Gentle Murderer (3 page)

“Then I’ll go out myself,” she said petulantly, her chubby, jeweled hand not moving from the railing.

Tim could feel a knot of revulsion rising in him. He shook his head and shivered. Easy, easy, he told himself. This always passes.

“Don’t you care whether I go or not?”

Go to hell and good riddance, swiller of wine and men, he thought. He choked out the words: “Send Johnny.”

“You’ll hurry before he comes back?” Her hand slid down the railing with a slow sensuousness.

He plunged toward the bathroom without answering.

In his room, the door open, Katie pulled his tool kit from beneath the bed and laid the hammer away in it, refastening the strap around the canvas. She took a shirt from the hanger on the pole that was stretched between the walls in the corner of the room. The other of the two shirts she had ironed for him that day was hanging there, as was his other pair of army suntans—his complete wardrobe. It was then that she wondered what he had done with his third shirt, the clean one that he had put on that afternoon. He was wearing a tee shirt now, and that so soaked with sweat it might have been wrung out in the sink and put back on without looking any different. Her thoughts drifted from it to the shirt she now laid out on the bed for him. She unbuttoned it and smoothed it out, feeling of the kind cleanliness of it, and relishing it as she so relished the same virtue in Tim. He was the one clean thing, she thought, in a world very much in need of scrubbing.

She went to the mirror and pushed up the waves in her black hair. She touched her lipstick on her lips with her little finger, spreading it where a little had congealed in the corner of her mouth. There was a faint scent to her hand, the same as she had noticed on Tim’s hand … Putty, she thought, or some such pungent stuff as would cling to the hammer from his work. She lifted her hand again and smelled it, and then put it from her, lest straining for the association she lose it altogether. Humming “When I Was a Fisherman,” she left the room and went downstairs.

F
ATHER DUFFY HAD THE
six o’clock Mass that Sunday. He had no more than fallen into a sodden sleep when the alarm clock wakened him. He was conscious several seconds before he could identify the sound. Whatever his dream, his first waking thought was that he was lying on the sidewalk somewhere, unable to move for a weight that was holding him down. He recognized the ringing then and was completely awake. Before he reached it, the alarm had rung out.

Raising the window shade he looked out on the deserted street, the night’s debris its only ornament. In another hour or so, the kids would gather up the beer cans and build skyscrapers with them, and they would harvest the bottle caps and count them into imaginary cash registers.

A police prowl car drove up to the call-box on the corner, and Father Duffy permitted himself his first fully formed thought of the man with the hammer: where was he at that moment? He shaved, showered and dressed, forcing the thought from his mind, calling on God and all His saints for help. He tried to fill his mind with prayers, and, in final desperation, repeated aloud to himself the prayers he had learned in childhood, pausing with each phrase to evoke from it an image. It was like thumbing through a box of old holy pictures, and he found himself hastening from one to the next without prayer, only with curiosity. It became a child’s game, and his mind sought then for a child’s saint, and he was again with the gentle St. Francis … and the gentle murderer.

At the altar, each time he turned upon the worshipers he scanned their faces, hoping fervently to find among them the man he had likened to St. Francis. He was sure now that he had not gone to the police. Sure? Fearful that he had not. Again and again, he strove to put the torment from him.

The Mass finished and his thanksgiving said, the priest abandoned himself to his troubled curiosity. He walked to the corner and bought a newspaper. He returned with it to the rectory, and in the study paged through it. Murder, rape and assault were not nearly so remote as he had thought. They were almost as conventional to Sunday breakfast as the comics. They were even conventional to some of the comics. But none suited the description of the one confessed to him.

