Read Death of an Old Sinner Online
Authors: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Death of an Old Sinner
“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —
The Denver Post
“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —
The Miami Herald
“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes,
Los Angeles Times
“A joyous and unqualified success.” —
The New York Times
on
Death of an Old Sinner
“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —
Daily Mirror
(London) on
Death of an Old Sinner
“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —
The New York Times
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A Gentleman Called
“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —
Chicago Tribune
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A Gentleman Called
“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —
The New Yorker
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The Judas Cat
“A book to be long remembered.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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A Town of Masks
“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —
The New York Times
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The Clay Hand
“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —
The New York Times
on
A Death in the Life
“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —
Library Journal
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The Habit of Fear
“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and
Shock Wave
is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Shock Wave
A Mrs. Norris Mystery
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
1
O
N GRAY DAYS GENERAL
Jarvis was restless. He loathed the country, he loathed the house, a rambling, rattling affair in the wind which seemed now when he was approaching old age, to be making the same ghostly insinuations with which it had mocked him in his childhood. In those days it had boasted its Hudson River lore, a hideaway for river pirates, a refuge for runaway slaves, its acquaintance with men like Major Andre and Benedict Arnold, Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, the first Dutch burghers… Lies all, of course, to be perpetrated only in a child’s mind. The house was Victorian. But now, he thought, looking down to the drifts of snow which sloped to the drop above the river’s edge, it told an obvious truth: for all its groans and sighs, it would survive him by at least a generation.
“Oh, do be quiet,” he said, returning to his desk. That, too, was a nasty habit of age—old people forever talking to inanimate things: abusing a rocker, begging the fire not to go out on them. He looked at the title on the folder before him:
The Memoirs of Major General Ransom Jarvis, U.S. Army, Retired.
Start it off with a few boyhood reminiscences, he had been advised. Well, he could remember fox hunting in Rockland County, and ice-boat racing on the Hudson above Hook Mountain. He remembered the coaches that met trains at the Piermont terminal a few miles south. He had held the horses while they loaded. And your ancestors, something about them. There was a president in the family, wasn’t there? Not much of a president, the General thought now, looking up at the portrait of a face with an expression quite as sour as his own mood. And your military career, of course. Five continents, three wars. The General puffed his cheeks and exploded a blast of air that would have shivered Ulysses. Some men at seventy-two might be content with their memoirs, their sherry, their dogs. His bored him to despair. The only things worth telling raised the question of libel, violation of other peoples’ privacy, or some such nonsense, and might also vicariously injure the career of his promising son. Don’t you mean the promising career of your son, General? he asked himself on behalf of some editorial inquisitor.
“No, by God! I mean my promising son. The things that lad has promised me…” The General rooted in the top drawer for his bank book, knowing exactly how little was tallied there and how long it needed to last him. He had already spent the advance payment on his memoirs, and thus far had made no more than a few skirmishes into its writing, neat little phrases in an elegant, old-fashioned law clerk’s hand. That, indeed, was where he had learned to write, at the desk of his father’s clerk. It was too bad, the General thought, snapping closed the bank book, that he hadn’t been apprenticed to a forger in his youth. He might now be able to write a check someone in Nyack would honor; no one would honor one with his signature certainly.
He heard a door bang downstairs, and presently from the courtyard the off-key voice of Mrs. Norris as she raised it as high as the wind. She had been keeping the Nyack house for him since Jimmie was an infant and himself a widower, and she couldn’t carry a better tune now than she could…how long?…oh my God, over forty years ago. It was unworthy of him, the General knew, but he could not avoid the thought of how her bank book must compare with his.
He decided to shave before going to her.
Mrs. Norris could have predicted, almost to the hour, the General’s descent from his study. It was a great waste on the part of the United States Army to retire a man like him so early, but that, if there was any one thing she had learned of America in her forty-two years of residence, was typical of the whole country. Waste, waste, waste. A dire reckoning lay before it. She gave a great sigh at that thought; on the whole she would as soon it didn’t come in her time. But she was convinced that the Lord kept a strict account book, all the same.
