Gentleman Called Read online

  The sisters, one more than the other, doted on him. Although at least two of them had grown children and grandchildren, Teddy was still their baby brother. Miranda all but pinched his cheeks whenever she managed to get near him. Why? He was neither attractive nor admirable, at least that Jimmie could judge. Was it merely that he was something alive? Or was it that to them he was never altogether alive? He was like a doll. Yes, Jimmie mused, there was a doll-like quality about him, the band-box tailoring, the complexion, and above all that walk of his—like something with a tight spring.

  The band-box, doll house atmosphere prevailed also in his rooms, Jimmie discovered later that evening when he stopped there on pretense of some small business. There were books in the cases, and clothes in the closet, but all of them had an undisturbed look, as though they might have been shifted on the hangers, the clothes, and the books might have been dusted, but none of them seemed worn. It was the damnedest thing, Jimmie thought, but he felt exactly the same way about Teddy Adkins: he simply was not worn enough for the years he was supposed to have been on this earth.

  Jimmie went to his own room feeling more and more uneasy about the case and about his own presence in this house. He lay in bed thinking about it, a book open on his stomach—The Life of Edward Coke. If Elizabethan England could not distract him, what in God’s name would? This house itself seemed unreal. Now and then a stirring of wind set the pine trees outside his window to a forlorn sighing. Poe must have heard such laments in nature to have written of the fall of Usher. And such a house might this be. Jimmie suddenly realized that he was doing precisely the old lady’s bidding, and entirely against his own better judgment. This case should not be allowed to go to court. But the only reason he could give was scarcely valid: it was just bad taste! A gentleman could not tell a woman like Georgianna Adkins she had bad taste, damn it.

  He was about to reach for a cigarette when a tapping came at his door. He looked at his watch. It was one in the morning. At six, the nephew Eric was to take him duck shooting.

  “Yes?”

  Miranda came in and closed the door behind herself before asking if it was all right. Her black, silver-shimmered hair was braided, and she wore a deep red corduroy housecoat that showed the extraordinarily feminine lines of her body. If this was woman at sixty, Jimmie thought, youth was a waste of time. He could not make up his mind to the proper behavior for himself. Should he leap up and get his dressing gown or roll over on his stomach and play dead?

  Miranda came to the side of the bed and helped herself to one of his cigarettes. “Excuse the intrusion at this hour,” she said. “But I saw that your light was on.”

  Jimmie motioned for a cigarette.

  “I’m a grandmother,” she said, smiling down at his articulateness. She held a match for him.

  Jimmie inhaled deeply, and spiraled the smoke to the distance of his toes. “My housekeeper blows into my bedroom now and then,” he said, “but whatever it is she wears on such occasions, she looks like a tea kettle. Forgive my manners. I should have got up.”

  “And offered me your bed?” she chided, and drew up a chair to the side of it.

  “That doesn’t sound decent, does it?” Jimmie murmured.

  “Do you mind talking about Teddy?”

  “Yes,” Jimmie said, “I do. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve done things I’ve minded more.”

  “It’s surprising how little opportunity you and I would have to talk in the daytime.” She put the ashtray on the edge of the bed where they both could reach it. “How does this whole affair, this suit, strike you, Mr. Jarvis?”

  “It was only a couple of days ago,” Jimmie said, “when you remarked that you did not intend to interfere.”

  “I did not intend to then, but I’ve come to think since that it has some rather sinister aspects. Since you don’t want to talk, do you mind if I do?”

  “I’m not a bad listener,” he said, and smiled. It was truly a pleasure to look at her, the high cheek bones, the broad brow, the delicate mouth. By the looks of the women in this house, Teddy Adkins must have come into it from outer space in a basket, aye and perhaps between dropped off at some Shangri La for a century or two on the way.

  Miranda studied her cigarette. “I don’t think Daisy Thayer has very much to do with it at all. Has that ever occurred to you?”

  “A lot of queer things about it have occurred to me,” Jimmie admitted, “but that isn’t one of them.”

