Gentle Murderer (21 page)

There was a curious hollow sound to her voice, and even in the fan of light she could see that his tool kit was gone from its usual place beneath the bed. She swung the door full open. His clothes were gone, the hangers stark in the empty corner.

“Oh Tim,” she whispered, groping for the cord to the lamp. In its first light she saw the pin-neat emptiness—except for his books. He had stacked them on the dresser, and between the cover and the fly leaf of the volume of Francis Thompson was a single sheet of paper on which he had written four words: “Katie dear, for you.”

That was all. No signature, no explanation. But that he was gone there was no doubt at all. Her own choked breathing was the only sound in the room. Why? Where? The questions whipped through her mind, uncalculated. There was only a knot of pain that would not be swallowed or dissolved.

“Katerina! What are you doing up there?”

She could only stand by the dresser dumbly, trying to rid herself of the choking lump.

“Come down. Do you hear me? Let Tim be if he wants to.”

She went from the room slowly, carrying the books. Her mother was halfway up the stairs. “Why don’t you answer me? You aren’t so independent you don’t answer your mother.”

“He’s gone,” Katie said flatly.

“All right. But answer me when I speak to you. Did you take those books out of his room?”

“He left them for me, Mama. He’s gone—left. Don’t you understand?”

“He’s moved out?” She started for the door to see for herself.

“Yes. His clothes, everything. Mama, did you nag him for his rent? Did you?” The tears had come, dissolving the lump.

“Don’t speak to me in that voice.” She looked from one corner of the room to the other. “Spit and polished. The little canary, the little half-a-man …”

“You drove him out, didn’t you, Mama? You’ve got to have real men at your table, don’t you? With hair all over them, coughing and belching and pinching your bottom. Yes! I’ve seen it. I’m not blind …”

“Shut up, Katerina.”

“I won’t shut up. You drove the only decent thing in this house since papa out of it. Just for a few lousy dollars.”

Mrs. Galli stood with her hand on her hips and stared at her daughter.

“Oh my God! It was him! I thought maybe you like books with him. Once I thought … but I couldn’t believe it. Look, Katerina. He’s not for you. It’s not right. He’ll come back. I know as well as I’m your mother he’ll come back. But you must get him out of your mind, little girl. He’s no good for you.”

“He is good. He’s a saint.”

“Then get yourself a sinner, Katerina. What do we know of him? A tramp who comes to the door for something to eat. ‘Let me have a room,’ he says. ‘I’ll pay you,’ he says. He doesn’t pay me fifty dollars in a whole year. When he makes money he gives it away. He even gave away the pipe when he fixed the plumbing downstairs. Pipe I was going to sell.”

“You reminded him of that, didn’t you, Mama? What do you know about the rest of them upstairs?”

“They pay their rent. That’s all. And they don’t look at you. I’m only trying to take care of you, Katerina. You don’t know about these things. Can’t you see?”

Katie’s eyes met hers boldly, evenly, and then fell away. She went to her room and closed the door. Mrs. Galli went to the room where Tim had stayed. She flung the window up, and then turned off the light. Going downstairs she got the vacancy sign and hung it in the front window.

T
HE FIXIT SHOP WAS
in the cellar of a West Thirty-third Street tenement. One thing sure, Goldsmith thought, Brandon wasn’t getting up in the world. A bell tinkled on the door as he shoved it open, and he got the smell of cabbage and old clothes so strongly that it was like a warm spray in his face. The Fixit was a junk shop where the owner bought rubbish by the wagonload, sorted it on the floor of his living room in the back and found a use for every tack and string of it.

Goldsmith looked about while he waited. No need for Mr. Fixit to be in a hurry. There was nothing worth stealing, and no one wearing a suit of clothes like his was there for anything profitable to Mr. Fixit. There was a window between the store and the living quarters somewhere in the blankets, coats and horse collars, and Fixit was taking his measure. Insurance, he was probably thinking, or selling vest-pocket comptometers that counted everything but cockroaches.

Finally Goldsmith walked toward the rear. As he expected, Fixit met him squarely in the doorway. A whiskered man, he was bent almost in two from the practice of his. trade. He had to cock his head, birdlike, to see his visitor’s face.

