Gentle Murderer (9 page)

Taking them with him, he went out and locked the door.

I
T RAINED THAT AFTERNOON
, a great burst of it at first that presently spread into a steady, gentle fall. Of all the people who welcomed it, none was more grateful than Tim Brandon. He had been sitting in a little park when it started, aware of everyone else who was sitting there listlessly, and thinking that everyone was aware of him. When the rain came, he felt it like a curtain about him, through which he could peek at others, safe himself from their prying eyes.

He watched the puddles form in the pavement, and remembered the patches of ice he had run and slid upon as a child. The little air bubbles in them had looked like nickels and quarters. He turned over the money in his pocket now, a crumpled dollar bill, a fifty-cent piece and four pennies. It was every cent he had to his name. He got up and shook the rain from his hair. He began to walk, holding between his shirt and his skin, under his arm, a wad of damp papers.

Street after street he walked, gradually corraling his thoughts from Mrs. Galli, his finances and Katie. More and more he had been thinking of Katie these last couple of days, but she, too, had to be banished now. By late afternoon he was on the lower East Side, his mind charging ahead of him with the lines he wanted to put on paper. The pushcarts were covered with swatches of canvas and people huddled in doorways cursing and blessing the weather in one breath. Kids were damming the flow of rain in the gutters with broken plates, tin cans and bits of boxes, they were sailing match packets, the slime of the street oozing through their toes. The sight fascinated him. It drew him out of his concentration, and he stood on the curb, watching the muddy water play around their feet. Instinctively he drew the back of his hand across his mouth, wiping saliva and the rain from it. He knew in an instant the association it had for him and shuddered. He hastened on but felt the drag of his waterlogged shoes. The slippery feel of them revolted him. He thought he was going to be ill and leaned a moment against a lamp post, tilting his face into the rain.

The blessed rain was clean and fresh from heaven. It cleansed his mind and face. He watched a boy come out of the shop beside him, taking great bites out of a frankfurter. His sickness was no more than hunger, he decided. He went into the shop and asked for one.

“Mustard?” the woman asked, holding the stick with a big blob of it dribbling off.

“Don’t!” He turned his head away quickly.

The woman shrugged. “If that’s the kind of stomach you got, I give you some advice. Don’t eat frankfurters. Ten cents, please.”

He gave her the fifty-cent piece and got his change. Taking the sandwich out with him, he walked another block and then crossed the street. There, in the shelter of the Williamsburg Bridge, he sat down on a pile of old sewer tiles and ate it.

He felt better then. He listened to the tumble and humping of traffic on the bridge above him, and glanced up at the giant frame of the structure. There was a wonderful grace and sweep to the arches that supported it. Closing his eyes and opening them again, he could imagine the colors of cathedral windows in the veils of rain. Gradually he once more composed his thoughts, and marshaled back before him the lines of the poem he had been pursuing. He drew the moist papers from beneath his shirt and a stub of pencil, sharpened at both ends, from his pocket. The blank pages he had folded into the middle were dry. He put them on top now, and began to write, using the top of a fruit box across his knees as a table.

As darkness drew upon the city, he bent closer to his words. Now and then he paused to scrape the pencil sharp on the rim of a pipe. His only interruption came from a bum who must have felt a kinship, for he started, “Excuse me, brother …” Tim gave him a quarter and kept on working. Finally he had no paper left. He whistled softly while he folded the sheets and tucked them away under his shirt once more.

Walking westward, he decided that he didn’t care if Mrs. Galli were home. In fact, if she were, so much the better. She would feed him and rub his hair with a towel. He would stay downstairs until after midnight, until she had gone to bed. If he could keep her from coming into his room, everything would be all right. Indeed, it was comforting to think of her warm hands on his chilled back, of the hug she might give him. Then he drew for himself the picture of Katie, her solemn eyes watching him. He imagined himself looking up at her and catching a flood of color in her face. All day, he realized, he had been waiting for the indulgence of this moment—when he would permit himself long thoughts of Katie. He quickened his steps. In a flash of memory, he watched her go down the aisle to Communion that morning and recaptured her radiance on her return from the altar and the sense of exaltation that surged up in him with his awareness then of her presence and the Lord’s beside him.

