Death of an Old Sinner (8 page)

“Now and then,” Mrs. Norris said, “I’ve taken a call to him from a woman who said it was his broker’s office calling. I think it was her called this morning. Remember, I told you? She hung up when I said he wasn’t home.”

“I remember,” Jimmie said dully. It was a matter he would have to drop there. “Did he take you to Brooklyn yesterday?”

“He did not. I thought of that myself when I heard he was there. He didn’t want us to know where he was going.”

“And obviously he doesn’t want us to know where he is now,” Jimmie said. “All right, Mrs. Norris. I’ll call you later.”

“Mr. Jamie?”

“Yes.”

“Have you eaten your dinner?”

“Not yet.”

“You go out of that room this minute and have a nice warm meal. Mind me, now.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Jimmie said. “I can go downstairs and have them page me if he comes in.”

“Do. And something digestible. Not too fancy.”

But Jimmie was not paged throughout his dinner which he did his best to linger over, because the prospect of waiting in his room was too terrible. In fact, leaving the dining room at a quarter to ten, he made up his mind that he would have to take some action if he had not heard from his father by eleven. Jimmie stopped at the desk again. The Mulvany was a small hotel, elegant and intimate, such as had all but disappeared from New York, and it was very, very proper. There was suddenly a severe aloofness on the part of the clerk. Instinctively, Jimmie looked at the key box, room 519. His father’s key was not in it.

Jimmie all but exploded. “Is General Jarvis in his room?”

“He is, sir,” the clerk said frostily.

“I asked to be informed…”

“I beg your pardon, sir, you asked to be paged if he called. He was in no condition to speak to you, sir. Out of consideration for you, and our other guests, I thought it best to have him taken directly upstairs. He abused me horribly.”

“That’s some satisfaction,” Jimmie murmured, and started for the elevator. “What time did he come in?”

“An hour ago, perhaps,” the clerk said, glancing at his watch.

He would never be governor, Jimmie decided in the elevator. Wherever he found them, he must call stupid men stupid, and all of them had the vote. Or, perhaps, thus would he come to office! When the only justice was poetic. He knocked on the door of 519. No answer. “Father, I’ve had enough nonsense,” he said, trying to make his voice carry without raising it. He knocked harder on the door. Still no answer. He tried the door. It was locked. He went around to the door of the bathroom which they shared. He hammered and all but kicked it in. To no avail. He called the desk then and asked the clerk to send up the pass key to 519, and when the clerk protested, Jimmie suggested that he send the house detective along with him; the old gentleman might have had a heart attack.

He went out in the hall to wait. The house detective came, put his key in the lock and glanced up at Jimmie. If the door had been locked from the inside, the key was not in it. The detective turned his passkey, withdrew it, and gestured Jimmie to proceed.

Jimmie threw the door open. The detective shone the beam of his flashlight about the darkened room. It caught the old man. He was awkwardly slumped over the back of a chair, as though he were hanging onto it, and yet in such a position that gravitation would seem to demand that he fall.

Jimmie ran to him while the detective turned on the wall switch, flooding the room with light. The minute Jimmie touched him, the old man tumbled to the floor. He was dead.

Dead, Jimmie marveled, wearing all the decorations befitting his rank and service. It was as though he had come upstairs and prepared himself for the next day’s duties before allowing himself to die.

T
HOUGH HE BEAR THE
shame of it to his own grave, Jimmie had to admit to himself at least that, listening to the house detective call the Medical Examiner’s office, his first thought was: it’s too much to expect of General Jarvis, a plain, simple heart attack.

Everyone, without saying so to him, seemed to share the view; men came from Homicide and precinct headquarters. Royalty could not have turned out more press representatives. Jimmie was glad, however, to see George Fallon, the District Attorney, and even more pleased to see in his company, his chief investigator, Jasper Tully, whom Jimmie trusted. Tully had served under him and many a D.A. before him and after him: he was forever shuffling his politics—easily shaking out the jokers for the next deal. A long, lean melancholy man, he had never to Jimmie’s knowledge raised his voice, though many a man he had set to screaming by his silent scrutiny.

Jimmie shook his hand affectionately and then turned to the D.A. “You know, Fallon, I was only waiting to talk to my father, tonight. Then I intended to volunteer my services…on the Rocco business.”

