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

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “And that’s how you came to the conclusion he was visiting a lady in the neighborhood?”

  “Oh no. Once he had a bottle of perfume. I could smell it.”

  “Thursday night, did he have any packages?”

  “He was in a hurry, sir. I wouldn’t say the General was ever frightened, but there was something on his mind. He was quite fidgety.”

  “Did he have any packages?” Tully hit again. He never asked a question that he did not get an answer to, however much gratuitous information was volunteered him in between.

  “Yes, sir, but I can’t remember what. I remember him carrying something….”

  “Master Jamie’s dispatch case!” Mrs. Norris cried. “I remember now him borrowing it in the morning!”

  The attendant was nodding his head. “Yes, ma’am, a dispatch case. Like a thin suitcase, and I remember gold initials on it.”

  “Completely irrelevant,” Helene said, “but I gave it to young Mr. Jarvis last Christmas. The initials are J.R.J.”

  “Better give me a full description,” Tully said.

  Helene did, concluding: “And I paid twenty-three dollars for it, plus tax.”

  “It pays to buy good,” Mrs. Norris said, approving just as much Helene’s recollection of the exact cost.

  Tully gave the boy fifty cents and told him that the ladies would take the car. “I suppose it could be at his club, the dispatch case,” he said then to Mrs. Norris. “Would you have any notions at all as to what was in it?”

  She shook her head. “Off and on he’s been composing his memoirs. Oh, and I do know he’s been rummaging in the attic amongst the family papers for the last week or so. You might just ask Mr. James about it.” Tully nodded and held the door for Mrs. Norris. “Safe home, ladies.”

  “Where’s your shamrock, Mr. Tully?” she asked, looking up in his face.

  “Deep in my heart,” he said, “where everything is green as spring.”

  Mrs. Norris gave Helene a poke with her elbow. “Drive on!” she cried, and fastened the veil around her hat.

  19

  A WALLET FULL OF money and a missing dispatch case, Tully thought, as he sat in the car with his notebook in front of him, and the Jaguar’s exhaust smoke still in his nose. He tried to blow it out. Roaring little stenches, he thought. They must tell as much of the man who owns them as, say, his handwriting. His own bet of the moment would be that the General’s hand was no firmer than smoke, than it had been when he was thirteen years old.

  He opened the notebook to a fresh page and began making a timetable from his notes, beginning from where he, of his own knowledge, could begin. He wrote:

  Thurs. Mar. 15, 8:15 PM—Water St. Brooklyn.

  " " " 8:50 PM—2nd Ave. & 60th, Manh.

  He drove then to the General’s club, and again was let know they found him a nuisance—because, he thought, in his day the General had been such a nuisance. But this time he saw the people he had missed in his early morning call. He was then able to proceed with his timetable:

  Thurs. Mar. 15, 10:40 PM—club, 39th St. near Madison

  (clerk put dispatch case in club safe)

  Thurs. Mar. 15, 10:45 PM—whiskey at club bar.

  (conversa. with Webster Toll who caught 11:13 train for Darien)

  About 11 o’clock to card room.

  Friday, March 16, 12:45 AM—left call at desk for 9 AM

  (can safely presume went to bed)

  9 AM—took call.

  9:05 AM—refused call fr. Broker’s office.

  9:30 AM—breakfast in dining room. (waiter gave him papers, apologized not latest edition.)

  9:50 AM—left club, on foot.

  11 AM—returned to club.

  1. Call to Nyack.

  2. Call to Plaza exchange.

  3. Refused call from broker, but gave message—will call.

  (note order)

  12 noon—took dispatch case from safe.

  12:20 PM—checked in Mulvany.

  Needed to wait in lobby few minutes till room ready. Thought to have made phone call.

  Requested switchboard not to allow calls through till he said so.

  4:45 PM—call to Eldorado exchange.

  4:50 PM—left hotel with dispatch case, wearing tweed suit.

