Gentle Murderer (2 page)

“God give you courage,” the priest said, “and me wisdom. I know you are aware how grave your sin is. You are truly sorry before God?”

“Father, I’m sorry that she suffered, that I made her suffer. I’m not sorry she died. There’s nothing dies but something lives. Don’t you see, I’m confessing everything that made me do this …”

“But you have blamed yourself for murder …”

“You’re mixed up, Father, and I haven’t got time to straighten you out …”

“There is time.”

“No. There isn’t. Just this once there isn’t. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have explained it all to you. Father, bless me. I’m going now.”

“God give you courage,” the priest repeated, for the man was already on his feet, his hands on the ledge of the window between them. “If you want me to, I’ll go with you, and you can explain it on the way.”

“You’d spoil everything by coming with me. Don’t you see? I’ve got to walk in there and say: ‘Here I am.’ Have you given me absolution, Father?”

“I’ll give you conditional absolution. I’ll visit you.”

The man had the curtain parted now. The pale light from one high chandelier silhouetted his frail shape, and for an instant Father Duffy saw something else; he was still carrying the hammer.

“I’ll offer my Mass in the morning …” the priest called out.

“You wouldn’t even tell me to go in peace. And you were right, Father. It wouldn’t do any good. There isn’t any peace on earth. Especially for men of good will, there’s no peace.”

When the curtain dropped from the man’s hand, it left the priest in darkness. And he had never known a darkness more profound.

W
HEN FATHER DUFFY LEFT
the confessional, only two people remained in the church, one of whom he knew to be blind, Mrs. Callahan. Every Saturday night she was the last one out of the church. Her son guided her to the next to the last pew early in the evening and then went down to O’Reilly’s Bar and Grill to pass the time until she was ready to go home. More than once Father Duffy had guided her along Sixty-third Street himself, and then up four flights to the small apartment she kept as neat as a match box, for all her blindness.

“Mind, it’s not that he forgets me, Father,” she would say. “It’s just that he forgets the time.”

The other occupant of the church was a younger woman who, as the priest went down the aisle, got up, genuflected and left. He did not recognize her and decided she had probably been walking down Ninth Avenue, and, passing the church, stopped in for a visit. As he heard the great door swing closed behind her, he stopped. Somewhere not far from there was the man with the hammer. The priest looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to ten. At most the man was no more than a few minutes away. Suppose he had lost his resolve to go to the police? By now he might be afraid of betrayal. Suppose she had looked up at him, or that he had thought she had looked up at him? Father Duffy lifted his cassock in his haste to follow her into the street. He slowed his pace on the church steps. The girl was talking with a young man who had obviously waited outside the church for her. They walked off, arm in arm.

“Well, Father, do you think the old lady’s got enough of them out of purgatory to suit her for one night?”

It was Mrs. Callahan’s son. The smell of beer was heavy on him.

“Well, she’s got you out of O’Reilly’s at least,” the priest said. “Good night, Tom.”

Inside the church again, he walked its length uneasily. Had he left the confessional at the same time Father Gonzales had left his, where would the man have gone? Directly to the police? Had he picked the church at random? Had he done his terrible deed in the vicinity? The priest laid his stole away and extinguished the church lights. He knelt a moment at the altar and then went down the darkened aisle and locked the doors. It was after ten when he set the lock in the side door by the sacristy and let it slide closed behind him.

A heavy breeze seeped up from the south, dank with the smell of fish and the sea. What oppressed him most was the conviction that the man was sincere in his confession, or at least in his intention—that he was aware of guilt and the need for retribution. It placed the priest under the seal of confession. He could not break it before his conscience. Nor was he expected under law to divulge his information—not even if justice or a human life depended on it. Whatever anxiety tortured the little man who trudged the streets of New York with a hammer in his hand at that hour, it was no greater than the burden of it he had placed on Father Duffy.

