A Gentleman Called (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  “The careful sort, isn’t he?” said Tully.

  “I’d say that. But maybe that’s how you get living in this neighborhood.”

  “He lives in the house?”

  “Across the street. It’s the only other building in this block the new ones haven’t got into yet.”

  The new ones, Tully mused. He had heard them called worse, God knows. “I take it he isn’t one of the—new ones?”

  “He’s a white man, Johanson. A Swede, I’d say.”

  “Have you got a statement from him?”

  “Only what the lad took who made the complaint with him. I wanted to know as much as I could about what happened in this room before tackling him. I’ve got an idea he’s going to be a very cagey fellow.”

  When he met Johanson himself a few minutes later, Tully agreed with the detective’s estimate. Shrewd or slow-witted, it was hard to tell at first. But Johanson measured his every answer before giving it. Mrs. Sperling’s building was the furthest uptown he worked.

  “I have good addresses, my other buildings,” he said. “Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, and I get good references from any of them I can tell you. I am a reliable man.”

  Tully was sure he would have good references, making that point of it. He sat back and listened to Greer’s questioning.

  “How long have you worked for Mrs. Sperling?”

  “Five years last April,” the man said slowly.

  “How often are you in this building?”

  “Every morning I come here at six o’clock. Because I live across the street I come here first. At five o’clock in the afternoon, wintertime, I come also. It is a very old furnace in the basement.”

  “Did you see Mrs. Sperling regularly?”

  “I do not know what you call regular, sir. One day I saw her and maybe not the next. I would see her at least two or three times a week.”

  “In her apartment?”

  “No, sir. In the vestibule.”

  Tully marked his own notes: that the victim had occupied the first floor apartment.

  “When were you last in her apartment?” Greer asked.

  “Not ever until I went in with the officer.”

  “Didn’t Mrs. Sperling interview you before hiring you?”

  “Yes, sir. In my own living-room across the street.”

  “It doesn’t seem just right, you having a key and never being in this apartment in five years’ employment. Don’t things go wrong with the plumbing in these old houses?”

  “Sure. But Mrs. Sperling, she was a very handy woman.”

  “She must have been,” the lieutenant said sourly. He enquired then about the other tenants, eliciting nothing that seemed pertinent to Tully. Then he asked about any visitors Johanson had ever encountered with Mrs. Sperling.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” the man said. “Now I could tell, Lieutenant, you don’t believe me when I say Mrs. Sperling was a handy woman. I don’t like to be called a liar by anybody. You listen to this—all of you.” He looked about to include Tully and the police stenographer.

  Tully nodded solemnly. Greer’s nerves were not as steady. “Get on with it,” he snapped.

  “One morning about three weeks ago,” Johanson proceeded at his own deliberate pace, “I found a leak in the joint of one of the furnace pipes. The pipes were knocking. There was a note to me in Mrs. Sperling’s handwriting about how I should fix it first thing. Now that pipe, Lieutenant, ran along the basement ceiling, and it goes up through the floor into her apartment. I was trying to fix it, but I could not do it alone, you understand. And being up high where I was on the ladder, I could hear voices in her apartment. I heard a man’s voice. So I went upstairs and I rang her bell, and her being in a night gown, I said maybe she would send down the gentleman to help me with the pipe.”

  Tully and Greer exchanged glances. The stenographer paused to blow his nose. But Johanson proceeded blandly, apparently to this day unaware of his lack of discretion. “She says, ‘What man are you talking about? I’ve got the radio on.’ And she came down to the basement and held that wrench for me herself. But I didn’t hear the radio when her door was open or any more when it was closed till she went upstairs again and turned it on. That time I knew it was a radio. So, I don’t like to be called a liar or a fool. I went home to my breakfast and I told my wife to bring it to me where I could look out of the window. At eight o’clock the man on the third floor left. I know him, he is the tenant. At twenty minutes to nine, the man on the second floor left and his wife with him. And then, by God…” Johanson slapped the flat of his hand on his knee…“at nine-thirty out comes the man who wasn’t there at all!”

