Gentleman Called (3 page)

There was the crux of the matter, Jimmie thought, and wondered if Adkins knew it of himself.

“Now I hope this won’t shock you, Jarvis, but I am most anxious not to displease Mama. I have not yet come into my inheritance, and despite evidence to the contrary, I do not believe she can live forever.”

And still it was not Mama’s age but Teddy-boy’s that Jimmie had to sometimes remind himself of. “I consider myself fortunate,” Jimmie said, interjecting a personal note, “in having been cured of such expectancy at the age of sixteen. My father borrowed ten dollars from me that I had just won in an oratory contest. To my recollection, he never did pay it back.”

“You can, at least, remember your father,” Adkins said.

“Oh yes,” said Jimmie. “It would be hard not to. I wonder if we could now go into some of the particulars in your relationship.”

“I suppose sooner or later we must get down to the sordid aspects,” Adkins said dismally. “And it was all so beautiful in the beginning.”

Jimmie glanced at him sharply, wondering if he were sincere. Apparently he was. Jimmie consulted his notes. “Did you on August 3, 1956, write a letter in which occurred the words: ‘I feel I must approach the holy day as was the custom in olden times when matrimony was a sacrament. I shall want a few days in solitary contemplation, in retreat.’ And then later in the letter: ‘In bond I shall love you out of all bounds.’”

Adkins had gone a deep red. “I wrote it,” he said quietly.

“Beautiful,” Jimmie said.

His client brightened. “I thought so myself.”

Jimmie cleared his throat and turned to another page. “The tape recording—you know what that contains?”

Adkins almost flew from the chair and began to pace the room. “Oh, yes. Despicable wench, to have turned it to such ill use! I should think that in civilized society the very presentment of such evidence would mitigate against her.”

“I hope that will happen, Mr. Adkins,” Jimmie said. “Now Miss Thayer recalls that you spent the night of August 5 with her…”

“The evening, not the night,” Adkins interrupted.

“Do you remember it?”

“Quite distinctly. It was a full moon when I drove home.”

“I don’t suppose the man in the moon is an unfriendly witness,” Jimmie said, “but I doubt that he’ll be much help. Do you suppose anyone else could testify to seeing you that night?”

Adkins shook his head. “I am solitary in my habits. I doubt it.”

“Did you and Miss Thayer exchange any mementos of your affections for each other?”

Adkins who had been standing before the fireplace whirled about on Jimmie. “What?”

Jimmie repeated his question.

“What, may I ask, suggests that, Mr. Jarvis?”

Jimmie shrugged, unable to understand the turn that seemed to have given his client. “I was trying to find evidence of cupidity on the part of Miss Thayer. I should think she might have tried to get a ring or some token she might use as a pledge from you.”

Adkins flashed a smile, a beamish boy, Jimmie thought. “Forgive me, Jarvis. I mistook you to be questioning my integrity. As a matter of fact she did ask me for a token. It came out of our conversation one evening, I think—she asked me if she might have my army ‘dog tag’ to keep for sentiment.”

“And did you give it to her?” Jimmie said, leaning forward.

“Yes. I had a devil of a time finding it, but I managed.”

“And does she have it now?”

“Oh no. It came back when we parted.”

“Could you tell me the circumstances under which you parted?”

“We quarreled one night over something trivial—and likely distasteful. A rather vulgar girl, Daisy, when one got to know her. As a matter of fact when I was leaving she told me then she was in a position to—to do what she has just done.”

That, Jimmie thought, was a very roundabout way of saying that Daisy had told him she was pregnant. Squeamish as well as beamish, Mr. Adkins.

“What did you say to her then, Mr. Adkins?”

The little man threw up his hands. “I told her to do it, by all means. I assumed it to be a wishful sort of bluff.”

“Have you any idea why she wanted your army ‘dog tag’?”

“At the time it was, well, like an intimate bit of apparel. Or so I thought. A bit of animal, there is in that girl, Jarvis.”

“There is indeed,” said Jimmie, “the vixen. A piece of vital information came to her by that tag: your blood type. And if, as you say, you are not the father of the child, she must have shopped to your specifications.”

