Death of an Old Sinner (23 page)

“Cunning,” Jimmie said.

“Miss Tims, we’re awful tired, all three of us,” Tully said.

“I guess I am, too,” she said, “and after you all go I’m goin’ to be left all alone again. That’s why I took up with Nick….”

“The night General Jarvis died,” Tully pushed gently. “Will you tell us what happened after you went to the pawn shop for his medals?”

Miss Tims drew a deep breath and plunged into the story. “Before that, he was so lovin’. I won’t ever forget it…and he didn’t feel very good. We’d had a quarrel you see the night before over Nick. But you know that. And it was so wonderful makin’ up and all. And he gave me a hundred dollar bill to get his medals. ‘I’ve got to wear ʼem in the morning, Flora. St. Patrick’s Day in the morning.’ ” Flora sniffed back the tears. “When I got home with them he was dead.”

“Dead at your house?” Jimmie said.

Flora nodded. “That’s how I felt about it too, Mr. Jarvis. I didn’t want him disgraced—you know.” She shrugged. “I’m nothin’ much without him…and I knew it would be in the papers. I got a friend down the hall. He works nights sometimes. I gave him fifty dollars and he helped me. We were goin’ to pretend that everything was just wonderful. All three of us havin’ a wonderful time. And we did it, too. I had to get Nick’s chauffer to drive us, but it worked out fine…almost.”

“Your friend down the hall,” Jimmie said, “he’s an entertainer?”

Flora nodded.

“A ventriloquist?” Tully prompted.

“How did you know?”

Tully looked at Jimmie. “Dead men don’t curse as elegant as it was said your father did that night. And nobody could look him in the face. Rubber legs, the cabbie said. It all fits—now. You didn’t waste much time moving him.”

“I was afraid of rigor mortis,” Flora said.

Tully rubbed the back of his neck. “That must’ve been the only thing in New York you were afraid of, miss.”

“Love finds a way,” Flora said calmly.

Mrs. Norris leaned forward. “And did you put his medals on him, dearie?”

“Don’t call me ‘dearie.’ I know what you think I am.”

“I saved your life this afternoon, Miss Tims.”

“That don’t give you the right to call me names. Yes, I put his medals on him. I knew he died proud and I wanted everybody else to know it, too.”

“A true Southern lady,” Jimmie said, and Miss Tims’ face just lighted up with a smile.

By its glow the three of them took their departure. At the door Flora said: “Mr. Jarvis, did you get your dispatch case?” Jimmie nodded. “I found it here later, and Nick said Lem Python would see you got it.”

“He did,” Jimmie said. “Oh yes, indeed he did.”

I
T WAS A GREAT
relief, Jimmie thought, to settle down to the monotony of politics. Helene was really and truly packing. Not in a huff. She had been tempted from the first offer despite its indignity. But many an artist has chiseled beauty out of an indignity, she said. Pygmalion again. Jimmie was wistful. It gave him a charming air of melancholy. Very good for a candidate running on a bachelor’s ticket.

On Saturday night Mr. Tully was to come to dinner, all the way to Nyack.

“Isn’t it a wee bit of a strain?” Mrs. Norris asked him.

“It’d be more of a strain if I didn’t,” he said, and ventured for the first time to give her a hug.

He was invited again and again and again.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Mrs. Norris Mysteries

M
RS. NORRIS FASTENED THE
last bit of sheeting around the legs of the last chair in the room to be covered, and then rechecked the whole of the hooded furniture for snugness. It was not that she expected wind—or for that matter, a windless occupancy—in the shuttered house. But neither would she have ruled out the possibility of the latter, especially in this room where the late General Jarvis had in his day stirred up so much fury.

The housekeeper gave a great sigh which, finally admitting the truth to herself at least, she acknowledged to have been sent after her late employer. There was many a man walking this earth of whom it could be said he was more dead than alive, but not many in their graves of whom you could say they were more alive than dead: the spirit was strong, however weak had been the flesh. She double-checked the locks on the windows and then went quickly from the room, clutching her skirts in her hand as though to be sure all of her got out at once and closed the door.

