The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (20 page)

The girl blushed, but she stood her ground. “I deserved that,” she said. “But that was the least of what I’ve learned, Mr. Gibson. I don’t think you can begin to conceive of what a fool I was, how much I had to learn.”

Gibby laughed. “We already know that your education did progress to the point where you knew how to pick up a man in a railroad station and go to a bar with him even if you drank nothing but ginger ale,” he said. “We have a pretty good idea of how much you learned.”

The girl didn’t flinch. What she might have had to say to that crack, we’ll never know, because Bannerman started another one of his charges at Gibby and she moved to hold Bannerman down and then just at that point we had an interruption. A man had come up to the house and rung the bell. The cops had let this early caller in and asked him his business. Now they brought him in to us.

It was the big boy, K. R. E. Jellicoe, and I had never seen him looking so well. It might have been that blue suited him better than had the browns he had been wearing the previous afternoon and it might also have been that the morning light did more for him than had those glaring arcs under which the Bellevue surgeon had been working at slapping on the adhesive tape. In any event, he was wearing a neat blue suit and blue shirt and blue tie and impeccable black shoes. He looked rosy and suntanned, not the yellow that had first drawn my eye to him. He did still have a surgical dressing on his face but it was a neat, white patch, neatly fastened down.

He recognized us, and a couple of familiar faces after the cops out in the hall apparently hit him as a welcome sight. We might have been a pair of his long-lost brothers. He went right into his story.

“Gosh,” he said. “You two. At least you’ll know what I’m talking about. I’m trying to find my car. Remember yesterday? You were there. It was outside that store. I met these two fellows I knew and they pulled a fastie on me. It wasn’t the first time. They’re always doing it. You see, I’d had a couple of drinks and they’re right enough because sometimes when I have drinks in me I don’t drive so good. What they do is they’ll get my car away from me and they put it away. Then, when I’m all sobered up and it’s safe for me to drive it again, they tell me where they’ve put it. It was like that yesterday afternoon and it was just as well because I did tie one on last night but now it’s morning and I’m sober as a judge and I’d like my car. I went around to one of them, his apartment, last night, fellow named George. I slept there and he didn’t come in all night so I figured this morning I’d go around to Harry’s and get my car from him. He’s the other fellow.”

“I know,” Gibby said. “You’ve been around to Harry’s?”

“I’ve just been there. He isn’t there. There’s nobody there but the super and he told me Harry was killed last night. So naturally I came right over here to tell Mae and now they say she’s been killed, too. Are they kidding me or what?”

“They’re not kidding you, Mr. Jellicoe,” Gibby said.

“Gee. I’m sorry about Harry and I’m sorry about Mae. We had a lot of laughs together them and me, but what about my car? If George doesn’t turn up, how do I find my car?”

“George isn’t going to turn up.”

“George? What’s happened to George?”

“George got it, too. He was killed last night, like Harry, like Mae, like Sydney Bell.”

“Yeah, I heard about her, poor kid. But Harry and Mae and now George, too. Has somebody gone crazy or what?”

“Crazy or what,” Gibby said. “It’s been a massacre. Mac, here, and myself, we were near misses.” He turned and indicated Bannerman and the girl. “You know these people?” he asked.

Jellicoe shook his head. “No,” he said. “Can’t say I do. The young lady I did see once. She was on Broadway with Sydney but we didn’t meet.”

Gibby did introductions.

“Kirk Jellicoe,” he said. “Milton Bannerman, Sydney’s brother.”

Jellicoe missed on the Bannerman completely.

He stuck out his hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bell,” he said. “I’m sorry about your sister. She was a good kid.”

Bannerman looked stonily at the hand and made no move to take it. “She was a…” he began. Joan Loomis caught him with a warning look and he never finished the sentence. It made no difference to Gibby or to me. We knew the word he hadn’t spoken. Jellicoe looked bewildered and, as he put his hand away, he looked a little bit hurt. He was almost pouting.

“Mr. Bannerman,” Gibby explained, “didn’t approve of the way his sister earned her living. He doesn’t want any part of her memory or of any of her associates. You were one of her associates, weren’t you?”

Jellicoe smiled. “She was a good kid,” he said. “We had some good parties.”

