Gentle Murderer (6 page)

“We could go into the parlor, Father, but we’d have to move Michael and Donel …”

“No, no, no. I’ve spent half my life in the kitchen, and I’ll only be able to stay for a few minutes.”

“It was me found the poor woman, you know, Father, and me in the house an hour not knowing … and handling them towels myself. As I was telling the girls …” She turned to her neighbors. “You won’t mind hearing it again?”

They shook their heads that they would not. They would hear it many times.

“It eases me some to tell it, Father, and it’s a terrible strain holding it.”

He nodded and settled in a chair by the sink, hearing the full story without prodding or subtlety. His tension mounted when she told of her interview with Lieutenant Holden. The priest recognized the visitor she had described.

“You’ve never seen the man around St. Timothy’s, have you?” the priest asked, trying to be casual.

“What would he be doing here?”

What indeed, he thought. “I don’t know. Things like that happen.”

“You don’t think he’s in the neighborhood, Father?” Mrs. Healy asked.

“No. Of course not.”

He had been and gone, the priest thought. He had groped his way across the park in whatever darkness had overcome him last night, and he had found St. Timothy a momentary refuge. There he had taken brief courage, and lost it once on the streets of New York again.

“He don’t sound like a murderer to me,” Mrs. Hernandez put in then.

“Where did you get the notion he was?” Mrs. Flaherty demanded. “It’s the furthest thing from my mind. And I made a point of it to the police, too. That kind had all manner of men hanging on her. Take the one on the phone. ‘Be so kind, please, as to ask Miss Gebhardt to take the phone.’” She mimicked his tones. “That gentleman is used to giving orders. I’ll wager a day’s pay … excuse me, Father … I’ll take my oath—he has a valet, a butler and a cook.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “And it’s a terrible thing to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had a wife. I ask you, what good is he up to, calling one like that, and calling her ‘Dolly,’ mind you, when I picked up the phone?”

“I have a sister called Dolly,” Mrs. Healy said with some indignity.

“That’s not my meaning at all. I worked for a woman once had one of them Mexican hairlesses—excuse me, Mrs. Hernandez—and called it Dolly. The point I’m making is he was on intimate terms with her.”

“Couldn’t that be your imagination, Mrs. Flaherty?” the priest asked. He had begun to sense Miss Gebhardt’s position and the suspects it would suggest to the police. But he had to be careful. He must not again say anything that might throw suspicion on the man who had confessed to him.

“Well, if it’s imagination, Father, the police have a share of it, too. If I was to nominate a candidate out of my acquaintance in the house, it’d be him. Didn’t he keep the phone ringing till it near put me off my nut? Didn’t he make sure I was going to call her, and how else would I call her if I didn’t go in where she was? Then didn’t he hang up the minute I laid down the phone?”

“I’m beginning to see what you’re getting at, Norah,” Mrs. Healy said. “You’d make a wonderful detective. He couldn’t stand waiting for her to be found, so he calls up and makes a fuss till you go and find her. Then he hangs up quick before anyone gets on to him. I heard the very likes of it on the radio the other night. The husband …”

“That’s my exact meaning,” Mrs. Flaherty interrupted.

“Wasn’t he the cagy one?” Mrs. Healy clapped her hands in admiration.

There was one question Father Duffy longed to ask, but the one he had asked earlier forestalled him. A few minutes later it was answered in the conversation, Mrs. Flaherty directing her words at him.

“And it wasn’t the little man I saw there called up. I’d take my oath on it. And I told that to the lieutenant.”

A
S SOON AS FATHER
Duffy left them, the three women swung about the table and relaxed.

“There! Wasn’t I telling you only yesterday,” Mrs. Healy said, “the clergy are into everything.”

Mrs. Flaherty drew herself up. “Who has a better right?”

Mrs. Healy made a noise of disgruntlement.

“On the contrary,” Mrs. Flaherty followed up, “I think it was decent of him to come climbing up here and sit down in the kitchen. There’s some I know wouldn’t come till you’re wanting Extreme Unction, and maybe getting here late for that.”

“All right, all right. I was only thinking on the queer tight way he was watching you tell the story.”

“It’s just the way of the man. He’s awful serious-minded nowadays. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was going on a crusade against that sort of woman.”