On the whole she was glad young Mr. Jarvis had decided to close the Nyack house for the winter. A Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park was not to be complained of by its housekeeper. True, she would miss the Hudson River which she often thought better company than some of the people she knew. But it was always cranky in November, the river, and rude as winter itself to all her acquaintance who didn’t live near it. Mr. Tully, for example—her friend the detective, as she called him, not being able quite at her age to call him her beau, and having a deep aversion to the phrase “gentleman friend,” as though she would have a male caller who was not a gentleman—Mr. Tully when he came at all this weather, would take up a stance before the fire the minute he gave up his topcoat, and turn himself round and round like a hare on a spit until it was time to go home.

Which but showed, she decided on further thought while she rolled up the hall rug, how little adaptability there was in the man. City born and city bred, he would not be transplanted at his age. She wondered then if her Master Jamie had taken into consideration Mr. Tully’s attentions to her, in making his own change of winter residence.

Now here was a man—her Mister James—perceptive and considerate, and himself marvelously adaptable. He could oblige fortune and fame, or he could brook failure with the dignity of a royal pretender. He was in fact all things to at least one woman. Mrs. Norris had raised him the forty-odd years of his life.

Downstairs, she paused at the library door and asked if there was any way in which she could help him. He was packing his own books.

“Do you have the measurement of the shelves in town?”

She liked the way the words “in town” slipped from his tongue. It took out whatever sting there was for her in the change. She measured the largest of the books by the breadth of her own hand.

“They’ll fit well enough, sir, but are you taking them all?”

“Those I need,” he said.

She started from the room, but could not resist a further plea though she knew the cause lost as far as coming between him and his books was concerned. “Don’t you have the law books at the office, Mr. James?”

“Yes,” he said, continuing to pack law books.

She waited a moment at the door. “I left your father’s den to the last and it’s done now. I have only to gather up my own few bits and pieces.”

“My God,” said Jimmie, “if you feel that bad, we’d better stop for a drink.”

“I don’t feel that bad at all,” Mrs. Norris said.

“Then you don’t want a drink?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ll not be made out a hypocrite, Mr. James.”

Jimmie rubbed his chin with a dirty thumb. Certainly not if it meant doing her out of a drink at the same time. “Will you bring in the makings, then, Mrs. Norris?”

“I will since you ask it.”

When she returned with the tray, Jimmie said: “I don’t suppose Jasper will take it at all hard, your moving into the city?” There was a bit of the tease in him his father had been.

“It’s very difficult to tell,” Mrs. Norris said. “Mr. Tully’s a cool man for an Irishman.”

“I’d never have known it hearing him speak your praises,” Jimmie said slyly.

Mrs. Norris gave her shoulders a vigorous shrugging. “I was speaking of his blood, not his blather.”

“Blather,” Jimmie repeated, wiping his hands on the duster she gave him. “Isn’t that an Irish word?”

“It is a Gaelic word, Master James, and there were Gaels in Scotland while Ireland was a circle of druids.”

Jimmie laughed. “I wonder what your friend Tully would say to that.”

“He would agree likely. Mr. Tully is not a contentious man when it comes to nationalities.”

“True enough,” said Jimmie, for he knew Jasper Tully well. That long, melancholy detective was chief investigator in the District Attorney’s office, and had been through many administrations, including Jimmie’s own a few years past. He poured Mrs. Norris her usual finger of Scotch whiskey straight and mixed himself one with soda. “Do you still call him Mister Tully to his face also?” he teased. “You’ve known him for quite a while now.”

Mrs. Norris pulled an extra inch of height from her dumpy shape. “I don’t approve the informality in the world today, Mr. James. It’s made strangers of us all.”

