Читать книгу The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead - Hampton Stone - Страница 5

She was pretty, prettier than average. She was young. Estimates put her age at about twenty. Eventually we did get the exact figure. It was twenty-two. She lived alone. There were indications that we’d been expected to think that she died alone, but we never thought that. By the time we came into it, that much was already known, the way the girl had died. It was manual strangulation, and that’s a field of endeavor that the do-it-yourself fad is just never going to reach. A girl simply can’t put her own two hands around her own lovely throat and choke the life out of herself. It’s like wrestling or making love, something that can’t be done with less than two people.

Her name was Sydney Bell, except that it wasn’t; but we’ll come to that later. Let’s start with the simple and easy things like who I am and how I got into this business of the girl who kept knocking them dead. That was the way Gibby came to describe it and I’ll tell you about Gibby. I can’t get far telling you about me without telling you about him.

I am an assistant on the staff of the New York County District Attorney and so is Gibby. You can call me Mac, which is what everybody calls me except in court where things go too formal for that. Since this is anything but a formal report, Mac will do for me. Gibby is Assistant District Attorney Jeremiah X. Gibson, who had once been Patrolman Gibson and later Detective Gibson. That’s the way he worked his way through law school. He was on the cops. I didn’t know him in those days, but I can tell you he was a good cop. Though I can’t speak for the patrolman part of it, on the detective bit nobody knows better. It’s in the boy’s blood.

Brilliant is the word for Gibby. Sober is the word for me. That’s why the DA has set us up as a team. If Gibby has a fault, it’s enthusiasm. He’ll go out on limbs. I try to see he doesn’t go too far out or doesn’t get sawed off; but let’s face it. He does better than I do. I swear he won’t do it to me, but every time it happens. He gets me out on that limb with him. One of these days we’ll both be sawed off.

Murder is Gibby’s specialty—on the detection end, of course. There aren’t many murders happening in our jurisdiction that Gibby doesn’t get to work on and, when Gibby’s on it, I’m on it with him. The Sydney Bell bit was murder and it happened in New York County. That made it our baby.

It happened in a nice little flat in the West Fifties. One room and bath and kitchenette, but the room was big and bright. It was pleasantly furnished, not spectacularly lush, not austere, but comfortably cheerful. The house had a decent look to it, but in a big city, of course, one never knows. There is nothing anywhere quite so impersonal as one of these apartment buildings. It happens again and again that the people who live in them go on for years without knowing the first thing about their neighbors and it’s not until something happens that they even begin to wonder whether the tenant in 5F had been exactly what she seemed to be.

Even then this thing that happens has to be something pretty big. What did happen to the tenant of 5F was quite big enough, of course, since it was murder; but it was evident that it was only when the police started asking questions that any of Sydney Bell’s neighbors gave her more than the most passing of thoughts. This one remembered her from meetings in the self-service elevator. Another remembered visitors who came and went. She had many friends, but nobody could describe them closely or tell us anything much about them.

Among the neighbors a rather tart young woman who taught school and lived in 5E, which put her next door to Sydney Bell, came closest to telling us something we could use. Her name was Nora McGuire. Gibby questioned her. It wasn’t easy. She went all out to impress us with how broad-minded she was and what a high value she placed on privacy, both her own and that of her neighbors. She didn’t want to answer questions. She wanted to mind her own business.

It didn’t take Gibby long to break that down. A girl had been murdered in her bed and there was only the apartment wall between that bed and Nora McGuire’s place. She could hardly call anything that had come as close as that none of her business. Nora McGuire conceded the point but she argued that she hadn’t known that her neighbor was going to be murdered. If she had known, she might have taken a greater interest in her and in the comings and goings of her visitors.

Even without taking any interest, however, she had noticed a few items and, after he’d worked at it awhile, Gibby drew those out of her. She had noticed a woman who had visited Sydney Bell at least twice. She might have seen this woman oftener but of the two occasions she was certain. The reason she was so certain was the fact that this woman owned two mink coats. She had worn a mink of one color on one visit and a mink of quite a different color on a second visit.

“I am that feminine,” Nora McGuire said. “I would remember that. I shall probably never even have one mink coat. I could hardly help noticing a woman who had them in assorted colors.”

While she was talking to us about mink, a radio was turned on in one of the other apartments in the building. It had come on loud but had quickly been turned down to a civilized volume. Even then, however, it was faintly audible. Gibby waited a bit, listening to the murmur of the radio.

“It’s a limited sort of privacy any of us has living in an apartment,” he said, after he had given it time to register. “Ever hear anything through the wall?”

“I might have if I had thought to stand with my ear against it or if I’d been equipped with listening devices. Must we go on with this, Mr. Gibson?”