Monsignor Brady looked in on him, frowned, bade him a curt greeting and moved on. He turned back then and told him that his nephew, who was also a priest, was visiting with them, and asked if Father Duffy minded giving up his nine o’clock Mass to him. The young priest agreed. When his superior left, he lit a cigarette. A few minutes later the housekeeper, as though she had smelled the cigarette smoke, brought him breakfast on a tray. Once more he turned on a radio and waited for the news. It was actually less than twelve hours since he had heard the confession. He seemed to have carried the burden much longer, so much longer, in fact, that for a few seconds he permitted himself to wonder if it had really happened at all, if he had not imagined it. But the face as he remembered it was real, and the words began to sound again in his mind. His mother had given him a hammer … St. Joseph was a carpenter … the only thing she had ever given him … his first confession … Father McGohey … McGohey, MacGoughy, McGooey … he had lost a fight …

Father Duffy emptied his coffee cup and got up. He turned the radio up only to find music still playing and then down again to a volume that only he might hear. He had been assuming that the man had come to the confessional almost directly from the murder—that was because he was carrying the hammer. Perhaps the man was carrying it as a symbol of his guilt: something to strengthen his resolve, something to show to the police. The murder might have been committed long ago …

Something else occurred to him then: the whole thing might be a horrible hoax. There might have been no murder at all. The supposed penitent might have been someone under the influence of God knows what, carrying on a private and deranged grudge against the priesthood. Things as fantastic had happened before.

Murder, he thought grimly as he glanced down at the paper, was far less fantastic. He turned up the radio as the hour signal sounded. Nothing for him.

“Nothing for me,” he repeated when it was over.

What
was
for him, then? He could find out from some source or other what murder might have been committed with a hammer that was unsolved, or perhaps wrongly solved. And if there had been a murder last night, as yet undiscovered, he would learn of it soon. There was obvious haste in reporting such news. But in either instance, what
was
there for him? His vows prevented him from going to the police. And could he go, what could he tell? That a man unknown to him confessed the murder? Beyond an imagined likeness to the holy picture concept of St. Francis, how could he describe the man? Walking down Ninth Avenue to Forty-second Street and across to Broadway, would he not see a hundred faces whose emaciation and aged youth likened them to that same concept?

There were other ways of identifying a man. The top comic sheet taught even children that police did not rely on faces to identify criminals. They looked for fingerprints. Among the hundreds on the little ledge in the confessional box, uppermost were those of the man with the hammer.

He left the newspaper on the tray for the housekeeper, and hastened to the rectory basement. There he got a screwdriver, and, during the eight o’clock Mass, he slipped into the confessional and removed the small board. At the other side of the church, Father Gonzales was hearing confessions. There had been no one on Father Duffy’s side since the last penitent of the night before. Careful not to touch the upper portion of the board, he tucked it into the folds of his cassock and carried it to his room.

T
HE EAST SIXTIES ARE
almost another world from the west sixties in New York. More than Central Park divides them, although less than a five-minute bus ride spans the geographic difference. That morning Norah Flaherty brushed her six oldest children out of St. Timothy’s after the seven o’clock Mass. She bought them a Sunday paper, forbade them the funnies until they were home, arbitrated the order in which they were to see them, and herded them along to Sixty-fourth Street two abreast and up the walk-up single file.

She sipped a cup of warmed-over coffee while she cautioned the oldest girl on the do’s and do-not’s of the day, the most important of which was that they might play in the bathtub provided they put on their bathing suits, and provided the baby was not left in it alone. Also, they were not to waken their father. He needed his sleep, working on the night shift. She hurried out of the house then, hairpins in her mouth, which she fastened one by one into her tawny hair as she went down the steps. She caught the crosstown bus and five minutes later had crossed into that other world. Invariably she got out at the front of the bus and thanked the driver.

His answer varied as little as her exits: “Take it easy.”

She hesitated on the curb to figure the ways of the traffic light. The bus driver waited, too, watching her. She drew a few deep breaths.

“My, it’s cooler over here,” she said up to him. “Sometimes I wish I could bring the kids.”

He nodded and waved her across the street. She went in the service entrance of a large apartment-hotel, getting a hat-tip from the doorman as he caught sight of her from his station at the guest entrance.

She spent the first two hours in the building counting the linen for which she was responsible, sorting and mending it. Actually this was not Sunday work, but she was very sensitive about disturbing people, and besides, doing it on Sundays saved a couple of hours for her family shopping during the week. Mrs. Flaherty considered it indecent for anyone to sleep beyond ten o’clock, however. Accordingly, she began her rounds at that hour, a great ring of keys in one hand and a bucket in the other, her arm stacked with towels.

