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

of a dish except that she was already a young old maid. He remembered a gray suit, a gray hat, and a white collar like one his sister used to wear when she had been going to some convent school.
    The boys had asked the desk and they got the same check-in time, 9:30 that morning. The clerk further remembered that Miss Loomis had come down from her room not more than fifteen minutes after checking in and had left her key at the desk. She had been out most of the day but had returned at the end of the afternoon well loaded down with parcels. Another bellhop had tried to take them from her but she had stubbornly insisted on carrying them herself. It was the opinion of the President Polk staff that she had been saving a second dime tip. This time she had spent perhaps a half hour in her room and then had gone out again, again leaving her key at the desk. The boys from Missing Persons had come along only a few minutes later. They were now settled in there waiting for her to return.
    Gibby asked them to keep on it. He was ready to hang up when the headquarters operator cut in and said they had something else for us. Gibby had turned in earlier the registration numbers on the two cars that had been parked outside the secondhand-clothes store. The Connecticut registration that was Jerk spelled backwards belonged to a man named Jellicoe, Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe. They were rushing this news to Gibby because they now had something else on a Kirk Reginald Emmenthal Jellicoe. A patrolman had picked up a beaten-up drunk on Madison Avenue and the man had given the officer that sesquipedalian name. The officer had taken the man down to Bellevue for treatment. They thought we might want to know since Gibby had put through the query on the car registration. Gibby said we were happy to know, particularly happy since we were at the morgue and, the morgue being an adjunct of Bellevue Hospital, it could hardly have been handier. He went over to Bannerman.
    “Looks like we’ve located Joanie,” he said.
    Bannerman leaped to his feet. “Where is she?” he asked.
    “At the moment I don’t know. At 9:30 this morning she checked in to a hotel. She was all right then. She went out and she was gone all day but she came in for half an hour not very long ago and then went out again. Anyhow we have that much. She was on her feet and evidently in perfectly good shape late this afternoon. No reason to expect she won’t be the same way when we find her.”
    Bannerman looked as though he wanted to believe it. He wanted to be happy but he was afraid to believe anything.
    “How do you know it’s she?” he asked.
    “She’s registered as Joan Loomis of River Forks, Ohio,” Gibby told him. “She also answers the description you gave us.”
    “I’d better go to the hotel and wait for her,” Bannerman said, starting for the door.
    Gibby caught his arm and held him. “Rather do that than meet your train?” Gibby asked him.
    Bannerman looked at his watch. “Yes,” he said. “The station first. She must be there right now waiting for my train.”
    “We’ll run you up there,” Gibby said. “There’s still time. We’ll take off as soon as we’ve gone around the corner to the hospital and had one of the doctors give you something.”
    Bannerman had lost all interest in medical assistance. He had even forgotten about prayer.
    “I don’t need anything now,” he said. “I’m fine now with this news of Joanie. That was better than any medicine.”
    He wasn’t just saying it. He looked it. He looked, in fact, every inch the eager bridegroom except for one thing he did have to bother him and that was some inner necessity to look less happy than he seemed to be feeling, since such a look would be suitable for a young man whose little sister had so recently been done to death by manual strangulation.
    Gibby didn’t tell him we had other business in the hospital. He just stood pat on his insistence that Bannerman had to be seen by a