Old Sinners Never Die (15 page)

“So you’re the one,” the woman said. “I knew he had another one somewhere lately. Shameless …”

Senator Chisholm interrupted. “Madam, you misunderstand! Mrs. Joyce is an artist. Your husband is interested in …” The senator faltered.

“We think your husband is a spy,” Tom blurted out, taking over. He could not do any worse than the experts, he thought, and the truth to a woman betrayed about anything that did not concern her betrayal was, he reasoned, welcome. “We’re not here to talk to you about his morals.” Tom meanwhile had looked about the room. It was the toys in high places that most interested him, toys that showed no signs of having been at the battering mercy of children. Tom reached up and touched one of them—a bottle with no bottom. He had wondered how a man came home in a dress suit to a house like this without a working-man’s explanation. “Your husband’s a magician, isn’t he?”

“So?”

Tom was conscious of the mute admiration of his two companions. In fact, he was rather in awe of himself. “So where was he supposed to be playing tonight?”

“At some private club,” she said. “I don’t ask that as long as he brings home the money afterwards.”

“Will you take the word of a United States senator that he attended the Beaux Arts Ball tonight?” Senator Chisholm put in.

“If this is your husband,” Helene added, pointing to the picture.

“Furthermore,” said the senator, “I sat at the same table with him at dinner.”

“You, too?” the poor woman cried out.

“Well,” said Tom, “the man
is
a magician.” No one seemed to appreciate what he thought was humour. He strode across the room to the library table then, on the shelf of which he had spied an album. There was scarcely a performer in the world who didn’t keep one. “You don’t mind if I look at this?” he said, already at it. “The Great d’Artagnan,” he read aloud.

“What’s the name?” the senator said.

Tom repeated it by syllables, but Mrs. Joyce pronounced it this time.

“It’s a wonder things couldn’t be spelt,” Tom said, “to match the sound they make.”

“You’re Mrs. d’Artagnan, then?” the senator said.

“I am.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Six years and twins.”

“Seven children,” Helene said, understanding her immediately.

“Does he talk about them?” the woman said rather wistfully.

“Quite often,” Helene said, “and of you.” The latter she added out of kindness.

“Are you sure it’s me?” the woman said. She turned to Tom. “What’s all this about him being a spy?”

“I think that’s a matter better gone into in daylight,” the senator interrupted, “and better with the great d’Artagnan himself. Don’t you think so, Tom?”

It was to muzzle him she consulted him, Tom knew, seeing the glare in the old eagle’s eye. “Sure it was only a manner of speaking in the first place, ma’am,” he said. “The truth is we’re looking for him to find out what he knows of the whereabouts of a friend of mine.”

“A lady-friend?”

“Aye,” Tom said, for whatever else she was, Mrs. Norris was a lady. “He went out of here with a suitcase. Now, do you know where he was spending the night?”

“All there was in the suitcase, I can tell you, was his card tricks,” the woman said. “I packed them for him myself.” This Tom knew to be the truth, that she had packed the suitcase for him. “He often sleeps right in the car if he’s going to be late,” she went on, “or that’s where he tells me he’s sleeping.”

“It’s a good place,” Tom murmured.

“Anyway, he was going to some private club he said to make a few extra dollars.”

“You had a few words on the matter, you and him, didn’t you?” Tom said.

“It’s you are the spy, it seems to me, spying on us,” the woman said.

“Well,” Tom said, aggrieved, “I had my reasons.”

“All right,” the poor wife said, “if he was meeting your friend there, I’ll tell you where he said he was going—the Club Sentimentale. Do you think he was telling the truth?”

“He just might,” said Tom, “for I’ve heard the name of the place before tonight.”

Outdoors, Helene said, “D’Artagnan and the three Musketeers.”

“That’s us!” said Tom. “Ach, the poor woman.”

“I don’t think she’s altogether without resources,” the senator said.

“She isn’t without kids, sure,” said Tom, “if you can call them resources.”

The senator laughed for the first time at something he had said that night. Too late, m’lady, he thought. You’ll not win me now by humouring my humour.