In his room he finished reading his office distractedly. He was sensitive to every sound of the city—the screeching brakes, running feet, a shout, a crying child, the rectory doorbell, Father Gonzales’s footsteps on the stair and past his door, Monsignor Brady’s door opening and closing at the front of the hall. In his shirtsleeves, he turned on the radio—music … hill-billy, jive and “music to read by.” Music to sweat by, he thought, plucking the shirt from where it clung to his back. He rubbed the aching muscles.

The minute-hand on his alarm clock lumbered toward eleven. It reached it simultaneously with the time signal on the radio. The newscaster began as he did every other night of the year. He numbered the global tragedies, fears and fiascoes, and finished off his reports with the metropolitan roundup—robbery and rescue, pathos and nonsense. Murder in New York was not among them. Nor was the word mentioned in the news summary at midnight.

As he turned off the radio he remembered the man’s last words: “No peace on earth, especially for men of good will.”

T
HERE WAS A PARTY
going on that night when Tim Brandon returned to the boarding house on Twelfth Street. There was generally a party on Saturday night. He could hear it half a block away. But then there were parties in most of the houses in the block, and with the windows open, the songs of one reached out to join the laughter of another. But Tim recognized Mrs. Galli’s voice. The laughter rolled up in her, shaking one layer in her buxom figure after another, and then exploded into the faces of those around her. They invariably rocked with it as though the whole room were shaking, even if they didn’t know what she was laughing at. Whatever Mrs. Galli did, the world did with her.

She had been calling up the stairs to him all night, Tim thought. The more wine she had, the more people she thought of to call into the party, and she would want him, especially him.

Her son’s concertina started as Tim went up the outside steps. He paused a moment and looked in through the limp curtains. “When I was a fisherman there by the shore …” Johnny Galli sang. He was a baker and the son of a baker, and if ever he had caught a fish he had trapped it in his mother’s goldfish bowl, Tim thought. He thought about goldfish and bowls for a moment, and how much like them people were, except that most of them didn’t know they were in the bowl. He knew it. It was why he liked the darkness and preferred to see a party from where he watched now. The chorus of Johnny’s song was picked up in Italian. The singers swayed with the music and closed their eyes, remembering the shore they sang about, the long white beach and the blue Mediterranean and the great gulls flying …

Tim was more weary than he could remember ever having been before. He entered the house and went upstairs unnoticed. In five minutes he was sprawled on his bed, clothes and shoes still on, and asleep.

He awoke suddenly to the sound of his name. He looked about the dark room frantically, trying to get his bearings, for he had been torn out of a wild and terrible dream.

“Tim, Tim, are you in there?”

He heard music now behind the voice and the knocking, and fumbled his hands over the bed. The tufted quilt was familiar. He turned his head and felt the coolness where the air sluiced his wet neck and forehead. He moistened his lips and breathed deeply. The knocking persisted.

“What is it?” he called out.

“It’s me, Katie, Tim. Mama thought you’d be sorry if you didn’t come down.”

“Just a minute, Katie.”

He groped for the light cord above his head and pulled it. Sitting up, he shook off sleep and the dream. “Come in if you want to.”

A slim, dark girl opened the door a few inches at a time.

“I didn’t want to bother you, Tim. But you know how mama is when there’s a party.”

“It’s all right, Katie. I’m just groggy with sleep. The light hurts my eyes.” He swung his feet to the floor.

She moved a pile of books from the one rocker in the room and sat on the edge of it tentatively.

“How do you feel, Tim?”

“How do I feel?”

“You had a headache this afternoon.”

“Oh. It’s all gone. I needed sleep. That’s all.”

“Wasn’t it hard?”

He felt a constriction in his breath as though a hand were at his throat. The dream seemed to be creeping up on him again. He fastened his eyes upon her to keep from being dragged back into it.

“Don’t look at me so funny, Tim,” the girl said. “I don’t see how anybody could fall asleep with all the racket downstairs.”

“Oh.” He sat a moment with his face in his hands.

“I’d better go downstairs.”

