Gentle Murderer (18 page)

“It was at the old Union Station. That was in the mid-thirties, I think. A few women and myself had set up a canteen there for the C.C.C. boys. Troops of them started out to their camps from there, and most of them were in need of a good meal. I can remember it just as plainly. I had noticed him during a lull—very thin, hungry-looking and dressed in his black suit. I motioned to him a couple of times, but when he caught me looking at him, he would turn away. To make a long story short, I finally coaxed him into eating something and drew out of him the fact that he was in a seminary preparatory school that he thought he had to run away from.”

Mrs. Benedict took off her glasses and laid them on the railing. “It was obvious that he was a very disturbed young man. When I could, I called my husband and he consented to my bringing the boy home. He stayed for a week with us then. Most of it he spent in my husband’s book room. Teddy was very fond of him. That little one, the hoyden—that’s Teddy’s daughter.”

Father Duffy looked at the children: happy, inquisitive, loud … They would run to meet their fathers and climb over them looking for presents … “My mother gave me a hammer for my tenth birthday, the only present …” The priest frowned at his recollection of the confessional
…
“The first birthday card I ever received in the mail …” A similar complaint.

“Do they disturb you, Father? I suspect they’re showing off. They can play as well in the back.” She leaned forward, about to call out.

“No, no. They don’t disturb me, bless them. You should know what I’m used to: the west side of New York.” He had not intended to say that, but the picture of the tough, hard-humored kids of his parish swept before him. “You were telling me about the Brandon boy, Mrs. Benedict.”

For an instant she looked at him, frankly inquisitive. When he met her eyes, hers fell away. There was an unspoken understanding between them then. “Yes,” she said. “He was such a gentle boy. During those days I learned his story—or bits of it. Do you know that, Father?”

“Fragments.”

She nodded. “I don’t suppose I know more. Something I could never understand—his mother was very kind to him, he said, and his father cruel … but of the two, he liked the father better.”

“I’m afraid that would be more accurate if you said that he disliked the father less.”

“Yes, I suppose it would. Why?”

“The mother was a peculiar combination,” the priest said, “inordinately affectionate toward the boy, and yet so religious she forced the idea of being a priest on him. Eventually, she entered a convent herself.”

“I see.”

Whether she saw or not, he could not tell, but the fact was no secret, and it suggested something of the spiritual tangle in the early pattern of the boy’s life.

“Well,” Mrs. Benedict proceeded, “he stopped with us in a real terror of going home. He was on his way to his father’s funeral. My husband—he’s gone now, which is why I live with the children—my husband with his good sense said that we shouldn’t try to persuade the boy to go on. He reasoned that having stopped with us Tim might start on his way again, lose courage, and end up God only knew where. We did get him to send off a letter to his mother. And through that week we persuaded him to return to the seminary. He was very religiously disposed, Father. But I’m not sure now that wasn’t a mistake.”

“Do you happen to remember where he sent the letter, Mrs. Benedict?”

“I don’t understand.”

“From what I know, his mother didn’t receive it. But I don’t suppose that’s important now.”

“I do remember that he wouldn’t let me mail it,” she said. “I plainly remember offering to send it by special delivery. He was quite adamant. It never occurred to me that he might not have sent it …” her voice trailed off.

“He may have lost courage,” he said.

“I suppose, but he might have been truthful about it. We were trying to help him.”

How many people had tried to help Tim Brandon, the priest thought. “And then it may be that the letter itself went astray,” he suggested, although he doubted it.

“That is possible, and he did go back to the seminary and make another try of it. That wasn’t easy, having to explain to them that he had not gone home.”

She wanted to believe the best of him. But there, too, Brandon had failed in courage. Was this failure accountable for his sense of guilt, the priest wondered. Was it sufficient to account for the belt of bramble he fashioned and wore?

“Or didn’t he tell them where he had been at all?” she asked suddenly.

“It doesn’t matter very much now,” Father Duffy said quietly. “And when he ran away from the seminary he came back to you, didn’t he?”

“Yes. That was a few months later. He said it was only a matter of time until they dismissed him.”

“Did he tell you why he thought they intended to dismiss him?”

