The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (4 page)

“Okay,” Gibby said, stepping back out of it. “Have fun.”

“We can go now?” It was the man who hadn’t bothered to yell for his rights who did the speaking.

Gibby nodded.

“Thanks,” the man murmured with only the smallest edge of sarcasm on it. He slid back behind the wheel and put his foot on the starter again. “See you,” he said to the man he was leaving with us.

With a wave of his hand, he pulled away. He was carrying New York plates. Gibby wrote down the number.

The man who had the Cadillac keys shook them and made them jingle. “Brother,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “You nearly tore that one.”

Gibby looked at him coldly. “Feel like talking?” he asked.

“Only to ask how come you didn’t smell the liquor on his breath,” the man said. “How far do you think he can drive with all that liquor in him before he’s pinched or even has an accident? This isn’t the first time we’ve talked him out from behind the wheel. You don’t know, but I do. He can be stubborn. Stubborn, and how. He’s all right now. I’ll put the Caddy in the garage for him and I don’t turn up with the keys till he’s slept it off. What did you think we were doing? Kidnaping the little fellow?”

“I didn’t like his looking so yellow,” Gibby said, “and getting much yellower the minute he saw you.”

“It’s an old story with him. He isn’t pretty when he’s drinking.”

The man got into the Cadillac. He was all affability now. He even asked if he couldn’t drop us off somewhere.

We weren’t going anywhere just then. I shook myself to get some of the creep out of my flesh. “It’s a good thing they were that nice about it,” I said. “There’s the time you really went overboard.”

He talked right past my words. “They didn’t look like male nurses,” he said. “Even working in pairs, male nurses should be bigger.”

“They said they were his friends and so did he,” I said. “You went over both of them and no guns. What’s wrong with believing them?”

“They didn’t look like friends,” Gibby insisted. “When two men close in on a third that way and crowd him that close, they’re letting him feel that they’ve got guns on him and he hasn’t got a chance.”

I didn’t even attempt to argue that the thing hadn’t looked that way. Just on the way the men had closed in on either side of Yellowface, on the way they had moved with him to the curb, on the way they had taken him to the car, it could have been a Police Academy demonstration of how a pair of gangsters might pull off a snatch out in the public street. I stuck with the point I could make. Appearances had been deceptive. It hadn’t been at all as it had looked. Gibby had checked and neither of the men had been carrying a gun.

Ramming his hand into his pocket, Gibby shouldered in tight against me. A lightning-fast jab caught me in the side just at that soft place between the rib cage and the hip bone. I have seen men who’ve been shot and the bullet’s point of entry was just there. It’s a bad place. They get it there and they don’t survive it. Furthermore they don’t die quickly or easily.

“Am I holding a gun on you?” Gibby asked.

I laughed at him. “That was your thumb, kid,” I said. “You aren’t carrying a gun.”

“Suppose you didn’t know I’m not carrying a gun, would you be all that sure then?”

“Completely sure. I know you. If you had a gun on you, you wouldn’t be playing games with it.”

“Suppose that hadn’t been your old pal, Gibson. Suppose it had been one of those friends of the jerk spelled backwards, how certain would you have been then?”

“I would have been in a cold sweat.”

“And the big guy was in just that.”

I’d known he would be building to that and I was ready for him or I thought I was.

“Not at the end there,” I said. “Not after you had checked on the both of them and found no guns. He couldn’t have been afraid of a thumb in his gut. He’s too big a guy for that.”

“If he believed me,” Gibby muttered.

“Why wouldn’t he believe you? Would you go looking for concealed weapons, find them, and then change your mind?”

“That’s what keeps me thinking there was something funny about all that,” Gibby said. “The two who had every reason to make an ugly fuss over my stepping in and crowding them like that were really docile about it. Since when do we get to throw our weight around that way and all we have to say is DA’s office and we get all that respect for it? They were too good-natured and they hardly looked at my credentials. I could have done it just as well on my driver’s license. I could have been Joe Doak, practical joker, and done it on a traveling salesman’s business card. And the boy they were pushing around, he didn’t look at all. Couldn’t he have been worrying about some really fancy trick, all four of us out to take him together?”

