Gentleman Called (2 page)

“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.

“I should certainly expect him to,” Wiggam said. “That is a matter to be worked out between him and counsel.”

“I take it you have accepted the retainer?” Jimmie said, scoring every point now that he could for himself.

“I could not do anything else,” Wiggam said sharply. “The man’s mother and mine went to school together.”

That gave Jimmie some pause. He had thought they were talking of someone young and hot-blooded. “How old is Teddy-boy?”

Mr. Wiggam winced. “Mid-fifties, I suppose.”

Jimmie made a quick calculation of the age of a mother of a lad of fifty-five. Wiggam was not easily cowed. A dowager Lysistrata, by the sounds of it.

“Fine woman, his mother. You will want to meet her,” Wiggam said brightly, confirming thereby Jimmie’s worst premonitions.

“I doubt it,” Jimmie said. “I assume from your confidence, sir, I am to take on the defense?”

“Johnson and I are convinced that without your active return to the firm, we could not have undertaken it, and Georgianna would never have understood our position.”

“Does she understand her son’s position?” Jimmie asked, intending the question to be taken as rhetorical.

“She is not an unworldly woman, Jim. You will have no trouble understanding one another.”

Jimmie grinned. “I wondered which of my qualities recommended me to this assignment. My worldliness, is that it?”

Wiggam said it with a straight face: “Precisely. Your sensitivity to the areas of what I may call ‘plunder,’ the plunder by one man of another’s privacy.”

It was not a lecture Jimmie needed to attend. He had made copy for more than one gossip columnist in his career. The remarks, however, told him obliquely the extent of Mr. Wiggam’s bias in the case, a bias natural enough to a man of his peculiar social consciousness.

“You would not allow the complainant any merit to her suit?”

“Certainly not,” Wiggam said.

“Has she money?”

“I have no notion. I should think not or she could not expect to win out over respectability. Deprivation is her only plea, deprivation suing plenty. And she will, of course, insist upon a jury trial, praying that that prospect will force you into a settlement.”

“Are you sure you’re not her advocate, sir?”

Wiggam was not amused.

“When do I meet our client?” Jimmie said.

“This evening. I have suggested that he call on you at home tonight—or as soon as you can conveniently see him there. I consider it a matter too delicate for the office.”

It was Jimmie’s turn to be not amused. Such availability had not been in his scheme of things when he decided on a city residence for winter.

M
RS. NORRIS HAD BEEN
expecting Mr. Tully to dinner that evening; she had laid in an excellent steak for him only to have him phone in the late afternoon and offer the most mournful of regrets. A policeman’s lot: murder for his dinner. She wished him a ‘good appetite’ that was neither tart nor sweet, taking herself a certain relish in the less sordid aspects of Mr. Tully’s business. She suggested that he might stop by for a cup of tea if he were able to make it before midnight.

She turned then to the refinements of settling the new household, the arrangement of the silver in the butler’s pantry. Mr. James was out to dinner. He expected a caller at nine o’clock and if he was not himself home then, Mrs. Norris had her instructions. At two minutes after nine the doorman phoned up to say that Mr. Adkins was in the elevator. Mrs. Norris washed her hands.

When she opened the door to him he was standing like something fresh out of a box, a bald, shining little man, scarcely taller than herself, his skin a scrubbed pink, his eyes almost a mad blue, they were so bright and lively. Whether he lingered those thirty seconds to appraise her or to be himself appraised, it would have been hard to say. No doubt of it, he liked to make an impression. And he had succeeded.

“Mr. Jarvis expects me, madam. I am Theodore Adkins.”

Glimpsing in the mirror his passage down the hall after her, his balance seeming to settle in his heels with every step, Mrs. Norris was reminded of a penguin. A pleasant enough bird, she reasoned, if you didn’t have to do its laundry.

“Mr. Jarvis will be home very soon, sir,” she said, throwing open the library door. “He bade me set the fire in here for you and offer his apologies if he was delayed. Can I bring you something?”

