Gentleman Called Read online

  “You’d better ask her. I think she’s got another boy friend.”

  “That will be the day,” Jimmie said.

  33

  AS JIMMIE DROVE BACK to the Adkins estate, he had ample opportunity to contemplate the modern condition of two ancient fortunes. Despite their obvious differences, the Adkins house and Neville’s had at least an atmosphere in common: decay was well set in in both instances—the old man dying alone, and the very old woman surrounded by decadent offspring. There was a deadly torpor among them all—except for old Georgianna Adkins and her son. In them a little torpor might have been desirable!

  Just how, Jimmie wondered, was he ever going to persuade his senior partner that it would be a very fortunate day if they got out of court without raking through a veritable pit of disease. Jimmie now believed from incident, kitchen rumor and Eric that Teddy Adkins was far from what current society called “normal.” Nor was he Milquetoast or Casanova, either of which would have been defensible. Seeing him walk in that peculiar, light-footed way of his one might suspect now, Jimmie mused, that he had come by it from trying to stretch high enough to peep into windows. That was the feeling Jimmie was getting about him, and it was not good.

  Jimmie drew a long and refreshing breath through the open car window. He had thought after his morning for ducks he would never enjoy fresh air again. Whether to have another go at Mama—that was the question. Could he possibly persuade her to settle out of court? Did he dare to prophesy that instead of winning either way, Mama was likely to lose either way? He might force Miss Daisy Thayer to the point where she would admit Teddy Adkins was not the father of her child—but if she had a mind to tell it—what did she have on the little dandy that she dared bring him into court on false charges? She had known a bad thing when she saw it, and she had known what it might be good for.

  All in all, the week-end was not lost, considering the purpose for which he had come, Jimmie decided. He knew at least the slough through which he must wade and try to come out alive.

  An ironic thought then struck him: he had abandoned politics to practice law and amongst the noblest of its advocates, a firm which would not touch divorce lest it compromise its proud title!

  Teddy Adkins was standing in the driveway when Jimmie drove up. He wore a scarf around his neck, its ends flying to the winds, and his bald head as ruddy in the frosty wind as his cheeks. He looked full of health and vigor—exuberant as a Dickensian hero. What a shame it was, Jimmie thought, to have to crack this apple open, and it so beautiful just to look at!

  “You’ll have Sunday dinner with us before returning to town,” Adkins said. “We have just time for a drink before it’s gonged out to us.”

  “You look in fine fettle,” Jimmie said.

  “Oh, I am, I am,” Adkins said. “I’m sorry to have abandoned you, Jarvis, but I may say now I had a matter of courting to attend.”

  “Courting?” Jimmie repeated, wondering if he had heard rightly.

  “Oh, yes,” said Teddy blithely. “And I have every reason to be confident in the success of my suit.”

  “You’d better attend one suit before pressing another,” Jimmie said dryly.

  “Ah, dear man, this time all is different. I have found a woman with whom I can be myself, whom I shall persuade to love me for my own sweet sake.”

  Poetic anyway, Jimmie thought. And all his calculations of the man were going a-kilter again. He swore to himself and wished profoundly that Tully’s mission had not delayed his departure from Connecticut. If he had left soon enough he would have gone out on a straight line at least. “You don’t seem to have any trouble finding them,” he said.

  “The women?” Adkins threw back his head and laughed with the grotesque glee of a mad child. He wiped his eyes. “An exaggeration that, of course, dear man, but a flattering one.” His sister Miranda met them at the door. Teddy took her arm. “Mr. Jarvis has just paid me an outrageous compliment,” he said.

  They went in to where the rest of the clan were gathered for the daily ritual of sherry or madeira in the great parlor which, Jimmie noticed, smelled of dogs and woodsmoke—the most masculine thing about the place.

  “Mr. Jarvis and I will have whiskey, Timsey.” Adkins turned to Jimmie. “You prefer Scotch, don’t you?”

  Jimmie nodded, watching Timsey.

