefs and had begun wiping. They had wiped the railings of the stairs and the doorknobs of the upstairs room. They had gone about that room, wiping everything. They’d had no memory of what they had touched and what they hadn’t, but they had wiped everything just to be certain.

“You were profiting by your mistake in Ellie’s apartment,” Gibby said.

“I couldn’t even think,” the girl answered. “I was sick with fear and horror and I was happy, too, because then I knew. I knew how mistaken I had been. It hadn’t been Milton at all because Milton was upstairs with me all the time. She went down to answer the bell and we waited for her and when we went down we went down together and she looked just like Ellie had looked, so it couldn’t have been Milton. He said we had to wipe everything clean and I did what he said. I was through with thinking. I had been such a complete fool.”

“Yes,” Gibby said. “Milton was smarter. He knew about fingerprints. You may not know it but the reason why we had it so easy spotting your fingerprints in the apartment was because before you went around the place touching things yesterday morning, the slate had been wiped clean. Everything had been wiped before you got there, just the kind of job Milton had you do with him here after Mabel Sylvester had been killed. Even in that respect this killing is a duplicate of his sister’s murder.”

“But he was upstairs with me,” Joan screamed. She saw the closing trap and she was trying to claw her way out of it.

“We have only your word for it,” Gibby said. “Do you think that’s going to be enough? After all, it’s only the word of a girl who thinks anything goes so long as she can save pure, unsullied Milton Bannerman.”

“You must believe me,” the girl said.

“Who’s going to make a jury believe you?” Gibby asked. “The wages of sin are death and, boy, has this been pay day! Ellie, the sinner, was killed in her bed and she hadn’t been looking at television when she died. The set had been turned on twenty-four hours before you came down from Boston and it had been turned on to screen any noise that might have been made while the place was being wiped clean of all prints. But Ellie was only the beginning. Ellie had really been something when she was alive. She had been the girl who kept knocking them dead. Look at Mr. Jellicoe here with his bit of red lace to remember her by. So the sinner was killed, but that wasn’t enough. There were the men who led her into sin. There was Harry and he got it just as he came out of his shower. He never even got the soap out of his eyes before the strangler’s hands closed around his throat. You can’t alibi Milton for that one. You were on your own then with a man you picked up in the station. Then you were in the bar with that man and Milton was outside and Mabel Sylvester came along in her car. She parked it not out front but down the alley. She parked it there for George because that wasn’t a healthy street for him, not with so many police around. George had telephoned her to tell her that the police were clustered around Harry’s place and that he had you in the bar down the street. He didn’t know that Milton was lying in wait outside the bar.”

“He wasn’t lying in wait,” Joan protested. “He was following us, worrying about me.”

“His story and your story. A jury will have to choose between that story and this one I’m telling you. Milton was lying in wait outside. His sinful sister had come to her just deserts. One of her procurers had come to his just down the street. Now Milton was watching the other procurer and Mabel Sylvester had the good sense to be worried. She was worried about George because it looked very much as though something had happened to Harry and what had happened to Harry could happen to George. She may not have known whether it was murder or merely a Vice Squad raid, but she would worry about either. If it was murder again, then she had further worries. There was Mr. Jellicoe, their best client. Wasn’t he in danger? Wasn’t she in danger herself? She was a brave woman. She told George to get out of town. She told him she would come around in her car and leave it in the alley for him. She told him to take the car and get out of town, go up to Westport and stay with Jellicoe. He would be safe there from New York’s Vice Squad if it was that and if it was the other, pay day for the wages of sin, he could watch over Jellicoe and Jellicoe could watch over him. Meanwhile she would see what she could find out from this girl.”

I was way ahead of the story at this point because, after all, I had been up in Westport with Gibby. I had been there when the rock had smashed against his head. I could still feel the strangler’s fingers on my throat. George had been in the bar. Milton had been waiting outside. On his own admission he had seen Mabel Sylvester come out of the alley. George had taken the car and driven to Westport but he hadn’t known that he had a passenger crouched down in back. He hadn’t known it till they had reached the Jellicoe place and the fingers had closed around his throat. The rest followed simply enough. George had died. The Westport cop, of course, had been only incidental. The killer’s work had still to be finished and we’d come along at a time when we might have stopped him with the last of his work undone. He took the red sedan from Jellicoe’s garage, drove back to New York, parked it at the end of the subway line, took the subway downtown, and killed the procuress.