The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead. Hampton Stone
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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