  Timsey said: “Whiskey?” and let his eyes run along the floor to Mama’s feet and up then to her face. Having found acquiescence there to Teddy’s wish, he said, “Yes, sir,” with sublime submission.

  The whiskey, Jimmie suspected when it did arrive, had been watered. He would like someday to pick Timsey’s mind, he thought, if he could find anything small enough to pick it with.

  Jimmie lifted his glass and toasted with abandon: “To victory with honor.”

  “To our own dear Teddy,” Miranda said sickeningly.

  Teddy turned on her. “You had better swaddle your own son, Mandy.” He pushed his chubby face into hers. “Teddy is going to run away from home.”

  “Hear! Hear!” the old lady cried.

  Miranda whirled about on her mother. “Why didn’t you wean him as a child then? You’re trying to thrust him out in the world now, to harden him up like—like something or other before you die.”

  Miranda’s outburst dried up, and the whole room seemed brittle with age and dust, as though any words loosed in it would themselves fragment and disintegrate.

  “That, my dear sister,” Teddy said, “is a very apt description of me—a something or other.”

  Mercifully, Timsey came round then with the gong, running hard upon the service of whiskey, Jimmie thought.

  Teddy took his accustomed place at the table after seating his mother, but there the pattern broke. He poked and probed and titillated almost everyone at the table, even those whose names or relationships to himself he scarcely knew, Jimmie thought. He was, in fact, a new man.

  “Do you know, dear Jarvis, my nephew, Eric, is going to apprentice to me? And I think we shall both start over in that case. I don’t suppose I’ve told you how I came to be a broker, an amusing little tale which I trust the family will forgive my repeating again in their presence. I began with the alphabet—artist, abattoir—oh, yes—I considered everything that came to mind in the ‘a’s, and nothing there seemed quite suited to my disposition. So I came to the ‘b’s…”

  It should have been the birds and the bees, Jimmie thought.

  “But now, as I say, we shall start over. I have discovered an ‘a’ I’d forgot. Alchemy. How does that suit you, Eric, my lad? Alchemy and black magic.”

  “Just fine, uncle,” Eric said, frolicsome as a toad.

  “Isn’t he a splendid chap?” Teddy said.

  After dinner, and when all his adieus had been said to the elder family, Jimmie sought out Eric in the gun room. He practiced the hypocrisy of thanking him for the duck shoot. “Your uncle came back in high spirits, didn’t he?”

  “Didn’t you ever see him that way before?”

  “No,” Jimmie said. “Does it happen often?”

  “Once in a while. Like a talking jag.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “Oh, a day or two. It sure livens up things around here while it lasts.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “He goes off on a trip somewhere, and when he comes back, well, we’re all right back where we started before the merry-go-round went round.”

  “You’re an extraordinary family,” Jimmie said, and offered his hand by way of getting away. “Thanks again, Eric.”

  “Never met one like us before, did you?”

  “There can’t be many,” Jimmie said.

  “Well, that’s the way the ball bounces,” Eric said.

  Jimmie could not get the bloody phrase out of his mind all the way home although, God knows, he had other things to think about.

  34

  TULLY STUDIED THE INTERVALS at which the known murders had occurred. He wondered if the time for killing was
by any chance, set by the man’s need for money. He had got five thousand dollars from two of the women, ten from one, and probably every cent Ellie True had. There had been at least a year between all of them which indicated some margin of present safety. But who dared predict that? It was fine for the psychiatrists to prognosticate. A detective didn’t care.

  The investigator was convinced they could catch the man now by his very arrogance, his determination to follow a pattern, his confidence in his own superiority to the law, the common intelligence, and above all to the women whom he bilked and murdered. He was versatile in that, the clever villain: he knew wherein not to set patterns. But in the end, Tully thought, it would be a little thing that would trick and tumble him.

  What had taken him out of New York on that one known occasion?

  Why Sando?

  He had assumed a doctor’s identity there, and while there, he had watched a magic show of Murdock’s or had been in some way associated with the magician. It still didn’t answer the question: Why Sando?

