Old Sinners Never Die

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  In the front seat, the mountain boys were singing, not raucously, and not harmoniously—just something to keep the driver awake. When the truck began a series of frequent turns, the General girded his loins, and if ever loins needed girding, his were they. He also divested himself of the striped sweater and tucked it between the cases.

  As soon as the truck stopped, the General took a leap out through the curtains, his body sinking almost to the ground as his knees collapsed. He had to hang onto the truck. Meanwhile, the sounds from within the Club Sentimentale suggested that more than one set of knees in this vicinity should be out of joint. The General did a few gingerly bends, hanging on still to the ropes.

  The mountain boys were standing beside the cab door, getting their own legs and bearings.

  “Hey, Red, do you hear that? And ain’t it near crowing time?”

  “It’s past crowing time, man, and that be a chicken you’re listening to, not a rooster. Matter of fact, I’d say it be an old hen.”

  “Sure can cackle, can’t she?”

  The General grinned to himself. He was safe on safe ground now. That would be Maria Candido touching up a bawdy song. He staggered around the side of the truck.

  One of the mountaineers nudged the other. “Oh-oh, Red, here’s one flew the coop.”

  “Can you gentlemen direct me to the Club Sentimentale?”

  “Reckon if you got this far you ought to be able to make it there, mister.”

  Amen, the General thought.

  “Yonder door.” Red gave a nod toward the carriage lamp-lighted entry.

  “Thank you very much,” the General said, and did a bit of weaving on his way which was not entirely put on.

  “Looks a mite like Grandpa, don’t he?”

  “Mite. Grandpa always wanted one of them monkey suits he got on. I’ve been thinking, Red, we could afford to get him one.”

  “What for—to sit and rock in?”

  “He’d have it to sit and rock in—or else to lie and roll in.”

  The General turned around and motioned to them. “Come on in, fellows, I’ll stand you a drink.”

  “Thanks, mister, but my brother and me don’t drink.”

  “That’s what I like,” the General said, “good, upstanding young Americans.”

  “We’re Virginians, sir!”

  “Bravo!” the General said, and went indoors.

  No one saw him arrive. The place was dark as a cavern and misted with smoke. He had not heard a racket like this since the war’s end, and he could tell by some indefinable quality to the odd ends of conversations, the pitch of voices, the air of all night abandon that there were newspaper men all over the place. So much the better, he thought.

  The first thing he did was explore the back walls of the building. It was on the river’s edge, he knew, but he wanted to see just where the mountain boys were going to unload their dew. He found a window at the end of the check room, overlooking the river. Even as he was looking out, one of the boys passed close by the window. It meant there was a walk alongside the building.

  The General then went to the men’s room to repair the ravages of a night on a bald mountain, or, to put it another way, he thought, grimacing at the face in the mirror, a bald night on a mountain.

  32

  “QUITE A HIDEAWAY, THIS,” Jimmie said as he drove zigzag up a mountainside.

  Dolores agreed: “Leo liked to come here, he said, so’s he could communicate with his soul. That doesn’t sound right, communicate, does it?”

  “I think it sounds fine in the context of Leo,” Jimmie said. “I don’t doubt he had trouble sometimes, communicating with himself.”

  “I’m sleepy,” Dolores said.

  From the high part of the mountain they could see the beginnings of dawn even as the General had seen it not so very long before.

  “We’re just about there,” Dolores said. “Those lights—that’s the cabin.”

  Jimmie put out his car headlights and, not having more than a few hundred yards to go, decided to park the car. “We won’t do any talking now, Dolores, and when we get to the point of talking, I’ll do it for both of us.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “I’d just as soon curl up in the car here and go to sleep.” She drew her knees up under her and tucked her head down on her shoulder. “I’m a pussy cat. Night-night.”

  Well, Jimmie thought, she might have said “’Bye now.” Everybody else was saying it these days. He took the keys of the car with him. “All right,” he said, “if that’s the way you want it, it’s all right with me. But you’re not to come after me once I’ve gone inside.”

