Gentle Murderer (7 page)

“I doubt it. Remember the shirt. But a lot of things are possible. I’ve no doubt you’re going to turn out some very fine gentlemen with those prints and that little book of hers.”

“But you don’t buy any of them, is that it, Goldie?”

Goldsmith shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.” He picked up a match from the floor and examined it almost as though it were a clue to the matter at hand. “Take the shirt the guy was wearing—cheap, worn, but there’d been starch in the collar. No laundry marks.” He looked up at the lieutenant. “Somebody was taking awfully good care of that guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if poor old Dolly tried it, too, in her own fashion. But she wasn’t the kind to dip his collars in starch. I wonder who is.”

“What size collar?”

“Fourteen and a half. A little man.”

“A little man scorned …”

“I wonder,” Goldsmith said.

“Is he the fellow Mrs. Flaherty described?”

“That’s quite possible, and to quote her on it, he was one man she entertained in street clothes. A brother to her.”

Holden got up and gathered the reports. “He’s your kind of guy, isn’t he, Goldie?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. I’ll put McCormick on the others. Unless they counter me from upstairs, he’s yours.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“Just keep in touch. That’s all. No secrets. Keep me posted.”

“Every step of the way.”

I
N THE BIG KITCHEN
of the house on West Twelfth Street, Lenore Galli sat beside the open window. A pile of socks and her sewing basket were on the table. She had not touched them. Upstairs a chair scraped across the floor and Tim’s footsteps began again, back and forth across the room, forth and back. Then quiet. She counted on her fingers the hours he had been working. It was ten o’clock now. Six hours.

She unfolded a pair of socks and used one of them as a fan. A cat whined somewhere not far from the window. The snarl spiraled into screeching that sent a bolt of pain to her head. The pain eased off. She sighed and listened to the scratchy flight of one cat up the withered catalpa tree near the window. Her body tensed as she waited for the sound of pursuit. The roughness of her fingers caught a few threads of the sock. She looked at her hands. Rummaging in the sewing basket she found scissors and cut away the hangnails and with the point cleaned beneath her nails. The screaming of the cats started again. Someone next door flung up his window and shouted out. There was a moment’s silence, then a low, persistent snarl. A few seconds later she heard a splash of water and the scurried flight of the animals.

She got up then and went to the kitchen sink, where she soaped and soaked her hands, all the while examining her face this way and that in the minor above the sink. She sniffed about herself for any smell of perspiration, and after she had dried her hands, dabbed herself with cologne. She combed her hair, straightening the part in the middle and then turned to look at herself with the hair flowing down her back. It was still a deep brown, although a few threads of gray shivered through it. After a moment of reflection on the way it failed to cover her thickening shoulders, she braided it up again: She rubbed her face in the towel and fluffed powder on it. There were no lines yet except the laughing kind, and her eyes were rich, shining limpidly back at her from the mirror.

She tidied the sink and went to the refrigerator. Taking a leg of chicken from it, tomatoes and preserves, she fixed a tray and took it upstairs. In the upstairs hall, she set the tray down for a moment on a little table. Katerina’s door was partly open. Her mother tiptoed to it and looked in. The girl was asleep, her light on, a book lying on the floor where it had fallen from her hand. Moving very softly, Mrs. Galli put out the light and drew the door closed.

Taking the tray, she went on to Tim’s room at the back of the house. “I’ve brought you up something to eat, Tim,” she said, opening the door before he answered her knock. “You need nourishment for all that work.”

He whirled around from the card table where he was working. The table and floor were littered with papers.

“I don’t want anything, thank you, Mrs. Galli.”

“Mrs. Galli,” she chided him. “I thought you were going to call me Lenore.”

“Lenore,” he repeated tentatively, his hands against the table as though he had retreated into it although he had not risen from the chair. He could smell the cologne on her as she advanced into the room ponderously.

“That’s better,” she purred. She set the tray on the bureau. “Too much work and no play … You didn’t come down for supper and you missed your dinner. There’s not much of you to begin with. But I never liked big men. I always liked that about you. You think less of your stomach than up here.” She motioned to her head with a jeweled finger. She rolled to the door and closed it, staying in the room. “You like to keep the door closed. I don’t blame you. I should get you a key. The palookas going up and down here wouldn’t understand the kind of work you do.”

