Gentleman Called (17 page)

“Not much,” the boy said frankly. “He’s a cornball.”

“But you don’t dislike him?”

“You mean on account of Mother, and the way she carries on over him?”

Jimmie nodded.

“You know my mother pretty well, don’t you?” Eric said, and there was something sly in the way he said it that gave Jimmie a turn. He remembered the same sort of remark in the kitchen between Timsey and the girl.

“I’ve only met your mother twice,” he said.

The boy curled one side of his mouth. “Then what was she doing in your room night before last?”

“Ant-eating,” Jimmie said like a shot.

The neatness of the retort registered with Eric. “If I cared enough about my mother,” he said, “maybe I’d be sore about the way she is over him. But if she carried on that way over me, I’d shoot her. Honest to God, I’d coax her out in the cat-tails along about twilight, ease off a ways from her and when the ducks flew high I’d shoot low.”

“That’s a nice, cold-blooded calculation,” Jimmie said.

“Worked out well, too, isn’t it? Uncle Ted says it won’t work, not unless I can get her to fly up with the ducks.”

“How did you know she was in my room?”

“Uncle Ted told me.”

“Did he tell you why she was there—what she said to me?”

Eric shrugged.

“Just what did he tell you?” Jimmie persisted, suddenly expecting something important to hang by the answer.

The boy was ever so slightly embarrassed. But he tried to shrug that off, too. “He just said she was there, and called her a name.”

“Like?” Jimmie tried with the monosyllable to keep the boy talking.

“A slut, that’s all.”

“A slut that’s all,” Jimmie repeated. “Where’s your uncle now?”

“I guess he’s still asleep if he came home last night.”

“I thought you might have put him in the hospital for saying that about your mother,” Jimmie said.

“Hell, it doesn’t mean anything when Teddy says it, Mr. Jarvis. I don’t even think he knows what it means.”

“Then, since you seem to, shouldn’t you assume the responsibility of teaching him?”

“No, sir. I like doing just what I do. I can see myself going on this way for fifty years, and Uncle Ted is the only person who can arrange that. I don’t want to upset the status quo. Not me.” Eric went to a bookshelf and disturbed the books in the only manner they had been disturbed for years, Jimmie thought: he had to move a couple of them to get a bottle out from behind them. “Like a little brandy in your coffee?”

“Yes,” Jimmie said, “and a little more brandy than coffee, please.”

T
HERE ARE PEOPLE WHO
would say that a man who works on the Sabbath does not deserve good fortune, and others who say that a man willing to work seven days a week deserves all the luck he can get. That Sunday morning, Jasper Tully, in a rare state of good cheer, just knew the breaks were due him.

He had before him what he called Bluebeard’s Chart:

Arabella Sperling

Given: Ruby

Gave up: Diamond lover’s knot

? owned ruby

Given what by killer? Gold fleur-de-lis?

Ellie True

Given: Black opal

Gave up: fleur-de-lis?

Widow Bellowes

Given: nothing known

Gave up: Black opal

Tully was determined for the moment at least not to go back beyond the Widow Bellowes. The two years between Ellie True’s murder and Arabella Sperling’s was the span on which now to concentrate. It broke down the file of violent deaths of New York women to something a bit easier to cope with. Somewhere in there was the woman who had owned the diamond-circled ruby—unless the killer had gone out of town again for that one. Tully didn’t like to face up to that possibility. Thus far, although all the major insurance companies had been contacted, none had any record of its loss, or, even more to the point, of its existence. And that was just plain ridiculous, Tully thought.

Then came his first break of the day. Amongst the cache of property of questionable origin taken off recent law offenders and held by the police until ownership was established was a small gold pin, a fleur-de-lis. It had been taken from a petty thief, but seven-time offender called Buzzy Ritt.

Buzzy had gone straight for over a year, but this was promising to be a cold winter. Buzzy had just stolen an overcoat and three and a half pairs of gloves.

“Probably expected to have one hand chopped off for it, like in the old days,” Tully said. “Where is he now?”

“In the Tombs,” the leg man said.

“I’ll just go down and brighten up his Sunday morning,” Tully said, breathing thanks for his second break.

