The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Read online

  “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.

  “She had promised you her good clothes?” Gibby asked and his face was a mask of the most sober interest. “Had she been planning something where she wouldn’t need them any more?”

  I was asking myself what she could have been planning unless it had been suicide and I’ve already been into that. When it’s manual strangulation, it just can’t be suicide. Gibby, however, was asking the question, and Gibby doesn’t ask questions just to hear the sound of his own voice. In a situation like this, more than ever, I have yet to hear him ask a completely idle question. I tried to figure him and I came up with a beaut. Could it have been a suicide pact?

  Suicide pacts aren’t too common, but they do happen and a large proportion of them never get done all the way. He kills her, by agreement, and he is to kill himself immediately afterward. He means to do it, of course, but his nerve runs out. We’ve had them like that. Also it wouldn’t even have to be like that. He killed her and he went off somewhere else to dispose of himself. He would have to have used some other method on himself in any event. He could have gone down to the river and in. He could have thrown himself under a subway train or a truck. He could just have gone home to his own place and shot himself or hanged himself. There were all sorts of possibilities.

  I was doing all this thinking but it wasn’t taking me any time to speak of. The thought hit me and the possibilities just whizzed through my mind. Immediately they whizzed out again. The woman was answering and her answer took care of the suicide angle quite to my satisfaction.

  “No,” she said, “Not like that. She was always giving me her nice stuff, real nice stuff, and it was still brand-new. When she would get through with something, it was not like some they give you things is only fit to wear cleaning house or like that. It’s had every last bit of good worn out of it. Miss Bell, she wasn’t like that. She always had to have the latest, whatever it was. She’d go shopping and she’d buy herself a dress, say. She’d bring it home and hang it in the closet. She wasn’t going to crowd her stuff up it should get crushed just hanging. She’d take out some dress she had from before and she wore it maybe ten times, maybe not even that, and she’d give it to me. It was like that all the time.”

  “I see,” Gibby said. “You felt that all her nice things she would be passing on to you one day.”

  “She promised me. She always said when she was through with a thing, nobody got it but me. My Gloria—Gloria, she’s my daughter—my Gloria, she’s so much like Miss Bell they could even be sisters. She’s a size twelve and a perfect figure. Something it fits Miss Bell, it’s a dream on Gloria. The things they look better even on Gloria than they ever looked on Miss Bell, because my Gloria, she’s got more style. Miss Bell, she’d bring home a new evening dress, real gorgeous, and she’d tell me like it’s now September I should tell Gloria about it because Gloria can figure on it for the Firemen’s Ball New Year’s Eve. That was just the way Miss Bell talked because my Gloria, she don’t go with firemen or like that. Who wants a fireman? They’re never home when you need them. When you’ve got him, where is he? He’s playing pinochle over to the firehouse. Then he falls off a ladder or something and you’re still young and what have you got? A pension?”

  Gibby had to nudge her back on the track again, because once she got going on her daughter Gloria, her talk began running very thin on items that were at all germane to any preoccupations of ours. Slicing Gloria out of the harangue, I can reduce it considerably. Sydney Bell was constantly buying clothes. What she bought was of the glamorous persuasion and it was costly. She never wore anything for more than perhaps four months and often for less time than that and the stuff was still in prime condition when she would give it to her cleaning woman for daughter Gloria.

  This procedure, furthermore, covered everything she wore. It wasn’t only the dresses. The pursuit of the dernier cri was equally relentless in all departments—undergarments, shoes, sleepwear, everything.

  “Even nylons sometimes,” the woman said. “She has drawers full of nylons, some of them she never even wore, and then they come out with something new like it’s a new shade and the stockings so thin all you can see is their seams. You can’t tell one shade from another once they’re on, but Miss Bell, she has to have the new shade or the shell soles or the heels high and pointy in back or whatever it is, and she gives me all the nylons out of her drawer, some she ain’t never even had on at all.”

  “And everything’s gone?” Gibby asked. “Even her nylons?”

  “No,” the woman said grudgingly. “Not the nylons. They’re still there and there’s one set of underwear—old lady stuff like maybe I’d buy for myself except it’s her size and in the closet nothing but her suits and her coat. They’re in there and two dresses, real plain, but nothing really nice, not even a nightgown except that flannel thing she was wearing and the good Lord only knows how she came to have that. She never had nothing like that long as I’ve known her or that one set of underwear in the empty drawer.”

  She went on about how she didn’t even know whether Gloria would want to wear any of the things that were left
, except the suits and the coat and the nylons. They were nice. She was bitterly contemptuous of the underwear and the red flannel nightgown.

  “Flannel,” she said, and her voice dripped contempt. “Since when is she wearing flannel to bed? Red, yes, but it’s sheer red nylon with lace set in it here. That was her style.”

  She indicated the location of here by patting her own too ample middle, but we got the idea. Sydney Bell, however sweet, had been the flaming seductress. We had what amounted to a stitch by stitch description of the sheer red nylon nightgowns with the lace set into them. The woman wanted to know what a girl who was wont to cover her fair white body with loveliness of that ilk would be doing with only one set of underwear in her drawer, and that old-ladyish. She also wanted to know what could make a girl who was accustomed to red nylon and lace let herself be caught dead in unglamorous flannel.

  “You had a good look around,” Gibby said. “When did you manage that?”

  The woman took the question in her stride. She was too much outraged over all the treasure that had slipped out of her Gloria’s grasp to have a thought for anything else.

  “I seen she was dead,” she said, “and I yelled. Then I was up there with her and waiting for the cop to come. What was I to do? Stand there looking at her that way, dead and all? I thought of all her lovely things and I thought I’d look at them for the couple of minutes while the cop was coming up. I opened the closet and I come near fainting. Then I looked in her drawers. I seen enough by the time that cop rang the bell.”

  We took her into the apartment. The body had long since been removed and the police lab boys were in there. They were giving the place the works—fingerprints, dust samples, the full scientific detection routine we have done on any murder scene. While we had her in there, the boys fingerprinted her. She didn’t like that much but Gibby’s explanation satisfied her. She had been in there cleaning. She had touched things. She had herself volunteered that she had opened the closet and various drawers. As fingerprints turned up in the place, the freshest ones were likely to be hers.