The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead by Hampton Stone Page A

nostril.”
    The attendant, who had been listening wide-eyed, interrupted at this point.
    “Nobody who is four foot tall could weigh five hundred pounds,” he said.
    “The height and weight,” Gibby said, carrying it off completely dead-pan, “are only estimates. They can be off an inch or two or a pound or two either way.”
    That took care of the attendant. He subsided into mumbling softly to himself and Gibby turned back to me.
    “Yes,” I said. “Of course. You wipe up everything to erase fingerprints and you clip the fingernails so close that there can’t be any microscopic bits of you left under them. Nothing there for the microscopic bits to be under.”
    We went back outside and brought Bannerman in. He hadn’t been a soldier for nothing. It’s no good saying he took it like a man because there are plenty of men—and it’s no reflection on their manhood—who when they have to make one of those morgue identifications, can’t take it at all. He made the identification and he said a short prayer over her. He asked whether he couldn’t get started on the arrangements for her funeral. He would have liked to have her out of the morgue as quickly as possible. Gibby promised to expedite that for him.
    We expected that would be all, but Bannerman came up with a surprise.
    “Joanie,” he said in a small and sickeningly tentative voice. “If something’s happened to Joanie and she hasn’t been identified, she might be here right now, wouldn’t she?”
    Gibby admitted that it was a possibility.
    Bannerman squared his shoulders and stiffened into grim, military bearing. He could have been posing for a recruiting poster.
    “If there are any girls who haven’t been identified,” he said firmly, “I had better see them.”
    “Perhaps you had better,” Gibby said dryly.
    We took him out with us while we checked. There was only one unidentified body of a young woman and we went back in to have a look at that. It was a redhead with freckles who had been hit by a truck in a traffic accident. She wasn’t Bannerman’s Joanie, not by a good forty pounds of fatty tissue and a flock of other details.
    “That leaves us hope,” Gibby told Bannerman. “It leaves us a lot of hope.”
    “Yes,” Bannerman said.
    That is, he tried to say it but it was no great success. We had to hurry him off to a place where he could be sick, which he was, spectacularly and protractedly. When he was through we knew it wasn’t any good offering him the drink he so obviously needed. It was equally not any good expecting him to carry on as white and shaken as he was.
    We just had to give him a bit of time to rest and pull himself together by whatever means of his own he might have. We did that and his means seemed to be prayer. Watching him, I had every expectation that it was going to work, but actually it wasn’t tested out. Gibby used the time to get on the phone. He called in to check on how well Missing Persons might be doing on the hunt for Joan Loomis. They were doing all right.
    The boys didn’t actually have Joan Loomis on hand for us but they did have an encouraging lead toward a Joan Loomis who answered the description Bannerman had given us. As we already knew, she wasn’t in the morgue. A check of the hospitals had produced nothing. The next step, however, a check of hotels, had been helpful. A Joan Loomis, registered from River Forks, Ohio, had been turned up at the President Polk. Miss Loomis was not in her room and she had not responded to paging, but there was one of the bellhops who remembered her. He had taken her up to her room at 9:30 that morning when she had checked in, and it was evident that he had studied the young woman with that appraising eye which a bellhop will inevitably turn on the ten-cent tipper.
    The description he had given the cops who had talked to him had included the fact that she had tipped him only a dime. As they relayed it to Gibby, he had described her as a young chick with the makings