“No. Months ago. I don’t know just when.”
That was the whole of it and it was more than we were ever to have from any of the other neighbors. Some of the others, as a matter of fact, were eagerly co-operative, but that was only a matter of attitude. They had nothing to give us apart from their willingness to give.
What we actually had at the beginning of this thing, aside from these tantalizing bits and pieces Gibby did manage to extract from Nora McGuire, was a small collection of quite as fragmentary and quite as tantalizing snippets of physical evidence. We had in the first place the body of Sydney Bell herself. I have already said she was young and pretty. We could to some extent see that from the body, but as Gibby had told the McGuire girl we hadn’t seen the body until after she had been more than twenty-four hours dead, and in that length of time an appalling lot of prettiness goes.
Just how much had gone we knew right away because on the table beside her bed she had a framed photograph of herself and, as Gibby put it, that was convenient for us even though a bit oddly narcissistic on her part. It was one of those tinted jobs, all pink and white and golden, with bare shoulders and a froth of filmy stuff just below the shoulders, but you could compare it with the body and, even if you made the reservation that in life she couldn’t have been quite so technicolor as that photo, you could say that the nose had been like this and the eyes like that and the mouth like so and the sum total something that would hardly have been hard to look at.
There was only the one other picture in the place. That was also a studio job but rather the better for being in black and white. It also stood on the bedside table. It was the picture of a man or possibly of a boy. Which you would call him might very well depend on the angle your own age might give you on an infantryman who looked as though he had just made Pfc. You know those photographs. This one was at least as much a picture of that single Pfc. stripe on the sleeve and of the combat infantry badge and campaign ribbon over the tunic pocket as it was of the young soldier himself.
He was an earnest looking lad of possibly twenty-one or twenty-two, certainly no more than that. The expression was pompously solemn and a bit stuffed but it was a clean-lined, lean face, with an honest-looking eye and a firm mouth. He might have been a little soft in the jaw department but he wasn’t chinless. If there was a really noticeable inadequacy anywhere it was at the top of the head. His hair looked unusually thin for his apparent age.
I remembered him when Nora came around to talking about Sydney Bell’s callers, but I couldn’t make him fit into that pattern. I had a feeling that he would have to have been older or possibly a sight more dashing to have been one of them. Even before we had talked to Nora, I had been wondering about him.
“A little young for a boy friend,” I’d remarked to Gibby.
“Could be an old picture,” Gibby said. “A lot of men who don’t go for being photographed at all did get the idea they were hot stuff in uniform. They do it then and then they don’t do it again. There are battle stars on the campaign ribbon. Those can’t be more recent than Korean War which is a little more than yesterday. If they’re World War II, this can be a ten-year-old picture or more than that.”
I took it the other way. These years Gibby was adding to the age of the kid in the soldier boy picture would have to be subtracted from what was obviously Sydney Bell’s approximate age at time of death. I decided it would have to have been Korean War because ten years back or more Sydney would have been much too young to be receiving affectionately inscribed photos from soldiers. She would hardly have been in her teens then and the inscription read: “All my love, Milty.”
So there was Milty and there was the body of Sydney Bell. Her cleaning woman, who had a key to the apartment, had come in at her usual time to do the place up and had found the body. This was a twice-a-week cleaning woman and she hadn’t been in the day before. It had startled her to find Sydney in bed. That had never happened before and the cleaning woman made it quite clear that she was a person who didn’t hold with sleeping past noon and also that in her profession time was money. She had come to clean and she started cleaning. Asleep or not, Sydney Bell was not going to have more than the hour she was paying for.
“I had it figured,” the woman said. “I’d start cleaning around her, she’d wake and get up. She was going to have to get up so I could make the bed anyhow and, the way I figured it, she’d be getting up and wanting a shower and all and then how was I going to get to do the bathroom in her hour and all? So I wasn’t being careful or anything. I kept bumping the bed like, figuring as how the quicker I woke her up, the better it would be. I bump the bed like that a couple of times and she don’t even turn over or stir or nothing and then I begin thinking it’s funny. I go over and look at her and right off I see she isn’t asleep at all. She’s dead and like laid out on the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. That’s when I started yelling.”
We knew all there was to know about her yelling. She had done it at the window and it had brought a policeman up to the apartment. He had taken it from there. He hadn’t recognized murder right off but he had recognized death and the doctor he had summoned had completed it—death by manual strangulation. In all justice to that cop, there had been a good enough reason for his not seeing it. The body had been dressed in one of those deals that happens as a result of the sleepwear manufacturers going cute.
Remember—it was a couple of years back—all the stores went Victorian or something with red flannel nightgowns, both male and female, red flannel nightcaps, complete with tassel? That was it. Sydney Bell’s body was dressed in one of those red flannel nightgowns. Hers was the female type, of course, and it was a fancy one. It had a sort of furry collar on it that buttoned up under the chin. It wasn’t fur, but it was white and fluffy, one of those fake furs they make out of synthetics. It covered up every last trace of the marks of strangulation. You see, it wasn’t until the doctor started undoing buttons that they showed up at all.
It was seeing that bit in the first report that came through that made Gibby ask the DA if he didn’t think this might be just our kind of a case. The DA was noncommittal. It could be a difficult one and it could be a cinch, too soon to tell.
“Much too soon,” Gibby agreed, “but, as I get the picture, this gal was 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,