Mr. Adkins drew a chair closer to the blazing fire and settled himself like a nesting bird before answering. He turned a cherubic face up into hers. “What would you suggest?”

“Brandy?” The burr native so many years before to her tongue turned up again at that instant, her having taken a slight pique at the man’s leisure with her time as well as his own.

“By my soul, you’re Scotch!” he cried.

“I am.” Her antagonism vanished. She dearly loved being discovered for what she was.

The man made a lacework of fingers far too delicate for the stomach over which he entwined them. “When I was a boy I knew Highlands and Lowlands. I had a governess who finished off prayers with me every night with a verse you might find familiar:

‘From ghouls and ghosties

And three legged hosties

And things that go bump in the night

The Lord deliver us…’”

Mr. Adkins smiled ruefully and shook his head. “I don’t know what it was that the Lord delivered me from in answer to her prayers, but do you know, I’ve taken an inordinate degree of pleasure ever since in things that go bump in the night?”

What a delightful man, Mrs. Norris thought. “You might like a glass of port, sir,” she suggested. “I’ve heard Mr. James recommend it to the real connoisseurs.”

“Will you have a glass with me?”

“No, sir, I will not,” she said, and with genuine regret that a man of such obvious high station should show such low taste.

He popped to his feet and gave a deep bow. “Forgive the familiarity, dear lady. Something in the moment brought me back to the company of my own Miss Ramsey.”

“I am a widow,” Mrs. Norris said, her emphasis on the word making the distinction between herself and his own Miss Ramsey even stronger.

“Of a sea captain,” Mr. Adkins cried.

“He was a man of the sea,” she admitted in some awe of the inner sight the man must possess.

“And lost at sea, wasn’t he?”

“Aye, sir, a long time ago.”

“And you’ve been faithful to his memory all these years,” he said with an awesome respect.

“He gave me no reason to forget him, poor boy,” Mrs. Norris chimed, aware of growing lugubrious. The truth was that he had given her little reason to remember him either.

“Then he did leave you provided for,” Mr. Adkins said.

Mrs. Norris lifted her chin. “Aye. With a sea bag to pack my duds in.”

Mr. Adkins blinked his eyes at her in mute admiration. “I shall have the port, thank you.”

The tastefulness and timeliness of his dismissal thereby recovered for him completely the esteem he had lost so early. He was merely impetuous, impetuous and open-hearted, Mrs. Norris decided, and she wondered—as she rarely did of his affairs—on what business Mr. James was seeing this remarkable man.

J
IMMIE REACHED HOME JUST
before nine-thirty. His first impression of his client was that he was a modest, conservative man. Not too modest, perhaps, Jimmie second-thought the matter: his clothes were cut to compensate nature’s mismanagements. But Adkins, surprised in the act of refilling his own glass, actually blushed.

“How do you do, sir,” Jimmie said, extending his hand. “Mrs. Norris, I see, has made my excuses.”

“Indeed she has. I might almost wish you longer delayed—with her company and this.” He held up the glass. “One might wonder which had been with you the longer.” He sighed and shook his head. “Wine and women, I should not mix them even in metaphor.”

Jimmie laughed.

“Oh, my dear man,” Adkins cried, “I hope you laugh because my situation is not desperate?”

“From what I can gather, your situation at its worst could be scarcely desperate, Mr. Adkins. You are not a married man?”

“Certainly not.”

“That is the sort of circumstance that might make a situation such as yours desperate,” Jimmie said.

“I am rather jealous of my reputation, Jarvis, and I cannot see this sort of legal action as improving it. That is why, for my part, I should like to see the thing settled out of court.”

“The plaintiff mentions a hundred thousand dollars as a sum she would consider settling for on behalf of her son—which amount, in turn, she would be happy to have you invest…”

“I am a broker,” Adkins said.

“She would like a guaranteed income of five thousand a year from it,” Jimmie went on.

Adkins threw back his head and laughed much too heartily. “Oh, my dear Jarvis, if you but knew the irony of that!” He was serious then. “I don’t have a hundred thousand dollars. My mother has several millions, but not I.”

