Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

“Yes. A man came by. He wouldn’t give his name.”

  “Young? Old? What did he look like?”

  “I haven’t time now. Old Mrs. Pedrosa had a stroke. He was thirty-five or so. Rather slight. I’ll see you tonight, Duffy …” As the door was swinging closed he turned, “He said he’d come back. I showed him the postcard you sent me.”

  Father Duffy murmured his thanks to God as he went to the rectory.

  34

  THERE WAS A HOT damp smell in the hall. The one window at its end was veiled with the dust of many summers and the rough yellow walls mottled with grease and smoke. From Harlem to here, near the Bowery, this was the typical entry to a First Avenue walk-up. Goldsmith tapped on the door and waited. Downstairs a store—grocery, tavern, pawnshop, junkshop, army surplus, clothier or restaurant, and beneath that, a cellar of rats, old bottles and the debris of several bankruptcies. He knocked louder and heard a child within calling its mother. A warped laundry rack leaned against the wall beside him, several pairs of damp socks hung on it, and beneath it, a scooter with one wheel missing. The detective pounded on the door and loosened his collar. He breathed through his mouth to keep the smell from his nostrils. A moment more of waiting and he would stride to the end of the hall and get some air into it if he had to smash the window. The long patience of poverty, he thought, and the slow breeding of grudge, envy and despair—the wedding bed of want and get where crime is begotten with petty politicians and crooked cops waiting to act as midwives.

  Someone was coming at last, and why should she hurry? Each time an assignment took him into squalor, the bitterness came near to blinding him to the job. The door opened a couple of inches. A dark, thin-lipped woman looked out at him, her eyes angry.

  “What do you want? You woke the baby.”

  “I want to talk to you, Mrs. Fericci. Sergeant Goldsmith, police department.” He avoided “homicide,” and added immediately, showing her Brandon’s application for a library card through the door, “Do you remember this fellow?”

  “No,” she said, even before seeing the card.

  At the back of the house the baby was screaming. Goldsmith pushed the door open a little wider. “Well, let’s talk about Tim. Maybe it’ll come back to you. You see, your name’s on the card, too. I’ll wait while you quiet the baby.”

  The woman gave ground before him. “My husband’ll be here any minute. Please go.”

  “It would be better to talk to me now, Mrs. Fericci. I might have to come back when your husband is here.”

  She was a young woman, in her early thirties probably. Her face was a little drawn and sallow, but there was a suppleness to her body.

  “Wait till I give the baby her bottle, then,” she said. “I’ll hurry.”

  “Take your time.”

  She started from the room, her hips quivering beneath the thin apron. At the door she turned. “If my husband comes, please don’t say anything about Tim.”

  “All right,” he said, although he wondered how else he should account for his presence.

  A boy of seven or so met his mother at the door. “Go outside and play for a while,” she said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Did you hear me?” she screamed.

  Goldsmith went to the window, his back to them. He heard the boy slam out and saw him on the street presently, kicking a bottle against a lamp post time and again until it smashed. A drunk watched him stupidly and then tried to clap him on the back. The kid yanked away from him and shouted something. The drunk drew his hand back clumsily as though to strike him. Instead, he scratched his neck. Two other youngsters joined the boy, and like so many little dogs they began to taunt the drunk, retreating when he swung clumsily on them, and charging his back as soon as he stumbled forward. Goldsmith lifted his eyes. The late sun was shining in the windows of the new housing projects, a scant few blocks away, complete with playgrounds. They were coming—a great slow tidal wave, but coming on. Stay young a while, kids, and the grass grows with you. At the back of the house, the baby was quiet now. The mother returned and the detective turned to meet her.

  “What do you want to know?” she said.

  “When you last saw Tim Brandon.”

  “Just after the war was over.”

  Goldsmith sat on the arm of an upholstered chair. His foot brushed the sofa. The room was overcrowded with furniture. “I wish you’d tell me how you met him.”