Bannerman was charging again. This time he was headed for Jellicoe. Joan made a try at stopping him but he knocked her aside, and Gibby and I had to catch him and hold him down. Joan fell and Jellicoe, who was quicker than you’d think for a man of his bulk, jumped forward and caught her. He helped her to her feet. She thanked him primly and stepped away from him. His hands fluttered after her with teasing affection but she sidestepped them. He dropped his hands and stood back and smiled at her. I shouted and a couple of the officers came in from the hall.

Gibby let me give the orders, and I told them to ride herd on our wild man. They shoved Bannerman down into a chair and stood either side of him. Gibby nodded approval.

Jellicoe touched Gibby’s elbow. “Now about my car,” he said.

“Stick around,” Gibby told him. “We’ll turn it up for you. We’ve already found the other one, the red sedan.”

“The sedan? That’s up home in the garage.”

“It was. It’s in the Bronx now.”

“But I locked the garage. I know I locked it. I always lock it. You mean someone broke in?”

“The door’s open,” Gibby said. “The lock’s broken. The sedan’s parked in the Bronx and one hell of a nice Westport cop is dead.”

Jellicoe blinked. He counted on his fingers. “Sydney,” he said, adding them up, “Mae, Harry, George, and you say a cop up home. I guess I shouldn’t be bothering you with my troubles. After all, it’s only cars and they make new ones all the time. Good kids, now, they don’t make those all the time, not like Sydney was, they don’t. I’ll buzz off and bother someone else with my troubles. You’ve got your hands full.”

Gibby gave him the big smile. “We have our hands full,” he said. “You’re right about that. We don’t want them any fuller though. We’ve had five killings and we’re stopping with that. We’re not going to have a sixth. I’m speaking plainly, Mr. Jellicoe. Sydney Bell was what her brother has called a whore.”

Jellicoe turned a reproachful look on Bannerman. “That’s no kind of name to be calling a good kid like her,” he said. “She had fun and she gave a man a good time. What’s so wrong with that?”

Bannerman turned purple and his pair of cops moved in a bit closer. He looked down at the floor and said nothing.

“Mr. Bannerman thinks it’s wrong,” Gibby said. “So wrong that he thinks that he, being her brother, had every right to kill her with his own two hands. Do I have to draw you a picture? She was strangled. Harry and George have been strangled and, since Mr. Bannerman started the plain speaking, we can go on with it. They were a pair of pimps. Let’s face it, Mr. Jellicoe. The girl is gone. Her pimps are gone. Mae is gone and Mae was running a call girl deal with Sydney Bell at the top of the list. So who is left? You’re left, Mr. Jellicoe, the man in Sydney Bell’s life. How does that make your neck feel? The cop up in Westport is dead for nothing at all, only because he got in the way. If you die, Mr. Jellicoe, it won’t be for nothing. It will be for laughs, for those laughs you and Sydney Bell had together.”

Jellicoe sat down. He was staring at Bannerman. Bannerman glared back at him and I began wondering whether two cops were enough.

“He is crazy,” Jellicoe said.

Joan Loomis darted forward. She stood in front of the big man and stamped her foot.

“He isn’t,” she screamed. “He has every right to be, but he isn’t. He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t killed anybody. He didn’t even know these people. He never suspected.”

She turned to Gibby and she talked. She needed no prompting or prodding. She had her story to tell and it poured out of her.

She had come to New York in her full prayer-meeting-and-church-supper River Forks innocence. New York had been a shock and Ellie Bannerman had been a worse shock. It wasn’t that she had known then what Ellie Bannerman was. She would never have set foot in Ellie’s apartment if she had known that or, having gone there and finding out, she would not have remained there another moment. That she hadn’t known, but she had seen right away that Ellie was not the girl she had made herself seem in her letters to her brother or in her visits to River Forks.

Ellie had been fast. That had been evident. There were all the ways Joan could tell. The liquor in the apartment and Ellie drinking it. Cigarettes and Ellie smoking them. Her clothes—the filmy red nightgowns and the black lace under-things, the way she talked to people on the telephone, calling everyone darling even when it was men who called.

