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

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “They’re not in my keeping.”

  “I’m sure they’re not, from what I’ve read,” Tully said. “He has snatches of all sorts of tales written out on separate pages—as though he thought to patch them together like a puzzle. It would make quite a book, you know, though by his notations there were things about people he didn’t dare publish.”

  “Were there?” she said. “I wonder, Mr. Tully, I often ask myself, did some of the things he talked about really happen, or did he make them up? He had a lively imagination.”

  “He did that,” said Tully, “whether or not he made them up.”

  “He used to come down to the kitchen and purposely rile me, to see how much I would take of his mischief. Do you know, Mr. Tully, I got so that I wouldn’t even blush? And that made him furious. He’d ask me if I had no modesty—me, mind you, and stomp up the stairs like a bull…” That turned her mind to something else. “Did you ask Master Jamie about the family papers?”

  Tully nodded. “All he knows is that the General was thinking of bringing out an edition of the President’s letters. I’ve put out an inquiry of all the major publishers—including the one which contracted for his memoirs. None of them gave him a thousand dollars.”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” Mrs. Norris said.

  “But I’m still waiting for his agent to call me back. Seems like he got a sudden urge to go fishing. I wouldn’t think so much of that except he had to buy a rod, a reel, boots…the works. His wife says it’s the first time he ever went in his life. Now that isn’t a disease that comes on a man sudden, Mrs. Norris. Well, we’ll see in a day or two. Maybe he’ll come back for the funeral. Keep your eyes open there, Mrs. Norris. Look out through your tears and see who else is watering the old fellow’s grave.”

  “I will. I hope you’ll be comfortable for the night.”

  “I will if the ghosts’ll let me,” he said with a wink.

  25

  BY EVENING OF THE next day, Sunday, Tully had learned very little more of General Jarvis’ intimate life than he knew when he came, of his recent intimate life, that was. The study was strewn with accounts of “the old days,” but the detective could find no reference to anyone who answered the description of the woman who had brought him home to the Mulvany. No surprises at all, Tully thought unhappily, unless it was in the General’s handwriting: the detective had been wrong about that thinking it probably childish. The old man had written an elegant hand, neat and controlled. Tully had consulted an expert on hypnotism. For the present he could see no purpose to consulting the hand-writing experts. They were not a lot to inspire confidence anyway. A carnival sort mostly.

  The detective was sitting in the study chair opposite the President’s portrait at that moment. A queer feeling came over him. He had been joking about the ghosts the night before. He was by no means a superstitious man, but at the instant it was like fifty years being snatched from his own life: he could have sworn he heard someone saying, “You’re getting warm.”

  Why the devil should he think of a childhood game…here? Probably in this room as a child the General himself had visited his own father, and got advice he didn’t take. Except for the General, there were two hundred years’ of lawyers in the family, including this old geezer on the wall. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” Tully muttered, half-jest, half-earnest.

  A person got a funny feeling sitting under his stare, the heavy-lidded eyes. He was a character, too, no doubt. Tully tried to put himself back in the mental state where he had felt “warm.” How was it the hotel clerk had described the General’s male companion? Salesman, maybe of gadgets for a penny arcade. And the elevator boy: circus maybe, fight promotor…that carnival spirit…carnival…

  There was a knock at the door and Tully’s reverie was over. Jimmie came in and introduced the man with him, August Fowler, the General’s literary agent.

  Fowler shook hands perfunctorily and then made quite a business of staring up at the picture. “So that’s him. I remember seeing the picture in my seventh grade history. American History, seventh grade. Or was it eighth? Interesting looking face, don’t you think?”

  Since the question was asked of no one in particular, no one answered him. Jimmie told the investigator: “It seems father came on a diary of the President—not as dull as we had thought his life might have been. Fowler, here, agreed to submit it for publication.”

  “You know, Jarvis, it would be a fine idea for you to go ahead with what your father planned—write an introduction. Good for you too.”

