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

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Gone?”

  “Legs like rubber hoses.”

  Tully leaned forward and put his finger on the cabbie’s chest. “Think about this, man: was it an act?”

  “I’d say it was more an act than real, mister. Nobody could be that far gone and talkin’.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, sir, I heard some of the damnedest cussin’ ever lighted up Fifth Avenue. And I’ll tell you, I felt real sorry for the little lady. She was shushin’ him, and makin’ all kinds of sympathic clucks. And I’ll tell you, mister, she didn’t look like an old hen type. I wouldn’t be surprised she was actin’ too. Could’ve been. Looked like a actress. Old-timer maybe. Boop-oopidoop, or whatever that was, diamonds are a girl’s last friend, you know?”

  “I know,” Tully said.

  “I got out to give ʼem a hand, hold the door, something like that? Sitting looking all day at the rear bumpers of hacks, cars, busses, you don’t get a show like that was. Boy, that chauffeur was pushing my chest in in a minute. The other guy, helping the old man in, he took some money out of his pocket, give it to the chauffeur to give me, and says ‘Thanks just the same,’ to me. D’you know what that bloated buzzard did? He looked at the bill. Whatever it was, he put it in his own pocket and gave me fifty cents. I’d like to’ve bounced it on the sidewalk in front of him. But I didn’t. He wasn’t the kind you monkey around with, I’ll tell you.”

  Tully nodded. “How long did he wait for them to come out?”

  “He didn’t. Got in, drove away. Clean. You can tell when somebody’s got to poke around the block a half hour.”

  “No reason for you to’ve noticed his license, I suppose.”

  “Jersey,” the cabbie said, “that’s all I noticed.”

  “How did you figure it?”

  “Well, sir,” said the cabbie, “I just thought to myself, the poor, old bastard. He’s just been rolled for everything he’s got, except what’s inside him. I figured him to’ve gone to one of them joints in New Jersey. Girls, gambling, the works. When it was all over, the boss, I figured, got his stooge to drive him home, that’s Moon-face. The other two, I don’t know. Maybe they picked him up here and took him over there, figuring a cut. Then again, maybe she got him, working alone, and when he passed out, this other guy was her steady boy friend. Sharp, her own class he was.”

  “Interesting,” Tully said. “You’re a pretty hep boy. I’ll recommend you for the force if you ever want to put your cab to pasture.”

  “You mean it?”

  Tully thought about it further. “As a matter of fact, I do.” There was something very canny in the lad’s story, he was sure. It came closer to the truth as he thought he could smell truth, than any tale he’d heard so far. “But now, how could the old man’ve been rolled if he wasn’t drunk? If he was pretending, like you thought?”

  “I didn’t think he was pretending till you put it up to me, sir,” the young cabbie said after a moment’s thought.

  “You know what I’d like you to do for me now?” Tully said. “Take a pencil and paper and write out all the curse words you heard. Don’t make any up, just the ones you remember.”

  The cabbie grinned. “A pleasure.”

  Later, when he compared the testimony, he saw that it pretty well tallied with the hotel employees’ statements: the only difference being, that the cabbie didn’t use abbreviations.

  Tully called his friend, the psychiatrist. The subject of hypnosis was less likely to use the language proposed to him by the hypnotist than to fall back on his own. This was New York street talk, Tully thought. The General might not find it offensive, but the detective just didn’t think his tongue would curl round it easy. The method might be like him, but the substance wasn’t. Not quite it wasn’t. The General had used his own style many times upon the pawnbroker, and this wasn’t it.

  The detective looked at his watch. He had enough time to brief the D.A. and do one more stretch of legwork before driving uptown to pick up Mrs. Norris.

  The legwork, merely a figure of speech this time, since he knew where he was going, took him to King’s Mart on Forty-third Street. August Fowler had said he equipped himself there for his sudden fishing trip. It might be a lousy pun, Tully thought, but fishy was the word for an urge to go on a sporting expedition such as you had never gone on before, and to do it on the morning after a client of considerable distinction is come upon dead. Especially when you were one of the last people to have seen him, certainly the last to do business with him. Just how fishy it was, Tully hadn’t realized until he asked the manager of King’s Mart, who had himself waited on Fowler, how much equipment the agent had bought.

