Death of an Old Sinner (17 page)

“Both of us?”

Tully nodded. “We’re going to stop at the office of General Jarvis’ literary agent.” And on the way he accounted his information on August Fowler.

T
ULLY STOOD, HAT IN
hand, beside Mrs. Norris before Fowler’s receptionist. He was, even stooping a little, head, shoulders, and almost an elbow taller than the dumpy little bundle of dignity beside him. Mrs. Norris’ hands were composed like a queen’s, over the leather bag. And the detective wondered how Fowler’s lacquered blonde would place him and the lady. He had no intention of properly identifying himself until he could strike Fowler a surprise blow.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fowler isn’t in,” she said, not even amusement in her eyes.

“When will he be back, ma’am?” Tully rolled his hat brim round in his hand, heightening the pose he had struck of a country lad on his first city venture.

The blonde shrugged. “Five o’clock possibly.”

“What do you think, child?” he said to Mrs. Norris, his long face solemn. “Havin’ come all this way, we ought to see him.”

All Mrs. Norris could manage was to nod her head.

The switchboard needed attention. The receptionist snapped them a smile, and attended a call… Her voice had the sound of having attended similar calls all afternoon. “Yes, Mr. Python…I’ll tell him, Mr. Python. As soon as he comes in, sir…. Mr. Python, I am not lying to you. There are people here in the office right now waiting for him…”

Tully and Mrs. Norris had taken chairs side by side. “What kind of name is that, Python?” said Mrs. Norris.

“He likes to be called a snake,” Tully said. “Haven’t you ever heard of the columnist, Lem Python?”

“Oh him,” she said with withering scorn.

“It’s a most peculiar world we live in, Mrs. Norris. Sometimes I think there’s people around today who regret not having been born in the Garden of Eden just so they could commit original sin.”

The receptionist broke one phone connection and opened another, apparently to an inner office. “Mr. P. again, Julie. What do I tell him next? Boiling…oh, honey, I want to live. I’ll give him to you next time…”

Again she stretched a rubbery smile at Tully and Mrs. Norris and snapped it off. “I don’t really think Mr. Fowler is going to be able to see you folks today,” she said. “Why don’t you make an appointment and come back tomorrow?”

Mr. Tully got to his feet hat clutched to chest. “Do you think we ought to stay in New York, child. Even tonight?”

Mrs. Norris opened her mouth and closed it. She could not play the game. And that merely provoked Tully into greater exaggeration.

“Wouldn’t you like to tell me your business? Maybe I could help you,” the blasé blonde suggested.

That was exactly the cue Mr. Tully wanted. “Well, I tell you, miss,” he drawled. “My sister and me were fixin’ to write a book. We get to see all kind of people in our business, you understand?”

“What business are you in?” she said, and stretched her mouth over a yawn.

“We run a H house…flowers, you know, a hot-house.”

At least, he thought, he had spoiled a good yawn. She looked him over then, and apparently decided he was genuine.

“I don’t really think Mr. Fowler would be the agent for you folks. But why don’t you go home and call him up tomorrow morning?”

“Early?”

“Very early, say eleven o’clock.”

By the time they reached the elevator, Mrs. Norris allowed herself to giggle.

“I’d like to have seen her expression if I’d given her the D.A.’s card,” Tully said.

“That lass lost her expression with her virtue,” Mrs. Norris said.

Tully sighed. “No doubt, no doubt.”

“Y
ES,” JIMMIE SAID, PACING
back and forth before the terrace window, “I kissed her. Furthermore she liked it.”

“But of course she liked it,” Helene said sweetly. “I told you she was in love with you. Furthermore, if you really want to be governor, you’re going to have to kiss her again and again, having started it.”

Jimmie stopped in his tracks. “It wasn’t so hard to do, you know. And it’s a hell of a lot better than smacking babies.”

Helene gave a vigorous stir to the martinis. “Okay, darling. You’re on loan till after elections. I’ll get more work done.”

“Nice,” Jimmie said, tracing his finger about a granite nude. “I haven’t seen this before, have I?”

“You have. I’m going to put it in the garden. It’s weatherable.”

“Very,” Jimmie murmured. “What do you mean, I’m on loan? Stop treating me like something you’ve carved out of stone.”