  “Bye now,” she said.

  Jimmie stayed in the shadows, approaching the building, but the moon was under a cloud. It was now the darkest hour. He was very close to it when he saw the Jaguar parked next to the cabin. In fact, he heard the creaks and sighs of it, the motor still hot, before he saw the automobile.

  He felt squeamish about entering without knocking, presuming he could get in. Then he remembered where the Jaguar had been in the last hour and he put his hand on the doorknob with no further qualm. The door was unlocked. The place was aglow with lights. Nobody here worried about electric bills, certainly. It passed through his mind then that he had not seen an electric light for miles. No wonder at almost four in the morning.

  He could hear the splash of running water. Someone was taking a shower. Jimmie swore softly, as, he was sure, no man had ever sworn at his own father. He moved through the completely modernized cabin step by cautious step. He observed the arsenal over the mantel, and saw the racks that were empty, but behind which ever so faintly the shape of two pistols showed in the faded varnish of the wood panelling.

  He glanced about the room then, and saw the purse, the furs, the shoes on the chair nearest the bathroom door. All the perfumes of Arabia, all the waters of Niagara …

  Then he noticed the huddled shape on the sofa, and said with deep though muted fervour, “You old reprobate.” But he moved quickly to the side of the couch, intending to rouse the sleeper. In the instant he put his hand down, he realized the shape was a dummy.

  “Father?” he said in a loud whisper, for he got the uncanny feeling that the old gentleman was watching him. But the only sound was the gush of water, then a rattling of pipes as the shower was turned off. Jimmie cast his eye about quickly for a place to conceal himself at least long enough to appraise the situation. He started for the closet in too sudden haste, his foot catching the carpet and noisily tumbling an ashtray.

  A few seconds later the bathroom door opened an inch or two. “Ransom, are you awake, honey?”

  Jimmie groaned almost involuntarily.

  “It’s almost time for you to go down home, but I just didn’t have the heart to wake you. Sleeping like a baby … no conscience, nothing. I’ll slip into something and you can get in here if you want to …”

  Jimmie backed his way gingerly to a wing chair on the other side of the sofa. It concealed him from her view unless, of course, she came to look in it directly.

  “There,” she said, coming into the room. “I must’ve fallen asleep myself. Ransom?”

  Jimmie could hear the clack of her slippers and then the few cushioned steps on the carpet until she reached the couch. He braced himself to act at the moment of her discovery. It came with a little “oh.”

  Jimmie, speaking to her back, said, “A friend of yours, Miss Allan?”

  She started at his voice and whirled around, but she had quite controlled her expression when she faced him. Life would hold very few surprises for her, he thought.

  “I don’t suppose you are either—a friend of mine,” she said, not precisely answering his question. “May I see your identification?”

  “Do you say that to all your visitors?” Jimmie said.

  “Very amusing. Who are you?”

  “James Ransom Jarvis, in search of my father.”

  “Oh.” She took a towel from around her head and shook
out the wheaten hair. “I don’t know where your father’s gone to, Mr. Jarvis. He got just awful drunk and I couldn’t get him to go down home so I went to bed myself and left him here—tucked in like that almost.” She made a helpless gesture toward the sofa.

  Jimmie nodded and waited.

  “This isn’t my place really,” she started up again, compelled now to tell a story, and a damned good improviser, Jimmie thought. “And I hope nothing’s happened to him. I wouldn’t want any scandal.”

  “Why did you bring him here in the first place?” Jimmie said.

  She looked him in the eye. “You are kidding, aren’t you, Junior?”

  Jimmie could feel himself blushing from the roots of his hair. “I am very definitely not kidding, Miss Allan. I didn’t ask you why he came. I asked why you brought him.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what I thought you said. But I don’t think it’s fitting, you asking a lady to answer that question. And I’d be much obliged if you’d just find him and take the both of you out of here before I get into trouble.”

