Old Sinners Never Die (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 3)

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “How did he react?”

  “Formal, polite. ‘But of course, Madame Senator—I understand.’ And he was nice as pie at the Chattertons.”

  “Did you see the photostats?”

  “Well, sort of the way you see the countryside from a train window. I saw geometric drawings and math figures. I couldn’t see more, refusing to look.”

  “He wasn’t exactly covert about it, though,” Jimmie said.

  “Not in the least. And maybe you can tell me, Congressman, if that’s good or bad.”

  Jimmie grinned. “I know what you mean. Imagination and timing: most factors are alterable.”

  “Exactly. A white dress makes a black shadow.”

  Jimmie’s respect for this grey-haired, blunt woman had deepened considerably. He drew the engraved card from his pocket and gave it to her.

  “Leo Montaigne,” she said. “I sat next to him at dinner. Do you know him?”

  Jimmie shook his head. “But when I went home tonight, I found this card on the kitchen table—and nobody at home; not my housekeeper, my man, and certainly not my father. Mrs. Norris had written the words ‘Key Bridge, Arlington side’ on the table, but I don’t even know that there is any connection. I came back by way of the Key Bridge. Nothing.”

  “He can’t be more than thirty,” the senator said, “but he smells musty, talks about the Riviera. He didn’t have much to say to me, but he seemed on intimate terms with the rest of the crowd.”

  “All of them?” Jimmie queried.

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. He had an argument with d’Inde. Your father took d’Inde’s side, I think. But it was trivial. I’m sure of that. Oh, something that struck me as queer; he was sitting between me and Secretary Jennings, and do you know, he called her by her first name?”

  “Curious,” Jimmie agreed, but there was something else curious, too. He was looking at the list of guests he had compiled with d’Inde’s help. “Have you any idea what he does for a living?”

  “Yes. And come to think of it, I found out by eavesdropping on the conversation across the table—between General Jarvis and whatever her name was. Montaigne runs something called the Club Sentimentale, and this woman is supposed to sing there.”

  Jimmie got up. “Well, as they used to say in the D.A.’s office, somebody sang tonight. I think I’ll try the Club Sentimentale.”

  “Senator Chisholm, will you stay and have some coffee with me?” Helene said.

  “Bless you, girl, I will.”

  Jimmie took his hat. Helene went out to the deserted hall with him and, when he gently lifted her chin with his forefinger, kissed him as though it were going to have to last him for some time.

  “I’d almost forgotten there were moments like this,” he said.

  Helene said, “There aren’t. You have to steal them. Call me as soon as you can.”

  13

  THERE WERE NO MORE than a half-dozen private automobiles scattered along the street near the Club Sentimentale. Washington was a city of taxicabs. Sometimes Jimmie thought its economy was structured on the zoning of cab fares. Certainly the economy of government employees was. Jimmie parked his car.

  The music reaching his ears was peculiarly thin, reedy, although the beat was ragtime. An electrified carriage lamp hung at the side of the club door, one weak light bulb faintly illuminating the sign. Identification, not advertising, he thought. The building itself was like an old stable, or perhaps a dock shed. There was even the suggestion of motion, but that doubtless was due to the ripple of moonlight on the Potomac in the background. It was an eerie night, at least down here: there was much so-called postwar building under way in this area, and everywhere the night-stilled cranes, derricks and other monsters of construction stood gaunt and fearsome as some nameless survivors of a dead era. About them, too, there was a suggestion of motion: and that, Jimmie realized, was the wafting of light clouds in the sky above them. A solitary cab was parked in the hackstand, driverless.

  Jimmie opened the heavy door and went inside, ignoring the jangling bell that reacted to the door’s motion. A bar stood some distance in front of him, he thought, although it would have been better lit by pure moonlight. The music was still off somewhere like an auditory will-o’-the-wisp. He stood just inside the door, trying to accustom his eyes to the atmosphere. He sensed walls close on either side of him. Catching the scent of disinfectant he supposed the washrooms were on his left.

