Gentleman Called Read online

  “Who isn’t?” somebody quipped.

  Tully asked Greer: “Could you get somebody from headquarters to tackle it from this angle: has any jewelry been lifted in the routine pickups?”

  Tully himself went down to headquarters in the afternoon and went through the gallery. There was not a jolly face in the lot.

  The first break came from Tommy Bassett: he called in that he had found and talked with Ellie True’s roommate. The only piece she could remember was a small gold “Florida leas.” He spelled it when Tully asked him to.

  Tully sat a time puzzling the word, saying it aloud. Suddenly it came to him: fleur-de-lis. “I don’t know,” he said. “They’re getting educated men these days on the regular police force.”

  “But I went to college,” Tommy protested.

  “Come on in,” Tully said. “You’ve done just fine.”

  His other man reported very late in the afternoon. There were a great number of known homicides of women during the period, one tenth of them open cases. Tully was almost through the open cases when he realized that it was dark outside. The office was deserted except for a cleaning man who was whistling something that sounded like Saturday Night Is the Lonesomest Night of the Week.

  It was dinner time. He picked up the phone and called Mrs. Norris, asking her if she could by any chance join him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Tully,” she said, “but I already have an engagement.”

  “With a man?” Tully asked out before thinking.

  “Does that surprise you?” she said.

  Tully was too deep in the stream of his work to surface for a spinner. “Let me talk to Jimmie,” he said.

  “Mr. Jarvis is spending the week-end in Weston, Connecticut.”

  28

  WHEN MRS. NORRIS HUNG up the phone, Mr. Adkins was standing beside her. “Mr. Tully,” he said, “isn’t that the young man you were telling me about, the detective?”

  “It’s been a long day since Jasper Tully was a young man,” she said. “But that was him.”

  “You were a bit harsh on him, considering he was once your suitor.”

  “I wonder how that word came about,” Mrs. Norris mused, “suitor. He wasn’t that at all, Mr. Adkins, unless it means a comfortable kind of person to be with. In that way he suited me well enough.”

  Mr. Adkins made a mouth of disapproval. He was like a child at times. Then he would say things almost biblically wise. “I hope,” he said, “I am not becoming one of those comfortable people in your life.”

  Whatever he was, Mrs. Norris thought, he was certainly around a good bit. “Well, I am getting used to you, Mr. Adkins.”

  “Good God! That, my dear, is quite enough to drive a man such as myself to extremities. Used to me, indeed.”

  What, she wondered, was to him extreme. “You’re a strange bundle,” she said.

  “That’s better. I’d rather by far be strange than be an old shoe you could kick off in a corner. Comfortable, pah!” He put a finger beneath her chin. “Tell me the truth, are you really looking forward to a rocking chair by the fire and a slobbering old man to fetch you a cup of tea? Say yes to that and I’ll go out the door.”

  “I’d as soon he wasn’t slobbering,” Mrs. Norris said, and her shoulders quivered with silent humor. Mr. Adkins laughed aloud.

  “Oh, God bless! You are my kind of woman.”

  “That’s a curry of nonsense,” she said. “You said the same thing I’m sure to Miss Daisy Thayer, and God knows to how many before her.”

  “What?”

  Mrs. Norris looked up at the sharp edge to his voice. He had gone quite pale. Oh, truly a strange little man. “Whenever a man fancies a woman, the woman he fancies is his kind of woman, or so he thinks at the moment. You know what they say—‘I’ll bet you tell that to all the girls.’ That’s all I meant, Mr. Adkins.”

  “No,” he said quite severely. “I do not. ‘All the girls,’ as you call them, revolt me.”

  “I meant one at a time,” she said. He had almost turned blue, like a baby in a pet, and him ordinarily a man with humor. “It was only a joke,” she said.

  “A disgusting one.”

  Mrs. Norris got up. “I don’t know in what way I’ve offended you, sir, but I’m beginning to be a mite offended myself. I think it would be as well if you left now.”

