Gentleman Called (7 page)

“Not for many a long year, though I got my passport a while back thinking I’d go soon.”

“Don’t go alone,” he said very solemnly. “It will mark the end of youth if you do.”

“I took that turn in the path several bends ago, Mr. Adkins.”

“No. Not as long as you can find your way back, ever,” he said, and flashed her a smile of persuasion. “Age is something sudden and absolute. Age is getting lost. And that’s why I said not to return to Scotland alone. To arrive and not find there the welcome which you had conjured…”

“Then all I’d have to do is turn around and come back. The ground is solid enough under my feet in America,” she said.

Mr. Adkins laughed. “Well said!”

He could say things well himself, she thought. She liked the bit: age was getting lost. One of the things she liked best about a man was a good manner of speaking. Likely the reason she had never got married again, the Jarvis men had spoiled her with their talk; she could not abide the thought of a man coming home at the end of the day with his head as empty as his dinner bucket; and they were the kind available. But Annie Norris was not by any means available to them.

“Stay a moment and talk with me,” Mr. Adkins said disarmingly. “Do you know a book called
Ballads of the North Countrie
?”

“I know you spell countree with an ‘i’ and an ‘e’,” she said.

“That’s the one. I used to know half the book by rote. I fancied myself a balladeer. I thought it would win me someone fair, my quavering tenor, or someone congenial. No one who likes a song lacks congeniality, Mrs. Norris.”

“That’s true,” she said, and then amended it: “depending of course, on what you call a song. There are things they call songs today a cat wouldn’t throw a shoe at.”

It took a few minutes, but Mrs. Norris was presently, and without her quite knowing how it came about, persuaded at least to the edge of a cane-bottomed chair, to talk to him. A nice thing about the man was his way of drawing out the best things she had to say and in a way which made her pleased with herself for having said them. Their talk came round to the uses America had made of the old country songs—in the mountains, the coal mines, on the railways, which naturally enough, the railways having been strung across the country on Irish melodies, turned her thoughts to Mr. Tully. She found herself telling Mr. Adkins about her friend, the detective.

Mr. Adkins showed his beautiful teeth in a gleam of satisfaction. It was too bad he didn’t have as many hairs on his head as teeth inside it.

“What kind of detection does he do?” Mr. Adkins asked.

“All kinds,” she said, “all the important kinds. He’s the chief investigator for the district attorney. Right now it’s murder, and an important one it must be. I’ve not seen him, face or fancy, since the night they found the woman.”

“Has it been in the newspapers?” said Adkins, apparently intrigued.

“Of course it has, though in moderation. Mr. Tully is a man of moderation. It was the woman up near Harlem—Mrs. Arabella Sperling. Isn’t that a lovely name to be done in with?”

Mr. Adkins seemed shocked, and Mrs. Norris realized she had come to take murder with the lack of personal involvement a policeman had to have.

“I didn’t mean that quite the way it came out, Mr. Adkins,” she explained. “But we cannot grieve at everyone else’s tragedy. We’d have no strength at all when it came to our own if we did.”

“Oh,” the little man cried, “I agree, I quite agree. Is there a mystery about it? I love a good mystery.”

“You’d better follow it in the papers then,” Mrs. Norris said. “It has all the promise of turning out to be that.”

“Then they don’t know who killed her?”

“The last I heard there was no arrest,” she said. For all she was hearing these days from Jasper Tully, the criminal could be in the Tombs now, waiting trial. “But, of course, my friend doesn’t tell me everything.”

“And I dare say you don’t repeat everything he does tell you,” Adkins prompted. “You seem to be a woman of rare discretion.”

The clock was striking six. “I must get some ice. Mr. James will want to make drinks for you and himself.” She was suddenly feeling the need of a pickup herself. Was it mention of Tully? He was getting along without her very well these days, as the song said. And Annie Norris was not a woman to delude herself. She was not one who would live on fancy, trailing her dreams like a tattered petticoat when the truth failed her. She got up and gave her shoulders a rustle as though to test the starch in them.

Mr. Adkins, watching her, did not get up because he knew it would offend her sense of fitness, and they had got on very nicely that afternoon. When she reached the door, he said:

“Next time I come here, I shall bring you my copy of
The North Countrie
if you would like to read again some of the old ballads.”