“No ear to the wall, no listening devices. I hear a radio. Don’t you?”

“I hear a radio.”

She crossed the room, going toward the wall beyond which lay 5F. For a moment I thought she was going to put her ear against the wall, but she didn’t. She went to her record player and started some music going. It was Chopin, not notably loud. She walked away from it.

“What’s that for?” Gibby asked.

“I don’t hear the radio any more,” she said. “I like music and when I’m here alone I have it going practically all my waking time. Even when I have visitors there’s likely to be music, and if there isn’t, it’s because I’m that much interested in my guest’s talk. Either way I’m not hearing sounds from next door. They’re blotted out by the sounds I have right here or possibly I blot them out because I am more interested in these sounds than in those. In any case I don’t hear them.”

“The volume of that radio when it first came on, you would have heard that.”

“I have normal hearing. The point is that there never were any loud sounds from 5F.”

Gibby smiled at her. “See,” he said. “You can be helpful when you try.”

“Is that helpful?”

“It gives us something. We know now that if there ever was a wild party the other side of that wall or a screaming quarrel, it happened when you weren’t home. In other words, she led a quiet life or a stealthy life.”

“A quiet life,” Miss McGuire said firmly.

“Except that quiet lives don’t often end in murder,” Gibby said. “But you don’t have to worry about that. Let’s get back to the people who visited her.”

Nora McGuire wasn’t quite ready to go back to that.

“I did hear something,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing I imagine would interest you, but it was something.”

“Everything interests us,” Gibby told her. “We know so little about this neighbor of yours that anything at all is an item for us even if it helps only in the smallest possible way toward learning what sort of a person she was.”

“I think she had a new job or something was going on the last couple of days that changed her habits,” Miss McGuire murmured.

She seemed to be thinking the thing out as she went along.

Gibby cut in on it. “Don’t think on it,” he said. “The trick is to tell us just what you know, not the conclusions you might draw from it. Conclusions can come later.”

“It was this morning,” she said, “but this morning was the second time. Yesterday morning was the first.”

“You heard something yesterday morning and you heard it again this morning?”

“Yes. Not anything that means anything. It was just her radio. Both mornings when I woke up I could hear it playing the other side of the wall. She didn’t have it on loud, not blasting or anything like that. I got up and started my records going and then I didn’t hear it any more. It wasn’t any louder than the radio you heard from somewhere in the building, but it was on. I did hear it both mornings.”

“When you woke? You have a regular waking time?”

“I set my alarm for seven.”

“And she was up before seven and playing the radio?”

“Not loud enough to wake me. My alarm woke me and I just heard it over there while I was getting up and before I put my records on.”

“You’re sure it was a radio you heard in there?”

“Oh, yes. That early morning sort of music and an announcer’s voice. One of those singing commercials about detergents.”

“The same both mornings?”

She frowned. “Yes,” she said. “I’m certain of it, the same singing commercial both mornings. The same announcer’s voice. The other music, the bit I heard of it, was different, a different tune.”

“And it was radio and not television?”

The question startled her. “Now really,” she said. “I couldn’t look through the wall and see which it was. That’s a silly question. The point I was trying to make is that, for whatever it’s worth, she was up and had the thing playing these last two mornings. I’ve lived here a year and she was in her apartment before I moved in and yesterday was the very first time I heard any sort of sound over there in the morning.”

“You have heard it other times of the day though?” Gibby asked.

“I suppose I have. I can’t answer with any certainty. I may have heard it dozens of times without ever noticing. I wouldn’t notice if I had the records going or if I was busy with anything else. It was just waking to it that way set me listening for the few moments until I was out of bed and started on the day.”

“Yes, naturally. I was thinking of last thing at night. Last night and the night before, about what time did you go to bed?”

“Eleven o’clock. Why?”

“That would be another time like first waking in the morning. I should think you would have heard it then if it had been on.”

She shook her head. “I hope it doesn’t matter,” she said, “because I wouldn’t have heard it. You see I always put a stack of records on the machine when I’m getting ready for bed, the sort of thing I like to fall asleep to. It goes on playing till I’m asleep and then it plays on till it’s through the last record and it turns itself off.”

Gibby shrugged it off. “Can’t be helped,” he said. “You see it does matter because she couldn’t have been up and playing it this morning. She had already been dead a good twenty-four hours by this morning.”

Nora McGuire gasped and swallowed hard. “But I heard it,” she protested.

“I know. That means either that someone was in there playing it or that it was playing when she died and never was turned off till the body was found. You see, if you could have told us that it definitely wasn’t playing when you went to bed last night, we could have drawn conclusions from that.”

“I’m sorry. I honestly wouldn’t know.” She thought a moment. “The maid who found her,” she said. “She must know whether the thing was playing this afternoon when she went in. If it wasn’t, then you definitely know someone was in there and turned it off. It was playing this morning. I can swear to that.”

