Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “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.”

  10

  AS 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.

  11

  AT 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 continue
d. “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?”

  “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.”

  12

  IN 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.