Gentleman Called Read online

  The old lady liked that. She nodded approval. “You need more than one evening for that, young man. I’ve had a look at her myself, you know. A perfume counter is in the public domain.” She sighed then. “I should not be surprised if Miss Thayer is also. Well. You may go now, Mr. Jarvis. I shall expect to see you again soon.”

  As soon as he had left her Jimmie realized he had managed no stronger persuasion with her than had Teddy. He shuddered to think what a lifetime in this household could do to any man.

  9

  AT NINE-THIRTY THE NEXT morning Jimmie was waiting outside his office door for Mr. Wiggam. The senior partner was not especially pleased to start his day with the Adkins affair, but Jimmie cared not: he was starting and ending his with it.

  “You see, sir, Teddy wants to settle out of court. His mother seems to think it would be better to fight it through the courts. But the peculiar twist to this thing is, sir: Teddy maintains his innocence. His mother rather hopes he will come out guilty.”

  “Nonsense,” Wiggam said.

  “No sir. I spent the evening with her. Very simply, she would like a grandson in or out of wedlock. And if the court says Teddy’s the father, she would be willing to take that word over his.”

  “Well, Jim,” Wiggam said after a long moment’s thought, “we’re Georgianna’s lawyers. If he hoped to settle it quietly, young Teddy should have got himself an attorney. Curious he didn’t, isn’t it when you stop to think about the situation? Why did he tell Georgianna at all?”

  “Miss Thayer wants a hundred thousand dollars,” Jimmie said. “Adkins doesn’t have it. I suspect he misjudged his mother—thinking she would come across. By the way, how much does he contribute to his mother’s support, Mr. Wiggam?”

  “Five thousand this year. I set the figure myself.”

  “So I was given to understand. Having been a guest in the house, I’d be curious to know how you arrived at the figure, sir.”

  “Very simple. I took the expenditures of the previous year, and divided the amount by the average number of people living within the family household. Primitive arithmetic.”

  Jimmie agreed. Twenty people had sat down to dinner. To reverse Wiggam’s mathematics, multiply five thousand by twenty. Sufficient to run the average house! “Isn’t ‘primary’ arithmetic the word, Mr. Wiggam?”

  Mr. Wiggam made one of his rare excursions into humor. “When I do it, it’s primitive.”

  Jimmie smiled. “Is he a good business man, Adkins?”

  “I suspect he’s no more than adequate,” Wiggam said. “We let him in on the administration of the estate a few years ago. It was an unhappy event. My own suspicion is he earns only what he needs. And I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “It’s rather admirable if it works,” Jimmie said.

  Wiggam said nothing. It was not his notion of enterprise.

  “Did you know Adkins as a young man, sir?”

  “I’ve been trying to think of my earliest recollection of him,” Wiggam said. “I think it rather typical: he was in swaddles. The nurse had left him for a moment in charge of his sisters. They were in a perfect fury over him, poor lad, pulling him, one from the other, and he screaming…”

  “Perhaps you remember him to better advantage later,” Jimmie suggested.

  “I’m afraid I remember the same sort of squabble on an adult level next,” Mr. Wiggam said. “When it came time for him to go to college the girls came home from the ends of the earth in order to have something to say about it. Very dominating women in that family. In the end, Georgianna, his mother, put that up to me also. It was very simple, really. His father was a Harvard man. What better solution than send the boy there?”

  “Do you know, sir, this is the first time I have heard the father mentioned?”

  Wiggam sat in a moment’s silent contemplation at the end of which he said: “Poor old Ted. I’d forgot him myself. Very quiet man. He died just after Teddy was born.”

  Jimmie was tempted to ask if it was in childbirth, but he said nothing. He doubted Wiggam would be amused.

  “I don’t suppose I’ve seen Teddy a half-dozen times since, all told, certainly not to talk to,” he summarized with dwindling patience. “Somebody must know him.”

  Jimmie knew he had been dismissed. No doubt somebody did know, he thought, and he wanted to know him better himself, considerably better before going into court to defend his honor. He went back to Who’s Who. The information on Teddy was meager, but at least it indicated Harvard, 1924, and membership then in the “Skiddoo” Club.

