Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I have a passion for paisley shawls,” Fabish explained as he faced the detective from behind a huge desk and saw him looking about the room. “They tell me my mother draped me in one when I was born.”

  Or dropped you in one, Goldsmith thought looking at the immaculate little man with a face as cold as salt. “Were you delivered by one of those?” He nodded toward one of many paintings of exotic birds with which the walls were hung.

  “How clever of you to guess!” Fabish showed most of his teeth when he smiled.

  Goldsmith resolved to keep his heavy humor to himself. “You said over the phone you’d found an address for Timothy Brandon.”

  “I did, and my dear man, you’ve no idea at all what I went through to find it.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “How can you appreciate it if you don’t understand it?”

  “Look, Mr. Fabish, I’m just a cop—a dumb cop maybe. Thanks for any trouble you went to. Now can I have the address?”

  “I have a very good notion to send it back to the bank where all the estate of the Young Poet is in escrow, so to speak, and let you jolly well get a warrant or whatever …”

  Goldsmith changed his tack. He needed all the time he could save. “I didn’t realize how much trouble you had to go to.”

  “Bankruptcy complicates papers, you know. In this instance particularly. There was a check involved. The letter was returned to us unopened.”

  “I see.”

  Fabish opened a drawer and drew the envelope from it. He deliberately held it, turning it about in his hands and reminiscing all the while about the Young Poet’s high aims and the sad state of the impoverished muse. How in the name of heaven anyone could work with this peevish, perverse character, the detective didn’t know. And yet his desk, several chairs and the grand piano were piled with manuscripts. While he waited, his eyes on the man, the muscles of his jaws tight, he thought of how it must be to come to someone like this in the hope of guidance, looking for a way to success. Whatever help or encouragement he gave, the detective thought, was handed down like blessings from a god’s shrine. It was given only to the worshipers and poetry became a cult. He extended his hand for the letter.

  In his own good time, Fabish handed it over. “I’m going to write another check, my personal check,” he said.

  Goldsmith examined the envelope. Brandon had lived on East Eighteenth Street when he submitted the poem. He was gone from there by the time it was accepted. He drew the uncanceled check from the envelope and slid it back. It was for five dollars. Five lousy bucks.

  Across from him, Fabish was putting the last flourish to his signature. “Now, if you find the young man, you might give him this. Morale, you know.”

  Goldsmith took the check and read it in front of Fabish. The poetry consultant had written: “For contribution to the Young Poet.” The salt god was smiling in satisfaction of his benevolence. Poets don’t grow old or die or steal or murder, the sergeant thought. On five dollars they live forever and write of spring and youth and love and beauty.

  “This ought to fix him up,” he said, pocketing the check. “So long, Fabish.”

  “It really wasn’t a very good poem,” Fabish said petulantly.

  “No? I thought it was beautiful.”

  30

  THERE WAS AMONG TIM Brandon’s things at the seminary only one clue to any contact beyond the school and home: a birthday card from someone signed “Teddy.” The envelope bore an address in Cleveland, and it had been mailed to him a few weeks after the date of his father’s death. Since Cleveland lay on the route Brandon would have taken to Marion City it was not too unlikely that there lay the story of his diversion from home and duty. Father Duffy arranged a few hours’ stopover in the city.

  On the train, he drew the yellowing card from his pocket. Teddy might be man or woman. The handwriting was immature, but not necessarily that of a young person, he thought. Nor did the selection of the card tell much about the sender except that some pains were taken to be neither too personal nor too distant. It was “wishing a friend a happy birthday.”

  Putting the card back in his pocket, Father Duffy tried to reconstruct what might have been the young seminarian’s journey when he started home for the funeral. He had not wanted to go, but he had been going because it was expected of him, perhaps because he had seen no way to avoid it. He was probably in dread of seeing his mother. He would have anticipated an overwhelming show of affection, a scene at his arrival and more of a one when the time came for his departure. And yet how great his need must have been in that period of his life for affection. Was Teddy someone he had met on the train? Or had he simply got off at Cleveland and wandered there much as he wandered away from an assignment at the seminary?

  By the time he stepped from the train Father Duffy had decided that Teddy was a woman, and he found in himself a terrible dread of finding her. The boy had been here in the very depth of the depression with several days to spend and only enough money to buy food for one or two. He must have been in distress over the deception he intended on returning to the seminary, if he intended then to return at all. His ultimate return might have been an escape in itself. He might have expected his mother to communicate with them. It was curious indeed that she had not. But from what he had learned of her, Father Duffy decided that she probably thought the order had not permitted the boy to leave.

  Glancing out of the window of the cab he took from the station, he saw in the distance the Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and the lineups at the ticket windows. That afternoon thousands of white-shirted baseball fans would be cheering the Indians—men and women who had taken the day off from factory, store or office. They would go home to supper, their kids and a night on the back porch or a movie—healthy, ordinary people who never heard of the Big Tims or the Little Tims until the newspapers caught them into headlines or the radio scripters concocted them for a half-hour’s distraction—and who could forget them with the turn of a dial and lie down to a quiet sleep. At that moment there was nothing the young priest would rather have done than pay off the cab and buy himself a ticket to the ball game. He longed for the smell of a cigar, peanuts, the sound of the rowdy cries for the home team and the feel of the warm clean sun on his back.