“Pygmalion-femina.” Helene refilled his glass, then touched hers to it. “Or perhaps it will be best after all if I avail myself of Judge Turner’s fellowship.”

The doorbell sounded at the front of the house. “That will be our young romantics,” Helene said, and went to admit Mrs. Norris and Tully.

Jimmie was enjoying a mood of liquid gold, momentary and transient. And strictly out of Helene’s martini mixer. But, God help him, he thought, why had he ever sought to spoil a beautiful friendship by talk of a marriage neither of them really wanted? Helene at least was no hypocrite. He was mouthing the catechismal lines of Mrs. Norris. The little housekeeper came in wreathed in smiles, and he would have sworn she would be of disapproving mien. Tully was a good influence.

Both she and Tully took their whiskey neat, while the detective summed up for Jimmie his work of the last two days. Jimmie would not take to the notion of hypnotism at all, and Helene sided with him.

“Got a better explanation?” Tully said, somewhat irked. He had not come easily by the notion himself.

“Who hypnotized him then?” said Jimmie. “The character who brought him in to the hotel? Father was not the type to submit himself to nonsense. He liked his whiskey straight, his women submissive, and his money in cash. Excuse my frankness, Mrs. Norris.”

She merely nodded, intent on something at which she was gazing.

Tully switched then to a discussion of Fowler, and while he was talking Jimmie became aware that the housekeeper’s attention was focused on the male nude he had commented on earlier. Now and then, she glanced from it to him, and back to it again. Jimmie realized what was going on in her mind. The piece was sculpted, hands behind the head, knees drawn slightly up, ankles crossed. It was a hell of a position, but Jimmie managed to take it. Tully was reading from notes. Helene saw the situation between Mrs. Norris and her employer, the man she had raised from rompers, and covered her mouth with a glass. Sixty seconds passed; Jimmie was aching. Then Mrs. Norris saw his position.

She gave a little “oh” and began to fan herself vigorously.

“You were saying, Jasper?” Jimmie said, springing loose his limbs. Helene turned her back.

Tully looked up from his notes. “I was saying that if Fowler denied giving your father a thousand dollars, if I were you, I’d get that diary back from him and take a good look at it.”

“I intend to,” Jimmie said. “I called him twice today, and no return call. I was going to ask you to take a hand.”

“Mrs. Norris and I stopped there on our way. He wasn’t in.”

“But the girl in the office thought he might be back at five o’clock, didn’t she?” said Mrs. Norris, having recovered herself.

“She changed her tune later. Remember?”

“Was that to us or was it to that Mr. Python on the phone?” said Mrs. Norris.

Jimmie leaped to his feet. “Wait a minute, wait! Python did you say?” Tully and Mrs. Norris nodded. “Go over that part for me slowly.”

Tully recounted the receptionist’s remarks. “My guess is, he was spittin’ mad, the Python, at our Mr. Fowler.”

“Was he?” Jimmie said, grinding the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. “Where do you think that diary is, Jasp?”

“If it was worth a thousand dollars cash to Fowler on Friday, and another thousand to hide under Saturday, I’d say it’s in a safe someplace.”

“Let’s get a warrant.”

“Well, I was thinking of that. But why not try it the easy way first—finding him and asking him for it? Could be, he’ll show up in his office in the morning. My guess right now is it’s Python he’s ducking, not us.”

“Did you see Python’s column this morning, Jasp?”

“Can’t really say I’ve ever read him.”

Jimmie took the clipping of the column from his pocket and gave it to Tully. “Might as well read it aloud,” he said, and went to the window overlooking the garden.

Tully read the item and whistled softly.

“Do you think that in some way your father was responsible for that, Jimmie?” Helene asked.

Jimmie raised his fists to heaven on the odd chance that the old gentleman had made it. “He’s one of two possibilities, and right now I’d nominate him, sure.”

Mrs. Norris finished her drink and got to her feet. “I’d say one of three, Master James,” she said with stiff formality.

“Three?”

“Aye, yourself is one also.”

There was no denying her Scots righteousness, Jimmie thought. And unlike Madeline Barker, she could not be converted by a kiss. Not by his at least. Jimmie let his eyes appeal to Tully.

Tully merely looked at his pocket watch. “It’s time for us to go out to our dinner, Mrs. Norris.”

Jimmie took them to the door. When they were gone, he returned, massaged his chin with his thumb. “I guess myself
is
one also,” he said, “for having got myself in so vulnerable a position.”

