Gentle Murderer (22 page)

“Then?”

“Dolly Gebhardt,” Goldsmith said without looking up, although he noted the question. “He used the hammer there first to try and force open a window. But whatever his intentions, I think he reaches certain points of crisis where murder or suicide is the only way he can find past them. Maybe he intends to get caught for murder, to give himself up and get the chair for it. I’ve known cases like that. And then, of course, I could be wrong altogether. He could be taking things into his own hands—righting the world. It could be some of both.” He glanced at the priest to watch the effect of his next words, “He may have gone through this whole business before—even murder.”

There was only a little quiver of the muscles about the priest’s mouth. Goldsmith flicked the ash from his cigarette. “Whenever I get talking like this at headquarters they tell me to bring him in. Let the psychiatrists figure the angles like that. They’re right. I’m just a cop. Would you like to hear the story as far as I have it?”

The priest nodded and Goldsmith recapitulated his day-by-day pursuit of Tim Brandon. “You see, Father,” he concluded, “there’s always been someone taking care of him. Some women must want to be mothers awfully bad—or else he’s got charm of a kind I’ve never heard about. The chances are somebody’s taking real good care of him right now. To be on the safe side, I want to protect that person. That’s one reason you don’t have this all over the papers.”

He laid out his map of Manhattan on the table and traced Brandon’s movements as he knew them. Coming to the Fixit address, he said, “That’s as far as I go, Father. A year and a half ago he was a half-hour’s walk downtown from there. I have people looking for his card number through every book of poetry in every branch library in town. If he’s done any reading lately, that might bring us home. Any little thing might bring us home.”

He folded the map and returned it to his pocket. He took out a copy of Brandon’s picture. “Here he is seven years ago. I don’t think he’s changed much. You can have that. There’ll probably be a couple of thousand of them out in the morning. But only for the police force. He’s kind of shy, our nature boy. I don’t want to frighten him.”

The priest picked up the picture. There was no doubt at all now. Those were the wistful eyes that he would not forget ever. The detective’s voice droned on, a little hoarse now from so much talking. He had had to carry all of it, and Father Duffy thought that, for his own part, he had been trying to hide Brandon in a glass house.

“… He’s a religious sort,” Goldsmith continued. “As a poet he probably fancies himself another Francis Thompson. He might even like to sit on the church steps scratching verses on sugar bags—like Thompson. There can’t be so many churches a half-hour’s distance from that shop.”

“Not so many,” the priest said.

Goldsmith picked up his hat. He motioned toward the bed. “I’ve collected pieces of wood like that myself—window sills, shelves … they’re not much good if a lot of people handle them.”

The priest stood up. “Am I being followed, Sergeant?”

“No. For a while you were being inquired after, let’s say. Now maybe we’re going to cross paths now and then, but I wouldn’t call that following. I’d say we were traveling together. I tell you, Father, I like to get my man like any other cop—but I’d just as soon he’d come to me.”

Father Duffy went downstairs with the detective and out into the street for a moment. Goldsmith extended his hand.

“Good luck and God be with you,” the priest said.

“Thanks. You know, Father, looking for a murderer is a very lonesome business, even in a crowd. There’s always the chance you’re going to be the one to find him. Be careful.”

G
OLDSMITH DROVE BACK TO
headquarters and sat a few moments in the car. He was beginning to feel the strain. Every effort he made to seem calm, easy and sure of himself drew the knot of his own nerves tighter. He rubbed the back of his neck to ease the aching tension there.

So many more things needed tying up. He had to have a report ready for Holden in the morning from which a directive might be drawn up to put out with the picture. He wanted to know what Father Duffy had learned beyond Chicago, the last report he had on the priest’s movements. There was something in his attitude that had suggested some other pattern of violence in Brandon’s background. That could wait, if necessary, until the complaint was prepared for the district attorney. Still, it was information that might precipitate a confession. Also, he would like to pace the distance from the Fixit himself. But time had run out on him. He bought a carton of black coffee and took it into the station with him. McCormick was waiting.

“Maybe you don’t sleep, Goldie. I like a few hours every night. It feels good.”

