Gentleman Called (19 page)

“That, my dear sister,” Teddy said, “is a very apt description of me—a something or other.”

Mercifully, Timsey came round then with the gong, running hard upon the service of whiskey, Jimmie thought.

Teddy took his accustomed place at the table after seating his mother, but there the pattern broke. He poked and probed and titillated almost everyone at the table, even those whose names or relationships to himself he scarcely knew, Jimmie thought. He was, in fact, a new man.

“Do you know, dear Jarvis, my nephew, Eric, is going to apprentice to me? And I think we shall both start over in that case. I don’t suppose I’ve told you how I came to be a broker, an amusing little tale which I trust the family will forgive my repeating again in their presence. I began with the alphabet—artist, abattoir—oh, yes—I considered everything that came to mind in the ‘a’s, and nothing there seemed quite suited to my disposition. So I came to the ‘b’s…”

It should have been the birds and the bees, Jimmie thought.

“But now, as I say, we shall start over. I have discovered an ‘a’ I’d forgot. Alchemy. How does that suit you, Eric, my lad? Alchemy and black magic.”

“Just fine, uncle,” Eric said, frolicsome as a toad.

“Isn’t he a splendid chap?” Teddy said.

After dinner, and when all his adieus had been said to the elder family, Jimmie sought out Eric in the gun room. He practiced the hypocrisy of thanking him for the duck shoot. “Your uncle came back in high spirits, didn’t he?”

“Didn’t you ever see him that way before?”

“No,” Jimmie said. “Does it happen often?”

“Once in a while. Like a talking jag.”

“How long does it last?”

“Oh, a day or two. It sure livens up things around here while it lasts.”

“Then what happens?”

“He goes off on a trip somewhere, and when he comes back, well, we’re all right back where we started before the merry-go-round went round.”

“You’re an extraordinary family,” Jimmie said, and offered his hand by way of getting away. “Thanks again, Eric.”

“Never met one like us before, did you?”

“There can’t be many,” Jimmie said.

“Well, that’s the way the ball bounces,” Eric said.

Jimmie could not get the bloody phrase out of his mind all the way home although, God knows, he had other things to think about.

T
ULLY STUDIED THE INTERVALS
at which the known murders had occurred. He wondered if the time for killing was by any chance, set by the man’s need for money. He had got five thousand dollars from two of the women, ten from one, and probably every cent Ellie True had. There had been at least a year between all of them which indicated some margin of present safety. But who dared predict that? It was fine for the psychiatrists to prognosticate. A detective didn’t care.

The investigator was convinced they could catch the man now by his very arrogance, his determination to follow a pattern, his confidence in his own superiority to the law, the common intelligence, and above all to the women whom he bilked and murdered. He was versatile in that, the clever villain: he knew wherein not to set patterns. But in the end, Tully thought, it would be a little thing that would trick and tumble him.

What had taken him out of New York on that one known occasion?

Why Sando?

He had assumed a doctor’s identity there, and while there, he had watched a magic show of Murdock’s or had been in some way associated with the magician. It still didn’t answer the question: Why Sando?

Tully went over the notes he had made in the Ohio town. He had a notation on
The Sando Bugle.
The night officer of the police had said he could find Murdock’s itinerary there if the magician was not at home. That itinerary must have been very important to the murderer during the last days of Ellie True.

Tully had more confidence in the New York Public Library than he had in himself. He called the reference desk. The librarian he spoke to thought it unlikely they should have
The Sando Bugle,
but he checked. It was with almost personal pride that he returned to say that the Newspaper Annex had two one-year files of the paper. But the annex was closed on Sunday.

“I can wait till morning,” Tully said, but he could feel a pulse of excitement. The files—with a year’s lapse between them—covered the periods of the Bellowes murder and the murder of Ellie True. “How do you suppose the library comes to have those files?” he asked.

“Likely a gift subscription. Or a request to subscribe with a very good reason.”

Tully had no doubt it was a gift subscription, and a very good reason was no doubt given for the keeping of them—in the name of a mining engineer, or a professor of metallurgy.

