Death of an Old Sinner (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 1)

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Her brother-in-law, whom she always called Mr. Robinson was, to her surprise, home when she arrived. And it was much to her pleasure. He was ever a cheerful man, where her sister Mag seemed given more every year to complaining.

  Mr. Robinson took her coat and said into her ear: “You’ve roses still in your cheeks, Annie, never mind the frosty pow.”

  “The frosty pow,” she repeated, running her hand over the white strands of her hair. “You’re handsome as ever yourself, Mr. Robinson. It’s the ride in the car—in the Jaguar if you please—that flushed my cheeks.”

  “Is it paid for yet?” said Mag.

  And somehow Mrs. Norris resented the question although she was herself responsible for the information. “We’re doing very nicely in the family, Mag. And there are certain omens in the wind that we may soon be doing better.”

  “Oh-ho?” said Mr. Robinson, pulling his chair closer to Mrs. Norris. “Would it be the young one or the old bird that’s bringing that to the nest?” There was something in his question and his way of asking it too direct for Mrs. Norris’ tastes, and her brother-in-law saw it immediately himself. “Aren’t you going to give your sister a cup of tea to warm her?” he cried to his wife.

  “You’re home at a queer hour, Mr. Robinson,” Mrs. Norris said.

  “How else would I get to see you?” he said with a wink. Was it, Mrs. Norris wondered, that she was getting old and skeptical? That wink seemed to have been a strain on Mr. Robinson. For the first time in all the years of their acquaintance she doubted the sincerity of his cheerful banter. And look at Mag; she was wrinkled as a bag of cheese while he was blooming. But after a while, Mr. Robinson bringing out a bottle of what he called “Boggy Dew,” Mrs. Norris thought it was all in her imagination.

  “I remember,” said Mr. Robinson when the drink was down, “your old gentleman was talking of writing his memoirs. Lively enough wouldn’t you say they might be?”

  “Lively enough to shame us all,” said Mrs. Norris.

  “You don’t tell,” said Mag, with her first pep of the day.

  “He’s been reading them to her,” said Mr. Robinson with a wink.

  “He’s neither reading nor writing them, thank God for our respectability.”

  “Sometimes,” said Mag, wrinkling her nose with disappointment, “I wonder if your respectability hasn’t got in the way of your chances.”

  Mrs. Norris squared her shoulders. “My chances of what, pray?”

  “Oh, for the love of heaven, don’t be starting to snipe at each other. Wouldn’t the two of you like to go to a motion picture?” Mr. Robinson put his hand in his pocket.

  “It might improve our dispositions,” Mag said forlornly.

  “Aw…” said Robbie, the twenty dollar bill already in his wife’s hand, “I’m like all the victims of the con men. Get me once and you got me forever. You do this to me every time, the two of you. I must be off now.” He came in again, putting on his coat. “Is it politics your old gentleman’s going into, Annie?”

  “Well, there’s been politics in the family for generations. You know that, Mr. Robinson.”

  “Whatever Mr. Robinson knows or doesn’t know,” he said, leaning down between the two women to kiss the cheek of one and then the other of them, “the information didn’t reach him by the lips of Annie Norris.”

  6

  THIS WAS TO BE the General’s first visit to Mr. Robinson’s place of business although he had had a standing invitation for some months. His interest in the dapper little man had been first provoked by Robbie’s knowledge of foreign cars which ran to such refinements as special models and the people who owned them, and then of course, there was the matter of horses, on which he was also an expert. Beyond these interests, Robbie had yet another, and that one the General had never expected to find useful to himself, English Royalty. But when he picked the printer up at the appointed hour, he came around to the subject as soon as possible.

  “Do you remember telling me about your collection of royal crests and coats of arms and whatnot?”

  “I remember,” Robbie said.

  “And charting a course to them for some obscure American descendants?”

  “Was that how I put it?” said Robbie. “Oh yes, I remember. But there wasn’t enough profit in printing the blasted things. And there were other complications. Ah, but I loved the research. D’you know, General, there’s times I’d sooner be parted with Mag than with my books.”

  “You still have the books then?”

  “An office full of them.”

  The General grunted his satisfaction. “Robbie, how would you like to help me set up a little detour in the course of history?”

  “I suppose,” he said, after considerable thought, “it would depend on the amount of traffic, if you know what I mean.”

  The General was deep in his own thoughts. “What do you suppose would have happened to the world if—say—Napoleon could have slept at night? Or suppose that Russian general of cavalry had not got boils on his backside when the revolution was at its crest?”

  The printer thought about the possibilities. “Do you think what happened happened because of their ills or in spite of them, General?”

  The General took his eyes from the road and looked at Robbie sadly. “That is a question worthy of an Irishman. I’d not have expected it of you, Robbie. I’m reviewing the Irish parade, by the way.”

  “Man, man, watch the road, or you’ll see it in the company of St. Patrick himself.”