“Looks like charity can begin at home now, doesn’t it?” Fallon said, and then bethought himself that he was speaking to the dead man’s son. “Sorry, Jarvis, but damn it, man, we were waiting, too. Just to give you the chance to make the first move. We purposely quashed the information that your father got in our line of fire last night, and that’s trouble for us in some quarters, sitting on something worth a headline.”

“Thanks,” Jimmie said. It struck him then that the old man would not again get into anyone’s line of fire, and the blow hurt.

Tully understood. “He was always a swell target, the General.” He laid a bony hand on Jimmie’s shoulder.

Jimmie gave him a wink and squared his shoulders. “Let’s talk some cold facts, gentlemen, just we three. I don’t know what my father was doing in Brooklyn—if he was there. Now I’ll have to take your word for it. I’d feel a lot better about that if I knew the full story on why the sudden interest in Johnny, The Rock. The truth, Fallon: was it politics?”

Fallon, not much older than Jimmie, pursed his lips. “When you were in my shoes, Jarvis, would you have answered a question like that?” He didn’t wait for Jimmie’s answer. “I don’t mind telling you most of the truth. Won’t give you names though. A couple of public investigators, we’ll call ʼem, wanted to dig through the records. I’ve let people with poorer credentials search them. I knew by the dates what they were after, but I’ll tell you something, Jarvis, it hit both Tully and me between the eyes when they came up with the name Johnny Rocco. Johnny’s had his name bantered around a lot in our circles lately on account of some very large bookmaking. In Brooklyn, true. But that’s not far enough away for us to relax. They’ve been pulling raids regularly over there, the D.A.’s men, and getting peanuts. Peanuts for the monkeys. Now you and I know that no good cop likes to be made a monkey out of. Comprenez?”

Jimmie nodded. He had got the same story from Mike: the suspicion of the police themselves, “That’s bad stuff,” he said.

“That it is. So you can see, Jarvis, how it was that when they said ‘sick ʼim’ to me, I put my best hound dog on the trail. It was your friend Tully here who spotted your father last night. He was working out of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. Fill it in from there, Jasp. I’d like to hear it again myself. Maybe it’ll make sense this time.”

Tully gathered in his legs and folded his hands. You could perish waiting for his first word, Jimmie thought. “The D.A. had a couple of leads over there, so when I showed up to help they decided to stake ʼem out last night. Three of their boys and me were posted outside a little one-arm restaurant called Minnie’s on Water Street.”

“What time?” said Jimmie.

“We set up about seven, figuring the collector would show before ten o’clock. And after the first hour we were dead sure we had something: in all that time one customer. Two roast beef sandwiches he took out with him. So we just sat, four of us outside, Minnie inside.”

“Do they always go in fours over there?” Jimmie asked.

“I don’t know that, but there was a couple too many of us all right as it turned out. The car wasn’t marked, and there was other cars, but this round-faced goon sure spotted us. It went off like a string of firecrackers. This fellow was coming to us on the run, don’t know where from, we picked up the sound of his feet hitting cement first, and I knew at the same time there was a car coming fast. When I open the window this cheese face hollers: ‘You want Johnny Rocco? Go get him!’ He was shouting because just about then the Jaguar goes by like a Jet out of hell. Our driver had his foot on the accelerator, but we never got any closer than the minute I got the license number, and it hit me right then maybe the car was the decoy, and the moon-faced guy the real collection man. By the time we got back he was gone, of course. Keystones, bloody Keystone cops they made of us.”

Jimmie could see the famous melancholia settling on Jasper.

“It was routine I put a tracer on that license number, Jimmie. I knew it was RO—Rockland County; in fact that’s what made me think we’d been decoyed.” Jasper scratched his ear. “Funny, RO—Rockland County. Ro, Rocco. He was a great guy for sport cars, too. He left a sweet little Austin-Healey in front of the bank last night.”

Jimmie thought about those implications. “You never picked up The Rock’s trail at all then?”

“Nope. Not till we saw him on a slab in the morgue this morning.”

“Do you suppose your father could have been used as the decoy, Jarvis?” the D.A. asked.

“Goddamn it,” Jimmie exploded, “he was a general in the United States Army!”

“Maybe he was covering up for somebody who got in trouble,” Tully said softly. “There’s a lot of times respectable people get mixed up with mobsters. Say they like the horses. Did he have lots of money?”

