Gentle Murderer (17 page)

As he watched her, he drew his hand across his forehead. Seeing the movement in the mirror, she rinsed out the cloth and brought it to him.

He did not lift his hand. “My forehead and neck,” he said.

She brushed them gently and then laid the cloth on the table. With her cool hands, she massaged the tightened muscles first at the back of his neck. Her fingers plunged farther down between his shoulders with each motion and spanned the width of his back, his shirt straining the top button at his throat until it gave and clinked on the porcelain-topped table. He let his head loll back, touching her breast.

Presently she stopped and let his head rest upon her for a moment. Then she moved it away gently and picked up the cloth which she returned to the sink.

“I’m going upstairs now,” she said, beside him once more. “I’ve got to hang the curtains in my room.”

She picked them up and folded them over one arm. As she turned she extended her hand to him. He took it and followed her, waiting mutely while she threw the night-latch on the front door.

L
IEUTENANT HOLDEN EXAMINED THE
pencil portrait before him. He took his time, holding a blotter first over the mouth and then over the eyes, in each instance studying the feature separately. Goldsmith, watching him, lit a cigarette. A great deal hung upon his superior’s decision. Nor was it an easy one for Holden to make. It was one thing for Goldsmith to want time to pursue Brandon in his own way, but quite another for Holden to go along with him. Should Brandon kill again, Holden would be under fire from the top, not the sergeant. Several times Goldsmith was tempted to say something, to try to influence him, but each time he held his tongue. If Holden came to his way of seeing it on his own, so much the better.

Finally the lieutenant slid the drawing across the desk to him. “Not good enough for you. Is that it, Goldie?”

“It’s the best we can do, Lieutenant. We’ve given the artist every detail of his description we’ve got. We’ve shown it to Mrs. Flaherty three times. The same with Liza Tracy …”

“I’m assuming it’s the best you could do,” Holden interrupted. “I’m simply asking you if you’re satisfied with it.”

“No sir. I’m not. Change the chin a little, shade the cheeks—almost any little deviation, and it resembles a dozen other guys, and maybe Brandon more than it does now.”

Holden shook his head. “I don’t like it a damned bit, but I agree with you. Keep looking, Goldie. But for God’s sake, let’s get something we can put our teeth into.”

The sergeant put the sketch away gratefully. A general alarm had been forestalled a while longer. “I’m not the only one looking for him, by the way.”

“That’s nice. Who else is?”

“Mrs. Flaherty’s parish priest. You were right that she’d never seen Brandon before or since. But it looks like the priest did. He’s looking for him now.”

“Where?”

“A little town in Pennsylvania, and then Chicago.”

“Then he did skip town.”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know what the priest’s angle is, but I’m pretty sure he started out looking for his name like we did. The sheriff down there went over his moves. It could be that when he gets back here he’ll lead us right to Brandon. It could even be Brandon will go to him again, maybe to confession.”

“That’s ticklish business, Goldie. I wouldn’t count on the priest for help.”

The phone was ringing on Goldsmith’s desk. “I’m not counting on it,” he said, going to answer it. “Just the opposite. I’m going to help him all I can.” He picked up the phone. “Goldsmith speaking.” He listened a moment and then said, “I’ll be there within a half-hour.”

Joshua G. Fabish, POETRY CONSULTANT,
the detective read on the doorplate as he rang the bell. It was a walk-up apartment on Fifty-sixth Street just off Lexington. The building also housed consultants on beauty and Inca coinage. Nobody could be beautiful, poetic or rich without a consultant, he thought, waiting for the buzzer to release the door lock. As it sounded he thought of Fabish, exeditor of the
Young Poet.
Magazines died, but editors transmigrated.

A bald, round-faced man opened the door to him. “Just eighteen minutes, Sergeant,” he said smiling. “Only the fire department surpasses your efficiency.” He led the way through ornate, wildly colored rooms. The odor of a sweet pipe tobacco permeated the place. Paisley shawls were spread over chairs, sofa and a grand piano that dwarfed the front room of the railroad apartment.

