Death of an Old Sinner (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 1)

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

“Don’t ever say that, Jimmie, even when it’s the truth.”

  The words hit him like a blow. “Right you are, my dear.”

  “I don’t want to be right, Jimmie. You know what I want.”

  And those words struck more deeply, twisting inside him the roots of longing to be with her. “Where shall we have dinner, Helene?”

  She laughed softly. “I do embarrass you, don’t I? I should like to go to the Ponder Inn tonight, since you’ve asked me.”

  He would have preferred dinner at her apartment, the old enchantment once again upon him. “Why there?” he said.

  “Jimmie, you make the arrangements.”

  “Of course not, Helene. I was merely curious. I’ll call for you at seven.”

  “Let’s meet there then,” she said. “I know you are to be congratulated, and I’m sure you must be very busy. Seven-thirty at the Ponder Inn?”

  “Right,” he said, and looked at the phone a moment in his hand when she had hung up. How, he wondered, had she come by the knowledge of his prospective candidacy. She was not that intuitive—though damned intuitive she was.

  He had met Helene ten years before—attending an exhibit of her sculpture with a friend. She had been a model in her youth, an artist’s model known the breadth of Greenwich Village. Now her fame was considerably wider, international in scope. But, Jimmie thought, grimly, it would be the Greenwich Village phase of her renown which would interest the Party.

  Jimmie dressed at his club and at seven-twenty-five was standing outside the Ponder Inn on East Fifty-second Street watching for Helene’s cab. She was not yet late, but at the moment she should have arrived, another cab drew up. The doorman opened it and Jimmie peered in. He recognized and was recognized by Judge Turner.

  The Judge emerged murmuring something like “Ah, my boy, how are you?” and Jimmie gave his hand into the cab to assist Mrs. Turner from it. It was a frail hand that took his, but the old lady smiled into his face.

  “How like your father, Jimmie!” she said, leaning an instant on him to gain her balance. “But so much steadier.” She squeezed his hand before releasing it.

  “I don’t suppose you’re dining alone,” the Judge said.

  “No, sir,” Jimmie said, but at that moment Helene arrived and he needed to introduce her. Beautiful she was, but with a lean, almost lupine sort of beauty—sensuous without being smackingly feminine. Jimmie sensed the reserve gathering in the Judge’s wife.

  “Mrs. Joyce,” the judge repeated, not quite acknowledging or rejecting the introduction.

  Jimmie’s spirits sank to their lowest.

  They parted, the two couples, to their separate reservations within the Ponder. For a long moment, Helene sat and looked at him, into him. Jimmie lifted his chin a little, but said nothing. When their drinks were served, Helene held up her martini and touched her glass to his. “Goodbye, Jimmie,” she said and drank a deeper draft than should be taken of a martini.

  “You do take giant steps, don’t you?” Jimmie said.

  “I can even run when I have to,” she said.

  “Would you mind running into my arms before running out of them?” he said, and then rather savagely, because he was being weak in saying that: “Who the devil has been talking to you?”

  Helene smiled. “Among others, the Judge’s wife just now although she said not a word.”

  “She’s an old hypocrite.”

  “Whatever she is, she’s not that, Jimmie. And you know it as well as I do. I read in Lem Python’s column—you’re lunching with Madeline Barker these days.”

  Jimmie bristled. “She anticipates,” he said.

  Helene laughed. “But of course she does—that you’ll be governor. I must tell you of an old association some day. Neither the best nor the worst of my youth.” She was thoughtful for a moment. “If ever Madeline Barker should try to blackmail you, Jimmie …”

  “What?” He started violently.

  “I do have a dirty mind. Am I right that it’s to be governor?”

  He nodded.

  Helene studied her glass, turning it slowly round with a strong, veined hand. She looked up at him. “Do you think you might be president some day?”

  “I am not that ambitious,” Jimmie said.

  “You will be when the time comes,” she said. “I’m very proud of you, my dear. And I shall be very circumspect. But I don’t suppose that’s enough, is it?”

