Old Sinners Never Die (The Mrs. Norris Mysteries Book 3)

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Dolores seemed to wither, her mouth quivering, and then the tears ran full in her eyes.

  “The best thing now is if you can help me find her,” Jimmie said.

  “Where’s Leo?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing you can do for him,” Jimmie said firmly. “He’ll be taken care of. But there will be a great deal of trouble, I assure you, and I will try to take care of you.”

  She dried her eyes and nodded her understanding of her need for it. The very young, he thought, were the least equipped to show false concern over others when it was themselves they most cared to protect.

  “Where is the most likely place to find her?” Jimmie persisted. “Especially if she has a man with her, where would she be likely to take him?”

  “I guess maybe to Leo’s cabin.” Then she thought about that. “But Leo hasn’t been gone that long, Mr. Jarvis. It takes almost a half-hour to get there.”

  Jimmie got up. “Put your coat on, Dolores. You know where it is?”

  “I think so. He … he took me there once.”

  “I understand,” Jimmie said. “Get your coat.” He looked around and saw a hallstand on which a light grey coat was hanging … so much the schoolgirl’s coat. “Is this it?”

  She nodded.

  Jimmie held it for her. “However did you meet up with him at all, child?”

  “I’m not a child. I told you, my aunt. Or didn’t I? Anyway, she’s—or she was—in love with him. Lots of women are. Were.”

  Jimmie took her out to the car by the side door, and then because he was afraid she might run away if he left her, he decided not to go back to telephone. It was a dilemma he had not anticipated, and his conscience, for the time being, was just going to have to be stuck with it.

  Dolores steered him through the town and out of it with an expert’s eye. He was put in mind of the accuracy of his own youth when it came to directions. But it was like pointing out the marvels of a baby who could remember where his toys were, or recognize his own family. What the devil else did he have to think about?

  Jimmie himself suddenly had quite something else to think about. The car had no more than eased up the first foothill when Dolores eased her little thighs along the distance between them, and put her little hand under his arm and her little head upon his shoulder.

  “Are you married, Mr. Jarvis?”

  Which made him laugh: not the question, but the formality of “Mr. Jarvis.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think you were. You’re so, so debonair. I just love older men. I guess I’m addicted to them.”

  “Are you?”

  “Is that the wrong word?”

  “I don’t know. It’s you that suffers from the affliction.”

  “I do suffer,” she said. “You’re so understanding.”

  “Just how old are you, Dolores?”

  “Fifteen.”

  He gave her a ruthless nudge with his elbow. “Then get the very devil over in that corner and think about Leo,” he said. “You’re old enough for that.”

  He had just driven a minor across the state border, and she hanging onto him like a Virginia creeper.

  27

  ONCE THE TRUCK TOOK off down the mountain, its canvas slapping like sails in the wind, the General felt fine. In fact, he had never felt better in his life. An old bear was not to be caught in a mousetrap. He put his hand in his pocket and touched the letters belonging to a cabinet member, letters, the very contents of which, although he could but surmise them, set the blood of an old warrior coursing. He was a knight without armour.

  Oh, by God, he had his work set out for him, for he was resolved to put everything in order, everyone anxious at ease: such was the elixir he had got with this new sense of his own power. What power was like that of a righteous man who has escaped dishonour and with the weapons at hand with which to destroy a cad! Blackmailer! Bootlegger! Bloodsucker!

  Oh, Montaigne, you fraud, you maggot, you fly in the champagne of life!

  A thunderous rattle broke in upon the General’s reverie. It was a moment before he realized they had crossed over the wooden bridge and onto the highway. He sat up on one elbow and peered out a crack in the canvas: it was beautiful country, this, but he would certainly hate to have traversed it in a litter. He was thinking again of the Civil War and—since he was on his back—of its wounded. The hills might well be haunted, the issues not yet at rest.

  By the glory of the skies, it was a night for poetry as well as justice! A night? A morning. For yonder cracked something brighter than moonlight haloing the mountaintops.

