Death of an Old Sinner (6 page)

“Essence,” Flora chided in her languid way, “they don’t call it that anymore, Ransom. That’s an old fashioned word, essence.”

“We’re fairly old fashioned people, you and I, Flora.” He looked at her critically. “You aren’t dieting again, are you?”

Flora sat on the back of a chair. “I never knew a more observant man in my life. I just haven’t been feelin’ very well, Ransom.” The drawl crept into her voice.

She had not in all these years of his telling her that he loathed the false accent she put on, realized that he really meant it, that whatever she hoped to wheedle from him thereby would be harder to get for it, not easier. Still, maybe she was right. She got what he could give her, one way or the other, and the drawl was her notion of charm, skill, witchery. It was something she could tote up in a personal assessment.

“Come tell me about it, Flora,” he said, and held his hand out to her.

She sat on the arm of his chair and stroked his hand. Then she gave a great sigh. “I suppose I got to expect it, Ransom, but I get so blue and lonesome.”

“Lonesome,” he mimicked her pronunciation. “I received a communication today from an old flame of yours—one, I hope, my dear, you’ll put out promptly.”

“Tell me about it,” Flora said languidly.

“I suppose you’ve given him no encouragement?”

“I don’t know if I have or not, Ransom,” she said in a schoolgirl fashion that touched his anger, “since I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about.”

“I’m talking about Nick Casey, Flora.”

Her whole face blossomed into the smile. “Was Nick enquirin’ after me, Ransom?”

“That is a quaint way of putting it, to say the least.”

“Nick Casey,” she mooned. “What does he look like now? Is he handsome still? When we were in public school, Ransom…”

“I know,” he cut her off rudely. “It’s a charming story.” He took his hand from hers and caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “When did you see him last?”

“In person?” Flora queried.

“He’s a gangster, woman, not a movie star! Yes, in person.”

Flora sighed and her eyes were wistful. “It was so long ago, my hair was natural. But he gave me a job in one of his clubs.”

There was something very wrong, the General thought. He wanted to read the note again now, but not in front of her. So he suggested that they have a drink and Flora went to the kitchenette for ice. He re-read Casey’s note and was no wiser. “I want a piece of your little plum.” The President’s diary? It could not be. The scheme was no further along than the vision in his mind. Unless Casey had been listening when he sketched the plan to Robbie. Impossible. No more than a half-hour intervened between Robbie’s departure from his private office and the oaf’s appearance. No, no, no. The diary was too subtle a business for Casey. “Face it—you are an old man…” Damn his insolence.

Flora returned, the tray nicely set with napkins, glasses, ice and whiskey. She had been, all in all, a wonderfully responsive girl, amenable to all the social improvements, to civilization in fact, and otherwise, marvelously uninhibited.

“What did you tell him about me, Ransom?”

For the moment he had forgotten Casey. “Oh…that you were a little plumper than when your hair was natural, and that I loved every ounce of it…

“Ransom!”

He touched his glass to hers. “How would you like to go on a vacation—away from all this?”

“Away from here?” she interrupted, and shook her head. “I’d be lost.”

“With me, even?”

“I guess especially with you,” she said thoughtfully.

He could understand it, he decided after a moment. This was the world she had made for him. She was its hostess, its goddess, its keeper of the flame… Oh, he was sentimental tonight. “If I were to make quite a sum of money soon, Flora, what would you like most?”

“I guess I would like best to have the bank book for it,” she said.

The General chuckled. He went to the phone then, taking his address book from his pocket. He dialed a number, and waiting an answer, blew a kiss to Flora. With her ruddy cheeks, she belonged in a French salon, by God, he thought, with her shoulders bare, her bosom… “Hello, Fowler? Ransom Jarvis speaking. How are you?”

The man at the other end asked if he could call the General back in a few minutes. The General gave him the number, hung up the receiver but held the phone in his hand while he waited. “You know, Flora, how some people cannot look you in the eye while talking to you?” She nodded, “Here’s a fellow that way on the telephone, believe it or not. No matter what hour you call him, at home or at the office, he must call you back. He needs to pretend that he’s that busy. Sometimes I wonder if he pretends it to himself as well.”

