cocktail or evening dress as small. I looked down at her feet. She was wearing grayish canvas sneakers that bulged over her bunions. I concentrated on imagining those feet in high-heeled shoes with brilliants studding the heels and I got over my impulse to laugh. That wasn’t a funny picture. It was pathetic.
“She had promised you her good clothes?” Gibby asked and his face was a mask of the most sober interest. “Had she been planning something where she wouldn’t need them any more?”
I was asking myself what she could have been planning unless it had been suicide and I’ve already been into that. When it’s manual strangulation, it just can’t be suicide. Gibby, however, was asking the question, and Gibby doesn’t ask questions just to hear the sound of his own voice. In a situation like this, more than ever, I have yet to hear him ask a completely idle question. I tried to figure him and I came up with a beaut. Could it have been a suicide pact?
Suicide pacts aren’t too common, but they do happen and a large proportion of them never get done all the way. He kills her, by agreement, and he is to kill himself immediately afterward. He means to do it, of course, but his nerve runs out. We’ve had them like that. Also it wouldn’t even have to be like that. He killed her and he went off somewhere else to dispose of himself. He would have to have used some other method on himself in any event. He could have gone down to the river and in. He could have thrown himself under a subway train or a truck. He could just have gone home to his own place and shot himself or hanged himself. There were all sorts of possibilities.
I was doing all this thinking but it wasn’t taking me any time to speak of. The thought hit me and the possibilities just whizzed through my mind. Immediately they whizzed out again. The woman was answering and her answer took care of the suicide angle quite to my satisfaction.
“No,” she said. “Not like that. She was always giving me her nice stuff, real nice stuff, and it was still brand-new. When she would get through with something, it was not like some they give you things is only lit to wear cleaning house or like that. It’s had every last bit of good worn out of it. Miss Bell, she wasn’t like that. She always had to have the latest, whatever it was. She’d go shopping and she’d buy herself a dress, say. She’d bring it home and hang it in the closet. She wasn’t going to crowd her stuff up it should get crushed just hanging. She’d take out some dress she had from before and she wore it maybe ten times, maybe not even that, and she’d give it to me. It was like that all the time.”
“I see,” Gibby said. “You felt that all her nice things she would be passing on to you one day.”
“She promised me. She always said when she was through with a thing, nobody got it but me. My Gloria—Gloria, she’s my daughter—my Gloria, she’s so much like Miss Bell they could even be sisters. She’s a size twelve and a perfect figure. Something it fits Miss Bell, it’s a dream on Gloria. The things they look better even 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