Tully next put in a call to Joe, his friend on the Sando force, and asked him to check with the circulation department of
The Bugle.
How had they got the subscription from the New York Public Library?

Joe called back within an hour. A cash transaction, the first subscription, across the counter. The second one had probably come through the mail, but cash, too.

“Tell you what was going on down here at the time might’ve interested your Wall Street people—some gold mining outfit was taking over control of the Bellowes mines, and all the other coal mines it could buy in. There was a whole anti-trust business blew up over it.”

Tully didn’t say so but he could not see Wall Street going to
The Sando Bugle
for its information. He said: “But why have the paper sent to the Public Library?”

“Maybe the light’s better there,” Joe said. “I know that’s the case down here. Best light in town’s in our library.”

Tully thought of all the lights in lower Manhattan. “I wish we could say the same,” he said. “Thanks, Joe.”

He sat then and mused on whether perhaps the killer was going to turn up next in the disguise of a mining engineer, or perhaps a business tycoon.

That gave him pause. They did not know yet what guise he had taken in his courtship of Arabella Sperling. She had spoken of her “broker’s” advice. Tully went back to Johanson’s testimony. The man he had seen leaving her house carried a brief case and umbrella.

Tully put the phone on night service and went home. He wanted to start fresh in the morning, to move the more surely, directly.

There was yet another role for the murderer to play, and this it was that gave the issue urgency. The moment was surely coming when the man’s mad ego would require that he take the ultimate risk. The day he decided to play himself, they could throw away any timetable his previous crimes suggested.

M
RS. NORRIS TOLD HERSELF
over and over throughout the day that she would not go to meet him. It was safe to admit she was infatuated, though never in her life before had that word had any place in it. She was daft to even think of seeing him, much less of marrying him, and she was not at all sure he wasn’t himself off to have asked her. He bubbled up like a pot on the stove, popping its lid though it wasn’t half full.

But she liked the music of it: there was no denying that. She could remember to this day her mother’s counsel: “No woman, whether sixteen or sixty can afford to turn her back on an honest proposal of matrimony—unless she already has one in writing.”

She was dressed in her best navy blue when Jimmie arrived home from Connecticut.

“I’ve had dinner,” he said in a fairly somber mood, “so don’t let me delay you.”

“Was it a pleasant week-end?”

“Jolly.”

“Have you heard from England lately,” Mrs. Norris inquired, “from your nice Mrs. Joyce?”

Jimmie scowled at her as though he expected her next to ask for an exorbitant raise. “I’m thinking of closing up the house and joining her,” he said threateningly.

Mrs. Norris ruffled her shoulders. “You might at least give a person sufficient notice.”

Jimmie threw up his hands in disgust. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, and ploughed into the study, closing the door behind him.

Mrs. Norris met Mr. Adkins in a quiet corner of the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. He was dressed in a dark suit and with the white cuffs of his shirt gleaming. Nothing so impressed Mrs. Norris in a man’s dress as just the right amount of snowy cuff slipping casually out of his sleeve—unless it was as white a bit of undershirt showing at an open collar. Of one thing she might be sure about Mr. Adkins: his linens would be impeccable. And things like that did give a woman a sense of pride in a man.

The tavern was not crowded at that hour, and unperceived by any eye which might disparage the gesture, Mr. Adkins took her gloved hand in his and in just an instant brushed it with his lips. To have gainsaid him that would have been to make more of the incident than it merited. He was merely being his flamboyant self. He had said himself he counted on her Scottish caution to settle him.

Mrs. Norris wished to heaven she could settle him—or herself. Her heart was thumping like a Waterbury clock.

“Oh, my dear, you look stunning!” he cried. “Blue, isn’t it? The gods be praised you’ve thrown off the widow’s black.”

“I’ll be throwing it on again tomorrow,” she said. “It’s still middling new.”

Mr. Adkins drew two leather chairs to the windows. They were edged with steam, the windows, but through the center of the many panes, the whole of a neon twilight shone. “I thought we might have our drink here,” he said, “then our dinner where there’s music. There’s so much I have to discover of you: do you dance?”

“Nought but the fling,” she said with a wink.