  “No, no, no,” Mr. Adkins protested, and paced away from her and then back again, the normal color gradually returning to his cheeks. He took her hand in his then—and his hands were quite cold, but strong. “Forgive me, dear one. I thought you were accusing me of…of promiscuity, and truly I am a very proper man.”

  “If you were not a gentleman, I should not have opened the door to you—on my own behalf, that is. But what a peculiar thing we’re doing, talking this way! What interest could a man of your education and background find in a prickly bundle of gorse like myself?”

  “I told you, my dear, I do not like comfort. A prickly bundle of gorse like yourself is much more to my liking than a velvet glove. I came tonight, wanting to talk of just that—of gorse and heather, lochs and leas, the leap of salmon and the burble of streams. I would like for my part to spend the second half of my life in the wilds of Scotland.”

  “The second half?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m counting on the Scottish clime to double my two score and fifteen. And do you know, my dear, I want double or nothing.”

  They soon eased again into conviviality. And in time Mr. Adkins mentioned that he understood Mr. Jarvis would marry soon.

  “What did you say?” Mrs. Norris asked, not sure she had heard rightly.

  “I don’t have a document on it,” Mr. Adkins said, “but it was my very clear understanding.”

  “And who will he marry?”

  “I’m not that intimate with him, and it was not said to me. I merely overheard his remarks.”

  Mrs. Norris was caught between disbelief and hurt, for no intimation of such a thing had come to her since Mrs. Joyce had gone to England. “I will hear about it in sufficient time,” she said.

  “In sufficient time for what? You should think of it now, and I want you to. What I’m really suggesting, my dear—and I hope you won’t think me shockingly bold—I want you to double your life with me. There! I’ve said it out. I don’t want a word from you now. I know you’re a woman of long independence, and probably of income sufficient to all the adventures of which you have dreamed.

  “But I want to open to you a new world of adventure. Perhaps you know I shall be heir to an enormous fortune. More money—if we touched it—than you and I could count by dimes before the turn of the century. But I do not intend to touch it. When it is mine to give we will scatter it to a hundred thousand causes and perchance that way hit one that will grow good seed…”

  She heard out his reverie, his nonsense rhyme, sitting tight with her own single thought like a dog with a bone in a crowded room. “Do I understand, Mr. Adkins,” she said with quiet self-containment when he paused, “you are proposing that we go off to Scotland together and live another fifty-five years on my money?”

  Mr. Adkins looked at her as though he were offended by so profane an interruption. “Are you so fond of money?”

  “I’m fairly close with my own,” she said, “and I can count it all by nickels, let alone by dimes, and while it won’t have to do me till I’m a hundred and twenty-two—which is the age I’d be doubled—I don’t intend to have to get by on the half of it, whatever the years left me.”

  “Ah, now,” Mr. Adkins said, laughing, “how well you knew yourself to say you were a prickly bundle. Bless you, my dear, I have no intention of sharing your money. Rather I intend to match it, dollar for dollar, no more, no less. I’m an investment broker, woman. I’m bonded to at least twice your worth. That’s why I offered my services to you the other day. I could advise your investment of money to return you a safe average of six percent. Are you making that now?”

  “Three and a quarter,” she admitted.

/>   “The Bowery bank,” he said with knowing deprecation. “What I should like to suggest—we match our small fortunes, mine to equal yours, and manage upon the income. Would you like to see my bond?”

  “Your bond?”

  “A certification of my right to invest—my brokerage license.”

  “I might,” she said, “if I was going to consider your proposal.”

  “All I ask tonight,” Mr. Adkins said, “and I beg it of you: do not insist upon answering my proposal now.”

  “Mr. Adkins, I don’t like toting up a relationship this way.”

  “I could not agree with you more!” he cried, and bounded to her side. “But I know you to be a practical woman and I wanted you satisfied therein before I bespoke the night’s true message. The night, as the song says, was made for love.” And before she could take cognizance of his intentions he had plastered a wet kiss on her cheek.

