Gentleman Called (14 page)

Tully sat a moment in awed silence. One more murderer who had not been on the scene of the murder.

T
HERE WAS NO DOUBT
at all, Tully knew, reading the description of the man who had assumed the Columbus doctor’s identity that it was Johanson’s Jim-dandy. He had been slimmer, apparently, and wore a beard in those days. But the thing he had not disguised was his walk, his buoyant, cock-of-the-walk walk. Tully marveled at the audacity of the man to call attention to himself by wearing a beard in a town like Sando. Three days’ stubble would not cause anyone to notice, but as the sheriff said, “This was a beard that would have pleasured General Grant.”

“And the Widow Bellowes,” Tully added.

“And her, and God knows, she was a hard woman to pleasure, wasn’t she, Joe?”

The Sando policeman grinned. “I never tried it myself.”

“Nobody would work for her, the way I heard it,” the sheriff went on. “The house was filthy. People saw the ‘doctor’ hanging out things on the line himself. Whoever he was, he was a demon for cleanness. It must’ve been a real test for him to climb into bed with that woman.”

“Had no trouble climbing out of it though,” Tully said gloomily. “Out of it and out of Sando, and into New York City.”

“Grand Central Station,” Joe said. “Is it all as big as it sounds on the radio?”

“Bigger,” Tully said. “And he got ten thousand dollars out of the widow. That’s the money that must’ve taken him to New York in the first place. Or do you think he came here from there?”

The sheriff shrugged. “We traced him to Columbus. He just got on the eight o’clock train the morning after he’d murdered her and rode up there, neat, cheerful, like any man having business in the big town. And that’s the last any of us or the Columbus police ever heard of him till now. Where he came from—well, he had a different kind of accent than any we’re used to. Not much like yours either. Somebody said it was Oxford, England. Somebody else said Boston, and we took to that, him maybe being a Harvard medical man. You see we never did get it out of our heads he was a doctor.”

“Did he treat anybody else while he was here?”

“Hey,” Joe said, “we can get him for practicing without a medical degree.”

“If that’s all we can get him for,” Tully said dryly. “I’m for seeing he gets the degree—honorary. How about it, anyone go up there with a busted finger or a bellyache, thinking him to be a doctor?”

There was no record of such an occurrence. Tully inquired then about the temper of Sando after the murder of a leading citizen, and by an outsider. The burden of the explanation was that Mrs. Bellowes had carried no favor with the local people. She had been known as a snob and as a cruel one, taking up at every chance with the outsiders. The town figured she got what she earned.

“The ten thousand dollars—did she keep amounts like that around the house, or was it got special out of the bank?”

“Two thousand was drawn out of the bank here just the day before. The rest out of banks in Columbus earlier. She was fixing to get married all right. She got her grandmother’s wedding ring out of the safety vault, and a great black opal pendant. When you stop to think of them two things side by side, it’d give you the creeps, wouldn’t it? Life in one and death in the other. The wedding ring was right on her bedroom table when they found her, but the black opal went east with him and the ten thousand dollars.”

Tully sat back and thought a moment about Arabella Sperling’s diamond pin, a “lover’s knot,” which was also missing. He told the two Ohio men about it.

“He must be getting quite a collection of female do-dabs,” Joe said.

“Do-dabs hell,” the sheriff said. “He’s collecting the females, it looks like. How about that one with the pretty name, did she have any jewels?”

“Ellie True,” Tully said. “That’s exactly what I intend to find out first when I get back to New York.”

M
R. ADKINS ARRIVED LATE
Friday afternoon to pick up Jimmie and drive with him to Connecticut. He arrived considerably ahead of the hour he was expected by Jimmie. Indeed Jimmie had not yet come home from the office.

If there was a pattern shaping in these arrivals, Mrs. Norris no longer found it troublesome. She had more than half-expected him, and was dressed in her second best gown, a neat black silk, with delicate white lace at the throat and wrists. Her hair was parted in the middle as usual and disciplined into a bun at the back of her head.

“I suppose you’ve been told you resemble Queen Victoria,” Adkins said, giving his overcoat into her arms.

“I’ve been told it, sir,” she said.

He turned round and put out a firm hand to delay her way to the closet. “And what else have you been told, that you’re ‘sirring’ me again? I thought we were democrats, you and I.”