“Sorry, Mac.”

“I thought you’d like to know Brandon worked for the Cabarino while she was up there. Handyman.”

Goldsmith nodded. “I’m not surprised. Get a cup if you want some of this.”

McCormick didn’t move. “Maybe this’ll surprise you, then. There was a murder up there in his time he was never even questioned on: a girl about nineteen with lots of money, and she’d been around the Cabarino a lot.”

“Why wasn’t he questioned?”

“Let me tell it the way I got it. There’s a girls’ school a few miles from the place, a boarding school that takes day students, too …”

“Convent?”

McCormick nodded that it was. “The kids used to beat it away from the school whenever they got a car and they’d head for the Cabarino. All this got the soft pedal, of course. Anyway, it was a hangout of theirs. They were really living. Breaking loose. You know that kind of story from history. Brandon gave them holy hell one day. That’s the only connection he has with the story at all.

“And Gebhardt tried to get them to go easy on the liquor. Had a fight with the management over it. Maybe that’s how Gebhardt and him got together. Gebhardt quit the place in the fall.

“There was one girl that was the ringleader, the rich one with the car. She was going home one night after one of these escapades. Nobody saw her after she drove her friends back to the school. But about midnight a state trooper cruised past her car and stopped. He found her in the ditch, beaten to death. It was in the papers. But not much. The Cabarino never really figured in it at all. She didn’t have her pocketbook and it looked like robbery. The car had a flat tire. Somebody started to fix it, and she was beaten with one of the tools. It was right there. No prints. Gloves probably. Her purse was found on the road near the school a couple of days later. The money was gone. My guess is she lost the purse when her friends got out of the car. Whoever found it took the money and left the purse there. In other words, whoever investigated put two and two together and made it fit where it didn’t belong. That’s it, Goldie, for what it’s worth to you.”

“When did it happen?”

“November 20, 1942.”

“And that winter Brandon showed up in New York looking for Dolly Gebhardt. It figures, Mac. Maybe we won’t prove it, but I’ll bet the guy who couldn’t stand to see a horse suffer could beat the pulp out of anyone who led the lambs away from the fold.”

T
HE SHORTEST ROOKIE COP
in the station got the leg assignment—a night of marking the distance he could walk at varying clips southward from the Fixit in a half-hour. After three trips to the identical spot, he angled his direction by an east-west block, and repeated the pacing. By four in the morning, he was footsore and disgruntled. He was even growing confused about the pace he intended.

In the first damp mists of dawn, he tramped through Abingdon Square, and saw the vagrants turn over on their benches and clutch the newspapers beneath their coats closer to them against the chill. A gust of wind picked up the dust and debris and swept it into his face as he walked. His eyes stung from it. He resented his job and envied the tramps their hard peace. To do his job, however, he clung to the pace he had set. But to vent his wrath, he drew his nightstick up and whacked the feet of the sleeping men as he passed.

Among those he roused, cursing and hawking the night’s dust from their throats, was one who sat up quietly and rubbed the back of his head where it had grown numb after a night on a canvas tool kit.

A
T FIVE O’CLOCK THAT
morning, the alarm clock on Katie Galli’s window sill sounded. She had set it there that its ring might not carry through the house. It had no more than tinkled when she caught it and turned it off. She lay very still in the bed for a few moments listening for other sounds in the house. Sleep was heavy upon her, having come only a couple of hours before. She sat up, still listening, and then satisfied that the alarm had awakened only her, she dressed in the semi-darkness. She went out the back door so that she would not pass beneath her mother’s window. On the steps she put on her shoes and tied her shawl about her neck.

She went to the church first in hope that Tim might have gone to the early Mass. Only a dozen worshipers knelt beneath the one lowly lighted chandelier, all women, most of them in shawls, praying everlasting rest for some dearly beloved soul, and going forth themselves then with courage to face a day in which there was little rest for them. Katie remained through the Offertory, offering the prayer that she might find Tim. A blue, green and purple light began to flow from the stained-glass windows as the sun edged near its rising.