  “It came to eight hundred and ten dollars,” the man said.

  Tully rolled his tongue around the phrase. He could almost taste it, a pleasurable bit to a detective who was tasting his first real substance. “Eight hundred and ten dollars, with tax, I presume.”

  “With tax.”

  “He wasn’t after perch, was he?”

  “Bass, I believe,” the manager said, not sharing Tully’s pleasure at all. “He said he expected to do quite a bit of fishing. Health, he said. Better than doctor bills.”

  “Weren’t you impressed with a purchase like that?”

  “Only enough to wait on him myself,” the manager said. Tully thought he might have humor after all. But it was said in deadly earnest. “He wanted advice.”

  “Do the bass really run in March?”

  “They do off North Carolina.”

  “Pretty cold though, isn’t it?”

  “I equipped him for that.”

  “I’ll bet,” Tully said. “And he took it all with him, paying cash. Or was it a check?”

  “Cash, sir.”

  “Would you’ve taken his check?”

  “Certainly. He’s a reputable business man.”

  “I guess he is at that,” Tully drawled. “But didn’t you have any thoughts about how a man would be carrying that much cash?”

  “Thoughts like that are valuable only to a policeman,” the manager said.

  “Touché,” said Tully, “or whatever it is they say in France. If I was to ask you now to give a guess as to where he got it, what would you say?”

  The man shrugged. “Gambling, perhaps, which is no sin in my books.”

  “I think he was gambling all right,” Tully said. “I think maybe he was gambling that me or somebody like me would be coming in here to talk to you. How much did he pay you to lay it on juicy and thick, just like you’ve done now?”

  The man lost neither his temper nor his color. “I will give you the duplicate of his sales slip, officer, and I will put at your disposal our price lists. You can add it up, and I will stake my honor on your computation.”

  “Do that,” Tully said. “Send it to the District Attorney’s office marked for me.”

  Tully stalked out of the shop. He didn’t like showing his temper, but he didn’t like to miss by as wide a margin as he now feared he had in accusing the manager of consciously collaborating Fowler’s story.

  The King’s man was incorruptible, of course, Tully mulled the words to himself, checking his notebook in the car for something else in Fowler’s story. He was going fishing with Wilson Dram, the writer. Tully drove up to Forty-seventh Street and consulted a dear little wisp of an Irish friend at Brentano’s. Five minutes later he knew who Dram’s publisher was, and a phone call there revealed that Dram had a home in Briarwood, Connecticut.

  Tully drove to East Side Homicide, the nearest police facilities. Then he played a hunch. He got in touch with the First National Bank of Briarwood, whistling softly while he waited. Even while he passed the amenities with the cashier, however, his mood changed; he realized that something was wrong with his theory. He tried it anyway.

  “Wilson Dram does have an account with you people?”

  “A substantial one, sir,” the cashier said.

  “When I put in this call,” Tully explained then, �
�I was going to ask you if he by any chance made a substantial withdrawal, say a thousand dollars, on the morning of March seventeenth. Then I realized that was Saturday. You’re closed then, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So he couldn’t have made it then?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  “Just for the hell of it, check yesterday and today, will you?”

  Tully watched the second hand round the clock four times.

  “Mr. Tully? Nothing, sir. But I’ve just talked with Mr. Ryan, our president, a personal friend of Mr. Dram’s. He would like to speak to you.”

  “Put him on,” Tully said.

  “I speak in absolute confidence,” Ryan started.

  “A policeman’s confidence can’t be very absolute, Mr. Ryan,” the detective said. “But I don’t think this information is going to hurt your client.”

  “I suppose you could get an order anyway,” the banker said.

  “Real easy,” said Tully.

  “Dram made a personal loan of all I could give him early Saturday morning. Got me out of bed for it about seven-thirty. He wanted a thousand. I could give him six hundred and did. I expect he approached one or two other people for the rest. He said a friend of his was in trouble.”