Joan had been distressed. She hadn’t even begun to suspect the actual truth, but she had been unhappy that a nice girl like Ellie should behave in this way that made her seem anything but a nice girl. She had been unhappy and she had worried. She had been glad to get away to Boston, but she had taken her worries with her. Milt was coming to New York. Milt would see what his sister was like. Ellie had made that clear to Joan. She was a big girl now and Milt was a big boy. He was getting married and he would be living his own life. She was living hers and she was tired of putting on an act for Milt. It was time he learned what the world was like and learned to accept it. This was the way people lived away from River Forks and Ellie was through with River Forks forever.

All this was going to be a terrible shock to Milt, and Joan, even when she had thought it had been nothing but smoking and drinking and clothes, had worried about how he was going to take it. Then Joan came back from Boston on that late train. She came up to the apartment. Ellie had given her a key and she let herself in.

She got that far with it and she faltered. She had gone very pale and she looked as though she were about to be sick. Gibby took her arm and gently led her to a chair.

“Take it easy,” he said. “It’s almost as rough in the telling as it was in the doing. Take it easy.”

She looked up at him. “You know what I did?” she murmured.

“I had a good hunch of it when we first met last night,” Gibby told her. “Once we’d fingerprinted you, I knew it was better than a hunch. It was a sure thing.”

He let her rest a bit while he told her what she had done. She had come into the apartment and had found there all the evidences of what had been a bacchanalia. She had found liquor glasses and liquor bottles and tumbled bedclothes and amid the tumbled bedclothes she had found Ellie Bannerman, dead and cold in her bed. She had seen the purple marks of strangulation on Ellie’s throat. She had seen the sheer red nightgown Ellie was wearing and the way the nightgown was and she had known everything then. She had known that Ellie had been what her brother was now calling her.

Her heart had broken for the dead girl, but she had known that it would be breaking again.

“Actually you were hoping that it could break again,” Gibby told her. “You were hoping that when Milt would come and see this, it would all be new to him even though you knew that it would be so bad that he couldn’t take it. You were hoping that it was like that, but you were terribly afraid it wasn’t. You were terribly afraid that he had come, that he had arrived ahead of time, had found his sister and had forced her to tell him that she was just what she was. You were terribly afraid that Milton had killed her.”

“I was a fool,” the girl moaned. “I should have known better.”

“How should you have known? He said so himself. He would kill her with his own two hands.”

Gibby went on with it, and as he reconstructed for her step by step just what she had done, the girl denied nothing and corrected nothing. He had the whole sequence and he had it in complete, circumstantial detail. Telling herself that she could steel herself to make the whole thing look very different, make it look so different that Milt Bannerman need never know the bitter truth about his sister, she had braced herself for what she thought she had to do. She had fought down the thought that Milt Bannerman might already know, that Milt might have killed his sister, for either way there would be this thing she was making herself do, whether to protect him from knowledge or to protect him from the consequences of his act.

“The wages of sin are death,” Gibby said. “You had heard that too often and you couldn’t get it out of your head. You knew so exactly what would be. The police would come. They would find the dead girl. She had sinned and she had been killed for it because the wages of sin are death. We would look for the most likely person to have paid Ellie Bannerman those wages and where could we look but to her brother?”

“I didn’t really believe it even then,” the girl said, sobbing. “No matter how it looked, I didn’t really believe it and now I know. He didn’t come ahead of time, not that much ahead of time. He never knew at all. I tried to protect him from ever knowing. Was I so wrong?”

“Don’t ask me,” Gibby said. “Ask Milt. He’s the moral standards man. He’ll tell you the truth must prevail.”

He returned to his reconstruction. Joan Loomis had locked the door. The television had been on low and she had left it on because it would screen the noise of what she was to do in the apartment. Then she had cleaned the place up. She had cleaned it thoroughly. She had made a parcel of liquor bottles and glasses and bar fixings and ash trays and cigarettes and lighters and matches. She had made a clean sweep of all these minor appurtenances of sin. Then she had gone through the closets and the drawers. She had removed all the sinful garments, all the black lace, all the pink satin, all the strapless, backless, frontless, sleeveless, clinging jobs. She had made a clean sweep, leaving only suits and the coat which, however fashionable, would still seem decent in the austere eye of Milton Bannerman.