  Jimmie was saved from needing to answer another of her painful questions by the arrival at their table of the head waiter. With the menu he gave Jimmie a note, written on the back of Judge Turner’s card. It read: “I will phone you at Nyack at 11 o’clock tonight.”

  Jimmie swore softly under his breath. On Helene’s quizzical look, he gave her the card.

  “I suppose,” she said, “there’s no question of your not being there?”

  “He is, in effect, ordering me home to bed,” said Jimmie.

  “Alone,” Helene said bluntly. She gave a great sigh. “I suppose I must tell you the story of my youth one of these days. New York is like the palm of your hand, Jimmie, millions of lines you scarcely see, but crossing and recrossing.” She shrugged. “Palmistry is for the young.”

  Jimmie took his pen and a card from his pocket and wrote: “I’m sorry, sir. But I will not be there.” He gave it to Helene to read.

  She smiled and tore it up. “Shall we order dinner, Jimmie? In a way I’m grateful. My work has been suffering. You are a dreadful distraction.”

  A few minutes later, and when they had finally managed a conversation without strain, they were again interrupted by the head waiter. This time Jimmie was wanted on the telephone. Since the only person who knew where he was—aside from Judge Turner—was the valet at his club, someone had been at considerable pains to find him. He excused himself and took the call in the manager’s office.

  Mike Zabriski was on the phone. There had been a leak all right on what had gone on at Albany, and furthermore to where it could hurt most, according to Mike: the opposition was going into Jimmie’s record as District Attorney.

  “Let them,” Jimmie said irritably. “It’s clean.”

  “You’re talking to old Mike, young fella, nobody’s record is that clean.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jimmie said.

  “The way I heard it just now, for example, you made a great hoopdedoo in the papers back in the ʼforties, and all the time was pushing a deal so that Johnny Rocco would just move out of your yard into Brooklyn.”

  “That is fantastic,” Jimmie said.

  “To tell the truth, son, I don’t remember you prosecuting The Rock, and I don’t think you needed extradition papers for Brooklyn.”

  “I needed cooperation, that’s what I needed…sir.”

  “All right, young fella, but if I was you I’d think up the names of the people who were supposed to cooperate with you and didn’t. We may need ʼem. Seems like the present regime is doggone cooperative. They’re out in Brooklyn now trying to pick up The Rock for questioning.”

  “I hope they find him,” Jimmie said.

  Mike’s sigh into the phone came like the sound of the sea in a conch. “The Rock’s an old man. He ought to have enough by now to retire to Florida, and you know, Jimmie—I wish he would. Goodnight, son.”

  What the Party needed, Jimmie thought, was to retire its old time hacks like Mike Zabriski. He looked at his watch. Almost nine already. Within the hour he would have to start for home. As far as he was concerned at the moment, the Judge, too, was past retirement age.

  When he got back to the table, Helene was gone. The head waiter held his chair. “Madame did not wait for dessert. She said you would understand.”

  Jimmie glowered in the direction of the Judge’s table. He and Mrs. Turner were also gone.

  “The Judge?” asked the waiter discreetly. Jimmie nodded. “They exchanged a few words together, leaving.”

  “Did they leave together?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, sir. I got the
impression—mind you, I may be wrong—but it is my deduction that he did not want to be present when you returned and found your companion gone.”

  “It’s a damned good deduction,” Jimmie said.

  The waiter clicked his heels. “Thank you sir.”

  8

  THE GENERAL AND ROBBIE had long since arrived at the authentic family affiliations of all whom the “diarist” proposed to make famous. And now, awaiting the return of Robbie’s chemist, they were turning the spirited events of their creation into rather dull affairs by converting them into the President’s style. It would be a fine irony, the General thought, if the old bore managed even at this distance to blunt the prickle of scandal. Remarkable, he complained to Robbie, what a bad cook could do to good meat.

