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

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Jimmie laughed. “I wonder what your friend Tully would say to that.”

  “He would agree likely. Mr. Tully is not a contentious man when it comes to nationalities.”

  “True enough,” said Jimmie, for he knew Jasper Tully well. That long, melancholy detective was chief investigator in the District Attorney’s office, and had been through many administrations, including Jimmie’s own a few years past. He poured Mrs. Norris her usual finger of Scotch whiskey straight and mixed himself one with soda. “Do you still call him Mister Tully to his face also?” he teased. “You’ve known him for quite a while now.”

  Mrs. Norris pulled an extra inch of height from her dumpy shape. “I don’t approve the informality in the world today, Mr. James. It’s made strangers of us all.”

  Jimmie thought about it and then nodded acquiescence. He gave her her glass and lifted his own. He was a long moment contemplating the toast that was to be given on this occasion. It might be said that he was abandoning the house in which he had been born. Abandoning it or escaping it and the man whose personality marked it more deeply than had his own.

  “To father,” he said at last. “May he rest in peace.”

  Mrs. Norris paused in the act of lifting the glass to her lips. “I’m not at all certain he would have said ‘amen’ to that, Master Jamie.”

  “Then, being his sole heir and executor, I shall say it for him,” Jimmie said, and added in gentle irony: “Prithy peace, amen.”

  The late Ransom Jarvis, retired major general of the United States Army, had left an estate of three dollars and seventeen cents.

  2

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING Jimmie commenced the pattern of what he expected to set as daily routine: the reading of The New York Times at breakfast, the walk to the Lexington Avenue subway, and the reading of the Herald Tribune on the ride downtown to the Wall Street office of Johnson, Wiggam and Jarvis.

  All his life he had enjoyed the setting of patterns—almost as much as he enjoyed breaking them. He had served in many capacities for a man his age, most of which had at one time or other benefited by his having been trained in the Law. He wondered if, now that he was determined to confine himself to its practice, his novitiate to politics would benefit him. He thought it likely. He had been defeated recently as candidate for governor of the state. And never had he stood so well with the very senior and very proper members of the law firm.

  An unsuccessful candidacy for high political office had certain things to recommend it, he mused. More to the respectable citizenry than, say, retirement from that high office. It might be implied, albeit the matter was insusceptible of proof, that the unsuccessful candidate had been above the making of deals. Impotence therein shone as virtue. Meanwhile it was patently obvious that no one fresh out of office had any right-of-way whatever in traffic with those who had succeeded him. But he was expected to run that way all the same, and was therefore damned twice for but one failure.

  Shakespeare could have made a sonnet of that, Jimmie thought, and turned to the editorial page.

  His secretary greeted him with too much cheer for a Monday morning. He expected bad news. With his mail she brought him word that Mr. Wiggam was waiting to see him on a matter of urgency.

  “Urgency?” Jimmie repeated. It was a word rarely used in the office.

  “He came to your office himself,” the girl amended.

  The placement of his office at the opposite end of the floor from the senior partners’ was a source of irritation to Jimmie. “He likes to take long walks in the morning,” he said. He was not long, however, in answering Wiggam’s summoning.

  Mr. Wiggam gave the first few seconds to a visual appraisal of the junior member of the firm. The wistful lingering of his eyes on Jimmie’s midriff suggested one of two things: either he would have liked to see what there was of it encased in a vest and bound by a watch chain, or he was being nostalgic after his own lean-bellied days. Finally he inquired after Mrs. Norris. Still later he brought himself to the matter which, urgent or not, was obviously painful.

  “Do you know the Adkins family?”

  Jimmie furrowed his brow in thought.

  “Weston, Connecticut. Particularly, have you heard of the son, Theodore Adkins?”

  “Not to my recollection,” Jimmie said.

  “Very old family. Georgianna—the mother—has been a friend of my family for years.” Wiggam drew a deep breath. “The boy—Teddy, that is—has got himself into something. A paternity action has been brought against him.”

  Small wonder Wiggam was pained. Johnson, Wiggam and Jarvis refused divorce cases. Jimmie thought it duly retributive that such a case as this be thrust upon them. But he pulled a long face.

  “Teddy is a bachelor,” Wiggam proceeded, “a condition which, I suppose, makes him susceptible to this sort of thing.”

  Jimmie, himself a bachelor, said: “Married men are even more susceptible, for which I suppose society should be grateful.”

  Wiggam cleared his throat. “I referred to the susceptibility to blackmail. And that’s what it is, whether or not he’s the father of this bastard.” He seemed to take a great deal of satisfaction out of the specifics of language, Jimmie thought.

  “He will contest the suit?” he asked.

  “I should certainly expect him to,” Wiggam said. “That is a matter to be worked out between him and counsel.”

  “I take it you have accepted the retainer?” Jimmie said, scoring every point now that he could for himself.

  “I could not do anything else,” Wiggam said sharply. “The man’s mother and mine went to school together.”

  That gave Jimmie some pause. He had thought they were talking of someone young and hot-blooded. “How old is Teddy-boy?”

  Mr. Wiggam winced. “Mid-fifties, I suppose.”

  Jimmie made a quick calculation of the age of a mother of a lad of fifty-five. Wiggam was not easily cowed. A dowager Lysistrata, by the sounds of it.

  “Fine woman, his mother. You will want to meet her,” Wiggam said brightly, confirming thereby Jimmie’s worst premonitions.

  “I doubt it,” Jimmie said. “I assume from your confidence, sir, I am to take on the defense?”

  “Johnson and I are convinced that without your active return to the firm, we could not have undertaken it, and Georgianna would never have understood our position.”

