Gentleman Called (5 page)

“You didn’t by any chance go back to Mrs. Sperling’s house that day to try to change her mind?” Tully asked quietly.

Johanson whirled around on him. “No, sir, but I thought about doing it, and then I remembered the morning paper in the hallway not picked up, and I thought Ha! She does not want to be disturbed. She’s got her little man with her again.”

“Oh, yes,” Greer said with heavy sarcasm. “That one.”

But with very little change, Johanson told the same story over and over again throughout the day to whomever asked it, whether at police headquarters, in his own living-room, or in the basement of the house that had belonged to the murdered woman. There were an old kitchen table and a couple of chairs in the basement which might have been used for conference. Both Mrs. Sperling’s and her superintendent’s fingerprints showed up on the porcelain top of the table. But no evidence of any worth showed up in Johanson’s favor. His only alibi for the night of the murder was his wife’s word, and she finally admitted having fallen asleep before he had even gone to bed. Greer and the Homicide men were in favor of charging the man. Tully had his doubts still. And since, through his boss, he was in theory at least, the man with the last word, the arrest was not made.

It was with the restlessness of a prisoned animal that Tully moved from source to source of evidence. He watched Mrs. Sperling’s two nieces finger greedily the jewels recovered from the pawnbroker and Johnny Thompson. They were hungry for inherited wealth, these two girls. They could not be more than thirty years old, either of them, but they had the look of having abandoned their hopes for marriage at puberty.

Having seen in his long life of police work, all degrees of wretchedness in human behavior, Tully was still most revolted by greed, and especially greed in a woman.

“Ladies,” he said, curling his tongue around the word, “I wonder if you could tell us whether anything is missing.”

One of the two snapped: “Five thousand dollars.”

“I mean among the jewelry,” Tully said.

They exchanged glances, and then fell to open and bitter argument between themselves as to what might have been there and wasn’t, and then as to what other disposition Mrs. Sperling might have made of something herself. It occurred to Tully while this was going on that in all the investigation so far no clear picture was coming out at all of the victim. That was chiefly what was wrong. Nobody had been able—or maybe it just was that nobody was willing—to tell what kind of person Arabella Sperling had been. Did anybody, for example, call her Arabella, or just plain Bella? What had she thought of these two gulls scrabbling now over the remains?

They had reached a decision. Something was missing after all.

“A breast pin, a diamond ‘lover’s knot’ in white gold,” the spokeswoman of them said. “It belonged to our grandmother.”

“Maybe she gave it to somebody,” Tully suggested.

The twosome wagged their heads. “It was to come to us. Auntie Arabella was a fair woman.”

Fair is foul, Tully thought, and took out his pen to write a description of the pin. One of them drew a picture: it was like a bow. “What would you say its value?” he asked.

“Only sentimental,” one said.

The other would have preferred a nominal price. “At least a hundred dollars.” She picked a figure out of the air.

He wrote “diamond (?) lover’s not,” and then appropriately had to go back and insert the “k” to make it, “lover’s knot.”

If the murderer had wanted that particular jewel, it might account why the bag with the rest of the stuff had been dropped in the hallway. Tully questioned the boy, Johnny Thompson again. He was satisfied that the boy had not seen the diamond pin.

A
S JIMMIE DROVE OUT
to Weston, Connecticut, to be received at court, as he put Mrs. Georgianna Adkins’ invitation to dinner, he had already begun to resent the social demands of the case: he was having to give it far too much out-of-office time. Still, he had received the invitation from the old girl herself, and it was quite something to be managing your own affairs even to that detail at the age of eighty-six.

The Adkins mansion was a well-kept relic of another era, probably resembling its owner in that. To be sure, Jimmie could not remember much of those days himself, but his own father had been in the habit of living—when he was at home in Nyack—as though they had never ended. How, Jimmie wondered, had Mrs. Adkins managed through contemporary taxes. Dependency allowances, he decided wryly, remembering that she had three daughters as well as Teddy…three daughters aged, according to
Who’s Who,
sixty-five, sixty-four, and sixty-two, and all of them widows. It took a brave man to live in that house. In fact, he decided, squaring his shoulders, it took a brave one to go near it at all.

