The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead by Hampton Stone

that’s recognizable except for the usual unburned bits of quite ordinary garbage.”
    “Anything that could have been clothing among those bits?” Gibby asked.
    “Nothing. We’ve checked most particularly.”
    We ran Bannerman down to the morgue and we left him in the waiting room while we went in for a preliminary look at the corpse. I couldn’t quite see the point of that since we had already seen Eleanor Bannerman’s remains and I couldn’t see that it made any difference that at the time we had still been calling her Sydney Bell.
    As soon as we were away from Bannerman, however, Gibby explained. The ME had told him that he had finished with her. There were the visceral samples that were going through laboratory analysis and we were going to have to wait for those analyses before we would know whether she had been drugged or anything like that; but the rest of the post-mortem examination had been done and the results were quite as indicated, death by manual strangulation.
    “There’s one thing I wanted to look at before we took him in,” Gibby said.
    “What thing?” I asked.
    “Do you remember her fingernails?”
    I did remember. The fingernails had gone with the red flannel nightgown and those other simplicities the cleaning woman had so emphatically insisted were uncharacteristic. They had been without polish and clipped very short. When we had seen the body they had seemed to me quite in keeping. The fact that they had been by no means in keeping with the picture we’d had of the dead girl from her maid and her neighbor had not come to my mind. There could be no question that they were in keeping with Eleanor Bannerman’s brother’s picture of her. I said as much.
    Gibby gave me a look of blank incredulity. “How do they fit with his story of what she’s been doing?” he asked. “Modeling hands. Do you think she was doing some stop-biting-your-nails ads?”
    I had been too much absorbed in the nice-girl side of brother Milton’s story. I had completely missed out on the staggering discrepancy. I suggested that Gibby kick me from slab to slab.
    The attendant pulled her out for us. “This whole fingernail angle has been nagging at me,” Gibby said. “I was wondering about it from the first, and when brother said she had been modeling hands, it got much too peculiar. I asked the ME if he had looked at them and he had. He can’t be certain but he says it isn’t a bad bet that possibly they were clipped after she was dead.”
    We examined the hands and Gibby pointed out to me a couple of fingers the ME had mentioned specifically. It was the doc’s opinion that on those fingers the nails were clipped so very close that it would have been an agonizingly painful operation unless the girl had already been dead or at least unconscious.
    I thought of the young man we had left waiting outside. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. Calendar art horrified him. He put great emphasis on a girl’s being a nice girl. Before he had even come on the scene the thought of religion and righteousness gone astray had inevitably suggested itself. Abruptly it was something far stronger than a suggestion. His sister had deceived him all these years. He had come to New York and made the horrible discovery. In his righteous wrath he had killed her and had erased all the symbols of her sinful life. Could this erasing of symbols have included that savage job of nail clipping?
    I had done my thinking aloud and Gibby concurred with it at least in part.
    “One possibility,” he said. “There is also another. Suppose the girl struggled. Women in the process of being strangled have a way of clawing and scratching. It’s been publicized almost as much as fingerprint evidence. You know, the microscopic fragments of skin and hair found under the victim’s fingernails indicate that her assailant was a man fifty years of age, four foot tall, weighing five hundred pounds and with a strawberry mark just above his right