Gentleman Called (13 page)

She cocked her head, contemplatively. “The poet, you mean?”

He nodded. “‘My heart is like a singing bird.’”

She was a lovely girl, looking at him now, a disconcerting appreciation in her dark, deep eyes.

“The Yankees used to have a second baseman by that name,” Arnold said. “Let’s talk about him.”

Jimmie turned a disbelieving eye upon him. “Do you like baseball?”

“I loathe it,” Arnold said bluntly.

Jimmie smiled and folded his arms. “Then let’s talk about Miss Daisy Thayer.”

There was an instant’s silence, stiff enough to have sat down amongst them.

“Brother,” Arnold said then, “you know how to deliver a line, don’t you? What about Daisy?”

“I suppose you might say I’m interested in anything you could call gossip.”

“You’re one of those columnists?” Miss Rossetti asked.

“God forbid! I’m a lawyer. I’m acting in the interests of a client of whom I think she is trying to take advantage.”

“She’s the girl who can do it,” Arnold said. “She takes a man for everything he’s got.”

Jimmie could not ask the question on his tongue, not in present company. He turned to the girl. “She’s a friend of yours, isn’t she?”

“She was kind of a friend. We attended Stewart’s personnel classes together. That’s where I got to know her. And she did introduce me to Arnold afterwards…” She threw a worshipful glance his way.

Jimmie sighed after his own youth. “That was trusting of her, wasn’t it?”

“She was through with me by then,” Arnold said.

“And how did you feel about her?” Jimmie glanced at the girl. “You don’t mind my asking him that, Barbara?”

She shook her head.

“I guess my vanity took it on the chin,” Arnold admitted. “She’s gorgeous looking.”

Poor Teddy Adkins, Jimmie thought; his vanity had also taken it on the chin, and everyone would say it served him right, the bantam chasing after the bird of paradise. “I take it there’s no doubt in either of your minds that Miss Thayer was out to find a man of money?”

“None,” Arnold said.

“But there’s nothing really wrong with that, is there? I mean nothing legally wrong with it,” Barbara said.

“Quite right,” Jimmie said. “It merely casts doubt on her moral integrity.”

“And maybe she did fall in love with him,” the girl added.

“Oh, come off it,” Arnold said.

“I wonder if you’re not talking about my client,” Jimmie said, wanting her to say the name out of her own memory if possible.

“Someone by the name of Adkins?”

Jimmie nodded. He thought then what a fine appearance Barbara would make on the witness stand, and she would impress the women as well as the men: he would have that up on Daisy Thayer anyway. The problem was to get Barbara on the stand without hostility toward him.

“Perhaps we are misjudging Daisy,” he allowed, since Miss Rossetti seemed to have a lingering confidence in Miss Thayer.

“I think you are,” Barbara said. “I know a lot of good things she has done.”

“Red Cross worker,” Arnold said sarcastically.

“She worked very hard, too,” Barbara snapped.

“Oh, sure, blood from stones
she
could get.”

Jimmie was fascinated. His mind gave a leap to a happy conclusion: “Worked on the Blood Bank, didn’t she?” he said.

“She got us over our quota, and nobody else seemed to care,” Barbara said.

“She cheated,” said Arnold. “Lined up all her bloody boobs like me and put us down as Mark Stewart’s employees.

“I don’t suppose the Bank records really care where the donors work,” Jimmie said with an ease that belied his glee. “To them the only important information is blood type, isn’t it?”

Barbara nodded, bless her innocence.

How Jimmie would have liked at that moment to ask the fatuous Arnold his blood type! But James Ransom Jarvis was a gentleman, and he cared not who had fathered Daisy’s child. His only job was to exonerate little Teddy Adkins.

He smiled at Arnold. “Speaking of blood from a stone, what makes you think she was after Adkins’ money?”

“Can you think of any other reason for her to check his credit the first time she met him?”

There was a bit of the mother in him, Jimmie thought. He had to tell everything he knew.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “Did she do that?”

“Tell him, Babs.”

Babs was not a blabber. “Wait till we have our drink,” Jimmie said, seeing her reluctance, and himself satisfied to have got the conversation to a point of easy resumption. He talked then about the theatre of which he knew considerable, and admitted that occasionally he invested in it, aware of how favorable a light that placed him in. The “Irish Coffee” arrived, an excellent pickup for a nippy evening. Barbara’s eyes shone with approval after her first taste.