  Then the General heard a sound almost beloved, so that it made him sad. He watched and waited and saw his dear Jaguar go roaring up the road, away from him and out of sight. He touched his lips with two fingers and blew the kiss into the night. Then he lay back and cushioned his head in his locked fingers. He would be a long time buying another Jag on a pension. It was altogether too melancholy a thought. Better to plan the morning’s triumph.

  28

  TOM HAD NOT DREAMED of talking to Senator Fagan himself. Well, he had dreamed of it, but the best he expected to happen to him awake was that he would get through to a secretary’s secretary. He probably did, getting through to quite a number of people, none of whom was more than half-awake, and none of whom more than half-believed him. But no one would chance dismissing him entirely, not with that story.

  What he needed for this sort of operation, Tom thought, dredging his fourteenth dime out of his pocket, was a government subsidy. He put the thought out of his mind immediately as unpatriotic.

  On all his calls, Tom had started by saying that he had seen a man behaving very much like a spy depositing secret documents and that the woman he had set to watch had disappeared. But by the time he got into the explanation of the Frenchman with two lives, one of which he lived under the name of d’Artagnan—a name never meant for an Irish tongue—most of his listeners were prepared to consign their share in the fame of exposure to someone else in the Senator’s chain of command.

  But on the fourteenth dime, as soon as he got an answer, Tom took hold of the phone by the mouthpiece. “Now listen to me, whoever you are at the other end there. I’ve had enough nonsense. Are you awake?”

  There was ever so brief a pause, then came a resonant: “It’s milking time, isn’t it?”

  Something in that voice reached Tom in his every fibre. It prompted him to give more what he thought was wanted than what he thought he had. “I think I’ve got onto a spy case, sir,” he said very slowly and distinctly, “and the way I got onto it, I was trying, all innocent, aye, ignorant you might say, to find a certain Army general.”

  Tom waited, scarcely able to hear anything above the throb of his own heartbeat. Nonetheless, he caught the sucking sound of shock and pained indignation. Then that voice said, “What army?”

  The question stunned him. He assumed it was the American. He had never thought to ask. Of course, it was the American. “American, sir.”

  “How many stars?”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “How many stars does the General have?”

  “I don’t rightly know, sir, but I’m sure as many as he could get. He’s that sort.”

  “What prompted you to call Senator Fagan at this hour of the morning?”

  Could he be wrong, Tom wondered, about who was at the other end of the phone? “Sure, sir, it all just happened.”

  “Are there any documents involved?”

  “There are, sir. That’s what I called about. I saw him hiding them in a tree like a squirrel its nuts.”

  “Well, God bless you, man! You stay right where you are until one of my boys comes and gets you. Let me have the address.”

  Tom gave the address and then thanks to heaven, for his dime’s worth of telephone had just run out. He went out of the booth and got the night clerk to sell him a cigar for his last dime, a very particular cigar for a very particular gentleman.

  “Do
you want it gift-wrapped?” the clerk said, and yawned in his face.

  29

  SENATOR CHISHOLM WAS SURPRISED to learn that her friend, Luke Forsman, an investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was in the office.

  “It’s that kind of night,” he explained on the phone.

  “It sure is,” the senator said earnestly. “You don’t happen to be working on the Chatterton dinner party?”

  “Don’t I?” Forsman said wearily.

  “Then why hasn’t somebody been in touch with me? I was there, too, you know.”

  “Have you been home since, Senator?”

  “No, come to think of it, I haven’t.”

  “I’m going to tell you, it’s asking a lot of the FBI to know where people are when they don’t know themselves. Do you want to give us a deposition, Senator? Some other people there want to. Matter of fact, most everybody in Washington wants to.”

  “Including an art curator called d’Inde?”

  “We’ll get to him,” Forsman said.

