Gentle Murderer (19 page)

“I wonder where she met him,” Goldsmith said.

“I’ve no idea at all—except that I don’t think it was in New York. But for the life of me, I can’t tell you why I’ve got that impression.”

“Maybe when he came to the house,” he suggested, “when she first saw him that night …”

Mrs. Moran nodded her head emphatically. “That’s it exactly. She was surprised to see him. ‘What are you doing in New York?’ That’s precisely what she said. My, aren’t you clever, Sergeant?”

“Not very,” the detective said. “The first and last words are pretty handy keys. The trouble is, the last words aren’t overheard very often. While they were both here, Mrs. Moran, how did they behave toward one another?”

“I’d say she tried to take care of him. He was like a friendly puppy, always looking for a hand to pet him. As a matter of fact, he rather looked for it from me after Doris left. But I have children of my own—four of them—and I was thirty-eight when the first one was born. Isn’t that something?”

Goldsmith nodded that it was. “Why did Dolly leave?”

“To move Uptown. She needed privacy, and, well, I needed the room. She was getting so many calls—and no show. I didn’t like it. I liked her, though. But on account of the children and all, I finally spoke to her. She had already set up the place for herself … where it happened. It was a sad day. I should have much preferred to see her take the bus back to Minnesota. How many kids go home after a try at it. Not Gebhardt. She had to beat it, one way or the other.”

Mrs. Moran was growing emotional in her reminiscences. She fumbled about her breast for a handkerchief and then blew her nose. Why, Goldsmith wondered, did people think in terms of beat or be beaten. “And the little man,” he prompted. “He stayed on with you?”

“For quite some time. In winter he stoked the furnace. When he wasn’t busy, he’d sit down there scratching verses on wrapping paper.”

“Tell me something, Mrs. Moran, did he know the occupation Dolly turned to?”

“It’s funny that you should ask me that. I don’t think he had any notion of it at all. But something strange: how I decided that Tim should go. I have a daughter—Sarah. She’s married now but she was about fifteen then and sometimes I’d notice him looking at her. Then I found him saving her school papers from the waste basket. And if he was outdoors and she walked by, he would stop his work and look after her. Now that, you may say, can happen with any man when a pretty girl walks by, and my Sarah is pretty. But when a man who doesn’t know a prostitute from a virgin starts looking at your daughter like that you do something about it.”

“What did you do?”

“I sent him packing.”

“It might have been a good idea to call the police.”

“Why? He didn’t touch her. Can you imagine what the cop on the corner would have said if I’d told him? ‘Lady, go wash your mind in a bird bath.’ That’s precisely what I’d have gotten.”

“I guess you’re right,” Goldsmith admitted.

“If he’d come back, then I might have done something about it. But he went out of here with his tool kit as meek as a lamb.”

“A tool kit?”

“Rolled up in sort of a canvas.”

“Any idea where he came from, Mrs. Moran?”

“No more than I have where he went to. But I don’t think he’d have had the strength to do a thing like—what happened to her.”

Goldsmith looked at her.

“It was he you came to ask about, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I got the address from a letter to him you returned to the sender.”

“From a poetry magazine. I remember it.”

“I’d like to go back to when he first came here, Mrs. Moran. See if we can pin down the date.”

“I’ve already pinned it down. It was during the first coal shortage of the war: winter of 1943.”

“And you knew Dolly pretty well then—to take in someone like that on her recommendation?”

“Yes. She’d been here a couple of years. I know that summer she’d been away to some country clubs. She danced a little. But mostly, it was glamor. We kept her room for her.”

“What country clubs?”

“I don’t know. Upstate, I think. She got the jobs through an agent.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I might if I heard it.”

“Dave Albright?”

“That’s the one.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Moran, was Tim a religious sort?”

“He was. He was running to church every morning.”

“How about Dolly? Was she a church-goer?”

“Not much. She had too much of it as a girl. Her father was the real old-fashioned revivalist. She would take a drink once in a while here—not so much. Sociability. And she would do her father getting saved on a Saturday night. The Lord God’s bringing me down the aisle, brother. Make room on the sinners’ bench. I’m in need of salvation.’” Mrs. Moran gave her own dramatic version. “Then he would go home and take his shaving strop to the children.”

