Free The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead by Hampton Stone Page B

you.”
    “Ellie,” Bannerman said, “Ellie always told me everything. She never had any secrets from me. She said it was crazy the way some girls were in a hurry to marry and took anyone who came along, boys with all sorts of vices and everything. She said she was waiting for Mr. Right to come along. She knew he would find her some day.”
    “I suppose she couldn’t have known that Mr. Wrong would find her first,” Gibby murmured sympathetically.
    If Gibby had stuck a pin into him he couldn’t have brought on a more startled reflex than he drew from Bannerman with those words. The man’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.
    He gasped. “You think it could have been a man?” he exploded the question at Gibby. “I mean someone she knew, someone she had visiting her?”
    “It looks very much like it,” Gibby said.
    “A burglar,” Bannerman said. He was babbling now. “Some kind of maniac.”
    “She was in bed,” Gibby told him. “She was strangled, possibly even in her sleep.”
    Bannerman shuddered but, when he spoke, he sounded almost a little relieved. “Then it was a burglar,” he said stoutly. “Or some lunatic who got in here. Ellie wouldn’t have any man in here and she in bed. Come to think of it, she wouldn’t have had any men visiting her here anyhow, not living this way in one room with the bed right here in the one room she had. I tell you she knew about things. She wouldn’t entertain a man in a room with a bed in it.”
    “I wonder,” Gibby began. The look on Bannerman’s face made it all too clear that he wasn’t in a mood to brook even a bit of wondering on any such theme. Gibby made a fresh start. “I wonder,” he said, “if she mightn’t have been married.” That wasn’t what he was wondering at all but if he had come any closer at that point, it was obvious that Bannerman would have exploded in such a hysteria of outrage that we couldn’t have hoped to have anything coherent out of the man ever again.
    “Without telling me?” There was quite enough outrage in Bannerman’s voice at even that suggestion.
    “She could have been keeping it for a surprise,” Gibby said.
    Bannerman looked at him. He was evidently wondering whether Gibby had gone quite insane or if this would be an example of the sort of horribly sinful thinking that was current in New York.
    “How could she have been married?” he asked scornfully. “She invited Joanie to stay here with her. Joanie was here with her till she went to Boston. You can see there isn’t another room. There isn’t even another bed.”
    “There sure isn’t,” Gibby agreed, but he left it at that. We took Bannerman out of there. We had the car parked out in the street and I waited with Bannerman in the car while Gibby went to a phone booth to get through to the Medical Examiner. That last bit was obviously on Bannerman’s mind. He asked me whether in New York girls, nice girls, entertained men in their apartments alone. I told him they did.
    “Aren’t they afraid of what people will think?” he asked.
    “I suppose some are,” I said. “In a house like this one for instance, people pay not the slightest attention to what their neighbors are doing.”
    “But what about the risk? A girl might make a mistake. The wrong sort of man.”
    “That’s another side of living in one of these apartments,” I said. “You’re alone and you’re not alone: Scream and there are a million neighbors to come running.”
    I put that out on a venture, to see how he would react. He shuddered. “A burglar,” he said. “A burglar, who killed Ellie in her sleep. Ellie never got to scream.”
    Gibby came back to the car and he was looking most thoughtful.
    One of the lab boys came out of the house and came to the car. He had a little something for us. They had been into the incinerator and had found some fused glass.
    “Could be nothing,” he said. “People throw empty bottles down those things all the time but it’s all