At half-past twelve she knocked at 4-B, leaned back to select the key in the light, and then slid it into the door and let herself in. The blinds in the apartment were still drawn, and she clucked her disapproval as she switched on the light in the foyer. Having used almost every moment and motion of her life to advantage, Mrs. Flaherty humped the towels on the table, took the damp rag from her bucket while she lifted it over the threshold, and without wasting a step, wiped the smudge marks from the brass doorknob and its fittings, inside and out, and then from the panel at the light switch. She was meticulous in her work and proud of her shortcuts. She gathered the bucket, two towels, and went directly into the bathroom, which lay between the living room and the bedroom with an entrance off the foyer as well as the one off the bedroom.

She sang tunelessly that she might not take Miss Gebhardt unawares. The door between bath and bedroom was almost closed, but not quite. The slippered feet of Miss Gebhardt were visible to Mrs. Flaherty just off the bed.

There was nothing gentle in the way she closed the door between them. She had no use for women who fell across their beds at night unable to take their shoes off, and in her weeks of cleaning she had formed a very low opinion of Miss Gebhardt and the rowdy company she found evidences of. Nor did she like people who had no regard for those working for them—“no more than they were dogs.” The bathroom was a mess, an empty soap powder packet on the floor and part of the powder spilled, wet towels lying in the tub, rusty-looking at that. An altogether distasteful job lay ahead of her. She clattered about it noisily, and thought of the things she would say to Miss Gebhardt if “that one” were to come to and complain of the racket.

The devil himself could not waken Miss Gebhardt apparently, and Mrs. Flaherty finished the bathroom and moved into the foyer once more. She had wrung out the towels and carted them now to the laundry chute. She caught one of the porters rolling the refuse barrels to the elevator and dumped the waste into it.

When she returned to the apartment and got as far as the kitchen the telephone rang. She wished that she were done now, that she might slip out without meeting Miss Gebhardt. It occurred to her that if she hurried she might make it. Having an extension phone by her bed, “that one” would lie there a half-hour talking into it. But the phone continued to ring.

Mrs. Flaherty grabbed her rag from the bucket and wiped the dust from the window sill and the door. She gave the fixtures a quick polish. If the one in there could stand the phone ringing, she could. She wasn’t going to touch the sink, she decided, seeing the array of bottles and glasses. Nobody said she had to do their dirty dishes after them. The phone persisted. The gorge rose in her, as she often said of irritations, and she stomped out of the kitchen and down the three steps into the living room. She caught the phone as though she would choke it.

“Hello?”

“Dolly?” The man’s voice was impatient.

And well it might be, she thought. “This is not Dolly. It’s the maid.”

“Then be so kind, please, as to ask Miss Gebhardt to take the phone.”

“If she isn’t taking it after all this time, I don’t think she wants it.”

“Will you ask her, please?”

“I’ll ask her,” Mrs. Flaherty said after an instant. I’ll ask her all right, she thought. She was becoming curious about Miss. Gebhardt. She wanted to see how anyone could lie next to a wailing telephone and do nothing about it. She was up the steps when she thought of something and went down them again. “Who do you want me to tell her is calling?”

She received no answer. “Hello there?” And after a moment: “Are you still not there?”

“I still am here and expect to be until four o’clock. What do you want, Mrs. Flaherty?”

“Is it the desk? There was a man on here asking for Miss Gebhardt.”

“I know. He must have hung up. He said she’s a heavy sleeper.” The clerk giggled.

“I’m hanging up,” Mrs. Flaherty said and did so, resolving never again to pick up a telephone where she was working.

She drew the blinds in the living room, thinking about the incident. The clerk was on to Miss Gebhardt. She probably slipped him a dollar now and then. She was generous. That much you had to say for her. By the clerk’s tone, he recognized the caller. She had excuse enough to go in and rouse the sleeper, she reasoned, or to pretend to that intention. The clerk could tell who it was that called, she might say, and it sounded terribly important.