My hands flew up my head and I nearly went wacky with horror. I gasped it out because I hoped he’d say no, but he didn’t, so it was yes. “You mean he danced with her after she was gone? Gave her dead body a dime each time, stabbed her over and over while he did?”
There was no knife, or whatever it had been, left around, so either they’d already sent it down for prints or he’d taken it out with him again.
The thought of what must have gone on here in this room, of the death dance that must have taken place... All I knew was that I wanted to get out of here into the open, couldn’t stand it any more. Yet before I lurched out, with Nick holding me by the elbow, I couldn’t resist glancing at the label of the record on the portable. “Poor Butterfly.”
Stumbling out the door I managed to say, “She didn’t put that on there. She hated that piece, called it a drip. I remember once I was up here with her and started to play it, and she snatched it off, said she couldn’t stand it, wanted to bust it then and there but I kept her from doing it. She was off love and men, and it’s a sort of mushy piece, that was why. She didn’t buy it, they were all thrown in with the machine when she picked it up secondhand.”
“Then we know his favorite song, if that means anything. If she couldn’t stand it, it would be at the bottom of the stack of records, not near the top. He went to the trouble of skimming through them to find something he liked.”
“With her there in his arms, already!” That thought was about the finishing touch, on top of all the other horror. We were on the stairs going down, and the ground floor seemed to come rushing up to meet me. I could feel Nick’s arm hook around me just in time, like an anchor, and then I did a clothes-pin act over it. And that was the first time I didn’t mind being pawed.
When I could see straight again, he was holding me propped up on a stool in front of a lunch-counter a couple doors down, holding a cup of coffee to my lips.
“How’s Ginger?” he said gently.
“Fine,” I dribbled mournfully all over my lap. “How’s Nick?”
And on that note the night of Julie Bennett’s murder came to an end.
Joyland dance-hall was lonely next night. I came in late, and chewing cloves, and for once Marino didn’t crack his whip over me. Maybe even he had a heart. “Ginger,” was all he said as I went hurrying by, “don’t talk about it while you’re on the hoof, get me? If anyone asks you, you don’t know nothing about it. It’s gonna kill business.”
Duke, the front man, stopped me on my way to the dressing-room. “I hear they took you over there last night,” he started.
“Nobody took nobody nowhere, schmaltz,” I snapped. He wore feathers on his neck, that’s why I called him that; it’s the word for long-haired musicians in our lingo.
I missed her worse in the dressing-room than I was going to later on out in the barn; there’d be a crowd out there around me, and noise and music, at least. In here it was like her ghost was powdering its nose alongside me at the mirror the whole time. The peg for hanging up her things still had her name penciled under it.
Mom Henderson was having herself a glorious time; you couldn’t hear yourself think, she was jabbering away so. She had two tabloids with her tonight, instead of just one, and she knew every word in all of them by heart. She kept leaning over the gals’ shoulders, puffing down their necks: “And there was a dime balanced on each of her eyelids when they found her, and another one across her lips, and he stuck one in each of her palms and folded her fingers over it, mind ye! D’ye ever hear of anything like it? Boy, he sure must’ve been down on you taxis—”
I yanked the door open, planted my foot where it would do the most good, and shot her out into the barn. She hadn’t moved that fast from one place to another in twenty years. The other girls just looked at me, and then at one another, as much as to say: “Touchy, isn’t she?”
“Get outside and break it down; what do I pay you for anyway?” Marino yelled at the door. A gob-stick tootled plaintively, out we trooped like prisoners in a lock-step, and another damn night had started in.
I came back in again during the tenth stretch (“Dinah” and “Have You Any Castles, Baby?”) to take off my kicks a minute and have a smoke. Julie’s ghost came around me again. I could still hear her voice in my ears, from night-before-last! “Hold that match, Gin. I’m trying to duck a cement-mixer out there. Dances like a slap-happy pug. Three little steps to the right, as if he were priming for a standing broad-jump. I felt like screaming: For Pete’s sake, if you’re gonna jump, jump!”
And me: “What’re you holding your hand for, been dancing upside-down?”
“It’s the way he holds it. Bends it back on itself and folds it under. Like this, look. My wrist’s nearly broken. And look what his ring did to me!” She had shown me a strawberry-size bruise.
Sitting there alone, now, in the half-light, I said to myself: “I bet he was the one! I bet that’s who it was! Oh, if I’d only gotten a look at him, if I’d only had her point him out to me! If he enjoyed hurting her that much while she was still alive, he’d have enjoyed dancing with her after she was dead.” My cigarette tasted rotten, I threw it down and got out of there in a hurry, back into the crowd.
A ticket was shoved at me and I ripped it without looking up. Gliding backward, all the way around on the other side of the barn, a voice finally said a little over my ear: “How’s Ginger?”
I looked up and saw who it was, said, “What’re you doing here?”
“Detailed here,” Nick said.
I shivered to the music. “Do you expect him to show up again, after what he’s done already?”
“He’s a dance-hall killer,” Nick said. “He killed Sally Arnold and the Fredericks girl, both from this same mill, and he killed a girl in Chicago in between. The prints on Julie Bennett’s phonograph records match those in two of the other cases, and in the third case — where there were no prints — the girl was holding a dime clutched in her hand. He’ll show up again sooner or later. There’s one of us cops detailed to every one of these mills in the metropolitan area tonight, and we’re going to keep it up until he does.”
“How do you know what he looks like?” I asked.
He didn’t answer for a whole bar. “We don’t,” he admitted finally. “That’s the hell of it. Talk about being invisible in a crowd! We only know he isn’t through yet, he’ll keep doing it until we get him!”
I said, “He was here that night, he was right up here on this floor with her that night, before it happened; I’m sure of it!” And I sort of moved in closer. Me, who was always griping about being held too tight. I told him about the impression the guy’s ring had left on her hand, and the peculiar way he’d held it, and the way he’d danced.
“You’ve got something there,” he said, and he left me flat on the floor and went over to phone it in.
Nick picked me up again next dance.
He said, shuffling off, “That was him all right who danced with her. They found a freshly made impression still on her hand, a little off-side from the first, which was almost entirely obliterated by then. Meaning the second one had been made after death, and therefore stayed uneffaced, just like a pinhole won’t close up in the skin after death. They made an impression of it with moulage, my lieutenant just tells me. Then they filled that up with wax, photographed it through a magnifying lens, and now we know what kind of a ring he’s wearing. A seal ring shaped like a shield, with two little jewel splinters, one in the upper right-hand corner, the other in the lower left.”