  He looked from one to the other of the police in triumph.

  “How do you know he wasn’t the guest of one of the tenants?” Greer asked without a smile.

  “I don’t think Mrs. Sperling comes to the window and waves goodbye to other people’s visitors, no sir, I don’t.”

  “I want you to give me the exact date this occurred, Johanson.”

  “October twenty-one,” he said with very little hesitation. “It is the day after we turn the heat up ten degrees, and that is a very busy day with old furnaces.”

  “A very busy day,” Greer said, “but you could sit and look out the window.”

  “My time is my own, sir. My contract, she calls for the job, not for the time I do the job.”

  “I wish I could say the same for mine,” Tully drawled, getting up, and taking part for the first time. He could never understand the baiting of witnesses in the wake of significant testimony as Greer had just done with his man. His own feeling was that by implying disbelief, the inquisitor weakened the witness’s concentration. He might thereby lose a detail almost as significant as the fact.

  “What was the fellow like, her caller?”

  Johanson relaxed. He even smiled at the picture started up in his mind by Tully’s question. It must be very vivid to him.

  “Why, he come down the steps real business-like, brief case under his arm, umbrella. Not very tall and kind of chubby, one way you look at him. Then he’s not so plump, you look at him another way. Good clothes maybe do that…”

  Tully nodded. He would have purred if that would have kept Johanson running on as smoothly.

  “He was neat as a spool of thread. I don’t just remember his face. But it’s the feeling I got when I saw him I remember real clear. He walked kind of bouncey—like on springs and back on his heels.” Johanson pounded one hand into the other. “A jim-dandy walking doll, that’s what I would call him! Do you see what I mean?”

  “I might if I saw the man,” Tully said. “From that description, I just might at that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if other witnesses can corroborate it.”

  By eleven o’clock that night, however, no other witnesses admitted having seen such a man in the vicinity of Mrs. Sperling’s, and Tully decided he had done a day’s duty. He could still reach Fifth Avenue and 78th Street before midnight.

  6

  “NOW IT WASN’T SUCH a bad story he told,” Tully explained to Mrs. Norris while he turned the plate round and round. Chocolate cake with coconut frosting: he wouldn’t get the coconut out of his teeth for a week. He had hoped for the steak, midnight or no. But the Scotch were always careful with meat.

  “Would you rather have something else, Mr. Tully?”

  “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Norris, cake is too delicate for my stomach at this hour. I need something rough and substantial after a day’s work.”

  “I’ve just the thing that’ll stick to your ribs,” she said. “These chilly mornings I make the porridge the night before. It’s sitting now warm in the pot.”

  “That’d be just grand,” Tully said with grim cheer, and returned to the description of the investigation. “You see it’s too neat, the story he told about this visitor, or maybe too bold. Every other witness we talked to tonight was shocked at the very suggestion of a man staying overnight in the woman’s house. Mrs. Sperli
ng seems to have been as careful a woman as, say, yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t rule out the careful ones any more than I’d rule them in for it,” Mrs. Norris volunteered with the porridge. “By which I mean a woman’s a woman for all o’ that. The careful ones are lonesomer than the free ones, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I do,” Tully said. “And they won’t rule out the man Johanson described, but it’s himself who looks like their best bet at the moment. The very way he went about discovering the body—having a policeman go in with him on his key to an apartment he swore he had never crossed the threshold of. If she wanted to keep him out, why did she allow him a key? And twice, when they were in the place, the officer he took with him had to call him on touching things around the place—as though he was deliberately trying to leave his prints on something which would in turn, account for any other prints the police might turn up of his.”

  “Take plenty of cream,” Mrs. Norris said. “You’re getting leaner all the time.”

  “It runs in the family,” Tully said.

  “What kind of a man is this Johanson?”

  “He’s a shrewd lad, Johanson is—forty, I’d say—good-looking in a rough, working-man way. He has a toothpick of a wife and no kids.”

