The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (2 page)

She hadn’t even looked at him. She had been trying to find her key in her purse. She had gone to her own door, still looking for the key, and she had only just found it when her neighbor opened the door to 5F. She had heard the man ask for Sydney Bell and she had heard Sydney Bell ask him in. That was all. Her key had turned up by then and she went into her apartment, as the man went into Sydney Bell’s.

“I didn’t give it a thought,” she said. “It was her business, but now with all these questions you’re asking, I did remember and I suppose it was a strange time for a man to come visiting her, particularly a man who apparently didn’t know her at all.”

“You got the impression that she had been expecting this man?”

“Oh, yes. Most certainly.”

“This happen recently?”

“No. Months ago. I don’t know just when.”

That was the whole of it and it was more than we were ever to have from any of the other neighbors. Some of the others, as a matter of fact, were eagerly co-operative, but that was only a matter of attitude. They had nothing to give us apart from their willingness to give.

What we actually had at the beginning of this thing, aside from these tantalizing bits and pieces Gibby did manage to extract from Nora McGuire, was a small collection of quite as fragmentary and quite as tantalizing snippets of physical evidence. We had in the first place the body of Sydney Bell herself. I have already said she was young and pretty. We could to some extent see that from the body, but as Gibby had told the McGuire girl we hadn’t seen the body until after she had been more than twenty-four hours dead, and in that length of time an appalling lot of prettiness goes.

Just how much had gone we knew right away because on the table beside her bed she had a framed photograph of herself and, as Gibby put it, that was convenient for us even though a bit oddly narcissistic on her part. It was one of those tinted jobs, all pink and white and golden, with bare shoulders and a froth of filmy stuff just below the shoulders, but you could compare it with the body and, even if you made the reservation that in life she couldn’t have been quite so technicolor as that photo, you could say that the nose had been like this and the eyes like that and the mouth like so and the sum total something that would hardly have been hard to look at.

There was only the one other picture in the place. That was also a studio job but rather the better for being in black and white. It also stood on the bedside table. It was the picture of a man or possibly of a boy. Which you would call him might very well depend on the angle your own age might give you on an infantryman who looked as though he had just made Pfc. You know those photographs. This one was at least as much a picture of that single Pfc. stripe on the sleeve and of the combat infantry badge and campaign ribbon over the tunic pocket as it was of the young soldier himself.

He was an earnest looking lad of possibly twenty-one or twenty-two, certainly no more than that. The expression was pompously solemn and a bit stuffed but it was a clean-lined, lean face, with an honest-looking eye and a firm mouth. He might have been a little soft in the jaw department but he wasn’t chinless. If there was a really noticeable inadequacy anywhere it was at the top of the head. His hair looked unusually thin for his apparent age.

I remembered him when Nora came around to talking about Sydney Bell’s callers, but I couldn’t make him fit into that pattern. I had a feeling that he would have to have been older or possibly a sight more dashing to have been one of them. Even before we had talked to Nora, I had been wondering about him.

“A little young for a boy friend,” I’d remarked to Gibby.

“Could be an old picture,” Gibby said. “A lot of men who don’t go for being photographed at all did get the idea they were hot stuff in uniform. They do it then and then they don’t do it again. There are battle stars on the campaign ribbon. Those can’t be more recent than Korean War which is a little more than yesterday. If they’re World War II, this can be a ten-year-old picture or more than that.”

I took it the other way. These years Gibby was adding to the age of the kid in the soldier boy picture would have to be subtracted from what was obviously Sydney Bell’s approximate age at time of death. I decided it would have to have been Korean War because ten years back or more Sydney would have been much too young to be receiving affectionately inscribed photos from soldiers. She would hardly have been in her teens then and the inscription read:
All my love, Milty.

So there was Milty and there was the body of Sydney Bell. Her cleaning woman, who had a key to the apartment, had come in at her usual time to do the place up and had found the body. This was a twice-a-week cleaning woman and she hadn’t been in the day before. It had startled her to find Sydney in bed. That had never happened before and the cleaning woman made it quite clear that she was a person who didn’t hold with sleeping past noon and also that in her profession time was money. She had come to clean and she started cleaning. Asleep or not, Sydney Bell, was not going to have more than the hour she was paying for.

