MRS. NORRIS ARRIVED BACK at Mrs. Joyce’s from Brooklyn mid-afternoon in a state of some bewilderment. There had been times when Mag seemed her old sour self whose company was pleasure only when you knew she best enjoyed herself in that disposition. Then again, Mag had perked up and talked about the trip she and Mr. Robinson were going to take soon—perhaps to Scotland. “But there,” she ended up, “he’s only talking to cheer me up. He hasn’t even the time to come up and see you in Nyack.”
Nor the inclination, Mrs. Norris had thought. The best she had come back from Brooklyn with was Mag’s promise to persuade Mr. Robinson that she should spend a week with Annie in Nyack whether he wanted to come or not.
Mrs. Norris stood outside Helene’s door for a moment listening to the sound of the chisel on stone. She hated to interrupt anyone at work but especially Mrs. Joyce whose power to make a stone look mortal was awesome indeed. But at that moment Jimmie came whistling up the street. He had his own key, the propriety of which Mrs. Norris refused to think on for the moment.
Then he held it under her nose. “This is a day key, Mrs. Norris, not a night key.”
She drew herself up to her best height. “Such a thought never crossed the threshold of my mind, Master Jamie.”
“Then it was wiping its feet at the door,” he said.
Between them they had the tea brewed when Helene came out of her workroom. “You two are in high spirits,” she said.
“Did you see the afternoon paper?” said Jimmie. “I just happen to have one in my pocket.”
Jasper Tully arrived soon thereafter with a second copy. He also carried the General’s valise, surrendered to him by the property clerk. The final report was in from the Medical Examiner—General Jarvis had died of coronary thrombosis. Tully was glad to hear Jimmie had had a good day, his own having been a misery. Furthermore, the D.A. was wondering why, as long as he seemed to be running on Jimmie’s ticket for Lieutenant Governor, he didn’t resign from the District Attorney’s staff.
“Not a bad idea, Tully for Lieutenant Governor,” Jimmie said. He wiped butter from his fingers. “Well, shall we have a look at father’s masterpiece? By the way, just for the hell of it, I stopped by an expert’s. It was his opinion this was genuine, so let it not be said that the old boy did a sloppy job of forgery.”
“Forgery?” Mrs. Norris put her fist to her breast.
“Oh, without a doubt,” Jimmie said. “I have no doubt he was working on it all afternoon of the day he died.”
Mr. Tully lifted the book to his nose. “Is it written in iodine?”
“No, it’s ink all right. He had the formula for the ink made in those days, and a sample of the shade he wanted all in my dispatch case. I suppose in time we’ll turn up the chemist who prepared it for him, or the printer. Chemist, I suppose.”
Mrs. Norris lifted her chin at the word printer. Something began to happen inside her, and she had to find a magazine to fan herself.
“When he was experimenting for himself,” Tully said, “he must’ve been using iodine. I found three bottles up there.”
Mrs. Norris cleared her throat. “And the gardener brought a fistful of nibs in from the flower bed under his window.”
Helene laughed aloud. “What a marvelous scandal this might have made!” She had taken the diary from Tully’s hands and read a passage.
“You have a charming sense of humor,” Jimmie said.
“Oh,” she said, “here it is—the passage that landed poor Python in the hospital.”
“Read it out!” Tully said.
Mrs. Norris could not share their mirth. She was remembering the talking-to she had given the Nyack telephone office for having billed two calls to Brooklyn instead of one. She just could not listen to the things they were laughing and shaking their heads over. But the good Lord be praised, at least, she had had the wisdom not to make her censure of the old gentleman too loud. Oh, she could remember now the occasions on which Mr. Robinson had been to Nyack. He had been introduced to General Jarvis, and Mr. Robinson was not a man to consider his position in life. She had often thought he didn’t know his own place, making free to wander into the garage. Oh, oh, oh. Her head reeled with the chagrin of it.
“Well,” Jasper Tully said finally, “there’s two men dead, and while there’s a thing or two explained, we’re not much closer to the how, why and who of that.” He accounted then his own day, starting with his last visit in Brooklyn. “One thing kind of significant to me about The Rock’s banking habits, Jimmie, he made his deposits every other day, and he always got his receipts in duplicate.”
“A partner?” Jimmie said.
“I don’t see any other explanation,” Tully said: “The Brooklyn police say it could be tax information. They got a tracer on that, but I’d go along on the partner idea.”
“I suppose we’re reasonably safe in assuming that it was not Father,” Jimmie said.
“Maybe you are,” Tully drawled. “I’m not making any assumptions from here on in. I’ve put out a questionnaire to every bank in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. I want to know if anybody else in New York was in the habit of making deposits on alternate days. The Rock’s business practices sound to me like a crook’s check on a crook.”
Jimmie grinned, catching some of Tully’s slow fire. It had been a long time since they worked together, and he had all but forgotten the strain tightening with each new discovery, the agony of each frustration. Tully gave the impression of being a man of infinite patience, but if you knew him like Jimmie did, you could see the fire kindling.
“What else, Jasp?”
Tully shrugged. “I went to see a thug called Slim, The Rock’s personal servant, the guy who wasn’t with him when he got taken for the last mile.”
“Did you ask him why not, where he was?”
“Nope. That’s the Brooklyn boys’ work. And you can’t ask a man about where he wasn’t. Only where he was. Anyway I was hoping to tie up the General’s fair lady with The Rock. It didn’t work out. No women in The Rock’s life at all. No women, no liquor…only horses and foreign sports cars, and he wouldn’t talk about the horses.”
“The cars he had in common with father,” Jimmie said.
Tully nodded. “Do you know that Austin-Healey of The Rock’s is an exact replica of one owned by the Duke of Glower?”
“So?” said Jimmie.
Tully sighed. “I was hoping that might mean something to you.”
“How did he know they were alike?” Jimmie said, trying to oblige.
“Knew somebody who was an expert—according to Slim. Just seems funny, being an expert on something like that, and the friend of a gangster.”
“Let me tell you something, Jasper, rum-running in its day made an aristocracy among gangdom. Johnny The Rock was the last Mogul. There were morning coats at his funeral.”
“I should’ve gone myself,” Tully said. “That may turn out to be the biggest mistake I made on this case, not being there to look over the chauffeurs.”
Jimmie slapped him on the back. “You can’t be two places at once, Jasp.”
“Funny,” Tully said, lifting his sad eyes from their contemplation of his own shoetops, “you never said that when you were District Attorney.” He gathered his feet under him. “If I get a wire recorder down here, would you be willing to go over it from the beginning tonight?”
“Willing, but not eager,” Jimmie said, thinking it must start at Albany for him.
“Mrs. Norris?”
“Aye.” She thought of the day the old man asked her for a few dollars until the first of the month. He had gone straight from her refusal to the family papers in the attic.
“Do you mind, Mrs. Joyce?”
Helene shook her head, and thought of seeing in Lem Python’s column that Madeline Barker was lunching with James Ransom Jarvis.
“I guess for me it starts on Water Street,” Tully said, “me as a stranger trying to place a bet at the one-armed restaurant called Minnie’s before we staked it out.” He pointed to the diary in Jimmie’s hand. “What are you going to do with that?”
“Put it right back in the attic—and if it shows up a hundred years hence, let them worry about its authenticity. A little scandal then may save the Jarvis name from oblivion.”
“You sound just like your father,” Mrs. Norris said with vast disapproval.