“Nice,” Goldsmith said.

“Something happened one night that might interest you,” Mrs. Moran said. “We had a nasty scene with Tim and her. She was higher than usual and the higher she got the more abusive she was of religion. She said something about what she thought of the Saturday night breast-beaters, the Sunday saints. Tim took issue with her. He started preaching about rising to fall to rise again. Gebhardt didn’t care much about her language at times like that, and she said the word she had for it right out. Sarah happened to be there. Tim ordered the child to leave. Gebhardt needled him about protecting the innocent. He turned on her and slapped her across the face. She just looked up at him and smiled. ‘Want the other cheek, honey? I need a lot of saving.’ My husband finally took him from the room and I got her to bed. An ugly scene.”

Goldsmith took a cigarette and offered Mrs. Moran one. He lit them and studied the end of the match. “That looks like a beginning, doesn’t it?”

“God help us, it does,” she said. “I hadn’t realized how significant it might be.”

“No victims, no murderers,” he said. “Got any more pretty things like that?”

“No. Another such scene and my husband would have put both of them out. They apologized in the morning, Tim most abjectly.”

“I think that sounds like him, too,” Goldsmith said, thinking of Father Duffy. “How did your daughter feel about him?”

“She thought he was wonderful. That was one more reason I wanted him out. Girls of that age are real suckers for poets. She was always getting him books on her library card.”

Goldsmith took a notebook from his pocket and made a note. “Can you give me a description of him, Mrs. Moran?”

“I can do better than that. It’s a group picture, but he came out very nicely in it. One of the boys took it one Christmas.”

“M
R. ALBRIGHT DOESN’T ANSWER.
Besides, we have instructions not to ring him before noon.”

“This is Homicide,” Goldsmith said. “Get him on the phone.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll keep ringing.”

While he waited, the detective turned the group picture of Mrs. Moran’s Christmas party over to the photography expert. He pointed to Brandon. “Can you blow him up and bring it out clear?”

“Sure. He’ll come out nice and clean. Like Washington on a dollar bill—or is it Lincoln?”

“Just bring out this boy. How soon?”

“By tonight.”

By tonight, Goldsmith thought, watching the lab man depart. Holden was apparently busy at his desk, but he wasn’t missing a trick. Still seven years off Brandon and by tonight—tomorrow morning at the latest—Holden would demand that a general alarm be put out with the picture. The papers would have it. He listened to the monotonous droning of the phone.

Suddenly the receiver was pushed off the hook at the other end. There was no sound at all. “Albright?” he said. He repeated the name several times.

The hotel operator came in. “Mr. Albright’s taken the phone off the receiver …”

“Get him on that phone in five minutes or we’ll bring him down to headquarters. Maybe that’ll wake him up.”

The fuzzy voice of Albright came on then. “What do you want from me?”

“I want to know what clubs you booked Dolly Gebhardt at in the summer of 1942.”

“Oh, for Chris’ sake.”

It was some moments before Goldsmith coaxed and threatened him into coherence.

“It wasn’t clubs anyway,” he said at last. “I got her a hostess-entertainer job in a roadhouse—the Cabarino, a few miles this side of Albany.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Goldsmith sat for a few seconds, thinking about it.

“Want to put McCormick on that?” Holden said.

The sergeant was grateful for the suggestion. He had no time now for going back, however valuable the connection might be in tying Dolly and Brandon together. He made notes of the information he wanted. Waiting for McCormick, he called the librarian who had helped him in the first futile search for Brandon’s “The Mother.” He had not checked the possibility of a library card because when he was there he had not had Brandon’s name.

Brandon without books was a beggar without a cup, he reasoned, and if he got a card of his own it was probably after his stay at Mrs. Moran’s. That meant an address and a reference, a listed phone number. He hoped fervently that the idea was not a boomerang back to Dolly.

McCormick had come and gone, promising a preliminary report by that night, when the librarian finally called back. But the call was worth waiting for: a card had been issued to Timothy Brandon in June, 1944. His residence and reference were the same: care of Mrs. Gerald Fericci at an address on First Avenue.

