Old Sinners Never Die (19 page)

“Never mind,” Mulrooney said. “Al! Can’t you drive any faster?”

“There’s some sort of accident up ahead, it looks like,” the man driving said. “Or maybe it’s on the bridge.”

“The Key Bridge?” Mrs. Norris asked.

“That’s the one,” Mulrooney said.

Mrs. Norris felt her stomach turn. Even as they drove nearer the bridge she could hear sirens wailing the approach of more police. The driver gave his own siren a turn just to show his authority. He pulled up to one of the troopers who had waved them down with his flashlight.

“What’s happened?” Al asked, and identified himself.

“Fella murdered down under on the other side.”

Mrs. Norris groaned and came very near to fainting for the first time in her life.

“Do they know who he is?”

“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard he runs some private club a few blocks from here. Name’s Fantana, Fontaigne, something like that. Blasted at close range.”

“Thanks,” Al said, and rolled up his window.

Mrs. Norris breathed deeply of what fresh air she could get. She and Mulrooney sat side by side the rest of the way to the house without saying a word.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Al said, slowing down.

“Yep,” Mulrooney said, “I can see the bicycle there against the house.”

“Mr. Mulrooney,” Mrs. Norris said, as he was about to step out of the car. “What was the name of that man who was killed?”

“Fontaigne. I’ve been thinking about it myself. Al, did you see Forsman’s list of that dinner party? I’m pretty damned sure that name was on it.”

The driver merely whistled.

“Would you mind waiting one minute for me?” Mrs. Norris said. “I want to run into the kitchen and I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll run in with you then and be sure,” Mulrooney said. To his partner he said, “Can you load the bicycle while we’re gone?”

Mrs. Norris could hear the telephone ringing within the house while she fumbled for her key. But her fingers were stiff, near as stiff as her heart, she thought, and by the time she got the door opened and reached it, the phone had stopped ringing. “If he needed me now,” she said, “I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Say now,” Mulrooney said, following her through the dimly lighted house, “isn’t that where the duel was going to be you told us about, under the Key Bridge?”

Mrs. Norris nodded assent for she could not find the use of her voice. She looked all about the kitchen table and then on the phone stand, but the card was nowhere to be found. Ah, but she knew without seeing it whose name it bore. And there on the porcelain-topped table, in her own writing, were the words still telling of where the challenger would wait.

“Mrs. Norris,” Mulrooney said, and with a certain kindness in his voice, “the man that was shot—it was at close range, so it was not in a duel.”

“I didn’t think it was, but it’s a curious set of circumstances all the same. And I’d give a great deal to know where Mr. James is right now.”

“Come along now and let’s get this chore over with, and maybe we’ll be able to help you locate him.”

Mrs. Norris looked up at him and nodded approvingly. “You have a Gaelic heart after all, Mr. Mulrooney.”

I
T WAS CHATTERTON HIMSELF
who opened the door to Helene and Senator Chisholm; the atmosphere as severe as a February funeral. “We’ve been expecting you,” Chatterton said, and when Helene murmured her regrets at being present, a stranger, he smiled slightly and added, “We are all strangers to one another tonight, Mrs. Joyce, which rather proclaims you a welcome, doesn’t it?”

“You’re very gracious,” Helene murmured, and followed with the senator as he led them into a library where a fire glowed in the grate.

Mrs. Chatterton looked round at them, and then leaned back. “I thought it might be the FBI man.”

“I understand Luke Forsman will be right along,” Senator Chisholm said.

Helene was introduced to Mrs. Chatterton and Secretary Jennings of the presidential cabinet. Secretary Jennings sat as rigidly erect as one in a pattern, Helene thought, stayed and corseted, soul and body.

It was Elizabeth Jennings who spoke first: “I am very sorry, Senator Chisholm, that you have been involved.”

The senator looked at her in mute surprise, for the presidential assistant had spoken as though it were her fault.

Chatterton said, “I don’t believe we should talk about this affair until Forsman arrives.”

“Poor Edward,” Mrs. Chatterton said. “Poor everybody.” She sat and plucked little bits of nothing—or so it seemed to Helene—from the arm of the chair. Suddenly she said, as though she had lost contact with the present difficulty: “I wonder what they’re doing at the club right now.”

A moment or two later Forsman arrived, along with another agent whom he introduced, but whose name Helene did not catch, and with them was Henri d’Inde.

Chatterton said, “Now if we had Ransom with us, we should have reconvened all the respectable members of our little party.”

“I resent that very much, Edward,” his wife said.

“I wonder if you have any idea, Laura,” he said quietly, “how much I resent it, myself.”

“So we meet again so soon,” d’Inde said to Helene. “Your congressman has a very zealous household, shall we say?”

“And patriotic.”

“You are disillusioned in me?”

“I am confused,” Helene said.

“Would it simplify matters if I now tell you the truth? I am what they call counterespionage.”

Senator Chisholm, standing nearby and purposely eavesdropping, said, “What?”