  “He’s going to be, Mr. Ryan. You can be pretty sure of that. Thanks very much. Just keep my call to yourself for a while, and I’ll do the same about where I got my information.”

  “I would deeply appreciate that,” the banker said.

  Tully had been going to get in touch with Dram. He decided there was not much point to it for the present. Dram would only lie—at least until he went under oath for his friend, Fowler.

  So, he thought, driving uptown to the Rockland bus station, when August Fowler learned that General Jarvis was dead, he had found it absolutely imperative to alibi himself with an expenditure of a near thousand dollars, and quick. His own bank account, wherever he kept it, and an hour’s exploration should discover that, would no doubt show a cash withdrawal of ten one hundred dollar bills sometime between ten a.m. and bank closing, Friday. The General was still in pocket near a thousand dollars when he died, Friday. Not for anything, did Augie Fowler want to be connected with the General’s pocket money.

  Why not?

  31

  MRS. NORRIS HAD A few things of her own to say when she got off the bus with the assistance of a hand from the gallant Jasper Tully. They both started to talk at once, then both were silent at once, and both then broke into laughter.

  In the car, Mrs. Norris took from her purse a piece of ribbon and handed it to the detective. The name of the shop from which it came was stamped on it: Eric’s Flowers…and with a number on Third Avenue, New York.

  “Aren’t you interested in how I came by it?” she said in a small huff when Tully merely grunted.

  “Oh, I am, I am.” The devil a person was interested in how he came by his information, as long as he got it. But sure it was his business. “Forgive me, dear lady.”

  “Well, I reported to you on the telephone, Mr. Tully, the vulgar floral piece I took to have come from that woman?”

  “You did,” said Tully. “Very observant of you.”

  “I knew it ne’er came from Rockland County,” she continued, “whatever we lack up there, we’ve taste. Well then, the more I thought of it through the morning, and knowing yesterday to’ve been a bit crisp, I wondered if the florist wouldn’t have wrapped something round it to protect the flowers from frost in transit.”

  “Worthy of Holmes himself,” cried Tully.

  “Will you stop it, man!” Mrs. Norris fanned her face. “So I called up Mr. Hanson who’s by way of being a friend of mine—especially at Christmas. He’s Sanitary Commissioner, you understand. He drove out himself to the refuse baskets near the cemetery gate. And sure enough, he found a whirl of papers and this ribbon inside it.”

  “A valuable piece of detection, Mrs. Norris, and that’s not flattery. You may have put us closer to her than we’ve been to date. She has a parakeet, by the way.”

  “A gaudy wench, Mr. Tully. I’m shocked even at the General.”

  “But simple tastes,” Tully speculated.

  “You call that horseshoe of a wreath simple?”

  “I’d forget about that, but don’t you see, Mrs. Norris, that was by way of her last tribute to him. It was nothing she asked for herself.”

  “That’s so,” Mrs. Norris said thoughtfully, and glanced at him sideways.

  “Well. I happen to know a very nice little restaurant in that neighborhood. If you’ll take your dinner with me, Mrs. Norris, we’ll kill two birds with a single sling. What do you say?”

  “I’ll have to let Master Jamie know where I am.”

  “Oh, we’ll do better than that. I’ve to report a thing or two to him myself, and they’ve asked us for a drink, you know, at Mrs. Joyce’s.”

  “Oh, I know Mrs. Joyce all right. I’m spending the night there, her guest mind you.”

  “A lovely woman,” Tully said. “Now first we have a bit of investigating to do.”

  “Both of us?”

  Tully nodded. “We’re going to stop at the office of General Jarvis’ literary agent.” And on the way he accounted his information on August Fowler.

  32

  TULLY STOOD, HAT IN hand, beside Mrs. Norris before Fowler’s receptionist. He was, even stooping a little, head, shoulders, and almost an elbow taller than the dumpy little bundle of dignity beside him. Mrs. Norris’ hands were composed like a queen’s, over the leather bag. And the detective wondered how Fowler’s lacquered blonde would place him and the lady. He had no intention of properly identifying himself until he could strike Fowler a surprise blow.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Fowler isn’t in,” she said, not even amusement in her eyes.