  She half-laughed. “I picked him up in the hall downstairs.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Frozen. I was trying to get the baby buggy out. Tommy was a baby then.”

  “That was in 1944 maybe,” Goldsmith said. “Was your husband in the army?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you mean, you see?”

  “Am I jumping to conclusions? I think you asked me a minute ago not to mention him to your husband.”

  “That don’t mean what you think. Gerald was sore because Tim wasn’t in the army and he was.”

  “I’ve wondered about that myself,” Goldsmith said. “Why wasn’t Brandon in the army?”

  “He didn’t believe in killing.”

  Ironic, Goldsmith thought. “All right, Mrs. Fericci. You found him in the hall and brought him up here. You gave him a good meal. Then what?”

  “Then nothing. I let him sleep on the sofa here that day. I went over to my mother’s.”

  “You let a stranger sleep here? In this neighborhood you let a bum you picked up in the hall stay in your house? Come now, lady.”

  She went to the window and stayed there, looking down the street. “All right. Tim was no bum. You could tell that. And I was so damned lonesome when Gerald went away I thought I’d go crazy. I even hated the kid. He couldn’t talk to me even, just squall at night and me almost scared to get up and look at him. I didn’t know what was the matter. What did I know? Tim picked him up that first day when I let him come up and the kid stopped crying. He took to him like candy. I could’ve bawled. I never seen the kid smile before. After that I didn’t care what people said. Let ’em live alone in hell a few months and see what they say then. He was the decentest guy I ever knew. And that goes for Gerry. He’s all right but he ain’t decent like Tim.”

  Thank God for that, Goldsmith thought.

  She looked at him without turning her body. “What did he do, kill somebody?”

  Goldsmith did not answer.

  “You can bet your badge they deserved it if he did. He never had a chance. A good clean kid with a drunk for a father and an old lady who couldn’t keep her hands off him. Then she sent him off to a monastery. A real cookie, she was.”

  She was watching the street again, straining for the first sight of her husband.

  “Relax, Mrs. Fericci,” the detective said. “If your husband comes in I’ll say I’m a building inspector.”

  She gave an ugly laugh. “He’d drop dead. I’ve been trying to get somebody up here for two years. Maybe election time. Now we’re training the rats. They don’t care about elections.”

  There was no answer to that, Goldsmith thought, and he knew instantly he had no business trying to answer it, no business sitting here so maudlin at the miseries of the city. He was a cop on an assignment.

  “I don’t want to put you in bad with your husband,” he said coldly, “but I do want every bit of information I can get on Brandon. If that means talking about him to your husband, I’ll do it.”

  “Atta boy,” she said. “Be yourself. I like it better that way. I don’t like nice cops. Gerald doesn’t know anything about him anyway. He thinks I was … being unfaithful with him. That’s all he can understand.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “No, I wasn’t!”

  The vehemence of her denial suggested to the detective that that particular circumstance was due less to her virtue than to Brandon. “Suppose you tell me where he was before he came to you.”

  “Tim?”

  “Of course.”

/>   She shrugged. “Picking up whatever he could. That’s all I know.”

  “Did he get any mail here?”

  “He sent some poems away once. He wrote kind of nice. Real educated he was. But nobody cared. He got them back here, the poems. That’s all.”

  “How old was he then?”

  “Twenty-five maybe. I never asked him.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  Her description was as vague as Mrs. Flaherty’s and Dolly’s friend’s. Finally Goldsmith asked, “Do you remember any scars or birthmarks?”

  “He had a funny mark, like a moth, almost purple.”

  “Where?”

  The color rose to her face. “Here.” She indicated the upper part of her hip. “He got a cold in his back. I rubbed it with Vicks.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “That you were very kind to him. You were a mother to him.”

  “No-o,” she said doubtfully, as though she weren’t sure whether that was good or bad.

  “Okay. A sister.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When did he leave here, Mrs. Fericci?”

  “Gerry kicked him out his last leave home.” She caught at the curtain. “There’s Gerry getting out of the bus.” She turned on him wildly. “Will you get out of here? I told you everything, honest I did. If Tim did something wrong, I don’t want him to know about it. I’d never hear the end of it.”

