Gentleman Called Read Online Free PDF Page A

triumph.
    “How do you know he wasn’t the guest of one of the tenants?” Greer asked without a smile.
    “I don’t think Mrs. Sperling comes to the window and waves goodbye to other people’s visitors, no sir, I don’t.”
    “I want you to give me the exact date this occurred, Johanson.”
    “October twenty-one,” he said with very little hesitation. “It is the day after we turn the heat up ten degrees, and that is a very busy day with old furnaces.”
    “A very busy day,” Greer said, “but you could sit and look out the window.”
    “My time is my own, sir. My contract, she calls for the job, not for the time I do the job.”
    “I wish I could say the same for mine,” Tully drawled, getting up, and taking part for the first time. He could never understand the baiting of witnesses in the wake of significant testimony as Greer had just done with his man. His own feeling was that by implying disbelief, the inquisitor weakened the witness’s concentration. He might thereby lose a detail almost as significant as the fact.
    “What was the fellow like, her caller?”
    Johanson relaxed. He even smiled at the picture started up in his mind by Tully’s question. It must be very vivid to him.
    “Why, he come down the steps real business-like, brief case under his arm, umbrella. Not very tall and kind of chubby, one way you look at him. Then he’s not so plump, you look at him another way. Good clothes maybe do that…”
    Tully nodded. He would have purred if that would have kept Johanson running on as smoothly.
    “He was neat as a spool of thread. I don’t just remember his face. But it’s the feeling I got when I saw him I remember real clear. He walked kind of bouncey—like on springs and back on his heels.” Johanson pounded one hand into the other. “A jim-dandy walking doll, that’s what I would call him! Do you see what I mean?”
    “I might if I saw the man,” Tully said. “From that description, I just might at that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if other witnesses can corroborate it.”
    By eleven o’clock that night, however, no other witnesses admitted having seen such a man in the vicinity of Mrs. Sperling’s, and Tully decided he had done a day’s duty. He could still reach Fifth Avenue and 78th Street before midnight.

6
    “N OW IT WASN’T SUCH a bad story he told,” Tully explained to Mrs. Norris while he turned the plate round and round. Chocolate cake with coconut frosting: he wouldn’t get the coconut out of his teeth for a week. He had hoped for the steak, midnight or no. But the Scotch were always careful with meat.
    “Would you rather have something else, Mr. Tully?”
    “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Norris, cake is too delicate for my stomach at this hour. I need something rough and substantial after a day’s work.”
    “I’ve just the thing that’ll stick to your ribs,” she said. “These chilly mornings I make the porridge the night before. It’s sitting now warm in the pot.”
    “That’d be just grand,” Tully said with grim cheer, and returned to the description of the investigation. “You see it’s too neat, the story he told about this visitor, or maybe too bold. Every other witness we talked to tonight was shocked at the very suggestion of a man staying overnight in the woman’s house. Mrs. Sperling seems to have been as careful a woman as, say, yourself.”
    “I wouldn’t rule out the careful ones any more than I’d rule them in for it,” Mrs. Norris volunteered with the porridge. “By which I mean a woman’s a woman for all o’ that. The careful ones are lonesomer than the free ones, if you know what I mean.”
    “Oh, I do,” Tully said. “And they won’t rule out the man Johanson described, but it’s himself who looks like their best bet at the moment. The very way he went about discovering the body—having a policeman go in with him on his key to an apartment he swore he had never crossed the threshold of. If she wanted to keep him out,