Leaving the church, she watched the people who were familiar to the streets at that hour—workmen with their lunch buckets, a milkman, a janitor, a couple of drunken sailors, old men with gunny sacks slung over their shoulders, and women with, shopping bags, these last hurrying toward the Eighth Avenue markets to pick up the freshest of the spoilage in vegetables and fruit.

She began to walk among them, block after block, peering into hallways and cluttered vacant spaces. The name Tim was often on her lips, whispered at moments of fear or hope. She looked for him as she might have sought a stray dog, coaxing gently at the rim of darknesses in which he might have taken refuge. At Mulberry Square she moved from bench to bench quickly. A grimy little man looked up brightly as she was abreast of him. He grinned toothlessly. “Looking for me, honey?”

She wove through the crazy patchwork of the Village streets and came then to Abingdon Square, not so very far from home. Even at the gate she recognized him, his knees drawn up beneath his chin, for all the world the shape of a small boy lost. At the sound of his name he unfolded and sprang to his feet. They met halfway across the park and clung to one another. A couple of tramps grunted as they watched the scene.

“Why did you go, Tim, why, why?” She led him by the hand to the nearest seat.

“I was going to watch for you going to work, Katie,” he said. “And I was going to watch for you to come home.”

“I was so lost, Tim. I need you terribly. Why did you go?”

His face was gray with the stubble of beard and there were deep hollows beneath his eyes. But the eyes were suddenly bright, burning bright.

“Say that again, Katie. Please?”

“What?”

“What you just said … about …” He faltered on the word. His fingers were like cold straps tightening and loosening about her hands.

“Needing you?” she prompted.

He nodded gratefully.

“I need you more than anything in the world, Tim, more than home or job or mother. Sometimes when I think about it, it seems like I need you almost more than I do God.”

The tears came to his eyes then, and he looked away quickly, knowing how it disturbed her. The men she knew didn’t cry, and he wanted desperately to be strong before her.

She drew her hands away from him gently and got up. “I’m going to get a drink,” she said.

He watched her to the fountain. The shape of loveliness and grace and even holiness, he thought. He brushed the tears on his sleeve and waited. He saw her need then. She did need him, someone who revered the pure beauty of her, and who would guard it against the filth of the world and the flesh. He was smiling in happy excitement when she returned. Drawing her down beside him on the bench, he folded his hand into hers.

“Nobody ever said that to me before, Katie. Until this moment I was never needed in the world.”

“You were needed, Tim. You just didn’t know it. Everybody’s needed sometime.”

“Perhaps,” he said, trying to believe her.

“I can think of times mama needed me. And once when papa was sick he said he would have died if I hadn’t been there beside him. You can think of times like that if you try.”

He permitted his mind to obey her suggestion for an instant. “No,” he said harshly. “I only used to think God needed me.”

“He does,” she said gently.

“Don’t say that, Katie.”

“I won’t say it if you don’t want me to, Tim. But I believe it. I believe He needs every good person in the world, and the bad ones need the good ones. That means everybody is needed.”

He laughed then, a childish, gleeful laugh. And because it was good to see him laugh. Katie joined him. The two tramps glanced at one another. “Nuts,” one of them muttered. “Goddam,” the other one said. “On an empty stomach, too.”

“What time is it?” Katie asked suddenly.

“A little after six. I heard the church bell …”

“Tim, we’ve got to talk serious. You’ve got to go home now. Listen to me, Tim. Mama expects you. She thinks you’ll come back …”

“I don’t want to go back, Katie. You don’t understand …”

“I do. I know mama better than you think. She’s either bullying you or smothering you. That’s her way, Tim. All my life, I haven’t known which one to expect. Johnny’s that way, too. I mean he feels that way about mama. You’ve got to make allowances for her, Tim. She’s lonesome, too. She was a young woman when papa died. Johnny and I didn’t think so before. But I see it now. Look. I used to think thirty-four was awfully old. I don’t now. Tim, sometimes I feel as old as you are.”

“And sometimes I feel as young as you, dear Katie.” He brushed the ends of her hair with the back of his hand.

“We’ve got to be practical, Tim.”