  “In what way?” said Jimmie.

  “Is it a secret you plan to run for governor? It was no secret to your father certainly. He told me about it.”

  Tully had been watching him while he talked. A sharp forty-five, he decided, a press agent who had taken a postgraduate course and got himself a literary license. “When did all this happen, Mr. Fowler?”

  Fowler jerked his head around, as though the cat had spoken to the king. “Oh, yes. I’d forgotten. You are the police.”

  “A police,” Tully amended. “When was it you last saw the General?”

  “May I take it from the beginning of the diary episode?”

  “Why not?” Tully drawled. “Take it from a chair, too, if you like.” He gestured the man into one of the General’s easy chairs. Jimmie half sat on the desk.

  “On Thursday night he called me at home,” Fowler started.

  “What time?”

  “After nine. We had dinner guests and were just leaving the table. I suppose you’d like to know where he called from?”

  Jimmie merely raised his eyes and Tully drawled: “What makes you think so, Mr. Fowler?”

  The agent looked from face to face and then leaned back. “Why, before the General came into my office the next morning—on an appointment we had made over the phone—I had a call for him. It was from…his broker’s office. And I think we are agreed, gentlemen, that General Jarvis did not have a broker?”

  Tully noticed the little muscles of anger working at Jimmie’s mouth. This guy was too familiar, too smooth, too much the son of a bitch. “I’m not sure I’d agree to that,” Tully said, “Would you, Jimmie?”

  “Not at the moment, I won’t,” said Jimmie.

  “I beg your pardon,” Fowler said. “Let’s put it this way then: I don’t believe he had a broker. Not with a southern accent asking for ‘Ransom’ on the phone.”

  That was a score and no doubt of it, Tully thought. “As a matter of fact, we would like to know just where the General was Thursday night, Fowler.”

  “Now, I’m in a funny spot,” the agent said. “Actually, I don’t know. I thought I had the phone number, but I couldn’t find it today when I looked for it. You see when he called me, I asked to call him back and jotted down the number. I do know it’s an Eldorado exchange.”

  Tully nodded. More confirmation. That was all. But he made a note. The General had called EL at a quarter of five from his hotel room. Now at least they could place exact limits on the area where the fair lady dwelt: within the Eldorado Exchange.

  “Now,” Fowler went on, “since she called my office Friday morning, I can only assume he gave her the number or else jotted it down on a pad at her house. A fair assumption, Mr. Tully?”

  “Reasonable anyway,” Tully said.

  “Thank you,” the agent said with sarcasm. “Now I shall volunteer an impression for what it’s worth to you. When he called, I suspected he was trying to impress somebody. Frankly, I pegged it an amatory tactic. When his broker called, I was sure that’s what it had been, and I was not in very great hopes of getting anything special in the way of a manuscript.”

  “And did you get something special?”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” the agent pursed his lips. “Still, it’s not dull…as some of these things are. I was pleasantly surprised.”

  “You really feel you can get it published?” Jimmie said.

  “As I told your father, I should like to try. There are
what is known as prestige books. As a matter of fact, I should like to proceed. With your permission. No hurry of course, I don’t suppose another hundred years would make much difference.”

  Hurry up and stand still, Tully thought. “Did you bring it with you, the diary?”

  “No. It’s in my office safe.”

  Suddenly mighty precious, Tully thought, for something that laid in an old trunk for a hundred years. “Just what are the royalties on a thing like this liable to come to?”

  “Possibly no more than a thousand dollars advance,” Fowler said. “If they caught on—they have a sort of archaic splendor, you might say,—they might make all of us a bit of money.”

  “Poor father,” Jimmie said, thinking how long ago the old boy would have dug out the diary had he but known a scratch of its worth. “Did he press you for money, Fowler?”

  Fowler made a deprecating gesture. “I wouldn’t say that. I knew him well enough to be circumspect in my promises.”

  “Did he get any?” Tully asked bluntly.

