“Yeah and I want it back. It belonged to my dear old mother.”
“It’s a valuable pin,” Tully lied, but careful not to mention in what coinage.
“Huh?”
“Of course, a fence mightn’t know that.”
“I never had it to no fence,” Buzzy said.
“I’ll level with you,” Tully said. “I want to know where you got that pin. I want to know badly.”
“I told you. My mother gave it to me.”
“When? It wasn’t on you the last time you were up.”
“I just didn’t happen to have it along when I got picked up.”
Actually Tully could not prove otherwise. He watched the thief carefully, but Buzzy Ritt had been in and out of too many tight places to show the pinch even when he felt it. Also, there was a chance that he was telling the truth. There must be a lot of gold pins in the world that shape. But if this one had any worth, Buzzy would long ago have parted with it—unless he was afraid to, unless he knew the pin was so hot that wherever it went, a murder rap went with it. In that case he would consider silence more golden than the pin.
“Okay, Buzzy, go back to sleep. I’m looking for a man and I thought you might help me.”
“If you find him, bring him around. Maybe then I could help you out. Who knows?”
Tully weighed the remark. “I just might do that,” he said.
A few minutes later he was studying the dossier on Charles “Buzzy” Ritt. At the time of Ellie True’s murder, Buzzy was living in the west sixties. Two months later he moved to a two-bit hotel on the Bowery. He lived there for five months. A visit to the West Side Precinct yielded Tully nothing.
The Bowery hotel was different. Something had happened in there all right. And the date was right.
It was not murder by the record, but suicide, and one for which the police had been, most regretfully, grateful. It had occurred last New Year’s Eve. Tully knew the story himself, roughly, but then, he knew a lot of stories, some rough, some smooth. The trouble was clearing the line to them in his memory.
On this one, he had the common police information—or, it might now turn out—misinformation.
For years before her suicide, Marjory Neville had been the plague of the police. The daughter of a wealthy and politically influential family, she was poison from the age of twenty: drinking, whoring, even taking to dope. And always her offense had to be handled discreetly, delicately, and reported through channels. Then at times she would take to reform as violently as she had to debauchery. Her reforms ran to street preaching, public penance, all of which were as much of a plague to the police. But she could, till the end of her life, be counted on for trouble. She had fallen off the wagon the night she died.
No one was surprised at her last debauche—at least no one among the police whom she had kicked in the teeth. And there had seemed to be something natural, however obscene, in her taking the overdose in a Bowery hotel.
A regular genius of a public relationships man had taken over the press angle of the affair. Whatever went into the columns read like a dirge for a high-strung debutante.
Tully moistened his lips. The hush-hush of the press would suggest that an insurance hush-hush would have been a minor operation. And Buzzy had been living in the room opposite the debutante’s!
If the little thief would talk, Tully thought, he would go bail for him himself.
31
BUZZY HAD JUST FINISHED his dinner when Tully got back to him, and taking the cigar the detective offered him, he admitted he was feeling better about the city.
“Best meal I had since mother’s cooking,” Buzzy said, blowing a smoke ring that would have collared a horse. He was beginning to feel important.
“I always thought you were an orphan,” Tully said. “That you had to make your own way in the world from the age of ten.”
“That’s a fact,” Buzzy said. “I never got any breaks.”
“A self made man,” Tully said. “Ah, my lad, you’ve come a long way. You’ve mingled with high society and low, all kinds.”
“A fact,” Buzzy agreed.
“Remember Marjory Neville?” Tully drawled.
Buzzy choked on the smoke. “You’re a snaky-tongued Mick, Tully, and your cigar’s as rotten as your jokes.” He dropped the cigar on the floor and put his foot on it.
“The D.A. gave me that,” Tully said mournfully. “His own private blend.”
Buzzy said what he thought it was made of.