“I have a passion for paisley shawls,” Fabish explained as he faced the detective from behind a huge desk and saw him looking about the room. “They tell me my mother draped me in one when I was born.”

Or dropped you in one, Goldsmith thought looking at the immaculate little man with a face as cold as salt. “Were you delivered by one of those?” He nodded toward one of many paintings of exotic birds with which the walls were hung.

“How clever of you to guess!” Fabish showed most of his teeth when he smiled.

Goldsmith resolved to keep his heavy humor to himself. “You said over the phone you’d found an address for Timothy Brandon.”

“I did, and my dear man, you’ve no idea at all what I went through to find it.”

“I appreciate it.”

“How can you appreciate it if you don’t understand it?”

“Look, Mr. Fabish, I’m just a cop—a dumb cop maybe. Thanks for any trouble you went to. Now can I have the address?”

“I have a very good notion to send it back to the bank where all the estate of the
Young Poet
is in escrow, so to speak, and let you jolly well get a warrant or whatever …”

Goldsmith changed his tack. He needed all the time he could save. “I didn’t realize how much trouble you had to go to.”

“Bankruptcy complicates papers, you know. In this instance particularly. There was a check involved. The letter was returned to us unopened.”

“I see.”

Fabish opened a drawer and drew the envelope from it. He deliberately held it, turning it about in his hands and reminiscing all the while about the
Young Poet’s
high aims and the sad state of the impoverished muse. How in the name of heaven anyone could work with this peevish, perverse character, the detective didn’t know. And yet his desk, several chairs and the grand piano were piled with manuscripts. While he waited, his eyes on the man, the muscles of his jaws tight, he thought of how it must be to come to someone like this in the hope of guidance, looking for a way to success. Whatever help or encouragement he gave, the detective thought, was handed down like blessings from a god’s shrine. It was given only to the worshipers and poetry became a cult. He extended his hand for the letter.

In his own good time, Fabish handed it over. “I’m going to write another check, my personal check,” he said.

Goldsmith examined the envelope. Brandon had lived on East Eighteenth Street when he submitted the poem. He was gone from there by the time it was accepted. He drew the uncanceled check from the envelope and slid it back. It was for five dollars. Five lousy bucks.

Across from him, Fabish was putting the last flourish to his signature. “Now, if you find the young man, you might give him this. Morale, you know.”

Goldsmith took the check and read it in front of Fabish. The poetry consultant had written: “For contribution to the
Young Poet.”
The salt god was smiling in satisfaction of his benevolence. Poets don’t grow old or die or steal or murder, the sergeant thought. On five dollars they live forever and write of spring and youth and love and beauty.

“This ought to fix him up,” he said, pocketing the check. “So long, Fabish.”

“It really wasn’t a very good poem,” Fabish said petulantly.

“No? I thought it was beautiful.”

T
HERE WAS AMONG TIM
Brandon’s things at the seminary only one clue to any contact beyond the school and home: a birthday card from someone signed “Teddy.” The envelope bore an address in Cleveland, and it had been mailed to him a few weeks after the date of his father’s death. Since Cleveland lay on the route Brandon would have taken to Marion City it was not too unlikely that there lay the story of his diversion from home and duty. Father Duffy arranged a few hours’ stopover in the city.

On the train, he drew the yellowing card from his pocket. Teddy might be man or woman. The handwriting was immature, but not necessarily that of a young person, he thought. Nor did the selection of the card tell much about the sender except that some pains were taken to be neither too personal nor too distant. It was “wishing a friend a happy birthday.”

Putting the card back in his pocket, Father Duffy tried to reconstruct what might have been the young seminarian’s journey when he started home for the funeral. He had not wanted to go, but he had been going because it was expected of him, perhaps because he had seen no way to avoid it. He was probably in dread of seeing his mother. He would have anticipated an overwhelming show of affection, a scene at his arrival and more of a one when the time came for his departure. And yet how great his need must have been in that period of his life for affection. Was Teddy someone he had met on the train? Or had he simply got off at Cleveland and wandered there much as he wandered away from an assignment at the seminary?

