Gentleman Called Read online

  Only a new brightness came into Tully’s eyes. “Get Mr. Jarvis on the phone for me, Tommy.”

  “Yes, sir…oh-h-h.” Tommy’s explanation sounded like a groan.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It was him I called yesterday, wasn’t it?” Tully nodded. “That’s where he was, Mr. Tully, at the Adkins’ home in Connecticut.”

  Tully frowned. “Get him,” he repeated and pointed to the phone.

  Meanwhile the call came through from the Sando police. “I got a half-dozen names for you,” Joe said. “The widow had ’em all up to the house a couple of times.”

  “Adkins,” Tully said. “Is there a Theodore Adkins on the list?”

  “T. E. Adkins,” Joe said. “Could that be him?”

  “Could be,” Tully said. “It very well could be. Thanks, Joe. I’ll keep you informed.”

  Bassett reported that Mr. Jarvis was not in his office. Nor was there any answer to his home phone.

  41

  MRS. NORRIS, NOT WANTING the doorman to know any more of her business, took the service elevator down and went out through the basement. Walking the few blocks to East Sixty-first Street, she had time to consider some of the untruths Mr. Adkins had told her. In his note he had mentioned his office. A lie that: no one in the building had any knowledge of his ever having had an office there.

  He must be the heir to the fortune, of course: Mr. James said so. What she really wondered was whether it might not be her own particular feeling about money, specifically about the money she had worked for and saved, which colored her impression. The truth was she had now the distinct feeling that his entire performance had been aimed at extorting her widow’s savings. And all by the promise of marriage! Oh, the conceit of the man. It was over that he would stumble some day, unless he learned there were women in the world who could resist him.

  She arrived at the 61st Street address. A tenement house! The man must be a complete fraud. Or a miser. But of course that was it! And he was indeed expecting to live off her money. The Wall Street phone listing gave him an important address for the price of an answering service.

  She stood a moment outside the bleak and foreboding hallway and looked up at the faded brick front. What eyes might be looking down upon her from behind the gray curtains, the dust-blotted windows. Some might call him eccentric, but for the first time, Mrs. Norris felt a little afraid of the man. She decided to go home, coward or no. Whirling round from the entrance, however, she caught sight of Mr. Adkins, bounding across the street to her with a smile on his face like the slice of an orange.

  He must, she realized, have followed her all the way from Fifth Avenue, and that in turn meant he must have watched her apartment building from the corner until she came out, suspecting her use of the service door. All she could do at the instant was stand in her tracks till he reached her.

  “Oh, my dear, I am delighted you have found me!” he cried.

  “I inquired of the phone company…” she started to explain in random quest of escape through conversation.

  But he had her firmly by the arm, the key already in his hand. “What matter? Love can always find the way.”

  It was impossible to be afraid of him, only annoyed with his persistence. “Mr. Adkins I only wanted to give you my answer.”

  “You will give me nothing on the street.”

  “It’s not proper,” she protested, “to go into your house.”

  “My dear,” he said, and let go of her arm, having her by then at the stairwell. “I shouldn’t dream of closing my apartment door. Stop acting ridiculous. We shall have a cup of tea—in view of all the neighbors who pass, and I assure you they will be numerous—and to accomplish anything as even slightly improper as an unmarried kiss, we should have to move far more quickly than either you or I are capable of doing.”

  The reasonableness of this speech did indeed make her protest seem ridiculous. It was very hard at such a moment to connect him with the romantic flibberty-gibbit he made of himself at other times. She might even keep him settled long enough to convince him she had no intention of accepting his proposal of marriage. And if she could not she would leave the jewel and go. She allowed herself to follow him up the stairs.

  42

  AFTER A CONFERENCE BETWEEN James Jarvis and himself, Daisy Thayer’s lawyer assured her it was all right to talk to Jimmie.

  “Everything?” Daisy said, as though it were not the safe thing to do at all.

  “Everything he wants to know.”

  “I think you two are conspiring against me,” Daisy said. “I never made easy money in my life.”

