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 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,” the woman growled.
“Suppose you tell us.”
“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, all right. It was all there the last time I cleaned and today it’s gone. Every last bit of it gone.”
“Every last bit of what?”
“Everything,” the woman said, and indignation was bursting out of her. We seemed to be getting the explosion of something that had been smoldering for some time. “Every last thing she had, it was any good, all her underwear with the nice, black lace on it, all them sheer nylon and lace nightgowns like she was always wearing, all her real good dresses like the evening dresses and the cocktail dresses, even her nice shoes, the high-heeled ones with like diamonds in the heels. Right through all the drawers, right through the whole closet, not even one of them things left, and all them things was mine. She’d promised them to me.”
Every tone of the woman’s voice was vibrant with growling cello notes of a sense of loss. I was careful not to catch Gibby’s eye because I was a cinch to laugh if I did and, if Gibby wanted answers to the questions he was asking, laughing at her wouldn’t help.
It was more than a little ludicrous, though. It wasn’t that the woman was so old. Fifty perhaps or possibly well up in her forties, but she had gone to flesh. She had gone to quite enough flesh to take her well past even what might be called the stylish-stout dimensions. She was well over into the outsize department,
