The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead Read Online Free

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, and Sydney Bell’s figure had been purely wolf bait. I worked at wiping out of my mind’s eye any picture of this babe in underwear with black lace on it eight or ten sizes too small for her, a 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 fit 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