Old Sinners Never Die (14 page)

“Ha-ha,” she said, and it was more speech than laughter. “I thought you might, too. They’re in Europe now, I stay with my aunt.”

“I see,” Jimmie said.

“But she’s got her own life to live.”

“Of course,” Jimmie murmured.

“I think a woman should as long as she can, don’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“After all, that’s what we got the vote for.”

“Oh yes,” Jimmie said. “I’d forgotten about that.”

He lighted her cigarette for her when she finally had it squeezed into the holder.

“What’s your name?”

“Jimmie.”

“Do me a favour, Jimmie?”

“Gladly, if it’s in my power.”

“Tell Leo how wonderful you think I was tonight.”

“I shall tell him,” Jimmie said. “But I don’t think he’d fire you if I didn’t.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Perhaps not.”

“But you will tell him?”

“All right, Dolores, I’ll tell him.”

“It’s very important—terribly.”

“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” Jimmie said.

She nodded.

The prospect of the end of this affair did not make Jimmie any happier. He was not especially taken with this child. But the contemplation of anyone young—or for that matter, of anyone decent—being in love with Leo Montaigne troubled him.

“Why does he call this place the Club Sentimentale?” Jimmie changed the subject painlessly.

“He says it’s truth spelled backwards.”

Which confirmed for Jimmie his suspicion that Montaigne was above all a cynic.

“Who are all those men?” she asked, for at that moment the members of the press began to spill into the room. “Are they all reporters?”

“Well, I don’t know about all of them, but some of them are. They seem to have come in with Ambassador Cru.”

“Oh, that’s for the duel!”

“Do you think there will be one, Dolores?”

She shrugged. “Leo says so.”

“Because the General is supposed to have carried off Leo’s girlfriend?” She nodded. “But I thought you and Leo were in love.”

“I’m in love with Leo, but he’s in love with Virginia. Or that’s what everybody thinks.”

“I should have learned a long time ago,” Jimmie said, “not to give advice where it’s not asked of me. But at the risk of your telling me to go to the devil, Dolores, I want to suggest that Leo is not in love with any human being—only with a peculiar set of dream characters that he thinks he has created himself.”

She looked at him and smiled, as though she herself was enchanted now by him. “That sounds so pretty,” she said. “You talk just like Leo does sometimes.”

Which, Jimmie supposed, was why such a world as “The Sentimentale” could exist at all. “I must now be about my father’s business,” he said, and realized what he had paraphrased. “Heaven help me,” he added.

The reporters had discovered Maria Candido. For the first time now the night promised them some game worth the candle. They were coaxing one little song out of her when Jimmie went out to the bar to find Ambassador Cru.

Behind him he could hear Maria’s warm-up trill, and the beginning of a bawd’s tale:

“There was a fair maiden

“Who with brains wasn’t o’erladen

“But laden she was just the same …”

“Everybody! Sing, ‘tra-la-la, tra-la-la’ …”

“Excellency,” Jimmie said at the bar, “may I introduce myself? I’m James Jarvis. I understand you have been with my father.”

“You are misinformed. I have merely delivered a challenge, acting on behalf of my friend, Leo Montaigne.”

“May I ask who acted on behalf of my father?”

“His secretary, his confidential friend and his servant.”

“Ah,” said Jimmie, “that one! Tell me, excellency, if the message reached him, would you really expect my father to answer such a challenge?”

“Are you accusing me, sir, of acting in bad faith?”

“Perhaps I am, if you have gathered all these reporters without having ascertained that the message ever did reach him.”

The small bandbox diplomat brought himself to attention. “You, sir, have impugned my honour …”

Jimmie interrupted him. “Save it; your honour, I mean, and your breath. I think it must have been pretty well arranged that my father would not show up. What’s it all about, Excellency—a smoke screen? There was another challenge thrown down tonight—a little more important to Americans. Where’s Montaigne?”

Jimmie crashed his fist on the bar and made the glasses bounce.

“You, sir, are a greater boor than your father,” the ambassador said, and turned his back.

The blonde hostess was pouring out straight gins as far as he could judge. It turned his stomach to watch her go round to each glass then with a spoonful of something pink.