  “I haven’t said he did anything wrong, Mrs. Fericci.”

  “Then what are you here for? I never seen a cop come on anything good yet. What do you want from me? Five bucks, that’s all I got …”

  “I don’t want your five bucks—or one buck or twenty bucks. And I’m not selling tickets. He got to his feet. “You were pretty gone on him, weren’t you?”

  “So what, for Christsake! He was clean. Do you know what it’s like to meet a guy like that?”

  “Sure. Did you look for him?”

  “So what?”

  “And you found him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I found him with her, the redhead, and if he killed her I’m glad. I wish I’d done it. She was no good. I tried to tell him. He wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t think bad of the devil in hell. Will you get out of here?”

  Goldsmith brushed off her hands where she tried to push him. “But he wouldn’t come back to you?”

  “No.”

  He moved toward the door. “Where was he living? It wasn’t with her.”

  “I don’t know. I took his tool kit to him—a shop across town. I forget where. In the thirties. The Fixit it was called.”

  They could hear the heavy footfalls on the stairs.

  “Tell your husband about it, Mrs. Fericci, just in case I have to come back.” He opened the door as Fericci reached the hall. He bade him time of day and kept on going.

  “Who the hell was that?” he heard the man say.

  “They sent somebody to look at that rat hole, Gerry.”

  The door banged closed. And, Goldsmith thought, it was neither the first nor the last rat hole he would see in his business.

  35

  KATIE WAS WASHING THE supper dishes. She had been washing them for a long time, humming to herself at the chore, and holding each plate up for a special inspection. It was not the plate she was inspecting, her mother thought. It was her own face in it. Scarcely aware of what she wrote, Mrs. Galli added “soap” to her shopping list. The girl was filling out. And it was time. At Katerina’s age she had already filled out. In America it was different, she told herself. Girls took their time. And here it was not such a disgrace not to be married altogether. Still, she preferred for her daughter to be in love. It was more natural. And there was no mistaking the signs … slow-motion, dreamy, blushing, taking a job …

  “So,” she said. “You’ve got a boy friend.”

  Katie glanced at her over her shoulder. She smiled and shrugged, and then blushed, all without a word.

  “It’s nothing to blush about to your mother. Did I ever say you shouldn’t?”

  “No, Mama.”

  “I thought you were going to be an old maid. Some mothers have to worry their daughters go out too much. Mine, she never goes out. Then a boy or two comes to the house. Once, twice, three times altogether. Maybe Tom, I thought. He’s all right. Noisy, but all right. Katerina don’t talk much anyway.”

  “Oh, Mama. Stop teasing.”

  “Then that one Willy Doheny. That time I was worried. Irish. Irish and Italian. They don’t mix good. Or maybe too good—like gasoline and matches. Still, I think it’s better than oil and water. But Willy went and Deo gratias. Now tell your mother who it is.”

  “Who said it’s anyone special?”

  “I said it’s somebody special. I know my little girl. Maybe you’ll bring him around some evening? On a Saturday night you’ll ask him. I’ll get Johnny to bring a cake and his accordion and we’ll ask …”

  “Please, Mama. Not yet.”

  “Not yet but sometime. Ha! There is someone special. I knew. Is he bashful like you?”

  Katie tossed her head. “Mama, I get paid tomorrow.”

  “You don’t get paid enough to change the subject. When all of a sudden you got a job, I should’ve known. You’re not lazy, but when you don’t want to go to school, that’s different. You’re wasting soap.”

  “The bubbles are pretty. I’ve got a thousand faces.”

  “They don’t taste pretty. Don’t leave them on the cups.” She got up and put away the pad and pencil. “I can remember the first time I was in love. Like yesterday.”

  “With papa?”

  “No. But I didn’t meet your papa yet.”

  “When you did meet him, Mama, were you in love with him right away?”

