The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (8 page)

We expected that would be all, but Bannerman came up with a surprise.

“Joanie,” he said in a small and sickeningly tentative voice. “If something’s happened to Joanie and she hasn’t been identified, she might be here right now, wouldn’t she?”

Gibby admitted that it was a possibility.

Bannerman squared his shoulders and stiffened into grim, military bearing. He could have been posing for a recruiting poster.

“If there are any girls who haven’t been identified,” he said firmly, “I had better see them.”

“Perhaps you had better,” Gibby said dryly.

We took him out with us while we checked. There was only one unidentified body of a young woman and we went back in to have a look at that. It was a redhead with freckles who had been hit by a truck in a traffic accident. She wasn’t Bannerman’s Joanie, not by a good forty pounds of fatty tissue and a flock of other details.

“That leaves us hope,” Gibby told Bannerman. “It leaves us a lot of hope.”

“Yes,” Bannerman said.

That is, he tried to say it but it was no great success. We had to hurry him off to a place where he could be sick, which he was, spectacularly and protractedly. When he was through we knew it wasn’t any good offering him the drink he so obviously needed. It was equally not any good expecting him to carry on as white and shaken as he was.

We just had to give him a bit of time to rest and pull himself together by whatever means of his own he might have. We did that and his means seemed to be prayer. Watching him, I had every expectation that it was going to work, but actually it wasn’t tested out. Gibby used the time to get on the phone. He called in to check on how well Missing Persons might be doing on the hunt for Joan Loomis. They were doing all right.

The boys didn’t actually have Joan Loomis on hand for us but they did have an encouraging lead toward a Joan Loomis who answered the description Bannerman had given us. As we already knew, she wasn’t in the morgue. A check of the hospitals had produced nothing. The next step, however, a check of hotels, had been helpful. A Joan Loomis, registered from River Forks, Ohio, had been turned up at the President Polk. Miss Loomis was not in her room and she had not responded to paging, but there was one of the bellhops who remembered her. He had taken her up to her room at 9:30 that morning when she had checked in, and it was evident that he had studied the young woman with that appraising eye which a bellhop will inevitably turn on the ten-cent tipper.

The description he had given the cops who had talked to him had included the fact that she had tipped him only a dime. As they relayed it to Gibby, he had described her as a young chick with the makings of a dish except that she was already a young old maid. He remembered a gray suit, a gray hat, and a white collar like one his sister used to wear when she had been going to some convent school.

The boys had asked the desk and they got the same check-in time, 9:30 that morning. The clerk further remembered that Miss Loomis had come down from her room not more than fifteen minutes after checking in and had left her key at the desk. She had been out most of the day but had returned at the end of the afternoon well loaded down with parcels. Another bellhop had tried to take them from her but she had stubbornly insisted on carrying them herself. It was the opinion of the President Polk staff that she had been saving a second dime tip. This time she had spent perhaps a half hour in her room and then had gone out again, again leaving her key at the desk. The boys from Missing Persons had come along only a few minutes later. They were now settled in there waiting for her to return.

Gibby asked them to keep on it. He was ready to hang up when the headquarters operator cut in and said they had something else for us. Gibby had turned in earlier the registration numbers on the two cars that had been parked outside the secondhand-clothes store. The Connecticut registration that was Jerk spelled backwards belonged to a man named Jellicoe, Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe. They were rushing this news to Gibby because they now had something else on a Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe. A patrolman had picked up a beaten-up drunk on Madison Avenue and the man had given the officer that sesquipedalian name. The officer had taken the man down to Bellevue for treatment. They thought we might want to know since Gibby had put through the query on the car registration. Gibby said we were happy to know, particularly happy since we were at the morgue and, the morgue being an adjunct of Bellevue Hospital, it could hardly have been handier. He went over to Bannerman.

“Looks like we’ve located Joanie,” he said.

Bannerman leaped to his feet. “Where is she?” he asked.

“At the moment I don’t know. At 9:30 this morning she checked in to a hotel. She was all right then. She went out and she was gone all day but she came in for half an hour not very long ago and then went out again. Anyhow we have that much. She was on her feet and evidently in perfectly good shape late this afternoon. No reason to expect she won’t be the same way when we find her.”