  “I’m always suspicious of a married man who hasn’t a family,” Mrs. Norris said.

  “Aye, if I didn’t know more of human nature, I’d be myself. But one of the biggest rogues I know has a parcel of kids and a wife that adores him. She’s waiting for him at the neck of the jug every time he gets out of it. Then there’s another kid. And the kids themselves are little angels, one prettier than the other. Ah, I had a friend once, Jimmie Phelan, God rest him, and he used to say when he’d get a few drinks in him: ‘Sure, Jasper, there’s many a horse thief sired a saint all unbeknownst to himself.’”

  “True,” Mrs. Norris said, wetting the tea. “Do you think this Johanson is trying to throw suspicion on someone he knows?”

  “Or on somebody he doesn’t know. Somebody he’s just seen once and remembered,” Tully said. “Mind you, I may change my mind about this in the morning. But let me ask you, if you wanted to give a good description of a man—by which you wanted to convince us there was such a man—wouldn’t you pick out one you’d seen somewhere that stuck in your mind?”

  “I would and I could,” Mrs. Norris said, and looked at Tully with deep admiration. “I saw him on the subway years ago, with dimples in his cheeks and his eyes blue and laughing. He was a Yorkshire man—on his way to Kansas City.”

  “On the subway is where to observe them,” Tully said.

  Mrs. Norris was lost in the recollection then. “And he called me ‘lass.’ I hadn’t heard the word said like that in years.”

  “I’m not very keen on your speaking to strangers,” he said.

  “’Twas before I knew you. But don’t you see, Mr. Tully, it proves exactly what you were saying: if I had to, this minute, conjure a face and a figure, there’s the man, the perfect red herring!”

  At that moment Jimmie knocked and put his head through the doorway of the butler’s pantry.

  “Come in, sir,” said Mrs. Norris. “Mr. Tully has a brand new murder.”

  “Congratulations,” said Jimmie. He came to the table and shook hands with the detective. “A crime of passion, I hope. And just before you make the arrest, I’d appreciate your recommending me to the suspect. My God, can’t you give the man anything better to eat at this hour than a bowl of porridge?”

  “It’s what he wanted,” Mrs. Norris said.

  And while that was not the truth, the truth was that he no longer wanted anything else, so Tully agreed with her.

  “Is your visitor gone, Mr. James?” his housekeeper inquired.

  “For the time being, at least. What did you think of him, Mrs. Norris? What kind of trouble would you say he was in?” Jimmie winked at Tully, and while he was waiting her answer helped himself to the cake the detective had passed up.

  “He’s not the kind of man who wears his troubles on his sleeve,” Mrs. Norris said after a moment’s contemplation. “And I dare say he’s easily taken advantage of, especially by women. I’d say he was the companion to an old witch of a mother who’s outlived her usefulness in this world by fifty years.” Seeing Jimmie grin, his housekeeper warmed to the subject. “She probably didn’t pay a fig’s worth of attention to him till she was widowed, and since then latched onto him like a snail. She’d not let an eligible woman near him for fear he’d marry. So I’d say, he’s probably in trouble now with an ineligible one. There now. Do I get the sixty-four thousand dollars?”

  Jimmie laughed. “Not tonight, but we’ll give you a crack at it next week,” he said. “You’re a marvelously perceptive woman.” He held his fork poised in the air a moment and looked at her. “Do you really think he’s a lady’s man?”

  “I found him attractive,” Mrs. Norris said.

  “Did you now?” said Tully, and to Jimmie. “Who the hell is she talking about?”

  “I will not have that language in my kitchen,” Mrs. Norris said, although the occasion did not displease her.

  “He’s the scion of an old and important family,” Jimmie said, “and the heir to a fortune when his mother lets go.”

  “There!” Mrs. Norris cried in triumph.

  “That’d make any man attractive,” Tully said, “to some women.” Then seeing himself in deep waters, he added: “Present company excepted, of course.”

