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

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She returned to the cab and promised the driver an extra dollar for speed.

  The cabbie squinted at her in the mirror as they pulled away from the curb, “If you mean I got to stay ahead of that black limousine, lady, I ain’t making rash promises.”

  Mrs. Norris twisted around and peered out the rear window. Loyal as a shadow, the great black car kept pace with them. She leaned forward in the seat then and raised her voice. “We’ll have worse than a rash you and me, young man, I promise, if you don’t keep ahead of it.”

  But the limousine narrowed the distance between the cars as soon as the cabbie stretched it.

  41

  JASPER TULLY WAS GIVING himself an hour off the top of every day now to try and find the General’s fair lady. He had that very morning located his third parakeet within the Eldorado exchange and within two blocks of the florist shop, and he had listened to the laments of many a sad and lonely woman any one of whom would have been glad to open her door to the General, he thought. But he was reasonably sure that none he had talked to so far had.

  Calling in to his office, he picked up Mrs. Norris’ message. Acting on her own—and this was the reason she had been in the D.A.’s office as long as Tully himself—the secretary had ordered tracers on Ex 4—1587 as well as the phone from which Mrs. Norris had called.

  “Mr. Tully, the unlisted phone belonged to John Rocco.”

  “Where the devil did she get it?” Tully cried. And then answered himself. “Never mind. Where did she call from?”

  The woman gave him the exact location, and Mrs. Norris’ word that she would not be there. Tully swore under his breath. Not only had she taken upon herself to do police work, by the looks of things, but she was expecting him to sit and wait for her to get in touch with him again.

  He called Jimmie at his office. Jimmie’s first reaction was alarm. But Mrs. Norris was a sensible woman, he assured I Tully.

  “All right then,” Tully said, “she can sit in my office or wherever she lands and sensibly wait for us. Just in case something went wrong over there, I’m going over.”

  “Pick me up on your way,” Jimmie said. “I’ll wait in front of the building.”

  The public phone from which Mrs. Norris called was in a cigar store just three blocks from Minnie’s Restaurant on Water Street. The man behind the counter swore no woman had been in his place that morning, either to phone or buy tobacco. Obviously, one had. The D.A.’s secretary did not make up the phone number nor the address. Tully and Jimmie went on to the restaurant. Minnie gave them a cold stare, and the surly retort: “I don’t serve no women in this place.”

  Tully called his office. No word yet.

  Jimmie called Helene, also from Minnie’s phone booth. The line was busy. He sat, the door of the booth open, waiting and thinking. She had relatives, a sister in Brooklyn, and she was worried about her.

  “Jasp, didn’t you bring her over to Brooklyn yesterday? Do you remember the name of her sister?”

  Tully was staring out the window, through the streaks of steam. He was reminded of rainy days in his childhood, his nose against the parlor window. “Robinson,” he said, and even as he said it, he saw the name printed in white letters on the brick wall across the way. He turned his head quick enough to suspect Minnie of having listened with very large ears. Minnie smiled at him. That was enough to make a more gullible man than Tully suspicious.

  “Come on, Jimmie.”

  They strode across the street. With no response at the back door, they tried the front, also without results. Tully had a feeling about the place, the minute they had circled it and he peered in the front of the building. The two benches, the great ashstands, the string of faded lettering samples in the window told of a very poor business—in printing.

  “How do we get in?” said Jimmie, having much the same feeling.

  Tully gave the matter but an instant’s thought. “I smell smoke,” he said, and Jimmie could not be sure whether it was a ruse or reality. Tully put the butt of his revolver through the glass of the door window. As soon as he could do it without destroying himself he hoisted his body up and in. He picked up the nearest phone, got the precinct police, identified himself, and told them he had broken in at this address, thinking there was a fire in the building. A mistake. Sorry.

  He and Jimmie stayed just long enough to confirm their first suspicions. Minnie was a duck all right, a sitting duck, a decoy. This was the real thing, a bookie’s paradise. Or had been. The shop was closed. All the phones save one were dead. Disconnected. Tully consulted the phone book. Having delivered Mrs. Norris to the corner, he was able to find Robinson’s home address quickly.

