Old Sinners Never Die

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

“Those boys are really Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they say we’ve got to stay here till they let us go. For my part, I’ve passed my capacity. Every drink I take from now on, I’ll get soberer and soberer. General Jarvis, sir, how about a little scoop for the Washington Inquirer? We didn’t get a smell of last night’s handout.”

  “My heart overflows. What was last night’s handout? I seem to have missed it myself.”

  “Well, there’s this United States senator, he’s the biggest Red-hunter since Wild Bill Hickock.” He then filled in the legend of Fagan’s charges about the Chatterton party.

  General Jarvis really could feel nothing but amusement. No doubt, there was something sulphurous going to come out of this, but he had a few sticks of dynamite of his own, if he could just set them off on time. It would be a hell of a note, however, to blow himself up, too.

  The club door flung open, and somebody shouted for more light in the place. One of the FBI men shot the beam of his flashlight into the faces of the newcomers.

  Senator Fagan himself had arrived, flanked by two strapping youths, one of whom the General would swear he had seen somewhere before. The other one knocked the light from the hand of the man who had shone it in the senator’s face. As fast as a bullet he got a fist in his eye that would close out the light there for a week. The senator stepped over him. He had observed the presence of the press.

  “Well, boys, it’s not often you beat me to a story! Let’s make it tit for tat. What’s going on here?”

  Tom was pulling on Fagan’s coat-tail. Fagan turned on him: “I’ve got an ear, haven’t I? Come up to it!”

  Tom whispered, “That’s General Jarvis standing at the bar, sir.”

  “General Jarvis?” Fagan repeated aloud.

  The General stood to attention and saluted. And thus was he standing when the entire Chatterton party arrived. They were accompanied by several uniformed police, and there was not a smile to be pinched from one among them. The officers opened a corridor through the reporters into the main clubroom, and the reporters closed in behind them.

  “My God,” the General’s friend said, “you don’t suppose they went through a looking glass?”

  “No,” the General said, “but I’m beginning to think we need a turnstile.”

  Senator Fagan catapulted himself into the clubroom after the Chatterton crowd. “One minute!” he cried. “A point of personal privilege!” Then at the top of his voice: “Doesn’t anybody here know who I am?”

  The General rubbed his hands together and, as though it were a genie’s signal, the outer door swung open again. This time it was something unexpected, unexpected at least in dimension: a woman with one child in her arms and enough of them hanging on her skirts to play ring-around-a-rosie!

  “The doct-err!” she demanded of the General and his friend, now the sole occupants of the bar. “I want to see Doct-err d’Inde.”

  “Madam,” the newspaperman said, “the doctor is in the next room, but there are a few patients ahead of you.”

  “I am Madame d’Inde,” she said haughtily and herded the brood through the doorway. The reporter and the General moved close enough to follow what was going on.

  A District of Columbia police captain was standing on the orchestra dais, his arms folded and the scowl of a Cromwell on his brow as he looked down upon the mélange. His men moved among the tables and soon put the spare ones against the wall, and they silenced the giddy as they went. In truth, a pall had soon fallen over the room.

  “Which one of you is Congressman Jarvis?”

  There followed a few seconds of silence. “I work for him, sure, sir!” Tom cried out.

  “His father’s present,” General Jarvis said from the doorway. “General Jarvis here.”

  Many a head twisted round at that pronouncement.

  The policeman said very coldly, “I want to see the man who reported Montaigne’s murder.”

  And that took the wind out of even the General.

  38

  “SO THE YOUNG MAN is dead! What price patriotism? All the officers of the law are amongst you, but Montaigne is dead!” Senator Fagan went forward as he spoke. The room was hushed, even to the d’Inde children who had corralled their father.

  “Murder most foul! I cry it to the heavens! No wonder the people have lost confidence in their government.”

  “Senator Fagan,” the captain said then, and severely.