“Okay, chum,” Tully said, “I got a man I want to talk to you about. You got a little gold plated pin not worth two bucks. Maybe you took it from her alive, maybe dead. It doesn’t mean that to me.” Tully snapped his fingers. “The lad I’m after took a piece of jewelry from her worth seven thousand dollars. Doesn’t that make you feel like a midget? And I’m pretty sure it was him gave her that little gold flower you’re carrying around since. Know where he got it?”
Buzzy only stared. He wasn’t talking yet, but he was interested.
“He took it from Ellie True. Remember her? The minister was tried for her murder…”
Buzzy wagged his head in recollection.
“It begins now to look like the Neville woman didn’t take all those powders on purpose,” Tully went on like a purring cat, “and if she didn’t, it means she was Number Three on my man’s list of what we could call…extinguished females. He ticked off Number Four last week. See why I don’t care how you got the pin? I just want to know where, and what you know about what happened to Miss Neville.”
Buzzy opened up. “Want to know something? I think the Neville dame was mixed up with a minister, too.”
Tully grinned. “Buzzy, you’re a gentleman.”
“She had this soup kitchen on the Bowery,” the prisoner started. “It was a kind of mission house, and this little guy—the damnedest looking little red-headed, red bearded—he wore one of them Van Dykes, you know what comes to a point?”
“I know what comes to a point,” Tully said, fascinated in spite of himself.
“Well, he did the preaching. I used to go round for the eats. The minister, he talked just like her, all beautiful words, but no sense, see? But he was hell-fire good on the singing and most of the nuts around like that. I don’t have a ear for music myself. Well, this went on a couple of months maybe. The grub—like it was catered. I went regular. And she was real serious about the mission. We all knew it was her had the money, and I heard from somebody she was a reformed drunk. The needle too. But she figured she was going to make up for all her sins, hiring us a salvation preacher.”
“The preacher,” Tully said, rubbing his pipe affectionately, “tell me some more about him.”
“What’s to tell? He had the gift of gab, that’s all, and what I could make out, the only thing wrong with the world was women. Who listened to him after that? Me, I like women just fine.”
“What did he look like?” Tully persisted. “Suppose he was coming down that corridor—how far would he be before you’d recognize him?”
“With that walk of his? I could tell him coming round the corner. Like a bouncing ball.”
“That’s my boy,” Tully said affectionately.
“You want to know about the night she passed out,” Buzzy went on, and Tully knew now where he had got his nickname. Once he started talking, he could buzz.
Tully nodded.
“We didn’t know her by the name of Neville, of course. That come out after the police was there, and she was identified. All we knew, she was ‘Sister Marge.’ I thought she was whacky at first, see, just plain off her track, but I got used to her. Then that night she comes flipping into my room like she had wings. ‘Buzzy,’ she says, ‘wish me the joy of the morning, for I’m to be married tomorrow.’ So I wished her. That was maybe ten o’clock. By eleven she was singing hymns, but it didn’t sound like religion to me, and I was getting thirsty. I figured all that singing just had to come out of a bottle. And I was right. I went over and interrupted t
hem. It was the Reverend Preacher opened the door.
“I stuck my hand out to him and says, ‘Congratulations.’ ‘For what?’ he says and I ask him: ‘Aren’t you the bridegroom-to-be?’ ‘Certainly not,’ he says. And cold sober. He said something about her being beyond his help and walked out. So there we were, her and me, with three quarters a bottle of whiskey. I poured us drinks. We clicked glasses, and I said: ‘To the bride.’ But she was already falling asleep.”
It might have been at that moment, Tully thought, that Buzzy acquired the gold pin. It wasn’t worth mentioning now. “The drink you poured her, was it in a clean glass?”
“No. The cops asked me that. I just added a good hooker to what she already had in the glass. As long as she was nodding, I took the bottle home with me. It turned out she woke up. Maybe she looked for a drink. I felt bad about that. She must’ve been feeling mighty low to do what she did.”