  He called the Brooklyn D.A.’s office to get out the warrant for Robinson and to get a squad car out here to go over the print shop. He opened up the siren on the way to the Robinson residence. It had been two hours and ten minutes since Mrs. Norris had called in, and she had not been heard from since.

  42

  MRS. NORRIS WAS FAR too busy with her own pursuits to think of calling anyone. Her cab had parted company with the limousine at the entrance to the tunnel. She credited her driver for it and gave herself up to thought of her sister. In all these years Mag had boasted the good provider, she had never questioned the whence of providence. She would soon be on her way to Florida now thinking the state itself designed for her comfort.

  She went up the steps to Mrs. Joyce’s thinking not for an instant of the four dollars and fifty cent fare she had paid. Helene opened the door almost as soon as she rang. A sweet woman.

  “Mrs. Joyce, do you remember the General’s valise Mr. Tully brought last night?”

  It sat where Tully had put it down in the living room, undisturbed by the cleaning woman. Someone had taken the trouble to lock it, however, and the devil knew what he had done with the key. With a cuticle scissors and an eyebrow tweezers, they managed to open it.

  “It may be my imagination,” Mrs. Norris said, spreading one of the newspapers on the floor. She was on her knees like a child with the comics. Helene spread the other paper. “I remember it, flitting in and out the corner of my eye…Nick, Nick, Nick…the name Nick. The big, moon-faced one, when he tried to get me into his limousine this morning…Nick, he said. I heard it….”

  Helene but glanced at her, an instant’s admiration. She was traveling like a tumbleweed in the wind Mrs. Norris blew up. “Here it is, here it is!” she cried, and read aloud the account of Nick Casey’s arrest as a Peeping Tom…

  “Read on, read on, girl!”

  “ ‘…Casey was released on the sworn testimony of Miss Flora Tims that….’ ”

  “That’s the one!” Mrs. Norris cried. “Flora! ‘Blossoms for my blossom’. That idiot of a florist! Flowers for my Flora, of course! Do they give her address?”

  “ ‘Miss Flora Tims of 763 East Fifty-ninth,’ ” Helene read.

  “Would you be willing to confront her with me, Mrs. Joyce?”

  “I’d be delighted to meet her,” Helene said. “Though she may not be nearly so eager to meet us, Mrs. Norris.”

  Mrs. Norris grunted, getting up from her knees. “We’ll be very hospitable,” she said. She folded the paper and tore the Casey item from it. “Let’s go.”

  43

  “YOU CAN POUND ALL day on that door, mister. They all left about a hour ago. Florida, I hear. Driving in a lovely black car, this long…” The woman stretched her hands as though she were playing a squeeze-box.

  “All,” said Tully. “How many?”

  “Well, there was the chauffeur. Mind you, the Robinsons with a chauffeur, and him coming over a immigrant without the nails to scratch himself…”

  “Besides the chauffeur?” Jimmie interrupted.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Robinson. They’re Scotch you know…”

  “Anybody else?”

  “A big man, handsome. Lots of authority. I bet he’s a magnet.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Jimmie, “Did you notice the license?”

  The
woman slowly put her own construction to that question. “Should I of?”

  “Only if you thought it was unusual.” Tully took over easily.

  “Oh, it was unusual enough, but Mr. Robinson, he’s got a regular menagerie of friends, coming in and going out at all hours the last few days.”

  Jimmie and the detective exchanged glances. Obviously, Mr. Robinson had been making book from home in the last few days, or as much of the old trade as he could manage from a residential address. Everything had been in a state of flux since the night The Rock was murdered.

  “I’ll come back and see you some day, ma’am,” Tully said and tipped his hat.

  Jimmie followed him back to the car. At the first police call box the detective stopped. He asked that a two state alarm be put out to intercept the limousine heading for Florida.

  44

  “ ‘TWO AND A HALF ROOM apartments,’ ” Mrs. Norris read as she and Helene crossed the street. “I’ve often wondered what a half-room was, and what they did with the other half they didn’t rent you in these places.” She found herself chattering and paying precious little attention to what she was saying. She would not have said she was nervous, but she found herself very, very grateful that Helene Joyce was with her. She caught Mrs. Joyce’s hand as she found the name TIMS on the box. The hand was cold and damp, but firm, telling her she was not alone in fear or fierceness.