  “You don’t know me very well to say that, Mr. Tully, or even to think it’s flattery to me to say it. I know the worth of money, having earned my own, and I must say, an honest fortune is a rare thing.”

  Both men laughed. And presently, realizing what she had said, Mrs. Norris joined them. “In fact,” she said, “the honester, the rarer.”

  7

  WHAT SEEMED TO BE the first break in the Sperling investigation came the next morning. A Third Avenue pawnbroker reported an attempt to unload a couple of pieces of feminine jewelry by a lad he seized and held for the police. Tully stopped at the precinct headquarters and heard John Thompson’s story himself. By then what was presumed to be the rest of Mrs. Sperling’s treasures had been surrendered by the boy. Since there was no insurance listing on them, they waited inventory by the two nieces.

  Johnny was only fifteen and small for his age at that. As one of the cops said, Arabella would have had to give him a hand to help in her own strangulation. He claimed to have found the chamois bag containing the jewelry in the hallway of Mrs. Sperling’s house. He was a very frightened boy, getting more attention in ten minutes now, Tully thought, than in all the years of his life put together.

  “In the first place, young fella,” Tully said, “what were you doing in the hallway?”

  “Readin’ the comics,” Johnny said. “Honest. Every day when I’d see The Newses delivered there, I’d sneak up and read ’em before they was took in. You can ask the super. He kicked me out sometimes.”

  “And what took you so long to try to sell the jewelry? You found it the morning before yesterday, didn’t you?”

  The boy nodded. “I was hopin’ there’d be a reward for findin’ them. I watched the paper, the Lost and Found.”

  “And decided this morning that honesty didn’t pay off quick enough,” Tully finished the story.

  The lad would not change that tale much, Tully knew. His methods were his best witnesses. Mrs. Sperling’s costume pieces were unlikely to have been taken for their own value. A ruse, likely, and a poor one without the sign of housebreaking. A bit of muddying on the murderer’s part.

  Johanson also stayed with his story: that of having never crossed Mrs. Sperling’s doorstep during her lifetime, and this despite the doubt cast on his word by information the Precinct men turned up. Johanson had numerous small investments in shoddy Harlem real estate. Furthermore, he admitted under intensive questioning, having approached Mrs. Sperling to join his investment syndicate.

  Tully allo
wed himself an editorial comment aloud on people who take exorbitant profit out of over-crowded housing.

  “You do not say this is not honest,” Johanson insisted. “I can name you a dozen operators in New York, respectable men, Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, and they all have money in Harlem real estate.”

  “Sure, you’re right,” Lieutenant Greer agreed. It was not his place to question the business ethics of either Johanson or the Sperling woman. Maybe the information would be of value to Tully whose boss would be in charge if Johanson was brought to trial, but that day wasn’t coming fast enough.

  “Let’s try to line up a couple of dates and hours,” Tully said. “When was it you asked Mrs. Sperling if she would like to invest in real estate with you?”

  “Two, three weeks ago,” Johanson said sullenly.

  “And you were standing outside her door when you did it?”

  “No, sir. We were in the basement of her building. She made me explain it over to her twice. Then she said she would ask her broker.”

  “Her broker,” Tully repeated. “Ever meet him?”

  The building super shook his head.

  “I want you to take time now and figure out the exact date this took place, this conversation in the basement,” Tully said.

  After much puzzling of the pocket calendar the detective gave him, Johanson concluded that it had been one week before.

  “That’s not two, three weeks,” Tully said.

  “The days don’t go so fast in my work,” Johanson said. “Now I tell you the truth, sir. I was afraid to tell you sooner. Then I realized you maybe seen her broker and he told you when she spoke to him about it. She told me ‘no’ on the investment the day after. That would be last Wednesday.”

  Lieutenant Greer and Tully exchanged a signal between them: the moment had come to spring a most damaging piece of information. Greer had that morning gone over Mrs. Sperling’s finances with her bank. He now took over the questioning.