Gentleman Called (9 page)

“I think I’d rather let her get her own publicity,” Jimmie said. “What do you know about Adkins?”

“He’s a born meddler. Not a do-gooder, mind you. He’s a calculator, and I wouldn’t underestimate his intelligence for a minute. If she’s got the knife in deep enough, though, I’d try to get her to take it out without twisting. Pay off a little. I’ll tell you why. If you put him on the stand in something like this, he won’t do himself any good. Too much ego. He’s got to show how clever he is. You can’t be clever out of one side of your mouth and naive out of the other. And naïveté is the only winning defense I know in these things.” Mumford brushed crumbs from the table. “But he couldn’t play it that way. Messy business. Old family, too. Settle out of court. That’s my advice. Which, come to think of it, you didn’t ask, did you?”

“I might have,” Jimmie said, “if I could take it. But we shall go to law, and for a variety of complex reasons. The best I can do for myself right now is find out what I can about the man I’m defending. How did Adkins come into the Ellie True affair?”

Mumford thought for a moment and then snorted: “Damned if I know how he came in. The way I came to try the case myself was irregular. I was asked to take it by a fraternal organization I belong to. I don’t like getting these holy men. I don’t understand them, and if you can’t pull them out clean as a baby’s tooth, you might as well let go of them. There’s no such thing with juries as mitigating circumstances for fallen angels. Now I have not lost a man to the chair yet.” He rapped heavy knuckles on the table. “And by the Almighty, I didn’t want to do it for charity!”

Mumford sat back in his chair, refused a cigarette, accepted a cigar. “I wonder where Reverend Blake is now. Texas would be my guess—the land of opportunity. Tell you something, Jimmie—I don’t have any more faith in him today than I had on our first interview. Did he kill her?” Mumford shrugged. “He was the self-appointed pastor of something called the Mellody Friendship Club, one of those homey places where misfits and myopics can sit and hold hands. Ellie True was a waitress at the club. Not a customer. That was how things came to look very bad for the Reverend Blake in the first place.

“The night Ellie was murdered, he admitted having called on her—as well as every member of the club—to deliver some salvation literature. A witness saw him in her apartment—and one of the few things in his favor at that stage, was that the witness had been able to see him because he and Ellie had left the door open—but no one saw him close the door or leave the apartment. That was about ten o’clock. It makes a long day even for a minister.

“When Ellie’s room-mate came home at two
A.M.
she found Ellie in bed—suffocated to death, probably by a pillow held over her face, just possibly in her sleep.

“When Blake was on the stand, he was not his own best witness. And the smart boy, the young Assistant D.A. made him look like a lecherous dog. He led him, and I mean led, to the point of admitting he’d finished up all his other calls, waiting till the last to enjoy his call on Ellie. Funny thing—the fact that Ellie needed saving was held more against him than in his favor.

“That was roughly where we had got by adjournment the day before Theodore Adkins showed up in my office with a lush named Michael Regan, the surprise witness. I was very, very glad to meet them both.

“All along, Blake had maintained a witness existed who could corroborate his story of having been home by ten-thirty. But he would not name him. Just how Adkins went about rounding up Regan, I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. But Michael Regan sober, as he admittedly had not been often in recent times, testified to having gone to see the Reverend Blake that fatal night, to having sat upon his brownstone stoop until the Reverend showed up at half-past ten, and to having spent the next hour with him confessing to all sorts of sins, including beating his wife. Conveniently, Regan had again fallen from grace. We were able to offer his wife in corroborating testimony. She had a fresh batch of bruises which the judge viewed in his chamber. Whereupon he decided it unnecessary to proceed. Tidy, isn’t it? We can prove Regan beats his wife as he said he does. Therefore he’s an honest man.”

“Tidier than justice sometimes is,” Jimmie said.

“Justice is as relative as sin and you know it, my boy,” Mumford said.

Jimmie nodded in reluctant agreement. “What denomination is the Reverend Blake?”

“Mongrel, I’d say, a mongrelarian.”

Jimmie grinned. “You’re an irreligious bastard.”

“No, I’m conservative in politics, orthodox in religion, and I have five children by the same woman.”

“Didn’t anyone question an Irishman’s confession to a Protestant clergyman?”