  “I think you’re going to have to. I doubt he’s going to come to you. Have you got an alias ‘d’Artagnan’ on him? Did you know he’s a magician by night as well as an art man by day?”

  “I’d have to have a subpoena before answering all those questions for you, Senator. Or is this part of the deposition you want to give us?”

  “See here, Luke. Sometime tomorrow morning—this morning—I’m going to get caught in Fagan’s dragnet because I was at that dinner. I don’t think it’s accidental that it happened to me, but I can’t prove that. Just the same, I don’t want to be one of the poor fishes he throws back into public life to sink or swim. I’ve had twenty years in the government and I’m good for a few more.”

  The young man listening to her sighed very gently, but not quite soundlessly. “I have a suggestion, Senator. As long as you’re still up and around, why don’t you go back to the Chatterton house? You might talk to your hostess.”

  “Has she talked to you?”

  “Right now she’ll talk to anyone, and maybe you’ll understand what we’re up against when you hear her. Everybody wants to have a dawn clearance on this damn business, but they won’t stop filibustering.”

  “Easy, Luke.”

  “Sorry, Senator. Go along there. It’ll be easier for us if you’re all in one place.”

  “All right, but I’m going to bring a young man with me I think you ought to talk to.”

  “Sure …” Then he asked abruptly, “Senator, is he Irish?”

  “As sure as the Pope’s a Catholic.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “That’s what I called you about, Luke, but you wanted it under oath.”

  “I’d better have it now,” Forsman said, “oathed or unoathed.”

  Senator Chisholm told him briefly of Tom and of the visit to the house of d’Artagnan the magician.

  “You’re right,” Forsman said. “Bring him with you. I’ll want to talk to him.”

  “What about Mrs. Joyce?”

  “I suppose she’d better come too, if she’s a witness.”

  When the senator hung up the phone she said, “I think we have a young man, don’t we?”

  Helene looked down to the street from the window. “His car is there. I doubt he’d go any place without it.”

  When they reached the lobby, however, the night clerk handed Helene the key to the jalopy and told them of Tom’s phone calls, the purchase of the cigar, and of his departure. “He said you could use the car, Mrs. Joyce.”

  “That was optimistic of him,” Helene said. “Shall we take it, Senator?”

  “It’s not a question of shall, girl, it’s a question of can. Can we take it? Come on.”

  “Where would you say Tom went?” Helene opened the car door for the older woman.

  “Well, I won’t say he went over to the enemy. Let’s just say he decided on a different commander.”

  30

  MRS. NORRIS WAS JUST finishing her cup of tea when another investigator joined the two who had been interrogating her. He was introduced as Mr. Forsman.

  “Well, this looks pleasant enough,” he said, “tea. I didn’t know we had such facilities.”

  “We don’t,” Mulrooney said.

  “Ah. It can’t be said we persecuted you anyway, Mrs. Norris.”

  “I am not saying a thing. I have lived a life of respectability, and I do not take easily to the notion of being under arrest.”

  “There are such things, you know, as protective custody,” Forsman said, arching his eyebrows slightly, as though he hoped she would cotton to the notion.

  “Are you telling me they plucked me up in my own back yard and hied me here for that? I do not believe it, sir.”

  Forsman sighed. “And there are such things, I believe, as honest mistakes.”

  “Ah, now, you’re talking, man. I knew the moment I got the tea there was something up.”

  Forsman grinned ever so slightly. “Hold on now, Mrs. Norris, I was rather thinking it was you who had made the honest mistake. If we’ve made one, it will take us a great deal longer to find it out—and longer still to admit it. I know this is going to upset you, but I assure you I have enough work to do tonight not to ask it if I didn’t need it—I want you to go over your story again, for me this time. I’ve just picked up a little information I’d like to try and fit into it.”

  Mrs. Norris ruffled her shoulders, but she started at the beginning, relating her adventure with Tom.

  Now and then Forsman checked some notes he had in his hand and nodded, she presumed at some verification of her story.