  Someone spoke to him from out of the darkness on his right. “Are you a member of the Sentimentale, sir?” The female voice was jazzy, coming from false tones, he would guess, deliberately off-key.

  Jimmie also guessed that he had been thoroughly observed in the few seconds by someone better accustomed to the semidarkness. He ventured to move a few steps forward. “No, I’m not. But I come well recommended. I should like to see Mr. Montaigne, please.”

  She flipped over her hand so that its palm was upturned. “Let me have your hat.”

  Jimmie, seeing better now, at least as far as he was looking, watched her sashay into the cloakroom and out again. She gave him a tab for his hat and then, hips swaying, led him into the bar-room and through it into the main clubroom. Her hair was blonde-white, glittery with some sort of luminous dust. The top of her dress was V’d, back and front, and fit her snugly but without a waistline all the way to the hips where it ruffled out into an extremely short skirt. He was put in mind of the frilled panties worn by the well-turned-out lamb chop. She might have been done up, Jimmie thought, for a Warner Baxter movie.

  And then he knew, of course, what there was about the entire place that made it dreamlike: it was a reconstructed speakeasy, a club of the ’twenties, which Jimmie could best identify from the midnight films on television. Sitting down at the red-checked cloth and looking round at the half-curtains hung on shuttered windows, he got the feeling of being on a movie set.

  “I’ll tell Leo you want to see him,” the hostess said. “Do you want a little drink?”

  “Could I have a Scotch and soda?” Jimmie asked, not sure that such a drink was in order here.

  The blonde gave his shoulder a gentle “go-on-with-you” sort of push. “Sure. Leo’s got anything you want.”

  Something ticklish ran down Jimmie’s spine. The orchestra was playing It Happened in Monterey … a long time ago. There was a patch of dance floor in the middle of the room, but no one danced. There were maybe twenty people present, all of them bent a little forward in their seats toward the orchestra, the only variation in their attitude, the hands under some chins. Jimmie began to feel himself misplaced, an anachronism.

  Leo, Jimmie thought; it was not exactly a common name, except perhaps among popes.

  The orchestra—three pieces, a shoofly drum, a saxophone and a piano—finished Monterey. While the musicians tuned up, a faint murmur of conversation ran among the guests—or members. The lights on all the tables were heavily shaded so that Jimmie saw most people in silhouette only; nonetheless, he sensed a familiarity about two or three of them. This too made him feel uneasy about time and place, for certainly no one of his acquaintance was likely to be here—except possibly his father and he had not spotted him yet. And in truth, this place was not at all likely to be to his father’s tastes. The old boy did not live in the past, alas.

  The hostess brought his Scotch and soda—already mixed. There was not a great deal of drinking done here, Jimmie thought, if she could handle it. The customers came for some other sort of soporific.

  The hostess waited until Jimmie had taken a sip. “Okay?”

  “Thank you, it’s fine.” It was not exactly fine, but it wasn’t dreadful either.

  “Leo’s busy till after the show,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “James,” Jimmie said, reluctant to disturb his incognito.

  And that reminded him of Mrs. Norris. Where was she? Had she been here? After all, she had taken some sort of message about or by Montaigne. “Have you seen a woman here tonight, not a member
—oh, getting on toward sixty, roundish, looks a bit like Queen Victoria?”

  “Can’t you tell me her name? I wouldn’t want to commit myself on another woman’s looks.”

  Jimmie saw no harm in giving it. “Mrs. Norris.”

  The blonde shook her head.

  “What about a strapping young Irishman, good looking, in his early twenties?”

  The blonde gave a wiggle that ran from her head to her toes. “Uhn-unh, but you send him along any time. I’d love to entertain him.”

  Jimmie pulled his neck a little higher out of his collar. Most of the table lamps went out then, a master switch apparently, and a spotlight flooded the dance floor. A young man came out from behind the orchestra and down through the watchers, getting a flourish of applause as a welcome. He wore a tophat and carried a cane, and when he took off the hat, his hair was brushed back, sandy and sleek.