“It takes all kinds,” Flora said. She came behind the General and brushed beneath his jaw with her cool fingers. “Who is he, Ransom?”

“An agent, a literary agent.” As the General had expected, the phone rang within a minute. “Look, Fowler,” he said, “I have a literary property I think you might like to place—what?…. No, not my memoirs. I’ll be at them soon. This is something interesting…”

They made a date for ten the next morning. The General hung up the phone and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past ten. He was suddenly very tired. Despite the note in his pocket, he was beginning to doubt the seriousness of Nick Casey’s threat.

“Ransom, when you write your memoirs, am I goin’ to be in them?”

He pulled her down on his lap. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep you hidden away in my heart forever,” he said.

She was slow in speaking and her eyes came round to his slowly, as she pushed away from him. “I don’t really mean much to you, do I, Ransom?” she said, and he had never seen so venomous a look. “Just somethin’ you pick up once in a while like a toy doll.”

“A damned expensive toy,” he blurted out. “Oh, Flora, what the devil’s the matter with you?”

She began to pace the room. “I don’t like bein’ a toy, even an expensive one!” There was something to Flora he had never known, the General thought. But of course he should have known it, the strain of panther in her. He watched the sly sensuousness of her movement.

He threw back his head and laughed. “Come here, Flora! I never loved you as well, my girl!”

She stopped and whipped the trail of her negligee from where it had twisted around her ankles. The garment fell open and she was very nearly naked. “If I come, it’s not because I’m lovin’ you, but ʼcause I’m owin’ you.”

The General dropped his eyes. He got up slowly and put on his overcoat without a word. They had had quarrels before, but never on this level. There was but one answer, she no longer needed him. Nick Casey was not so far away, after all. Flora flung herself on the studio couch then, face down, and began to weep. A really sordid scene, the General thought, adjusting his hat in the mirror. He did not want to seem to hurry, but he felt a certain urge for haste, nonetheless. There was not much point in his being heroic when their affairs had come to such a pass. He started violently at the ringing of the doorbell. Flora too started up. The parakeet made such a racket, she needed to throw the sheet over it on her way to the house phone.

“I think it’s Nick Casey,” she said, her hand over the mouthpiece. But automatically she was pressing the buzzer to admit him.

“Is there any other way for me to leave here?” the General demanded.

Flora nodded, waving to the window. “The fire escape.”

The General tried to recall an occasion when he had been here in daylight. The window looked down on some sort of court. He sat on the windowsill and swung his legs out. She was all but pushing him.

“I’m an old man, Flora,” he protested, and for the first time in his life.

“Then hang onto the railin’,” Flora said.

He caught hold of it and took his first step down. The whole contraption sagged and he came near pitching forward and down.

“Be careful, Ransom,” Flora cried, and immediately closed the window between them.

His temper warmed him then to the task of his descent. It was, after all, but three floors. On the second he paused and without thinking what he was doing, stared inside. A woman looked up from where she had been polishing her toenails. She gave a scream and leaped for the phone. The General moved gingerly, and the ladder rode down to the ground beneath him. He found the passage to the street that brought him out a few feet from the building entrance. There at the door of a black limousine—double parked—waited the two lads who had tried to pick him up coming out of Robbie’s.

Thank God he had put the Jaguar in a garage. He retreated into the court again and looked for another exit opposite. Finding it, he looked up at the window from which he had made his departure. She had even pulled the blind! Oh, what a dissembling witch, his Flora!

The General was making his way out of the court onto another street when he heard police sirens. Perhaps to rescue the lady with the unfinished paint job on her toenails? How would Mr. Casey feel, hearing the sirens? Would his boys drive off without him? Perhaps he too would depart via the fire escape! The General was almost tempted to wait and watch. Police cars were converging from all directions. Then he was struck with the vulnerability of his own position. He skipped out into the street, sprinted the hundred or so feet to Third Avenue and then slowed his pace. He went into the next bar for a drink. Suddenly he wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was an astounding thing, but he had come within an ace of arrest as a Peeping Tom!