  (took bath afternoon sometime)

  Near the end of a busy day, Tully thought, looking over his record, and just as near the end of a busy life. There was only one big gap in the timetable—from 8:50 when he was at Second Avenue and Sixtieth, and 10:40 when he was at Thirty-ninth and Madison. How did he get from one place to the other? He might have had time to walk, but probably not the inclination. At headquarters, Tully requested a man be put on the cab possibility. He checked with Homicide on what the lab had turned up in the General’s car. Nothing, not even the smell of Brooklyn; in fact less than nothing; on the handle, right side, there were no hand or fingerprints at all; clean, wiped clean.

  Very, very curious, Tully thought. The General had driven Mrs. Norris in from Nyack Thursday morning, and Tully would give heavy odds that she was a door handle clutcher. Even if she weren’t, there had to be some prints on it; the handle of the other door was a smear of them. Someone had deliberately wiped the right one clean.

  Which again raised the question of where the General was in Brooklyn. Out of bounds for him at the present, Tully decided, and drove downtown then to see Mr. Webster Toll at his Wall Street office.

  20

  “IT’S NOT THAT I don’t want to cooperate,” Mr. Toll said. “I just don’t remember. I had been drinking—rather much. My own wife and I had had some differences. Otherwise, I should not have been at the club that late.”

  Tully nodded his head sympathetically. “ ‘My own wife…’ That’s what you just said, Mr. Toll. That sort of indicates, doesn’t it, you and the General might have been talking about…his woman?”

  Mr. Toll took off his glasses and polished them. “We were talking about women, that’s right,” he said thoughtfully, “but I suspect in a rather drunken philosophical way…you know, their changeability, their ambition for a man. I remember saying that if it weren’t for Matilda, I should be well content in a pair of frayed trousers gathering mussels on some small island.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “I remember that very clearly: ‘With or without Matilda?’ he said.” Toll sat a moment, nodding his head in recollection. “He was telling me that just that evening he had proposed a bit of a trip to his friend. She had refused it; preferred her own apartment with him coming there…”

  Tully hoped she hadn’t changed her mind about a trip. “In fact,” Toll went on, “he recommended that I take a mistress. I think ‘prescribe’ was the word he used. ‘Then when something goes wrong you can clear out and no alimony.’ And from that I think I got telling him about a friend of mine who is now paying alimony to three ex-wives.”

  “I don’t suppose he called his friend by name, Mr. Toll?”

  “I don’t suppose he did,” the man said. “I don’t recall hearing it. They had had a bit of a tiff, I think. He said once or twice that he was not jealous. It was beneath him to be jealous, certainly of a man like that….”

  “Like what?” Tully interrupted.

  Toll threw up his hands. “You’ve broken my whole line of thought.”

  He had known himself it was a mistake the moment he broke in. “It was beneath him to be jealous of a man like that,” he prompted.

  “Then I said that it was not beneath a man like Othello to be jealous—and he was a pretty fair general. Whereupon, we got into a discussion on whether or not Othello was a good military man, and the psyche of military people. I almost missed my train.”

  “I guess it’s just as well you caught it,” Tully said, getting to his feet.

  “Oh, indeed it was. Matilda met the last train and that was it.”

  Tully kept his hat in hand until he passed Toll’s secretary on the way out. If he had even seen anyone who looked like
a “Matilda” it was she, but then probably all the women in Mr. Toll’s life would.

  21

  A GANGSTER’S FUNERAL WAS always an embarrassment to decent society, but especially to a clergyman. Listening to this one bend all his eloquence toward ambiguity, Jimmie thought it would be a good idea for him on such occasions to recite Mark Antony’s “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” speech and let it go at that. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones…” That turned his thoughts to his father. The old man had known his Shakespeare, and had sometimes lived it. An argument on Othello at the club bar, Tully said. “Beneath him to be jealous of a man like that…”

  Like whom? The one helping him to play drunk? Someone in Brooklyn? Johnny Rocco? They were contemporaries, by God! And the old man had always liked good whiskey. An acquaintanceship could very well have gone back to Johnny’s rum-running days when the General’s level of society needed the Johnny Roccos at a party before they could make it a success.

