Gentleman Called Read online

  Jimmie was already dialing the number. He could tell instantly it was an answering service.

  Tully got the telephone supervisor on the line. “I want information on Whitehall 9-7150,” he said, having identified himself. “It seems to be listed to a dummy address.”

  “It’s a dual phone service as I explained to your office this morning, sir…”

  “Hold it,” Tully said. “Who did you talk to in our office?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know her name. She said she was calling for you, sir.”

  “All right,” Tully said. “Just give me the information again.”

  “The residential address which that number also services is 732 East 61st Street.”

  “Thank you very much,” Tully said, hanging up, getting to his feet and holstering his gun all in the same instant. “There! She was even trying to get that information through to me,” he said to Jimmie. “I told you what she was doing.” He put his hat on his head and led the way out, loping down the hall like a rheumatic moose.

  46

  WHEN MRS. NORRIS CAME to, she found herself propped and cushioned like the Queen of Sheba. Mr. Adkins was waving a scented cloth beneath her nose, and he seemed to have half-drowned her with compresses, for her head and shoulders were soaking.

  “Bless you,” he cried. “You are alive!”

  “I’m very glad one of us is aware of it,” she said, and looking painfully about, she recalled the situation. “Help me off this couch at once, sir. You’ve closed the door, Mr. Adkins.”

  “I bolted it, as a matter of fact. How is it our song goes: ‘Get up and bar the door?’ I did just that. And since there is to be no marriage ceremony, we can at least have a marriage feast in private. Look, I’m binding your head in what might have been a bridal wreath.”

  “When did that news get through to you?” Mrs. Norris said of his abandoning his matrimonial prospects.

  Teddy Adkins was too busy to answer. He thrust a mirror into her hand. Her head, as she watched—and assumed it to be her head—became swathed and circled in silken handkerchiefs he was pulling out of a bottle by the dozens. Then turning the bottle upside down, he extracted from there a fistful of red poppies which he flung about her. Mad! Out of his head—or she out of hers?

  “You did not know I was a magician!” he cried. “Did you not ever hear of Murdock the Mighty?”

  “You’re acting daft, man.”

  “Dear Mrs. Norris, how many people would agree with you if only they knew me as well. But I am not known at all, for I am many people. I am he, and he, and he…” He pointed to one, then another of the pictures on the wall, amongst which Mrs. Norris could see very little resemblance, except perhaps in the general tendency to rotundity.

  “Are they all you?” she said, unable herself to match them. But then at the moment she could not have matched one of her own eyes with the other.

  “All, every one…and all these ladies…” He rubbed his chin. “We might call them your ladies-in-waiting, my dear…they were the brides-to-be of those various gentlemen.” He began to make the round of his sculptured heads. “Do you not remember her? This is Ellie True.”

  “The Murder of Ellie True!” Mrs. Norris cried. She remembered.

  Mr. Adkins bowed. “Your humble servant.” He swung around and made a face at as ugly a lump of clay as Mrs. Norris could imagine. “This is the Widow Bellowes. I swear her to have been the devil’s midwife. But I don’t suppose you would have known her.”

  Mrs. Norris had no notion now what she did or didn’t know. She had always thought him a bit daft in a pleasant sort of way. And he was cheerful enough in public to be morbid in his privacy—but to have created a studio like this for himself: it was like furnishing your own room in the underworld!

  “You don’t take me seriously, do you?” he said.

  “Surely not as seriously as you take yourself, Mr. Adkins.”

  “Then perhaps you would like to meet the most recent amour. The clay, you will observe, is not yet dry. Her name is Arabella Sperling. And there—” he darted a finger at one of the pictures—“that dapper chap with briefcase and umbrella…I wonder would you have observed his name in the vestibule? Alexander Cardova. She finally found in him a lover, Arabella did, and I must say that of them all, she most deserved him.”