“Your service isn’t much good,” the detective said.

“I don’t sell service. What is it you want?”

Goldsmith showed him Brandon’s picture. “Ever see him?”

The man fumbled for the glasses, which hung from a string about his neck.

“Better take it to the light,” Goldsmith suggested.

The Fixit man cocked his head. “What you miss in the daylight, I see in the dark.”

Goldsmith smiled and waited. A tawny cat was washing itself on the table in the back room, surrounded by the supper dishes.

“Yes, I seen him. What about it?”

“When did you last see him?”

“Months ago—what is time?”

“In this case, quite a lot. I’m looking for him.”

“Police?”

“That’s right.” He drew out his identification.

The man brushed it aside. “If you find him, I wish you’d find my horse at the same time. He took it out one day and came back later and said he’d lost it. I ask you, how can a man lose a horse in New York?”

“Are there such things as horse-pounds?”

“All I know, some peddler maybe got himself an animal just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Do you know how long I have to work to make the price of a horse?” He took an old raincoat from a rack. “For this I’ll get two dollars, lucky maybe, and if I don’t die before I sell it and if it don’t rot before it gets bought. For this, twenty-five cents.” He picked up one rubber.

“You don’t have to wait for a one-legged man to come along, do you?”

Fixit threw the two items on a packing box that served as a counter. “I have to wait for another rubber. How is it people always lose their right rubbers? Six right-footed rubbers I got.”

“How did you happen to trust Brandon with the horse?”

“He knew where he could get me a load of lead pipe for nothing.”

“Where?”

The old man shrugged. “That wasn’t any of my business. I know he could walk it. When he lost the horse, he carried it himself. Three trips a day, two days. He said the pipe would make up for the horse. He was right. It had asthma bad. On its last legs. But I thought about the people in this world dragging around on their last legs. Why should horses die easy?”

Until then he had not smiled at all. But he seemed to feel that in this he had made a joke. His stooped shoulders quivered with laughter and his lips parted over crooked yellow teeth. He poked Goldsmith with his glasses.

“When he brought me the pipe and I got it weighed up I let him alone on the horse. Maybe he’ll tell me, I thought. I got the idea, see, he just walked it over to the humane society and delivered it. All I wanted was the price of the hide. I’m entitled, ain’t I? Oats, hay …”

Fresh air and water, Goldsmith thought. “Where did you pick up Brandon?”

“He came around, offered to do odd jobs. I had to give him something to put on his back—and in his stomach. Lord, God, he was a misery on two feet”

“All right,” Goldsmith said. “Try and tell me the last time you saw him. Winter? Summer? Christmastime … spring house-cleaning, moving days …”

“Wait, wait, wait …”

The old man pushed by him and went to a rolltop desk in the corner of the shop. He lit an overhead lamp and adjusted his glasses. He glanced at the detective. “He was very handy fixing things. He put in this light for me. Did all the lights in the place.” He motioned toward the front of the shop. “There’s some magazines up there. This is going to take a few minutes.”

“I’m all right,” Goldsmith said. He watched the man unlock one drawer and take a tin box from it. He unlocked that and drew out some papers. His tongue worked all around his mouth while he searched through them.

“I got it,” he said at last. “Spring, 1949, he was still here, but not long after. He got himself a job for his room down a ways …”

“How far down a ways?”

“So far he could walk it in a half-hour. I remember him asking the time. Had to be there by three o’clock. He started two-thirty. You can see I forgave him the horse.”

“I can see,” Goldsmith said. A half-hour’s walk downtown from here just over a year ago. “Thanks very much.” As he reached the door he called back, “You’re sure of that date?”

The Fixit proprietor nodded and showed his teeth in a smile. “I took a loss on the horse on my income tax.”

A
T NINE-THIRTY THAT NIGHT
Father Duffy was in his room. He had brought the week’s accumulation of newspapers up from the rectory basement and gone through them page by page. There was something terrifying in the fact that not one mention of the Gebhardt case appeared. Once more he experienced the sensation of unreality about the whole thing. Now in his own room with the grind and wheeze of the city beneath his window, the trip seemed a part of the dream from which he could not quite awaken. There was even a dizziness in his head as he straightened up at the sound of Father Gonzales’s step outside his room. He half expected to spiral out of sleep and dress for a sick call.