  “Does she understand her son’s position?” Jimmie asked, intending the question to be taken as rhetorical.

  “She is not an unworldly woman, Jim. You will have no trouble understanding one another.”

  Jimmie grinned. “I wondered which of my qualities recommended me to this assignment. My worldliness, is that it?”

  Wiggam said it with a straight face: “Precisely. Your sensitivity to the areas of what I may call ‘plunder,’ the plunder by one man of another’s privacy.”

  It was not a lecture Jimmie needed to attend. He had made copy for more than one gossip columnist in his career. The remarks, however, told him obliquely the extent of Mr. Wiggam’s bias in the case, a bias natural enough to a man of his peculiar social consciousness.

  “You would not allow the complainant any merit to her suit?”

  “Certainly not,” Wiggam said.

  “Has she money?”

  “I have no notion. I should think not or she could not expect to win out over respectability. Deprivation is her only plea, deprivation suing plenty. And she will, of course, insist upon a jury trial, praying that that prospect will force you into a settlement.”

  “Are you sure you’re not her advocate, sir?”

  Wiggam was not amused.

  “When do I meet our client?” Jimmie said.

  “This evening. I have suggested that he call on you at home tonight—or as soon as you can conveniently see him there. I consider it a matter too delicate for the office.”

  It was Jimmie’s turn to be not amused. Such availability had not been in his scheme of things when he decided on a city re
sidence for winter.

  3

  MRS. NORRIS HAD BEEN expecting Mr. Tully to dinner that evening; she had laid in an excellent steak for him only to have him phone in the late afternoon and offer the most mournful of regrets. A policeman’s lot: murder for his dinner. She wished him a ‘good appetite’ that was neither tart nor sweet, taking herself a certain relish in the less sordid aspects of Mr. Tully’s business. She suggested that he might stop by for a cup of tea if he were able to make it before midnight.

  She turned then to the refinements of settling the new household, the arrangement of the silver in the butler’s pantry. Mr. James was out to dinner. He expected a caller at nine o’clock and if he was not himself home then, Mrs. Norris had her instructions. At two minutes after nine the doorman phoned up to say that Mr. Adkins was in the elevator. Mrs. Norris washed her hands.

  When she opened the door to him he was standing like something fresh out of a box, a bald, shining little man, scarcely taller than herself, his skin a scrubbed pink, his eyes almost a mad blue, they were so bright and lively. Whether he lingered those thirty seconds to appraise her or to be himself appraised, it would have been hard to say. No doubt of it, he liked to make an impression. And he had succeeded.

  “Mr. Jarvis expects me, madam. I am Theodore Adkins.”

  Glimpsing in the mirror his passage down the hall after her, his balance seeming to settle in his heels with every step, Mrs. Norris was reminded of a penguin. A pleasant enough bird, she reasoned, if you didn’t have to do its laundry.

  “Mr. Jarvis will be home very soon, sir,” she said, throwing open the library door. “He bade me set the fire in here for you and offer his apologies if he was delayed. Can I bring you something?”

  Mr. Adkins drew a chair closer to the blazing fire and settled himself like a nesting bird before answering. He turned a cherubic face up into hers. “What would you suggest?”

  “Brandy?” The burr native so many years before to her tongue turned up again at that instant, her having taken a slight pique at the man’s leisure with her time as well as his own.

  “By my soul, you’re Scotch!” he cried.

  “I am.” Her antagonism vanished. She dearly loved being discovered for what she was.

  The man made a lacework of fingers far too delicate for the stomach over which he entwined them. “When I was a boy I knew Highlands and Lowlands. I had a governess who finished off prayers with me every night with a verse you might find familiar:

  ‘From ghouls and ghosties

  And three legged hosties

  And things that go bump in the night

  The Lord deliver us…’”

  Mr. Adkins smiled ruefully and shook his head. “I don’t know what it was that the Lord delivered me from in answer to her prayers, but do you know, I’ve taken an inordinate degree of pleasure ever since in things that go bump in the night?”

  What a delightful man, Mrs. Norris thought. “You might like a glass of port, sir,” she suggested. “I’ve heard Mr. James recommend it to the real connoisseurs.”

  “Will you have a glass with me?”

  “No, sir, I will not,” she said, and with genuine regret that a man of such obvious high station should show such low taste.

  He popped to his feet and gave a deep bow. “Forgive the familiarity, dear lady. Something in the moment brought me back to the company of my own Miss Ramsey.”

  “I am a widow,” Mrs. Norris said, her emphasis on the word making the distinction between herself and his own Miss Ramsey even stronger.

  “Of a sea captain,” Mr. Adkins cried.

  “He was a man of the sea,” she admitted in some awe of the inner sight the man must possess.

  “And lost at sea, wasn’t he?”

  “Aye, sir, a long time ago.”

  “And you’ve been faithful to his memory all these years,” he said with an awesome respect.

  “He gave me no reason to forget him, poor boy,” Mrs. Norris chimed, aware of growing lugubrious. The truth was that he had given her little reason to remember him either.

  “Then he did leave you provided for,” Mr. Adkins said.

  Mrs. Norris lifted her chin. “Aye. With a sea bag to pack my duds in.”

  Mr. Adkins blinked his eyes at her in mute admiration. “I shall have the port, thank you.”

  The tastefulness and timeliness of his dismissal thereby recovered for him completely the esteem he had lost so early. He was merely impetuous, impetuous and open-hearted, Mrs. Norris decided, and she wondered—as she rarely did of his affairs—on what business Mr. James was seeing this remarkable man.

  Buy A Gentleman Called Now!

  About the Author

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.

  Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1957 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Copyright renewed 1985 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  978-1-4804-6030-0

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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