  Tully went over the notes he had made in the Ohio town. He had a notation on The Sando Bugle. The night officer of the police had said he could find Murdock’s itinerary there if the magician was not at home. That itinerary must have been very important to the murderer during the last days of Ellie True.

  Tully had more confidence in the New York Public Library than he had in himself. He called the reference desk. The librarian he spoke to thought it unlikely they should have The Sando Bugle, but he checked. It was with almost personal pride that he returned to say that the Newspaper Annex had two one-year files of the paper. But the annex was closed on Sunday.

  “I can wait till morning,” Tully said, but he could feel a pulse of excitement. The files—with a year’s lapse between them—covered the periods of the Bellowes murder and the murder of Ellie True. “How do you suppose the library comes to have those files?” he asked.

  “Likely a gift subscription. Or a request to subscribe with a very good reason.”

  Tully had no doubt it was a gift subscription, and a very good reason was no doubt given for the keeping of them—in the name of a mining engineer, or a professor of metallurgy.

  Tully next put in a call to Joe, his friend on the Sando force, and asked him to check with the circulation department of The Bugle. How had they got the subscription from the New York Public Library?

  Joe called back within an hour. A cash transaction, the first subscription, across the counter. The second one had probably come through the mail, but cash, too.

  “Tell you what was going on down here at the time might’ve interested your Wall Street people—some gold mining outfit was taking over control of the Bellowes mines, and all the other coal mines it could buy in. There was a whole anti-trust business blew up over it.”

  Tully didn’t say so but he could not see Wall Street going to The Sando Bugle for its information. He said: “But why have the paper sent to the Public Library?”

  “Maybe the light’s better there,” Joe said. “I know that’s the case down here. Best light in town’s in our library.”

  Tully thought of all the lights in lower Manhattan. “I wish we could say the same,” he said. “Thanks, Joe.”

  He sat then and mused on whether perhaps the killer was going to turn up next in the disguise of a mining engineer, or perhaps a business tycoon.

  That gave him pause. They did not know yet what guise he had taken in his courtship of Arabella Sperling. She had spoken of her “broker’s” advice. Tully went back to Johanson’s testimony. The man he had seen leaving her house carried a brief case and umbrella.

  Tully put the phone on night service and went home. He wanted to start fresh in the morning, to move the more surely, directly.

  There was yet another role for the murderer to play, and this it was that gave the issue urgency. The moment was surely coming when the man’s mad ego would require that he take the ultimate risk. The day he decided to play himself, they could throw away any timetable his previous crimes suggested.

  35

  MRS. NORRIS TOLD HERSELF over and over throughout the day that she would not go to meet him. It was safe to admit she was infatuated, though never in her life before had that word had any place in it. She was daft to even think of seeing him, much less of marrying him, and she was not at all sure he wasn’t himself off to have asked her. He bubbled up like a pot on the stove, popping its lid though it wasn’t half full.

  But she liked the music of it: there was no denying that. She could remember to this day her mother’s counsel: “No woman, whether sixteen or sixty can afford to turn her back on an honest proposal of matrimony—unless she already has one in writing.”

  She was dressed in her best navy blue when Jimmie arrived home from Connecticut.

  “I’ve had dinner,” he said in a fairly somber mood, “so don’t let me delay you.”

  “Was it a pleasant week-end?”

  “Jolly.”

  “Have you heard from England lately,” Mrs. Norris inquired, “from your nice Mrs. Joyce?”

  Jimmie scowled at her as though he expected her next to ask for an exorbitant raise. “I’m thinking of closing up the house and joining her,” he said threateningly.

  Mrs. Norris ruffled her shoulders. “You might at least give a person sufficient notice.”

  Jimmie threw up his hands in disgust. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, and ploughed into the study, closing the door behind him.