  A few minutes later they parked in the lot at the rear of Mr. Robinson’s plant, and Robbie getting out from the Jaguar, took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his hands. Despite the weather, they were almost running with his nerves. He resolved to ride no more with General Jarvis in the city. He even wiped the handle of the car door where it, too, was moist from his clutching it.

  Two men, watching from the doorway of the restaurant across the street, exchanged looks and ambled across the street with deliberate ease. Robbie noticed them, wondered where he had seen them before, speculated idly on whether their tans came from a gymnasium sun lamp or the Florida sun and then forgot about them.

  The General’s first impression of the shop was that no great amount of printing was done in it, not enough certainly to occupy the platoon of men lolling about, not one of whom seemed any more inclined to set to work on Robbie’s arrival than he had been in his absence. This was not Scottish industry.

  “What do they do?” he asked out.

  “They’re ru…markable men, all of them,” Robbie said, steading himself after a quick change of course. If the General didn’t understand what he saw, there was no need to start his education at this age. “They’re messengers.”

  “Are they,” the old man murmured.

  “And this is a linotype machine,” said Robbie, steering him past the one piece of equipment and into a hallway.

  It needed dusting, the General thought of the machine, but he said nothing.

  “Most of our work is done out,” Robbie further explained, opening the door and turning the light switch in his private office. “I keep a few lads on the phone to take orders, and I have a good man on my books.”

  “An accountant,” said the General, following his host’s example and hanging his overcoat on the hall tree inside the door. Robbie looked at him sharply: the question often came up between them—who was pulling whose leg? “The most important man in our generation, Robbie, but it’s not your accountant I’m interested in. I want to inquire into a certain English family of a hundred or so years ago—that of a Lady Sylvia Mucklethrop. She may have been the last of the line. I expect they’re extinct by now.”

  “Oh, no,’ said Robbie. “They’re very much alive.”

  “Are they,” the General growled. “I’d never have expected it by her taste in gentlemen.” He thought about the implications of a thriving, respectable clan of Mucklethrops to his scheme. But, of course! That was better still! More’s th
e interest.

  “You’ll want to look them up,” said Robbie. And with that he motioned the General into a leather-upholstered chair, while he pushed a couple of buttons, one of which threw more light on what had seemed a very dismal office indeed, and the other of which turned panels as dark likely as the inside of a coffin round to shelf upon shelf of books. Robbie, with a flourish of his hand, unrolled a map and then a chart which by cross reference, he explained, would give the key to the lands and kins of many a noble family, including the Mucklethrops. Still another chart indicated the make and model of automobiles in the family. To complete the General’s bewildered admiration, he opened what looked like a wall safe and brought from it a bottle of eighteen year old Scotch whiskey. He set it up with glasses.

  “I have to leave you for a while now, sir. I’ll be back after post time…”

  “When?” said the General.

  “After the postman goes. I have a ton of orders to get into the afternoon mail.”

  “Carry on,” said the General, already under the British influence.

  He began poking among the shelves. There were tomes on royal crests and seals, genealogies, histories and biographies, diaries and account books. It would take a librarian to sort them, and by the markings on some of the books they had once passed into and out of library hands. But that was none of the General’s business. Alone in the room, or thinking himself alone, he was suddenly elated at the discovery of the name Mucklethrop. It so absorbed him that he was scarcely aware of a great lump of a fellow sweeping the office until the man swept off the tops of the General’s shoes. The General bent down to look; so did the sweeper, and straightened up with him also, like a burlesque comic. The old man looked about for something to throw at him, but the fellow was gone before he found it, and all the General remembered of his looks really was that his face was the color of stage makeup.

  And what a turn that gave the General, thinking of stage makeup!

  Flora: it was as though his Flora had come into the room and gone from it, just while his back was turned, and not Flora as he knew her now, but as she was when first he met her. He was tempted then to pick up Robbie’s phone and call her. He lifted the receiver. It was an extension phone, the line in use. He had not thought of Flora like that, in connection with the stage—for how long? Not at least since she herself had forsaken show business, and had become content in the small apartment he provided for her. He decided to let the call go since he would be seeing her that night. But he must remember to tell her. What an extraordinary experience! Like peeling twenty years from his life.

  He forced himself back to his researches. “Suppose you were a Mucklethrop, Robbie,” he said when the printer returned, “would it distress you to discover that your great-grandmother carried on a bit with a gentleman who was subsequently President of the United States?”

  “I suppose, General,” Robbie said, and after taking more time than the General thought necessary, “it would depend on where I discovered it.”

  “What the devil difference would that make?”

  “Reliability—the reliability of the source,” said Robbie. “Since you asked it, I assume you want to know.”

  “Go on.”

  “If it was true, I’d probably find it amusing. And if it was false, General, I’d sue to the depth of American prosperity.”

  “Oh, so would I, so would I,” said the General.