She had come over from Scotland at twenty, Mrs. Norris had, already a childless widow, and the truth was that over the years, adding a bit now and then to her husband’s stature from what she took off that of other men, she probably loved him better now than ever she did in their brief marriage. He had been off to his last sailing within a week of their wedding. And she, having come out soon thereafter to her sister in Brooklyn, had almost as soon been eager for her independence. Starting as nurse for General Jarvis’ son James, she had approved the house from the moment she put her foot inside the door, although to this day she did not altogether approve the General.
The old Mrs. Jarvis, the General’s mother, had been alive then, and first laying eyes on Mrs. Norris, she had said of her within her hearing: “My dear, she looks just like the young Queen Victoria!” The resemblance had increased with the years and with the few odd pounds Mrs. Norris had put on here and there to where now she was a bit dumpy. When she went out, dressed in black with her head done up in a hat that would have nested a raven, it would have seemed a little more natural had she got into a carriage than an automobile.
The General was holding the door open for her when Mrs. Norris came in from the clothesline with the last of the sheets. Her nose was as red as pimento.
“Couldn’t we strike a match, Mrs. Norris?” he said, with a nod at the open hearth, and a wink at his double meaning.
So, she thought, that’s the mood he’s in. He’ll want to go into New York now, and she calculated the day of the month, and by it, the state of his finances. “Not for me,” she said, “but if you’re staying in my kitchen, light it.”
“Not with that sort of invitation,” he said, offended. He watched her folding sheets that had been unfolded to hang on the line. “Why in the name of God do you hang out clothes you’ve had finished?”
“They were laundry done, sir. I cannot abide the smell of public soap.”
“Oh,” said the General. “Have you ever smelt the public without soap?”
“I have,” Mrs. Norris said.
And there didn’t seem to be much future to that tack in the conversation. “During the war there were things you could buy on the other side with soap that you couldn’t buy with money.”
“What things?” Mrs. Norris snapped with the air of one tightening her hold on her convictions.
This was the day he was not going to get round her flank, the General realized, so he might as well make a direct assault. “You wouldn’t have a few dollars about the house you could spare till the first, would you?”
“I would not. Mr. James said I could not give you any money while he was gone, sir.”
The General clattered his heels on the brick floor. “I would remind you, Mrs. Norris, that Mr. James wasn’t as big as a wink when you were hired.”
“Yes, sir.”
She was humble enough, he thought, when she had her money well buried. “Mr. James is now trying to hasten me into my dotage.”
“If you hadn’t put a lien on your pension, sir…”
“I should not have had an automobile! Or do you agree with Mr. James about that also, Mrs. Norris, that at my age I don’t need an automobile?”
“I don’t think you need a Jaguar, sir, if you want the truth.”
“I don’t want the truth!” the General roared. “What’s so damned necessary about the truth all the time?”
Mrs. Norris drew her dumpy shape to its best height. “Oh, I’ll say again what I’ve said many’s the time in this house, if it wasn’t for little Master Jamie, I’d give my notice.”
“And many’s the time if it wasn’t for little Master Jamie, I’d have taken it. Little Master Jamie is forty-two years old!”
The General marched out of the kitchen and clacked his heels on the polished floor all the way back to his study. It was a terrible thing for a man to escape the discipline of military life into the tyranny of his family. Old generals, by God, should not be left to fade away. Like horses, they should be shot on becoming obsolete.
He shoveled the papers strewing his desk into the folder and gazed up at the portrait of his ancestor, the family’s man of distinction—more or less. He had been a one term president of the United States. Unmarried, he had founded neither line nor fortune, unless, as Mrs. Norris would have said, it was done without his ken.
An unlikely situation that, by the looks of him. But bloody unfair it was to hang on the best wall in the house for a hundred or so years, and to have made no more contribution to the family than a clutter of papers in the attic and the reputation for having been one of the best forgotten presidents of your country.
Still, the General thought, knocking his pipe out in the fireplace, it was ungenerous to judge a man’s looks by the fashion of his age in cravats; it would be very difficult for any face to rise above a thing like that looking less like an oyster than did granduncle. Nonetheless, you had to appraise him as his own times did—and his best recommendation for high office was his absence from the country in months of crisis. But then, so came generals also into politics oft-times, to the latterday destruction of their hard-won fame.
