Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “She didn’t give it,” the woman said. “She sent it.”

  “Yes. I know that. She left Marion City after her husband’s death. It was a year later that she sent it.”

  “Do you know why she sent it at all, Father?”

  “Why?” he said, wanting to hear her version of it.

  “Mary had a son. Not much of a one, to my thinking, but he was all she had. If you’re coming from Marion City, I don’t need to tell you what her husband was like. I’ll never forgive our father for that. There’s no woman needs marrying as much as to send her to the likes of him with the bargain made ahead of her. Mary was always delicate. Even in the old country she was ailing one day to the next. Her life was a misery …”

  She rocked in her chair a moment thinking about it, and it occurred to Father Duffy that he was being prepared in her telling for some final tragedy that had befallen Mary Brandon.

  “You were telling me why she sent your address to Marion City,” he prompted gently.

  “It was the son.” She cocked her head at him, as with a sudden thought. “Is it the boy you’re inquiring after, Father? Has he been found?”

  “I didn’t know he was lost,” the priest said.

  “He came out to the preparatory school for the priesthood in Fort Grayson, Indiana. That was a year or two before Tim Brandon died. And never the word did his mother hear from him after the first year he was there, and after her giving her youth for him. She was pining so after him when she came here to me and Mr. Grosvenor, I took her to the parish priest. We thought maybe it was one of them cloistered orders. Well, our priest made inquiries. The boy just up and left the seminary where he was studying. He was working one day in the summer out in the fields with a team of horses, and when night came, the horses came home by theirselves. It near broke Mary’s heart, hearing that, what was left of her heart for breaking, that is. From that day to this, there’s been no word of the boy. It was her thought he might be lying dead in the fields, but the whole seminary had turned out looking for him when the horses came home.”

  “Didn’t they send word to his mother?”

  “They did, and the letter went back to them. She was gone then from Marion City, you see, and it was before she sent our address.”

  Father Duffy turned his hat around in his hands. He was no closer to Tim Brandon than when he had left Marion City. Indeed he had been closer to him in New York, for there it was a possibility that the man would seek him out again, having once found courage in his presence.”

  “And Mary Brandon, Mrs. Grosvenor?” he said.

  “She took the blame for his failure on herself, Father. And in the end it was right what she did according to her own lights.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Indeed she’s not. She joined the Holy Sisters of St. Clement ten years ago as a lay nun, and there’s no one happier today this side of heaven.”

  24

  GOLDSMITH PAGED THROUGH ONE magazine after another at the public library, some prominent and some obscure, religious and scientific journals, magazines flourishing and those now out of print. If poetry was a living art, as he had read in one caption, the publications bearing it often died in childbirth. He was reminded of the line from Thompson … “There is nothing lives but something dies.” He left the library and began a weary search of the bookshops. It was late afternoon of his second day’s searching that he found the Winter, 1944, issue of the Young Poet. He was sitting in the basement of a midtown shop, the sweat dropping from his nose onto the dusty cover. It was ironic that he caught the words “The Mother” shimmering under the drop of sweat. He turned to the poem then and read:

  Who is this woman to be so adored?

  Her dress is torn and grimy at the thighs

  From hands that fumble there—young hands and old,

  No odds to her now which. She only stands and sighs.

  She’ll scratch, and pat her hair back into place

  And shift her weight, one foot to the other,

  And let him have her hand across his face

  If he keeps hollering with his—“Mother.”

  But still she is the only world he’s heir to …

  Except the God at night he cries his prayer to.

  And it was signed: Timothy Brandon.

  Goldsmith repeated the name to himself as he drove to headquarters, as though the sound of it were his reward. One thing was certain about the poem, it wasn’t written to Mother with love. The Young Poet had gone out of business with the Spring issue, having been founded the year before.” He wondered if the editor might not be as hard to find as Timothy Brandon.

