Old Sinners Never Die (18 page)

“Papa’s going to be in a lot of trouble, Junior,” Virginia said. “After all, I guess he did manage to get down there somehow without waking me up. I was expecting to make him coffee after I took the shower to wake myself up.”

It was something to think about, Jimmie mused, for he supposed his father must have done just that—got back to the city somehow.

“You’re even going to prove I was here all the time, breaking in on me like you did,” Virginia went on persuasively.

Jimmie thought he should have brought the youngster in as witness. He should have had her with him to touch the hood of the Jaguar and be able to testify to its heat. He did not know of anyone else who had seen the Jaguar in Washington. The Key Bridge had been deserted while he examined Montaigne’s body. Father and son: he sickened at the thought of what giving testimony in a case like this was going to mean.

Jimmie finally got an answer on the phone. He identified himself to the desk officer, and then said, “I want to report a violent death. The body is at the foot of the embankment on the Arlington side of the Key Bridge.” He did not take his eyes from Virginia Allan while he spoke. She listened, her head on the side, her lips pursed in a little pout of mock sorrow.

“I’ll be at the Club Sentimentale on K Street and the river when your men want to talk to me,” Jimmie went on quickly, hoping thereby to avoid the question of where he was calling from. “The dead man’s name is Montaigne. He runs the club.”

“Congressman, you better stay …”

Jimmie hung up the phone. The call might well be checked, of course. But there was a chance that it might not, his having identified himself, and he might thus have the opportunity to offer his explanation on a saner, safer plane.

“You know Leo challenged your father to a duel, don’t you?” Virginia said.

“So I’ve heard. And hoped to get a great splurge of publicity thereby. Why?”

Virginia shrugged. “Leo loved the limelight.”

“How did you get him into the Jaguar with you? Weren’t you supposed to be up here entertaining Father?”

“Honey, you don’t want to ask me those questions. Look up there—” She pointed to the wall where the guns were missing. “I’m just noticing two duelling pistols missing. Leo must’ve taken them—or else your father did. You don’t suppose Leo was shot with one of them?”

“Come on, Virginia, I’ve got a date with the police.” He strode to the chair and gathered her purse and her furs and threw them at her. Her purse was not heavy enough to carry even one duelling pistol, he thought, but it was far from empty. “And so have you.”

“I’m coming with you,” she said, “but just so’s I can give testimony against your father.”

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate it,” Jimmie said.

Virginia dressed in front of him and Jimmie thought it was the only thing in her manner that told of uncertainty, for beneath the silks, the props showed: she was the sagging relic of what once must have been the fine shape of a woman. Her face had held up, but she was nostalgia from the neck down.

“Funny, Ransom didn’t tell me about you,” she said, putting her head through a sweater which brought back certain illusions.

“Would it have mattered?”

“I don’t suppose. But I like to know about people and their families, never really having one myself.” She got another purse from the drawer and was about to change her things into it.

“Take the one you had,” Jimmie said.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t match. But then I don’t guess most things do tonight.”

They went through the house together when she was ready, turning off the lights. Outdoors she turned the key in the door, and stood back a moment and looked at the cabin. “All gone boom,” she said.

Jimmie was almost touched, and for the first time tonight surely.

“Going to leave his car here?” she asked.

“He can come for it at his convenience.”

“Remember the Dusenberg?” Virginia said. “Leo always wanted one. I wish he could have had it.”

Something was happening to her, Jimmie thought, remorse … Whatever it was, he counted on the confrontation with Dolores to crack her control. But her manner did not change.

“Poor little lamb,” she said, “trying to be a black sheep. I don’t mind sitting in the back alone.”

“Sit in front,” Jimmie said. “Dolores, it will be better if you get in the back. I’m sorry if it’s cold there.”

The sullen youngster did as he had asked.

“There’s lots of places it gets cold along toward morning,” Virginia said, and climbed into the front seat.

Jimmie, rounding the car, was half prepared to face some small pocket weapon, but her hands were folded in her lap and she had deliberately placed the purse where he could reach it as easily as she could.