“I’d be honored, sir,” she said, and gave a little bob of a curtsey that she had always found the best way to get out of a room when you were torn between going and staying.

It was too much for Mr. Adkins, fitness or no. He leapt to his feet and bowed low.

J
IMMIE, HAVING SPENT THE
greater part of that day as well as the two preceding evenings either with the person or the problems of Teddy Adkins, could have thought of several people he would have preferred to find waiting in his study.

“You asked me to bring you these newspaper bits as soon as I could,” Adkins said. “Otherwise I should not be here. I’m sure you are already approaching satiety with myself and my family.”

“Not at all,” Jimmie murmured and fortified himself with a stiff drink. Teddy took sherry.

“We should not have this grab-bag of my adventures and misadventures if it weren’t for the dotage of my sisters. But we do have it. So we may as well use it if it turns me out a gentleman.” He opened the portfolio and took a neat scrap book of clippings from it. “How would you like to have had your life catalogued from mewl to middle-age by three doting sisters?”

“It would drive me to a double life,” Jimmie said, hoping to start a gleam of appreciation in Adkins’ eye.

He did not even look up. “Is there anyone in this world who lives but a single life?”

“Let’s see what you’ve got here,” Jimmie said, and pulled up two chairs to the large library table.

Teddy opened the book. The caption on the first piece of yellowed newspaper read:
Sit Down Strikers in Brooklyn Encouraged by Socialite.

Adkins ran a long delicate finger along the words and then pointed to the picture of a man, his back to the camera, his fist in the air, apparently addressing a windowful of factory workers.

“That is I,” he said proudly.

“What?” said Jimmie.

“Oh, yes. My sympathies have always been with the people outside. Certainly you did not think me at home in the bosom of my family?”

Jimmie took a long pull at his drink. “It did occur to me to wonder what you would do with that menage when you came into your inheritance.”

“I shall put a match to the house in the dead of night, set up an alarum, and watch them run out in their nightclothes. It will be interesting to see how they go about living when there is nothing left for them to eat but one another.”

He said it with such calmness, detachment, that a shiver ran through Jimmie, his reaction compounded of both horror and delight. He turned to another page of the album. The clipping there was of a May Day parade in New York City, headed:
The Commies’ Thinning Ranks.

“There I am,” Teddy said. “Bold and balder.”

“This is great,” Jimmie said. He was going into court to defend a Red in a paternity suit. “A Communist’s word is not gospel to most Americans, you know, and their behavior in court hasn’t endeared them to judge or jury.”

“But my dear boy, I am not a Communist. I loathe them. That’s why I’m there. They should not have a monopoly on the defense of men’s rights. And I certainly didn’t want to surrender the first of May to them. Though why I should cherish it, I don’t know. One of the most dreadful of my childhood recollections is of prancing around a maypole with my shoes full of gravel.”

Jimmie scratched his head. “I suppose there’s a sort of logic to your reasoning. I’m not sure Mr. Wiggam is going to see it.”

“My dear Jarvis, if my mother saw it, Wiggam will see it. He will have to.”

“Quite true,” said Jimmie. On the whole he was not displeased with this new picture of little Teddy Adkins which was emerging. He was showing up to be a man of good will, however dubious seemed his wisdom…or was he merely an exhibitionist? “Wouldn’t you like to leave the album with me for a day or two? I won’t use any information without your consent.”

“I doubt I shall be more uncomfortable at your using it than at your culling it.” Adkins wiped the perspiration from his hands on a handkerchief. “It is rather embarrassing, you know.”

Jimmie grinned. “You must think of me as you would a psychiatrist, Mr. Adkins.”

“Do you know, I’ve often thought I’d go to one, but I’m afraid it would spoil the fun I get out of life.” Adkins finished his sherry. “I don’t like to leave that about really,” he said, referring again to the scrap book.

“I’ll go over it right away,” Jimmie said, and took him to the door himself.

Finally, just before the door closed on him, Adkins said: “Don’t leave it where your housekeeper will find it, will you?”

“I’ll lock it up,” said Jimmie, “although I’d leave my own diary with Mrs. Norris.”