“To an evangelist,” Mumford corrected. “There’s a distinction. Only an evangelist gets through to a drunkard. They both live in worlds of exaggerated reality. I am sure Michael Regan blackened his wife’s eye to prove he was a gentleman—in not smashing her mouth. No one doubted his story, any more than they would question his confessor. Why City Hall is a virtual hotbed of orthodoxy, man, but an evangelist can get Times Square for his pulpit. Yes, and I’ve no doubt the loan of the Vice Squad to pass the collection plates along Broadway.”

Jimmie laughed and signaled the waiter for the check.

W
HEN TULLY MENTIONED TO
the D.A.’s secretary that he was going to see Mrs. Mellody who had a club for matrimonial availables, he got a nod and then a sudden response. Mary Ryan had been in the District Attorney’s office since she finished business college.

“Jasp, wait a minute. Mellody Friendship Club—is that it?”

“That’s it.” He went back to her desk and stood rubbing the back of his neck. There was such a nagging familiarity to the name. “Do we have something on them?”

“The murder of Ellie True,” Miss Ryan said.

“My gosh, I knew that!” Tully cried, and allowed a slow great smile to crawl all over his face. It made his ugly visage a joy to see.

Miss Ryan hated to spoil matters. “Wait till you get into it,” she said. “It’s not all that pretty.” She began getting out the files for him.

Tully took them into his office, and when one of the men who had worked on the case came in, Miss Ryan sent him in to Tully. By then the latter had lost much of his enthusiasm, just as she had prophesied. Every member of the Mellody Club at the time, including Mrs. Sperling and George Allan Masters, had been checked out. Genuine, strong alibis.

The investigator told Tully what he already knew: the last person they wanted to charge with murder was a clergyman. But the heat was on over the rackets, and Ellie True was a good name with which to attract the public attention. Also, one hell of a good case had been collected against Alfonzo Blake.

“And you know something, Jasp? I still think we had the right man. That’s why the thing’s been quiet ever since. But what happened, just as Junior was about to nail things down for the prosecution…(‘Junior’ was the uncomplimentary nickname the old timers in the office gave to one of the assistant D.A.’s)…just at the critical minute, some damn fool millionaire philanthropist had to get in on the act.

“No connection with the case whatever. Never heard of the Mellody Club in his life. Read in the papers that poor old Reverend Blake couldn’t compromise his holy office by naming a witness. So out he went and scoured the streets until he found the witness or a reasonable facsimile thereof. He pushed that poor slob Regan into court to swear he was confessing wife-beating to Blake down on Fourth Street at the very hour we said Blake was holding a pillow over Ellie’s face.

“Well, Jasp, Junior couldn’t say soap for blowing bubbles, and to make things tougher he was up against Elmo Mumford, and you know what a killer that guy is when he smells blood.” He shook his hands, palms down, at the files. “It’s all in there, God help us.”

“Any idea where Blake is now?” Tully asked.

The other investigator shrugged. “We can put a line on him if you like.”

“We better do that, and just for the hell of it, I’ll see if we can pick up Regan.”

“That’s a long time ago for a man with his thirst, Jasp.”

“Maybe I can buy him a drink.”

“What about the millionaire—Adkins, I think his name was?”

Jasper Tully massaged his chin. “He shouldn’t be hard to find if we have to.” He grinned. “I’d hate to have him pull the same sort of thing on me he did on you fellows.”

Tully began his exploration of the files. He did not relish the prospect of tracking down all these people, members of the Mellody Club at the time. He wondered if any of them still belonged to it. He doubted it. One name had been crossed from the list before the alibi check had even begun: Edward T. Murdock, Grover Hotel, had left New York for Sando, Ohio, two days before the murder.

T
ULLY ATE A GOOD MEAL
too fast, but he got to the Friendship Club just as most of its members were arriving for the evening. He suspected he looked right at home himself. All he needed do was give his hat a twist in his hand while he waited. He tried it. Sure enough, that got him a winsome smile from a great innocent lump of a woman. Tully sighed. The world was loaded with innocents, and none the better for it.