“I am Miranda Thabor, Mr. Jarvis…Teddy’s youngest sister.” She came across the marble foyer, her hand extended, and with the movement of a woman of great grace. She was taller than her brother, much more slender, and quite beautiful, even at sixty-two. She waited while Jimmie gave his coat and hat into the hands of the butler, and then led the way through a small waiting parlor. Jimmie opened the great doors for her when they reached them. “We are all home tonight,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?”

“That’s just fine,” Jimmie said. He supposed it was.

The grand sitting room was enormous, full of lights and of people. Jimmie saw eight or nine without particularly looking for them. A couple of young men were amongst them, he was glad to observe; all were dressed for dinner and apparently engaged meanwhile each in his own interests, a newspaper, a book, a chess game. Some were even talking.

“Here is Mr. Jarvis, mother,” his escort announced him, and everyone then abandoned his own enterprise and followed in Jimmie and Miranda’s wake to the old lady’s winged chair before the fire.

Jimmie bent low and took the ancient hand in his, a small silken bag of bones. There was no doubting that she was Teddy’s mother, her face and eyes were as round as his, and if the ruddy glow was gone from her cheeks a sort of sheen had come into them, yellow but bright.

“It is naughty of Teddy not to be down when his particular guest arrives,” she said, giving each word careful guidance around the few teeth left her. Jimmie was amused, remembering that Teddy had used the word “naughty” in speaking of his mother. “I knew your father when he was a young man.”

She managed all the introductions herself, each member of the family coming forward as though by signal. “This is my second daughter, Alicia Montelegro, Mr. James Ransom Jarvis…You do use Ransom’s name, don’t you, Mr. Jarvis?”

“Yes,” Jimmie said.

“Alicia,” the old lady went on, as though time itself would stand around with the un-introduced members of her family waiting for her to proceed, “married into the Italian House of Clavoy. Do you know they contested the custody of her children and kept the boys in Italy? Very important, it seems…” Jimmie wondered if there were not some oblique promise of her own attitude in the reference. “And we thought they had married us for our money,” she concluded the matter and summoned forward another of the family. “This is Theodore Eric Thabor, Miranda’s son, named after his uncle, whom he resembles as much as I resemble Cardinal Richelieu.”

The resemblance between her and Cardinal Richelieu was not all that remote, Jimmie thought, and glancing down he observed the very glow of mischief in her aged eyes: the old witch had deliberately used the comparison to prompt his consent in it.

She then introduced her oldest daughter who soon after fled to the remotest corner of the room.

“You will promptly forget half the names in our family, Mr. Jarvis, but never mind. It is very unlikely you will find it necessary to speak to most of them again. There are some here I have not spoken to myself for twenty years, I’m sure.”

Most of them dispersed then to their own interests within the room.

“Mother Adkins, you don’t mind if I run up to the nursery for a minute?” So said one of the granddaughters-in-law whose name Jimmie had already forgot.

“I should certainly prefer it to the nursery’s running down here, my dear,” the old lady said with a withering dryness. And to Jimmie when the girl was gone, she added matter-of-factly: “I loathe small children, especially female.”

Wine was then passed, two kinds of sherry and a very dry madeira which Miranda recommended.

“It deserves your praise,” Jimmie said, “I can hear it sing.”

Miranda laughed. There was music there, too. Sixty-odd years. My God, but the women in this family preserved themselves and their femininity. And that was something which did not survive if put away in a box. He amused himself with the thought that the basement might be paved with the bones of lovers!

“Have you ever observed the affinity between the Italian and the English?” Miranda interrupted his reverie. “We are New England, of course, but the pull has reached across to us. When a true New Englander seeks out a warm climate, to this day he goes to Italy.”

“Not Florida?”

“Mr. Jarvis, they would rather go to hell than to Palm Beach.”

Jimmie accepted another half glass of wine at the moment Teddy Adkins made his entrance, and it occurred to him to wonder if he was thus being repaid for not having been present at his own house when Adkins had first called on him. Teddy was a very neat man. He shook his guest’s hand and went then to kiss his mother.

