The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead. Hampton Stone
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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.
two
Her cries of injustice were by no means the whole of it. She was also a theorist. She wasn’t content with simply yelling burglary. She insisted that we look for a burglar who was also a ghoul. Miss Bell was dead. She had known Miss Bell well. Miss Bell would never have been caught dead in a flannel nightgown. Therefore it followed inevitably that Miss Bell had not been wearing that red flannel when she had died. The burglar had stopped at nothing in collecting the loot. He had even stripped off the poor girl’s body one of those glamorous red nylon-and-lace jobs and substituted for it that detestable flannel.
We had Nora McGuire in from