  “Is it the old gentleman whose picture is in your study?”

  “The very same. He’s been confiding to me about the Mucklethrops, Robbie,” said the General slyly.

  “Why, the old bastard.”

  The General grinned. He gave Robbie a gentle poke. “And something he’s taught me: how to sign his name. Look.” The General took his pen from his pocket and looped the signature, complete with its nineteenth century flourishes.

  “Oh, the villain!” Robbie cried and took his handkerchief to the palms of his hands again.

  “Do I dismay you?” the General asked, destroying the paper in the ashtray.

  “Dismay is too mild a word. You shock hell out of me, sir.”

  The General gave a grunt of approval. “Before he was president, he served at the Court of St. James—this philandering ancestor of mine. He kept a diary that would put you to sleep even if you had a toothache… But, Robbie, he left a great blank at the end of each day’s trivia as though he some day meant to enter the truth. That’s what you and I are about to compose, to give to the world, and demand that history take another look at him! Is that not an honorable intent?”

  “The very soul of it,” said Robbie, with a bright sort of despair.

  “I shall have to use a nibbed pen, of course,” the General said. “Oh, there’s something else I’ll need. I have a formula here for ink. Do you know a chemist?”

  “Kind of a chemist.”

  “Ring him up and engage him,” the General said, and rubbed his hands together.

  Robbie looked at him with admiration. “You mentioned the honorable intent of this …this…”

  “Historical supplement,” the General prompted. “And you would like to know the dubious intent?”

  “Aye,” said Robbie, “since my share likely comes out of that.”

  “Quite. I’m doing it for money. I expect to publish these memoirs which I, in family pride, have rescued from the dust, and to accept as my inheritance the royalties therefrom.”

  “ ʼTis only fair,” said Robbie, “but just as a matter of information, General—in case, mind only in case something gangs awry—would you still be able to draw your pension in the pokey?”

  “Damn it, sir, I might as well be in the pokey now for all I see of it!”

  Robbie sighed. “He jests at scars that never felt a copper’s breath upon his neck.”

  “Oh, haven’t I though? Many’s the time, Robbie, many’s the time, and once the breeze of a nightstick.”

  Robbie laughed then and the two men bent with a will to the task at hand. “I remember when I was in India,” the General started. “There was a duchess of somewhere or other seated next to me at dinner one night. She came right out and said to me…well, actually, she whispered it, but straight, Robbie…”

  “Oh, they’re straight, the English, straight as darts. What did she say?”

  The General whispered into Robbie’s ear and then folded his arms. “Do you think we could use it?”

  Robinson clapped his hands in pleasure. “Why not? Let me tell you, General: the Lady Mucklethrop in your President’s time might as likely have said it as your duchess. ‘Privilege’ is an old English word, you know.”

  “Shall we start with that?”

  “Aye, put it down, man. Put it down.”

  7

  SINCE HIS RETURN FROM Albany with the promise of the gubernatorial nomination, Jimmie had spent most of his time at the office, and he made sure that the senior partners knew it. He would have liked very much to defend in a good jury trial before summer, even if it meant a curtailment of his campaigning. Or perhaps especially if it meant such curtailment. And he belonged to a firm who still believed in going to court now and then. He was still a junior partner, however, and although it had never been so specified, he was not likely to become a senior until his father died. The old gentleman had in his youth, by leaving the firm for the military, reduced almost to permanent clerkship the Jarvis position. If there had been a younger Jarvis now in Harvard Law School, Jimmie thought… But there was not. In fact there was not even one in the cradle.

  He was never so oppressed by this thought as at the office where women still looked out of place, where men wore vests, and where per capita there were more rimless glasses than anywhere else in the United States; he always felt himself here to be running up and down the halls of eternity. And yet, he loved the place. He would have liked very much to have become a great trial lawyer who wore his fame like a robe, to be shed on leaving the courtroom. But the pattern had been broken for him early—by the old man—w
ho had not advocated the law for Jimmie until it seemed possible that the boy would wind up on the wrong side of it altogether. The partners still had the attitude of having taken him in to keep him out of trouble.

  Still, Jimmie was only a little discontented in politics, and he wore the aura of his law firm—of all the things he thought it meant and wished it meant to him—into the political forum. That was part of his charm: his fairly modern ideas in the comfortable old shell of Victorian conservatism. Also, Jimmie thought, taking his own measure that afternoon, he had been given his childhood training by Mrs. Norris, and when in his youth it had come time for him to rebel from something, it had been from Mrs. Norris. For all he knew, that was why he had gone home to her from every woman he had known since.

  Several times during the day he had thought of another woman he should call, indeed must call, to confirm their weekly date of that evening. Then the phone rang, he heard her voice and knew why he had not made the call. Helene Joyce would not suit the tastes of the party executives. But what he was going to do about it, he didn’t know.

  “Hello, darling,” he said, “I was about to call you.”