Jimmie thought about it and then nodded acquiescence. He gave her her glass and lifted his own. He was a long moment contemplating the toast that was to be given on this occasion. It might be said that he was abandoning the house in which he had been born. Abandoning it or escaping it and the man whose personality marked it more deeply than had his own.

“To father,” he said at last. “May he rest in peace.”

Mrs. Norris paused in the act of lifting the glass to her lips. “I’m not at all certain he would have said ‘amen’ to that, Master Jamie.”

“Then, being his sole heir and executor, I shall say it for him,” Jimmie said, and added in gentle irony: “Prithy peace, amen.”

The late Ransom Jarvis, retired major general of the United States Army, had left an estate of three dollars and seventeen cents.

T
HE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING
Jimmie commenced the pattern of what he expected to set as daily routine: the reading of The New York Times at breakfast, the walk to the Lexington Avenue subway, and the reading of the Herald Tribune on the ride downtown to the Wall Street office of Johnson, Wiggam and Jarvis.

All his life he had enjoyed the setting of patterns—almost as much as he enjoyed breaking them. He had served in many capacities for a man his age, most of which had at one time or other benefited by his having been trained in the Law. He wondered if, now that he was determined to confine himself to its practice, his novitiate to politics would benefit him. He thought it likely. He had been defeated recently as candidate for governor of the state. And never had he stood so well with the very senior and very proper members of the law firm.

An unsuccessful candidacy for high political office had certain things to recommend it, he mused. More to the respectable citizenry than, say, retirement from that high office. It might be implied, albeit the matter was insusceptible of proof, that the unsuccessful candidate had been above the making of deals. Impotence therein shone as virtue. Meanwhile it was patently obvious that no one fresh out of office had any right-of-way whatever in traffic with those who had succeeded him. But he was expected to run that way all the same, and was therefore damned twice for but one failure.

Shakespeare could have made a sonnet of that, Jimmie thought, and turned to the editorial page.

His secretary greeted him with too much cheer for a Monday morning. He expected bad news. With his mail she brought him word that Mr. Wiggam was waiting to see him on a matter of urgency.

“Urgency?” Jimmie repeated. It was a word rarely used in the office.

“He came to your office himself,” the girl amended.

The placement of his office at the opposite end of the floor from the senior partners’ was a source of irritation to Jimmie. “He likes to take long walks in the morning,” he said. He was not long, however, in answering Wiggam’s summoning.

Mr. Wiggam gave the first few seconds to a visual appraisal of the junior member of the firm. The wistful lingering of his eyes on Jimmie’s midriff suggested one of two things: either he would have liked to see what there was of it encased in a vest and bound by a watch chain, or he was being nostalgic after his own lean-bellied days. Finally he inquired after Mrs. Norris. Still later he brought himself to the matter which, urgent or not, was obviously painful.

“Do you know the Adkins family?”

Jimmie furrowed his brow in thought.

“Weston, Connecticut. Particularly, have you heard of the son, Theodore Adkins?”

“Not to my recollection,” Jimmie said.

“Very old family. Georgianna—the mother—has been a friend of my family for years.” Wiggam drew a deep breath. “The boy—Teddy, that is—has got himself into something. A paternity action has been brought against him.”

Small wonder Wiggam was pained. Johnson, Wiggam and Jarvis refused divorce cases. Jimmie thought it duly retributive that such a case as this be thrust upon them. But he pulled a long face.

“Teddy is a bachelor,” Wiggam proceeded, “a condition which, I suppose, makes him susceptible to this sort of thing.”

Jimmie, himself a bachelor, said: “Married men are even more susceptible, for which I suppose society should be grateful.”

Wiggam cleared his throat. “I referred to the susceptibility to blackmail. And that’s what it is, whether or not he’s the father of this bastard.” He seemed to take a great deal of satisfaction out of the specifics of language, Jimmie thought.

“He will contest the suit?” he asked.