Bannerman looked as though he wanted to believe it. He wanted to be happy but he was afraid to believe anything.

“How do you know it’s she?” he asked.

“She’s registered as Joan Loomis of River Forks, Ohio,” Gibby told him. “She also answers the description you gave us.”

“I’d better go to the hotel and wait for her,” Bannerman said, starting for the door.

Gibby caught his arm and held him. “Rather do that than meet your train?” Gibby asked him.

Bannerman looked at his watch. “Yes,” he said. “The station first. She must be there right now waiting for my train.”

“We’ll run you up there,” Gibby said. “There’s still time. We’ll take off as soon as we’ve gone around the corner to the hospital and had one of the doctors give you something.”

Bannerman had lost all interest in medical assistance. He had even forgotten about prayer.

“I don’t need anything now,” he said. “I’m fine now with this news of Joanie. That was better than any medicine.”

He wasn’t just saying it. He looked it. He looked, in fact, every inch the eager bridegroom except for one thing he did have to bother him and that was some inner necessity to look less happy than he seemed to be feeling, since such a look would be suitable for a young man whose little sister had so recently been done to death by manual strangulation.

Gibby didn’t tell him we had other business in the hospital. He just stood pat on his insistence that Bannerman had to be seen by a doctor. We went around the corner and Bannerman, chafing with impatience, came along.

When we hit the receiving room, the doctor in attendance was busy. A cop was in the outer room writing in his notebook. It was no cop either of us knew but he had evidently seen us around. He recognized us and said hello. Gibby asked him if the doc was going to be long.

“Nah,” he said. “He’s in there with a beat-up drunk I picked up. I found this guy staggering along Madison Avenue and, boy, had he taken a shellacking! Says he got in a fight in a bar somewheres and he don’t know what bar or where. Of course, he’s lying.”

“It does happen in bars once in a while,” I said.

The cop laughed. “Not the way I got it figured,” he said. “He had this in his hand.” He dug in his pocket and brought out a small piece of red lace. “What’s that if it ain’t a hunk ripped off of some dame’s panties? He knows where he was and what he was doing when her husband came home and caught him at it. And you should see the size of him. I’d like to see what that husband looks like.”

Gibby took the bit of red stuff out of the cop’s hand.

“Watch our boy for a minute, will you?” he said. “He’s just been to the morgue on an identification. You know what to do if he faints. We won’t be long.”

The cop sobered and a look of sympathetic concern came over his ordinarily cheerful face.

“Tough,” he murmured. “Relative?”

“Kid sister,” Gibby said.

“Gee, tough,” said the cop.

We left Bannerman to the officer’s tender mercies and went on into the next room. The doctor was in there going like a house afire. He had a man on the table and the man was stripped to the waist. Large areas of him—and this was a man of large areas—were already neatly punctuated with surgical dressings and the doctor was zipping along over this big boy’s acreage, cleaning up cuts and abrasions, slapping dressings on them, and making the dressings fast with his neat, white criss-crosses of adhesive tape. The patient lay on the table with his eyes closed. The alcohol on his breath was doing battle with the antiseptic odors of the room and it was almost winning out. Of course, it was the man whose license plate read JERK backwards.

Gibby whispered to the doctor and the doc stepped out of the room with us. We didn’t go back to the anteroom where Bannerman was waiting. We went on into another examining room, an empty one.

“Did you say DA’s office?” the doc asked.

Gibby gave him the full identification. “How drunk is the big boy?” he asked.

“Not very. He has been drinking. I suppose you could smell it. When they stagger and they smell like that, the police assume it’s drunkenness. With him it’s more that he’s groggy from that pasting he took.”

“What are you planning to do with him?”

The doctor shrugged. “When they’re like that,” he said, “we patch them up and send them home. They always live.”

Gibby nodded. “I don’t want to put him under arrest and I haven’t time for him right now,” he said, “but it would be handy for the DA’s office if we could have him on ice for overnight. I’ll be ready to take over on him in the morning and he can be turned loose then and no harm done. Could he seem more alcoholic than he is to the extent of a secure night’s lodging?”

“We don’t have too many beds to spare,” the doc said, hesitating.

“I know,” Gibby said, “but we don’t have too many citizens to spare either. We’re working a murder case and we saw him earlier today. He was in better shape then. Turn him loose now and this one just might not live.”