  “Welcome sinners …” The applause to this beginning was perfunctory. “Well, we can’t all, all the time, can we? … Just the same wasn’t it a busy day in Washington? I’m glad so many of us are gathered here together. Some, I hear, have fled to the woods. The redcoats again. I don’t think they’ve ever gone home, myself. I was just thinking about that a little while ago, and I said to myself, all right—let them stay. They can have Washington. I’ll take Paris. Anybody else want to go to Paris tonight?”

  It was fascinating, Jimmie thought, the way all these faces had turned up as to the sun. A great chorus of yeas and hurrays rang out an answer to the question the M.C. had just asked. Everybody wanted to go to Paris. He began pouring on the nostalgia then. It was better than reading Elliot Paul. And in this Paris of his, there walked yet and much alive, the long dead, Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald, Grace Moore, George Gershwin, quite as gracefully as though their future had never passed.

  He told his tale in the exhortation of an evangelist, and some people there found Paris. There were happy tears in their eyes. Jimmie began himself to dread the moment Montaigne would break the spell. The return to reality must be very harsh. It was then ten after one; at one-thirty Montaigne was telling anecdotes still, and much as though they flowed from recent memory, memory as detailed as the prose of Marcel Proust.

  Jimmie remembered then d’Inde’s remark about Montaigne—very gay but reactionary, and there were words about Mussolini and Hitler between him and the General. Such names would spoil his séance, like a dead cat tossed into a banquet. And yet, not necessarily. The world he was recreating would acknowledge the dictators only in their early promise, not their grim fulfilment. Montaigne might even affect an admiration for Mussolini, as a number of young men did, sojourning in Italy in those days.

  Jimmie was caught up in admiration despite his first and deep revulsion. Young Montaigne had the imagination of genius. He had actually brought to life a dead world and closed out the living present. He had, for as long as he regaled them, taken twenty-five years from the lives of each member of his cult. How often, Jimmie wondered, could he do this? Was tonight a very special occasion? Jimmie doubted that one of such imagination could stand self-repetition indefinitely. Then what? And how did he come by this depth of verisimilitude? Not merely out of books, off films. Jimmie would suspect there was a real live model—perhaps clinging to a lost youth of her own by making him her lover … Speculation, yes. Virginia Allan? Then what was she doing with Father?

  Suddenly it was over. A stillness and a limpness pervaded the room, the people hangdog. No applause. Gloom. Montaigne himself stood, his head lolling forward, his long hair streaming over his face, his arms dangling. It might have been the awed moment after a magnificent orchestral performance, and he the conductor. And in a way it had been just that.

  Someone at a table nearby sobbed. There had been an attempt to stifle it, but the sound of repressed emotion escaped.

  Montaigne lifted his head and threw back the hair from his face. “No tears tonight!” he cried out. “I promise you the night has just begun. Stay with me, friends, and watch. Your vigil will have its own reward. Now!” He threw back his shoulders and rubbed his hands together.

  “Now. In the absence tonight of our dear old Virginny …”

  “No! No!”

  “We want Virginia!”

  “Virginia Allan!”

  There was an increasingly vigorous protest from the audience. Montaigne seemed to lose his temper.

  “I tell you she is not here! She ran off tonight with an Army man. …”

  Someone tittered. Montaigne screamed, “It isn’t funny at all, you fools!”

  Some woman in the audience made a soothing noise, as she would perhaps to a child. Jimmie could feel the sweat break out on his back.

  Montaigne threw his head back and gave a violent direction of his arm, pointing to the orchestra. “Play, you clowns! Dolores, come out here and sing!”

  He half-walked, half-glided then among the tables and off to the room behind the orchestra, never pausing an instant and rejecting all the hands of women flung out to him as he passed. Jimmie started to get up, intending to confront him at once.

  The hostess, behind him, put her hand on his shoulder. “Not now.”

