Gentleman Called Read online

  “I’m sure he is,” Mrs. Norris said. “You can have all the radio and all the television and all the moving pictures. Give me a good play with real, live actors.”

  “Ah, Madam, it does my heart good to talk to a woman like you. Hold up your hand, dear.”

  Mrs. Shaw leaned close, pulling down the glove she was fitting, and Mrs. Norris said into her ear: “The dark-haired girl at the perfume counter—haven’t I seen her somewhere?”

  “She says she’s a model.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Mrs. Shaw mentioned it and Mrs. Norris bit her lip; she had got the wrong one.

  “The blonde looks familiar, too.”

  “Maybe you’ve seen her in pictures,” Mrs. Shaw said, “but if you did, you’re the only one I know who has. And we’ve been watching, I can tell you. Miss Daisy Thayer, that is. She’s back on the job here after a year in Hollywood. Or so she says. My Arnold says she may have been—the hidden item on somebody’s expense account, if you know what I mean.”

  “It would be hard to hide something like that,” Mrs. Norris said. A year, she thought: time enough to package a baby, poor thing. “And Stewart’s hired her back?”

  “Oh the men swarm round her like bees, and it’s them buy the perfume, you know.” Mrs. Shaw gave her customer’s hand a pinch. “Arnold used to come into the store now and then. He’s very handsome if I do say so. That was the first time she noticed that I also was on this planet. She would smile over at me as though she had a lump of sugar between her teeth. Arnold took her out several times, and I never interfered. Then all of a sudden, she couldn’t see him for gold dust. A man half Arnold’s size and twice his age. With my own eyes I watched her pick him up.”

  “Did you? She must be a bold thing to have done it right in front of you.”

  “Not only that. When she came back from having lunch with him that first time, on her relief she went up to a friend in the Credit Department for information on him. And you know what kind of information they have up there.”

  “What kind?” said Mrs. Norris.

  “Well, it’s not going to tell her whether he goes to church on Sunday.”

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Norris. “It would be his financial status.”

  “It would give his bank and credit references, and his home address which was Weston, Connecticut, and he certainly didn’t live there in a bird’s nest.”

  Mrs. Norris wished she had all this in an affidavit. “How do you know she went up to the Credit about him?” she asked, as though she could scarcely conceive a thing so calculating.

  “The girl she asked is also a friend of Arnold’s so it was right she should tell his mother something like that. And that information is confidential, you know, what Miss Daisy Thayer wanted.”

  “Couldn’t you report her?” Mrs. Norris asked hopefully. The more witnesses the better.

  “My dear, it was well over a year ago, all this. Closer to two, you know the way time goes. And at the time, I told it where it would do me and mine the most good. I told it to Arnold. And that put a finish to them.”

  “Bully for you,” Mrs. Norris said with meager enthusiasm. “And did he believe you?”

  “He believed her if he doubted me,” said the mother. “She wanted no more of him, having Connecticut in tow.”

  Mrs. Norris wondered how close friends Arnold was now with the girl in the Credit Department, who was also a friend of Daisy’s at the time she hooked poor Mr. Adkins.

  “I’ll take them,” Mrs. Norris said of the second pair of gloves. She had never bought two pair at once in her life till now.

  “Charge and send?” said Mrs. Shaw.

  “Cash and carry,” Mrs. Norris said, and counted out a great deal of money. “Raggle Toggle Tom—is it a play about gypsies?”

  “Oh, no. Tom is a poor little street urchin.”

  “I don’t care much for problem plays,” Mrs. Norris said.

  “It’s not a problem play at all. Not every poor child’s a delinquent.”

  “I would love to see it,” Mrs. Norris said. “Maybe I can get my Jamie to take me.” Before she left the counter she was persuaded to try to make it that very night when Mrs. Shaw would be there herself, and could introduce them to Arnold.

  And before she left the store Mrs. Norris went up to the Credit Department and made out an application for a charge account in the name of somebody she didn’t know at an address where no one she did know lived. Meanwhile she studied the girls. She was quite certain she would recognize any of them she saw again. They were all clean and decent and acting themselves only, leaving all the airs to be put on by them opening the charge accounts. There were few things of which Mrs. Norris approved less.

