The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (14 page)

“Or a new boss,” Gibby suggested.

Harrity shrugged. “Who knows?” he said.

“Two years they’ve been smarter than you,” Gibby told him. “They never were that smart before. Would you say they could have turned that smart all of a sudden?”

Harrity gave it the “oh, Master” routine again, but he conceded Gibby’s point. If there was anything in the way of uncommonly effective thinking being done, it was being done for George and Harry, not by them.

We came to the house and Harrity dropped off to hit a phone and do the couple of chores Gibby had handed him. We went up to have a look at the new corpse.

THIS one was not only very new. It was also soaking wet. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the marks of the strangler’s hands were perfectly clear on the man’s throat, I would have been prone to expect this one to be a death by drowning. Water was still streaming from the hair and drops of water stood on the dead man’s skin. The body was completely naked. It lay across the threshold of the bathroom doorway and a large bath towel lay in a heap on the floor beside it.

“Fresh out of the shower and reaching for his towel when he got it,” Gibby said. “Taken by surprise, I’d say.”

The cops who were in there working the deal seemed to be seeing it the same way. I was coming down with a couple of reservations. I went back for a close look at the apartment’s front door. There was no indication that there had been any tampering with the lock or forcing of the door.

“Killed by someone he left waiting while he went to take a shower?” I asked. “Or would it be someone who had a key to the place?”

“Could be someone who just walked in because the door had been left open,” Gibby said.

The building superintendent was still hanging about, still clinging to the pane of glass he had been going to put into the window. He had a bit of information and he volunteered it.

“He was always doing that, Mr. Camp was,” he said.

Gibby indicated the body. “That Mr. Camp?” he asked.

“Yes, him. He was always doing that, like I said. He wanted something done in here, like maybe put in a new washer or something, he’d tell me and he’d leave the door open so I could get in to do it. Off and on, it seems like, he had the door open more than it was shut.”

“And he wanted the glass put in his window,” Gibby said. “That makes it easy, doesn’t it?”

“Trusting soul, extraordinarily trusting for his line of business,” I remarked.

Gibby didn’t see it that way. He argued that a procurer would ordinarily have no one to fear but the police and that locking the door to his apartment wouldn’t do him much good if it was the police who wanted him.

“What about burglary?” I asked. “Most people in New York are at least a little bit concerned about the possibility of burglary.”

Gibby swept the place with a quick glance. “What could a burglar get?” he asked.

From anyone it would have seemed a stupid question. From Gibby it seemed incredible. The answer couldn’t have been more obvious. It lay right out in plain sight. When Harry had undressed for his shower he had draped his clothes over the back of a chair. He had taken off his watch and had left it lying on the table. It was a cinch that any money he would have had on him would have been in the pockets of his clothes. I pointed to the watch and spoke of the money.

Gibby conceded me a point, but he took the concession back almost as quickly as he had given it. It was quite true, he argued, that while Harry had been under the shower, someone could have slipped in and made off with his watch and his money. He even allowed that it was a nicer than average watch, a watch that a man might not care to lose. He went on to check the pockets of Harry’s coat and pants. The pants pocket yielded something over a dollar in change. The coat pocket yielded a billfold and it was not too badly stocked. There was something over $150 worth of folding money in it. Gibby looked at it, counted it, and put it back. While he was at it, he went through the rest of the contents of the billfold. He didn’t find anything much. There was a driver’s license and there were about a half dozen little photographs. In the trade they call them art poses. The police have been bearing down on the places that sell them. Gibby showed more interest in them than he usually does in that sort of thing and, when he caught me looking at him quizzically, he explained.

“I just wanted to know whether Sydney Bell had posed for any of them,” he said. “She was a model, you know.”

It was an engaging idea. I took a good look. It didn’t look like Bell and anyhow in these the photographer had most emphatically not been concentrating on hands.

“There are other models,” I said.

“At the moment,” Gibby said, “other models aren’t much our business. We were talking about burglary. Here it is, available for a burglar: one good watch, something a little over $150 in cash, and six very high quality feelthy pictures.”