  “I am not in the habit of paying money before it’s in the house,” Fowler said. “I can’t afford it.”

  That was not an answer, not absolutely, Tully thought. But he would wait a while and get at it another way. “When did he bring the book to you?”

  “First was the ten o’clock appointment. He was at my office on schedule. We merely talked. I suppose you might call it a briefing. He spoke to me from a few notes he had written out. Quite eloquently. I said if he could make the introduction and commentary as good, and if the diary had the merit he thought, I would try to place it. He said then that he would bring it in that afternoon. And that is exactly what he did. At five o’clock, he brought the diary to my office. I saw him but a moment, as my secretary will testify.”

  “Why should your secretary need to testify?” Tully said, leaning forward in the General’s chair.

  “Wasn’t General Jarvis murdered?”

  “Not that we’ve been able to prove so far. But any such information you can give us would get full consideration.”

  “Oh, no. I’ve given you what I know.” He seemed to be genuinely shocked.

  “Was that why you went fishing, yesterday—thinking the General was murdered?” Tully asked.

  “Certainly not. I had promised a friend a week ago. I was already in North Carolina when I heard that General Jarvis was dead.”

  “Didn’t you read the paper yesterday morning?”

  “I didn’t have time. Nor the desire. When I take a vacation, it’s complete.”

  “Anybody we know—your friend?” Tully said easily.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Try us.”

  Fowler looked at him venomously. Plainly the agent liked him as little as the detective liked the agent. “Wilson Dram, the writer,” he said.

  “I’ve been wanting to go fishing a long time myself,” Tully said, “I understand from Mrs. Fowler you got yourself some new equipment. Get a good buy?”

  “Not very.”

  “Where? so I’ll be sure not to go there.”

  “King’s Mart on Forty-third Street.”

  Tully nodded. “I’ll remember. I don’t suppose the General left his dispatch case in your office?”

  “No. But I remember him carrying it. Yours wasn’t it, Mr. Jarvis? I remember the initials, JRJ.”

  “It’s mine, wherever it is,” Jimmie said.

  “I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Fowler,” Tully said, getting up from the General’s desk.

  Fowler left without shaking hands. After he had seen him to the front door, Jimmie came up again. “What do you think, Jasp?”

  Tully was making notes. “I’d like to have heard his story if he didn’t think the General was murdered. Still, it’s just about as hard, Jimmie, for him to sort out the lies he’s going to tell as it is for us to sort ʼem out after he’s told them. That’s what I’m working at now, by the way.”

  26

  THE GENERAL’S FUNERAL WAS a magnificent pageant. It became an ancient warrior, some tribal chieftain, Jimmie thought, whose progeny would divide the kingdom and then war upon each other. And there, perhaps because the sermon was so dull in contrast to the setting, Jimmie thought for the first time of a will. The old man might not have had anything to leave, but he might at least have registered his good intentions. And it might carry the name of his mistress. But surely Jasper Tully had thought of that….

  The General’s funeral was an insult to civilized man. Pomp and circumstance. There were flowers here by the bushel, there was a wreath you’d expect to see around the neck of a horse after he won the Kentucky Derby, Mrs. Norris thought. But at the cemetery when taps sounded, she dabbed her eyes, and for the first time remembered Mr. Tully’s advice: watch who else is watering the grave. Matrons, they were for the most part, the women of old families, who wore their money as easy as a good pair of gloves. Unostentatious wealth: the minks between them and the damp winds looked as natural as squirrels to the woods. And there wasn’t a car of violent hue in all the mile’s caravan of them. Glimpsing the cars nearest, from under her veil, Mrs. Norris saw a face in the window of a black limousine. She groped for the hand of Helene who was standing next to her, for her own heart had begun to thump. She gave Helene’s hand a fierce squeeze, and pulled her close.

  “Look at the woman’s face in the car with the man at the wheel,” she whispered. All the other chauffeurs were standing together.

  In the time it took Helene to locate the car, the man had started its motor.