  22

  “ARE YOU SURE THAT’S what she said?” Jimmie insisted. “It’s more important than I can tell you.”

  “I’m in the habit of getting things right,” Mrs. Norris said. “Mrs. Shaw said she watched the hussy pick him up herself.”

  “It isn’t her picking him up or putting him down,” Jimmie said. “That amounts to hearsay. But that Daisy Thayer went deliberately to check on Theodore Adkins’ financial information—that’s the thing to hand a jury. What I should like now is an affidavit on it.”

  “Then take me to the play tonight, Mr. James.”

  “But I can’t do that,” Jimmie said. “Don’t you understand? Suppose the Thayer woman were to show up herself tonight for this boy’s opening—she knows him, doesn’t she?—I’m going to be facing her in court, Mrs. Norris.”

  “Well, Mr. James,” she said with Scots doggedness, “if it’s below your dignity to do what you ask me to do, all right. It seems to me an excellent opportunity for you to get first hand your ammunition. And tell me this—if she does show up tonight, is that the proper place for the mother of a fatherless child?”

  Jimmie had to admit there was something to that. Besides which, Mrs. Norris had touched a sensitive point—his dignity. He was being too bloody zealous of it for his own liking.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  “Now I’ll have to call you by your first name, sir. I’ve told her you were my son.”

  “What do I answer to if somebody calls me by my last name?”

  Mrs. Norris gave that a moment’s thought. “Norris, I suppose.”

  Jimmie grinned. “Won’t you tell me, mother dear, who my father was? I have the right to know.”

  “Get out of my kitchen!” Mrs. Norris cried, and fanned herself with the evening paper.

  Mrs. Shaw was waiting for them near the box office, having every confidence in their arrival. Just before the curtain went up on Raggle Toggle Tom, Mrs. Norris elbowed Jimmie.

  “There she is! I was right!”

  “Thayer?” said Jimmie.

  “No. The girl from the Credit Department of Stewart’s, Daisy Thayer’s friend, or rather her ex-friend, I’d not be surprised. Here’s the way I figured it from something the mother told me: the boy probably went out on a double-date—she’s a pretty thing, isn’t she?—with her and Daisy…”

  Jimmie was saved from following Mrs. Norris over the obstacle course of her reasoning by the play’s commencement. Sufficient to the needs of the night was the fact that the girl was here, the girl who could testify to Daisy Thayer’s calculations. As the play wore on and out, Jimmie thought of several nice things to say to the actors. They, fortunately, were better than their vehicle.

  Afterwards, following Mrs. Shaw backstage, Mrs. Norris whispered to Jimmie: “Remember you’re an actor, now. Act.”

  On his introduction to Arnold Shaw, however, Jimmie admitted he was only an occasional actor. He said he was in business.

  “That’s where all actors should be,” Arnold said with a smugness Jimmie found it hard to forgive him. “Mrs. Norris…and Mr. Norris, I should like you to meet a friend, Miss Barbara Rossetti.”

  Miss Rossetti was the girl from the Credit Department. Jimmie took his cue: “What do you s
ay we all have supper together? Be my guests.”

  At that point Mrs. Shaw hooked her arm into Mrs. Norris’. “Why don’t you young people go along without us? Mrs. Norris and I will have a nice quiet cup of tea somewhere, and a good talk.”

  It was arranged before Mrs. Norris could get the tacks off her tongue, Jimmie thought, but by the look on her face she was ready now to start spitting them. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Good night, dear mother of mine. Don’t wait up for me.”

  Jimmie was not long in the company of these young ones before he felt his age, and furthermore, he knew they felt it. He did not intend to play-act much longer. He ordered their supper with an ease that impressed his guests; then he looked for a long moment at Miss Barbara Rossetti.

  “You have a famous namesake,” he said.

  She cocked her head, contemplatively. “The poet, you mean?”

  He nodded. “‘My heart is like a singing bird.’”