“Castor oil was never like that,” Jimmie said, beginning to enjoy the boisterousness of his act. He suspected he could tumble this card house … but not too soon. “Where’s your boss, honey?”

The blonde threw him a venomous look. “He just stepped outdoors. And I dare you to do the same thing … Mr. James.”

“I just might,” Jimmie said. “I could stand some fresh air.”

Maria was really warmed up in the back room, so were the boys around her. The whole place had begun to sound like the
Hot Mikado
.

M
RS. NORRIS WENT QUIETLY
, as they say. After all, if ever a lady had an alibi, she assumed she had one. Never before this morning had she been in Washington at all.

Even as she told her story in the investigation room, however, she realized that it was going to require corroboration. The skepticism with which the agents viewed her account of the beginning of the chase was very discouraging.

A duel? In this day and age?

Over what?

Mrs. Norris closed her mouth on that subject permanently. It did not become Mr. James in any way, strangely, in that instant Mrs. Norris first felt the sting of truth.

When she looked at it from all directions she was in quite a predicament. One of the men was running the microfilm through a machine. He shut it off then and turned to her. “I don’t suppose you know what this film is about at all, do you, ma’am?”

“I’ve told you exactly what I know about it,” Mrs. Norris said. “I’d never have touched the little package myself if I wasn’t afraid it would fall into evil hands. But I could not stand in the cold all night waiting for an Irishman.”

“My name is Mulrooney,” one of the investigators said.

“More’s the pity you have to hear the truth then,” Mrs. Norris said, and the other man gave vent to a smile. One of them was human, at least.

“Would you like a lawyer, ma’am?”

“Will my word mean any more to you if you get it through the mouth of a lawyer?”

Mr. Mulrooney said, “We were thinking of your interests. We’ll take care of ours, I think.”

“Your constitutional rights,” the other one added.

“If I was to take you to the house where I saw this man—this Frenchman. According to the Irishman, he’s French, that is. He’ll probably turn out a Hindu. If I were to take you there and show you the baluster where he had the package hidden, would you believe me?”

“My dear woman,” Mulrooney said, “do you suppose we picked up your trail out of thin air?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Norris said, and after a moment, “Then you have the Irishman, too?”

Neither man answered her. They were not likely to tell her if they had, of course, but it made her feel a little more tender about Tom Hennessy. But it all meant that they were themselves on the trail of the Frenchman before she and Tom ever put their feet into it. And this made her wonder if Mrs. Joyce was in any way implicated. It all came much too close to Mr. James, whose innocence in any issue she would proclaim from a burning stake if need be.

“Now, let’s hear the story again,” Mulrooney said. “Just what did you intend to do with the package? Who was your contact? When’s your next rendezvous?”

“My only rendezvous of the night was with Tom Hennessy, and if ever I keep another in my life, it won’t be with him.”

“And what were you going to do with the package?”

“I was going to consult my lawyer on it.”

“Congressman Jarvis?”

Mrs. Norris clamped her lips tightly over her teeth.

“You know, ma’am, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the proper channel for such information. We are very willing to cooperate with Congress, but we are better trained in investigation than most congressmen.”

“Congressman Jarvis was once the district attorney of New York. So I daresay he could investigate along with the best of you.”

“For God’s sake, let’s go out for coffee and let her think it over,” Mulrooney said to his partner, and wiped his hands and his forehead with his handkerchief.

“I could do with a cup of tea myself while I’m waiting,” Mrs. Norris said, “if you can arrange it, please.”

“I
T’S A GOOD THING
for my plumbing,” Senator Chisholm said at the top of her voice, “that I spent a good part of my young days on a tractor.”

“She gets us there,” Tom said, and gave the steering wheel an affectionate pat. “Doesn’t she, Mrs. Joyce?”

“But where?” said Helene. “That’s the question.”

“Right here,” Tom said, and drove up to the park gate and turned off the motor. He stuck his head out the car window and whistled the first few bars of
Annie Laurie
. He did not get even an echo in response. With the next passage he woke a couple of robins from their sleep. They gave him two chirps apiece.

“We’d better get out and look,” the senator said.