“Take us back to the hotel, Tom,” the senator said. “The best thing to do is to put this all in the hands of the FBI right now.”

It might seem best to her, Tom thought, driving back. But for himself and since he had contributed no small share to the unravelment he felt entitled to an opinion—he had another idea.

He stayed in the lobby when they went upstairs. He changed his dollar and a half into dimes and went into a phone booth. Having spent part of the night in the company of one senator, he had the courage to try to reach another—one more to his liking, a man, and a man willing and ready to tackle a case like this. Tom started by calling Senator Fagan’s favourite columnist at the Washington
Herald
. It was a bold start, and a good one.

T
HEY WERE TAKING THEIR
damn good time starting to load the booze, the General thought, especially for a pair waiting to collect on it. At best he had a delicate bit of athletics before him, for he could not hoist himself into the truck before they had loaded it, and he was not as nimble of leg as he was ambitious. He could hear the shuffle of playing cards, the squirt (he supposed) of tobacco juice slicing the air and occasionally nicking the hot stove.

The thing he feared most was that Virginia might return and find him missing before he really was missing, and that he might be searched for here. After all, this should be a well-kept secret until the proper moment, especially if it were stoked with dynamite. A touch-and-go business, to say the least.

He decided on total calculation, however, to risk a return to the house. There was something there he wanted, and his joints needed loosening. Up the hill again he scrambled like an infantry private on night manoeuvres. Dust man was and to dust returneth. The General spat a mouthful of it into the face of the stars.

He went in through the basement and up the stairs where he made a great bulging heap of pillows beneath the blanket: a shape he hoped resembled Ransom Jarvis. The prone sight of him could forestall an early search, he hoped. But it was a revolting lump to contemplate. Given time, he might have stuck pins in it himself.

He was standing back to further scrutinize his work when the electric lights took a turn for the brighter. That meant they had turned off the power on the still below, he reasoned, and would soon be ready to go.

The General hastened to the mantel, intending to lift one of the pistols just in case the boys needed persuasion somewhere along the way. But when he got to the wall, the racks were bare.

Both pistols, it would seem, had gone down the mountain with Virginia.

“All the king’s horses,” he murmured to himself, marching down the basement steps, and down the hill again, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s horses’ asses.”

The boys were loading up. He could hear the rattle of bottles as they humped cases of them onto the truck. Did they have labels, he wondered … Old Dynamite, maybe. He could tell from the next pattern of sound that they were roping the cases into place, and for that he was grateful. If they had to rope, there was room in the truck for him.

He fell to speculating on how long it would take the stuff they were making tonight to ripen and mellow. They could take their time with a setup like this, and maybe turn out a tolerable keg. There were, no doubt, some fine old family formulae in the hill country around Washington, coming all the way down from the times of the Whisky Rebellion.

One of the men came out in the open then and got into the truck. The General made ready to jump. But the other fellow was not yet in sight. It trembled his nerves, but the old soldier held steady.

The driver moved the truck out of the garage and the General thought for one bad instant that he was left behind, for he could no longer leap off to the top of the truck. He got a whiff of coffee on the wind then, and the driver got out of the truck and went into the cave again. The General eased himself down beyond sight of the door and, catching hold of a scrub pine, swung himself over and dropped to the ground with the quiet alacrity that would have done credit to a guerrilla scout. He climbed over the truck gate and lay down flat between where the cases were roped into place and the tailgate.

There was room for two like him, he thought, in the truck though not, perhaps, in the world.

J
IMMIE SUSPECTED FROM THE
blonde’s attitude that once he stepped outdoors, he might have to wrestle her to get in again, and while nothing about the place now suggested that anyone in it was expected to behave like a gentleman … Besides, she was bigger than he was.

Before going out, however, he made one more attempt to reach home by telephone; quite futile. He got his own hat and then took fifty cents and laid it, not too gently, in the saucer.

“Thanks,” the blonde called out as though genuinely surprised.

Jimmie stepped into the night and closed the door between him and the raucous soprano. The hack stand was empty except for a car bearing a PRESS sign. Wherever Montaigne had gone, he was not anywhere in sight.