  Jimmie shook his head. That line of thought was too horrible to share even with Jasper Tully, and certainly not to be confided to the D.A. Fallon was counting off the limousines lined up outside the funeral chapel. There were three car-loads of flowers.

  “I never saw so many Homburg hats,” Fallon said, “and look at the cigars lighting up, fifty centers—three for a buck the cheapest.”

  “We live in prosperous times,” Jimmie said. He was watching the license plates of all the great black cars—to small purpose, but he could not help but wonder if Johnny the Rock had not had his last ride-but-one in one of them. “It’s a Who’s Who of the underworld, isn’t it?”

  “And every goddamned man of them has accounted his whereabouts while Johnny went bye-bye,” the D.A. said.

  “Now that’s remarkable in itself,” said Jimmie, “don’t you think?”

  The D.A. grunted. “You should hear some of the alibis. Nick Casey was trying to get out of a Peeping Tom nab in night court.”

  “Did he make it?”

  “Only when he got his girl friend in for corroboration. His defense was very funny. You should hear old Henny tell it: ‘For Chrissake, Judge, what’d I want lookin’ in a window at some dame in her bare feet? I got a whole row of ʼem on my payroll, and they don’t wear nothin’ but a piece of string!’ ”

  The last limousine pulled out into the cortege, white with purple trim. “Sic transit Rocco,” Jimmie said.

  “Born Giuseppe,” the D.A. said. “Well, that’s one way to get deported.” He looked at his watch. “Want to take a look at that joint on Water Street?”

  “Very much,” said Jimmie, but wishing fervently that it was not one of the last places his own father had been seen alive.

  It was mid-afternoon when they drove up to Minnie’s Diner. In the daytime Minnie had the appearance of being legitimate. There was at least a stack of dirty dishes in the sink which the restaurant keeper was tackling himself. There were, however, three telephones in the place—a fact so obviously suspicious that Jimmie thought most investigators would discount it.

  Fallon ordered coffee and made no secret of his identity. “How come the three phones, Minnie?”

  “One for me, one for my customers…and one for you. You want to make a phone call?”

  “Pretty cool,” the D.A. said, the sides of his mouth down.

  “You got jurisdiction in Brooklyn?” Minnie asked, and Jimmie thought he’d been put through the works in the past couple of days.

  “I’ve got friends here,” Fallon said.

  “Me, too. In a pig’s eye.”

  “Was Johnny Rocco a friend?”

  “If he was, I’d be at the funeral,” Minnie said.

  “We were looking for you, a real slam-bang affair.”

  “I’ll read about it in the paper.”

  They were getting nowhere and not very fast either, Jimmie thought, and when he got the chance, he asked the man how long he’d been in business here.

  “Since my wife died,” he said. “That’s going on two years. It was her place, see, but I decided to try and make a go of it. A man’s got to make a living.”

  “And what did you do before your wife died?”

  “Five years at Sing Sing, and you know it as well as I do, damn your souls! Now get the hell out of here and come back with warrants if you want in. The one thing I learned up the river, my rights!”

  It was not very easy to leave Minnie’s with dignity after that, but to make a show of it, Jimmie stood at the curb, his topcoat open, his hands in his pants’ pockets. He scanned the neighborhood: The Tower Foundry and Iron works, Schwartz’s steel bearings, Robinson’s Printing…

  “Let’s go,” Fallon said. “We’re not going to get anything out of that baby.”

  “Right,” Jimmie said. “But mark my words, Fallon, that boy is clean. An ex-con who wasn’t could not afford the luxury of kicking a D.A. out of his place.”

  “Minnie can’t afford it either,” Fallon said grimly.

  Jimmie thought that attitude a great mistake on the part of Fallon. It was the enemy of an open mind. On the whole, it was a good thing for the District Attorney that he had a man like Jasper Tully. But then what D.A. would be worthy of his office if part of him wasn’t a Jasper Tully, Jimmie decided, remembering how often the investigator had made him look good.

  22

  “THERE ARE MESSAGES COMING from all over the world,” Mrs. Norris greeted Jimmie when he reached Nyack toward evening. “And a basketful from Washington. Mrs. Joyce has been answering the phone all afternoon.”