  She started up from the chair with such a bounce, she toppled her short-legged Romeo to the floor. He picked himself up with the most of a very little grace.

  “I feel like something out of a Jane Austen novel,” he said, “and I have never admired the only roles in that to which I was suited. You have hurt me deeply, Mrs. Norris. I am a sensitive man for all that I play the clown. There was something about you that seemed refreshing after my horrid experience with that, that wretch. You have disillusioned me terribly.”

  “I have hurt your pride,” she said, “and what is pride to a man who has a sense of humor?”

  His moment’s contemplation of that seemed to mollify him.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am too sensitive, and I know I take myself too seriously. My dear, your wisdom is the perfect balance to my wit.”

  He could persuade a bird, Mrs. Norris thought, to nest on a scramble egg. “I’m going to put on the kettle,” she said, “and we’ll have a nice cup of tea.”

  29

  JIMMIE HAD FINALLY FALLEN so soundly asleep after his backstair wanderings, that he managed to be unwakeable at dawn Saturday. When he did get about the house, absolutely no reference was made to the nocturnal events of Friday. It was a dull, and for Jimmie, fruitless day and evening. Teddy’s presence was so little felt, his absence was scarcely noted at dinner, Eric merely moving up to sit between his grandmother and mother. The one thing the boy managed from there was to persuade Jimmie to rise and shine at six A.M. on Sunday.

  Jimmie had, he supposed, spent more miserable weekends, but he was hard put to remember one. It was bad enough to land in a wet duck blind before dawn of a raw November morning, but spending the next four hours in it with a decoy like Eric all but petrified him. He began to feel like something preserved in a jar. Every once in a while Eric would look round at him, presumably to see if he had turned blue. Otherwise there was no communication between them, or for that matter, between them and the ducks.

  He was a handsome lad, Eric, being Miranda’s son, and in his early twenties, and Jimmie wondered what he did besides hunt and fish. Did he make his own pocket money? Enough to take out the girls who must vie for his attentions. Or did they take him out? Nothing would surprise him about this family.

  When they finally gave up the shoot for the day and got to coffee, Jimmie asked him what he did for a living.

  “Oh, I expect to go in with Uncle Ted some day,” Eric said. “He’s not in a hurry to have me, and I’m in no rush for the 8:02 myself.”

  “Nobody in the family seems to be in a hurry,” Jimmie said. “Is it a family concern—your uncle’s brokerage?”

  “No. It’s something he invented himself,” Eric said.

  “That’s a beautiful gun,” Jimmie said, as Eric emptied the cartridges and began to oil the weapon. “Invented?”

  “Sure. That office makes just enough money to support Grandma. We all know that. It’s like his having a private printing press on which to run off exactly one thousand five-dollar bills.”

  “One might think he’d be tempted sometimes to increase the run,” Jimmie said.

  “Why?”

  Jimmie shrugged. “Oh, just to break the monotony. Eric, if I were to ask you what was the nicest thing you could say about your uncle, what would it be?”

  Eric thought about that. “I guess that he minds his own business,” the boy said. “Everybody else in this family has a nose like an anteater, but Uncle Teddy, he just goes bouncing along with his in the air.”

  “You admire him then?”

  “Not much,” the boy said frankly. “He’s a cornball.”

  “But you don’t dislike him?”

  “You mean on account of Mother, and the way she carries on over him?”

  Jimmie nodded.

  “You know my mother pretty well, don’t you?” Eric said, and there was something sly in the way he said it that gave Jimmie a turn. He remembered the same sort of remark in the kitchen between Timsey and the girl.

  “I’ve only met your mother twice,” he said.

  The boy curled one side of his mouth. “Then what was she doing in your room night before last?”

  “Ant-eating,” Jimmie said like a shot.

  The neatness of the retort registered with Eric. “If I cared enough about my mother,” he said, “maybe I’d be sore about the way she is over him. But if she carried on that way over me, I’d shoot her. Honest to God, I’d coax her out in the cat-tails along about twilight, ease off a ways from her and when the ducks flew high I’d shoot low.”