  He sat back and thought over his acquaintanceship among Harvard alumni. Finally by the intermediation of a mutual friend, he was in touch with a Skiddoo man of the class of ’24.

  10

  JIMMIE MET MARTIN RIDER at the Harvard Club in late afternoon. It was not until they found a picture in the 1924 class publications that Rider could place Theodore E. Adkins. Jimmie thought the face of his client, by that picture, oddly unchanged in over thirty years. A curious thing about Rider: while he could not remember Teddy, he recognized the family name immediately. “They’re the Tripp Gold Mines people.”

  It conjured a strange picture for Jimmie: little round Teddy sitting by a water’s edge, panning gold. He mentioned it to his companion.

  Rider laughed. “It’s a long year past since that family did any of their own panning. But now, you know, you’ve almost brought Adkins back to me, the sense, the feeling, an intimacy of him. What the devil is it now…?”

  He went over the Skiddoo Club book and suddenly he leaned back. “Oh, my God, sure. I remember him now. You know how it is with fellows that age—boasting about the women in their lives? And that was the twenties. Well, little Teddy Adkins used to turn up at our bull sessions with the most fantastic stories of his conquests. And no matter how we bated him, he stuck by his stories.

  “So, of course, kindness not being especially characteristic of boys that age, we set a trap. A couple of the fellows followed him on one of his twilight excursions. They followed him to the edge of the river—a place well off the road—but there he took off every stitch of his clothes and sat down. Naked, with his arms and legs folded, he sat for a solid hour like a bare Buddha. Then he got up, dressed, walked into town, stopped at a soda fountain and had a Green River, and then came back to the dorm. The spies got home about ten minutes ahead of him and we were waiting for him. But he came in and looked around.

  “‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and I can see him to this day, apple cheeks, a tuft of blond hair…‘I regret to say I have nothing to report tonight. I have been stood up. One hour I waited at our usual rendezvous, and made a feast, alas, only for the mosquitoes. Oh, the perfidy of woman!’ He always did have an old-fashioned way of talking. And you see, we’d had the rug pulled out from under us. Or maybe it was our leg, both legs. I’ll tell you this, Jarvis. We left him alone after that.”

  “You believed him?” said Jimmie.

  “Let’s put it this way, we respected him, and even if we didn’t admit it, we were probably a little scared of him. Looking back on it all now, I’d be inclined to say he was as canny as he was imaginative. He probably knew he was being followed. He put the only silencer possible on us. Like Lot’s wife, we were stricken dumb. But think of the nerve it took to do that, man.”

  Jimmie nodded. But it was not the sort of tale one told a jury by way of assuring them of a man’s innocence. And it did seem a bit thick that one who started life so cannily should fall easy victim to the scheme of Miss Thayer. Still, the episode showed a ken of the ways of men, not of the wiles of women.

  “Any other recollections of our friend?” he asked.

  “He had a flare for dramatics,” Rider said.

  “Redundant,” said Jimmie.

  “I remember his habit of getting sick on every visitors’ day. He could even manage a temperature.”

  “At the merest thought of his sisters, no doubt,” Jimmie said.

  “That’s ri
ght!” Rider cried. “We used to call them—what’s the play with the three sisters in it?”

  “The Cherry Orchard,” Jimmie suggested.

  “No. Shakespeare, King Lear.”

  “Goneril, Regan and Cordelia,” Jimmie recalled.

  “I remember one of his papers in English Lit about them. He could be very amusing. He undertook to prove the young one—the one that’s supposed to be the old man’s angel child—Teddy set out to prove her the arch villainess of literature. It was her sickening sweetness that made a weakling of the old man. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a play. That was his thesis. You might be able to find that. Do you mind my asking—are you writing a book about him? I know—you’re ghosting his autobiography.”

  Jimmie grinned. “Not quite.”

  His companion shrugged. “Most everybody who can afford it is having it done these days. Maybe it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis at that.”