“If anything’s happened to the dear woman,” said Tom, “she’ll never forgive me. Neither will the boss.”

They walked, the three of them, into the park which was very still and full of shadows in the moonlight. A shiver of wind moved among the leaves.

“Hadn’t I better have a look in the tree?” said Tom when it was obvious that no mortal other than themselves was about.

The two women nodded.

Watching him slide his hand in behind the stone plate, Senator Chisholm murmured, “Wouldn’t Fagan like to be in my shoes right now? And wouldn’t I be glad to loan them?”

Tom returned, empty-handed. “I can’t find a thing, and the poor woman’s gone. Do you suppose she’s been done in? A fine woman like that ’ud be a great loss to the world.”

“Don’t set up the wake just yet,” the senator said. “She may be as wily as yourself and just as much alive.”

“That’d be the best thing that could happen to both of us,” Tom said fervently. “She may even be off on more of an adventure than we are. Sure, I’d have been here myself taking this chance instead of her if she could’ve driven the car.”

“Where’s the house with the woman and all the children?” the senator asked. “You’d better drive us there, Tom. If we’re this far into it, we had better go far enough to find out what it’s all about.”

“My very thought, ma’am,” Tom said, and skipped ahead of them to open the car door.

“Did you know he had a family, Mrs. Joyce?” the senator asked when they were in the car again.

Tom wished he could muffle Sophie, the better to hear himself.

“I’ve known him only professionally—and not so long at that,” Helene said. “He’s been very helpful to me in my efforts to get the sculpture commission I told you about. He knows all the tastes and disposition of this town.”

“So it would seem,” the senator said. “He’d be all the more useful for that, wouldn’t he?”

It seemed like a ruminative question so no one answered. In fact, no one spoke at all as they drove across the bridge and back into Washington proper. Tom craned his neck as they crossed the river, but not a stir of activity seemed to be moving there on either bank, no more than if the dawn was never expected. Tom parked the car in front of the house not far from Dupont Circle.

“You’d better come with us, young man,” the senator said, “since you’re the one who was here before.”

It never occurred to Tom that she might wish to exclude him. But that was a woman’s way: when things got interesting, they expected a man to stand back and let them push up ahead to where everything was happening. On the way up to the darkened house, and while his finger was on the doorbell where there was no name plate, Tom brooded over it.

No buzzer sounded, but presently a woman came out to the glass door in the vestibule and pulled aside the curtain.

“Well, Tom?” the senator said shortly.

“That’s her.”

She opened the door to them, seeing, no doubt, that it was the women who held the balance of power. “What is it you want?”

“I’m Senator Grace Chisholm, madam, and I’d like to speak to your husband. If he’s not here, then I’d like to speak to you.”

“He’s not here. Let me see your identification.”

The senator opened her purse and brought out a wallet Tom thought better suited to an industrialist.

“I guess I’d know you from your picture anyway, Senator. What time is it?” Even as she asked, she allowed them to follow her into the house.

Helene looked at her watch. “Twenty minutes to three.”

“George won’t be home tonight,” she said.

Helene laid her hand on the senator’s arm to draw her attention, and then shook her head.

Tom had forgotten what it was, but he was pretty sure Dandy’s name wasn’t George. Both women cast him a look of inquiry. He shrugged. What could he tell them? He was sure this was the place—the nameplate missing from the box, the balusters in front of the house. And sure, he had recognized the woman.

It was a dull, middle-class living room she led them into, with gaudy reproductions on the wall. A glassed-in bookcase held a few paper-backed books, not all American. There were toys strewn about, and some of elegance above any child’s reach.

“Will he go directly to work, Mrs. d’Inde?” Helene ventured.

The woman turned on her. “What did you call me?”

“Mrs. d’Inde,” Helene repeated, having cast the die. She edged toward a table on which there was a wedding photograph.

“That’s not my name,” the woman said. “What do you people want at this hour and where’s your search warrant?”

Helene by then had picked up the photograph. The man was doubtless Henri d’Inde, though much younger than he was today. “Do you ever go to the National Museum?” she asked the woman. And when she got no answer, she said, “I know him from there, you see, as Henri d’Inde.”