  “And so much of it,” her lawyer murmured. “Just tell him everything from the beginning the way you told me.”

  Daisy told it truthfully this time, so far as Jimmie could tell, starting at the umbrella counter, and she admitted having checked up on Adkins’ true identity, and his credit information.

  “Why?” said Jimmie.

  “Because he told me his name was Alexander G. Cardova, and I didn’t believe him. I got lots of friends Italians, and I just knew he wasn’t.”

  “Now tell me why you denied this up till now, Miss Thayer?”

  “Because Teddy came to see me after I filed the suit and said he’d see I got something out of it even if I lost—though he was going to try to settle out of court for a lot of money—if I just didn’t mention him using the name Cardova.”

  “Why, I wonder,” Jimmie said.

  “He said it was the name of a good friend of his.”

  Jimmie accepted the answer, although it struck him as curious: it was the first reference he had ever heard to any friend of Teddy Adkins.

  “Well, me getting to know him so well,” Daisy went on, “and him promising to marry me when I knew he wasn’t even using his own name—I just did the only thing I could about it, Mr. Jarvis—the baby.”

  Jimmie glanced at her lawyer. He was apparently in blithe ignorance of just how Daisy had gone about that. But then he had never met Teddy Adkins.

  “Anyway, he told me he was an inventor, and then in the end it was at the point of me loaning him some money for his inventions to get patents. And since I knew there was money where he came from I figured I didn’t have much to lose.”

  “How much did you have to lose, Miss Thayer, in cash, I mean?”

  “Almost three thousand dollars though I told him it was five which was what he wanted.”

  “Five?” Jimmie repeated.

  “That’s what he asked for,” Daisy said.

  Jimmie was weathering a bit of shock. Five thousand dollars was the amount Teddy had to clear to contribute to his mother’s support.

  “Did he take the three thousand?” he asked.

  “Well, I gave it to him that night just before bedtime. He was kind of pettish about it not being all I said it was. But everything blew up that night…later. He was real sweet at first. Gave me the prettiest little gold pin—a fleur-de-lis—do you know what that is?”

  Jimmie nodded.

  “But in the middle of the night when he thought I was sleeping he got up and dressed, quiet as a worm. I let him go till I heard him in my dressing table drawer. I thought the dirty little bum wasn’t only taking my three thousand dollars, but he was taking back his jewel, and aiming to walk out on me and he didn’t think I was ever going to find Mr. Alexander G. Cardova.”

  Jimmie leaned forward, fascinated.

  Daisy herself warmed to the story she was telling. “When he was all set—and mind you it was just about pitch dark in the room—only the light from the street shining in. He must’ve studied that room like braille the way he got round. When he was all set, he came to the side of the bed, and gentle as a lamb, he pulled down the sheet and put his cold fingers just as delicate—on my cheek and on my throat and on my breast. It made me shiver so I had to speak up. I said then: ‘Is this supposed to be goodbye, Mr. Theodore Adkins?’ I could hear the echo of my own voice in that room.”

  “
It must have given him a shock,” Jimmie said.

  “He jumped like a cricket,” Daisy said. “He sat down at the bottom of the bed and I could hear him panting for breath. ‘As a matter of fact, my dear, that is exactly what it was supposed to be,’ he said just as cool. So I got pretty cool about it myself. ‘Turn on the light, Teddy’—I always did call him that, him saying from the first it was his nickname. ‘Turn on the light, and let’s talk business.’ That was when I told him I was going to have a baby, and if he didn’t marry me I’d slap a suit on him for being its father. He just laughed, and didn’t believe me till last week. And I didn’t see him ever since till that night last week.”

  “Did he give back the money?”

  “He did, and he gave back my gold locket.”

  “Gold locket?” said Jimmie.

  “That’s right. That’s what he took from my jewel box, a little gold locket. He wasn’t taking the fleur-de-lis like I thought. He was intending to leave that as a kind of a souvenir, and taking for a keepsake my little gold locket. But I gave him back the fleur-de-lis.”