  But Fagan snapped at him, “I have the floor, sir. I tell you I will not see this day spent, I will not allow this collection of rogues and rummies dispersed until we have got to the bottom of this dastardly deed …”

  General Jarvis had never seen Fagan in action. It was a pity, he thought, that he could not now enjoy it. He knew in his bones that if Jimmie were involved, he had become so in his father’s interests. It was touching and tedious, this dogged devotion, and it made him infinitely sad that he was unlikely ever again to be able to run away from home.

  “Let it be known now,” Fagan continued in resonant eloquence, “Leo Montaigne was in my employ. He volunteered his services as truly as a soldier. And he has died by an assassin’s hand. The country will not be safe until he is avenged. I demand protection for my people …”

  No one was really surprised by Senator Fagan’s information, and having at hand such intimate letters as were in his pocket, the General doubted not that Montaigne had numerous sources of confidential information. And God knows, Fagan had an insatiable appetite.

  The captain of police made another feeble attempt at interruption, only to be brushed off by Fagan. He could hold the devil at bay, this man, and possibly he thought he was doing just that. It would be the unresolved question of a decade.

  The General edged his way through to where Mrs. Joyce was standing. “Do you know where Jimmie is?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Is he saving me again?”

  She nodded, smiling a little.

  “I think it would be better this time,” the General murmured, “if he would save himself. I have had certain obligations fall to me this day. Excuse me, my dear.”

  He moved on to the side of Madam Jennings. Her face was as grey as the morning sky before sunrise. A new commotion by the bar-room door created a distraction. The senator had to strive for attention. But the General was glad of the disorder: there was even, it seemed, some little good in bedlam.

  “Madam Jennings,” he said, leaning close to her ear, “I have managed, almost by inadvertence—and not much courage, I’m afraid—to rescue a certain property of yours. There are some letters in a package I shall give you now, six of them, I believe. I assure you, Madam, I have read no more of them than told me they were yours, and perhaps made me wish they had been addressed to me.” He bowed ever so slightly and put the envelope into her hands.

  She did not look at him, did not speak, merely clutched the letters. A few seconds later her eyes were welling with tears that she did not attempt to conceal. But she was still looking straight ahead.

  Madame Cru, a few paces away, glanced in their direction, and seeing the flow of tears, ungushed her own. Maria Candido put her head on poor old Katz’ bosom and wept unrestrainedly. The General was waiting for the wails to start.

  They did, but from another quarter: d’Inde was being besieged by d’Artagnan the magician’s wife—and children. The General started to count, for the place was swarming with kids. He gave up counting at eleven, knowing he had missed some. Doubtless, they totalled twice seven.

  Even Senator Fagan yielded. “You, you, sir …” He pointed at d’Inde, for Tom was whispering in the senator’s ear. “Somebody arrest that man. He’s a spy.”

  “I am a counter-spy!” d’Inde shouted.

  “I don’t care what kind of a spy you are! Arrest him!”

  “Hold everything,” Forsman said, trying to take over on behalf of sanity. “He was a counter agent, Senator. But he’s taken this double-life business far too seriously for us.”

&nb
sp; A newspaper reporter broke in: “Only two lives to live for his country! What a television gimmick!”

  “Television?” Senator Fagan said. “Did someone say television?”

  The police officer, in desperation, took his whistle from his pocket and blew it: it quieted the house.

  “Has anyone here any information on where Congressman Jarvis might be? You may as well understand, you’re not leaving until he is found.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to get to me, Captain,” Jimmie said from the doorway.

  The General cried, “My boy!” and pushed back through the mainstream to where Jimmie and Virginia Allan were standing hand in hand, reluctantly hand in hand. No one really noticed the sulky Dolores whom Jimmie had hold of with his other hand.

  39

  “RANSOM, HONEY,” VIRGINIA SAID, disengaging herself from Jimmie who gave her to his father’s care, “your son is a brute. And you never even told me about him.”

  “It’s something a woman has to find out about a man for herself,” he said.

  Jimmie said, “Hold her for your life, Father.” Then he raised his voice: “Who is the officer in charge?”

  “In charge of what?” someone quipped.