The Arlington side of the Potomac under the Key Bridge. Jimmie got into his car and turned it up to the highway. It wasn’t far. Francis Scott Key. Oh, say, can you see by the dawn’s early light? He wondered if, by any chance, Mrs. Norris was huddled beneath it, trying to keep herself warm. Not a car on the road. Suddenly then, two small round bores of light: a car, Jimmie realized, coming at enormous speed. He pulled over to the side, himself slowed down almost to a stop. He did stop suddenly, and stepped out of his car almost simultaneously with the other car’s passing of him: it was as fast as reflex for he recognized the Jaguar as soon as it was a few yards from him, and he got out of his car shouting, trying to wave it down. But it sped on through the night like an earthbound comet, streaking out smoke like a tail.

It was a quiet and reverent oath Jimmie swore while he got back into his car. Whatever his father’s follies, he would not drive like that under any circumstance Jimmie could imagine.

He was, for the first time, truly alarmed. There was no point turning in the Jaguar’s wake. Unless it crashed up, he could not catch it. He drove on and across the Key Bridge, and then parked in the circle. He took the flashlight from the glove compartment, perhaps as a weapon, for he moved as surely, and as tremblingly, as though some fate had taken hold and now directed him.

At the end of the bridge where the grass sloped down from the roadside to the river’s edge, he stood and flashed his light first upon the ground at his feet. It had the softness of spring, and there was indeed a great circular indentation as of a car swung hard and fast to the beginning of the incline. The tyre’s size was that of a Jaguar.

Jimmie peered down then toward the river’s edge. He half-expected what waited discovery there, the dark, huddled shape of a man where he had been tumbled down the slope. Jimmie, trained as he was in matters of evidence, avoided the direct way down lest he spoil certain markings. Thus he went down the embankment a few yards to the north and approached the body from along the river bank.

He touched nothing, but shone his light in the face of Leo Montaigne. He felt for the pulse. There was none, though the flesh was warm. Jimmie saw the area of the wound, and leaning a little closer, could smell the powder. He had been shot at very close range, and he had doubtless died instantly.

J
IMMIE DID NOT EXPECT
to find the Jaguar at the Club Sentimentale, but he knew that among the things he would find there, and as quickly as anywhere else, was a telephone with which to call the police. It had to be done even though it add confoundment to confusion. Jimmie had several thoughts about Montaigne; any number of people might have killed him and probably with good reason. But not very many people could have made it look like General Jarvis’ doing. It was sheer chance he had seen the car himself, and could so accurately call the time of the murder.

Jimmie went into the club as though he intended to butt his way if anyone obstructed him.

But the blonde called out to him from the bar, “Leo ain’t back yet, honey.”

“I know,” Jimmie said, “I’ve just seen him. What time did he go out that door?”

“Three a.m.,” the blonde said. “I know because it’s closing time. Not tonight though. We’re staying here till dawn.”

Jimmie looked at his watch. Montaigne had been murdered between three and three-ten.

A reporter was in the phone booth, for which Jimmie was grateful. Why the hell had he been raised with a conscience like a deacon’s and a mismatched father? He pushed through the raucous room where Candido had been hoisted up on a table, the better to lead the riot. It was a crazy, mad cabaret jumping on the banks of the Potomac. Jimmie flailed his way through to where some of the boys had taken up with Dolores. They were trying to get a rival songfest going with the popular songs of the day.

Jimmie simply caught the girl by the arm and dragged her away from them toward the back room. “I’ve got to talk to you about Leo,” he said.

It was enough. She went willingly.

The back room was a combination storeroom for bar supplies and dressing room. He set the girl down at a dressing table and pulled up a chair.

“Dolores, I’ve got to have some information. It’s very important, and you’ll know why pretty soon. What do you know about this Virginia Allan?”

The girl shrugged. “There’s all kinds of stories about her. Somebody said she used to be with Texas Guinan, whoever she was. I heard she wrote novels once, you know, a writer with three names?”

Jimmie nodded. “What did Leo tell you about her?”