  Mrs. Norris managed to pump herself out of his cushions. Her legs would not support her, however, so she sat down on the edge of the nearest chair. “I don’t care much for your hobby, Mr. Adkins,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster. “But I would appreciate the cup of tea you offered, thank you. Then I will let you see me home.”

  “My dear, you are home!” He pulled up a chair and sat down, his knees touching hers. “Do you know, Mrs. Norris,” he went on quite earnestly, and his eyes as sharp as darts, “you are the only woman I have ever known whom I have found it genuinely difficult to loathe?”

  “Get up from there and let me go,” she said, “or I’ll make it simple for you now. I’ve never heard anything so conceited in my life. Do you think all you have to do is propose yourself as a giddy rogue and any woman will marry you?”

  “You are my only refusal,” he said.

  “And what do you call that Daisy Thayer?”

  “Why, I quit her, dear woman! She’d be Mrs. Adkins now if I’d have her.”

  “Is she here?” Mrs. Norris asked suddenly.

  “Certainly not. And for an obvious reason.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mr. Adkins sighed wearily. “I shall have to do her with two heads, if ever.” He threw his arms in the air in a sudden change of mood. “You’ve not understood me at all.”

  “I want to go home,” Mrs. Norris said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

  “It’s all gone wrong,” he said, almost tearfully. “I wanted us to be happy in our last hour together. Well, the tea. It can be postponed no longer. The bitter tea of Dr. Woodling. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him either?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “The murderer of the Widow Bellowes.”

  “You’re a very morbid man, Mr. Adkins,” she said after him. “A little interest in murders is all right, but you’ve taken an overdose of it.”

  He smiled wistfully from the kitchen door. “Go and pretty yourself up. There are towels—and a comb. I’ve mussed the part in your hair, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s hard to make a straight one with an axe,” she said.

  When she came out from the bathroom, the tea was ready, the steam rising in the chilly room. Mr. Adkins rubbed his hands together in apparent satisfaction at the service he had set. He bounded to her side and held the chair. She was of a mind to open the door, but really for tea it mattered little, and she was very tired.

  Mr. Adkins sat beside her, very proper, and poured two cups. He made light of the shuffle of feet and a sudden commotion somewhere down the hall. But almost instantly there was a pounding on the door and the roar of men’s voices.

  “Open up, Adkins!”

  “Cardova or whatever you call yourself!”

  “Mrs. Norris are you in there? Are you all right?”

  “Why, that’s Mr. James,” she said.

  Adkins lifted his eyes to her face very slowly. “I am disappointed in you,” he said. “I thought you a woman as bold as myself, and as circumspect, and here you have invited an army…”

  “In the name of the law…”

  “That’s Jasper Tully!” Mrs. Norris said.

  “Then for heaven’s sake get up and open the door!” Adkins cried.

  Mrs. Norris managed to get up although there was a new and awful weakness coming on her with the hindsight. She was determined not to faint. There might be a first time in her life for that, but this was not to be the occasion. She reached the door and pulled open the latch.

  Mr. Tully was the first in, bruising her arms with his bony fingers so fearful and fierce were their clutch. He shot his head out from h
is shoulders like a crusted turtle, to better peer into her face.

  “You’re a trifle pale,” he said, but his tone was bitterly sarcastic. He thrust her into Jimmie’s arms and confronted Adkins: “I arrest you, Theodore Adkins, for the murder of Arabella Sperling…”

  Mrs. Norris sucked in enough breath to revive her. She pointed to the nearest bit of sculpture. “And Ellie True,” she said.

  Jimmie took in the room in a glance. “There must be a dozen!” he cried.

  “Presently there should have been,” Adkins said ruefully. “Will you gentlemen care for tea?”

  Tully lifted a cup to his nose. “You didn’t have any of this, Mrs. Norris?”

  “Certainly not,” she said.

  Teddy Adkins offered to take the cup from Tully. “Oh, no,” the detective said. “This goes into the laboratory, not into you, my bucko.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of touching it now,” Adkins said. “I would much rather have missed the day I was born than the days ahead of me. We shall be very busy, you and I, my dear Jarvis. You will accept my retainer?”