  This brought their consideration to the dinner hour, and Robbie thought it best to bring in sandwiches since there was no telling when his chemist friend would return. The General grumbled about his digestion, the simplicity of the ink formula, and his need of another drink. The drink Robbie provided, and himself got into his overcoat to go for the sandwiches. He stuck his hand in his pocket, and along with his gloves pulled out a wallet. He was a minute looking at it, taken by surprise, and then opened it to the identification.

  “You’re getting careless with your fortune, man,” he said, and tossed the wallet on the desk to the General. “You must have put it in my pocket instead of your own.”

  The General instinctively put his hand to the pants’ pocket in which he normally kept his wallet. It was empty, at least of the wallet, but he found instead a piece of notepaper.

  “I’m off,” said Robbie. “I’ll not be long.”

  The General merely nodded. He unfolded the paper and took a three-line typewritten note to the light. He read:

  I want a piece of your little plum. Make arrangements while you are there tonight or I will make them for you. You are an old man. There is enough for both of us.

  Nick Casey

  The name also was typed. The General sat down heavily. He might have taken his wallet from his pocket during the afternoon, but as sure as he spent the day in consciousness, he had not taken off his clothes to give anyone the opportunity of putting the note in his pocket. Nor did he put the wallet in Robbie’s pocket. And at first the message made no sense to him at all. Except that the name Nick Casey was vaguely familiar.

  “I want a piece of your little plum…tonight…” Flora? Did it mean Flora? But of course it meant Flora! Memory and comprehension smote him. He sat very still, commanding himself to beware of anger. At his age it could be his greatest enemy.

  How well he remembered Nick Casey now! A few years ago when he returned from Europe and was spending his first evening with Flora—during the Kefauver crime hearings it was—she had gone down to the delicatessen and brought up along with the groceries a tabloid newspaper. And there was Casey’s picture. “Just look at him,” said Flora, and not without admiration. “Imagine, I went to public school with him. He gave me my first job. In Coney Island it was and now he owns all kinds of places in Jersey.”

  And of course! The oaf pushing the broom over his shoes, a nimble-fingers, a pickpocket in Casey’s employ! Likely he just walked in. How would Robbie know one man from another with the motley assortment he had in the place?

  “Enough for both of us!” the General cried aloud in agony, quoting the note. The vulgar, uncouth, arrogant villain!

  The General had got some hold on himself by the time Robbie returned. And Robbie was now given also to thoughtfulness; had the General been less absorbed in his own problem, he might have seen it. He would have mentioned the whole matter to his friend, but what gentleman could make such a distasteful disclosure, and of so personal an affair? He and Robbie ate their sandwiches in respect for each other’s silences. Finally, the chemist, a Mr. Chipsey, arrived.

  He was, and even the General noticed it, a very nervous man. The General gathered his papers into his dispatch case, and put on his coat, feeling the alarm in the air.

  “You know the place is bein’ cased, Robbie,” Mr. Chipsey said.

  “Is that what those men are doing?” said Robbie, in so pious a tone even the General looked round at him.

  “And you know whose boys they are, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Nick Casey’s. Imported from Florida, so something’s up.”

  “Nick Casey’s,” Robbie repeated. “I’ve been told they can get very nasty.”

  “It wasn’t square of you, Robbie, to’ve pulled me in here, I can’t afford any trouble,” the “chemist” whined.

  “Would I be here myself if I expected trouble? Would I have brought the General here?”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” the General said, putting on his hat with great dignity. “I do believe Mr. Casey’s interest is in myself only…”

  “What?” Robbie shouted. “You’re mixed up with Nick Casey, and come here to me like a bloody germ carrier!”

  The General was always at his calmest just before zero. He turned to the other man. “Did you bring the ink, Mr. Chipsey?”

  Chipsey took the bottle from his pocket. “You meant ink—when you said ink,” he asked very deliberately, “didn’t you?”

  “Of course he did,” Robbie shouted.

  “You can have it free gratis,” Chipsey said, and gave him the bottle.

  The General decided it was no time to quibble. “Goodbye, Robbie. Wish me luck.”

  Robbie took his hand. “I’m sorry I spoke like I did to you, sir. You’re a gentleman and a scholar.”