N
EW YORK HAD NEVER
seemed so small to Father Duffy as when he saw it from the sky—a child’s model-city with squares and spheres poking upward—and never so large as when he drove through block after block of tenements on the way from the airport.

At St. Timothy’s he stopped in the church for a few minutes to pray. This was home, he thought, and his place at his appointed altar of God. That he should have left it to seek someone who had already come to him there now seemed the folly of a vain man. What turns and twists the conscience took, he thought. His own had urged him first to seek the man at his beginnings, and now it plagued him for not having waited where the murderer might have come again to him.

He wondered then if other priests in other parishes, perhaps in Cleveland, perhaps in New York, God knew where, had not suffered his same tortures, for there was something in the killer that made him feel righteous in his sin, arrogant in his humility. Somewhere in his warped mind, conscious of it or not, he took sadistic release in throwing the burden of his crime on the priest. Perhaps it was a vengeance for his own youth, his failures.

The first words of the Mass ran through Father Duffy’s mind: “I will go unto the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth …” What must Brandon’s thoughts be, he wondered, saying those words over and over? What a mockery he must make of them.

No. If that were so, he could not have persisted so long in his pursuit of God. It was no use trying to reason thus, the priest decided. He was judging the man, not finding him, nor helping him, and judging him by a behavior standard which was not applicable to him.

Leaving the church by the sacristy door, he met Father Gonzales. He was hurrying, about to go on a sick call and stopped only long enough to shake hands.

“Do you know if anyone was looking for me while I was gone?” Father Duffy asked, holding the door for the other priest.

“Yes. A man came by. He wouldn’t give his name.”

“Young? Old? What did he look like?”

“I haven’t time now. Old Mrs. Pedrosa had a stroke. He was thirty-five or so. Rather slight. I’ll see you tonight, Duffy …” As the door was swinging closed he turned, “He said he’d come back. I showed him the postcard you sent me.”

Father Duffy murmured his thanks to God as he went to the rectory.

T
HERE WAS A HOT
damp smell in the hall. The one window at its end was veiled with the dust of many summers and the rough yellow walls mottled with grease and smoke. From Harlem to here, near the Bowery, this was the typical entry to a First Avenue walk-up. Goldsmith tapped on the door and waited. Downstairs a store—grocery, tavern, pawnshop, junkshop, army surplus, clothier or restaurant, and beneath that, a cellar of rats, old bottles and the debris of several bankruptcies. He knocked louder and heard a child within calling its mother. A warped laundry rack leaned against the wall beside him, several pairs of damp socks hung on it, and beneath it, a scooter with one wheel missing. The detective pounded on the door and loosened his collar. He breathed through his mouth to keep the smell from his nostrils. A moment more of waiting and he would stride to the end of the hall and get some air into it if he had to smash the window. The long patience of poverty, he thought, and the slow breeding of grudge, envy and despair—the wedding bed of want and get where crime is begotten with petty politicians and crooked cops waiting to act as midwives.

Someone was coming at last, and why should she hurry? Each time an assignment took him into squalor, the bitterness came near to blinding him to the job. The door opened a couple of inches. A dark, thin-lipped woman looked out at him, her eyes angry.

“What do you want? You woke the baby.”

“I want to talk to you, Mrs. Fericci. Sergeant Goldsmith, police department.” He avoided “homicide,” and added immediately, showing her Brandon’s application for a library card through the door, “Do you remember this fellow?”

“No,” she said, even before seeing the card.

At the back of the house the baby was screaming. Goldsmith pushed the door open a little wider. “Well, let’s talk about Tim. Maybe it’ll come back to you. You see, your name’s on the card, too. I’ll wait while you quiet the baby.”

The woman gave ground before him. “My husband’ll be here any minute. Please go.”

“It would be better to talk to me now, Mrs. Fericci. I might have to come back when your husband is here.”

She was a young woman, in her early thirties probably. Her face was a little drawn and sallow, but there was a suppleness to her body.

“Wait till I give the baby her bottle, then,” she said. “I’ll hurry.”