  Jimmie chose to beg the issue at the moment. He looked down at Mrs. Norris who was leaning rather heavily on his arm. “How long have you been onto him?” he asked.

  Mrs. Norris chose to beg that one. “Where’s my purse?” she said, and braced herself for the instant Jimmie would let go of her.

  It was among the cushions and Jimmie got it for her. She took from it the diamond lover’s knot wrapped still in Mr. Adkins’ handkerchief. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to give this back,” she said.

  Tully groaned and clenched his fists. Jimmie grinned. Mr. Adkins took the pin, glanced at it but an instant, and gave it into the detective’s outstretched hand.

  Mrs. Norris stood eye to eye with Teddy Adkins. “Why didn’t you finish me off with the axe? You had the opportunity.”

  “I am a gentleman, not a butcher,” Adkins said. He held his wrists out then to Tully for the handcuffs, and wearing them, turned back once more to Mrs. Norris. “Do you know, my dear, you have made me very happy today? I have just realized that when this is over I shall probably never have to look at another woman all the days of my life.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mrs. Norris Mysteries

  Preface

  GENERAL JARVIS IS DEAD, OF COURSE. THE extraordinary finish to a life that was itself rarely ordinary was accounted in DEATH OF AN OLD SINNER. So many people have been kind enough to say that he died too soon—I pass over the dissenters, certain of them within his own household—that I now propose to tell a tale of him when he was a younger man, short of seventy. For his part in this escapade I am guided by the late General’s notes for his memoirs. Alas, those memoirs were never finished, his having got on with the publisher’s advance of several thousand dollars so much faster than with the writing of the book. Also, every time he took pen in hand, he suffered from what might be called intimations of libel. Therefore, let me say forthwith, all the characters herein are fictional; and this includes the General.

  DSD

  1

  THERE ARE SEASONS IN Washington when it is even more difficult than usual to find out what is going on in the government. Possibly this is because nothing is going on, although a great many people seem to be working at it. Such a season occurs during the first months of change in presidential administrations. An army of newcomers is then engaged in finding places. For themselves, of course: boldly, shamelessly, ruthlessly. This is refreshing: it only becomes sordid when they start looking for places for others. The old-timers who survive the season engage themselves for its duration almost entirely in the culling of retirement lists.

  So ran the speculation of Major General Ransom Jarvis on that spring afternoon in 1953 when he was put on notice that his own retirement was imminent. The General’s blast of wrath all but trembled the Pentagon. Then the old boy went home for the day. He loathed his desk anyway, and it was there he had been tethered since the war’s end in Europe. But it was going to be a great deal more loathsome to get along on retirement pay. A man’s income should be doubled, not halved, to match the time he was given to spend it in the last, numbered years of his life.

  Among the varied oppressions settling on the General as afternoon advanced into evening was a sense of parsimony. He lived at his club; he had never before quibbled with his conscience over what he put on his bar bill, but that was the state in which he now found himself. It was natural, therefore, that his thoughts turned to the presence in Washington of his son, James. Jimmie was the freshman representative from a congressional district the number of which Ransom Jarvis never could remember although he had maintained his family residence there all the years of his life. It was there, he supposed, he would have to go on retirement—to the dour care of a Scotch housekeeper who had got her start in America as nursemaid to his son! Damn it, he had not lived that long. Certainly, not that much. About to motion the bartender, his thoughts turned again to Jimmie, or more specifically, to the twelve-year-old Scotch whisky he was sure the boy favoured in Washington as well as at home. He forewent a second drink at the bar.

  Whatever kind of a son Jimmie had been in other ways, he prided himself on the patience with which he had always listened to his father. Considering the worth of that gentleman’s advice over the years, such patience was by now heroic. And that afternoon he was hard put. As a dear friend had said slyly after her congratulatory kiss on his election, he was now to have the winning candidate’s just reward: the privilege of listening to the speeches of all the other winning candidates in the country. That was the kind of day it had been.