  They drove out of the downtown area, through slums, at each block of which he expected the cab driver to flick off the meter. But on around the lake they drove, and he was wholly unprepared when the driver turned into a residential neighborhood of spacious and well-built homes and began to look for the house number. When the car stopped and Father Duffy read the number himself, he said, “You’re sure this is right?”

  “I know this town like I know my own teeth, Father.”

  Two little girls were playing in the yard. They stood at the walk and watched him pay the driver. When he turned, they chorused, “Good morning, Father.”

  He could remember no greeting that had given him so much pleasure. “Hello. Is your mother home?”

  “I don’t live here,” one of them said. “I live across the street. We’re not Catholics.”

  He smiled. “A lot of people aren’t.”

  He looked at the other girl. “My mother’s at the tennis matches, but grandma’s home,” she said. “I’ll go tell her you want to see her.”

  “Thank you. My name is Father Duffy.”

  “I’m coming, too,” the neighbor child said. “I want a drink of water.”

  He watched them run around the stone house to the back door. A cocker spaniel crawled out from beneath a clump of bushes and shook himself. He trotted a few feet after the youngsters and then stopped to look back. The priest whistled softly and the dog came to him, wriggling with friendliness.

  A couple of minutes later a pleasant woman in her mid-forties came to the front porch and held the door open to him. “Won’t you come in, Father?”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t even know your name.”

  “Irene Benedict.” She motioned h
im to a chair, and sat down beside him. The children returned to their play.

  “Is there someone in the family called Teddy, Mrs. Benedict?”

  “It’s my daughter’s nickname. Her name is Theodora, after her grandfather.”

  Father Duffy drew the birthday card from his pocket, feeling much relieved that he need not attempt to be circumspect here. Everything about the woman, the children, the dog, gave him a feeling of well-being, a security that would weather any trouble or intimation of trouble. It was a house where a family lived from one generation to the next. He showed the card to Mrs. Benedict. “I wonder if you happen to remember this boy?”

  She took a pair of glasses from her pocket. Father Duffy watched her face: a look of puzzlement at first and then sudden remembrance, but no sign of disturbance at all. He felt an irrepressible surge of pleasure, a singing inside of him, which he knew had no relationship to the ultimate story at all, but which he accepted and enjoyed.

  “Indeed I do remember him. We’ve often spoken of Tim and wondered what became of him.”

  Which somewhat dampened the priest’s elation.

  She gave back the card. “Teddy sent him that. She was twelve then, I think. Later, when he came back to us, he said it was the only birthday card he had ever received in the mail.” Her voice grew serious. “I’ve often wondered if letting Teddy send that wasn’t a mistake. He was such a sensitive boy. It may have been the one thing …” She lifted her hands in a gesture of inquiry. “Well, who can say? What became of him, Father?”

  What indeed? “I don’t know,” the priest said flatly. “I’m trying to find that out myself. How did you happen to meet him, Mrs. Benedict?”

  “It was at the old Union Station. That was in the mid-thirties, I think. A few women and myself had set up a canteen there for the C.C.C. boys. Troops of them started out to their camps from there, and most of them were in need of a good meal. I can remember it just as plainly. I had noticed him during a lull—very thin, hungry-looking and dressed in his black suit. I motioned to him a couple of times, but when he caught me looking at him, he would turn away. To make a long story short, I finally coaxed him into eating something and drew out of him the fact that he was in a seminary preparatory school that he thought he had to run away from.”

  Mrs. Benedict took off her glasses and laid them on the railing. “It was obvious that he was a very disturbed young man. When I could, I called my husband and he consented to my bringing the boy home. He stayed for a week with us then. Most of it he spent in my husband’s book room. Teddy was very fond of him. That little one, the hoyden—that’s Teddy’s daughter.”

  Father Duffy looked at the children: happy, inquisitive, loud … They would run to meet their fathers and climb over them looking for presents … “My mother gave me a hammer for my tenth birthday, the only present …” The priest frowned at his recollection of the confessional … “The first birthday card I ever received in the mail …” A similar complaint.

  “Do they disturb you, Father? I suspect they’re showing off. They can play as well in the back.” She leaned forward, about to call out.

  “No, no. They don’t disturb me, bless them. You should know what I’m used to: the west side of New York.” He had not intended to say that, but the picture of the tough, hard-humored kids of his parish swept before him. “You were telling me about the Brandon boy, Mrs. Benedict.”

  For an instant she looked at him, frankly inquisitive. When he met her eyes, hers fell away. There was an unspoken understanding between them then. “Yes,” she said. “He was such a gentle boy. During those days I learned his story—or bits of it. Do you know that, Father?”

  “Fragments.”

  She nodded. “I don’t suppose I know more. Something I could never understand—his mother was very kind to him, he said, and his father cruel … but of the two, he liked the father better.”