“I have no politics except Mr. James’ when he’s running.”

“Nor I, even were Mr. James running. It was a social attitude of which I was speaking, and there, no matter how much of a snob you may be—and you are, you know—I am truly democratic.”

“I have no trouble believing that,” she said, and took his coat to the closet. “I was in Mark Stewart’s yesterday.”

“I see,” Adkins said, and walked in his jaunty way to the study door. He might hang his head, Mrs. Norris thought, but he could not drag his feet. He was a cheerful man in spite of woe and weather.

He went into the study and lighted the lamp himself. In the room ahead of her, there was no need to play you-first, no-after-you at the door. “And I suppose you saw my former amour?” he said.

Mrs. Norris could not prevent the bob up her head gave at the word.

Nor was it lost by Mr. Adkins. He was hard put to suppress the pleasure it gave him to see her react to it. “Does the word offend you, my dear?”

“I suppose it did a mite,” she said, aware of his “my dear.” That had come out so offhandedly, it did not distress her.

“Since you were interested enough in my affairs to observe the woman,” Adkins said quietly, “I thought you deserved the truth, however painful it might be for me to admit it. I did have strong feelings once for the woman.”

“There are things in my own life it would be painful for me to admit,” she said.

“I find that a solace,” Adkins said. Then he looked up and smiled, rather like a small boy who had just been lectured and reprieved. “Do you suppose we might cadge—is that the word?—a glass of Mr. Jarvis’ sherry?”

“The hospitality of the house is always mine to offer,” Mrs. Norris said, and went to the wine cabinet.

“You will have a glass with me,” Adkins said, and laid his hand on hers, but lightly, reassuringly, and surely with no undue intimacy.

“I prefer whiskey,” Mrs. Norris said bluntly.

Adkins drew away in mock gravity. “Oh, my. I see what you mean about the painful admissions in your life.”

They laughed together, and Mrs. Norris was persuaded to nip a bit of Scotch while he sipped his sherry.

“I suppose it is incomprehensible to you, how ever I could be attracted to a woman like Daisy Thayer,” he said then.

Mrs. Norris would have preferred to forget that, but he, poor man, must be obsessed with it. “Oh, she’s a woman of a certain beauty,” she said.

“You have laid the truth in a bed of charity!” he cried. “Vanity. It was my vanity to which she appealed. Indeed that is the appeal such women make to all men. They are pied pipers, nay, to use your own word, dear Mrs. Norris, they are vipers. They sing to us, the long and the short of us, the fat and the hollow, and for a little while we think we are solid men.”

It was an elegant sort of madness he was piping, a raving rhapsody all in the same key. At the end, Mrs. Norris said—having enjoyed both it and her whiskey—“You make such nice noise, Mr. Adkins.”

He fairly rolled into a ball with pleasure. He grew grave then. “Why have you no faults, Mrs. Norris?”

“You’re a peculiar sort of a man,” she said thoughtfully, “who looks for the faults in an acquaintance.”

“I’ve never had to look for them before,” he said, and rubbed the knuckles of his hands with his thumbs as though there were an itch in them.

Mrs. Norris got up and brushed the crinkles out of her dress. “I don’t suppose I have ever heard anything more conceited than that in my life…sir.”

Mr. Adkins was genuinely shocked. He leapt to his feet. “Oh, my dear, you misunderstand. What kind of woman, but the wrong kind would care for an ugly little clown like myself?” He bobbed his head down to where the bald pate was shining in her face. “Look, I could paint a smile on the top of my head and who would know it from my face?”

“Oh, sir, that’s a cruel thing to say of yourself. You have a very nice face. There’s kindness in it, and sometimes a twinkle. It’s true, it’s not a handsome face, but I’ve always wondered how ever a handsome man could manage to be sincere. Except my Master Jamie, of course.”

Mr. Adkins stood as though in bondage to her. He gave his nose a wrinkle. “Don’t be distracted with thoughts of him. Let me suppose for just one moment I am enough to fill your thoughts.”

But he had lost her. She looked up at the clock, and at that moment the house phone gave a long and two short buzzes. “Now who would that be?” she said. “It is time for Mr. James, but he’s in the habit of letting himself in.”

