LITMIR.BIZ

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effect that she had never had the slightest interest in her neighbor’s habits, but she had already confessed to us that she was enough a woman to have taken some considerable notice of her neighbor’s clothes. We asked Nora to look over the things in the drawers and the closet. Nora was appalled. She remembered a pink satin evening coat. She remembered several dazzling dresses. She was by no means as letter perfect in the late Sydney Bell’s wardrobe as was Gloria’s mamma, but she remembered enough. None of the party clothes she had been seeing on her neighbor’s back were now to be found in her neighbor’s apartment.

      She had, of course, no knowledge of the lingerie or the nightdresses, but she did give it as her opinion that the items in that department, as described by Gloria’s mamma, would have been the sort of thing she would have expected. Sydney Bell had not been the flannel nightgown type. They were agreed on that.

      They left us with something to think about. I turned to Gibby.

      “What now?” I asked. “Do we go hunting the ghoulish burglar?”

      “That,” Gibby said. “Or else we concentrate on the religious tracts. I don’t know that they aren’t worse.”

      I didn’t quite follow him there but he sketched enough of it in and I was able to take it from there to fill out the whole picture. Party girl murdered. Every last physical trace of her party-girl life removed. Girl left looking like the complete Miss Prim in death. Prayer book and religious tracts among her things. Start reconstructing from that and see where you come out.

      It’s all too easy. Sydney Bell has been leading the gay life. She goes out partying. Men call on her, even at strange hours. She has fun. Then she meets a man and this man is different. He’s a serious type who talks religion at her. Would Sydney Bell have had any time for a type like that? One never knows. The wilder forms of religiosity do have a way of turning up in extraordinarily virile and ardent people at times.

      You must understand that this isn’t religion we’re talking about. It’s insanity, the kind of insanity that comes of guilt feelings gone out of hand, the sense of sin run amok. This type sets out to save the girl’s soul. He calls it that in his twisted thinking and he believes it. She goes for him. She’s saved. She makes the clean sweep of all her fripperies, all the trappings of that sinful life she used to lead. Next stop the Kingdom of Heaven, but the poor girl hadn’t dreamed it could be that quick. This crazy type she’s fallen for does one of those quick twists you have to look for in people who have set up housekeeping in a fantasy world. Abruptly the whole picture turns itself inside out for him. He hasn’t saved her soul at all. She has led him into corruption instead. He rears up out of her sinful bed, puts his hands around her fair, white throat and chokes the life out of her. Then he buttons her up neatly to the chin. It’s in character. His sense of propriety has been satisfied, and he goes his crazy way.

      In any murder case, as soon as the surrounding circumstances begin to take on a peculiar look, somebody is bound to come up with the easy out, a mad killer. The thought is, of course, that, having a collection of evidence which you cannot make add up into any rational pattern, you can just stop trying, tick it off as the work of a madman, and call it one that cannot be expected to make sense. Actually it is never quite that simple. The mad killing is not without pattern. It may follow a mad pattern but within its own crazy frame it will be rational enough.

      The possibility of a madman in the Sydney Bell killing was not one of those things that popped into our heads because we were feeling baffled and defeated. The evidence had begun to form and it was giving sharp indication that it might be shaping in that special direction. It wasn’t the easy out. It was a conclusion to which we might very possibly be forced, however reluctantly, because when they are like that they can be awfully tough.

      Meanwhile, of course, Gibby was quite right. It was no good trying to forget the possibility of the madly righteous loon but it was also no good settling for anything that definite, at least until we had done all the available digging along all the lines that presented themselves.

      We had just gone into a huddle with the lab boys to see whether they might have something that could be a lead for us, when the cleaning woman came pounding back in a fever of excitement. She knew where all Miss Bell’s lovely things had gone. She could take us there and show us.

      “It’s only around the corner,” she said. “Secondhand clothes it is and never a thing in the window that isn’t from five years ago and nobody, they’re anybody, is wearing it any more until just now I went past and I seen it right away. One of Miss Bell’s beautiful red nightgowns—nylon and lace and all sheer like she had made special for her all the time—one of them is in the window and inside I can see hanging the pink coat and the new evening dress with the harem skirt.”

      We let her show us the way. It was, as she said, just around the corner, and the shop looked as unprepossessing as she had described it. A sign in the window said they bought and sold used clothing and the stuff on display could hardly have looked more used. It was a crowded window except for a space in the center of it. That space was empty.

      Gloria’s mamma gasped. She pointed at the empty space.

      “It was there only a minute ago,” she said. “Right there.”

      We could see through the window into the shop. A rather frowzy woman who unmistakably had the secondhand look was in there with a man. She was holding up for his inspection something that was so red and so filmily transparent that it looked like a tongue of flame. It had lace on it and the lace appeared to be in just that area that Gloria’s mamma had described to us as here.

      The cleaning woman dug Gibby in the ribs and pointed. Gibby nodded. He made no move. He just watched through the window. We made quite an audience at that window. So much so, that I began to feel a bit crowded. There were the three of us but there were two men as well and they all but had their noses pressed to the windowpane. I glanced at them and dismissed them as not worth a second look. I may have wondered a bit at their being interested in this window, but I also dismissed that.

      They could see that red nightgown the woman was showing to the man inside. No man who is a man can look at one of those things without immediately dreaming up a picture that would put some dame into it and it wouldn’t be just any dame either. It would be something luscious, but necessarily. Tossing off the pair who were outside looking in as a couple of idle dreamers, I concentrated on that more enterprising character inside who appeared to be on the road toward implementing his dream.

      That was one big hunk of man. He had a very yellow look, but it was the look of the outdoors type who happens to be having a spot of ill health. You know how a really dark suntan looks when the healthy, red blood isn’t coursing under it. This lad had been out in the sun plenty, but under the bronzing he was carrying an unhealthy pallor.

      His clothes didn’t help. He was wearing a reddish brown suit and a reddish brown shirt and a yellow tie, colors calculated to make a sick man look sicker. The shop’s show window had been modernized with a surrounding trim of mirror glass and I noticed that this gent’s color scheme seemed to be repeated in the glass. I turned my head to have a look at what was reflecting in such splendid combinations of brown and yellow.

      It was an enormous convertible, parked at the curb, a very special-looking job of bronze paint and yellow leather upholstery. It was an easy guess that the convertible belonged to the man in the shop. He was dressed to match it. Another car, far less spectacular, was double-parked just outside the big bronze and yellow job.

      I turned back to the show window and a new detail caught my eye. The mirror glass reflected the convertible’s license plate. It was a Connecticut license—one of those that is all letters and no numerals—and in the glass it read JERK. That seemed too comic and I turned back for another look at the car. Of course, the plate read KREJ.

      Meanwhile inside the shop the man, whom I was now in my own mind calling Krej spelled backwards, dug in his pocket and brought out a couple of bills which he gave the woman. She put the luscious red nightgown in a bag for him. The two men who had been watching with us moved. They didn’t move far, only to the shop door. There they waited; and when the big boy came out with his package, they fell in on either

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