  “I’m afraid that would be more accurate if you said that he disliked the father less.”

  “Yes, I suppose it would. Why?”

  “The mother was a peculiar combination,” the priest said, “inordinately affectionate toward the boy, and yet so religious she forced the idea of being a priest on him. Eventually, she entered a convent herself.”

  “I see.”

  Whether she saw or not, he could not tell, but the fact was no secret, and it suggested something of the spiritual tangle in the early pattern of the boy’s life.

  “Well,” Mrs. Benedict proceeded, “he stopped with us in a real terror of going home. He was on his way to his father’s funeral. My husband—he’s gone now, which is why I live with the children—my husband with his good sense said that we shouldn’t try to persuade the boy to go on. He reasoned that having stopped with us Tim might start on his way again, lose courage, and end up God only knew where. We did get him to send off a letter to his mother. And through that week we persuaded him to return to the seminary. He was very religiously disposed, Father. But I’m not sure now that wasn’t a mistake.”

  “Do you happen to remember where he sent the letter, Mrs. Benedict?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “From what I know, his mother didn’t receive it. But I don’t suppose that’s important now.”

  “I do remember that he wouldn’t let me mail it,” she said. “I plainly remember offering to send it by special delivery. He was quite adamant. It never occurred to me that he might not have sent it …” her voice trailed off.

  “He may have lost courage,” he said.

  “I suppose, but he might have been truthful about it. We were trying to help him.”

  How many people had tried to help Tim Brandon, the priest thought. “And then it may be that the letter itself went astray,” he suggested, although he doubted it.

  “That is possible, and he did go back to the seminary and make another try of it. That wasn’t easy, having to explain to them that he had not gone home.”

  She wanted to believe the best of him. But there, too, Brandon had failed in courage. Was this failure accountable for his sense of guilt, the priest wondered. Was it sufficient to account for the belt of bramble he fashioned and wore?

  “Or didn’t he tell them where he had been at all?” she asked suddenly.

  “It doesn’t matter very much now,” Father Duffy said quietly. “And when he ran away from the seminary he came back to you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. That was a few months later. He said it was only a matter of time until they dismissed him.”

  “Did he tell you why he thought they intended to dismiss him?”

  “That is a strange thing, Father. He said at first it was because he could not do the work they put him to. Then one day—oh, quite a while later—out of a clear sky he said it was because he got a birthday card, from a girl.”

  Father Duffy looked at her. “Was it out of a clear sky?”

  “Well, I wondered that myself. It was foolish, of course, the notion of their disapproving of that. For one thing, the name Teddy could be boy or girl. But what disturbed me, as you suggest, was its indication of what was going on in the boy’s mind. He was seventeen or eighteen then—a late adolescent.”

  “How long did he stay with you?”

  “Several weeks. My husband got him a part-time job at the branch library. Very little money. All this was before he made that remark about the birthday card. Teddy was in the eighth grade then, and not very good at English and composition. He helped her a good deal. He wrote very nicely—some excellent verses for a boy his age—delicate things, very much like him. I don’t remember just when he said that, but after it I made a point of being near by whenever they were together, and I watched him. You know how disturbing something like that can be to a mother. I’m certain there was nothing secret between them. I have always been very frank with my children. I have an older son, too. Tim occupied his room, in fact. He was in boarding school at the time. Well, about the time I started watching him, he took to staying out rather late at ni
ght. I thought that strange as he had no friends outside of ourselves that I knew of, except at the library. To make a long story short, Father, I was much relieved when he told me one day that he was leaving. I was very fond of the boy, please understand, but uneasy. I began to wonder if we really knew the truth about him.”

  “I suppose, when he came back, he again wrote a letter—this time to the seminary?”

  “Yes. And again mailed it himself. I suppose that if he had not left us when he did, I should have taken it upon myself even at that late date to write the seminary about him.”

  “It might have been well,” the priest said, thinking the words sententious as soon as he had spoken them. “I mean it’s always well to know something of people you take into your home,” he amended.

  “Are you that careful, Father?”

  She had faced him with the question and he felt the color rise to his cheeks. “No, I’m not. It was a stupid remark. Under the same circumstances I’d have done what you did.”

  “Tim was a good boy,” she said. “I’ve always believed that. He may not have had much courage, but I don’t think courage is the greatest of virtues. And I’m quite sure it was part of his innate decency that made him move from here. He understood my feelings—and his own, whatever they were. I know he was devoted to Teddy, and she to him. The amount of time she spent in the library after that was amazing. Then we let her go away to high school and that pretty much took care of it.”

  “Where did he go after he left you, Mrs. Benedict?”

  “He used to come back to visit once in a while. He found a room over a shoemaker’s shop where he could stay for cleaning up the shop. And he stayed on at the library for a year, perhaps. I don’t know when it was that he stopped coming. There was a great scandal about then, a tragedy really. Mrs. Philips, I think her name was—the juveniles’ librarian. She was beaten to death one night on her way home from the library.”