“Good,” Gibby told her. “It might be very important. Now, let’s get back to her visitors.”

She started to pull back. “Now don’t think every time she had visitors I saw them,” she said. “It was only when I met someone by accident in the elevator or the hall.”

“We understand.”

“There were men. Possibly four or five times. Once I came in after the theater—it was about a month ago, I think—I met her in the elevator with a man. We rode up together and then she gave him her key. He was opening her door for her when I went into my own place.”

“He go in with her?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t wait to see.”

“But you think he might have gone in?”

“Men have brought me home from the theater and I’ve had them in for a drink. It is done, Mr. Gibson.”

“Sure,” Gibby murmured. “See the same man more than once?”

“If I did, I didn’t notice or I don’t remember. None of them wore mink. There was nothing to make me notice.”

“But you have the impression of more than one man?”

“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “If it had been the same man every time, I think I should have noticed. Since I never did notice, I think it was probably different men.”

“And since you didn’t notice, they must have been pretty ordinary sorts.”

“No Hottentots. No turbaned Moslems.”

“No Greek gods?” Gibby asked, taking it on her own terms. “No scar-faced lugs, no seven-foot basketball players, no circus midgets?”

“Just men, except . . .”

She caught her lower lip between her teeth and she blushed.

“Except?” Gibby urged.

“Except one time,” she said. “Damn, this is going to sound terribly Mrs. Grundy.”

“Just let it sound McGuire,” Gibby said, keeping it light. “We know you’re broad-minded and closemouthed. Now we’re also broad-minded. We don’t shock and we don’t titillate. We just try to catch people who choke the life out of other people.”

I’m not going to go through the direct quotes on it. She kept interrupting herself to hedge it around with explanations of how she came to see and hear it, making it just as clear as could be that she had not been spying, that what she knew was only what she couldn’t possibly have helped knowing.

What she did know was something that was a little like the episode she had already given us, the man who brought her neighbor home after the theater and who may or may not have gone in for a drink. This one, however, was different. This time Nora McGuire had again been coming home from the theater. She had met no one in the elevator. On the fifth floor, however, she had seen a man at the door to 5F.

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.

“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 lit 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.

“That don’t mean I done anything,” she protested. “I done just like I told you.”

Gibby reassured her, explaining that we could hardly eliminate from the picture such obviously innocent fingerprints as hers unless we had hers for identification. She was a bit restive about having them taken but she submitted with not too much fuss.

With her guidance we went through the drawers and the closet. It was quite as she had said—no low-cut gorgeousness, no nylon transparencies, no black lace seductions. There was only the sparsest of sparse wardrobes. Not a spare nightdress, only one solitary set of underthings, and nothing anywhere that Nora McGuire next door might not have primly worn for her school-teaching.

“Even her laundry,” the outraged cleaning woman said. “She’d drop things in the hamper I should rinse them out for her when I come in. Even them things, her dirty things, they’ve been swiped, too.”

We covered the whole place. The bottle of Scotch was gone. Nothing left in that department but the soda. Gibby wondered about papers. There were no letters or papers of any kind and the cleaning woman dismissed those quickly. There never had been any. She had seen Miss Bell when she would go down for her mail. She would read a letter and throw it away. She wasn’t one to keep stuff, the woman said.

We did find her purse. It was in one of her drawers along with a handsome assortment of other purses and a collection of smart-looking gloves. This one purse was evidently the one she had carried last. It contained the usual cosmetic items but it also contained money, $250 in bills plus a couple of dollars in silver. The cleaning woman took that discovery as the crowning outrage. This had been the meanest kind of burglary, she felt. Nothing had been taken except the things that would ordinarily have passed on to her for her Gloria, nothing except the Scotch and the cigarettes. Gloria was a good girl. She had never tasted a drop in her life. She didn’t smoke either.

We made another discovery and that also outraged Gloria’s mamma. In the drawer with that one set of demure underthings we found a prayer book and a couple of tracts. The tracts were those Jehovah’s Witnesses sell on street corners.

“Them,” the cleaning woman sneered. “None of them was ever around here before. Who wants them?”

The last of it was we had to get her out of the apartment. Gloria could use the suits and the coat and the nylons and the bags and the gloves and, since they would have been hers anyhow when Miss Bell would have been through with them and nobody could say she wasn’t through with them now, Gloria’s mamma came down with the idea that she might just as well pack up anything her Gloria could use and take it right off with her.

Gibby had to explain about the possibility of a next of kin. He did the best anyone could with it, but Gloria’s mamma wasn’t convinced.

The things had been promised to her. It was injustice. That’s what it was.