  She was a lovely girl, looking at him now, a disconcerting appreciation in her dark, deep eyes.

  “The Yankees used to have a second baseman by that name,” Arnold said. “Let’s talk about him.”

  Jimmie turned a disbelieving eye upon him. “Do you like baseball?”

  “I loathe it,” Arnold said bluntly.

  Jimmie smiled and folded his arms. “Then let’s talk about Miss Daisy Thayer.”

  There was an instant’s silence, stiff enough to have sat down amongst them.

  “Brother,” Arnold said then, “you know how to deliver a line, don’t you? What about Daisy?”

  “I suppose you might say I’m interested in anything you could call gossip.”

  “You’re one of those columnists?” Miss Rossetti asked.

  “God forbid! I’m a lawyer. I’m acting in the interests of a client of whom I think she is trying to take advantage.”

  “She’s the girl who can do it,” Arnold said. “She takes a man for everything he’s got.”

  Jimmie could not ask the question on his tongue, not in present company. He turned to the girl. “She’s a friend of yours, isn’t she?”

  “She was kind of a friend. We attended Stewart’s personnel classes together. That’s where I got to know her. And she did introduce me to Arnold afterwards…” She threw a worshipful glance his way.

  Jimmie sighed after his own youth. “That was trusting of her, wasn’t it?”

  “She was through with me by then,” Arnold said.

  “And how did you feel about her?” Jimmie glanced at the girl. “You don’t mind my asking him that, Barbara?”

  She shook her head.

  “I guess my vanity took it on the chin,” Arnold admitted. “She’s gorgeous looking.”

  Poor Teddy Adkins, Jimmie thought; his vanity had also taken it on the chin, and everyone would say it served him right, the bantam chasing after the bird of paradise. “I take it there’s no doubt in either of your minds that Miss Thayer was out to find a man of money?”

  “None,” Arnold said.

  “But there’s nothing really wrong with that, is there? I mean nothing legally wrong with it,” Barbara said.

  “Quite right,” Jimmie said. “It merely casts doubt on her moral integrity.”

  “And maybe she did fall in love with him,” the girl added.

  “Oh, come off it,” Arnold said.

  “I wonder if you’re not talking about my client,” Jimmie said, wanting her to say the name out of her own memory if possible.

  “Someone by the name of Adkins?”

  Jimmie nodded. He thought then what a fine appearance Barbara would make on the witness stand, and she would impress the women as well as the men: he would have that up on Daisy Thayer anyway. The problem was to get Barbara on the stand without hostility toward him.

  “Perhaps we are misjudging Daisy,” he allowed, since Miss Rossetti seemed to have a lingering confidence in Miss Thayer.

  “I think you are,” Barbara said. “I know a lot of good things she has done.”

  “Red Cross worker,” Arnold said sarcastically.

  “She worked very hard, too,” Barbara snapped.

  “Oh, sure, blood from stones she could get.”

  Jimmie was fascinated. His mind gave a leap to a happy conclusion: “Worked on the Blood Bank, didn’t she?” he said.

  “She got us over our quota, and nobody else seemed to care,” Barbara said.

  “She cheated,” said Arnold. “Lined up all her bloody boobs like me and put us down as Mark Stewart’s employees.

  “I don’t suppose the Bank records really care where the donors work,” Jimmie said with an ease that belied his glee. “To them the only important information is blood type, isn’t it?”

  Barbara nodded, bless her innocence.

  How Jimmie would have liked at that moment to ask the fatuous Arnold his blood type! But James Ransom Jarvis was a gentleman, and he cared not who had fathered Daisy’s child. His only job was to exonerate little Teddy Adkins.

  He smiled at Arnold. “Speaking of blood from a stone, what makes you think she was after Adkins’ money?”

  “Can you think of any other reason for her to check his credit the first time she met him?”

  There was a bit of the mother in him, Jimmie thought. He had to tell everything he knew.

  “I see what you mean,” he said. “Did she do that?”

  “Tell him, Babs.”