Jimmie was troubled as he drove toward the city. Certain things had seemed to have come quite clear to him: for instance, he was sure that Virginia had been used to decoy the General, to keep him safely out of Washington while the duel was ballyhooed to the reporters. It did not matter to Leo if it all fell flat afterwards; indeed he must have expected that to happen. Jimmie also reasoned that Leo was Senator Fagan’s informant; it occurred to him that Leo with his entrée to high places and high level conversations would have little trouble in manufacturing “security risks” and Virginia would have been the perfect helpmate—especially with someone like the General.

But the murder of Leo Montaigne: there was the phone call from which he did not return to the club room, and his departure within a half-hour or so, apparently telling no one in the club. Virginia had come down to see him on some pretext that was sufficient to lure him into the car with her, something presumably that could not be passed between them on the telephone, and something urgent enough in Leo’s terms to justify her leaving the General alone, something that could not wait until morning. It was fair to surmise her bait to have been “security” stuff she had got out of the General. Whether or not she got it—and Jimmie suspected there was nothing his father had to give of that nature—was unimportant to Virginia. It was a tale sufficient to lure Leo.

Jimmie did not doubt at all that she had killed him. And from the moment of finding the body, he had suspected jealousy as motive; the young lover’s betrayal of an ageing mistress, and the opportunity to get away with it, placing the appearance of guilt upon the General. But from the moment she turned the key in the cabin door, something in this line of conjecture seemed out of joint.

He turned his head when he spoke to her. “Miss Allan, why do you think my father might have killed Montaigne?”

It was Dolores who responded, crying out: “You said she killed him!”

“I said I thought she was implicated,” Jimmie said.

Beside him, Virginia did not answer. Instead she lifted her chin and raised her voice—high, clear, and sterile as the night wind—and sang at its top,
The Old Rugged Cross
.

Jimmie could feel the crawl of his flesh into goose-bumps.

T
OM WAS DRIVEN DIRECTLY
to the home of Senator Fagan, and on the way he resolutely kept his mouth shut. He was onto the likes of these boys, apprentices to fame. There was not a word he would let out of his mouth now wouldn’t get to the senator ahead of Tom, aye, and maybe instead of him. It was a terrible commentary on human nature that the greater the man, the greedier his watchdogs.

It was a modest house, the senator’s, and a great disappointment to Tom who had somehow hoped to find it cluttered with books and papers and legalistic scrolls; he had thought perhaps to find a collection of scientific instruments that would enable the senator to read beneath the lines. But the place was as neat as an old maid’s hope chest.

The senator himself, however, was waiting for him in the study. He sat, bleak-faced and red-eyed, in robe and pyjamas behind his desk. He offered Tom a limp, wet hand without rising, and much to Tom’s chagrin there wafted up between them the distinct aroma of whisky. Ah, but sure, it could have been mouthwash. Hadn’t he wakened the man in the middle of the night?

“Now, young man, the first thing I want is the name of the general.”

“Well, you see, sir …”

“The name of the general,” one of the senator’s boys said.

“I work for the son of General Ransom Jarvis,” Tom said.

“Is that the man you spoke of on the phone?”

“It is.”

Tom glanced up at the senator’s echo. He was slowly nodding his head. And so was the senator, with that famous stubborn grin now breaking through the granite.

“Sit down, lad, and tell the whole story in your own way. Would you like a cigar?” The senator indicated the gold humidor on his desk: more gold had gone into its making than ever Tom had seen in a piece, and the handles on either side of it were the graven heads of Texas steers.

“No, thank you, sir. I have one I’ll save for later.”

Tom told the story as straight as ever he was likely to tell one, and while the General’s part was obviously a disappointment to Fagan, he was very happy indeed with the revelation on d’Inde, since d’Inde, too, had been at the Chatterton party.

“You’ve done a fine turn for your country tonight, my boy,” the senator said. He looked up at the echo. “Get somebody from the
Herald
on the phone, somebody worth talking to.”