  “Get dressed, Miss Allan. You’re coming with me. I think you are in trouble.”

  “I don’t want to go, and I’ll have you arrested if you try to make me.”

  “You’re coming down to answer the charge of murder.”

  She opened wide her eyes in a show of innocence. “I don’t know what you’re saying at all. Just how did you get in here in the first place?”

  “I followed the Jaguar which my father was not driving.”

  “I suppose, being so holy, you got wings.”

  And indeed, Jimmie knew he would have needed wings to keep pace as that car had set it. He did not answer, but instead, crossed the room directly to the telephone where it hung just inside the kitchen door.

  Virginia Allan merely stood, twisting the towel idly. She had nerves stronger by far than his, Jimmie thought.

  The operator came sleepily to his persistent signal. “Give me the District of Columbia Police Headquarters.” He called Washington although jurisdiction was probably Virginia: let the police decide.

  “Papa’s going to be in a lot of trouble, Junior,” Virginia said. “After all, I guess he did manage to get down there somehow without waking me up. I was expecting to make him coffee after I took the shower to wake myself up.”

  It was something to think about, Jimmie mused, for he supposed his father must have done just that—got back to the city somehow.

  “You’re even going to prove I was here all the time, breaking in on me like you did,” Virginia went on persuasively.

  Jimmie thought he should have brought the youngster in as witness. He should have had her with him to touch the hood of the Jaguar and be able to testify to its heat. He did not know of anyone else who had seen the Jaguar in Washington. The Key Bridge had been deserted while he examined Montaigne’s body. Father and son: he sickened at the thought of what giving testimony in a case like this was going to mean.

  Jimmie finally got an answer on the phone. He identified himself to the desk officer, and then said, “I want to report a violent death. The body is at the foot of the embankment on the Arlington side of the Key Bridge.” He did not take his eyes from Virginia Allan while he spoke. She listened, her head on the side, her lips pursed in a little pout of mock sorrow.

  “I’ll be at the Club Sentimentale on K Street and the river when your men want to talk to me,” Jimmie went on quickly, hoping thereby to avoid the question of where he was calling from. “The dead man’s name is Montaigne. He runs the club.”

  “Congressman, you better stay …”

  Jimmie hung up the phone. The call might well be checked, of course. But there was a chance that it might not, his having identified himself, and he might thus have the opportunity to offer his explanation on a saner, safer plane.

  “You know Leo challenged your father to a duel, don’t you?” Virginia said.

  “So I’ve heard. And hoped to get a great splurge of publicity thereby. Why?”

  Virginia shrugged. “Leo loved the limelight.”

  “How did you get him into the Jaguar with you? Weren’t you supposed to be up here entertaining Father?”

  “Honey, you don’t want to ask me those questions. Look up there—” She pointed to the wall where the guns were missing. “I’m just noticing two duelling pistols missing. Leo must’ve taken them—or else your father did. You don’t suppose Leo was shot with one of them?”

  “Come on, Virginia, I’ve got a date with the police.” He strode to the chair and gathered her purse and her furs and threw them at her. Her purse was not heavy enough to carry even one duelling pistol, he thought, but it was far from empty. “And so have you.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said, “but just so’s I can give testimony against your father.”

  “I’m sure he’ll appreciate it,” Jimmie said.

  Virginia dressed in front of him and Jimmie thought it was the only thing in her manner that told of uncertainty, for beneath the silks, the props showed: she was the sagging relic of what once must have been the fine shape of a woman. Her face had held up, but she was nostalgia from the neck down.

  “Funny, Ransom didn’t tell me about you,” she said, putting her head through a sweater which brought back certain illusions.

  “Would it have mattered?”

  “I don’t suppose. But I like to know about people and their families, never really having one myself.” She got another purse from the drawer and was about to change her things into it.

  “Take the one you had,” Jimmie said.

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t match. But then I don’t guess most things do tonight.”