  “All sentiment and no sense, my man,” said Jimmie. “That’s why we’re paying off one hundred thousand dollars.”

  He left Daisy and her lawyer in an even more thoughtful mood than he had been in when he sought them out. In fact, he was genuinely troubled about Teddy Adkins—the man was at once calculating and irresponsible. He was mercurial—of person and of tongue, tripping off lies more easily than the truth, and moving so fast from one point to the next, even his lies had difficulty in catching up with him.

  Jimmie was nearer to his home than he was to the office. And home was the point from which he had had all his dealings with Teddy Adkins. He boarded a Fifth Avenue bus and sat back remembering Adkins’ first visit to the house. Afterwards Jimmie had gone into the kitchen where Mrs. Norris was entertaining Jasper Tully and asked her if she thought Adkins was a lady’s man. What was it she had said that Tully took with ill grace—she thought him attractive.

  A great number of things then broke in upon Jimmie’s train of thought at once—Tully’s own assignment of that night, its possible tie-in with Marjory Neville’s death. He himself could tie Adkins into the Ellie True murder! He rose up in the bus and walked forward as though that would hasten him home. He wanted to see Tully, but he wanted also to take Mrs. Norris along with him as long as he was this close to home.

  43

  MRS. NORRIS WAS VERY short of breath by the time she reached the fifth floor walk-up apartment. Mr. Adkins had gone up the stairs like a bouncing ball, at first before her, leading, then aft, encouraging. And once he had the effrontery to say:

  “If you’d married me first, love, I might have carried you.”

  “Ha!” Mrs. Norris said. “It’d take you two trips.”

  “Possibly,” he said, and smiled as though in beatific happiness. He unlocked the apartment door and flung it open. He bowed from the waist, waiting her entry.

  Mrs. Norris took her first timid step into a bachelor’s apartment. You might call the one she kept for Mr. James that. But it was entirely different. Oh, in so many ways. Mr. Adkins was a gypsy! She had never in her life been in a place like this: hung with tapestries and masks, lined with clay model heads. And pictures of costumes were hung round the walls, and the costumes themselves, bits of armor, and all sorts of weapons.

  “It’s a museum!” she cried.

  Adkins stood, his hands on his hips, his elbows out, resembling a spinning top in the little sway of his body. Mrs. Norris wondered if it was herself that was a bit dizzy.

  “You, my dear, are the first woman ever to grace it,” Adkins said, “the first living woman, that is.” And he laughed at his own macabre joke.

  “What do you do here?”

  “I make tea—and effigies.” He put two bricks to the door, one to keep it open a certain width, and one to keep it closed that width. “Come. I’ve kept my word. The door is open, and there are a dozen heads in the building of a size to peek round that corner, so fear not for your modesty. I have something to show you.” He led her to a stand amid the tables and pedestals (on which were models of women’s heads and in some instances, busts of women) and at the stand unswathed some brown, dirty clothes, revealing in wet clay a bust of…well, she supposed it was herself, but in oh, such a nasty mood.

  “I wouldn’t want to see that in a mirror,” she said bluntly.

  Mr. Adkins smiled. “You could pay me no higher compliment. When people show themselves to me at what they propose as their best, I see them at their worst.”

  She flicked a finger about the room. “Who are all of them?”

  “Are you jealous?” he said, with an impish twinkle in his eye. “I’ll banish them.” And with a sweep of his arm he toppled two of the nearest clay models to the floor. They made a great thud, but nary a lip nor an ear nor a nose so much as chipped.

  Mrs. Norris could not but titter at the indestructibility of his women. Watching her, Mr. Adkins puckered his face into a blue wrath. He caught from the wall a primitive axe and began hacking wildly at the toppled models, all of which merely moved and spun, and shed little more of themselves than dust, until finally the axe-head flew from its handle, and hurtling through the air, grazed Mrs. Norris’ brow—or so she thought. She saw the flick of stone and felt a sharp pain. Because she could still see for an instant thereafter, a watery shimmering view of the strange room and man, she thought it must be but a glancing blow. But then there was nothingness.