“Okay,” the doc said. “I’ll take him in, but it will be only till morning. By then he’s going to look much too sober for us to keep.”

“Any time the DA’s office can do you a favor,” Gibby said.

“No, thanks,” the doc answered.

THE doctor came out to the waiting room with us and gave Bannerman a slug of aromatic spirits of ammonia. Just in the couple of minutes we had left Bannerman alone, a lot of the zip had gone out of him. He had again begun to look as though he could use a pick-me-up. The boy had obviously been thinking and thinking had been doing him no good.

We were in the car and headed uptown before he spoke a word. Then he started asking questions.

“What hotel?” he asked. “I mean where Joanie’s staying. I wonder how she found a hotel.”

“Moderate priced,” Gibby said. “Reasonably decent, very well known. A place called the President Polk.”

Bannerman did a double-take on the name. “Did you say President Polk?” he asked.

Gibby nodded. “That where you’re staying?” he asked.

It was phrased as a question, but it did sound like one of those questions to which we already knew the answer.

“Yes, but how did you know? I didn’t say.”

Gibby shrugged. “Miss Loomis from River Forks, Ohio. She doesn’t know the town. She wouldn’t know the hotels. She has a sudden need of one. I’d expect her to pick the one you were going to be at. She knew you were going in there, didn’t she?”

“Yes, of course, she knew.”

“No mystery about that then,” Gibby said.

Quite suddenly Bannerman looked troubled. “She went there at 9:30 this morning,” he said, thinking aloud.

“That was her check-in time,” Gibby told him.

“Do they keep a record of those times?” Bannerman asked. His happiness was dimming fast.

“It may not be exact,” Gibby said, “but it will be close enough.”

“More than six hours after her train from Boston came in. There isn’t any place she could have been those six hours. They must be wrong on the time.”

“They couldn’t be that wrong,” Gibby said, speaking as though he were making the point only in the interest of accuracy, as though it weren’t of any consequence at all. “Some time shortly after three in the morning would have meant that a night clerk checked her in. The night shift of bellhops would have been on. By 9:30 this morning she would have been received by a completely different staff. It’s this day staff that has checked out with us on her description.”

Bannerman had broken out in a sweat. “Six hours,” he muttered. “Six hours when everybody would be asleep, when there would be no place she could possibly have gone.”

“She was somewhere,” Gibby said.

“But where?” Bannerman wailed.

I took a hand. “Wherever it was,” I said, “it’s reasonably clear that she came to no harm. She seems to have been in good shape this morning when she did turn up at the hotel. What’s to get in a sweat about?”

Bannerman thought awhile. He was in a good deal of a sweat, but he pulled himself together. This, evidently, was going to be a private sweat.

“There will be some perfectly reasonable explanation,” he said. “Joanie will be able to explain.”

He was trying very hard to sound as though he were believing it, but he didn’t seem to be getting very far with convincing even himself.

Gibby spoke to him. His tone was studiedly soothing and reassuring.

“New York,” he said, “isn’t River Forks. Even after three in the morning you’ll find all sorts of people up and around in New York.”

Bannerman reacted not at all to the tone. He rose sharply to the words.

“Joanie wouldn’t know any of those people,” he said firmly. “Joanie doesn’t know anybody here except Ellie, and Ellie…”

His voice trailed away from finishing his statement about Ellie.

“She had been here several days before she went up to Boston,” Gibby said. “Your sister had many friends. She had probably gotten to know some of your sister’s friends.”

Bannerman didn’t even want to think about the possibility that his Joanie might have spent those evil hours in this evil city with anyone, however friendly. He came up with a new idea, presenting it hopefully.

“Trains down from Boston?” he asked. “Aren’t they ever late?”

“Often,” Gibby said and it was that soothing tone again. “Often late. I’ve known them to be as much as a whole hour late.”

If it had been anybody else I might have been wondering whether he knew that he was driving the needle into this worried young man. It was Gibby, however, and since it was Gibby, I couldn’t have the first doubt. He not only knew he was giving Bannerman the needle. He knew precisely which nerve he was probing and precisely how far the needle point was going.