  “I wonder,” Miranda said, and her speculatives, fraught as they were with melodrama were making Jimmie distinctly nervous. He wished to God he was out of the bed and had some clothes on.

  “Say out what’s on your mind, Mrs. Thabor. It’s after one o’clock and my wits are slow.”

  “Has it occurred to you that Teddy might be using this suit to break Mother’s hold on his inheritance?”

  “No,” Jimmie said. “That did not occur to me.”

  “If this were not his intention—if it were something he wished to keep as much as possible from Mother’s knowing—why did he not hire his own lawyer?”

  “Because he was not prepared to pay for one,” Jimmie said. “That’s my opinion, if you’re asking for one.”

  “I’m not. And I don’t really care whether you concur in my views or not: but I believe Teddy is in collusion with Miss Daisy Thayer.”

  To hell with propriety, Jimmie thought. He kicked off the blankets and got out of bed and into robe and slippers. “You picked just the right person for your confidence, Mrs. Thabor,” he said sarcastically, and trying hard to figure out why she had brought this choice monkey wrench to him. “I am trying hard to prepare an honorable defense for your brother, and in a case that will at best have many distasteful aspects. Distasteful that is to everyone, presumably, except your mother. She seems prepared to enjoy the victory whoever wins.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Miranda cried. “And didn’t Teddy know that would be her reaction, oh, didn’t he know it! The wicked old witch. She cannot see that she and Teddy will break each other and scatter us all. She should be dead and in her grave. She would like to breed her family like livestock, and she has managed it with all of us—except the most important one with her. I do not believe for an instant that Teddy has a child…”

  Just as had happened on their first acquaintance, Jimmie observed, Miranda the beautiful, the controlled, the articulate, became a jibbering fanatic on the subject of, or in the presence of, her brother.

  “Do you have your brother’s confidence?” Jimmie asked quietly.

  “Certainly I do,” she said, and squashed out her cigarette with determination.

  “Then I wish you would go out from here now, Mrs. Thabor, and to his room. Tell him that you suspect him of collusion with Miss Daisy Thayer, and tell him that you’ve told it to his lawyer.” Jimmie went to the door and opened it, and held it until she went from his room.

  “You think I am afraid to do it, Mr. Jarvis. I am not.”

  “Good night,” Jimmie said. This time he turned the key in his door. Sleep was even more elusive, and he tried lulling himself with the composition of a letter to his beloved friend in England. “Dearest,” he started, “I am about to try a case which has involved me with the most primitive family, surely, this side of Wuthering Heights…” His reverie was interrupted by a woman’s cry and within seconds, even while he sat stock upright trying to decide where it had come from, there was a shuffling and hurrying of footsteps in the hall. He waited. If anyone needed help, by the sound of the steps, plenty of people had turned out to give it.

  Ten minutes passed, the commotion subsided, the whimpering voices faded, and Jimmie knew that he was not going to be called upon. He got up, into his gown and slippers and went out into the hall. He was just in time to see the butler go down the back stairs. Jimmie padded softly after the man.

  He was within sight of the swinging door into the servants quarters when the man went through it, and he caught a glimpse of the young woman wh
o waited him there. Jimmie hastened to catch their first exchange of words. It was a twist this, his spying at the servants’ keyhole.

  “You can go back to bed. It’s all over,” the man said.

  “I can go back to New York in the morning, that’s what I can do,” the girl said. “There’s lots of nice, respectable places, and with just as good wages. A man what throws mouthwash would just as soon pitch acid, I says.”

  “You says too much. I’ve worked for Mrs. Adkins for forty years, and I don’t consider myself contaminated.”

  “Who would contaminate an old stick like you?” the girl said with a familiarity, Jimmie thought, that would have shocked Mrs. Norris.

  “I was once a young buck,” the butler said, “and all the kick isn’t gone out of me yet. So button your nightgown before I’m tempted.”

  “EEEeh,” the girl squealed, and Jimmie felt distinctly out of place. But within a few seconds, the girl asked: “Would you like a nice cup of tea, Mr. Timsey? It wouldn’t take long. I’ve the kettle boiling.”