  “When will he be back, ma’am?” Tully rolled his hat brim round in his hand, heightening the pose he had struck of a country lad on his first city venture.

  The blonde shrugged. “Five o’clock possibly.”

  “What do you think, child?” he said to Mrs. Norris, his long face solemn. “Havin’ come all this way, we ought to see him.”

  All Mrs. Norris could manage was to nod her head.

  The switchboard needed attention. The receptionist snapped them a smile, and attended a call… Her voice had the sound of having attended similar calls all afternoon. “Yes, Mr. Python…I’ll tell him, Mr. Python. As soon as he comes in, sir…. Mr. Python, I am not lying to you. There are people here in the office right now waiting for him…”

  Tully and Mrs. Norris had taken chairs side by side. “What kind of name is that, Python?” said Mrs. Norris.

  “He likes to be called a snake,” Tully said. “Haven’t you ever heard of the columnist, Lem Python?”

  “Oh him,” she said with withering scorn.

  “It’s a most peculiar world we live in, Mrs. Norris. Sometimes I think there’s people around today who regret not having been born in the Garden of Eden just so they could commit original sin.”

  The receptionist broke one phone connection and opened another, apparently to an inner office. “Mr. P. again, Julie. What do I tell him next? Boiling…oh, honey, I want to live. I’ll give him to you next time…”

  Again she stretched a rubbery smile at Tully and Mrs. Norris and snapped it off. “I don’t really think Mr. Fowler is going to be able to see you folks today,” she said. “Why don’t you make an appointment and come back tomorrow?”

  Mr. Tully got to his feet hat clutched to chest. “Do you think we ought to stay in New York, child. Even tonight?”

  Mrs. Norris opened her mouth and closed it. She could not play the game. And that merely provoked Tully into greater exaggeration.

  “Wouldn’t you like to tell me your business? Maybe I could help you,” the blasé blonde suggested.

  That was exactly the cue Mr. Tully wanted. “Well, I tell you, miss,” he drawled. “My sister and me were fixin’ to write a
book. We get to see all kind of people in our business, you understand?”

  “What business are you in?” she said, and stretched her mouth over a yawn.

  “We run a H house…flowers, you know, a hot-house.”

  At least, he thought, he had spoiled a good yawn. She looked him over then, and apparently decided he was genuine.

  “I don’t really think Mr. Fowler would be the agent for you folks. But why don’t you go home and call him up tomorrow morning?”

  “Early?”

  “Very early, say eleven o’clock.”

  By the time they reached the elevator, Mrs. Norris allowed herself to giggle.

  “I’d like to have seen her expression if I’d given her the D.A.’s card,” Tully said.

  “That lass lost her expression with her virtue,” Mrs. Norris said.

  Tully sighed. “No doubt, no doubt.”

  33

  “YES,” JIMMIE SAID, PACING back and forth before the terrace window, “I kissed her. Furthermore she liked it.”

  “But of course she liked it,” Helene said sweetly. “I told you she was in love with you. Furthermore, if you really want to be governor, you’re going to have to kiss her again and again, having started it.”

  Jimmie stopped in his tracks. “It wasn’t so hard to do, you know. And it’s a hell of a lot better than smacking babies.”

  Helene gave a vigorous stir to the martinis. “Okay, darling. You’re on loan till after elections. I’ll get more work done.”

  “Nice,” Jimmie said, tracing his finger about a granite nude. “I haven’t seen this before, have I?”

  “You have. I’m going to put it in the garden. It’s weatherable.”

  “Very,” Jimmie murmured. “What do you mean, I’m on loan? Stop treating me like something you’ve carved out of stone.”

  “Pygmalion-femina.” Helene refilled his glass, then touched hers to it. “Or perhaps it will be best after all if I avail myself of Judge Turner’s fellowship.”