  “The investigation of Montaigne’s murder,” Jimmie said, “since I should think in this case the last thing comes first.”

  “I am,” the captain of police said.

  “Technically,” Fagan added.

  “All right, Senator,” the policeman said angrily, “Let’s get technical.”

  Jimmie said, “I charge Miss Virginia Allan with the shooting of Leo Montaigne, and I am prepared to give evidence substantiating the charge.”

  “The first thing I want,” the captain said, coming up, “is the weapon.”

  Virginia, defiant as though the cause were far from lost, said, “Okay, Congressman, give it to him. He wants the weapon.”

  Jimmie said, “Father, open Miss Allan’s purse.”

  “With your permission,” the General said to her, and took the purse from her hands. She gave it willingly enough.

  “No weapon, Jimmie,” the General said.

  “Her gloves, may I have them please?”

  Grey kid, they were, and rather soiled for so dainty a female, spotted as though a child had pencil-dotted them, and even as he gave them into Jimmie’s hand he could smell the gunpowder on them.

  Jimmie, without a word of explanation, lifted them to his nose and then handed them to the officer in charge. He did the same thing. Then he turned to her.

  “I arrest you, Miss Allan, on suspicion of murder.”

  It was very simple, said and done, and a certain awe hung over the room at the dreadfulness of the moment after all. Even the murder of a rogue connived against the living.

  “Don’t you want to know why?” Virginia said. And she moved with that old grace and sway that had made the Club Sentimentale a gaudy tribute to the good old days; she moved, unrestrained, to the middle of the room. Why not, the General thought. Everyone was doing single turns, as the vaudevillians called it. “Leo was washing me out. I made him, and I unmade him, because of that little Miss Dolores Nobody. You know, friends, and I got some here I like to think, Leo was a bad person.”

  “Enough, woman!” Fagan cried. “You’re speaking of the dead.”

  “Honey,” and surely it was the first time he had been so addressed since infancy, “I ought to know that better than you even. But I’m going to say out now something I don’t even think you know. Whatever Leo promised you about four people at that dinner last night, he was going to make it up, him and me. I did most anything for him. Even up to the end. I lured that dear old gentleman—General Jarvis—out of town for him—and I came back in and told Leo all about him and the Russians …”

  The senator moistened his lips and interrupted, “What did you tell him, Miss Allan?”

  Virginia smiled. “I told him General Jarvis knew how to count in Russian.”

  The dear old gentleman was beginning to feel cantankerous; he did not feel old and he certainly did not feel dear.

  “That’s all I told him, but you see, I had to tell him something to get him into the car with me. And it was all so easy then. I used the duelling pistol, and I just thought it was all going to look like the General did it, him being a fighting type man. But I’m a softy. I thought he was asleep and in the end I was going to swear he stayed up in that cabin until after dawn, and I hoped he’d do the same about me. You’re going to have to drag the Potomac River to find those pistols. They were a pair, but I only used one. I shoot true.”

  The General, if he had not felt cantankerous, would have been tempted to a certain sentimentality himself. Virginia had begun to sniffle, and she had won more than small sympathy. Jimmie was no doubt thinking what she would be like on the witness stand. He would not want to be the prosecutor. But then, Jimmie never really wanted to be a prosecutor. It was why he had escaped into politics. If the General were going to feel sentimental, it was better at the moment to feel it about his son.

  “Dear Ransom,” she said, and with a gesture from the heart stretching her hand toward him, “Would you fetch me a hankie from my purse?”

  The General had been sent to the well once too often. He brought Virginia the handkerchief she asked for, but he held the purse still and when he turned his back to her, he drew from it a large white envelope and, with the flap open, drew from it the papers inside.

  Senator Fagan, with the eye of a falcon, pounced across the room ready to collect any documents.

  The General, however, lifted his guard and warded off the gentleman. He read the top line aloud:

  “Never sally when you can dally …”

  Tom let out an agonized shriek: “That’s my poem! I wrote it myself to a girl in Ireland!”