  At headquarters the detective began a simultaneous check of police records, selective service registration and social security. While he was trying to trace the sponsors of the Young Poet, Lieutenant Holden came in, listened a moment to the telephone conversation, shook his head and went on to his own desk. When Goldsmith got off the phone he took the magazine to his superior’s desk and laid it open before him.

  “That’s our boy who wrote that,” he said.

  Holden read it through. “That’s not Dolly he’s describing,” he said.

  “No. Not exactly. But there’s a connection, I think.” Goldsmith picked up the magazine. “I’d give a lot to know what his own old lady was like.”

  “Now don’t start that tack, Goldie. Just bring in this guy Brandon. Let his lawyer figure that angle.”

  “You know,” the sergeant said thoughtfully, “I’ve got an idea that if we knocked on his door and said to him: ‘Brandon, you’re under arrest for the murder of Dolly Gebhardt,’ he’d come in just as meek as a lamb and tell us all about it.”

  Holden pulled a cigarette from where it had stuck to his lip. He swore to himself. “Yeah, Goldie. Then on the way down here, he’d take out his hammer and beat your skull to a pulp, too. Don’t get sentimental over him. He’s a killer. I don’t care what he did before or what he’s doing now. I don’t give a damn if he’s scrubbing church steps somewhere or helping old ladies across the street. That Saturday night he did as brutal a job of murder as I’ve seen. Get him.”

  “Take it easy, chief. I want him, too. And I want him quick. Set him up the right circumstances, I think he’d have killed the woman he wrote this poem about.”

  “Then I hope he’s writing lots of poetry these days,” Holden said with some sarcasm, “if that’s going to keep him happy till you get there.”

  “So do I,” Goldsmith said. “It’s occurred to you then that he might kill again?”

  “Sure. That’s why we’ve had a man on Mrs. Flaherty’s back step ever since.”

  “Mrs. Flaherty,” Goldsmith repeated. He took a cigarette from the package on Holden’s desk. “There’s a lot of neighborhoods this poem could have been written in. That’s one of them.”

  Holden looked at him. “Is that the strongest hunch you got on where this guy is?”

  “No. But I’ve fallen on my face chasing big ones before. That’s an Irish neighborhood. He mentioned to her that she was Irish, and mentioned his mother in the same breath.”

  “But Flaherty never saw him before,” Holden said.

  “Did you ask her that specifically?”

  “No, but hell, man, the way she was willing to talk, she’d have said it out.”

  “I wonder. She had her own notion of the kind of man who killed Dolly. It wasn’t Brandon.”

  Holden ground out his cigarette. “Then ask her, Goldie. But I think you’re wasting time, valuable time.”

  “Maybe I am, chief. But I’m going to risk it.”

  25

  THE DETECTIVE FELL INTO step with Mrs. Flaherty the next morning as she was going into the apartment-hotel. He went into the laundry with her. “Do you remember the fellow you described to Lieutenant Holden, Mrs. Flaherty? You thought he might have been Miss Gebhardt’s brother?”

  “Are you coming to tell me he did it? I wouldn’t believe it if he told me hisself.”

  “W
ell, that’s not exactly what I came for,” Goldsmith said. “You liked him, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know whether I liked him or no. I just liked his looks and the decent word he had for me.”

  “I was wondering if you’d ever seen him before, Mrs. Flaherty, not at Miss Gebhardt’s, but maybe around your own neighborhood.”

  She looked up at him from where she was taking her apron from a laundry stack. “Do you think I wouldn’t of told that to the officer if I had?”

  “Well,” the detective said, “I thought it might have slipped your mind. And there was no need to tell him when he didn’t ask.”

  “No need, indeed. There was my own conscience. There’s sins of omission as well as the kind you do in broad daylight.”

  Goldsmith smiled. “If only the world had your conscience. I won’t keep you from your work.”