  “But it shouldn’t have happened to me during this—of all—administrations,” the General complained of his retirement notice.

  “You are well into your sixties, aren’t you, Father? If it hadn’t been for Korea this would have happened some time ago.”

  “I’m in my prime, boy! I could have run for president myself. Sound as a hound dog’s tooth.”

  “The word is ‘clean’. Clean as a hound dog’s tooth,” Jimmie said patiently.

  The General grunted. “Huh. That’s something else again, isn’t it?”

  Jimmie grinned and poured them both another drink.

  His father looked about, wondering if he had not been in this house before at, say, an affair of some now extinct embassy or such. Newly decorated, of course. There were two smells he always associated with Washington. One was fresh paint. “Isn’t this place a little large for you, Jimmie?”

  “No.”

  “Are they paying congressmen this much salary these days?”

  “No.”

  The General tried another tack. “The club has always suited me when I’ve been stateside. I’m limited, of course, in the entertaining I can do there—so to speak.”

  Jimmie grinned. “So to speak, I am too, Father.”

  “I wasn’t speaking of that kind of entertainment. When a man reaches my age, he needs friends …”

  Oh, Lord, Jimmie thought, and once more lamented the event that had brought him to Washington and a father’s care.

  “He needs friends,” the old man repeated sententiously, and then looked up. “Or money.”

  “I suppose you’re going to have to face up to that aspect of it,” Jimmie said blandly.

  “Somebody is, and I don’t think it’s going to be the United States government!”

  Jimmie took a long pull at his drink. “Would you like to move in here with me, Father?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  Jimmie laughed—out of gratification as much as amusement at the old man’s bluntness. “We could bring Mrs. Norris down and live like a proper family, God help us.”

  Then Ransom Jarvis, surprising himself almost as much as he did Jimmie, said, “I suppose we might try it for a while.” He was prompted by several considerations: if he were going to have eventually to retire to the care of Mrs. Norris, he might as well get used to it here before set
tling into isolation with her in the old house on the Hudson River; and he could save money living on Jimmie, as it were. He would make an occasional gesture, of course, but Jimmie had inherited entirely from his mother, and it the fortune he—Ransom Jarvis—had married into. All in all, he had not done very well by himself in such arrangements, for ultimately he also must take credit for having hired Mrs. Norris and, therefore, for the careful training she had given his son with regard to money. There was not a bairn raised in Scotland with a tighter fist than his son James.

  “Do you mean it, Father?”

  “Of course I mean it. Since you’ve taken the precaution of making a home, we should … sanctify it.”

  “It was not a precaution,” Jimmie said. “I like a home, I am conservative by nature.”

  “Mmm. Not by your father’s nature. By your mother’s, I dare say. And Mrs. Norris’. She puts up a good argument for environment. Her kind always does, God help me.”

  Jimmie laughed in spite of himself and looked the old gentleman up and down. He really was in the prime, limber of brain and joint, and bristling with energy. Jimmie drew a deep breath and said, “We must have been switched in our cradles, Father.”

  The General was pleased. His glass in hand, he made a tour of the house. The neighbourhood was good: Georgetown, after all. And his son’s tastes were to his own liking. There was a smell of leather in the study, well-bound books, good light … He conjured the picture of himself at work there on his own memoirs. There ought to be something in the past he could turn into a contemporary dollar—by means other than blackmail. Such was the turn his mind took with his first glimpse at the more interesting aspects of his career. He would have to be careful what he said about some people in high places, considering what he thought of them, though damn few people high or low were careful what they said about him.

  He paused at a piece of sculpture and ran his hand over it, a vivid bronze nude. “Helene’s work?”

  Jimmie nodded. His father’s reference was to Jimmie’s friend, Helene Joyce, a sculptress, whose work was beginning to get international notice.