Death of an Old Sinner (24 page)

“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 residence for winter.

M
RS. 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.

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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

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