All the while she spoke Tim cringed against the table. With the door closed she seemed to overflow the room like a genie rising from a bottle. “Go away,” he whispered to himself. “Please God, make her go.”

She stood at the tray now, opening a Cola bottle and pouring the liquid into a glass. Twice herself she was, reflected in the mirror. Looking at him through it, she smiled.

“I have a key for my room. It’s the only room in the house with a lock to it.” She turned and advanced with the glass in her hand. “Here, Tim. This will make you feel better. ‘Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, twelve ounce bottle, that’s a lot …’” she sang the jingle, the richness of her voice like the velvet color of the drink.

He leaped to his feet, his hip catching the fragile table and careening it over on two legs, the papers tumbling among the discarded sheets already on the floor. He went down on his hands and knees to gather them, eager to escape the sight of her for those few blurred seconds at least. His sweat dripped on the pages in his hand.

She set the glass on the dresser and squatted down in front of him to help, her dress a taut line across her knees. Tim spun away from the sight and sprang to his feet. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered hoarsely. His face was gray-white, the blue veins standing out on his forehead.

“Will you get up from there and leave me alone? Please …”

She leaned on the bed and hoisted herself up. She flung the handful of papers on the bed. Her smile was gone and some of the hair had straggled from the pins.

“What’s the matter with you? Am I so ugly? Am I so old?”

He shook his head. “No, Mrs. Galli, no, no, no.” He motioned desperately toward the tray. “Thank you for bringing that to me.”

“Mrs. Galli, Mrs. Galli! There’s more man in that cat scratching up the tree out there than there is in you.”

“Please,” he said, thumping the fat of his hand against the chair.

“Please,” she mimicked again. “It was please before and thank you after. I could take you in from the street all shaking like you had palsy. I could knit you sweaters and socks and darn them for you. I could put food in your belly and a blanket around you at night. It was please and thank you for all of that. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was,” he said more quietly. His pressure was easing off as her anger mounted. Her anger was easier on him than her affection.

“You liked my arm around you then. You let me take your hand. Put it where it’s warm. ‘Envelop me,’ you said. ‘Envelop me.’ I never forgot the word. I looked it up. A hundred times I looked it up.”

Her anger was easier on him, but not her memories. Tim moistened his lips and reached for the Cola she had poured for him. She slashed out with her fist and spilled the dark stuff to the floor and over his manuscript.

“That kind of refreshment I can give you, can I? Well, I’m telling you you won’t have it. You can lick it up from the floor. That’s what you can do. Get down and lick it up like a dog. Then get out of my house. Go and do your begging on somebody else’s doorstep. All your life you beg, don’t you, beggar-boy?”

She watched him gather the pages and wipe the Cola from them with his sleeve. Her anger snapped the instant she spilled over the glass. She turned from him, trying to hold a part of it to hide her rising shame. Catching her reflection in the mirror, she saw the red splotches on her face and the ugly sweat seeping through them. Her heavy breathing hissed through her teeth. Her mind churned wildly as she sought for words, for issues on which to abuse him.

“You think I don’t know what’s changed you. I seen you looking at her and her looking at you, and neither one of you looking at the same time.”

That thought seemed to revive her anger. She swung around and pulled him to his feet, forcing him to look at her. “She’s my daughter. Flesh of my flesh.”

“I know,” he said helplessly. “I know.”

“You want her, do you?”

His head shot up and he wrenched free of her grasp. He looked at her, and through her.

“I don’t want her. Before I would lay a hand on Katie I would cut it off.”

“I don’t believe it. You think she didn’t tell me. My Katerina don’t keep secrets from her mother. You think I didn’t see you coming out of the church with her. I did. I seen you get on the bus together. Coming home at three o’clock. Leaving me to stand over the stove. And I told her something, too. Letting me get old-looking when I’m not over forty-one. ‘Oh, Mama,’ she says, ‘why do you care how you look?’ There. That’s your fine young Katie for you. I’d like to see if she looks as good as me at forty. What were you doing in the park?”