  “No, Robbie, I am a gentleman. You are a scholar.”

  The General moved into the hall and out the back door as against a wind. No sooner did Robbie turn the key than he switched out every light in the building. In the near darkness the General measured the distance between him and the Jaguar and just at that instant two men moved in, one on either side of him.

  “Well, old man,” one of them said, “what do we tell the boss?”

  “Tell him it’s up to Miss Tims herself,” the General said.

  “Huh?”

  The General went on, doing a bit of a dance as though their touch were loathsome to him: “If he expects to move in tonight, I shall be there, waiting for him.” With that he executed a quick move whereby one thug threw the block intended for him on the other, while the General broke into the open, the Jaguar’s key in his hand. He primed her with his foot and she rose as though it were a spur. In the last moment before her motor roared, the General heard men shouting; distinctly he heard: “Turn ʼem loose on him, the bulls! Turn ʼem loose!” The Jaguar bolted into the street. And sure enough, just before he opened the car up on the parkway, he heard the screaming of sirens. He turned east and circled west later, and was never overtaken.

  9

  THE GENERAL DID WHAT might be called knee-dips, waiting for the elevator in the hallway of Flora’s building. His legs were still shaky. It was having to drive across the Brooklyn Bridge that did it. A bridge could be a trap in these days of radio communication. Well, he had come out of it safely, whatever it was he had come out of. The elevator picked him up: it was the closest to the French type of lift he had ever seen in America, a small cage, the marvel of whose workings one could watch through the ceiling. A very appropriate sort of elevator for the house in which one kept his mistress—in the best of tradition if not of style. A feeling of serenity came upon him ordinarily in this old-fashioned contrivance—but it was missing tonight.

  Whatever it was he had come out of—what was he entering into? The usual welcome of Flora’s parakeet to his rap on the door did not raise his spirits. “Ransom, Ransom, Ransom,” it croaked.

  “I almost fell asleep, Ransom, honey. You’re so late.” Flora all but yawned in his face.

  Greeting him thus she could scarcely have entertained Nick Casey while waiting for him, the General thought. “A bit of trouble, my dear, a bit of trouble,” the General said, and kissed her cheek. “You smel
l delicious. Do I know it—your essence?” He gave his finger to the bird to peck at a couple of times. After that it quieted for the evening.

  “Essence,” Flora chided in her languid way, “they don’t call it that anymore, Ransom. That’s an old fashioned word, essence.”

  “We’re fairly old fashioned people, you and I, Flora.” He looked at her critically. “You aren’t dieting again, are you?”

  Flora sat on the back of a chair. “I never knew a more observant man in my life. I just haven’t been feelin’ very well, Ransom.” The drawl crept into her voice.

  She had not in all these years of his telling her that he loathed the false accent she put on, realized that he really meant it, that whatever she hoped to wheedle from him thereby would be harder to get for it, not easier. Still, maybe she was right. She got what he could give her, one way or the other, and the drawl was her notion of charm, skill, witchery. It was something she could tote up in a personal assessment.

  “Come tell me about it, Flora,” he said, and held his hand out to her.

  She sat on the arm of his chair and stroked his hand. Then she gave a great sigh. “I suppose I got to expect it, Ransom, but I get so blue and lonesome.”

  “Lonesome,” he mimicked her pronunciation. “I received a communication today from an old flame of yours—one, I hope, my dear, you’ll put out promptly.”

  “Tell me about it,” Flora said languidly.

  “I suppose you’ve given him no encouragement?”

  “I don’t know if I have or not, Ransom,” she said in a schoolgirl fashion that touched his anger, “since I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about.”

  “I’m talking about Nick Casey, Flora.”

  Her whole face blossomed into the smile. “Was Nick enquirin’ after me, Ransom?”

  “That is a quaint way of putting it, to say the least.”

  “Nick Casey,” she mooned. “What does he look like now? Is he handsome still? When we were in public school, Ransom…”

  “I know,” he cut her off rudely. “It’s a charming story.” He took his hand from hers and caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “When did you see him last?”