  “When?”

  “After Dolores gets off. Wouldn’t you like another of those?” She indicated his drink.

  “All right,” Jimmie said, but resolved not to drink it. He waited until the woman was out of sight, intending then to make his own way to Montaigne. Dolores was singing, something inane and in a voice he could only think of as dollish. Even he could tell she was phony. No umph. Jimmie had passed but a few tables when he stopped and sat down at the next empty one. Montaigne was at the door, smoking, watching Dolores through the smoke with an intentness Jimmie had rarely known in anyone who wasn’t in love.

  Although Montaigne himself led the applause the rest of it was only perfunctory. Jimmie took a good look at Dolores as she left the floor. She might not have nostalgia, he thought, nor “it”, nor “umph”, and she might not fit the ‘twenties’ makeup someone had plastered on her, but she had one thing in common with Leo Montaigne that so far as Jimmie had observed no one else in the house shared: she too was very young.

  14

  THE GENERAL STOOD, HIS hands behind his back, before the fireplace in which there was no fire because Miss Virginia Allan was concerned about a bird’s nest in the chimney. The wall above the mantel was a virtual arsenal of weapons—shotguns, a rifle, a snub-nosed revolver, a set of pistols, really nasty looking.

  “Those are my souvenirs, Ransom,” Virginia purred up at him from the sofa.

  “Of what, my dear?” The General half-expected her to say of her late husbands.

  “My hunts for antiques.”

  “Not all of them are antique, you know.”

  “I know. There’s one or two I keep workable in case I need ’em—you know, a woman all alone this way in the wilderness.”

  The General would not like to have given odds on the times she had been alone in the wilderness.

  “Are you a good shot, Ransom?”

  “Passable.”

  Virginia laughed, quite prettily. “I’m only passable myself. Come here, honey.”

  The General skipped across the room.

  “Sit down nice and comfy and I’ll fetch you another drink.” She was up before he was down so there was little point in protest. But he resolved he had taken his last gambol at her command. It was getting on toward two in the morning, and he had not yet discovered what she was up to. That in itself had become a challenge. He brushed his eyes with his hand. He had better go lightly on the whisky or that would be a challenge, too. He was a man who could drink a great deal—in the right company. But he needed good, solid talk, something to tear apart and shake up while he was drinking. And there was no use deluding himself, he had not come here for intellectual stimulation.

  She returned and once more they touched their glasses. “I had to switch you to bourbon, Ransom. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Whisky,�
� he said profoundly, “is whisky.” He had just about had enough.

  “Have you ever drunk vodka?”

  “I don’t like the stuff. False friend.”

  “Just like the Russians, I daresay.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” the General said. “You make a friend of a Russian and you can’t get rid of him. He comes to you and sits with his soul. He brings it to you like—a pomegranate, breaks it open in front of you and expects you to sit and pick at it with him.”

  “I’ve never had a pomegranate,” Virginia said.

  The General took a great gulp of whisky to avoid saying what was on his tongue.

  “Tell me some more about the Russians. Where did you get to know them, Ransom? You’ve been just everywhere.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” He lifted one eyebrow in self-mockery.

  She wrinkled her nose at him and laid her hand in his. “Go on.”

  “I never knew a Russian half as interesting as you, Virginia,” he lied out of an old gallantry. “What about this boyfriend of yours—what’s his name—Montaigne?”

  Just a flicker of what might be malice seemed to have touched her eyes. “Are you interested in him or me, Ransom?”

  The General feigned hurt. “Don’t you think I could better ask that question at the moment? Did you bring me here to make him jealous?”

  She gave a little “ha!” that was quite bitter.

  “Is he by any chance going to burst in here and snatch up one of those guns and run me down the hill with it?”

  Virginia Allan looked deeply into her glass which he noticed she was holding very tightly. “No, he isn’t,” she said.

  The General reached across and patted her knee. He was beginning to feel paternal. “That’s much too bad, isn’t it?”