  “I would the Lord you could keep me from it this morning,” she said. “I have to ready her place for new tenants today, and I’ll have to go in there one day after the next, and looking every time and seeing her still lying there with her toes in the air. You’ve no idea the nightmares I’ve had since it happened. I’m always seeing someone after me.”

  “That could be a policeman,” Goldsmith said.

  “Could it now? Protecting me?”

  He nodded.

  “Isn’t that thoughtful of them?” She unlocked the linen cupboard and then turned around. “Can you tell me something, officer? What do they do with her things in a case like this?”

  “They’re held by the property clerk to be put in evidence,” he explained. “Then the family usually claims them. If not, they’re sold.”

  She nodded. “I was arguing that with my Billy. He has the queer notion they’re burned. Like murder was a disease, you know. Something catching.”

  “God forbid,” Goldsmith said. He straightened up from where he had been leaning on one of the tubs. “If you ever should see that fellow again, Mrs. Flaherty, I wish you’d get in touch with us. Don’t be alarmed about it. We just want to ask him some questions. But speak to us, not to him. Some people aren’t as willing to talk to us as you are.”

  “You want to ask him the way you’re asking me?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m glad that’s all it is. A queer thing, the night I went home from here after I found her, Father Duffy, our assistant, came round when I was telling the story at home. He asked the same question as you—did I ever see the man around the church or in the neighborhood?”

  “He was curious about that, too,” Goldsmith said easily. “Well, it’s a natural question. It was decent of the priest to come up and see you. Or was it an accident that he happened to come around that particular night?”

  “It was no accident, though I was thinking then he was after something else. It came to me all of a sudden—he was going on a campaign to clean up … them kind of women. He’s a sainted man, Father Duffy. But maybe you’re right after all. He was curious about the little man.”

  “I wouldn’t say that for sure, Mrs. Flaherty. I don’t know Father Duffy at all.”

  “When you meet him you’ll know him.”

  Goldsmith smiled. “I hope so. Thanks for talking to me, Mrs. Flaherty.”

  “Small thanks is due. I’m in no hurry this morning.”

  The detective paused at the door. “What parish are you in, Mrs. Flaherty?”

  “St. Timothy. It’s on …”

  “I know it well,” Goldsmith cut in. “Good luck to you.”

  26

  TIMOTHY, ST. TIMOTHY, GOLDSMITH thought, as he drove crosstown. He had already conceived the notion that Brandon was a religious man. It fitted with his idea of the circumstances of Dolly Gebhardt’s murder. He could think of only one reason that the priest might have asked that question of Mrs. Flaherty: he too was looking for the man. Brandon might not be in the parish at all. Probably not or the priest would not have needed to question her. But St. Timothy was Brandon’s patron saint. His name might account for the association entirely.

  The detective parked some distance from the church and walked the intervening blocks. The doors to St. Timothy’s were open. The great murky church seemed cool at first, but the air was heavy and humid. Goldsmith slipped into a back pew and sat down. Except for a nun moving with flowers between the sacristy and the altar, the church was empty. When his eyes became accustomed to the dull light, they perceived things in greater detail, the wordings on the stations of the cross, the names on the confessional boxes: Father Gonzales, Father Duffy …

  Goldsmith had been in Catholic churches before, but never that he could recall alone. Partly out of curiosity and partly because Father Duffy’s name was above it, the detective got up and went to the confessional. He looked about self-consciously and then opened the center door. He saw the little bench and the two small screened windows at either side. Closing the door softly, he drew one curtain and then the other apart, seeing the kneelers for the penitents, and in one the little ledge where they might rest their hands in prayer. He noticed the absence of the ledge in the other booth immediately for the wood was lighter where the two supporting arms had been taken away. And because he was trained to think of the likely places for fingerprints, he wondered at its absence. He tested his weight on the ledge at the opposite side. It would be unlikely to give under the full weight of a man, much less his quarter weight, leaning on it to rise from his knees.