“But you lead such an exemplary life,” Mr. Adkins said. He flashed his transitory smile and departed.

What the hell does he know about my exemplary life, Jimmie thought, returning to his study. It was particularly irksome to have heard the man say it because it was all too true. He poured a drink and took it to Mrs. Norris’ sitting room off the kitchen. She would not help herself to one unless she was about to go into a faint.

She looked up from the afternoon paper. “Ah, Mister Jamie, thank you. He’s gone, is he?”

“For the present. I don’t very much like his habit of popping in. I hope it doesn’t annoy you.”

“If it took no more than that to annoy me, you could put me out to pasture. I find him a congenial man.” She saw that Jimmie was reading her paper. “You may have it if you like, sir.”

“Excuse me,” Jimmie said, and stated what he had come in about: “Could you give me something to eat on a cracker? Where I’m going tonight we won’t sit down to dinner till nine.”

“There’s not one word about Mr. Tully’s case in the whole paper. It’s all about those dreadful boys going around in gangs…”

Jimmie eased himself out of a discussion of them, and realized even as he was doing it that too many people in New York were doing the same thing.

In his study again, he was about to put Adkins’ scrap book away for the night when another item in it attracted his attention. It was from a morning New York paper of a year and a half before:
Minister Exonerated in Murder of Girl.

Jimmie but vaguely remembered the affair as he read the lead paragraph. The case had been dismissed. He had been in Washington, himself, but if nothing else came back to him about the trial, the name of the victim did: Ellie True. He had thought then, as likely did anyone who could carry a tune, that someone should write a ballad on
The Murder of Ellie True.

Jimmie put down the album, deliberately stopping his eyes from racing through the article. He was in the habit of plucking meat and marrow from the newspaper, leaving the bones to be picked by those who read nothing else. But he had one of those rare premonitions of something in this for the connoisseur. He mixed himself another drink and took it to the window to mull with his speculation. The sky beyond the flickering mountains of buildings to the south of the park was a deep blue flecked with stars high up, but pearly at the buildings’ rim. Clear, exquisitely clear, as the lives of men most certainly were not, Jimmie mused paraphrasing a poem which was not exquisitely clear to him either.

What in the murder of Ellie True had interested Teddy Adkins? Whatever it was that had led to the dismissal of charges against the man accused of her murder, he speculated. He returned to the piece. He had been quite right:

“The break came in the twelfth day of the dramatic trial of the Reverend Alfonzo Blake. Defense Counsel Elmo Mumford introduced the witness who corroborated Dr. Blake’s alibi for the night of the murder. Defense counsel then motioned for the dismissal of the trial. Judge Wilkins adjourned court for ten minutes. Returning from his chambers, he dismissed the charges and discharged the jury.

“The real drama of the case developed quietly in the search by wealthy socialite Theodore E. Adkins for the ‘so-called’ missing witness. Adkins became interested in the case when convinced by newspaper accounts that Dr. Blake was telling the truth. Reached at his Connecticut home, Mr. Adkins said: ‘I am deeply gratified. I am sure Dr. Blake has many years of provident ministry before him.’”

Provident ministry, Jimmie thought: the peculiar combination of words was characteristic of Teddy Adkins. He made a note to himself. He knew the attorney, Elmo Mumford, a noted trial lawyer, and he intended to see him at the first opportunity.

M
RS. NORRIS HAD FOUND
nothing in the newspaper about Arabella Sperling’s murder, because nothing new had been turned up, nothing at least that Jasper Tully was willing to give the newspapers.

The Medical Examiner’s report was filed. It showed that nothing out of the ordinary was likely to have occurred to Mrs. Sperling the day of her death, nothing strange in the way of food or drink, or physical activity. If she had gone to bed with a gentleman that night—and by the evidence obtained so far it was thoroughly improper to suggest it—it had been in the strictly literal sense, to sleep at his side.

Only Oscar Johanson dared suggest the existence of such a man. And he had had reason to hope profoundly that one existed. No one except Jasper Tully believed him. But miraculously for both of them, his innocence was attested by the report of the Medical Examiner: two lovely tapering thumbs, almost feminine—and perhaps they were—in their delicacy, had stopped the flow of breath through Mrs. Sperling’s throat.