  Helene rang a bell other than Miss Tims’. The buzzer sounded to let them in. “This way if she’s in we’ll be face to face with her at least when she slams the door on our foot.”

  “Clever, very clever,” Mrs. Norris said.

  “Our foot,” Helene repeated, as she and Mrs. Norris squeezed into the elevator, and giggled.

  “This was made for love not elevation,” Mrs. Norris cracked, as they grindingly got off the first floor.

  Outside Miss Tims’ door the two women stood and looked at each other. Then Mrs. Norris gave the bell a push. Within the apartment the parakeet started a racket. It carried on for a moment, then stopped like a machine turned off. Mrs. Norris thought of a remark but her mouth was suddenly dry.

  The little eye-view door opened. “Why don’t you ring downstairs and give a girl warnin’?”

  Mrs. Norris lifted her chin. “Miss Tims, I am the late General Jarvis’s housekeeper.” That, she calculated, would either get them in or get them out in a hurry.

  Miss Tims unlatched her door without a word, opened it, and stood before them in her slip. “Wouldn’t you like to come in, Mrs. Norris? I’m awful glad to make your acquaintance.”

  “This is Mrs. Joyce.”

  Miss Tims began to sniffle, and nothing could have made Mrs. Norris feel less at ease. She had been prepared to beat this woman over the head if necessary, but certainly not to console her. Maybe with her clothes on she looked like a flapper, but this way she looked like something out of an old English movie.

  Meanwhile the parakeet was squawking a noise that sounded very much like “Take it off, take it off,” wherever he was.

  Miss Tims lifted a sheet from over the cage.

  “Ramsom? Ramsom?” said the bird.

  Mrs. Norris was distinctly embarrassed. “He talks very nicely,” she said.

  Miss Tims then burst into sobs. “Oh, Mrs. Norris, it was just a terrible mistake, him being jealous of Nick. It mightn’t ever’ve happened if it wasn’t for that.”

  Helene took a well-cologned handkerchief from her purse and gave it to Flora.

  Flora dabbed her eyes with it and then breathed the smell of it into her lungs. “Gee, honey, this smells real sweet. What is it?”

  “Peasblossom,” Helene said. “You may keep it.”

  “Thanks just awfully. Ransom used to bring me essences from all over the world….poor dear. I miss him so.”

  “About him and Nick,” Mrs. Norris prompted. It gave her a most uncanny feeling to speak familiarly of a gangster. She had better get used to it, having one in the family. God’s righteousness smiting her for her pride.

  “It was all a mistake, don’t you see?”

  “Not quite,” she said.

  Flora bit her lip. “I’ll show it to you, but don’t you tell anybody I got it, ʼspecially Nick.”

  “ ʼSpecially Nick,” Mrs. Norris promised willingly.

  The girl went into the bedroom, the stupid bird calling after her “Night-night, night-night.” In a moment she returned and handed to Mrs. Norris the note which had first sent the General into a rage when he received it in Robbie’s office. Helene read it over her shoulder.

  I want a piece of your little plum. Make arrangements while you are there tonight or I will make them for you. You are an old man. There is enough for both of us.

  Nick Casey

  “He thought I was the little plum, don’t you see?”

  Mrs. Norris nodded. At least she could see that Nick Casey was the link in the chain that had brought the General low. “And it wasn’t you?”

  “I hadn’t seen Nick for years till then. And Nick was talkin’ about a business deal he wanted in on—out in some silly place in Brooklyn.” Flora laid a finger as limp as her backbone on Mrs. Norris’ arm. “Furthermore, I don’t know what Ransom was doin’ out there at all. The note wasn’t meant for him in the first place. It was meant for somebody else entirely.”

  “Mr. Rocco?” said Mrs. Norris.

  “Sh-sh,” Flora said. “He’s dead.”

  “So is the General,” Mrs. Norris snapped.

  “But he died different,” Flora wailed.