  Goldsmith stepped back and let the curtains fall into place. He left the church and went outdoors. Down the side street, a game of roller-skate hockey was in noisy progress. Among the spectators—a dozen girls and a few housewives with their baby buggies, hoods toward the game—was a priest. He was wearing his biretta and cassock as though he had been attracted to the game on his way between the parish house and the church. Goldsmith ambled toward him. Two ashcans represented the goals at either end of the playing area, and the youngsters playing were streaked with sweat and dirt.

  Goldsmith stood beside the priest. “Father Duffy?”

  “Father Duffy’s out of town for a few days. I’m Father Gonzales. Can I do anything for you?”

  “No, thanks. I just thought I’d look him up.” Goldsmith left it there purposely and pretended absorption in the game.

  After a moment the priest looked at him as though trying to estimate his age. “Did you know him in the army?”

  Goldsmith was saved from a direct answer by the roaring sweep of the players past them. “They’re going to kill one another if they don’t die of the heat,” he said.

  “You’d be surprised how well they survive. We get some of them off to camp for a while every year. Some of them like it better here. Which isn’t to say they wouldn’t change their minds, given half a chance.”

  “How long is Father Duffy going to be away?”

  “A couple more days, I think. I got a postcard from him. ‘Seeing America,’ he wrote.”

  “There’s a lot of it to see in a couple of days. How far away is he?”

  The priest fumbled beneath his cassock and brought the card out. “Marion City, Pennsylvania.”

  “That part I never heard of,” Goldsmith said.

  “I don’t think he did before, either. I never heard him mention it.”

  Goldsmith looked at his watch. “I’ll drop around and see him one day when he gets back. Thank you, Father.”

  He was on his way when the priest called after him, “Shall I tell him you called?”

  “I don’t think he’d know me,” the detective said. He hurried before an out-of-bounds puck, and heard the clang of hockey sticks on the fenders of the parked cars and the screech of roller skates on the hot brittle sidewalk in pursuit of the puck—the cry of “foul” and a spray of abuse on the one who had cried it … “What the hell, give us your stick if you can’t take it … get an umbrella … what’ve we got to have a goddam creampuff on our side for?”

  Which, Goldsmith thought, made up a kid’s world in Hell’s Kitchen.
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  27

  “OF COURSE I REMEMBER the boy. In my thirty-eight years as a novice-master and superior, there is not one—not a single one, success or failure, scholar or dolt, whom I have forgotten. Sit down here beside me, Father.”

  Father Duffy took the chair the Superior indicated. Then, finding the sun glaring in his face, he got up and moved the chair back. Holes showed in the carpet from where he moved it. Many a tortuous hour had been spent here by novices, he thought, their faces to the window where their master might search their souls in God’s sunlight.

  “You find the sun disconcerting?” the old priest asked.

  “Not disconcerting, Father. A nuisance. I like to see the person with whom I’m talking.”

  “So do I. Hence I have placed the chair there. Where did you take your orders?”

  There was in the tone of his question the implication that he should not have received them under him without learning subordination. That he was severe was obvious. That he was more severe with himself than others might be a saving grace, one that would command respect as well as fear. But one thing Father Duffy had learned early: an authoritarian has just so much authority, and if another human being stands up through the first brush with it, he finds a man no stronger than himself, and perhaps much weaker, needing the show of strength. How many times he had met teachers and priests like this white-haired disciplinarian, and how impatient he had grown with their show of strength.

  “I received my orders in New York, Father. You were going to tell me about Brandon.”

  The old man got up from his desk and drew another chair near Father Duffy. “I remember taking him on the recommendation of his parish priest, himself a graduate of ours.”

  “Father McGohey,” the young priest prompted.

  “Yes. Father McGohey. And I remember at the time thinking young Brandon a strange sort for his recommendation. He was an unlikely candidate for the priesthood from the beginning. Even if he had tried, I doubt that he should have made the grade.”