  Jimmie got up. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “No. It will be in the papers soon I expect. He’s the defendant in a paternity suit.”

  “Little Teddy Adkins? Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Just what is it that surprises you?”

  “Why, that he got caught, man. He’s smarter than that.”

  “That’s just fine,” Jimmie said.

  He decided to walk home to see if he could pace some order into his mind. It began to look as though there were at least two faces to Theodore Adkins, and juries were not notoriously partial to two-faced defendants.

  11

  MRS. NORRIS POWDERED HER nose and shook a few drops of lavender on a handkerchief which she tucked into her bosom. In an association she had clung to for well over fifty years, she could remember her mother calling her “her wild Annie” and pulling her head into her bosom a minute before taking the comb to the snarls in her hair. The smell of lavender had been as deep in her mother’s breast as though it were grown there.

  She was putting on her tea apron when the doorman phoned up and said that Mr. Adkins was in the elevator. “But Mr. James is not home,” she said, without thinking to whom she said it.

  “Is it a chaperon you want? I’ll come up myself when I go off duty in a few minutes.”

  “Just polish your brass buttons, young man,” Mrs. Norris said.

  The doorman, who had managed to slip past retirement age without calling attention to it, tittered.

  Mrs. Norris hung up the phone in disgust. A couple of moments later she opened the door to a smiling Mr. Adkins. He stood, his hat in hand and a portfolio under his arm. “I promised Mr. Jarvis some papers at my earliest convenience. I hope it’s at his—or yours—to admit me now, Mrs. Norris?”

  “Mr. James is not at home, but I expect he will be before long. It is after five, isn’t it?”

  Adkins consulted a gold watch which he took from his vest pocket. “Five twenty-seven. I rather assumed he would leave his office at five.”

  He gave his portfolio into Mrs. Norris’ hands and took off his topcoat. She had no choice but to put him and his portfolio in a chair. After all he was a client, and an affable man. But neither she nor her master liked to be called upon without advance notice, and Mr. James had not mentioned his coming. She lighted a lamp and then took a match to the fire set in the grate. Mr. Adkins bounced to her side, and saved her the stoop before she was well into it. In fact they were both suspended for a few seconds halfway between a squat and a stance, face to face. Mr. Adkins lifted his nose and fairly rolled it up in a sniff.

  “Heather!” he cried. “Or is it lavender?”

  “Lavender,” Mrs. Norris said, but the word “heather” had scored with her nonetheless, and she remembered his having told her he had been in Scotland as a boy. Or had he been transported only by the tales of a Scottish nurse?

  He put the match to the paper and kindling, and then stood back, turning his hands about before the sudden flames; his eyes seemed absolutely sky blue, and sparkled with the firelight. “I have been thinking of Scotland—and of you, Mrs. Norris—since last we met. You’ve not been back for a long time, have you?”

  “Not for many a long year, though I got my passport a while back thinking I’d go soon.”

  “Don’t go alone,” he said very solemnly. “It will mark the end of youth if you do.”

  “I took that turn in the path several bends ago, Mr. Adkins.”

  “No. Not as long as you can find your way back, ever,” he said, and flashed her a smile of persuasion. “Age is something sudden and absolute. Age is getting lost. And that’s why I said not to return to Scotland alone. To arrive and not find there the welcome which you had conjured…”

  “Then all I’d have to do is turn around and come back. The ground is solid enough under my feet in America,” she said.

  Mr. Adkins laughed. “Well said!”

  He could say things well himself, she thought. She liked the bit: age was getting lost. One of the things she liked best about a man was a good manner of speaking. Likely the reason she had never got married again, the Jarvis men had spoiled her with their talk; she could not abide the thought of a man coming home at the end of the day with his head as empty as his dinner bucket; and they were the kind available. But Annie Norris was not by any means available to them.

  “Stay a moment and talk with me,” Mr. Adkins said disarmingly. “Do you know a book called Ballads of the North Countrie?”

  “I know you spell countree with an ‘i’ and an ‘e’,” she said.