She went to the hall phone, and behind her and not to her especial observance, Mr. Adkins took their glasses to the pantry. He did not care to have Jimmie know of their intimacy.

It was the doorman on the phone. “Your boss is on the way up, Mrs. Norris. I thought you might like to know it, you entertaining company.”

Mrs. Norris fanned herself in a sudden wrath. “This not my company I’m entertaining, John.”

“I’m glad to hear that. He’s not my notion of company either.” He hung up before Mrs. Norris could summon anything sufficiently scathing to say into the phone. The old goat had a mind like a rusty can.

Jimmie, meanwhile, was turning the key in the door. When he opened it, Adkins was the first person he saw, standing in the study doorway, his hands in his pockets.

“You’re late,” Adkins said.

“Sorry,” said Jimmie, though he thought he was not all that late. He had never known a person of such punctuality. “How are you?” he said to Mrs. Norris, giving her his coat. “Perhaps you’ll get Mr. Adkins a drink while I pack a few things.”

“I’ll bring you in one yourself, sir,” she said.

“Good,” said Jimmie.

She went to the kitchen for ice. Her face was so hot she would have liked to dip it into the ice bucket. And there when she turned around was Mr. Adkins standing and watching her, and with the strangest look—one almost of tenderness—seeming to try to tell her something with his eyes.

“Is there something, sir?”

“Sir,” he mocked gently. He held her eyes with his own while he spoke. “I wish it were you and not your beloved Master Jamie with whom I were spending the week-end.” He said the words in a sort of whispered despair, and left the room as soon as he had said them.

Really, Mrs. Norris thought, that was too bold of him. He should not have said anything like that even if he felt it. And for the life of her, she could not have said what she felt about him. It was not at all the comfortable sort of thing she felt for Jasper Tully. And yet there was pleasure in it.

They had but a moment alone after that. It was at the front door when Jimmie went back to his dressing room for something he had forgotten.

“Mrs. Norris,” Mr. Adkins said, “stay at home tomorrow evening.” It was just the shadow of a gesture, but she thought he touched his fingertips to his lips.

J
IMMIE FELT LIKE A
snoop, and like one of the most vulgar sort, who, while enjoying the hospitality of your house, go about silently, eyeingly pricing the worth of everything, including your family relationships. But he had decided that if Teddy Adkins intended being less than frank with him, he was going to have to be the more informed on Teddy Adkins.

After dinner he had coffee and brandy with the immediate family: Mama, the three sisters and Teddy. Teddy, in their midst was entirely the person Jimmie had first supposed him, a cheerful nothing of a man, who, frankly, Jimmie doubted had ever slept with a woman, though Daisy Thayer might have coaxed him into her bedroom.

The sisters, one more than the other, doted on him. Although at least two of them had grown children and grandchildren, Teddy was still their baby brother. Miranda all but pinched his cheeks whenever she managed to get near him. Why? He was neither attractive nor admirable, at least that Jimmie could judge. Was it merely that he was something alive? Or was it that to them he was never altogether alive? He was like a doll. Yes, Jimmie mused, there was a doll-like quality about him, the band-box tailoring, the complexion, and above all that walk of his—like something with a tight spring.

The band-box, doll house atmosphere prevailed also in his rooms, Jimmie discovered later that evening when he stopped there on pretense of some small business. There were books in the cases, and clothes in the closet, but all of them had an undisturbed look, as though they might have been shifted on the hangers, the clothes, and the books might have been dusted, but none of them seemed worn. It was the damnedest thing, Jimmie thought, but he felt exactly the same way about Teddy Adkins: he simply was not worn enough for the years he was supposed to have been on this earth.

Jimmie went to his own room feeling more and more uneasy about the case and about his own presence in this house. He lay in bed thinking about it, a book open on his stomach—
The Life of Edward Coke.
If Elizabethan England could not distract him, what in God’s name would? This house itself seemed unreal. Now and then a stirring of wind set the pine trees outside his window to a forlorn sighing. Poe must have heard such laments in nature to have written of the fall of Usher. And such a house might this be. Jimmie suddenly realized that he was doing precisely the old lady’s bidding, and entirely against his own better judgment. This case should not be allowed to go to court. But the only reason he could give was scarcely valid: it was just bad taste! A gentleman could not tell a woman like Georgianna Adkins she had bad taste, damn it.