We got up to the station and found a place to park and all the time that needle of Gibby’s was busy. We didn’t go right around to the Incoming Train board to find out on what track they would be bringing in the train from River Forks. We went around to the station master’s office instead and checked on the arrival time that morning of the Boston train that had been scheduled for arrival around three o’clock. The information was available and they gave it to us pridefully. That would be the train that had been due in at 2:58. It had been on time.

“Of course,” Gibby said, as we were leaving the office, “it does take a bit of time to get off a train and find a cab and all that. It would have been at least 3:15 before she could have been out of the station.”

“There will be some perfectly reasonable explanation,” Bannerman repeated. This time the statement was made with considerable heat.

“There will have to be,” Gibby said.

We were crossing the station to that section at the far end where they post up incoming trains. We had Bannerman walking between us and he wasn’t cooling down any. He strode along in a simmering silence.

That bulletin board where they post the trains is at the far end of a large room. As we approached the broad entrance to that room, we saw the man. He was standing in profile to us and both Gibby and I had had a good look at him in profile before he had come out from behind the wheel of his car to talk with us. The recognition hit us both at the same time and automatically we both stopped short. Bannerman, of course, was charging right ahead, but Gibby reached out and pulled him back.

“What’s the matter now?” he growled.

“Hold it a sec,” Gibby said. “You can see the whole area from here. Is Miss Loomis there?”

Bannerman was straining at the leash but he stood under Gibby’s restraining hand and looked carefully over the knot of people collected before the board. There was a shift in the crowd and he jumped forward again.

“There she is,” he shouted trying to shake Gibby off. “Right there in front of the board. Let me go.”

“In a minute,” Gibby said, holding him. “A man right by the entrance. He could be watching her. A man in a brown hat, light brown suit. See him?”

“I don’t care about any man,” Bannerman growled. I thought for a minute he was about to swing on Gibby.

“She’s there,” Gibby snapped. “She’s okay. You can see she’s okay. You’ll get to her soon enough, but first I want you to look at that man. See the one I mean?”

“I see him,” Bannerman fumed. “Brown hat, tan suit. What about him?”

“Ever seen him before?”

“How would I have seen him? I don’t know a soul in New York.”

“You’re sure you don’t know him?”

“I’m sure. What’s all this about?”

“Your sister Ellie. Remember your sister Ellie?”

Bannerman’s jaw dropped. “That man?” he gasped.

“Damn it all, Bannerman,” Gibby said. “Some man. Look at him. Is he watching the board? Is he looking around as though he were waiting here to meet somebody, or is he just watching Miss Loomis?”

“Who is he?”

Gibby didn’t answer the question. “He’s our job,” Gibby said. “I’m giving you a job, Bannerman, and you’re going to have to do this exactly according to instructions. You’re going to think I’ve gone crazy, but take my word for it, I haven’t. You’re going in there to Miss Loomis. Go in and come up behind her. Don’t say a word. Just reach around her from behind and put your hands over her eyes. You know, surprise her.”

He did look at Gibby as though he thought Gibby had gone crazy.

“I’ll scare her to death,” he protested. “Look, she’s alone here. She doesn’t know anybody. She thinks I won’t be here till that train gets in.”

“You took that earlier train so you could surprise her,” Gibby said, implacably giving Bannerman his orders. “Now you are going to surprise her. You are going to have to follow instructions exactly.”

Bannerman moved as though he were trying to break away from Gibby but it was an ineffective try. He seemed to be as curious as he was rebellious.

“I’m not going to do anything of the sort,” he said. “I don’t have to follow anybody’s instructions.”

Gibby fixed him with a withering look. “And then when you’re up to your ears in trouble,” he asked, “where do you plan to turn for help? Your sister’s been murdered. You’ve been half crazy with worry about your girl. Now you see her. She’s okay, so you think school’s out. Just because nothing’s happened to her yet, don’t push your luck too far.”

Bannerman tried to laugh it off. “I don’t know why you’re trying to scare me,” he said. “I was frightened for Joanie because I thought she had been in the apartment with Ellie and if she had been there, something horrible could have happened to her. It did happen to Ellie, didn’t it?”

“Don’t bother to remind me,” Gibby snapped. “I’m reminding you.”