He could not regain the thrill of memory but that once, try as he might. Its fading depressed him a little. He blamed himself for his failure of concentration. All his life, he had failed in that. If his will had been equal to his wish, the world would have been shot through with his poetry even as the heavens were shot through with stars. And that thought was a diversion … a diversion of a diversion. Thoughts sifted through his mind like sand through a child’s fingers. He remembered lines from Poe: “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

By the time he turned into Twelfth Street his spirits were as heavy as his shoes’.

There was a low light in the living room from the lamp in the corner by the piano. The outside door was open. A light was on in the hall, also, but the kitchen was darkened, a bit of linoleum shining a reflection of the hall light. Mama Galli was not home. Tim paused at the foot of the staircase. The sliding door to the living room was open. He caught the pale reflection of himself in the mirror over the fireplace. He caught some other movement also, movement within the room on the sofa which crowded against the wall, its arm by the door. The light was insufficient to define it. He was about to go upstairs, his hand already on the railing when he heard giggling. It was Katie.

He returned to the door and looked in. He could scarcely see the girl for the bulk and position of the boy holding her. Katie looked at him over the boy’s shoulder, and while he stood there without the power of speech or movement, she pushed the boy from her and got up. The boy whirled around, saw him, and scrambled to his feet.

Katie threw her hair back and smoothed her dress. “Hello, Tim.”

He did not speak, looking from one to the other of them.

“This is Tom Crosetti, Tim. We graduated from high school together.”

Crosetti stuck a big hand at Tim, hiding his embarrassment as best he could.

Without a word Tim wheeled away from them. Katie caught his arm. In almost the same motion he turned to her, he slapped her hard across the face. The girl stumbled back from the blow.

“You little bastard …” The boy started for him.

“Don’t touch him, Tom!” Katie regained her balance and grabbed his arm. “And keep your filthy tongue still.”

“What is he, your father or something? What’s the matter with you?”

Tim groped his way out of the room and up the stairs, the words a whorl of color and sound in his brain following and surrounding him so that he could not escape them …

“Shut up, Tom! Go. Shut up and go home.”

“Look, little girl, you were asking for it, asking …”

“Go …”

“Tiger cat, tease, tiger, tease …”

Tim swung his door closed on the sound and leaned against it in the darkness. He fumbled inside his shirt and drew out the manuscript. He flung it toward the dresser, neither knowing nor caring whether it landed there. The numbness was going, everything inside him becoming an ache, the slow hard ache of grief that can’t be rubbed away. He made his way to the bed and sat down there, aware only of loss and pain.

Katie found him there when she knocked on his door, and, getting no answer, opened it. The light from the hall shone in on him. Without speaking, the girl went into the room and lit the lamp over his bed. She drew his hands away from his face and saw that he was crying, and then herself began to cry.

“Tim, don’t say anything. Just listen to me.” She turned her back on him. “It’s hard for me to say this. I wish you could help me. I know you don’t want to. I wish you did. I never let a boy touch me before. Not since I was a little girl. I didn’t then, but it happened. I never let it happen again till tonight. I didn’t really want it tonight. I hate him. I hate myself more. I waited all day for you to come home. I was thinking about you. I thought maybe it was you when he came. Then when mama went out he stayed. He put his arm around me once. I didn’t want it, but I thought I heard something. I thought maybe it was you again. I thought if you saw it … I don’t know what I thought, Tim. I just know I was thinking of you. All the time.” She swung around. “Why do you make me say these things?”

He got to his feet wearily. “You know I’d never touch you like that, Katie.”

“I know. That’s why it makes me feel so rotten inside. So dirty.”

“Poor little Katie. I’ve made you miserable, too.”

“No. I’ve done it myself. I had to spoil things. I’m no good. I’ve never been as happy with anyone as I am with you. But I had to spoil it.”

“It’s me that spoils it, Katie. You’ll know that some day. Don’t cry any more. Your face is red where I slapped you. Don’t you hate me for that?”

“I couldn’t ever hate you, Tim.”

“Thank you,” he said very humbly.