“I’ve known burglars to show interest in a lot less,” I said.

“A lot less,” Gibby agreed. “But these would normally be on Harry’s person. There isn’t another thing in this place he would worry about losing. Since there’s nothing around he worries about losing, he forms the habit of never giving burglars a thought. Comes the time when he doesn’t have his valuables on his person, when he’s under the shower, the old habit persists. He’s careless. He doesn’t give a thought to burglars.”

“What about his clothes?” I asked.

“Also normally on his person any time he leaves the door open,” Gibby said.

“Extra clothes?”

“I doubt that he has much,” Gibby said.

He threw open the door of the one closet the place had. There were a few things hanging in there, but they were little better than rags.

It was my first thought that here we had another one just like the first. Clothes are taken and money is left. I didn’t speak the thought because Gibby had prefaced the opening of the closet with the remark that Harry hadn’t owned much in the way of clothes. I asked about that.

“We’ve had one where only clothes seem to have been taken,” I said. “It’s screwy, but if it can happen that screwily once, why not again?”

Gibby pointed to the clothes hung over the chair. “Look at those,” he said.

They looked all right to me, nothing like that worn junk that hung in the closet. Everything looked brand-new, in mint condition.

“He was a snappy dresser,” I said.

“That he was,” Gibby agreed. “New shirt, never been laundered. New shorts, never been laundered. Everything new. I know these snappy dressers. They own one suit at a time. If it needs a press, they sit in the back room of the tailor shop while it’s being pressed. Cleaning, that gets done overnight. You check into a Turkish bath and by morning they’ve done the complete valeting job for you. Once in a while, maybe, you send something out to the laundry, but mostly when you need a clean shirt, you stop in and buy one, change into it in the store and don’t bother to take the dirty shirt along.”

“Sounds like an expensive way to manage,” I said. “What’s the purpose? No laundry marks for identification in case of trouble?”

Gibby shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s usually a corpse who is identified by laundry marks and you don’t often find one of these boys prone to look that far ahead.”

I took objection to that. I remembered a killing we’d had down in the Village. It was one of the easier ones. The killer had bloodied his shirt in doing the killing. He changed out of the bloody shirt and left it while he took off in a shirt he’d swiped out of one of his victim’s drawers. The laundry marks on the abandoned shirt had led straight to him. I reminded Gibby of that one.

He laughed it off. “What made that so easy,” he said, “was that the dope had never thought of laundry marks. Anybody who’d thought of them enough so that he wouldn’t want any wouldn’t have left us the shirt.”

I could hardly dispute that. I returned to my original question.

“Then why all this buying of new shirts instead of having the old ones laundered?”

Gibby shrugged. “A way of life,” he said. “Sending laundry out is thinking ahead to next week when you are going to need a clean shirt. You’re in a line of business where next week you’ll just as likely as not be in jail, you live for today. It’s particularly characteristic of these boys. Their arrest rate is high and their conviction rate is also high. Sentences, on the other hand, are short. A couple of months and they’re back in circulation. Another couple of months and they’re picked up again. It’s in and out all the time for them, so while they’re out they live from day to day. If you see much of them, you get so you can spot it. The day they’re holding, they’ll be the well-dressed man, everything the very latest wrinkle. Hit them when they’ve had a run of thin days and they don’t look shabby. They look dirty. No clean shirt to change into and no dough for buying a clean shirt so they go on wearing it while the rim at the edge of the collar gets darker and darker.”

While Gibby talked, he was going through all that fancy raiment the dead man had hung on the chair when he had gone to take his shower. He seemed to be looking for something and, whatever it was, he wasn’t finding it. He talked to the cops who were working the place and told them to watch especially for any papers—receipts, storage checks. Anything of that nature they turned up he would be wanting.

Jim Harrity came bouncing in and interrupted him.

“They’re all on the move,” he said. “Maybe you can figure it.”

“Bannerman and the girl gone from the hotel?” Gibby asked.

“They came in. They sat in the lobby together awhile and talked. Then they went up to their rooms. Then almost immediately they went out again, but fancy.”