“You were going to tell me about Daisy’s checkup on my Mr. Adkins’ credit,” Jimmie prompted. “Let’s get it over before our supper comes.”

“I work in the Credit Department,” Barbara started, “and one day—it’s over a year ago now—Daisy came up and asked me to look up the credit record on this man—she had the information off his charge plate, you see.”

“His having purchased something from her,” Jimmie said, trying to ease the revelation on.

“No,” Barbara said tentatively. “I remember her saying she’d had to follow him all over the store to get it. Finally he’d bought something.”

The cream aboard Jimmie’s Irish Coffee seemed to curdle. “Why did she need the charge plate? Hadn’t she just been to lunch with him?”

“Yes,” Barbara said.

“I assume he introduced himself before inviting her,” Jimmie said, but already suspecting his assumption had a false bottom.

“Oh, but he hadn’t used his own name, you see,” Barbara said brightly. “He’d told her a name like Cardova. Something like that.”

It had been considerably less than frank of Mr. Theodore E. Adkins not to have confided the pseudonym to his lawyer, Jimmie thought. He might now prove Daisy to have tricked Mr. Adkins into paternity, but no jury could be outraged on behalf of a gentleman who did not use his own name on making overtures to the young lady.

J
ASPER TULLY WAS NOT
a man who liked to get out of New York City. In a town the size of Sando, Ohio, he felt lost. His feet could move round in his shoes. His coat left enough room between it and himself for the wind to crawl in and make free with his bones. Sando, at the hour of the milk train’s arrival—and this was the only conveyance Tully had found out of Columbus—was gray with the sittings of coal-dust, and scarcely stirred at all at the sun’s rising.

People came to New York from the damnedest places, Tully thought, and then did the most damnable things.

He inquired of the station master where the police department was. The man walked to the end of the platform with him in his shirt-sleeves, the sleeves puffed out around black elastic bands.

“Yonder,” he said. “It’s in the same building with the fire department. There ought to be somebody one place or other.”

Tully arrived in time for the changing of the guard, as it were, the night man going off, and the day man coming on. He showed his identification. One of the men went into the back room from which came the smell of coffee. He returned with three cups and the pot. Tully had never had coffee he appreciated more.

“Who you looking for?” one of them asked then in the easy drawl of the hill country.

“A man by the name of Murdock, Edward T. Murdock.”

The two policemen exchanged glances. “What’d he do?”

Tully assumed from their glances and from the size of the town that they knew the magician. “I want to question him in the murder of a couple of women.”

“Murdock the Mighty?” the policeman said.

“What’d he do, saw ’em in two?” said the other.

It was fairly grisly humor, even for Sando, Tully thought. “Does he have any police record with you?”

“Might have. Licensing violation. He don’t like having to pay to perform his magic shows.”

“No felony record?”

“No-o-o. Why he couldn’t put a dying rabbit out of misery.”

“That kind’s been known to have no trouble doing away with their wives, Joe,” his partner said.

“But Murdock don’t have a wife. Where’s these women supposed to have been murdered?”

“They weren’t
supposed
to be murdered, and they’re not supposed to have been murdered,” Tully said, concerned with semantics for once in his life. “They were both murdered in New York—one last week and one a couple of years ago.”

“Took you quite a while to get round to that one, didn’t it?” Joe drawled.

“Funny damn thing,” his partner said, “we had a murder down here a while back…a Columbus doctor, what was his name…?”

Joe was thinking about Murdock, however: “Tell you, mister, I think you must have the wrong man. Murdock was out last week on what he calls his Cincinnati circuit, plays down one road, Washington Court House, Wilmington, Hamilton, and up the other, a show a night. I don’t see how he could’ve been in New York when you said.”

“To hang the truth up where the dogs can’t get it,” his partner chimed in, “I don’t reckon Murdock ever has been to New York. Don’t know anybody in Sando who has been lately, except old man Clinton. He owns the Number Two mine. It’s the only one operating full shifts these days. You’ll hear the morning toot blow any minute now.”

Tully was ready to blow his own toot. “I think I’d better get to see Murdock just the same,” he said, “and I’d appreciate it if one of you came with me.”