“That is a strange thing, Father. He said at first it was because he could not do the work they put him to. Then one day—oh, quite a while later—out of a clear sky he said it was because he got a birthday card, from a girl.”

Father Duffy looked at her. “Was it out of a clear sky?”

“Well, I wondered that myself. It was foolish, of course, the notion of their disapproving of that. For one thing, the name Teddy could be boy or girl. But what disturbed me, as you suggest, was its indication of what was going on in the boy’s mind. He was seventeen or eighteen then—a late adolescent.”

“How long did he stay with you?”

“Several weeks. My husband got him a part-time job at the branch library. Very little money. All this was before he made that remark about the birthday card. Teddy was in the eighth grade then, and not very good at English and composition. He helped her a good deal. He wrote very nicely—some excellent verses for a boy his age—delicate things, very much like him. I don’t remember just when he said that, but after it I made a point of being near by whenever they were together, and I watched him. You know how disturbing something like that can be to a mother. I’m certain there was nothing secret between them. I have always been very frank with my children. I have an older son, too. Tim occupied his room, in fact. He was in boarding school at the time. Well, about the time I started watching him, he took to staying out rather late at night. I thought that strange as he had no friends outside of ourselves that I knew of, except at the library. To make a long story short, Father, I was much relieved when he told me one day that he was leaving. I was very fond of the boy, please understand, but uneasy. I began to wonder if we really knew the truth about him.”

“I suppose, when he came back, he again wrote a letter—this time to the seminary?”

“Yes. And again mailed it himself. I suppose that if he had not left us when he did, I should have taken it upon myself even at that late date to write the seminary about him.”

“It might have been well,” the priest said, thinking the words sententious as soon as he had spoken them. “I mean it’s always well to know something of people you take into your home,” he amended.

“Are you that careful, Father?”

She had faced him with the question and he felt the color rise to his cheeks. “No, I’m not. It was a stupid remark. Under the same circumstances I’d have done what you did.”

“Tim was a good boy,” she said. “I’ve always believed that. He may not have had much courage, but I don’t think courage is the greatest of virtues. And I’m quite sure it was part of his innate decency that made him move from here. He understood my feelings—and his own, whatever they were. I know he was devoted to Teddy, and she to him. The amount of time she spent in the library after that was amazing. Then we let her go away to high school and that pretty much took care of it.”

“Where did he go after he left you, Mrs. Benedict?”

“He used to come back to visit once in a while. He found a room over a shoemaker’s shop where he could stay for cleaning up the shop. And he stayed on at the library for a year, perhaps. I don’t know when it was that he stopped coming. There was a great scandal about then, a tragedy really. Mrs. Philips, I think her name was—the juveniles’ librarian. She was beaten to death one night on her way home from the library.”

Father Duffy felt a stiffening in his body, and a sort of helpless rolling in his head.

Mrs. Benedict was unaware of the effect of her words. “It was a shocking business. Her husband was arrested—a salesman. She had been seeing other men while he was on the road—young men.”

The priest controlled his voice with effort. “I suppose, along with everybody else who worked in the library, Brandon was questioned?”

“I suppose he was asked some questions. The husband killed himself in jail the night of his arrest. But it probably affected the boy. The papers were full of it.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“Only once. I went around to the cobbler’s shop, and he was mending shoes. The little Italian shoemaker had taken a liking to him. ‘He’s a good boy,’ he told me. I remember his accent. ‘Like my own son.’ When I stopped by a month later, he was gone. He had walked out as I suppose he did from the seminary. The old man wept telling me. We never heard of Tim again.”

In the afternoon Father Duffy canceled his railroad reservation and flew back to New York.

T
HE HOUSE ON EAST
Eighteenth Street was not as bad as Goldsmith had expected when he got below Gramercy Park. The gray stone front was scrubbed clean and the window curtains were stiff with respectability. So was the ornate sign:
MRS. MORAN’S THEATRICAL BOARDING HOUSE.
It was the sort of place he imagined to have thrived before the Forty-second Street theaters converted to movies. When he rang the bell a small-voiced dog responded. It continued to bark until someone came and evidently picked it up, for he could hear mothering noises although the words were indistinguishable.