  “That is an understatement of some proportions,” Helene remarked. She had the note from Mrs. Norris’ hand, and was about to put it in her purse. Flora’s eyes were not too wet to see it. She rubbed her fingers together, the gesture of “hand-it-over.” It had been worth a try, at least, Helene thought.

  “A girl’s got to have some protection,” Flora said, naive as a fox. “You ought to know all about that, honey. This is my insurance policy.” On her way to the bedroom again, she paused. “I don’t suppose Ransom left me anything? I’ve been dyin’ to find out only Nick wouldn’t let me. And I don’t care about money. I just want to know if he mentioned me.”

  Suddenly there was a long ring and a short at the doorbell. The parakeet began to screetch “Ransom, Ran-son,” and Flora leapt for the bird’s coverlet. “That’s Nick downstairs now, I promised him to go to Florida with him and I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go away from here ever…Ransom and I was so happy.”

  “Miss Tims, I should prefer not to meet Mr. Casey here,” Mrs. Norris said. Helene was already looking out the window.

  “Not out there in daylight, honey,” Flora cried. “Nick’d look there first if he was lookin’. I got to hide this note. Why don’t you two just roll under the beds? There’s two of them, one for each of you…”

  Since the choice of escapeways was even narrower, the two women looked at each other and then abandoned their dignity.

  45

  THE DETECTIVE AND JIMMIE were caught between wrath and despair arriving at Mrs. Joyce’s house and finding her gone as well. This was the logical place for Mrs. Norris to have come—unless she had found out far more than her phone call intimated. Tully went to the kitchen, Jimmie into the living room to see if there was a note anywhere. There Jimmie found the General’s valise gaping, one of the pages of the newspaper on the floor, spread open. He called out to Tully, and before the detective reached him he had found the other paper, one item having been torn from it.

  It took Jasper Tully nine minutes on the phone with the newspaper’s librarian.

  “Nick Casey! That’s it all right….” He listened to the rest of the story, shaking his head at his own blindness. Even while he listened, his eyes wandered through the story of the St. Patrick’s Day preparations….the perfect decoy. Just like Minnie’s restaurant.

  He wrote the name and address of Miss Flora Tims, thanked the librarian and hung up. “Blossoms for my little blossom,” he muttered in
disgust. “Do you know what’s wrong with the world, Jimmie?” He waved his arms in the air. “Too many distractions! Nobody pays attention! Nobody listens. Everybody talks. That’s what hell is going to be like when we get there.”

  “Maybe that’s where we are now,” Jimmie said. “Are we on our way?”

  “With the throttle open.”

  46

  MRS. NORRIS AT LEAST had had the presence of mind to go under feet first, as it were, so that her head was beneath the foot of the bed, and she could plainly hear all that went on in the living room. Mr. Casey was in an ugly mood. Mrs. Norris could see his feet and Flora’s, toes to toes, suddenly Flora’s were lifted from the floor entirely, and it was not because she was caught in a loving embrace.

  “Make up your mind, baby. You’re going with me in five minutes whether it’s with a suitcase or in it.” The man’s pointed toes were suddenly flapping across the bedroom. In its cage, cover or no, the parakeet was screaming with glee. Casey flung Miss Tims on the bed, fortunately the one under which was Helene. There wasn’t room for an ounce of play between Mrs. Norris and the springs. Casey opened the closet door, helping himself to clothes and suitcase, which he tossed onto Mrs. Norris’ bed. “Now you get them packed pronto. I’m going to take care of that bird.”

  That would be a mercy, Mrs. Norris thought.

  Flora began to scream and thump the bed. “I won’t go and you leave my bird alone! Ransom bought him for me at Christmas.”

  “I’ll buy ya a peacock for the Fourth of July!” Casey shouted.

  “I just want you to go away and leave me alone,” Flora wailed.

  “Un-unh. You know too much about Nick, baby. And Nick don’t like to see you gettin’ lonesome.”

  He stomped out then, and there was a terrible flurry and threshing about in the living room. Flora lifted the skirt of the bedspread, throwing some light on Mrs. Norris. “Can’t you help me save my poor little bird? I’m goin’ to tell him you’re here if you don’t.”