“I’ve seen a few on the corner I’d like to give him the names of, then,” Mrs. Healy said. “Standing there as bold as morning within a stone’s throw of the church.”

“What awful bad things they must think of,” said Mrs. Hernandez.

“It’d poison a pup, I daresay,” Mrs. Flaherty put in. “What gets me is wondering the kind of men taking up with them.”

“Them coming off the boats,” Mrs. Healy said. “They say during the war the soldiers were terrible …”

“That’s it then!”

“What’s it?”

“Father Duffy. That’s what he’s after. He was a chaplain in the army, you know. They say he hated it and he won’t join any of their organizations. That’s what it is. I’ve often thought to myself when some of them conventioneers are in town what they do to a decent woman on the street would turn your stomach. So what’d they do with one like that meeting her?”

Mrs. Hernandez shook her head. “They’re not all like that. My oldest son is a veteran.”

“Your boy could go through hell without getting singed,” Mrs. Flaherty said. “Oh, we’re going to get a fine sermon Sunday at the eight o’clock.” She rocked back and forth, thinking about it.

“The Monsignor won’t let him,” said Mrs. Healy.

“Then we’ll get it by the innuendo. You’ll see. And he’s the one to do it. The men will take it from him. They say when he was in the army the boys thought the world of him. He’d go through the barracks of a Sunday morning shouting: ‘Come on, you bloody heathens, get the hell out of your beds and into the chapel!’” She gave a great thump with her hand on the table.

“You’ll wake up the kids,” Mrs. Hernandez said.

“The kids? She’ll be waking the dead,” said Mrs. Healy.

“There’s one I won’t waken,” Mrs. Flaherty said in sudden sobriety. “But I’ll never forget the feeling—standing there at her door trying … And then when I went into the room …”

She was off on the story again from the beginning.

A
T EIGHT O’CLOCK THAT
night Lieutenant Holden returned to headquarters after a tardy dinner. Goldsmith arranged a series of reports before him, the autopsy findings on top, while the lieutenant called the chief inspector. Hanging up the phone, he wiped the sweat from his chin.

“That’s so the old boy can stick his feet back up on the railing and enjoy the sea-breeze. What a great night for something like this.”

“The only comfortable place I’ve been to today was the morgue,” Goldsmith said. “Which is a nice thought for Sunday. Want to go over the autopsy?”

The lieutenant picked up the report and read it through, now and then repeating a section aloud. Goldsmith was lining up photographs.

“Last meal about two o’clock,” Holden commented, “salad, greens …”

“A vegetarian, no doubt,” Goldsmith said.

“Some alcohol. Probably a cocktail or two. No more.” Holden looked up. “Would you say she was the kind to drink alone?”

“I doubt it. McCormick’s checking that. Also her shopping tour.”

“Sunday’s a tough night for that.”

“We’d like to find out if anyone was with her yesterday. There’s a set of fingerprints on her wardrobe door. It looks as though she’d taken somebody there to show him what she had in it, or maybe what she didn’t have. According to Flaherty’s cleaning schedule, those prints got there after Friday afternoon.”

Holden returned to the autopsy report. “The blunt instrument,” he murmured. “Hammer, butt of a gun …”

“If you’ll look at these pictures, Lieutenant, I think we can eliminate the gun. The depth of the wounds indicates more leverage than a gun would allow.”

Holden went to the wall board where Goldsmith had lined up the pictures. The sergeant traced the areas he wanted to call particular attention to. Holden nodded while he listened to Goldsmith’s theory. He returned to his desk.

“That would mean a mechanic’s hammer. Is that your idea?”

“It is. The medical examiner corroborates.”

“That would suggest someone who drives a car, maybe his own, maybe not. All it really suggests is someone who has access to a mechanic’s hammer. I suppose practically all the men she entertained owned their own cars?”

Goldsmith sat down on the corner of the desk. “We don’t know all of them yet. And I don’t think she entertained many of them at home. She went out on her important calls, though she may have had a regular or two. Before we get to the suspects I’d like to go over what we can of her activities Saturday.”