Jimmie somehow wanted to delay a discussion of the Dowager Adkins as long as possible. “Miss Daisy Thayer—the plaintiff—and if it does come to trial I ought to be able to do something with that name before a jury—seems to have an extraordinary memory. It would seem she has almost total recall of the incidents of your relationship.” Jimmie had spent the afternoon going over the particulars in the bill.

“Oh, the wretch!” Adkins cried.

“How old is Miss Thayer, by the way?”

Adkins thought about it. “I’m not very good at gauging the ages of women. My mother seems ageless and my sisters perennial. I should say Daisy is anywhere between twenty-five and forty.”

“That puts her within the age of consent at least,” Jimmie said dryly. A blind man could draw a better sight than that on a woman.

“Oh yes,” Mr. Adkins said quite seriously.

“You seem to have made several proposals to her—in writing and it would seem on tape recording—that suggest serious intentions, a permanent relationship.”

“I had something of that sort in mind, all right,” Adkins admitted.

“Matrimony?”

“Matrimony is not very permanent in our concupiscent times, is it?” Adkins said earnestly. “But no doubt I suggested it, nonetheless.”

“To what purpose?” Jimmie said. “That’s what the jury will want to know.”

Adkins folded his hands and smiled, a flashing beatific sort of smile that suggested a very unworldly man. “No doubt,” he said.

Since his answers were ambiguous, Jimmie put his questions the more directly. “Do you think you’re the father of—what’s its name—Alexander?”

“Certainly not.”

“You did not have relations with the woman?”

“I did not.”

Jimmie sighed. It was not going to be easy to make a persuasive argument to that effect in face of Miss Thayer’s memories. Yet there was something about Adkins to give credence to his words, an aura, an attitude, something, to put it bluntly, virginal. But try to get that across to a jury!

“You mentioned wanting to make a settlement out of court,” Jimmie said. “What did you have in mind?”

“Why,” Adkins said, “I suppose I’d be willing to be say, godfather to the child.”

“I somehow doubt that that will satisfy his mother,” Jimmie said. “And I’m just afraid you and I are going to have to go over some of the details of your relationship, Mr. Adkins. It’s rather important that at least I understand your position.”

Adkins nodded. Then he asked brightly, “Would you like to know how I met her?”

“All right,” Jimmie said, but he excused himself first and got a wine glass from the cabinet. He filled his own glass and added a half to Teddy Adkins’. The little man’s cheeks were peony red, and he had himself a baby sort of face. Very good timing on Miss Thayer’s part to bring suit at this age of her child’s: hold any baby of six to twelve months up next to Teddy Adkins, and you were bound to strike a resemblance. “You were going to tell me about meeting Miss Thayer,” Jimmie prompted.

“I was. She worked—and I believe still does—in the perfume department of one of our better stores, Mark Stewart’s. It was midsummer, a year ago last July probably. I remember how enormously cool she looked…”

And calculating, Jimmie thought.

“The perfume counter adjoins umbrellas,” Adkins went on. “I have never in my adult life been able to resist the perusal of an umbrella counter. Nor, for that matter, a perfume counter, although until that occasion, I had managed to observe the latter from a safe distance.”

Jimmie smiled. At least Adkins had a sense of humor about it, and he was going to need it.

“I remember now that she spoke first, said something about having an umbrella like the one at which I was looking. She advised me against the purchase of it. Said the knob always came off in her hand. I said some damned nonsense about its not being difficult to lose one’s knob in her hands…” He blushed now at the recollection. “Not every man is gifted with the prophecy of his own doom, eh, Jarvis? I invited her to lunch…and learned a great deal about perfumes. I even thought a bit about manufacturing them. I putter a bit with one thing and another. Making things, you know. A restless sort of man, I am.” Adkins sighed. “But I thought then of Mama. I must take her into consideration every move. Having raised three daughters in tweeds while despairing first of a male heir and then of his survival, she could not be expected to take kindly to his careering in perfumes.”