I was about to take the line of least resistance by reminding him that we already had a murder we were working on, but by that time Gloria’s mamma had tired of staring bale-fully through the shop window. She came over to the curb and joined us there.

Gibby took her by the arm and we went into the shop. He asked the woman in there whether she had any more red nightgowns like the one she had just sold. The woman went into a quick song and dance about how very special those nightgowns were. It was the build-up for asking such a price as wouldn’t often be named in a place like that.

I think Gibby, for a while at least, would have played it along as though we were merely shopping, but Gloria’s mamma gave the show away. There wasn’t any help for that. She began going through the place and pulling out one thing after another.

“See,” she kept saying. “This is mine and that’s mine and that over there is mine.”

The woman who ran the place was, of course, lightning-quick to go on guard.

“What is this?” she asked. “What do you want?”

We showed our credentials and Gibby started asking questions. It wasn’t the first time we had talked with a fence and we recognized all the answers the woman had ready. She had bought these fine things over a period of several months. She had bought them from various people, none of them regular patrons of her shop. She didn’t think she would recognize the people if she were to see them again. None of the items Gloria’s mamma was claiming had she bought within the last few days.

That was her story and she couldn’t be shaken from it. Even when Gibby told her she was covering for a killer, she wouldn’t budge. Gibby didn’t waste much time on that. He went into action. He called the apartment house and had one of the cops over there ask Nora McGuire to come around the corner and join us. She came, and although she couldn’t speak for lingerie, she did back Gloria’s mamma up on the pink evening coat and a flock of dresses.

Gibby took it from there. He impounded the identified items and gave the shopkeeper a receipt for them. Then he turned them over to one of the Homicide detectives. It was going to be this man’s job to trace them back to the places where they had been bought. It was a cinch that some of the stuff at least would be pinned down as not even having been manufactured at the dates when this woman said she had bought them. She would break down eventually, but it was going to take time, a lot of time.

One of the police lab chaps came down to talk to us. He waited restlessly while we finished what we had to do in the secondhand-clothes store. At that point Gibby thanked Gloria’s mamma and Nora McGuire and sent them on their way. Nora went with good grace. Gloria’s mamma went off repeating her cries of injustice. We went out to the street with the lab cop. We left the dame in the store to utter her own cries of injustice, but those were no more than normal expectancy.

That cop was the fingerprint man and he had the dope on prints. He looked about as agog as those boys ever get. Those lab cops, after all, are the scientists of the police department and for the most part they work very hard at their air of scientific detachment. This boy’s detachment had come detached.

“We’ve got a little honey in this one, Mr. Gibson,” he said.

Gibby wasn’t going to be easily impressed. “All prints wiped clean?” he asked.

“Yes and no,” said the cop.

Gibby gave him a hard look. “When did you start talking like a girl on the porch swing?”

The cop grinned. “Yes, the whole place was wiped clean of prints,” he said. “But no, the place wasn’t clean of prints.”

“Anything we can use?” Gibby was still not impressed. It happens often enough, more often than not in fact. Fingerprint evidence has been so well publicized. Everybody knows about it. Almost anyone bent on crime these days knows enough to wear gloves or wipe clean any surface he has touched. You get it all the time that a place has been carefully wiped up to remove all prints, but one or two surfaces will have been forgotten. Practically anyone will think of doing it. Many aren’t nearly methodical enough to do a complete job of it. This cop, in his experience, should have seen dozens like that. It seemed strange that this one should excite him so much.

He shrugged. “I don’t know how you’ll use it,” he said, “but maybe you can make something of the fact that the dame lived there and in the whole place we can’t bring up even a fragment of a print that will fit with hers.”

Gibby’s interest quickened. “All wiped away?” he asked.

“Even in the places they mostly don’t think of like the toilet seat,” the cop answered.

“But you did get prints?” Gibby asked. He was eager now.

“Two people’s prints. We have an easy make on one of the people, that cleaning woman you’ve been working on.”