  “Now, this French fellow,” Forsman said when she was finished, “would you say he acted as though he felt at home?”

  “Except with the baby, but to tell the truth, I didn’t hold that against him, for not many men can take over when the wee one is skirling like that.”

  Forsman nodded.

  “Oh, something I forgot to mention—he stepped out into the vestibule once, as though he was going to the mail box,” Mrs. Norris said. “But it was Tom’s notion that he took the nameplate off the door, for it was missing a few seconds later when Tom went in to look.”

  “Is Tom a reliable sort?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person for that opinion,” Mrs. Norris said, “but he must have something steady to recommend him. He’s worked for Congressman Jarvis since he came to Washington.”

  Forsman gave a moment to summarizing his notes. Then he said, “Congressman Jarvis’ father is Major General Jarvis, isn’t he?”

  “He is.”

  To the other two men he said, “General Jarvis was one of the people at the Chatterton dinner last night.”

  Mrs. Norris bit her lip, remembering—how long ago it seemed—Tom’s reading out of the paper Senator Fagan’s charges. “The son isn’t the father, let me tell you,” she said.

  Forsman looked at her curiously. “Why do you say that?”

  Mrs. Norris was more cautious. “He has a bent for trouble, the old gentleman has.”

  Forsman nodded, pleasantly enough. “It’s not necessarily trouble—I hope, though it’s trouble enough for us, God knows. Do you know someone by the name of Joyce?”

  “I do, or I know who she is,” Mrs. Norris said, and clamped her teeth down in front of her tongue.

  “Would you mind telling me … confidentially?”

  “She’s a friend of Mr. James’—Congressman Jarvis’—and a world-famous sculptress.”

  “Ah-h-h.”

  “And it was her the Frenchman took home from the Ball when Tom and I started to follow him.”

  “Now I’ve got a couple of things in place,” Forsman said. “I can tell you one thing, your Irishman’s safe. He’s with Senator Chisholm and this Mrs. Joyce.”

  Mrs. Norris dumped her chin on her breast. “Trust him to that,” she said.

  “They all seem to have gone looking for you.”

  “Did they find me?”


  “No, but I shall see that they do before long.” He turned to the other investigators. “Senator Chisholm was also at the dinner party. Also Ambassador and Mrs. Cru.”

  “We don’t have to check them out, do we—foreign nationals?”

  “Only if they ask it,” Forsman said.

  “Let’s get out of here before they do,” Mulrooney said.

  “Man, you’ve just begun to work,” Forsman said. “But in this case it looks as though we’ve flushed a swan instead of duck, doesn’t it?”

  The men nodded agreement.

  Forsman picked up the rolls of film which had made up the package Mrs. Norris found in the tree.

  “Why can’t I just go and put that back in the tree,” she said, “and get something I left in its place?”

  Forsman looked at her. “Don’t you think these things should be processed so we can see what’s in them?”

  “That,” Mrs. Norris said, “is your business. But it would seem to me that if you wanted to snare somebody else the way you did me, it wouldn’t matter what was in the box as long as you caught them with it.”

  “You want to put the box back where you found it?” Forsman said.

  “It would clear my conscience,” Mrs. Norris said.

  “I have no better idea at the moment,” Forsman said. “Gentlemen?”

  “Isn’t the whole thing off?” Mulrooney growled.

  “Not where Mrs. Norris is concerned,” Forsman said. “She’ll wait for you in the sitting room. Won’t you, ma’am?”

  “What’s my choice?”

  “A few minutes,” Forsman said soothingly, “and the boys will be at your service.”

  “Will they take me home?”

  Forsman nodded. “Wherever you want to go.”

  31

  THE TRUCK BEARING THE General and other contraband cargo rattled into Washington. The General could tell their arrival by the condition of the streets: a city of monuments and broken car springs. He was not sure he had not broken a spring or two himself on this trip. It was no escapade for a man near seventy. But at least he was out of the mountains.