“I haven’t forgotten. Luckily Joanie wasn’t there, so that’s that.”

“This man who’s watching her doesn’t seem to think that’s that. We have to know what he’s doing here, what he’s up to.”

“Why don’t you ask him? You’ve asked me plenty of questions. What makes him immune?”

“We’ll take care of him, but you’re going to set it up for us. We’ve got the job of catching up with your sister’s killer. I can see that you don’t care a damn about that.”

“That’s a lie.”

“You can convince me by co-operating and you had better also remember that it’s our job to prevent any further killings if we can. Protecting Miss Loomis is at least as important as any other part of this thing.”

“Joanie will be all right now. I’ll take care of protecting her.”

Gibby shook his head sadly. “And then we’ll end up protecting you, too,” he said. “Can’t you just assume that we know what we’re doing and play along?”

“When you ask me to play a silly practical joke…”

“Stop thinking,” Gibby snapped, “and do as you’re told. You go up quietly behind her and put your hands over her eyes. That’s all you have to do. After that just take her over there where it says Waiting Room. Go in there with her and wait till we come and get you. While you’re waiting, you tell her nothing. Your story is that you came in early to surprise the girls. You went around to your sister’s and there was no answer to the bell. You’ve been trying over there ever since and no answer, so, as train time approached, you came over here just on the chance that she would be here. If she wasn’t you were going back to your sister’s and try again, figuring that they would certainly be home by then since it was the time they would have been expecting you. Now that isn’t difficult. You can do that, can’t you?”

Scowling, Bannerman shook his head in emphatic refusal. “I do not tell lies,” he said and he couldn’t have summoned up more indignation if Gibby had tried to suborn him to perjury. “I don’t know what you’re after or how important it may be to you, but this is important to me. Joanie and I have a lifetime ahead of us. I don’t blemish it now by lying to her.”

“Okay,” Gibby growled. “Have it your own way. I was going to give you a break, let you have a couple of moments alone with your girl. You don’t want it that way, so you can have your couple of moments alone with her and a police officer.”

“You can’t do that,” Bannerman protested.

“Unless I have your oath that you will follow my instructions,” Gibby said coldly, “I’ll do exactly that.”

Bannerman hesitated. He studied Gibby’s face for a moment. It was absolutely stony. He turned to me. I put everything I had into making mine as granitic as Gibby’s. I must have succeeded. Bannerman caved in. He did bargain a bit, but we had him.

“I make one condition,” he said. “If I am to lie to Joanie, I’ll be doing it under duress. You will tell her that. You forced me to lie to her.”

“We’ll tell her,” Gibby promised. “We forced you to lie to her. We know more about how to handle these things than you can know or she can know, but even in the face of that you didn’t want to lie to her. You did it for the only reason that could ever have moved you, the fact that her safety and maybe her life are at stake.”

Bannerman sighed. “I don’t know why I believe you,” he said, “but I do. I’ll follow your instructions.”

Gibby let go his arm and slapped him on the shoulder. “Good boy,” he said. “Go to her now.”

Bannerman took off. When he had first seen her, he had been ready to take off on the run. Now he went with dragging feet. The task Gibby had set him was evidently so distasteful that it was quite outweighing his eagerness.

“Do you think he’s going to do as you told him?” I asked.

“That,” Gibby said, “depends on whether he’s scared enough to go against his principles. We have to risk it.”

As he spoke he was moving slowly off to the left. I moved with him. I could see what he was doing. He was keeping in position so that, he had the man in the tan suit and brown hat, Bannerman, and the girl all lined up in front of him. He was watching all of them at once. The man didn’t move around much, only as much as was necessary so that he could keep his eye always on Joan Loomis. I didn’t even for a moment have the thought that we might be mistaken. There was no question about it. This was the man who had driven Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe away from our encounter in front of that secondhand-clothing store.

“You know,” I murmured, “we’re going out on so many limbs today that I’m losing count. We’ve tangled with this baby once before and got out of it luckily. We’re holding Jellicoe down at Bellevue on the phoniest of phonies and now I don’t even want to think about when the time will come around and you’ll have to explain all this to Bannerman. He’s the righteous type. If he catches you cutting corners, he’ll take it to the Old Man. That’s not a boy who believes in forgiveness for sin.”