“Where did you turn hers up?”

“Knobs on the front door, inside and out. Knob of the closet door and panel of the closet door. Soiled clothes hamper in the bathroom. Front of every drawer in the place. Footboard of the bed.”

Gibby was scowling with concentration, making an evident mental check of each location the cop mentioned.

“And another person?” he asked.

“Clear prints well spread over the apartment. Small fingers, probably a woman’s. Not in our files and we’ve put them through to the FBI for a check with their central file.”

“Too soon to have anything on that yet,” Gibby muttered. “You say well spread over the apartment. What specific locations?”

The cop consulted a list he was carrying. He read it off for us and it did sound as though this unknown had covered the place completely, touching just about everything in sight. These prints had been turned up on the closet door, on several empty hangers found in the closet, on all drawer fronts, on both headboard and footboard of the bed, on all the cupboards in the kitchenette, on the toilet seat in the bathroom, on the taps of the bathroom washstand, on a can of cleansing powder in the bathroom, and on the porcelain of the bathroom washstand. He spoke specially of this last set.

“The ones on the washstand,” he said, “they’re the doozies, Mr. Gibson. Both hands, left and right, and all ten fingers. It’s like they’d been done for the file, perfect and complete. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve never picked up another set like them.”

We went up to the apartment with him and he took us into the bathroom and showed us the exact position on the washstand where he had been able to bring out these phenomenal prints. The four fingers of each hand had turned up on the sides and the thumbs had turned up on top. Gibby smiled grimly.

“No wonder they’re so good,” he said. “She had her whole weight behind them.”

The cop shrugged. “Craziest one I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Don’t forget this was after wiping the place clean.”

“I’m not forgetting,” Gibby said.

We were moving out of the bathroom when the bell rang. The cop knew all about the bells. He had been working in there most of the afternoon and there had been plenty of coming and going, what with all the police and the Medical Examiner’s men.

“That’s the downstairs bell,” he said. “One of our fellows coming back that’ll be.”

He put his finger on a button that would release the lock on the downstairs door. He held it there for a few moments.

“Expect any of your men back here now?” Gibby asked.

“We’ll be keeping a man on here tonight anyhow—” the cop began.

“Just in case some of her friends should turn up,” Gibby said, finishing it for him. “Someone has turned up. It can be one of our boys. It could be someone for her. Let’s not assume anything.”

The cop flushed. He was a specialist and evidently a bit rusty on the general run of police routine, but he was still a cop. He made an apologetic gesture. Nobody said anything. We were waiting. In the quiet I could hear Nora McGuire’s record player next door. It was coming through pleasantly as just the most discreet murmur of music. The sudden, sharp shrilling of the upstairs doorbell made me jump a bit.

Gibby moved to the door and opened it. A young man with thin hair stood on the doormat. He was all big grin and dancing eyes. He saw us and the grin faded and some of the gaiety went out of his eyes. He went into a flutter of apologetic gestures.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have the wrong apartment.”

“Come in,” Gibby said. “You have the right apartment.”

I thought he was just riding a hunch. In fact, it did strike me that this could very possibly belong to Nora McGuire next door. He looked the type who might join her for a high old time with Frederic Chopin on the gramophone.

Then he came in and the light fell full on his face. Just for verification, I took a quick glance at the picture on the bedside table. He was looking some years older and he wasn’t in uniform, but there was no mistaking him. Even without the combat infantry medal or the Pfc. stripe, this was Milty, the only man in the life of the late Sydney Bell on whom we had anything more than Nora McGuire’s vague descriptions.

At that moment he stuck his hand out and introduced himself. “I’m Milt Bannerman,” he said. “You know, Ellie’s brother.”

Since nobody had taken his hand he now used it to gesture toward his picture where it still sat on the table.

“Yes,” Gibby said. “We recognized you from the picture.”

“Both the girls out?” Milty asked. “Serves me right, I suppose, for trying to surprise them. They weren’t expecting me till tonight. I found I could get an earlier train.”