“I had it figured,” the woman said. “I’d start cleaning around her, she’d wake and get up. She was going to have to get up so I could make the bed anyhow and, the way I figured it, she’d be getting up and wanting a shower and all and then how was I going to get to do the bathroom in her hour and all? So I wasn’t being careful or anything. I kept bumping the bed like, figuring as how the quicker I woke her up, the better it would be. I bump the bed like that a couple of times and she don’t even turn over or stir or nothing and then I begin thinking it’s funny. I go over and look at her and right off I see she isn’t asleep at all. She’s dead and like laid out on the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. That’s when I started yelling.”

We knew all there was to know about her yelling. She had done it at the window and it had brought a policeman up to the apartment. He had taken it from there. He hadn’t recognized murder right off but he had recognized death and the doctor he had summoned had completed it—death by manual strangulation. In all justice to that cop, there had been a good enough reason for his not seeing it. The body had been dressed in one of those deals that happens as a result of the sleepwear manufacturers going cute.

Remember—it was a couple of years back—all the stores went Victorian or something with red flannel nightgowns, both male and female, red flannel nightcaps, complete with tassel? That was it. Sydney Bell’s body was dressed in one of those red flannel nightgowns. Hers was the female type, of course, and it was a fancy one. It had a sort of furry collar on it that buttoned up under the chin. It wasn’t fur, but it was white and fluffy, one of those fake furs they make out of synthetics. It covered up every last trace of the marks of strangulation. You see, it wasn’t until the doctor started undoing buttons that they showed up at all.

It was seeing that bit in the first report that came through that made Gibby ask the DA if he didn’t think this might be just our kind of a case. The DA was noncommittal. It could be a difficult one and it could be a cinch, too soon to tell.

“Much too soon,” Gibby agreed, “but, as I get the picture, this gal was strangled and her collar was buttoned up afterward. I’d like to ask some questions about that little item.”

The DA, who is really great stuff on racket setups and corporation executives who get too smart with their bookkeeping, has never been any sort of a murder man. I don’t say there haven’t on occasion been DAs who were nothing better than political slobs, but our boy isn’t one of those. In his own field he’s terrific and he’s big enough to know his limitations. Knowing them, he sends the murders Gibby’s way.

“If you say so, Gibson,” he murmured, “you’d better get up there and ask your questions. Take Mac with you, keep reporting, and work it the usual way.”

“Thanks,” Gibby said.

“One thing before you take off,” the DA asked. “Why couldn’t she have been strangled collar and all?”

“Innocent until proved guilty, boss,” Gibby said.

“And what does that mean?”

“I always like to assume a man knows his job till something proves it otherwise,” Gibby explained. “The doc who’s seen the body says manual strangulation. He can’t possibly know any more than strangulation unless he has seen marks on the throat that are unmistakably the marks of hands. If anybody took a double handful of throat, furry collar and all, and choked this dame to death without hands slipping off collar to make direct contact with skin of throat, there could be no hand marks on the throat, no marks to say this strangulation is manual strangulation. It could be a garroting, for instance. Now if it had been this thin chiffon stuff, or lace, there would be no question, but a furlike fluff, that’s protective padding.”

The DA nodded. “You’d better go ask your questions,” he said.

Gibby had asked them. He’d begun with the cop. The cop had seen not the first sign of any violence. He had found the room neat, about as neat as a room would be when it was in the process of being cleaned. The bedclothes had been straight and tucked in all around.

“Like it was fresh made or like it was a hospital maybe,” the cop said, elaborating the point.

The body had been dressed in the red flannel deal with the furry collar and the collar had been buttoned all the way. He was certain of that. We saw the nightgown and it was evidently of a piece with the neatness of the bedclothes. It didn’t even look as though it had been slept in, much less that its wearer had come to a violent death in it.