Jimmie held up his hands. “If my father had owned the state of Texas, gentlemen, he could still have managed to be out of funds by any given weekend. That is why, unfortunately, I have to speak slowly when I defend him.”

“How is Mrs. Norris?” Tully asked, having a sudden association with someone who also spoke slowly when it came to defending the General.

“She’ll be in tonight, I expect,” Jimmie said. He looked at his watch. “Eleven-twenty. It’s taking them a while in there, isn’t it?”

Both men shrugged, as though casualness best explained it.

“Finish up your Brooklyn fiasco for us, Jasper,” Fallon said.

Tully looked at him mournfully. “Well, it wasn’t ten minutes till we got back to Minnie’s. Minnie never saw or heard of Moon-Face, of course. Matter of fact, I never did either. I went through the gallery today and I couldn’t find him. Anyway, it wasn’t another fifteen minutes till Minnie closed up and went home. That was twenty minutes to nine. And he did go home, I dropped out and tailed him myself all the way to his television set.

“I picked up the boys in front of Rocco’s house later. In fact all four stakeouts wound up there at midnight. At three o’clock we knocked off. Eight hours of nothing. And just about that time the beat man patrolling the First Federal Bank on Fulton Street came on the Austin-Healey at the curb, motor still running. He checked the bank, nothing happening. Went back, turned off the ignition. Forgot about it. They’re going to give him a wooden medal tomorrow. And here’s another nice touch: at seven-fifty this morning his relief man ticketed the car for illegal parking.”

“Where did the papers get the ‘black limousine’?” Jimmie asked.

“A drunk claims to be a witness. He was sitting in the precinct station when it broke this morning. Said he tried to tell a cop about the guy he saw being shoved into the black limousine on the same corner, near the bank last night. Even gave the cop the license number, nice simple number, Jersey license plate. The only trouble, he must’ve juggled the numbers. No such combination issued.”

“Son of a gun,” said Jimmie.

“I said something like that myself when I heard it,” Tully said.

O
NE HOUR AND TWENTY-ONE
minutes after hanging up the phone in Nyack, Mrs. Norris flailed her way through policemen and reporters to the desk of the Mulvany. The taxi had cost her ten dollars and she had made the driver earn it. In the moment’s politeness she now allowed herself before interrupting, she realized that the clerk was accounting to the police the General’s staggering state of inebriation.

“That’s a lie!” she said without thinking, but with a poke of her umbrella for emphasis.

“Were you here, madam?” The clerk looked at her ferociously.

“Were you in his employ for over forty years?” she snapped back.

“Certainly not, thank God. But I tell you, Officer, he staggered in here on the arms…”

“Young man! I don’t believe your generation knows the difference between a stagger and a swagger.” She addressed herself to the policeman with the notebook then. “I assure you, Officer, General Jarvis never staggered in his life, not once since he got out of rompers.” And to the clerk again: “What’s the room number?”

“Five-nineteen. But you can’t go…”

“Ah, but I can,” she said, and did. She was passed from the door of the General’s room, however, to Jimmie’s, and there Jasper Tully admitted her. Jimmie rose to meet her, and caught her in his arms when she lunged at him like a tumbling sack of potatoes. “The poor old gentleman,” she said, and meant it.

Jimmie introduced her to the District Attorney, Fallon, and then asked, “Do you remember Jasper Tully?”

Tully pulled himself to his best height.

“Most of him,” Mrs. Norris said, needing to lift her head to look into his face.

The men laughed, but Mrs. Norris looked at Jimmie solemnly. “And to die a spectacle in a public place,” she said under her breath.

“Now that’s not quite so, Mrs. Norris. As a matter of fact, father came upstairs and somehow managed to bedeck himself in full regalia for tomorrow’s review. There’s something rather desperately heroic about that, isn’t there?”

“Ah, lad, he was a good man when it came to his country. Did he have his medals?”

Jimmie nodded and Mr. Tully pulled at the lobe of his ear, a habit he had at moments of registering something to remember.

It was not long then until the Medical Examiner came in. He had found nothing to indicate that the General had not died from a coronary attack, but in view of the hotel employee’s account of his drunkenness—Jimmie and Mrs. Norris exchanged glances on this—he thought an autopsy was indicated. It would show the justified degree of intoxication, and as well it would reveal if anything in the nature of a drug had been administered to him. At this Mrs. Norris nodded her head in approval, unseen by anyone save Tully.