A large, handsome woman opened the door, the fuzzy dog under her arm, tail to the front.

“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Moran,” Goldsmith said.

“I am Mrs. Moran.” She said it in the grand manner and looked down at him graciously, for all the world as though he were a whole audience. She had been on the stage in her youth, he decided, and had retired from it to run a boarding house where she could “keep in touch.” Her hair was a white mountained pompadour and her face elegantly powdered and rouged. Her pendulum earrings glittered in the morning sun.

On a sudden impulse he decided against asking her about Brandon directly. “I’m Ben Goldsmith, Mrs. Moran, homicide division of the police.” He showed identification. “I’m working on the Dolly Gebhardt case. I wonder if you read about it in the papers?”

“Very little to read, I should say. Won’t you come in?”

She led him through the vestibule into a large comfortable living room. There was a faded richness to it, the lace curtains and the doilies, the worn oriental rug on the floor. He could see the long mahogany table in the dining room and the circular windowed cabinet for dishes. Somewhere upstairs a soprano was warming up. Mrs. Moran set the poodle on the floor and gave his rump a shove with her hand that sent him almost to the dining room. “Run and play, Patsy. The gentleman and I wish to talk.”

The dog gave a whimper of protest, shook himself, and went to the back of the house.

“Miss Gebhardt did live with you, didn’t she?” Goldsmith asked.

“Yes. I think it was she.” Mrs. Moran arranged her ample body in a chair and motioned him into one opposite her. “She was not Dolly then, however. Doris, and a respectable sort of person when she came. I have only respectable people in my house, Mr. Goldsmith.”

The soprano chipped off a high note. “I believe you,” he said, grinning.

“She does hit clinkers now and then. It’s really a nice voice—when she sings, that is. She has an audition this afternoon for a new musical. So excited. Oh, my dear boy, the celebrations and the mournings I’ve been a party to in this house.”

“You were in the theater yourself, weren’t you, Mrs. Moran?”

“How did you know?”

“Call it instinct—and the picture above the mantel.” He nodded toward a well-corseted ingenue with a rich brown pompadour.

She smiled broadly. “I’ve changed a great deal but I’ve managed to keep young with young people about me.” She sighed. “Though I sometimes wonder if anyone in the theater stays young for long any more.”

“Dolly Gebhardt had a hard time doing it.”

“Not as hard as some, I’m sure. She was a blonde in the days we knew her, by the way.”

“That was in 1943, wasn’t it?”

“Earlier. She came here before the war, I know that. The Sunday we heard about Pearl Harbor, I remember her sitting right here with us.”

“Was she working then?”

“An occasional night club booking. She could have managed.” Mrs. Moran insinuated her meaning into the words.

“But she didn’t,” Goldsmith said.

“Well, I’ll say this, Mr. Goldsmith: she was no hypocrite. I’m not going to cast a stone. I’m not a fool. I’ve seen the scales in this business balanced by a lot of things. They say talent gets its reward. Well, I know where a lot of talent tests occur, and it’s not behind footlights. I suppose it’s the same in other professions. I just happen to know mine. Gebhardt wanted money. I don’t know why. She wasn’t greedy. She had no great notion of her ability as a dancer. I just don’t know. I often said to her: ‘Doris, if you had money, what would you do with it?’

“‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have some fun. There’s a lot of things I’d like to do. There’s some people I could help …’

“‘Don’t sell your soul to buy peanuts for the monkeys,’ I told her. That all came about because of a little fellow she was forever helping out, a nice enough boy, but scarcely worth a turn—well, you know, officer.”

“I know,” Goldsmith said. “Tell me something about the young man.”

“Tim his name was. I can’t even remember his last name. He came to the door one night and asked for her. She talked to him for a while and then she asked me to give him something to eat. ‘A poet,’ she said to me, ‘down on his luck.’ It’s a very sad commentary on our world, but if there’s anyone less in demand than an actor, it’s a poet. Well, to make the short of it, my husband gave him a cot in the basement, and he stayed with us for quite some time—in fact, until after Gebhardt herself was gone.”