Death of an Old Sinner (14 page)

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.”

T
HE 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.

J
ASPER 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 rolled 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.”

“That’s interesting,” Tully said. “I’ve been wanting to meet her.”

“Yeah? She ain’t so much, not for a man of his…but what the hell? I used to think he was a four-flusher. Then he’d come in here, and by Chris’, he did sound genuine.”

“He was,” Tully said patiently.

“I know. I read in the papers all about him. The real thing.”

“Tell me about the girl friend. Do you know her?”

The big man settled himself on a stool behind the counter, maneuvering his bottom on it to get comfortable. Tully was aware of the ache in his own feet. “No, but I’ve seen her around, I think.”

“You mean without the General?”

“Maybe, but I don’t know where. What I mean is, maybe she’s an ex-singer, something like that, see?”

“Could be she is,” Tully said. “Got a name for her? Did she sign a receipt?”

The pawnbroker shook his head. “Cash, merchandise, tickets. No signatures needed. That’s household finance stuff. We’re specialists. She had the ticket, she got the medals.”

Tully at least got a good description of the woman. It tallied well with the hotel clerk’s. “What time was she in?”

“Along about now. I have to put the lights on special in the window, and I was up there by the switch when she came in. I saw her outside looking up at the number first.”

Tully looked at his watch. Six-twenty.

“What did you think you were going to get from her?” Tully asked. “Or did you know her from having been in before with the General?”

“That was her first time, I think.” The big man rubbed his chin and you could hear the scrape of his hard thumb on the stubble of beard. “Funny, you ask that. I got a beautiful watch here. It came in a week ago, a guy from out of town, green, scared. I figured she came to get it for him. Class, you see. Whatever she was, she had class. Not enough maybe for a general. But class.”

“Just the same,” Tully drawled, “you figured her to be…whatever she was.”

“Oh sure.”

“Would you say she was worried? Upset?”