  “That’s the one. I used to know half the book by rote. I fancied myself a balladeer. I thought it would win me someone fair, my quavering tenor, or someone congenial. No one who likes a song lacks congeniality, Mrs. Norris.”

  “That’s true,” she said, and then amended it: “depending of course, on what you call a song. There are things they call songs today a cat wouldn’t throw a shoe at.”

  It took a few minutes, but Mrs. Norris was presently, and without her quite knowing how it came about, persuaded at least to the edge of a cane-bottomed chair, to talk to him. A nice thing about the man was his way of drawing out the best things she had to say and in a way which made her pleased with herself for having said them. Their talk came round to the uses America had made of the old country songs—in the mountains, the coal mines, on the railways, which naturally enough, the railways having been strung across the country on Irish melodies, turned her thoughts to Mr. Tully. She found herself telling Mr. Adkins about her friend, the detective.

  Mr. Adkins showed his beautiful teeth in a gleam of satisfaction. It was too bad he didn’t have as many hairs on his head as teeth inside it.

  “What kind of detection does he do?” Mr. Adkins asked.

  “All kinds,” she said, “all the important kinds. He’s the chief investigator for the district attorney. Right now it’s murder, and an important one it must be. I’ve not seen him, face or fancy, since the night they found the woman.”

  “Has it been in the newspapers?” said Adkins, apparently intrigued.

  “Of course it has, though in moderation. Mr. Tully is a man of moderation. It was the woman up near Harlem—Mrs. Arabella Sperling. Isn’t that a lovely name to be done in with?”

  Mr. Adkins seemed shocked, and Mrs. Norris realized she had come to take murder with the lack of personal involvement a policeman had to have.

  “I didn’t mean that quite the way it came out, Mr. Adkins,” she explained. “But we cannot grieve at everyone else’s tragedy. We’d have no strength at all when it came to our own if we did.”

  “Oh,” the little man cried, “I agree, I quite agree. Is there a mystery about it? I love a good mystery.”

  “You’d better follow it in the papers then,” Mrs. Norris said. “It has all the promise of turning out to be that.”

  “Then they don’t know who killed her?”

  “The last I heard there was no arrest,” she said. For all she was hearing these days from Jasper Tully, the criminal could be in the Tombs now, waiting t
rial. “But, of course, my friend doesn’t tell me everything.”

  “And I dare say you don’t repeat everything he does tell you,” Adkins prompted. “You seem to be a woman of rare discretion.”

  The clock was striking six. “I must get some ice. Mr. James will want to make drinks for you and himself.” She was suddenly feeling the need of a pickup herself. Was it mention of Tully? He was getting along without her very well these days, as the song said. And Annie Norris was not a woman to delude herself. She was not one who would live on fancy, trailing her dreams like a tattered petticoat when the truth failed her. She got up and gave her shoulders a rustle as though to test the starch in them.

  Mr. Adkins, watching her, did not get up because he knew it would offend her sense of fitness, and they had got on very nicely that afternoon. When she reached the door, he said:

  “Next time I come here, I shall bring you my copy of The North Countrie if you would like to read again some of the old ballads.”

  “I’d be honored, sir,” she said, and gave a little bob of a curtsey that she had always found the best way to get out of a room when you were torn between going and staying.

  It was too much for Mr. Adkins, fitness or no. He leapt to his feet and bowed low.

  12

  JIMMIE, HAVING SPENT THE greater part of that day as well as the two preceding evenings either with the person or the problems of Teddy Adkins, could have thought of several people he would have preferred to find waiting in his study.

  “You asked me to bring you these newspaper bits as soon as I could,” Adkins said. “Otherwise I should not be here. I’m sure you are already approaching satiety with myself and my family.”

  “Not at all,” Jimmie murmured and fortified himself with a stiff drink. Teddy took sherry.

  “We should not have this grab-bag of my adventures and misadventures if it weren’t for the dotage of my sisters. But we do have it. So we may as well use it if it turns me out a gentleman.” He opened the portfolio and took a neat scrap book of clippings from it. “How would you like to have had your life catalogued from mewl to middle-age by three doting sisters?”