“Talking,” Tim said. “Talking and walking, and then we ate a hot dog and came home.”

“You didn’t hold hands even, I suppose?”

“No,” he said, and then added wistfully, “we didn’t even hold hands.”

She believed him, and believing him, had nothing left for which to abuse him. Her anger was all spent even as her other emotion was spent in the anger.

“Is that poem about her?” she asked sullenly.

“In a way.” He laid the pages together on the card table as he righted it.

“Am I in it?”

“Yes. In a way you’re in it, too.”

She fussed about the dresser a moment, setting the glass upright. “It’s awful stuffy in here. I’ll open the door.” Her movements to the door and back were awkward. She fumbled with the dresser scarf, painfully aware now of her own awkwardness, her bulk. She was tired, conscious of the weight of her body in each part of it separately. “There’s some Coke left in the bottle. I’m sorry I spilled it over your poem, Tim.”

He permitted her to give him the glass. He drained it in one swallow.

“It’s the heat,” she said. “If it would just let up for a couple of days things wouldn’t choke up inside us. You need clean curtains. New York’s awful dirty in summer.”

“Thank you,” he said, giving the glass back to her.

“There’s more in the icebox. I’ll go down and bring you a bottle. Eat something here while I’m gone. Don’t leave it for the flies.”

He did not protest.

At the door she turned. “Tim, don’t put me in the poem like I was just now. It was the heat—and things.”

B
Y MONDAY MORNING CONSPIRACIES
and taxes had crowded the murder into the small subheads of the tabloid front pages:
CABBIE SOUGHT IN SLAYING
. On page three, however, the caption read:
FATHER REFUSES BODY OF MURDERED REDHEAD
. Only in the final paragraph was the theme of the front page explained: the cab driver was expected to throw some light on Miss Gebhardt’s activities on the evening of her death.

Father Duffy read the story through … Reached at his home in Little Falls, Minnesota, Albert J. Gebhardt, an iron-ore miner, commented on his daughter’s death, “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.” Dolly’s life was no secret to her father or to any of the other five hundred souls in Little Falls. Someone had visited her in New York and taken home a righteous story of her career. Since then, Albert Gebhardt did public penance for the sins of his daughter over a thousand miles away.

It was an odd twist on the Biblical prophecy of the visitation of one generation’s sins upon the other, Father Duffy thought. He dropped the paper in the wastebasket and went to his desk. There he composed a letter to the parish priest at Little Falls, acting on a hunch and inquiring if there had ever been a Father McGohey serving there. He gave the possible variations of the spelling as they came to him.

The letter sealed, he drew another piece of paper from the drawer and tried to recompose the distraught confession of the murderer … the hammer, his mother had given him one because St. Joseph was a carpenter … he wanted to be a priest … a prayerbook for his first Communion … the hammer … her windows always stuck this time of year … dirty again … the dream of slime … if I could just keep my mouth clean …

Bit by bit, the fragments came back to him, and he refashioned the story in all its incoherence. In a way it took on a strange logic of its own, the priest thought, especially in the association of his crime with early guilts in his life, early guilts and sufferings. He read through his notes and then juxtaposed the phrases to bring them as exactly as he could into the order he had heard them. He rewrote the confession and read it a few times, committing it to memory. Then he tore the papers into small pieces and burned them a few at a time in the ash tray.

He closed his eyes and remembered again the feeling about him in the confessional that night, the ache and heat and someone calling good night to Father Gonzales. For a moment he caught the outline of the man’s face as it was when he had first looked up to see if there were someone really there. He remembered his association of the face with St. Francis, and then with the faces of boys he had seen returning from their first experience under fire during the war.

Two thoughts out of the whole pattern seemed to converge for Father Duffy then. They had no right to come together because only one of them came out of the confession at all. The other was out of himself, his own character, prejudices, experience. But wherever the conviction came from, he was virtually certain in that instant that Father McGohey had at some time in his life been an army or navy chaplain, and probably in the First World War.