  44

  JIMMIE TURNED THE KEY in the door and called out Mrs. Norris’ name as soon as he opened it. There was no answer. He went to the foyer table where she was in the habit of leaving him a note if she expected to be out at an unexpected hour. But this was not an unexpected hour for her to be out. The only unexpected thing about it was the dust on the polished table.

  Jimmie went through the house, somehow hoping she would come home while he was there. There was, he thought, something about the place which bespoke a hasty departure, either that or a limited occupancy. For example, there was not a thing in the huge refrigerator to indicate her usual early shopping.

  On his way out of the building, he asked the doorman if Mrs. Norris had by any chance mentioned to him where she was going.

  “Isn’t she up there?” the man said. “She was a few minutes ago, sir.”

  “She’s not now,” Jimmie said. “Thanks, John.”

  “She must have gone out through the basement then,” John said after him.

  Jimmie turned back. “Why would she do that?”

  John took off his glove and rubbed his chin. “Mr. Jarvis, I wouldn’t want it to get back to her that I told you, sir, but that little man’s been here already today—the little bald one who always comes to see you before you get home?”

  Jimmie nodded.

  “Well, sir, he was here this morning—not an hour ago—and I called up the way I always do to inform her who’s coming up whether they asked to be announced or no. And he’s not been asking it lately…”

  Jimmie made a gesture of impatience. He was now remembering Teddy Adkins’ “older woman.” But Mrs. Norris had sense, he told himself, and she had Jasper Tully…or did she have as much of either as he had thought?

  “She said she wasn’t going to answer the door to him, and it was the first time she didn’t tell me to keep my nose out of her affairs.”

  “Go on,” Jimmie said.

  “He went up and he came down, and I don’t think he saw her,” John said, “for he went to the table in there in the vestibule and wrote a note which he asked me to give her personally. I took it up and when she wouldn’t answer to me either, I tucked it under the door.”

  There had been no note on the floor, Jimmie knew that. He signaled a cab to wait for him. “Anything else, John?”

  “Do you think he’s up to no good, the same as I do, sir?” the old doorman said. “Your Mrs. Norris is too nice a lady for him.”

  “I agree on bo
th things,” Jimmie said.

  “Then I’ll tell you something I should be ashamed of. But I felt the way you do. I read the note, sir. It was full of mush and promises.”

  “Oh, Godalmighty,” Jimmie said.

  45

  WHEN JASPER TULLY SWORE, it was with rare deliberation and thoroughness. He now delivered a veritable litany against the day he had ever allowed Annie Norris to think herself a detective.

  “Do you think she’s trying to bring this man to justice herself? Is that it?” said Jimmie.

  “What else? Of course, that’s what she’s doing,” Tully said.

  Jimmie had his doubts, though he kept them to himself. But having briefly compared notes with Tully, he did not consider that possibility to be any more dangerous than trying to marry Teddy Adkins. “He has an office on Wall Street; did you try it?”

  “He’s not expected there till this afternoon,” said Tully. “Bassett just checked.”

  “And he was at my apartment within the hour,” Jimmie said.

  Tully began to pace his office. “I suppose we’d better try to pick up her trail from her own back door.” He bellowed down the hall. “Tommy!”

  Bassett came running and Tully gave him his instructions. “Call in every half hour wherever you are.”

  “A half hour’s a long time,” Jimmie said. He picked up the phone and called the Adkins house in Connecticut. He asked for Miranda, wondering while he waited, who would break the ultimate news of her brother to her.

  All that Miranda could suggest by way of finding him was that Jimmie leave a message with Teddy’s secretary.

  “The Precinct men are staking out his office,” Tully said. “Oh, I hope the devil takes a feather to her for this.”

  A call came through from the stake-out. Theodore Adkins had no office at that address on Wall Street.

  Tully picked up the notation of Adkins’ phone number. “Who the devil did Bassett talk to then?”