He watched Mrs. Mellody amble her amiable way toward him. She treated all her visitors like children whether they were twice or half her age. Suddenly he realized she had been sizing him up from the moment she came out the kitchen door. Her clients might think he belonged, but she had him pegged for a cop before she was across the room.

“I wonder if you don’t have a good notion why I’m here, Mrs. Mellody?”

“I’m sure it’s something we had better speak of in private,” she said. “I don’t like my people disturbed.”

“I wasn’t thinking of disturbing them, ma’am. I don’t suppose it takes much to make them want to fly away, does it?”

She had been about to take him upstairs. She changed her mind. “Maybe we can sit in what we call The Little Parlor. I see applicants for membership in there. When they can hear the laughter and the music and the clatter of plates, it encourages them to want to join us. We are a family in many ways—the only family some of us will ever know.” She scarcely changed her tone of voice. “It is the Sperling woman you want to speak of, officer?”

“That’s it, all right.”

“She was one of those who left us after the Ellie True affair.”

“Well, I’m glad of that for your sake, Mrs. Mellody. It’ll save you some questioning anyway.”

She looked at him. An open-faced woman, she might be shrewd, but she was also frank, and appreciated the quality in others. “I do believe you are,” she said. “What is your name again, officer?”

“Jasper Tully.”

Her mind was always far in advance of her speech. “One of the people I misjudged in my time—and I don’t often misjudge so far as the interests of the house are concerned—was Arabella Sperling. She was a human spider. She would intrigue a man into her web and sit back watching him perform for her. She would poke and prod. Oh, very unpleasant. I should have asked her to leave many a time, but it wasn’t that simple. I think she might have tried to pull the house down about us. Smiling, of course, while she did it. I must say I’m not surprised at what happened to her. I could have strangled her myself many a time.”

“Do you know anyone else who felt that way about her, Mrs. Mellody?”

“No. I lost complete track of her. I don’t suppose I heard of her since—until her death.”

“But I mean at the time she was here, did anyone, to your knowledge, come to really hate her?”

Mrs. Mellody thought more carefully of that. “I suppose all our boys—all the men, that is—must have been glad to escape her attentions.”

“Anyone particular?” Tully persisted.

“No…o,” she said still with a note of qualification.

“Anyone still with you who was in the club in her day?”

“Not a soul, I’m happy to say. By which I mean, Mr. Tully, we like to see people depart from us able to stand up to, and participate in, an aggressive society.”

Onward Christian Soldiers, Tully thought. He brought from his coat pocket the list of mourners who had put in an appearance at the funeral parlor. “Any names here you recognize, Mrs. Mellody?”

The big woman fetched a pair of nose glasses on a string from somewhere in the depth of her bosom and studied the list. A show of recognition came to her face. “George Allan Masters. He was one of ours. Oh, dear…a nice man. Divorced from a horrid wife at the time. I went into that. I have to, you see. So many of our people don’t approve of divorce. And if there are children, it makes such complications. But then of course, we don’t get many divorces. The economic station of most of our people doesn’t encourage it. But George was one of those she wanted particularly to coax into her parlor.”

“When did he leave the Friendship Club?”

“Under the happiest of circumstances. He married one of our new girls, a woman a bit older than himself.”

One of the new old girls, Tully thought. Since Masters was solidly alibied for the night of Mrs. Sperling’s murder, there was no point in searching him. “Now, what about Dr. Alfonzo Blake?”

“That man,” Mrs. Mellody said with consummate scorn.

“Didn’t he fit in?”

“He did not, though he belonged to us. He joined strictly for purposes of his own, I do believe, and I don’t think they had anything to do with the Lord’s work. Oh, I don’t suppose that’s fair to him either. He needed all the sources of income he could find to scratch out a living. And not much of a living it was. I never knew a man so thin. If he’d swallowed a needle, you’d see the bulge.”

Tully smiled.

“You have a nice face when you smile, Mr. Tully.”

“Kind of awful without it though, isn’t it?” he drawled. “Was there any particular friendship between Blake and Mrs. Sperling?”

“No, none. The only half-way special friend Blake had was Eddie Murdock. And what they had in common was a matter of considerable worry to me—.” Mrs. Mellody leaned forward and put a finger on his arm that Tully thought would pin down any man. “They both liked ‘girls’…young girls.”