  Babs was not a blabber. “Wait till we have our drink,” Jimmie said, seeing her reluctance, and himself satisfied to have got the conversation to a point of easy resumption. He talked then about the theatre of which he knew considerable, and admitted that occasionally he invested in it, aware of how favorable a light that placed him in. The “Irish Coffee” arrived, an excellent pickup for a nippy evening. Barbara’s eyes shone with approval after her first taste.

  “You were going to tell me about Daisy’s checkup on my Mr. Adkins’ credit,” Jimmie prompted. “Let’s get it over before our supper comes.”

  “I work in the Credit Department,” Barbara started, “and one day—it’s over a year ago now—Daisy came up and asked me to look up the credit record on this man—she had the information off his charge plate, you see.”

  “His having purchased something from her,” Jimmie said, trying to ease the revelation on.

  “No,” Barbara said tentatively. “I remember her saying she’d had to follow him all over the store to get it. Finally he’d bought something.”

  The cream aboard Jimmie’s Irish Coffee seemed to curdle. “Why did she need the charge plate? Hadn’t she just been to lunch with him?”

  “Yes,” Barbara said.

  “I assume he introduced himself before inviting her,” Jimmie said, but already suspecting his assumption had a false bottom.

  “Oh, but he hadn’t used his own name, you see,” Barbara said brightly. “He’d told her a name like Cardova. Something like that.”

  It had been considerably less than frank of Mr. Theodore E. Adkins not to have confided the pseudonym to his lawyer, Jimmie thought. He might now prove Daisy to have tricked Mr. Adkins into paternity, but no jury could be outraged on behalf of a gentleman who did not use his own name on making overtures to the young lady.

  23

  JASPER TULLY WAS NOT a man who liked to get out of New York City. In a town the size of Sando, Ohio, he felt lost. His feet could move round in his shoes. His coat left enough room between it and himself for the wind to crawl in and make free with his bones. Sando, at the hour of the milk train’s arrival—and this was the only conveyance Tully had found out of Columbus—was gray with the sittings of coal-dust, and scarcely stirred at all at the sun’s rising.

  People came to New York from the damnedest places, Tully thought, and then did the most damnable things.

  He inquired of the station master where the police department was. The man walked to the end of the platform with him in his shirt-sleeves, the sleeves puffed out around black elastic bands.

&
nbsp; “Yonder,” he said. “It’s in the same building with the fire department. There ought to be somebody one place or other.”

  Tully arrived in time for the changing of the guard, as it were, the night man going off, and the day man coming on. He showed his identification. One of the men went into the back room from which came the smell of coffee. He returned with three cups and the pot. Tully had never had coffee he appreciated more.

  “Who you looking for?” one of them asked then in the easy drawl of the hill country.

  “A man by the name of Murdock, Edward T. Murdock.”

  The two policemen exchanged glances. “What’d he do?”

  Tully assumed from their glances and from the size of the town that they knew the magician. “I want to question him in the murder of a couple of women.”

  “Murdock the Mighty?” the policeman said.

  “What’d he do, saw ’em in two?” said the other.

  It was fairly grisly humor, even for Sando, Tully thought. “Does he have any police record with you?”

  “Might have. Licensing violation. He don’t like having to pay to perform his magic shows.”

  “No felony record?”

  “No-o-o. Why he couldn’t put a dying rabbit out of misery.”

  “That kind’s been known to have no trouble doing away with their wives, Joe,” his partner said.

  “But Murdock don’t have a wife. Where’s these women supposed to have been murdered?”

  “They weren’t supposed to be murdered, and they’re not supposed to have been murdered,” Tully said, concerned with semantics for once in his life. “They were both murdered in New York—one last week and one a couple of years ago.”

  “Took you quite a while to get round to that one, didn’t it?” Joe drawled.

  “Funny damn thing,” his partner said, “we had a murder down here a while back…a Columbus doctor, what was his name…?”

  Joe was thinking about Murdock, however: “Tell you, mister, I think you must have the wrong man. Murdock was out last week on what he calls his Cincinnati circuit, plays down one road, Washington Court House, Wilmington, Hamilton, and up the other, a show a night. I don’t see how he could’ve been in New York when you said.”