Gentleman Called by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

chair, refused a cigarette, accepted a cigar. “I wonder where Reverend Blake is now. Texas would be my guess—the land of opportunity. Tell you something, Jimmie—I don’t have any more faith in him today than I had on our first interview. Did he kill her?” Mumford shrugged. “He was the self-appointed pastor of something called the Mellody Friendship Club, one of those homey places where misfits and myopics can sit and hold hands. Ellie True was a waitress at the club. Not a customer. That was how things came to look very bad for the Reverend Blake in the first place.
    “The night Ellie was murdered, he admitted having called on her—as well as every member of the club—to deliver some salvation literature. A witness saw him in her apartment—and one of the few things in his favor at that stage, was that the witness had been able to see him because he and Ellie had left the door open—but no one saw him close the door or leave the apartment. That was about ten o’clock. It makes a long day even for a minister.
    “When Ellie’s room-mate came home at two A.M. she found Ellie in bed—suffocated to death, probably by a pillow held over her face, just possibly in her sleep.
    “When Blake was on the stand, he was not his own best witness. And the smart boy, the young Assistant D.A. made him look like a lecherous dog. He led him, and I mean led, to the point of admitting he’d finished up all his other calls, waiting till the last to enjoy his call on Ellie. Funny thing—the fact that Ellie needed saving was held more against him than in his favor.
    “That was roughly where we had got by adjournment the day before Theodore Adkins showed up in my office with a lush named Michael Regan, the surprise witness. I was very, very glad to meet them both.
    “All along, Blake had maintained a witness existed who could corroborate his story of having been home by ten-thirty. But he would not name him. Just how Adkins went about rounding up Regan, I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. But Michael Regan sober, as he admittedly had not been often in recent times, testified to having gone to see the Reverend Blake that fatal night, to having sat upon his brownstone stoop until the Reverend showed up at half-past ten, and to having spent the next hour with him confessing to all sorts of sins, including beating his wife. Conveniently, Regan had again fallen from grace. We were able to offer his wife in corroborating testimony. She had a fresh batch of bruises which the judge viewed in his chamber. Whereupon he decided it unnecessary to proceed. Tidy, isn’t it? We can prove Regan beats his wife as he said he does. Therefore he’s an honest man.”
    “Tidier than justice sometimes is,” Jimmie said.
    “Justice is as relative as sin and you know it, my boy,” Mumford said.
    Jimmie nodded in reluctant agreement. “What denomination is the Reverend Blake?”
    “Mongrel, I’d say, a mongrelarian.”
    Jimmie grinned. “You’re an irreligious bastard.”
    “No, I’m conservative in politics, orthodox in religion, and I have five children by the same woman.”
    “Didn’t anyone question an Irishman’s confession to a Protestant clergyman?”
    “To an evangelist,” Mumford corrected. “There’s a distinction. Only an evangelist gets through to a drunkard. They both live in worlds of exaggerated reality. I am sure Michael Regan blackened his wife’s eye to prove he was a gentleman—in not smashing her mouth. No one doubted his story, any more than they would question his confessor. Why City Hall is a virtual hotbed of orthodoxy, man, but an evangelist can get Times Square for his pulpit. Yes, and I’ve no doubt the loan of the Vice Squad to pass the collection plates along Broadway.”
    Jimmie laughed and signaled the waiter for the check.

15
    W HEN TULLY MENTIONED TO the D.A.’s secretary that he was going to see Mrs. Mellody who had a club for matrimonial availables, he got a nod and then a sudden response.