Buzzy took the occasion to spout his grievances against the city who couldn’t bring him to trial any faster. It was all right for characters who could raise bail. They were out in the fresh air.

“I don’t see what you’re making such a fuss about,” Tully said. “You only get homesick on the outside.”

Buzzy made a vulgar noise.

“Buzzy, I understand the police are holding a little gold pin for you…”

“Yeah and I want it back. It belonged to my dear old mother.”

“It’s a valuable pin,” Tully lied, but careful not to mention in what coinage.

“Huh?”

“Of course, a fence mightn’t know that.”

“I never had it to no fence,” Buzzy said.

“I’ll level with you,” Tully said. “I want to know where you got that pin. I want to know badly.”

“I told you. My mother gave it to me.”

“When? It wasn’t on you the last time you were up.”

“I just didn’t happen to have it along when I got picked up.”

Actually Tully could not prove otherwise. He watched the thief carefully, but Buzzy Ritt had been in and out of too many tight places to show the pinch even when he felt it. Also, there was a chance that he was telling the truth. There must be a lot of gold pins in the world that shape. But if this one had any worth, Buzzy would long ago have parted with it—unless he was afraid to, unless he knew the pin was so hot that wherever it went, a murder rap went with it. In that case he would consider silence more golden than the pin.

“Okay, Buzzy, go back to sleep. I’m looking for a man and I thought you might help me.”

“If you find him, bring him around. Maybe then I could help you out. Who knows?”

Tully weighed the remark. “I just might do that,” he said.

A few minutes later he was studying the dossier on Charles “Buzzy” Ritt. At the time of Ellie True’s murder, Buzzy was living in the west sixties. Two months later he moved to a two-bit hotel on the Bowery. He lived there for five months. A visit to the West Side Precinct yielded Tully nothing.

The Bowery hotel was different. Something had happened in there all right. And the date was right.

It was not murder by the record, but suicide, and one for which the police had been, most regretfully, grateful. It had occurred last New Year’s Eve. Tully knew the story himself, roughly, but then, he knew a lot of stories, some rough, some smooth. The trouble was clearing the line to them in his memory.

On this one, he had the common police information—or, it might now turn out—misinformation.

For years before her suicide, Marjory Neville had been the plague of the police. The daughter of a wealthy and politically influential family, she was poison from the age of twenty: drinking, whoring, even taking to dope. And always her offense had to be handled discreetly, delicately, and reported through channels. Then at times she would take to reform as violently as she had to debauchery. Her reforms ran to street preaching, public penance, all of which were as much of a plague to the police. But she could, till the end of her life, be counted on for trouble. She had fallen off the wagon the night she died.

No one was surprised at her last debauche—at least no one among the police whom she had kicked in the teeth. And there had seemed to be something natural, however obscene, in her taking the overdose in a Bowery hotel.

A regular genius of a public relationships man had taken over the press angle of the affair. Whatever went into the columns read like a dirge for a high-strung debutante.

Tully moistened his lips. The hush-hush of the press would suggest that an insurance hush-hush would have been a minor operation. And Buzzy had been living in the room opposite the debutante’s!

If the little thief would talk, Tully thought, he would go bail for him himself.

B
UZZY HAD JUST FINISHED
his dinner when Tully got back to him, and taking the cigar the detective offered him, he admitted he was feeling better about the city.

“Best meal I had since mother’s cooking,” Buzzy said, blowing a smoke ring that would have collared a horse. He was beginning to feel important.

“I always thought you were an orphan,” Tully said. “That you had to make your own way in the world from the age of ten.”

“That’s a fact,” Buzzy said. “I never got any breaks.”

“A self made man,” Tully said. “Ah, my lad, you’ve come a long way. You’ve mingled with high society and low, all kinds.”

“A fact,” Buzzy agreed.

“Remember Marjory Neville?” Tully drawled.

Buzzy choked on the smoke. “You’re a snaky-tongued Mick, Tully, and your cigar’s as rotten as your jokes.” He dropped the cigar on the floor and put his foot on it.

“The D.A. gave me that,” Tully said mournfully. “His own private blend.”

Buzzy said what he thought it was made of.