“Don’t go yet, Katie,” he said, making an effort to be congenial then. “Let me get awake. I’ll go down with you.” He got up and went to the window. He caught her reflection in it. She was watching him, unaware that he could see her. Her eyes asked him frankly to come downstairs for her sake, just to be in the room with her, like a protector. She had come eagerly on her mother’s errand. Something hurt him in the thought of it. It was too soon after the dream, gnawing as it was at his consciousness. He flung the window to its limits and leaned out.

“Look at the stars up there,” he said over his shoulder. “Like you could step from one to another of them and never stop going.”

“I’d like that,” she said, when he pulled back into the room.

He turned and looked at her. “Would you, Katie?” He answered himself, seeing the response in her eyes. “I believe you would. Just think. If we were doing that, we could reach down and pick up the earth and just toss it like a snowball.”

She giggled at the picture. “Where would you throw it?”

He thought about that a moment. “I’d smash it right in the face of the sun, I think. It would go f-f-ft and that’s all there’d be to it. You know that’s what’s going to happen some day. That’s how important the earth is really, Katie. A lot of people know that.”

“It’s more important to God,” she said. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Tim.”

“How can it be so important to God if it means so little to men? He’s got lots of worlds, and they’ve got only one.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Good. I hope you never learn it.”

“I’ll learn it,” she said proudly, “if it’s something to learn.”

He nodded. “Maybe. But I won’t be the one to teach you.”

“You’d better comb your hair. It’s all messed up.”

He went over to her then and brushed his hand against her cheek. “Poor little Katie. You don’t like to hear me talk like that.”

“Your hand smells funny.”

“Does it?” He drew it away and looked at it, turning it over slowly. “Have you ever thought about all the things a hand does, Katie? Without hands, how lost we would be! How would your brother make his bread? How would I repair things? …”

The girl got up from the chair and shook her hair out from where it clung to the back of her neck. Out of the habit of household chores, she straightened the spread on the bed.

“What were you doing with the hammer, Tim?” she asked, picking it up from where it lay with his jacket at the foot of the bed.

He did not seem to hear her, absorbed now in his own words. This was not unusual. She was accustomed to his ramblings, sometimes directed at her, but as often spoken as though she were not there at all. She liked it a little better when he was not speaking directly to her, in fact. Although she could not explain it, those times seemed to include her more than when he did talk with her. No one she had ever known talked like Tim. The boys she knew talked baseball, cars, hot bands and getting into the big time. When they stopped talking and looked at her, every fiber in her body tightened to its defense. First the eyes and then the hands. She was drawn to it and frightened of it, hating herself. It was like Tim was saying now …

“‘… And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee … And if thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee; for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body go into hell.’ What is hell like, Katie? What is it like when cutting off our hand is nothing compared to it?”

She was startled by his appearance when she turned to look at him. There were great hollows under his eyes and his whole face looked gray, almost green, slimy, swimming as it was in sweat.

“You better go to bed, Tim. I’ll tell mama. It’s after midnight, anyway.”

“No,” he said harshly. “I’ve got to have some music. I’ve got to sing. When I can’t work I’ve got to sing.”

He pushed the rocker out of his way and got a towel from where it hung at the side of his dresser. He looked at himself in the mirror and brushed the sweat away with the back of his hand. He caught her reflection in the glass.

“I frightened you, Katie. I frightened the little bird.”

“I’m not a little bird.”

“Oh? Have you grown into an eagle all of a sudden?” He smiled at her and picked up his toothbrush and soap.

The whole room changed when he smiled. “I’m a skylark,” she said, lifting her chin.

“Ah, that’s it. A little pilgrim of the sky.” He went to the door. “Don’t fly away until I come back. I can’t fly alone, you know.”

“Katerina!” The rich full voice of her mother boomed up the stairs.

Tim went to the head of them. “She’s talked me into coming down, Mrs. Galli. As soon as I wash my face.”

“Before you come down it will be already time to go up. The wine will be gone.”

“Then save a song for me.”

“Send her down, Tim. Maybe if she runs down to Krepic’s before he closes …”

“Not alone!” Tim shouted.