  “They’re going. Quick!” Mrs. Norris said.

  But she was asking the impossible of Helene or herself at a graveside. Neither of them could very well pick up her skirt and run. Helene, however, was graceful enough to move without plunging, and quick enough to see the face of the driver: round as a moon with but a night or two’s wane, and the color of yellow wax, like a faded sunburn. She could not see the woman at all. But she got the license number.

  Mrs. Norris lingered at the grave long enough to ask one of the attendants if there was a card on the large gaudy wreath. There was none, but he remembered the man delivering it; brought it right to the cemetery, a fellow in a black chauffeur’s suit that didn’t fit him. Looked like he was going to burst it. In fact, he looked like he was going to burst his skin, a moon of a face…

  When they got back to the house, Mrs. Norris called Mr. Tully at the New York District Attorney’s office, and told him. She also gave him the license number Helene had taken, and promised to come into the city herself the next afternoon.

  27

  JASPER TULLY HAD THOUGHT of the will. It was one of the things he had expected to see, spending Saturday night and Sunday in the country, and since he had been given carte blanche in the General’s rooms, he had searched it out among the old gentleman’s papers. A very simple affair it was: leaving both his assets and his debits to his only legitimate son, James Ransom Jarvis. It had been drawn up in 1945, and interestingly, initialed and dated in the presence of a notary once a year since. It was a blister of notary stamps. And the obvious intention was to show it as the one and only testament of Ransom Jarvis.

  Just one more item of interest in the legend of the General. Tully was rapidly filling his notebook with them. At this rate he could soon write the old rake’s biography himself.

  Meanwhile the detective had undertaken to do his own leg work, from broker’s to broker’s—the pawn brokers’ shops of Eighth Avenue. Many a rookie cop walked this beat. He had pounded its like himself—too long ago. Here was the dividing line between respectability and the downbeats. A woman fed the pigeons—clouds of them—from a paper bag, the two-bit con men spotted tourists and gave them the damnedest welcome to New York City, Buddy, can you spare five bucks? The jukeboxes moaned the whole day long; old time vaudevillians met as though by chance and regaled each other with the same old tales of going on the road so long ago the dust rose from the wagon wheels; actors sped to rehearsal, last night’s r
olled drunks to pawn five-dollar cuff-links for the price of morning coffee, lonesome old whores were walking their breedless dogs, the crippled beggars squeezed out happy music, the children of God knows who—Miguel and Joshua and Patrick—flipped pennies at the wall.

  It was a long day’s walk and the old man’s mention of Eighth Avenue might well have been a figure of speech. Tully put his question for about the thirtieth time just when the lights were going on outside the shop. The man behind the counter—a great flabby lump whose face had the grayness of nightfall in it—opened his mouth and closed it. Then he shrugged.

  Tully repeated his question, adding: “Seven decorations in all, including the Croix de Guerre and the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “I know,” the man said wearily. “I can tell you the why of all of them, what he did to get ʼem and how he got some of ʼem for things which he didn’t do.”

  Tully permitted himself a little sigh. “A talkative old fellow, eh?”

  “A salesman, he should’ve been a salesman. You know why he talked, don’t you?”

  “More money?”

  “That’s it, my friend. Five dollars worth of tin and alloy and forty-five bucks of talk. I’m a sucker for talk.”

  He was a sucker for good custom, too, Tully thought. He must have had the General’s decorations in and out many a time. The General might talk up the loan, but there were no odds at all on his chance of talking down the interest rate. “Did he give you much talk last Friday?”

  “I got the talk when he brought them in. I got abuse when he’d take them out. He’d curse me out for a usurer, a flesh-bleeder. I wish you could hear the words, some of them I never heard, a foreign language.”

  “Did he give you the treatment Friday?” Tully persisted, having in mind the old man’s reported abuse of the desk clerk.

  “Nope. You see he didn’t come in for them himself. It was his girl friend.”