Adkins made a round mouth of shocked surprise. “For a…a…”

“That’s right,” Jimmie said. “If you’ve been framed, it has been done in proper style. I don’t suppose you knew any other young men of her acquaintance at the time?”

“Oh, no. I was not competitive,” Adkins said.

“And would anyone else know of your having given her your ‘dog tag’?”

Adkins thought about that. “My sister, Miranda, would know of my having looked for it at the time. It was she had it, and no small business was it to get it from her either. She’s rather possessive about me, you see. But naturally I did not tell her for whom I wanted it.”

After threshing through, but not out, other incidents of Mr. Adkins’s relationship with the woman, Jimmie tried to put the alternatives in the case before his client. “We may in the end have to pay something to keep it from going to trial,” he said. “Would you consider doing that?”

“I would, but Mama would not. As a matter of fact, Jarvis, this whole thing seems to be giving her an inordinate amount of pleasure. It seems to have rejuvenated her, and to tell the truth, I had rather counted on it to have the opposite effect. She has become a naughty old woman. And I am just afraid it is you who will have to deal with her. After all you are
her
lawyers, Wiggam and all of you.”

Adkins seemed to be going to pieces at the very mention of his mother. It confirmed Jimmie’s suspicions of the woman. He gave a great sigh himself. He was getting a little old to deal with the vigors of her generation. “She will see me?”

“Noblesse oblige,” Adkins said.

J
ASPER TULLY WAS INDEED
a melancholy man at having to pass up Mrs. Norris’ invitation to dinner. A widower, he lived in the Bronx with his sister whose cooking, like her conversation, was composed of scraps she had picked up and flavored to her own taste.

But the report of homicide which had come through to the District Attorney’s office late that November afternoon located the incident in the upper east Nineties, a neighborhood congested and inflammable with a new minority people pressing in upon an old minority, and in their midst, trying to withstand both pressures, were a few resident holdouts of second or third generation New Yorkers in the once elegant brownstones. To these latter, the victim, Mrs. Arabella Sperling, belonged. The District Attorney thought his chief investigator ought to be on hand.

Tully sometimes wondered if all the Precinct and Homicide men who answered a complaint were necessary. He was in favor of science if it didn’t get in the way of reason. But then, the younger men didn’t need room to think. Left alone, they couldn’t think their way through a railroad flat. Teamwork. It was all a matter of teamwork. Tully slithered his way through the team and its equipment to the room from which the victim’s body had been recently removed. He talked with the Medical Examiner who had waited for him.

The woman had been dead for about forty-eight hours, apparently strangled to death in her bed, and likely in her sleep, for there had been no struggle at all. Her throat had been neatly and deeply massaged by someone who knew his anatomy.

Tully looked then at the double bed from which the technical men were about to remove the linens.

“Anybody sleep in that with her?” he asked.

Lieutenant Greer, who was in charge of the investigation, stood by also. He was at the frustrating stage of the investigation where everything remained to be done and nothing could be done immediately: men were searching for physical evidence, others for witnesses, without having turned up enough of anything yet to justify action.

“Not regularly,” he said in answer to Tully’s question.

Tully observed the salvaging and preservation of a long gray hair. “How old a woman?”

“Fifty-one, according to her insurance policies.”

“Who’s the beneficiary?”

“Two nieces,” Greer said. “Very unlikely suspects.”

“Got any likely ones?”

Greer looked at him with a jaded tolerance. “Give us an hour or two, will you, Tully?” He led the way then to the dressing table; a film of fingerprint powder lay over much of it. “There was robbery. This jewel box was emptied. But no sign of housebreaking. And herself sleeping peacefully in bed.”

“Herself not surprised,” murmured Tully. “Who made the complaint?”

“The building superintendent. When the newspapers accumulated in the hall from a couple of days, he remembered that she was in the habit of telling him if she expected to be away overnight. That’s his story. She owned this building, and he has a key to the apartment. But—he got a cop to come with him before entering.”

“The careful sort, isn’t he?” said Tully.

“I’d say that. But maybe that’s how you get living in this neighborhood.”

“He lives in the house?”

“Across the street. It’s the only other building in this block the new ones haven’t got into yet.”