  Mrs. Norris met Mr. Adkins in a quiet corner of the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. He was dressed in a dark suit and with the white cuffs of his shirt gleaming. Nothing so impressed Mrs. Norris in a man’s dress as just the right amount of snowy cuff slipping casually out of his sleeve—unless it was as white a bit of undershirt showing at an open collar. Of one thing she might be sure about Mr. Adkins: his linens would be impeccable. And things like that did give a woman a sense of pride in a man.

  The tavern was not crowded at that hour, and unperceived by any eye which might disparage the gesture, Mr. Adkins took her gloved hand in his and in just an instant brushed it with his lips. To have gainsaid him that would have been to make more of the incident than it merited. He was merely being his flamboyant self. He had said himself he counted on her Scottish caution to settle him.

  Mrs. Norris wished to heaven she could settle him—or herself. Her heart was thumping like a Waterbury clock.

  “Oh, my dear, you look stunning!” he cried. “Blue, isn’t it? The gods be praised you’ve thrown off the widow’s black.”

  “I’ll be throwing it on again tomorrow,” she said. “It’s still middling new.”

  Mr. Adkins drew two leather chairs to the windows. They were edged with steam, the windows, but through the center of the many panes, the whole of a neon twilight shone. “I thought we might have our drink here,” he said, “then our dinner where there’s music. There’s so much I have to discover of you: do you dance?”

  “Nought but the fling,” she said with a wink.

  Mr. Adkins cleared his throat. “I certainly shan’t tempt you into that tonight. Or perhaps I shall!”

  He went off then and brought their drinks himself. Mrs. Norris prayed hers would sober her. She was not at all steady without it.

  “‘I went into a public ’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,’” he quipped. “Remember that? Rudyard Kipling’s man, Tommy Adkins.”

  “Any relation?” Mrs. Norris said.

  “I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I come of very simple origins.”

  “Isn’t it strange,” Mrs. Norris said, folding her hands round the empty glass, “here am I, the great-great-great-granddaughter of a Scottish chieftain, and keeping house for a barrister.”

  “There’s a very natural answer to that,” Mr. Adkins eased in. “Hereafter you will keep house with an ex-stockbroker, a house and a garden and a small fire in the grate. And I’ll be the one to bar the door! Do you have a passport?”

  “I do, but…”


  “But-me-not. Rather, hear me through.” He took from his breast pocket a picture of a matched cottage, the roses tumbling around it, a river bending into the distance. “All this can be yours, my dear. This is the beloved bit of Scotland I have chosen to present you.”

  “There are no thatches in Scotland that I know,” she said.

  “That is why I chose this house!” he cried. “I wanted for you all the virtues of your native land, and a little bit more, something different. When we get there we can change it.”

  We can change it before we get there, Mrs. Norris thought, and drew in a deep breath she let out in a sigh. The time had come to put an end to his golden dream-talk. “Mr. Adkins…”

  “Sh-sh…Your sigh is a thrill to me, more eloquent far than words.”

  She leaned over to look more closely at him. She could not believe it: there were tears in his eyes. He did believe what he was saying! He thought he had persuaded her.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Adkins…”

  He was shaking his head like a mop. “Wait,” he said, a catch in his voice. “Will you wait?” He took a handkerchief from his pocket.

  “Yes,” she said, presuming to wait for him to blow his nose.

  “Forever?” he said.

  “For what?” said she.

  “Then for a day only. Tomorrow, we shall seal our bargain. Tonight is merely the pledge of our hearts. Tonight, my dear, you shall take home with you a lover’s knot.” He opened the handkerchief and plucked from it a small glittering bow of diamonds.

  Mrs. Norris could only say, “Oh.”

  Mr. Adkins placed the tiny jeweled bow on the dark blue sleeve where she could better see it. It glittered like something wet and crawling.

  “Put it away,” she managed. “It’s too beautiful for the likes of me. Oh, truly Mr. Adkins, this is all too much.” She was herself near to tears.

  “It’s no more than a trinket,” he said, “a token of what I may call…perpetuity.”

  Even as she watched him, fascinated, he slipped her purse from beneath her arm and tucked the jewel into it, returning the purse to where he had got it. “I shall have it back, you see, when I have you.”