“If she did it,” Tully said. “Three quarters of the bottle left when you got there. Do you suppose she had another bottle?”
“No empties. The cops looked.”
“What was the preacher’s name?”
“I’ve been trying to remember—Drake, Buck—something easy.”
“Not Blake?” Tully said, incredulous.
“No. It wasn’t just that.”
“You didn’t see him again, I suppose.”
“Only at the station. But I tell you, I cleared out myself as soon as the cops let go of me.”
“Didn’t the police frisk you, Buzzy?”
“Nope, and I’ve been thinking about it since you mentioned that expensive jewel. Why didn’t they?”
“I’ll ask them that myself,” Tully said, getting up. “But I think I know the answer. They didn’t know it was missing.” At the door while he signaled the guard that he was through talking to the prisoner, he said: “Do you want bail posted, Buzzy? I know a man who’d do it for me.”
The man thought about it. “What’s the weather like?”
“Cold as a witch’s kiss.”
Buzzy settled back in the chair, his hands behind his head. “I just think I’ll let nature take its course.”
Tully got back to his office in a hurry. It was almost as hard to get information about the Neville “suicide” from police circles as it would be from her family. Her death had come at the time her father had just been confirmed in an important ambassador’s post. The family home was in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Tully called the Chief Medical Examiner himself. Meanwhile he had Tommy Bassett call Mrs. Norris and get from her information on where Jimmie could be reached. Weston was within ten miles of Norwalk, and Jimmie was discreet, persuasive, had the D.A.’s office behind him, and was himself high born enough for the Nevilles to talk to—if they would talk to anyone.
Being a quick and efficient lad, so far as his brains took him, Bassett got Jimmie on the phone before giving it to Tully. Tully briefed Jimmie on the information he wanted: what the family knew, if anything, about the preacher, and the story on the jewel. He could play a melancholy tune to them—their daughter had not taken her own life likely, however willing they had been to accept that verdict.
Tully went then to see the Precinct Captain of the district wherein the suicide had occurred. It hadn’t taken them long to clean up the case at the time.
“Do you mean to say you didn’t even bring in the so-called missionary?”
“Godalmighty, the problem wasn’t bringing him in,” the captain exploded. “The problem was getting him out. He was in here every day for a week, volunteering this and that—nosing around to see if she left his mission something. Finally, we told him to go see the old man.
“That, he thought, was a good idea. The family might set up a memorial fund for the mission. That’s how we got him out of our hair.”
Tully shook his head. “Oh, the arrogant pup!”
32
WHILE THE PROSPECT OF the job he had agreed to do for Tully was not especially pleasant, Jimmie was glad of the diversion from the Adkins family. He had spent most of the day in their library of uncut books. Miranda had not spoken to him again. Teddy had cured her, apparently, of intimacies on his behalf. Teddy himself had disappeared after cocktails on Saturday night and had not been seen since. He was in the habit of doing that, his mother said, the family being too much for him. Jimmie had no trouble understanding that much about Teddy Adkins.
There was something very wonderful about Connecticut roads in late November, a brown and gray landscape that caught and held any chance bit of color as though waiting for the artist who would come and put it to canvas. And, alas, there was not much left of that part of the state that had not been put to canvas or to house or to antique shoppe…unless it was the few grand estates remaining.
Turning into the long poplared drive of the Neville estate, Jimmie wondered how the household would stand comparison with that which he had just left. He could remember having met Marjory Neville on a few occasions in the forties, a wild sort of girl then with an angular beauty that must have died a horrible death in her dissipation. He had not seen her for at least five years before her death. He recalled now, Helene Joyce had once remarked that Marjory Neville had a wonderful face to sculpt. And he could remember what Helene had said when she died: She had used and misused life for thirty-five years. Then she wrapped it up in an old rag and threw it away.
Later, having got Andrew Neville to the point where he would talk of his daughter even though it grieved him, Jimmie thought again of Helene’s remark when the old man said: “If only she had died a clean death.”