There was, of course, always the possibility that the maid had done some neating up between yelling for the police and the arrival of the patrolman. Gibby was quick to check her on that and she couldn’t have been more emphatic on the point. She hadn’t buttoned up any collars and she hadn’t touched the bedclothes. She hadn’t touched either Miss Bell or the bed except to bump the bed a little in the hope of waking her.

“Look,” she said, “my job, it’s to clean the apartment. I don’t do no undertaker’s work.”

That’s the way the thing had stood when we went to talk to the neighbors. After we’d had the stuff about detergent spiels at seven o’clock two successive mornings, we had a second go at the maid.

“When you came into the apartment this afternoon,” Gibby asked, “was the television on?”

“What would she have the television on for and her asleep?” the maid muttered, countering question with question.

“And her dead,” Gibby said, tossing it in as though it were only the most minor of corrections.

The maid turned detective. “The way I see it, the poor thing, she was murdered in her sleep,” she said. “It comes of young ones like her living alone. I’m sure I don’t know what their mammas are thinking of. I never slept even one night away from home, not till I was married, and then it was only away from my folks’ home. I was with my husband, God keep him.”

“You’re positive it wasn’t on when you came in?” Gibby tried to nudge her back onto the track.

“What wasn’t?”

“The television.”

“No. It was like now, turned off.”

“Could you have turned it off yourself and then forgotten?” Gibby asked. “It would be playing when you came in and you took no special notice until you realized she was dead. Then, waiting for the police, it would get on your nerves and you would switch it off.”

“If it was on when I come in, I would have noticed and switched it off right away. I don’t hold with wasting electricity that way. Electricity costs money and you don’t go burning it up playing televisions in your sleep. I wouldn’t have turned it off when I saw she was dead. I know better than that. A person’s dead, you get help. You don’t go touching anything. I didn’t touch a thing once I seen she was dead and before that only carpet-sweeping the floor a little, but then I didn’t know she wasn’t just sleeping.”

“Very proper,” Gibby murmured soothingly. The woman was going just a bit shirty in her protestations of knowing just what was done and what wasn’t done. He tried another approach. “You’ve been cleaning her apartment for some time, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Ever since she came to live here and that’s going on two years now.”

“Good. What was she like?”

“Sweet. She was the sweetest thing. There’s never been anyone like her. It breaks my heart, thinking of what that robber done to her.”

“Robber?” Gibby asked.

“Robber,” the woman said. “What else?”

“You know her place well. You’d know if there was anything missing?”

“I know what’s missing, all right,” the woman growled.

“Suppose you tell us.”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, all right. It was all there the last time I cleaned and today it’s gone. Every last bit of it gone.”

“Every last bit of what?”

“Everything,” the woman said, and indignation was bursting out of her. We seemed to be getting the explosion of something that had been smoldering for some time. “Every last thing she had, it was any good, all her underwear with the nice, black lace on it, all them sheer nylon and lace nightgowns like she was always wearing, all her real good dresses like the evening dresses and the cocktail dresses, even her nice shoes, the high-heeled ones with like diamonds in the heels. Right through all the drawers, right through the whole closet, not even one of them things left, and all them things was mine. She’d promised them to me.”

Every tone of the woman’s voice was vibrant with growling cello notes of a sense of loss. I was careful not to catch Gibby’s eye because I was a cinch to laugh if I did and, if Gibby wanted answers to the questions he was asking, laughing at her wouldn’t help.

It was more than a little ludicrous, though. It wasn’t that the woman was so old. Fifty perhaps or possibly well up in her forties, but she had gone to flesh. She had gone to quite enough flesh to take her well past even what might be called the stylish-stout dimensions. She was well over into the outsize department, and Sydney Bell’s figure had been purely wolf bait. I worked at wiping out of my mind’s eye any picture of this babe in underwear with black lace on it eight or ten sizes too small for her, a cocktail or evening dress as small. I looked down at her feet. She was wearing grayish canvas sneakers that bulged over her bunions. I concentrated on imagining those feet in high-heeled shoes with brilliants studding the heels and I got over my impulse to laugh. That wasn’t a funny picture. It was pathetic.