“Tim, you won’t hate me for what you saw tonight? You won’t shut me out of you for what I did?”

He smiled. “My dear, you are the light I live by. My life would be nothing but darkness if it weren’t for you.”

Her face was suddenly radiant, all purity, all youth, all beauty flooding it before him. He felt like flinging himself down in adoration before her, but he felt also that he must hold the vision before his eyes that he might take his share of it then to cherish forever.

“Tim, will you kiss me … just once?”

Their lips met gently, as soft a benediction upon each other as the rain that night upon the city.

G
OLDSMITH WAITED AT HEADQUARTERS
for Holden to come out of conference with the chief inspector. While he waited, he went over the file on Dolly Gebhardt—statements of witnesses, scientific reports, the summary of the medical examiner. His own contribution was negligible, He thought. That was probably the reason Holden had called him in. He could imagine the lieutenant’s reaction if he were to tell him he had been reading poetry. Holden came finally, whistling.

“I thought maybe they were putting the heat on,” Goldsmith said.

“For Gebhardt? You know better than that, Goldie. The old boy’s happy with our handling of it.”

Goldsmith grunted. “It doesn’t take much to make him happy.”

“That’s my feeling,” Holden said. “I’m not as easily contented. How are you coming?”

“Something. Nothing. I finally got a line on a girl friend of Dolly’s.”

“Good. McCormick got a line on a boy friend. That’s why I called you in.”

“I was noticing him in the files—her host Saturday night, T. C. Loring, manufacturer of bedsprings. That’s a nice touch.”

“It’s not Loring I’m talking about,” Holden said. “He never met her. A blind date. Didn’t even have her phone number. He waited until eight o’clock, had his dinner alone—at your club—and then presumably found other entertainment. When he saw the paper Sunday night, he took the first train home to Toledo.”

“I don’t see where we’d get very far seeing him,” Goldsmith said.

“I agree. Even if we scared him into telling us where he got lined up with her, I think we’d find two or three go-betweens. We’d lose the trail before we got to the source.”

Holden looked at his watch. “The gentleman due here right now is Edgar G. Winters. He’s the unhappy owner of several sets of fingerprints in Miss Gebhardt’s apartment. The elevator operator recalls a gentleman of his proportions calling there Friday night, several Friday nights, in fact. His secretary also recalls taking six hundred dollars from the office safe for him Saturday. He called this morning and asked to see us. That’s the picture.”

“It’s a great omen, him wanting to see us.”

“Don’t be ungrateful, Goldie. He could clean this all up for us with a confession. Maybe he was jealous.”

“That naïve he can’t be.”

Within five minutes Mr. Winters arrived, white-haired, portly and very nervous. Holden waved him into a chair and rang for the stenographer.

“This is a terrible business, officer, a shocking thing,” Winters started.

“Hold it a minute,” Holden said. “We need routine information first. Then, you understand, Mr. Winters, your statement will be taken down and you’ll be expected to sign it.”

“Will it go into the newspapers?”

“It might. That depends on a lot of things.”

“It will kill my wife.”

“Miss Gebhardt is already dead,” Holden said coldly. He motioned to the stenographer and began questions on age, occupation, previous arrests … Then he asked abruptly, “Where did you meet Miss Gebhardt?”

“At a party,” Winters blurted. “Yes, at a benefit party.”

“For whose benefit?”

“I don’t know that. I’m invited to so many. My wife rarely goes. She is something of a recluse. Indeed, that’s why …”

Holden interrupted. “When was the party you met her at?”

“Two years ago. Yes, two years ago. It was a Christmas party.”

“This is August. Christmas came early that year?”

“More or less. I mean it was two years ago, more or less.”

“Obviously. Pin it down for us.”

“See here, officer. Be so kind as not to fluster me. I came in of my own volition, you know.”

“Be so kind …” Goldsmith thought. The phrase had occurred in Mrs. Flaherty’s testimony. “Be so kind as to ask her to take the phone …”

“A lot of people come in of their own volition, Mr. Winters,” Holden said. “Some of them confess to murder.”

“I certainly didn’t come here for that. I’m sorry I came at all if that’s what you expect.”