  The General handed over the sheaf of poems to their owner. “Young man, you need never fear being plagiarized.”

  “But, but …” Tom turned and spread out his arms to Jimmie. “Boss, I gave them this afternoon—or yesterday, whenever that was—to Mrs. Norris to read. Will you tell me what they’re doing with this wench? I’d never have asked her to read them, sure.”

  “Tom,” Jimmie said coldly, “where is Mrs. Norris?”

  “If I knew, sir,” Tom said quite humbly, “I don’t think I’d be here now.”

  Luke Forsman stepped up to them then and said, “I think it’s safe to suppose she is home by now—having spent a night quite as wild as anyone else here.” He looked Virginia Allan up and down. “If you had been picked up in the park in Arlington tonight, Miss—would it have prevented you from committing murder?”

  She shook her head, and this time that fair head was bowed.

  Forsman went on, addressing himself now to Tom: “Mrs. Norris, when she got tired waiting for you, picked up our plant—you see, the two of you got in the way of a prearranged contact between our agent and the foreign courier. We thought months of work was undone till now …” He turned and nodded at the General, by way of tribute.

  “Then you might say I discovered a spy!” Tom cried, unwilling to let go fame when it was so near.

  “Well, possibly uncovered,” the Federal man said.

  “My boy!” Senator Fagan said, and laid his arm across Tom’s shoulder.

  Jimmie spoke up then: “Well, since you put it that way, Senator, you can have him.” He went to Virginia and took her hand, much as a lawyer, which he was after all, might take a witness’ leading her to the stand.

  “Since we’ve come this far together, Virginia, why not tell us now the real reason you murdered Montaigne?”

  “He knew,” she said quietly. “He saw me a week ago with the man … who pays me … the Big Man, and he recognized him. Leo never forgot anything or anybody, and he’d met him in Europe and knew what side he was on. I was one of the four names he’d promised to Senator Fagan, and then my whole life, love and adventure was all over.”

  “Who were the others?” the senator asked.
“I demand you tell me their names now. You will be protected—the best lawyers …”

  Jimmie realized in an instant that not one name had yet been given to the newspapers—nay, not even to Fagan. He had released the Chatterton story on Montaigne’s promise.

  “Aren’t you going to arrest this woman?” Jimmie said, catching Forsman by the arm and inspiring him to haste.

  “I arrest you, Miss Virginia Allan …” Forsman started.

  “She’s already under arrest,” the police captain shouted.

  “And I demand …” cried Fagan over all.

  And not one of them ever finished the particular sentence he had started, for at that moment, another breeze swept into the place, and somebody shouted, “Quiet!” Four men stood abreast just inside the door. One of them stepped forward and waved his credentials over his head. “Nobody try to leave! Everybody in the house is under arrest. This is a Treasury Department raid.”

  “What for?” somebody shouted.

  “For the sale and consumption of illegal alcohol.”

  General Jarvis chuckled. He had indeed got caught in his own explosion. He had promised on the phone to sign the complaint, but he hadn’t actually done it yet. It wouldn’t matter, though. They were here, and so was the stuff. They would find out for themselves, having a search warrant. But they might in time have to wash out the arrests.

  “Look here,” Forsman cried, going up to the Treasury officer, “I’m a Federal agent myself.”

  “Then more’s the shame on you, getting caught!”

  Suddenly then, one of the women screamed.

  The place was tilting one way, then another.

  “An earthquake!” someone screamed.

  A good, hearty voice spoke out: Senator Chisholm: “It’s an act of God, and high time.”

  Jimmie knew well the feeling. So did the General: he had been to sea oftener than many a sailor.

  “No real cause for alarm!” Jimmie said, cupping his hands over his mouth. “Nothing to be afraid of. This place was built on a barge. Somebody’s cut us loose, that’s all.”

  There were some sensible people aboard, or perhaps they were merely exhausted. They stood where they were while those closest to the windows broke open the shutters. And by the dawn’s early light, they were indeed sailing down the river, slowly, ponderously, but inevitably.