“A lot of people were vulnerable during the war, Jimmie.”

“While the generals died in bed,” Jimmie said, misquoting a poem of that sentiment.

His eyes met Helene’s for a moment. “Sorry,” he said, “that was crass of me.”

“Some people say martinis are depressants,” Helene said. “Shall I put on the steak?”

“D
UTY FIRST. THEN WE
can relax,” Mrs. Norris said, and then suddenly realized she was relaxing more with Mr. Tully than so short an acquaintance justified. Ah, but it was like the stress of wartime, and like war, it wasn’t the circumstance you welcomed, but the distraction you found from it.

Mr. Tully, who might never have relaxed at all if he did the duties connected with his office first, consented at least to follow up Mrs. Norris’ clue to the General’s fair lady. He commenced their exchange with the florist by buying Mrs. Norris a single tea rose for her shoulder and a bit of green to cushion it. She was putting it on and Tully paying for it when she remembered Robbie and his quoting of Bobbie Burns… “My love is like a red, red rose.”

“Oh there now,” she said, “you’ve put me in mind of my brother-in-law.”

“Is that good or bad?” said Tully, waiting his change.

“I don’t know that it’s bad, but it isn’t good,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it later if you like.”

The man behind the counter returned, and counted Mr. Tully his change. “I wonder,” the detective said, “if you’d mind telling me about a floral piece you fixed yesterday morning early… You describe it, Mrs. Norris.”

Mrs. Norris did, mostly with a great circular motion as though she were illustrating an angel’s wings.

The man’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. He shook his head, “I don’t think it came from here, madam.”

Tully took the ribbon from his pocket and ran it through his fingers while he spoke. “Now nobody would fix more than one or two pieces like that in a lifetime, much less on a Monday morning.”

The man lifted his head. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t remember fixing it.”

Tully went on easily. “I’d guess maybe a lady bought it, an old customer who lives in the neighborhood. A good-natured woman, likes birds, an ex-show girl.”

Mrs. Norris looked up. It was quite a picture Mr. Tully was drawing. She had not reached the “show girl” part of it in her own mind, but it fit in very neatly, she realized now. It was pleasant to admire a man as she was now admiring Jasper Tully. And there again she cautioned herself. For longer than some men’s lifetimes, she had admired Mr. Robinson.

The florist shook his head steadily, and this in spite of the fact that his eyes took in the ribbon in the detective’s hand.

“Do you have an assistant?” Tully asked.

“Only my wife. She relieves me at mealtime. And she would not have done up anything like you describe, believe me, sir.”

“I’d like to,” Tully said, and tried another approach before throwing the authority of his office into the persuasion. “I’ll tell you who it was for. That might refresh your memory. It was for the funeral of General Ransom Jarvis. Does that help?”

The man squeezed the color out of his fingers. “I knew General Jarvis, if that’s what you mean, sir.”

“That’ll do for now,” Tully said. “Tell us about it.”

“Not much to tell. He was in the habit of coming in once a week or so, and picking out a bouquet to take with him.”

“Never sent them?” Tully asked.

“No sir. And just to show his authority, he was in the habit of plucking out a stem or two. ‘Can’t offend the lady,’ he’d say.”

“When was he in last?”

“Friday night—a little after five. He drove up in a cab and bought two dozen roses.”

“You’re sure of the time?” said Tully.

“I am. My wife was due at five o’clock and I was getting hungrier by the minute.”

“Did he keep the cab waiting?”

“No sir.”

“How much were the flowers?”

“Eight dollars.”

“What did he pay them out of—what size bill?”

“A five and three singles, but he did ask if I could change a hundred dollar bill.”

“That’s what I figured,” Tully said.

He could afford a cab but he walked from here, the detective thought. It must put his lady within—say—a block or two.

Mrs. Norris cleared her throat. “Had he been your customer for a long time, sir?”

“Off and on, a good many years. I remember him in uniform.”

“Do you now?” she said, in a tone that took the pleasure out of the florist’s reminiscence.

Tully edged around the matter for a moment to let the man’s hackle settle, and then asked: “Does the lady ever buy flowers herself from you?”

“I tell you, sir,” the man said with exaggerated patience. “I don’t even know the lady. This might be her for all of me.” He indicated Mrs. Norris.