Joe elected himself Tully’s companion. The question was: would Murdock be home or was he out on the road again.

“If we don’t find him, you can look up in the
Bugle
what circuit he’s on,” the Day Officer said.

Tully thanked him for the coffee, shook hands and followed Joe out of the station. The town had come awake since his arrival, and Joe knew everyone on the street. And everybody knew his companion for a stranger. Wherever Joe stopped—and he was not a man, going off duty, to miss his morning convivials—he introduced Tully as a friend of Murdock’s.

That was just fine. It showed Joe to be a man of rare good sense. Tully liked him.

“If you have got the wrong man, no use harming poor old Murdock by telling everybody your business,” Joe explained.

“No use at all,” Tully agreed. If I got the wrong man, he thought, the gloomy prospect already explored by his subconscious.

The magician’s truck, lettered
MURDOCK THE MIGHTY
, stood in the yard. That much luck he was going to have, Tully thought. Murdock himself, who apparently lived alone so far as human companionship, came to the door. As soon as he opened it, you could scent the company of livestock. Tully took a long deep look at the man. He was short and slight, hollow-cheeked and dark as a gypsy. He might even be an East Indian mystic, but he in no way resembled Johanson’s fair, apple-cheeked boy who seemed also to have been Murdock’s New York namesake.

“Is Murdock the name you were born with?” Tully said.

“It is.”

“You’re dark for an Irishman,” the investigator commented. “Not that I give a damn what a man is, as long as he is what he says he is.”

The swarthy little man flashed him a beautiful smile. “I’m the great grandson of a tinker, or so I’ve been told.”

“Are you?” said Tully. “Some of my mother’s folks came from the west of Ireland. That’s where most of the tinkers are, isn’t it?”

“I’ve no idea,” Murdock said.

“When was the last time you were in New York, Mr. Murdock?”

“1908, I think. That was the first, last and only time, Mr. Tully, and I don’t remember it. I must have been four years old.”

“Well, it’s a long road that doesn’t go anywhere,” Tully said. “Would there be another man by your name belonging to the Society of Magicians?”

“Not till one of us died, sir. One at a time, and I’ve belonged to the Society for thirty years.”

“Got any enemies you know of who’d go to some trouble to make mischief for you?”

“No,” the magician said after some thought.

“Do you know anybody at all who might have gone to New York and taken your name while he was living there?”

The policeman Joe and Murdock looked at each other as though they thought Tully out of his senses.

“But somebody did it all the same,” Tully said, “and furthermore gave as reference to your good name the president of the Society of Magicians.”

“For God’s sake,” Murdock said.

“He registered at a hotel, joined a hospitality club, and furthermore, two years ago—and I’ll give you the exact date in a minute—October 27, 1955, he let it be known that he was coming home. He bought a railway ticket for Sando, Ohio.”

“Who is he then?” Joe asked.

“According to my records he’s Edward T. Murdock.”

For the first time, the magician looked as though he sensed trouble. Any man would, his identity borrowed, as Tully further remarked.

“Hey, this is bringing something back to me,” Joe said. “You don’t have a description of this man, do you?”

“I was coming to that,” Tully said. He turned the page and read aloud the composite he had made from Johanson’s and Reverend Blake’s descriptions.

The magician shook his head when Tully was done, but Joe was sitting, his eyes blinking fast, his mouth slightly open. “Murdock, do you remember the Widow Bellowes?” he said then.

Murdock nodded.

The policeman turned to Tully. “We’re going to have some ham and eggs. Then we’re going up to the sheriff’s office. It’s three or four years ago, the Widow Bellowes—she was heir to the Bellowes’ Coal Mines—got herself strangled to death and robbed of ten thousand dollars.

“She had this Columbus doctor coming to see her real often. Sometimes he stayed all night. Just a little scandal, not much. Sando is so far out of the way, most people got to stay all night when they get here. She had a big house, and everybody figured she could afford a fee to make it worth while for a city doctor to stay over.

“But here’s the thing that’d curl your toenails—when the sheriff went up to question the Columbus doctor, he’d never heard of the Widow Bellowes.” Joe shook his fist in the air. “The night the Widow Bellowes was strangled, the good doctor was seven hundred and fifty miles away, giving a lecture to ninety-five medical students in Des Moines, Iowa!”