Jimmie could almost feel the weight of years that had come upon Neville in the wake of the tragedy. He had withdrawn from public life, indeed even from the company of intimate friends.
“I’ve been told, sir, that she completely rehabilitated herself. That takes a great deal of strength.”
“Without a great deal of strength she could not have persevered in so much debauchery,” the man said bitterly. “Oh, I am being less than honest, Jarvis. What turned my soul to acid, she deceived me at the end. I believed she was sincere. I believed her cured. I did not approve her mad venture of saving all the derelicts on the Bowery. And where she lived revolted me. But she had turned a dismal hotel room into a nun’s cell: scrubbed and bare, austere as charity…”
“You were there?”
The old man nodded. “She had caught me up with that child-like joy. She always could. And she had such faith in this young missionary.”
“Did you get to know him?”
Neville shook his head. “She had intended that I meet him, but he had gone on a begging expedition on that occasion—that’s what she called it.”
Jimmie hated to put this question, but no better time for it was likely to come: “Did you contribute to the mission, Mr. Neville?”
“Five thousand dollars. I had wanted to meet the young man first. But knowing the other men with whom she had at one time or other been involved, I was too well satisfied in merely knowing his profession.”
“What did she tell you about him?”
Andrew Neville drew his long fingers down his gaunt cheeks until he much resembled an El Greco painting. “That he was not handsome, but that he was pure. She had got an obsession on purity, you see.”
“Anything about where he had come from?”
“She said, I believe, that his family background was similar to hers. He came from San Francisco.”
“And his name?”
“Francis Drake. Not easily forgotten.”
Jimmie agreed. “A pirate, wasn’t he, on what might be called a continental level?”
“Yes,” the old man said.
“What about the gem, the ruby, Mr. Neville?”
The old man started up violently, and one of the corners of his mouth twitched. He had had a stroke recently, Jimmie thought. “It was some time later I discovered that was missing,” he said finally. “I did not want the affair revived. My lawyers had al
ready paid heavily to have the tragedy quietly forgotten. I had the brooch removed from the insurance inventory.”
“You may be able to recover it now,” Jimmie said.
“I shall consider it a breach of faith if you suggest it, Jarvis. I have been painfully frank with you upon your promise of confidence.”
“Would you release me from that promise if it becomes evident that Marjory Neville did not commit suicide? That she was likely persuaded to take one drink to toast an engagement to marry this preacher, that she didn’t drink much at all that night, but was probably drugged?”
The old man covered his eyes with trembling fingers. “By him?”
“Yes,” Jimmie said. “She was likely murdered, and if at the time you had not been so willing to believe her beyond rescue, and so zealous of your own good name…”
“My own good name,” Neville interrupted, “my ambition, my fortune, my life—all of them are crumbled like dry leaves. Look at me. All there is left of me is yours to put on public exhibit—if you can prove that.”
“Thank you,” Jimmie said, and got up. “Please don’t disturb yourself. I shall go out by the garden. I expect a gentleman from the New York District Attorney’s office will come to see you when he needs your cooperation. He is a good man, Jasper Tully.”
Andrew Neville merely nodded. Glancing back at him, huddled as he was in a great leather chair, Jimmie thought he looked like something which had tumbled there from among the curios lining the walls of this, his trophy room.
Jimmie called Tully from a public phone booth.
“So he got five thousand dollars, and a ruby he gave to a scrub-girl,” Tully said in summary. “What was the name he used?”
“Francis Drake…like Queen Elizabeth’s boy. And he came from San Francisco, so he told her, from a family like her own.”
“A little truth, a little fancy,” Tully said. “I’m obliged to you, Jimmie. Come in the office when you can and take a look at the whole picture. It’s going to be one of the damnedest cases ever brought to trial—if we get the wily bastard.”
“You will,” Jimmie said. “Tully always gets his man.”
A Gentleman Called (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 2) Page 14