  They went through the house together when she was ready, turning off the lights. Outdoors she turned the key in the door, and stood back a moment and looked at the cabin. “All gone boom,” she said.

  Jimmie was almost touched, and for the first time tonight surely.

  “Going to leave his car here?” she asked.

  “He can come for it at his convenience.”

  “Remember the Dusenberg?” Virginia said. “Leo always wanted one. I wish he could have had it.”

  Something was happening to her, Jimmie thought, remorse … Whatever it was, he counted on the confrontation with Dolores to crack her control. But her manner did not change.

  “Poor little lamb,” she said, “trying to be a black sheep. I don’t mind sitting in the back alone.”

  “Sit in front,” Jimmie said. “Dolores, it will be better if you get in the back. I’m sorry if it’s cold there.”

  The sullen youngster did as he had asked.

  “There’s lots of places it gets cold along toward morning,” Virginia said, and climbed into the front seat.

  Jimmie, rounding the car, was half prepared to face some small pocket weapon, but her hands were folded in her lap and she had deliberately placed the purse where he could reach it as easily as she could.

  Jimmie was troubled as he drove toward the city. Certain things had seemed to have come quite clear to him: for instance, he was sure that Virginia had been used to decoy the General, to keep him safely out of Washington while the duel was ballyhooed to the reporters. It did not matter to Leo if it all fell flat afterwards; indeed he must have expected that to happen. Jimmie also reasoned that Leo was Senator Fagan’s informant; it occurred to him that Leo with his entrée to high places and high level conversations would have little trouble in manufacturing “security risks” and Virginia would have been the perfect helpmate—especially with someone like the General.

  But the murder of Leo Montaigne: there was the phone call from which he did not return to the club room, and his departure within a half-hour or so, apparently telling no one in the club. Virginia had come down to see him on some pretext that was sufficient to lure him into the car with her, something presumably that could not be passed between them on the telephone, and something urgent enough in Leo’s terms to justify her leaving the General alon
e, something that could not wait until morning. It was fair to surmise her bait to have been “security” stuff she had got out of the General. Whether or not she got it—and Jimmie suspected there was nothing his father had to give of that nature—was unimportant to Virginia. It was a tale sufficient to lure Leo.

  Jimmie did not doubt at all that she had killed him. And from the moment of finding the body, he had suspected jealousy as motive; the young lover’s betrayal of an ageing mistress, and the opportunity to get away with it, placing the appearance of guilt upon the General. But from the moment she turned the key in the cabin door, something in this line of conjecture seemed out of joint.

  He turned his head when he spoke to her. “Miss Allan, why do you think my father might have killed Montaigne?”

  It was Dolores who responded, crying out: “You said she killed him!”

  “I said I thought she was implicated,” Jimmie said.

  Beside him, Virginia did not answer. Instead she lifted her chin and raised her voice—high, clear, and sterile as the night wind—and sang at its top, The Old Rugged Cross.

  Jimmie could feel the crawl of his flesh into goose-bumps.

  33

  TOM WAS DRIVEN DIRECTLY to the home of Senator Fagan, and on the way he resolutely kept his mouth shut. He was onto the likes of these boys, apprentices to fame. There was not a word he would let out of his mouth now wouldn’t get to the senator ahead of Tom, aye, and maybe instead of him. It was a terrible commentary on human nature that the greater the man, the greedier his watchdogs.

  It was a modest house, the senator’s, and a great disappointment to Tom who had somehow hoped to find it cluttered with books and papers and legalistic scrolls; he had thought perhaps to find a collection of scientific instruments that would enable the senator to read beneath the lines. But the place was as neat as an old maid’s hope chest.

  The senator himself, however, was waiting for him in the study. He sat, bleak-faced and red-eyed, in robe and pyjamas behind his desk. He offered Tom a limp, wet hand without rising, and much to Tom’s chagrin there wafted up between them the distinct aroma of whisky. Ah, but sure, it could have been mouthwash. Hadn’t he wakened the man in the middle of the night?