Gentleman Called Read Online Free Page A

sigh himself. He was getting a little old to deal with the vigors of her generation. “She will see me?”
    “Noblesse oblige,” Adkins said.

5
    J ASPER TULLY WAS INDEED a melancholy man at having to pass up Mrs. Norris’ invitation to dinner. A widower, he lived in the Bronx with his sister whose cooking, like her conversation, was composed of scraps she had picked up and flavored to her own taste.
    But the report of homicide which had come through to the District Attorney’s office late that November afternoon located the incident in the upper east Nineties, a neighborhood congested and inflammable with a new minority people pressing in upon an old minority, and in their midst, trying to withstand both pressures, were a few resident holdouts of second or third generation New Yorkers in the once elegant brownstones. To these latter, the victim, Mrs. Arabella Sperling, belonged. The District Attorney thought his chief investigator ought to be on hand.
    Tully sometimes wondered if all the Precinct and Homicide men who answered a complaint were necessary. He was in favor of science if it didn’t get in the way of reason. But then, the younger men didn’t need room to think. Left alone, they couldn’t think their way through a railroad flat. Teamwork. It was all a matter of teamwork. Tully slithered his way through the team and its equipment to the room from which the victim’s body had been recently removed. He talked with the Medical Examiner who had waited for him.
    The woman had been dead for about forty-eight hours, apparently strangled to death in her bed, and likely in her sleep, for there had been no struggle at all. Her throat had been neatly and deeply massaged by someone who knew his anatomy.
    Tully looked then at the double bed from which the technical men were about to remove the linens.
    “Anybody sleep in that with her?” he asked.
    Lieutenant Greer, who was in charge of the investigation, stood by also. He was at the frustrating stage of the investigation where everything remained to be done and nothing could be done immediately: men were searching for physical evidence, others for witnesses, without having turned up enough of anything yet to justify action.
    “Not regularly,” he said in answer to Tully’s question.
    Tully observed the salvaging and preservation of a long gray hair. “How old a woman?”
    “Fifty-one, according to her insurance policies.”
    “Who’s the beneficiary?”
    “Two nieces,” Greer said. “Very unlikely suspects.”
    “Got any likely ones?”
    Greer looked at him with a jaded tolerance. “Give us an hour or two, will you, Tully?” He led the way then to the dressing table; a film of fingerprint powder lay over much of it. “There was robbery. This jewel box was emptied. But no sign of housebreaking. And herself sleeping peacefully in bed.”
    “Herself not surprised,” murmured Tully. “Who made the complaint?”
    “The building superintendent. When the newspapers accumulated in the hall from a couple of days, he remembered that she was in the habit of telling him if she expected to be away overnight. That’s his story. She owned this building, and he has a key to the apartment. But—he got a cop to come with him before entering.”
    “The careful sort, isn’t he?” said Tully.
    “I’d say that. But maybe that’s how you get living in this neighborhood.”
    “He lives in the house?”
    “Across the street. It’s the only other building in this block the new ones haven’t got into yet.”
    The new ones, Tully mused. He had heard them called worse, God knows. “I take it he isn’t one of the—new ones?”
    “He’s a white man, Johanson. A Swede, I’d say.”
    “Have you got a statement from him?”
    “Only what the lad took who made the complaint with him. I wanted to know as much as I could about what happened in this room before tackling him. I’ve got an idea he’s going to be a very cagey fellow.”
    When he met Johanson himself a