“Okay, chum,” Tully said, “I got a man I want to talk to you about. You got a little gold plated pin not worth two bucks. Maybe you took it from her alive, maybe dead. It doesn’t mean that to me.” Tully snapped his fingers. “The lad I’m after took a piece of jewelry from her worth seven thousand dollars. Doesn’t that make you feel like a midget? And I’m pretty sure it was him gave her that little gold flower you’re carrying around since. Know where he got it?”

Buzzy only stared. He wasn’t talking yet, but he was interested.

“He took it from Ellie True. Remember her? The minister was tried for her murder…”

Buzzy wagged his head in recollection.

“It begins now to look like the Neville woman didn’t take all those powders on purpose,” Tully went on like a purring cat, “and if she didn’t, it means she was Number Three on my man’s list of what we could call…extinguished females. He ticked off Number Four last week. See why I don’t care how you got the pin? I just want to know where, and what you know about what happened to Miss Neville.”

Buzzy opened up. “Want to know something? I think the Neville dame was mixed up with a minister, too.”

Tully grinned. “Buzzy, you’re a gentleman.”

“She had this soup kitchen on the Bowery,” the prisoner started. “It was a kind of mission house, and this little guy—the damnedest looking little red-headed, red bearded—he wore one of them Van Dykes, you know what comes to a point?”

“I know what comes to a point,” Tully said, fascinated in spite of himself.

“Well, he did the preaching. I used to go round for the eats. The minister, he talked just like her, all beautiful words, but no sense, see? But he was hell-fire good on the singing and most of the nuts around like that. I don’t have a ear for music myself. Well, this went on a couple of months maybe. The grub—like it was catered. I went regular. And she was real serious about the mission. We all knew it was her had the money, and I heard from somebody she was a reformed drunk. The needle too. But she figured she was going to make up for all her sins, hiring us a salvation preacher.”

“The preacher,” Tully said, rubbing his pipe affectionately, “tell me some more about him.”

“What’s to tell? He had the gift of gab, that’s all, and what I could make out, the only thing wrong with the world was women. Who listened to him after that? Me, I like women just fine.”

“What did he look like?” Tully persisted. “Suppose he was coming down that corridor—how far would he be before you’d recognize him?”

“With that walk of his? I could tell him coming round the corner. Like a bouncing ball.”

“That’s my boy,” Tully said affectionately.

“You want to know about the night she passed out,” Buzzy went on, and Tully knew now where he had got his nickname. Once he started talking, he could buzz.

Tully nodded.

“We didn’t know her by the name of Neville, of course. That come out after the police was there, and she was identified. All we knew, she was ‘Sister Marge.’ I thought she was whacky at first, see, just plain off her track, but I got used to her. Then that night she comes flipping into my room like she had wings. ‘Buzzy,’ she says, ‘wish me the joy of the morning, for I’m to be married tomorrow.’ So I wished her. That was maybe ten o’clock. By eleven she was singing hymns, but it didn’t sound like religion to me, and I was getting thirsty. I figured all that singing just had to come out of a bottle. And I was right. I went over and interrupted them. It was the Reverend Preacher opened the door.

“I stuck my hand out to him and says, ‘Congratulations.’ ‘For what?’ he says and I ask him: ‘Aren’t you the bridegroom-to-be?’ ‘Certainly not,’ he says. And cold sober. He said something about her being beyond his help and walked out. So there we were, her and me, with three quarters a bottle of whiskey. I poured us drinks. We clicked glasses, and I said: ‘To the bride.’ But she was already falling asleep.”

It might have been at that moment, Tully thought, that Buzzy acquired the gold pin. It wasn’t worth mentioning now. “The drink you poured her, was it in a clean glass?”

“No. The cops asked me that. I just added a good hooker to what she already had in the glass. As long as she was nodding, I took the bottle home with me. It turned out she woke up. Maybe she looked for a drink. I felt bad about that. She must’ve been feeling mighty low to do what she did.”

“If she did it,” Tully said. “Three quarters of the bottle left when you got there. Do you suppose she had another bottle?”

“No empties. The cops looked.”

“What was the preacher’s name?”

“I’ve been trying to remember—Drake, Buck—something easy.”

“Not Blake?” Tully said, incredulous.