  “That’s a nice, cold-blooded calculation,” Jimmie said.

  “Worked out well, too, isn’t it? Uncle Ted says it won’t work, not unless I can get her to fly up with the ducks.”

  “How did you know she was in my room?”

  “Uncle Ted told me.”

  “Did he tell you why she was there—what she said to me?”

  Eric shrugged.

  “Just what did he tell you?” Jimmie persisted, suddenly expecting something important to hang by the answer.

  The boy was ever so slightly embarrassed. But he tried to shrug that off, too. “He just said she was there, and called her a name.”

  “Like?” Jimmie tried with the monosyllable to keep the boy talking.

  “A slut, that’s all.”

  “A slut that’s all,” Jimmie repeated. “Where’s your uncle now?”

  “I guess he’s still asleep if he came home last night.”

  “I thought you might have put him in the hospital for saying that about your mother,” Jimmie said.

  “Hell, it doesn’t mean anything when Teddy says it, Mr. Jarvis. I don’t even think he knows what it means.”

  “Then, since you seem to, shouldn’t you assume the responsibility of teaching him?”

  “No, sir. I like doing just what I do. I can see myself going on this way for fifty years, and Uncle Ted is the only person who can arrange that. I don’t want to upset the status quo. Not me.” Eric went to a bookshelf and disturbed the books in the only manner they had been disturbed for years, Jimmie thought: he had to move a couple of them to get a bottle out from behind them. “Like a little brandy in your coffee?”

  “Yes,” Jimmie said, “and a little more brandy than coffee, please.”

  30

  THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO would say that a man who works on the Sabbath does not deserve good fortune, and others who say that a man willing to work seven days a week deserves all the luck he can get. That Sunday morning, Jasper Tully, in a rare state of good cheer, just knew the breaks were due him.

  He had before him what he called Bluebeard’s Chart:

  Arabella Sperling

  Given: Ruby

  Gave up: Diamond lover’s knot

  ? owned ruby

  Given what by killer? Gold fleur-de-lis?

  Ellie True

  Given: Black opal

  Gave up: fleur-de-lis?

  Widow Bellowes

  Given: nothing known

  Gave up: Black opal

  Tully was determined for the moment at
least not to go back beyond the Widow Bellowes. The two years between Ellie True’s murder and Arabella Sperling’s was the span on which now to concentrate. It broke down the file of violent deaths of New York women to something a bit easier to cope with. Somewhere in there was the woman who had owned the diamond-circled ruby—unless the killer had gone out of town again for that one. Tully didn’t like to face up to that possibility. Thus far, although all the major insurance companies had been contacted, none had any record of its loss, or, even more to the point, of its existence. And that was just plain ridiculous, Tully thought.

  Then came his first break of the day. Amongst the cache of property of questionable origin taken off recent law offenders and held by the police until ownership was established was a small gold pin, a fleur-de-lis. It had been taken from a petty thief, but seven-time offender called Buzzy Ritt.

  Buzzy had gone straight for over a year, but this was promising to be a cold winter. Buzzy had just stolen an overcoat and three and a half pairs of gloves.

  “Probably expected to have one hand chopped off for it, like in the old days,” Tully said. “Where is he now?”

  “In the Tombs,” the leg man said.

  “I’ll just go down and brighten up his Sunday morning,” Tully said, breathing thanks for his second break.

  Buzzy took the occasion to spout his grievances against the city who couldn’t bring him to trial any faster. It was all right for characters who could raise bail. They were out in the fresh air.

  “I don’t see what you’re making such a fuss about,” Tully said. “You only get homesick on the outside.”

  Buzzy made a vulgar noise.

  “Buzzy, I understand the police are holding a little gold pin for you…”

  “Yeah and I want it back. It belonged to my dear old mother.”

  “It’s a valuable pin,” Tully lied, but careful not to mention in what coinage.