The knock on his door sounded reality for him. “Come in.”

“The man I told you about this afternoon is downstairs. Will you come down?”

“Will you bring him up? Give me a couple of minutes and then bring him up, please?”

“Up here?”

Father Duffy nodded, his heart pounding.

“Whatever you say.”

In the instant Gonzales left him, he doubted the wisdom of that decision. He had never felt so completely alone in his life. Once more he reminded himself of his duty to the man who came to seek his help. But over and beyond that, he was determined that Brandon this time should go with him to the police, or at least to some institution where attention would be paid him. That would be his key. The man wanted attention. He should have it. In the moment before his visitor’s arrival the priest got out the ledge he had removed from the confessional box. He laid it in plain view on the bed. If need be, he would confront the man with the fact that his prints were on it He arranged two chairs where they would sit opposite each other, the table between them.

“Your visitor, Father Duffy.” Gonzales opened the door.

Father Duffy hesitated only a moment, seeing Goldsmith. “Sit down, please,” he said mechanically. He sat down himself, stiffly erect, and waited. He had been living in a nightmare after all. This was normal, a stranger calling on him to talk of a mixed marriage, to take instruction, to enlist him in a citizen’s committee, a veteran’s committee … a complete stranger.

The detective sensed the situation instantly, glimpsing the newspapers and the oblong piece of dark wood. Although he had not quite planned it to this detail, he had intended to surprise Father Duffy, purposely withholding his identity from the other priest. Seeing the pale, sweating face opposite him, its muscles working in spite of great effort at control, he cursed himself and his job for its sometime cruelty to the innocent as well as the guilty. His greatest kindness now would be to ignore the priest’s confusion.

“I’ve come to you for help, Father. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” He did not look at the priest after that. He spoke quietly, identifying himself and his job. “Sometimes I get an assignment because I like people. I give them a break if I can. I’m careful and I can be trusted. So much for me. The reason I’ve come to you—I’ve got a notion we’re looking for the same man. In fact, I’m downright positive of it—not through any indiscretion on your part … pure coincidence that I found out. I was trying to study the man. I came on a poem he wrote.” Goldsmith shifted his position. “Came on isn’t the right words. I spent three days looking for it.”

He took the
Young Poet
from his pocket and opened it to “The Mother.” He slid it along the table to the priest. Seeing an ash tray, he lit a cigarette while he waited. “He doesn’t seem to think much of mothers,” he said when Father Duffy returned the magazine.

“Not much.” The priest accepted a cigarette.

“It struck me, reading it and talking to Mrs. Flaherty, that he could have been writing about someone in her neighborhood. I was fishing her for that when I pulled you in—quite by accident. By the way, she has the notion you’re out to clean up the town’s prostitutes.”

“What?”

“She thinks there’s no limits to the power you have.”

“There’ll be a very short limit if that gets to the Monsignor.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d be doing you a favor in suggesting to her that you were interested in only one prostitute. So I kept still.” He saw the trace of a smile at the corners of Father Duffy’s mouth, and knew then that his first estimate of the man was right. Under other circumstances, he was a regular—a right guy.

“I got to thinking about it, reading that poem, Father, and I thought maybe Brandon would come in of his own accord, if, say, a priest were to tell him something decent about his own mother—something that might change his notion about women. She’s in a convent herself now, I think.” He spoke easily, repeating information picked up for him first by the sheriff at Marion City and then by the Chicago police following in Father Duffy’s wake. “From all the other things I’ve found out about him, it seems to me that information should make him very happy. And, Father …” He waited then for the priest’s eyes to meet his. “It’s very important to keep that man happy until we can bring him in.”

“I see,” Father Duffy said. The initial shock of seeing Goldsmith was spent now. It was foolish for him to have thought that he was acting in secret. For all that he fervently intended secrecy, he could not deny the comfort he took from this sure, easy man across the table.

“I don’t say he intends to do murder again,” the detective continued. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend to then.”