  “He needed such a haircut. Maybe it was the next time I fell in love with him.”

  “And you knew then it was forever, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I knew.” Mrs. Galli picked up a cup and turned it around and around in her hand. “Sometimes, when I like somebody I see your papa all over again after all these years.”

  “You’ve been terribly lonesome, haven’t you, Mama?”

  She put the cup back into the basin. “With not so much soap you would see the dirt. Lots of people are lonesome. Look at old Mrs. Gasperi. Two canaries. She talks to them like grandchildren. I heard her once. ‘Eat your dinner, Tami. You won’t grow big and strong if you don’t.’ Who ever heard of a canary growing big and strong?”

  “Silly,” Katie said.

  “It’s not silly if all you got left in the world is a canary. Give me the dish towel. Run upstairs and ask Tim if he would like a cup of coffee.”

  “I didn’t know he was home.”

  “An hour ago I heard him. Back and forth again up there.”

  “He didn’t even come down to supper. I’ll go see.”

  “He don’t eat enough for Mrs. Gasperi’s canaries.”

  Katie was already at the door wiping her hands on her apron. She paused. “Mama, maybe it isn’t fair to charge him as much as the others when he doesn’t eat.”

  “You do the arithmetic for the big employer who pays you fifteen dollars a week for it. I’ll do mine.”

  “All right, Mama.”

  She went up the stairs slowly, thinking about it. For the last couple of days Tim had seemed dejected again. He was proud, she thought. You couldn’t just tell a man you were going to make money for him. Especially someone like Tim, no matter how right you tried to make it look. And it wasn’t as though she were making enough anyway. With each step up the stairs, she was more convinced that she had spoiled things instead of helping them. Her boldness had shocked him, frightened him. A sudden shame in what she was doing overcame her. She could feel its telltale color in her face. She remembered other girls buying things for boys. She remembered a girl giving her brother Johnny a penknife, and him kidding about it with his friends. “She’s gonna stick it in you, Johnny. She’ll cut you u
p in little pieces with it.” “The hell she will,” and he had made her take back the knife and he didn’t go to see her any more. No, no, Katie thought. I’m not like that. This is different.

  She went into her own room first and closed the door. But am I different? she asked the mirror. I want Tim for myself. She wanted Johnny. She wanted him to take her out, to buy things for her. I want to take care of Tim, and do things for him. If that’s shameful, I should be ashamed. But it’s not. He’s good and decent. So am I. Or I try to be, anyway. She had almost convinced herself when she forced another question into the open: why didn’t she admit the truth to her mother? Why didn’t she say his name when her mother asked? Fear that because Tim was older she would object? Or because he had no money? Both of them were good reasons … but there was something else, something deeper that was more of a feeling than a reason—an instinctive dread of the issue. She tried to imagine Tim saying the things he said to her in front of her mother—to imagine him saying, “Katie is the beauty in my life, the flowers. I owe her whatever’s good in my work.” She conjured no picture at all. She could not even see Tim. He was afraid of her mother.

  “But I’m not. I’m not afraid of anything,” she said aloud and went out of her room.

  She leaned down to see if there were a light beneath his door. The room was dark. “Tim,” she called, knocking softly. Getting no answer, she opened the door a bit. The hall light fanned across the floor about her shadow. “Tim, are you here?”

  There was a curious hollow sound to her voice, and even in the fan of light she could see that his tool kit was gone from its usual place beneath the bed. She swung the door full open. His clothes were gone, the hangers stark in the empty corner.

  “Oh Tim,” she whispered, groping for the cord to the lamp. In its first light she saw the pin-neat emptiness—except for his books. He had stacked them on the dresser, and between the cover and the fly leaf of the volume of Francis Thompson was a single sheet of paper on which he had written four words: “Katie dear, for you.”

  That was all. No signature, no explanation. But that he was gone there was no doubt at all. Her own choked breathing was the only sound in the room. Why? Where? The questions whipped through her mind, uncalculated. There was only a knot of pain that would not be swallowed or dissolved.