  “I suppose there’ll be people tonight,” Jimmie said.

  “By the tens and hundreds. Would you like a drink in your room while you dress?”

  “Couldn’t we all take time for one in the living room?”

  “Your father’s been laid out there.”

  “Oh,” said Jimmie, “of course. I’ll have it upstairs.”

  The smell of flowers permeated the house. It was heathenish, Jimmie thought. He beat his retreat upstairs as soon as he could. Mrs. Norris had managed to rub a bit of Presbyterianism off on him.

  “She’s a plainer woman than I thought,” the housekeeper said, bumping the door closed behind her when she brought the whiskey and ice.

  “If you mean Mrs. Joyce, I think she’s beautiful.”

  “I mean there’s no fancy trimmings about her. She speaks her mind and thinks straight.”

  “Oh,” said Jimmie. “That she does.”

  Mrs. Norris stood on one foot and then the other. She was not waiting to be offered a drink, Jimmie thought, having brought but one glass. Finally he asked: “Is something troubling you?”

  “No, of course not. You’ll have your dinner buffet off the kitchen. Mr. Jamie…how will you introduce her to people tonight?”

  “Helene? Why, as Mrs. Joyce. How else?”

  “You couldn’t say…‘my fiancée’?”

  “My God,” said Jimmie, “You have been impressed! Or is it respectability you’re worried about?”

  Mrs. Norris folded her arms. “If I was worried about respectability, I’d have been out of this house a long time before now.” She turned on her heel and stomped to the door.

  Jimmie called to her: “Mr. Tully will be here soon. He’ll be spending the night.”

  “And my sister and brother-in-law are coming. Where will I put Mr. Tully?”

  “In father’s quarters. That’s how he wants it.”

  Jimmie wondered, dressing, if there had been any discussion between Helene and Mrs. Norris to warrant such a suggestion. He drained his glass and paused on his way downstairs to see which room she had put Helene in. It would tell better than words Mrs. Norris’ estimation of the woman. It could not have been higher. The light shone from beneath the door of the north bedroom, and if he was not mistaken, it was from there that the smell of wood smoke was coming: the housekeeper had lighted the fire in the grate. Jimmie tapped on the door.

  �
�Come!”

  He opened the door a bit and stuck his head in. “Are you decent?”

  “If clothes will do it, enormously. Come by the fire—or the window. I’m torn between them.”

  “I’m not,” said Jimmie, taking her in his arms and holding her close. The kiss was long and soft with but the faintest stirring of passion at its end, so that Helene withdrew and took his hand to lead him to the window.

  “It’s changed,” she said, speaking of the river with the sky’s color on it, “from when last I looked.”

  Jimmie looked at her only. “ ‘How many loved your moments of glad grace…The sorrows of your changing face.’ Damn. I’ve forgot a whole patch of that.”

  Helene smiled and squeezed his hand. “The people’s candidate. You are an egghead, Jimmie. What will they do to you?”

  “I don’t even know what I want them to do to me. It all seems so long ago, that afternoon in Albany. I wanted very much to be governor then. Now I want the leisure to live a little, quietly, and hear wood fires crackling and remember full poems and not snatches of them. And I want terribly to make love to you.”

  “We are both so vulnerable to each other now, darling.”

  “Does love hurt you that much, Helene?”

  “I have been looking at the face of someone out there. I loved a boy and lost him, and a man loves me whom I respect and whom I yield…Jimmie, there is something I must tell you about Madeline Barker and the Judge.”

  “You have no idea,” he said with all the cold hurt he could manifest, “how much jollier I’ll find that story with a drink in my hand. I’ll be in the kitchen with Mrs. Norris. When your boy out there disappears, you might like to join us.”

  Helene lifted her chin and did not move or speak until he was gone. Jimmie could not have felt more miserable; he had thought this sort of thing was over between them, the raising of ghosts whenever he neared the subject of matrimony.

  Mrs. Norris took one look at him and got a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator. “Aw, lad,” she said, “you’ve no sense of tactics at all.”

  “What the devil do you know about it?” Jimmie cried.