The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Read Free Page B

question, but a furlike fluff, that’s protective padding.”
    The DA nodded. “You’d better go ask your questions,” he said.
    Gibby had asked them. He’d begun with the cop. The cop had seen not the first sign of any violence. He had found the room neat, about as neat as a room would be when it was in the process of being cleaned. The bedclothes had been straight and tucked in all around.
    “Like it was fresh made or like it was a hospital maybe,” the cop said, elaborating the point.
    The body had been dressed in the red flannel deal with the furry collar and the collar had been buttoned all the way. He was certain of that. We saw the nightgown and it was evidently of a piece with the neatness of the bedclothes. It didn’t even look as though it had been slept in, much less that its wearer had come to a violent death in it.
    There was, of course, always the possibility that the maid had done some neating up between yelling for the police and the arrival of the patrolman. Gibby was quick to check her on that and she couldn’t have been more emphatic on the point. She hadn’t buttoned up any collars and she hadn’t touched the bedclothes. She hadn’t touched either Miss Bell or the bed except to bump the bed a little in the hope of waking her.
    “Look,” she said, “my job, it’s to clean the apartment. I don’t do no undertaker’s work.”
    That’s the way the thing had stood when we went to talk to the neighbors. After we’d had the stuff about detergent spiels at seven o’clock two successive mornings, we had a second go at the maid.
    “When you came into the apartment this afternoon,” Gibby asked, “was the television on?”
    “What would she have the television on for and her asleep?” the maid muttered, countering question with question.
    “And her dead,” Gibby said, tossing it in as though it were only the most minor of corrections.
    The maid turned detective. “The way I see it, the poor thing, she was murdered in her sleep,” she said. “It comes of young ones like her living alone. I’m sure I don’t know what their mammas are thinking of. I never slept even one night away from home, not till I was married, and then it was only away from my folks’ home. I was with my husband, God keep him.”
    “You’re positive it wasn’t on when you came in?” Gibby tried to nudge her back onto the track.
    “What wasn’t?”
    “The television.”
    “No. It was like now, turned off.”
    “Could you have turned it off yourself and then forgotten?” Gibby asked. “It would be playing when you came in and you took no special notice until you realized she was dead. Then, waiting for the police, it would get on your nerves and you would switch it off.”
    “If it was on when I come in, I would have noticed and switched it off right away. I don’t hold with wasting electricity that way. Electricity costs money and you don’t go burning it up playing televisions in your sleep. I wouldn’t have turned it off when I saw she was dead. I know better than that. A person’s dead, you get help. You don’t go touching anything. I didn’t touch a thing once I seen she was dead and before that only carpet-sweeping the floor a little, but then I didn’t know she wasn’t just sleeping.”
    “Very proper,” Gibby murmured soothingly. The woman was going just a bit shirty in her protestations of knowing just what was done and what wasn’t done. He tried another approach. “You’ve been cleaning her apartment for some time, haven’t you?” he asked.
    “Ever since she came to live here and that’s going on two years now.”
    “Good. What was she like?”
    “Sweet. She was the sweetest thing. There’s never been anyone like her. It breaks my heart, thinking of what that robber done to her.”
    “Robber?” Gibby asked.
    “Robber,” the woman said. “What else?”
    “You know her place well. You’d know if there was anything missing?”
    “I know what’s missing, all right,”