Holden agreed and Goldsmith lit a cigarette. “We know that she went shopping in the afternoon. I think she bought, or at least shopped for, something in fur. There was a newspaper in the living room opened to an ad for furs—Friday’s paper, by the way. Saturday she came home tired about five o’clock. She wasn’t feeling very well. As you can see in the report, she had a bad stomach. But she had a dinner appointment important enough to keep anyway …”

Holden lit a cigarette from Goldsmith’s. He had learned most of this during the afternoon’s questionings, this and a lot of things that were no doubt extraneous. He noticed that some of them were missing from Goldsmith’s recapitulation. He had pared off the non-essentials.

“Her date must have been for an early dinner,” the sergeant continued. “That inclines me to the opinion that her client might be an out-of-towner. I don’t think she rested at all then. She probably showered and dressed as soon as Flaherty left. I think she expected someone—but not her date. Whoever she expected was keeping her late. She smoked two cigarettes in the living room. The lipstick matches what she was wearing when she died. She wouldn’t wear that shade in the afternoon. I think she waited there in the living room as long as she dared without chancing to stand up her date … all dressed to go out, and carrying in her evening bag over two hundred dollars.”

Goldsmith flicked the ash from his cigarette into the wastebasket.

“That’s a lot of money to start an evening with,” Holden said.

“And to finish it with,” the sergeant added. “It was still in her purse, and the purse was open on the bed. But we’ll come to that presently. By a few minutes to seven she could wait no longer. She went out without leaving a message at the desk. In a way, that throws off my theory that she was waiting for someone, but I think she was, nevertheless.

“Outdoors, the doorman tried to get a cab for her, but she flagged a cruiser herself on the corner of Madison. Unfortunate. It may take a while to turn up the cabbie. She was gone no more than a half-hour when she returned, the cabbie helping her out of the car and upstairs. She had a shock, or else she really got sick. Probably that. The hotel employees tell this story. That would be a few minutes after seven. The doorman rolled the cab down the street away from the front door when the driver didn’t return quick enough to suit him. In fact, he doesn’t know when the driver returned. He didn’t think of him again till we started questioning.

“The cabbie didn’t take the elevator downstairs. The operator remembers a persistent ringing on the fourth floor a few minutes after they had gone up, but when he got down, there was no one there. It’s probable that the man was worried about his cab and ran down the stairs when the elevator was so slow. The stairs are clearly marked in the hall. And something we know now: the murderer used them.”

Holden looked at him.

“We’ve got the shirt he wore. It’s in the lab. A couple of hours ago one of the men picked it up behind some ash-cans at the service entrance.”

“He didn’t pick up the murder weapon, too?”

“Just the shirt. Rolled up in a ball. Washed and rolled up in a ball. He must have gone out of here in his undershirt.”

“Or naked,” Holden said. “I think he could have gone out naked for all the notice there was taken of him.”

Goldsmith smiled. “Possibly. The funny thing is, I don’t think he was trying to avoid attention particularly. I think a lot of things fell his way.”

“Then why didn’t he take the shirt with him?”

“That I don’t know.”

“I see you’ve eliminated the cab driver,” Holden said.

“I don’t eliminate him. He’s the best suspect we have at the moment. He might have returned …”

“Why not have killed her then?”

Goldsmith thumbed through the reports.

“There was a phone call to her apartment about eight-thirty. She was alive then. Alive and able to answer it. That’s all we know about the call.”

Holden drummed on his desk. “You don’t like the cabbie because of motive. Is that it?”

“Mostly. There’s no indication that the murderer was interested in her physically—at that moment. And there’s the money untouched.”

“At that moment?” Holden picked up.

“At that moment,” Goldsmith repeated. He rummaged through the photographs. “She was on the bed, not in it, fully dressed, as you can see here. There is every indication that she was murdered there. Apparently there was no struggle. It’s just possible that she was asleep. If she was, it means that after the cabbie left someone came whom she trusted. Maybe the person she expected earlier.”

“What was wrong with her?” Holden asked.

“An ulcerous stomach.”

“Nothing worse? Or nothing she could have thought was worse?”

“We’ll have to check her doctors for that.”

“You see what I’m driving at, don’t you? The possibility of a mercy killing?”

“If it was, it was done the most unmerciful way in history. I don’t think so, Lieutenant. It looks more emotional than calculated.”

“How about her date? Could he have come up there jealous?”