I
N THE MORNING THE
General fell asleep again after he had been called. He had spent the night at his club, and with a rare sense of fellowship for the men he usually thought dullards, he had stayed up too late at cards. He woke with the peal of the phone bell: “his broker’s office”—that was Flora. He refused the call. He needed then to have a Turkish bath, and all in all, he was pressed for time at breakfast. He could but glimpse someone else’s discarded paper and he tore from it the pages carrying two items, one of which at least he intended to fully savor later:

Nick Casey, a figure prominent during the crime hearings, had been picked up for questioning as a Peeping Tom in the courtyard of an East Side apartment. The woman who at first swore he had appeared twice on her fire escape, later withdrew the charge, when a neighbor affirmed Casey to have been with her at the time. Casey said that he had left the apartment of Miss Flora Tims in such an unconventional manner on hearing her doorbell ring. He had not wished to embarrass her, an unmarried lady.

The General made a clucking sound and stuffed the page into his pocket. And Flora had the nerve to call him at the club that morning! She had used their usual ruse, of course…his broker’s office calling. Just the same it was crude of her.

The other item concerned Jimmie: they were out for his hide already, poor boy. The district attorneys of three counties were cooperating in the effort to pick up Johnny “The Rock” Rocco, old time rum-runner, who was wanted now for questioning about the Manhattan killing in 1948…. The General paused and placed the date for certain; it was during Jimmie’s term all right. Oh yes, the newspaper had made the same calculation: “During the administration of James Ransom Jarvis, an indictment was sought against Rocco, but for reasons now under investigation, was never brought. Jarvis, who has since served in the United States House of Representatives, is prominently mentioned as a likely candidate for governor this year.”

Poor boy, poor boy. Well, it was the price one paid for the privilege of public service. The General pocketed that page also, but he put its matter out of mind for the time being. He needed all his wits to confront Augie Fowler within the hour.

The agent kept him waiting no longer than it took to finish a phone call. There was rather more pomp to his manner than usual, the General thought. He was what Mrs. Norris would call “a weatherable man,” meaning that he could smell in the wind something to his advantage.

“By the way,” he said, gesturing the General into a chair, “you’re to call your broker’s office.”

The General grunted his thanks. Flora, obviously, was in a hard way to get hold of him. How canny of her, to have found him here. That was not quite like her. “Well, shall we get down to business?” he said.

The agent nodded. “What have you got?”

“A most extraordinary thing, Fowler, an unpublished diary of a president of the United States.”

“Which one?” Fowler said. “I mean which president.”

The General named him.

“That’s one I’ve never heard of,” the agent said bluntly.

“He was unsensational—at least as the world knew him then—my grand-uncle, by the way.”

“Oh?” said Fowler with the look of first believing a word the General said. “And you think that at this late date his diary ought to find a publisher?”

“My dear man, it is a debt to history, on the part of the publisher, myself and now you. Furthermore, I don’t think it would embarrass any of us financially.”

“I wouldn’t allow myself an opinion on that if I were you, General. Frankly, the only kind of diary I could stir up interest in right now—well, it would have to come out of my lady’s chamber, if you know what I mean.”

“Precisely,” the General said.

The agent looked at him to be sure his meaning had got across. “Okay. Let’s have a look at it.”

“Oh, it’s far too precious to cart around. But let me read you a few passages which I have transcribed. This, you understand, occurred while he was ambassador to England. The lady in mention is of a house still prominent in English nobility, by the way…which I don’t suppose needs inhibit us, eh?”

“Read, read,” Fowler said, with an impatient wave of his hand.

The General selected a provocative passage naturally, and glimpsing an actual glint of greed creeping into Fowler’s eyes as he listened, he wished that he had long long ago turned his hand to fiction.

“You know,” Fowler said when the General pocketed his sample, “we could feed bits of this—without names, probably, to the columnists. Whet the public interest. It might start some bidding before ever we submit to publishers.”