Miranda, whose conversations until then had been adult and not by any means dull, remarked: “Isn’t he adorable?” Her eyes upon her brother were worshipful, even when, leaning down to brush his lips to his mother’s cheek, he turned his plump little fifty-five-year-old bottom into the air.

Jimmie sipped his wine. He was acutely embarrassed.

“I can very well understand someone’s conniving to get him,” Miranda said. “But that, as Mama says, is not my affair. It is why you’re here though, isn’t it, Mr. Jarvis?”

“I am a lawyer,” Jimmie said.

“And so very discreet. Don’t be distressed. I shall not mention it again.”

Somebody had better mention it, Jimmie thought. But very shortly he took Miranda in to dinner while Teddy gave his arm to his mother. She needed no other support.

At the long table over which hung a crystal chandelier, prismatically lustrous as diamonds, twenty people sat down. The butler and two waitresses served them, and the murmur of talk down the table ran to boating, travel, game fishing, and amongst the women someone commented on what an extraordinarily common game tennis had become. Just anybody played it now. All small talk, this, Jimmie thought, reflective of a class, so that it made stand out as the more remarkable, the old lady’s sudden statement to Jimmie—a statement for all that it was put as a question: “Did you know, Mr. Jarvis, that I am supported by my son, Theodore?”

“It had not occurred to me to think about it,” Jimmie said frankly, but now that he did think about it, he decided she was merely juggling words or perhaps money allotments. Teddy had been very precise in saying that he had not yet come into his inheritance.

“I support the house. He supports me.”

Jimmie nodded. The gesture must pass for understanding. He glanced at her plate: a strong mouse could have fetched home such provision.

“For generations it has been the custom in the family, Mr. Jarvis, that the male heir must support his mother as long as she lives before coming himself into nominal possession of the family estate. Perhaps John Wiggam has told you this: he determines each year what he considers a proper share for Theodore to contribute to our household expenses by way of my support in the appropriate fashion. What do you think of the arrangement?”

“It seems to have bred strength to the distaff side, doesn’t it?” Jimmie said with a lack of tact quite unusual for him. He didn’t really care. It would serve Wiggam right if the Adkins retainer was lost to the firm by the bungling of its junior partner. He had been in no way prepared for this household. “But I assume,” he added, having scarcely paused for breath, “it was intended to perpetuate the ideal of individual ruggedness. A tradition beloved of Americans, isn’t it?”

Teddy himself turned that to a bad ending: “An ill-served ideal in my case, isn’t it?”

“I will not hear you criticize yourself, Teddy,” Miranda said. “You have done more splendidly than anyone in this room.”

“Just how splendidly we may have yet to learn,” Mama said, and then raised her voice to Miranda’s son: “Eric, I will not have you shooting in the cove. I have neither time nor patience at this stage of my life to deal with game wardens, and I do not wish to go into the next world answering to bribery in a matter so insignificant.”

That, too, was meant for his ears, Jimmie thought. In matters significant she would have no qualms. He learned a good deal by indirection at this otherwise undistinguished meal. In contrast to the service, the fare itself was ordinary. It indicated cookery to the satisfaction of a woman who no longer had any interest in her palate. Jimmie speculated that the cook, too, was a tyrant in her own realm. But he had not come for the food. He found that Teddy almost flinched at the touch of his too-loving sister, Miranda; in fact, when any of his sisters addressed him, he was hard put to raise his eyes to their faces. He had no appreciation of their beauty certainly. What, Jimmie wondered, were his plans for this household when he did come into his inheritance?

As they were about to leave the table, the old lady announced: “You will now excuse Mr. Jarvis and myself. He and I will take our coffee upstairs.”

On his arm, she piloted the way to the elevator. The butler hastened after them and took them up. The fire had been lit in her sitting room.

“Well, Mr. Jarvis,” she said, to the point immediately: “what do you think of Miss Daisy Thayer?”

“I think she has a fair case against your son,” Jimmie said.

“Good. I’m delighted to hear that. She will not be tempted to drop it. Do you suppose they lived together as she claims? Be frank with me, young man.”

“I think you should ask your son to be frank with you, Mrs. Adkins.”