Mr. Adkins cleared his throat. “I certainly shan’t tempt you into that tonight. Or perhaps I shall!”

He went off then and brought their drinks himself. Mrs. Norris prayed hers would sober her. She was not at all steady without it.

“‘I went into a public ’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,’” he quipped. “Remember that? Rudyard Kipling’s man, Tommy Adkins.”

“Any relation?” Mrs. Norris said.

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I come of very simple origins.”

“Isn’t it strange,” Mrs. Norris said, folding her hands round the empty glass, “here am I, the great-great-great-granddaughter of a Scottish chieftain, and keeping house for a barrister.”

“There’s a very natural answer to that,” Mr. Adkins eased in. “Hereafter you will keep house
with
an ex-stockbroker, a house and a garden and a small fire in the grate. And I’ll be the one to bar the door! Do you have a passport?”

“I do, but…”

“But-me-not. Rather, hear me through.” He took from his breast pocket a picture of a matched cottage, the roses tumbling around it, a river bending into the distance. “All this can be yours, my dear. This is the beloved bit of Scotland I have chosen to present you.”

“There are no thatches in Scotland that I know,” she said.

“That is why I chose this house!” he cried. “I wanted for you all the virtues of your native land, and a little bit more, something different. When we get there we can change it.”

We can change it before we get there, Mrs. Norris thought, and drew in a deep breath she let out in a sigh. The time had come to put an end to his golden dream-talk. “Mr. Adkins…”

“Sh-sh…Your sigh is a thrill to me, more eloquent far than words.”

She leaned over to look more closely at him. She could not believe it: there were tears in his eyes. He did believe what he was saying! He thought he had persuaded her.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Adkins…”

He was shaking his head like a mop. “Wait,” he said, a catch in his voice. “Will you wait?” He took a handkerchief from his pocket.

“Yes,” she said, presuming to wait for him to blow his nose.

“Forever?” he said.

“For what?” said she.

“Then for a day only. Tomorrow, we shall seal our bargain. Tonight is merely the pledge of our hearts. Tonight, my dear, you shall take home with you a lover’s knot.” He opened the handkerchief and plucked from it a small glittering bow of diamonds.

Mrs. Norris could only say, “Oh.”

Mr. Adkins placed the tiny jeweled bow on the dark blue sleeve where she could better see it. It glittered like something wet and crawling.

“Put it away,” she managed. “It’s too beautiful for the likes of me. Oh, truly Mr. Adkins, this is all too much.” She was herself near to tears.

“It’s no more than a trinket,” he said, “a token of what I may call…perpetuity.”

Even as she watched him, fascinated, he slipped her purse from beneath her arm and tucked the jewel into it, returning the purse to where he had got it. “I shall have it back, you see, when I have you.”

Mrs. Norris managed to get to her feet. She excused herself and trundled off in the direction of the powder room. But finding first a door to the park, she stepped outside and thanked the good Lord she was a woman who kept her coat on everywhere; it was still about her shoulders. She was all in a piece. She fled along the walk toward Central Park West, and thought she had never seen so lovely a sight as the first empty taxi.

How close she had come to making an utter fool of herself no one must ever know, she thought, except Mr. Adkins, who would in time come to see his share in the proposed folly. She would seek him out in daylight and give him back his jewelry. If she had behaved cowardly tonight, it was to be atoned with at least that much courage on the morrow.

Near home, she treated herself to a strong cup of tea and some toast at a Schrafft’s on Madison Avenue. She preferred, reaching home to take the shame she could not quite keep down, directly to her own room.

Ah, but a welcome sight was Mr. Jamie, despite the scowl with which he greeted her. He was still in the black mood, and that was all right, she thought. It was a great relief after the giddy, grinning Romeo from whom she had fled.

“Your dentist called,” Jimmie said with a considerable edge to his voice.

“My dentist,” she repeated, managing at the last second to keep the wonder from her voice, and added lamely: “I have a bad tooth.”

“Three times within the hour,” he said. “Have you that many bad teeth?”

M
ONDAY MORNING FOUND JASPER
Tully making out a library call-slip for The Sando Bugle.