Tom was impressed with the efficiency of the senator’s assistant. If Congressman Jarvis showed a little more authority, in fact, Tom’s own efficiency could be stepped up. He thought for the second or two he was out of the limelight, how the boss would fit in a role like Fagan’s. Sure, he had the background for it, New York district attorney at one time. And he had guts, and patriotism, sure as much as the next man; he was a war veteran. Ah, but he was shy, if you came right down to it: he wasn’t the sort to light up the sky. In fact, Tom was sure, if it had been Congressman Jarvis he had taken this story to about d’Inde, he would have done the same thing as the two women: he’d have gone to the FBI, and never a word in the papers of his own part in it. Tom was convinced that good works should be proclaimed aloud; leave the whispering quiet to spies and traitors.

“Do you come from Ireland, my boy?” the senator interrupted Tom’s reverie.

“I do, sir,” Tom said, and told him the town.

“Do you know my grandmother came not far from there? A grand woman.”

The senator’s assistant hung up the phone: “Every reporter in town is at Montaigne’s place, Senator. They say something’s going to break there any minute.”

“Get my clothes,” the senator said, rising. “Get them now!”

T
HE GENERAL CAME OUT
of the washroom feeling much refreshed, and the more he saw of the characters gathered in The Sentimentale, all in varying stages of dilapidation, the more he thought a night in the mountains had something to recommend it.

It was only the melancholy drunks, however, that clung to the bar, ministered to by one blonde barmaid. The General had had enough of blonde maids for the night. “What’s the celebration?” he asked of anyone who might give him an answer.

“Drinks on the house. All you need is a press card,” a fellow of rubbery status said.

It made the General a little dizzy to watch him. “I suspected that. Is our host getting married?”

“Ha! Mañana maybe. He’s challenged some old geezer to a duel. We’re all going out to the battleground as soon as it comes daylight.”

“Swords or pistols?”

“You’re a pistol yourself. Hey, blondie, give my friend here a drink.”

The General scowled and held up his hand. “Not before breakfast, thank you.” He went to the clubroom and looked in: Babel could not have been worse. There, presumably, people tried to understand one another and couldn’t. Here nobody was listening … except him, and the philosophic melancholics who were listening to themselves.

Madame Cru was dancing the Charleston, and her little pomposity of a husband was ladling out bromides as only a persistent bore could. Poor Madame, she must cherish naughty thoughts behind those shuttered eyes of hers. And it was a desperate woman who could do the Charleston at her age at four-thirty in the morning. Somebody brought Joshua Katz a violin and thrust it upon him. Katz, waltzing around her with the grace of a hippo, played out the dance for Madame.

Away went Maria Candido then, running up and down a cadenza. By God, the General admired her; she was sober enough to put words to whatever there was left in her of tune:

“Hi diddle-diddle, Katz and the fiddle,

Ho-ho-ho—Katz and the fiddle,

He-he-he—Katz and the fiddle,

And the cow jumped over the moon.

Ho-ho-ho—Katz and the fiddle,

He-he-he—Katz and the fiddle,

The little dog laughed. …”

Katz, very calmly and deliberately then, and with more delicacy than he had played the instrument, lifted the fiddle to his lips and then high into the air and brought it down on the coloratura’s head. She swooned away into the arms of the ambassador.

The General stepped out of the doorway and went to the phone booth. He had to come out again and borrow a dime from his pal at the bar.

The reporter followed him to the booth. “Say, chum, you didn’t kidnap a lady tonight, did you?”

“Have you seen one tonight you’d like to kidnap?” the General growled and pulled the phone booth door closed between them. He popped it open again. “Could you make it two dimes, friend?”

“T
HE FIRST THING WANT
to do,” Mrs. Norris said to Mulrooney, “is return the bicycle, and I’d as soon do it before I have to make any explanations.”

“Madam, your theft of a bicycle is not the concern of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Mulrooney said.

“I was thinking of you as a gentleman,” she said.

“Al,” Mulrooney said with a deep sigh, “drive up to Georgetown first.” To Mrs. Norris he said, “Have you any notion whatever the trouble and expense your playing detective has cost the United States government?”

Mrs. Norris thought for a moment. “I shouldn’t think your salary would be more than ten thousand a year. Or do you get overtime for something like tonight?”