“How fancy?”

“He came right back down to the lobby and hung around. You know, trying to look like a potted palm. A minute or two later she came down and tore out to the street. He didn’t join her. He followed her. The bellhops enjoyed the show. The way those hellbops have it, he was hanging around the lobby waiting for her to come down and go out. She did and he tailed her.”

“That’s two on the move,” Gibby said. “What about George?”

“Full report,” Harrity said. “The station cops know George and they know his record. He hangs around their station and gives a gal the eye, they watch him.”

As Harrity repeated to us the full report, it became evident that the station cops had been keeping a good watch. They had given him the full deal on the part of it we had ourselves witnessed except that they did add an interesting detail even to that chunk of it. They had first spotted George when he had been watching the Incoming Trains bulletin board.

“Knowing the business he’s always been in,” Harrity said, “they naturally wondered if maybe he wasn’t there to pick up a flesh shipment due in from the hinterland. Nothing much they could have done about it if he was, but you can’t blame them for being curious.”

“He was just watching the board?” Gibby asked. “Not trying to make any girl?”

“The girl came later. He had been there several minutes just watching the board when the girl turned up. She was watching the board, too, except that then George gave up on the board and took to watching her instead.”

He went on from there to give us what we already had. The man who had come along behind the girl and put his hands over her eyes, the slap, the faint, the men from the DA’s office who had talked to George, the whole continuity. Gibby hurried him through that part of it and asked him for anything they’d given him on George after that. They had given him plenty.

George had left the Incoming Train board and had sauntered over to a vantage point from where he could see through the glass doors into the waiting room. He had watched us until we had left the station, taking the girl and Bannerman with us. Then he had returned to his old place, but now he had been turned the other way, watching the ramp down to the suburban-trains level.

Periodically he had gone down to the lower level and waited at the gate of one of the Connecticut trains. He would wait there while the train loaded to go out and as soon as it had departed he would go back to his old post and watch the ramp again.

At this point Gibby had another question.

“This,” he asked, “didn’t happen until after we’d talked to him? He had shown no interest in the ramp or in the Connecticut trains before that?”

“Only in the Incoming board and the girl,” Harrity said.

“Good,” Gibby said. “He still in the station?”

“No, he’s gone off with the girl.”

At that point I had a question. This was going a bit fast for me.

“What girl?” I asked.

“Your girl,” Harrity said. “The saint and flap dame.”

“The what?” I yowled. Despite the hellbops of only a few moments before, I had completely forgotten about Harrity’s spoonerisms.

“Faint and slap,” Gibby growled. “Joan Loomis.”

“I was guessing Joan Loomis,” Harrity said smugly. “George was back watching the ramp. Your babe returned to the station and walked right up to George and engaged him in conversation. If it had been the other way around, maybe the station cops would have taken a hand, but the way it was they just watched. In fact, they had it figured that everything was under control because the girl talked to George and there was this guy who had followed her into the station. They knew him, too. He was the one who had soaked up the slap. He was right in there watching and they made the not-too-unnatural mistake of thinking he was one of your boys tailing her. So, when she left the station with George, and this man—he’ll be Bannerman, of course—soft-shoed after them at a discreet distance, they told themselves it was all safely in the hands of the DA’s office and they kept their own mitts off it.”

Gibby sighed. “That leaves us only one,” he said. “Jellicoe. What do they report on him?”

Harrity shook his head. “I exaggerated,” he said. “I have nothing on Jellicoe. Nobody reports seeing him or anything that answers his description.”

One of the lab boys who had been working the body had come over and was standing by waiting to talk to us. We took a break from Harrity and listened. What he had for us was one of those tiny fragments those boys so dearly love. It had come from under one of the dead man’s fingernails. It wasn’t of the order of those fine scrapings that sometimes yield up information under microscopic examination. This was big enough to be seen with the naked eye and enough bigger than that to be readily identifiable. It was a bit of colorless, transparent Scotch tape about an eighth of an inch wide and perhaps three-eighths of an inch long.