  Fortunately for Jimmie, Mr. Timsey accepted. Jimmie was again reminded of Mrs. Norris. She, too, wielded “a nice cup of tea” like a weapon.

  The girl and Timsey settled near enough to the door for Jimmie to become their silent partner in the gossip.

  “This fellow, Jarvis—the guest—he’s a lawyer, you know. From what I could make out Lady Miranda had been in his room, and it put our Teddy in a fury.”

  “Is he a fairy?” the girl asked. Surely of Teddy, Jimmie thought.

  “I don’t really know. Forty years in the house, and I still can’t make him out. But mark you this, young lady—stay away from him. There’s nothing he likes better than to get a girl into trouble.”

  “That doesn’t sound like one to me then,” she said.

  “I don’t mean that kind of trouble,” the butler said. “He has all kinds of mean tricks—like saying his pockets have been gone through. And he’s done far worse. I remember a prune we had for a parlor maid—years ago this is—and he fixed her. One day when she was answering the upstairs calls, and he knew she was on all right, he asked her for his coffee. She went up with the tray and he opened the door to her stark naked. Pretended he thought it was me, to her that is. When I told Madam and she spoke to him, he said the woman had made it up. Furthermore, he said, she was always turning up in his room trying to surprise him. Madam discharged her on the spot.”

  “I’d have quit if I was her, but first I’d have let him have the hot coffee where he couldn’t put clothes on for a while. That’s dirty, what he did, Mr. Timsey.”

  “Exactly what I’m warning you, my girl. You’ll get used to the eccentricities of old families. Like walking the deck on a rough sea it is. I can’t help wondering though, what he’s done now, with the lawyer here. Mind you now, you’re not to repeat what I’ve told you to the other servants. You look to be a girl a man can speak his mind to, eh?”

  “I don’t like old families, Mr. Timsey. I’m going to apply for a position with a new one. A girl can say where she wants to work in times like these.”

  “With a new family,” Timsey said scornfully, “you will be allowed to launder and do the Saturday scrubbing. They have no code, woman. In a house like ours a waitress has a trade, the upstairs maid is an artisan. Cooking and buttling are professions…”

  Jimmie was about to retreat. He did not feel up to auditing a lecture on the domestic species at two in the morning.

  “Besides, our Teddy isn’t home often enough to give us much concern.”

  “I wondered about that,” the girl said. “Sometimes his bed isn’t slept in. I suppose a gentleman like him has a club he stays at?”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to think,” the butler said with a tone of finality. “Wash up the cups, my girl, or cook will scald the both of us at breakfast.”

  “She won’t know it was us.”

  “Won’t she now? She has a nose for midnight raiders.”

  Jimmie retired to his room. He had wondered himself at Adkins’ lack of club affiliations. Not since his college days, apparently, had he joined anything.

  If he was going to have to shoot ducks in the morning, Jimmie thought, he’d be shooting blind. But with a little more luck like tonight’s he might at least know something of what he was about when it came to Daisy Thayer versus Teddy Adkins.

  27

  TULLY GOT BACK TO New York in time to have a good night’s sleep in his own bed on Friday. He got up early, ate a hearty breakfast, and on his way downtown collected his thoughts from where his sister’s palaver had scattered them.

  At the office he called a meeting of himself, the investigator who had worked on the Ellie True case, and Lieutenant Greer, the Precinct officer in charge of the Sperling case. He called in also a couple of leg men.

  “I hope you don’t begrudge giving Saturday morning to chasing a Bluebeard, gentlemen.”

  “I’m a nature lover myself,” the other man from his own office said.

  “So he was a Bluebeard,” Greer said.

  “IS,” said Tully. “Very much IS.”

  “Got a name for him yet?” said Greer.

  “No, have you?” Tully snapped. Greer shook his head. Tully went on: “But what I have got may turn out to be a pretty good clue. Oh—I also have another murder to put down to his credit.” He filled in the story from Sando, Ohio. “The pattern is similar. He uses the identity of a man, just picking it up like a pair of gloves, wearing it till he’s done with it, and throwing it away.”

  “Like a shadow at night,” Greer said.