By the time he stepped from the train Father Duffy had decided that Teddy was a woman, and he found in himself a terrible dread of finding her. The boy had been here in the very depth of the depression with several days to spend and only enough money to buy food for one or two. He must have been in distress over the deception he intended on returning to the seminary, if he intended then to return at all. His ultimate return might have been an escape in itself. He might have expected his mother to communicate with them. It was curious indeed that she had not. But from what he had learned of her, Father Duffy decided that she probably thought the order had not permitted the boy to leave.

Glancing out of the window of the cab he took from the station, he saw in the distance the Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and the lineups at the ticket windows. That afternoon thousands of white-shirted baseball fans would be cheering the Indians—men and women who had taken the day off from factory, store or office. They would go home to supper, their kids and a night on the back porch or a movie—healthy, ordinary people who never heard of the Big Tims or the Little Tims until the newspapers caught them into headlines or the radio scripters concocted them for a half-hour’s distraction—and who could forget them with the turn of a dial and lie down to a quiet sleep. At that moment there was nothing the young priest would rather have done than pay off the cab and buy himself a ticket to the ball game. He longed for the smell of a cigar, peanuts, the sound of the rowdy cries for the home team and the feel of the warm clean sun on his back.

They drove out of the downtown area, through slums, at each block of which he expected the cab driver to flick off the meter. But on around the lake they drove, and he was wholly unprepared when the driver turned into a residential neighborhood of spacious and well-built homes and began to look for the house number. When the car stopped and Father Duffy read the number himself, he said, “You’re sure this is right?”

“I know this town like I know my own teeth, Father.”

Two little girls were playing in the yard. They stood at the walk and watched him pay the driver. When he turned, they chorused, “Good morning, Father.”

He could remember no greeting that had given him so much pleasure. “Hello. Is your mother home?”

“I don’t live here,” one of them said. “I live across the street. We’re not Catholics.”

He smiled. “A lot of people aren’t.”

He looked at the other girl. “My mother’s at the tennis matches, but grandma’s home,” she said. “I’ll go tell her you want to see her.”

“Thank you. My name is Father Duffy.”

“I’m coming, too,” the neighbor child said. “I want a drink of water.”

He watched them run around the stone house to the back door. A cocker spaniel crawled out from beneath a clump of bushes and shook himself. He trotted a few feet after the youngsters and then stopped to look back. The priest whistled softly and the dog came to him, wriggling with friendliness.

A couple of minutes later a pleasant woman in her mid-forties came to the front porch and held the door open to him. “Won’t you come in, Father?”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t even know your name.”

“Irene Benedict.” She motioned him to a chair, and sat down beside him. The children returned to their play.

“Is there someone in the family called Teddy, Mrs. Benedict?”

“It’s my daughter’s nickname. Her name is Theodora, after her grandfather.”

Father Duffy drew the birthday card from his pocket, feeling much relieved that he need not attempt to be circumspect here. Everything about the woman, the children, the dog, gave him a feeling of well-being, a security that would weather any trouble or intimation of trouble. It was a house where a family lived from one generation to the next. He showed the card to Mrs. Benedict. “I wonder if you happen to remember this boy?”

She took a pair of glasses from her pocket. Father Duffy watched her face: a look of puzzlement at first and then sudden remembrance, but no sign of disturbance at all. He felt an irrepressible surge of pleasure, a singing inside of him, which he knew had no relationship to the ultimate story at all, but which he accepted and enjoyed.

“Indeed I do remember him. We’ve often spoken of Tim and wondered what became of him.”

Which somewhat dampened the priest’s elation.

She gave back the card. “Teddy sent him that. She was twelve then, I think. Later, when he came back to us, he said it was the only birthday card he had ever received in the mail.” Her voice grew serious. “I’ve often wondered if letting Teddy send that wasn’t a mistake. He was such a sensitive boy. It may have been the one thing …” She lifted her hands in a gesture of inquiry. “Well, who can say? What became of him, Father?”

What indeed? “I don’t know,” the priest said flatly. “I’m trying to find that out myself. How did you happen to meet him, Mrs. Benedict?”