“Alas, all the volunteer patriots—they have ruined my usefulness, according to Mr. Forsman, that is, and I suppose he knows what he is talking about.”

The senator looked from him to Forsman who was himself awaiting Mrs. Chatterton’s response to something he had asked her. He nodded confirmation of d’Inde’s account of himself.

“Alas, also,” the Frenchman added, “it has very much complicated my life.”

“I should think it would simplify it,” Helene said, “now that you can be yourself. What are you, by the way, curator or conjurer?”

“I am glad you can make a joke at this hour,
mon cher
. It will be the major decision of my life, which I am hereafter.”

“Hold on one minute here,” the senator said. “Just what were those photostats you were trying to get me to take a look at the other day on the Hill?”

D’Inde laughed. “Those were the theories on hydraulics and on the flight of birds, as computed by Leonardo da Vinci maybe five hundred years ago.”

“That Renaissance painter?” The senator gave an off-and-on smirk in imitation of the Mona Lisa.

“That’s the one,” d’Inde said. “My purpose was to see if someone with—shall I say?—a glancing knowledge of the mathematical sciences, would know those computations from top secret matter on short observation. Also, they were to be further reduced on microfilm: what you call a decoy. That’s what I was hoping to lure a contact with tonight.”

“It’s a good thing I’ve only had a glancing knowledge of several things till now,” the senator said dryly.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Forsman said, “we must try to be quick about this. There is very little time left. I assume everyone here wishes to make a deposition? Frankly, I think now that those could wait until daylight … in view of certain recent developments.”

“Recent?” Chatterton said.

“Within the hour. Secretary Chatterton, who compiled your guest list?”

The secretary deferred to his wife. “Laura?”

“I did … but I was restricted in it. Oh, what nonsense not to tell it! Edward felt it would be to his advantage in the department to have as our guest, Secretary Jennings. Madam Jennings has all but withdrawn from social functions, and, well, she turned down my invitation.

“Afterwards I mentioned it to a mutual acquaintance—to a young man. To Leo Montaigne. He prevailed upon Secretary Jennings to come, and then suggested—perhaps I must use a stronger word—insisted that he compile the guest list. Truly, it was all of his choosing, every name on it.”

“Everyone?” Forsman said.

“I believe so. It was happily true for Edward’s sake, or so I thought at the time, that General Jarvis was included. He is an old friend of Edward’s.”

“Most likely why he was included,” Chatterton said. “But with the exception of the present company, I should say it was a fairly ghastly arrangement … Forgive me, Laura, if some of them chanced to be your friends … but I do believe that in their selection Montaigne was perpetrating some monstrous joke he assumed would have been amusing twenty-five years ago, by including the singers and that clown Katz.”

“And so it would have been—not monstrous, but very funny—if it weren’t for these dreadful times, and that man, Fagan.”

“There are other dreadful things that have happened in the last twenty-five years, Laura,” her husband said, “which in their way, perhaps account for the likes of Fagan.”

“Don’t you think I know?” she cried out, rising from the chair. “Do you think I would have needed Leo if I didn’t know? This world is too terrible! I won’t live in it. I won’t!”

Her husband went to her then and put his arm about her. “It’s the only world we’ve got, Laura.”

Forsman left them and turned to Elizabeth Jennings. “Madam Secretary, is there anything you wish to say to me now? You may give your deposition in private, of course.”

She said with great dignity: “I think not, for the moment, publicly or privately. In the end, one can betray only oneself, and betraying oneself, everybody. I think, however, you must talk with my nephew—with the boy who calls himself Montaigne.”

“I would like very much to do that,” Forsman said, “but I was informed by radio on my way here that Montaigne is dead. He was murdered sometime this morning.”

No one in the room said anything, but Helene, watching Secretary Jennings, thought that the corners of her sad, firm mouth twisted downwards in a brief, ironic smile.

“I have promised the police every co-operation,” Forsman said, “so we had better go together from here to where the others of your last night’s guests are being detained.”

T
HE GENERAL, STEPPING OUT
of the phone booth, became aware of the presence of several men even more sober than himself. Two of them were at the bar, one was outside the washroom door and one at the booth whom he had at first presumed to be waiting to make a call. Nobody would be abroad coldly sober at this hour unless he were getting paid for it, he decided. Therefore, he assumed them to be police.

He stood up at the bar beside his friend the reporter. “Who are they?”

“Society for the prevention of cruelty to generals. They have just announced there’s not going to be any duel.”

Ah, yes. The General understood now: Montaigne had claimed to challenge him and had then taken the precaution of having Virginia detain him in the mountains. What a cheap, despicable publicity stunt! He put his hand to the letters he had stolen from a thieving blackmailer, and was more than ever gratified to have them.

“I could have told you that some time ago,” he said.

The reporter turned and looked him up and down. “Then I was right! You’re old han’some Ransom himself.”

“I am General Jarvis, and I’m going to get out of here right now and I’d advise you to do the same thing.”

The reporter shook his head. “I’m sorry, General, we’re quarantined.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“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!