  “That’s exactly right,” Tully said. “But here’s a taking-off point for us: remember Sperling’s diamond pin?”

  Greer’s head shot up from his chest. “I’ve got something to say on that.”

  “Good,” Tully said. “He seems to have taken a keepsake from the Widow Bellowes—a black opal pendant.”

  “A black opal,” the other investigator said. “That rings a bell with me, Jasp…”

  “I was hoping it would.”

  The Ellie True files were got out.

  Lieutenant Greer said: “Want to hear my piece now?” He moistened his lips and Tully realized how excited he was. “I had Sperling’s two nieces come in to see me yesterday. They had a confession to make. When they gave us the inventory okay on their aunt’s jewelry, they didn’t mention that one of the pieces was a stranger to them. They got a little greedy when they saw it. But finally their consciences got to working. They thought it might mean something to us.”

  “A black opal?” Tully ventured.

  “Man, this is a ruby, ringed round by blue diamonds. I had it appraised last night; seven thousand dollars.”

  Tully sat a moment, his lips clamped on the speculation this started. Finally he said, “A piece like that must have a history. Did you put somebody on it?”

  “I did.”

  Tully took an empty pipe from his desk; he pulled on it now and then, making a hollow sound. Every man in the room was thoughtful. His co-worker was still ploughing through the Ellie True files. Tully said: “Somehow, I can’t imagine diamonds being friends with Ellie True. She was a working girl.”

  “That means there’s another link missing then, doesn’t it?” Greer said.

  “At least one,” Tully said grimly. “What else have your boys turned up?”

  “Not much. We keep hammering away. The tenants upstairs of Sperling say now they sometimes thought she was crazy, laughing at the top of her lungs. They figured she had company though they didn’t see him. He must be quite a jokester.”

  Tully nodded. “Like they say, you don’t catch flies or women with vinegar.”

  His partner glanced up from the files. “You ought to know, Jasp.”

  Tully wagged a long finger at the man. “If you’d learned to read you wouldn’t have such a hard time finding out what’s in the files.”

  “Here it is, the property clerk’s inventory—‘one black opal, filigree
gold chain. Presumed family heirloom.’”

  “And where did you and the homicide boys think the True family loomed from?” Tully asked dryly.

  The other investigator shuffled the files and answered what Tully had intended as merely a jibe. “Ellie True came up from Georgia. Poor white. She must’ve been the daughter of a Southern cracker.”

  “That’s what I was digging at—did she have any money?”

  “We never found out how much, Jasp. Not much, most people thought. No bank accounts. But she was close-fisted, saving to better herself for five years. Thought she could marry a millionaire, her having the Southern accent, her roommate said. And she was saving up for her trousseau…” The man was guiding his remarks by the testimony. “None of the savings ever showed up, so he must have got something out of her.”

  “His women seemed to have confidence in him, don’t they?” Greer said.

  Tully nodded. “He must set himself up as a man with money—temporarily short of funds. Nothing much new in that approach. But he must be a very capable faker. Smart, good with his hands—a doctor, a magician.” He turned to the other man from the D.A.’s office. “Anything missing from Ellie True’s jewel box?”

  “That’s what I’m looking for. Nothing listed. But that doesn’t mean anything, Jasp. What she’d have of her own would probably not be worth listing, dime store junk.”

  “But something in it might’ve been worth taking for sentimental reasons,” Tully said. “What’s the name of her roommate?”

  The man told him.

  Tully made a note of it and the address and gave it to one of the leg men. “Here you go, Tommy. See if you can find her. Then find out if she remembers any jewelry of Ellie’s at all, anything she especially liked to wear.”

  Tommy Bassett, a hard-working if not very imaginative youngster, was off.

  “Suppose you do turn up such a piece, where will it get you?” Greer asked.

  “To whoever it was he lifted the seven thousand dollar gem from, I hope. He must have climbed pretty high up on the social ladder for that one.”

  Tully addressed himself to the other leg man: “I want you to go through the records and report to me every woman who died a violent death in New York City in the past five years. Cause and circumstance. Case open or closed. I’m particularly interested in women with money now.”