The new ones, Tully mused. He had heard them called worse, God knows. “I take it he isn’t one of the—new ones?”

“He’s a white man, Johanson. A Swede, I’d say.”

“Have you got a statement from him?”

“Only what the lad took who made the complaint with him. I wanted to know as much as I could about what happened in this room before tackling him. I’ve got an idea he’s going to be a very cagey fellow.”

When he met Johanson himself a few minutes later, Tully agreed with the detective’s estimate. Shrewd or slow-witted, it was hard to tell at first. But Johanson measured his every answer before giving it. Mrs. Sperling’s building was the furthest uptown he worked.

“I have good addresses, my other buildings,” he said. “Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, and I get good references from any of them I can tell you. I am a reliable man.”

Tully was sure he would have good references, making that point of it. He sat back and listened to Greer’s questioning.

“How long have you worked for Mrs. Sperling?”

“Five years last April,” the man said slowly.

“How often are you in this building?”

“Every morning I come here at six o’clock. Because I live across the street I come here first. At five o’clock in the afternoon, wintertime, I come also. It is a very old furnace in the basement.”

“Did you see Mrs. Sperling regularly?”

“I do not know what you call regular, sir. One day I saw her and maybe not the next. I would see her at least two or three times a week.”

“In her apartment?”

“No, sir. In the vestibule.”

Tully marked his own notes: that the victim had occupied the first floor apartment.

“When were you last in her apartment?” Greer asked.

“Not ever until I went in with the officer.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Sperling interview you before hiring you?”

“Yes, sir. In my own living-room across the street.”

“It doesn’t seem just right, you having a key and never being in this apartment in five years’ employment. Don’t things go wrong with the plumbing in these old houses?”

“Sure. But Mrs. Sperling, she was a very handy woman.”

“She must have been,” the lieutenant said sourly. He enquired then about the other tenants, eliciting nothing that seemed pertinent to Tully. Then he asked about any visitors Johanson had ever encountered with Mrs. Sperling.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” the man said. “Now I could tell, Lieutenant, you don’t believe me when I say Mrs. Sperling was a handy woman. I don’t like to be called a liar by anybody. You listen to this—all of you.” He looked about to include Tully and the police stenographer.

Tully nodded solemnly. Greer’s nerves were not as steady. “Get on with it,” he snapped.

“One morning about three weeks ago,” Johanson proceeded at his own deliberate pace, “I found a leak in the joint of one of the furnace pipes. The pipes were knocking. There was a note to me in Mrs. Sperling’s handwriting about how I should fix it first thing. Now that pipe, Lieutenant, ran along the basement ceiling, and it goes up through the floor into her apartment. I was trying to fix it, but I could not do it alone, you understand. And being up high where I was on the ladder, I could hear voices in her apartment. I heard a man’s voice. So I went upstairs and I rang her bell, and her being in a night gown, I said maybe she would send down the gentleman to help me with the pipe.”

Tully and Greer exchanged glances. The stenographer paused to blow his nose. But Johanson proceeded blandly, apparently to this day unaware of his lack of discretion. “She says, ‘What man are you talking about? I’ve got the radio on.’ And she came down to the basement and held that wrench for me herself. But I didn’t hear the radio when her door was open or any more when it was closed till she went upstairs again and turned it on. That time I knew it was a radio. So, I don’t like to be called a liar or a fool. I went home to my breakfast and I told my wife to bring it to me where I could look out of the window. At eight o’clock the man on the third floor left. I know him, he is the tenant. At twenty minutes to nine, the man on the second floor left and his wife with him. And then, by God…” Johanson slapped the flat of his hand on his knee…“at nine-thirty out comes the man who wasn’t there at all!”

He looked from one to the other of the police in triumph.

“How do you know he wasn’t the guest of one of the tenants?” Greer asked without a smile.

“I don’t think Mrs. Sperling comes to the window and waves goodbye to other people’s visitors, no sir, I don’t.”

“I want you to give me the exact date this occurred, Johanson.”

“October twenty-one,” he said with very little hesitation. “It is the day after we turn the heat up ten degrees, and that is a very busy day with old furnaces.”