The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Read Free

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