The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Read Free Page A

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