by Lee Harris
But the car was used little aside from the monthly trip to Oakwood, and bank interest covered the car’s expenses. There was still a sizable chunk on deposit when I left the convent.
In September I would start to teach at a local community college. The letter from the chairman of the English Department still brought smiles when I reread it:
“As part of our continuing effort to offer a wide range of courses by a staff of diverse backgrounds, I am pleased to offer you the position of associate to teach Poetry and file Contemporary American Woman.”
The idea of teaching poetry had filled me with sheer delight, but if Professor Caldwell thought that fifteen years in a convent teaching English to nuns and secular women in a Catholic college qualified me as a contemporary woman, I had to wonder at his judgment. But I was so thrilled at the offer that I had telephoned my acceptance and followed it with a letter that I had personally mailed at the post office the following morning.
The pay was probably low for college teaching, but for me, it was bountiful. It would more than pay for a winter wardrobe and probably take care of my utility bills as well. I was ecstatic.
—
The cost of parking my car left me dumbfounded. Mrs. McAlpin had been right to warn me. Lunch took another unexpectedly high toll. In future, I would take a sandwich with me on my travels. My former vow of poverty would stand me in good stead for my summer’s work.
But the microfilm of the newspapers gave me so much information that I quickly forgot about the expense of acquiring it. EASTER MASSACRE! the Monday front-page headline of one tabloid shrieked at me. “Retards Slash Mother,” the subheadline at the bottom of the page continued. I moved the screen to the next page.
BLOODY APARTMENT YIELDS GRISLY SECRET, the inside headline read.
Retarded twins James and Robert Talley, 29, apparently slashed their mother to death in the kitchen of their Brooklyn apartment over the Easter Weekend, leaving bloody fingerprints in every room. Horrified police, acting on a phone call, entered the apartment before noon yesterday to find the body of Mrs. Alberta Talley, 61, on the floor of her kitchen, her throat slashed and multiple stab wounds throughout her body. “Only a madman could have done this,” police Detective Kevin O’Connor said as the body was being removed from the apartment. The murder weapon was believed to be a serrated bread knife about ten inches long which was found near the body. The twins, whose hands and clothes were stained with blood, were nearby.
I began taking notes in the steno book I had taken with me, but soon abandoned the task. I was able to make hard copies of the microfilm by positioning the screen to the section of the page I wished to copy and depositing quarters. A reader in the reference room and a helpful librarian added to my supply of coins, but the librarian admonished me to bring plenty of quarters with me next time. I agreed to do so.
I read days of articles in the first newspaper, then moved on to other papers to see if any one of them might have a different slant or some new nugget of information. I was surprised at the number of papers available in New York in 1950. The Herald Tribune was still alive, as were others I had never heard of: the World Telegram and Sun, the Journal American, and the Daily Mirror. It became a task of diminishing returns, but by the time I felt that I was finished, I had accumulated a collection of names, dates, times, and suspicions. When finally I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly five o’clock and felt an incipient headache from staring for so many hours at the screen, I gathered my papers and notes, returned the last film, and went to ransom my car.
—
At home, I ate quickly and sat down in the dining room, which I had never used and could be conveniently converted to a makeshift workroom. I took a package of typing paper, the photocopies of the newspapers, my steno notebook, and some pencils and pens. On the first page of the notebook, I had printed a favorite line from Keats: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” As always when I read it, I felt the poet speaking directly to me. I smiled and began my work.
On a page of typing paper, I started a chronology of events, beginning with the morning of Friday, April 7, 1950.
At a little before nine, as she always did on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, young Magda Wandowska, an immigrant from a Baltic country (variously described by the papers as Estonia, Latvia, and Poland), arrived at the apartment of Alberta, James, and Robert Talley. She would spend three hours cleaning the apartment, allowing Mrs. Talley the freedom to leave, to shop, occasionally, it appeared, to have her hair done (as she did that morning), without having to worry about the welfare of her sons. “They were good boys,” Magda was quoted as saying in two of the papers, a somewhat amusing comment because the “boys” were eleven years older than she.
It was an ordinary morning. She cleaned up the kitchen and chatted with the boys. Mrs. Talley put her hat on and left a little after nine. She had a nine-thirty appointment at the beauty parlor—in honor of Easter, Magda explained—and then she would shop for food and return home.
During her three hours, Magda took the boys for a walk along Ocean Avenue, where their apartment house was. (One paper mentioned that Mrs. Talley paid $74.50 for the two-bedroom apartment, and I was not sure whether that was a great deal or practically nothing, but the reporter seemed surprised at the amount.) The three of them walked to Quentin Road, over to East Seventeenth Street, and up to a park that was a favorite spot of theirs. There they sat and talked and played the kinds of games the boys liked to play, word and number games that gave Magda the feeling that, although they were not normal in the sense that they could function in society (she didn’t use those words), they had been selected by God for greater gifts. On that day Magda asked them about the day she had been born eighteen years earlier (in one of those Baltic countries), and they had told her the weather—in Brooklyn—what they had eaten for lunch, and the color of Mama’s dress (purple). Even though she had been born some five thousand miles away, it had given her a closeness to the boys, knowing they remembered the day.
About eleven-thirty they had started back, this time going along Avenue S to Ocean Avenue, a slightly longer walk, but they were in no hurry. Mrs. Talley had arrived promptly at noon with her bags of groceries and her freshly coiffed hair and had paid Magda for the week, nine dollars for the nine hours (a generous sum for the time), and thirty cents for carfare. Magda had promised to return on Easter Sunday to help Mrs. Talley take the boys to church—not that she needed help, the boys were so good, but it didn’t hurt to have an extra person along. Generally when they went to church, Mrs. Talley would sit at one end and Magda at the other so that the boys were enclosed between them. Magda never accepted payment for attending church with the Talleys, which was only about once a month; it was her gift to God. But Mrs. Talley always gave her ten cents for carfare and often placed a dollar in the collection basket, a princely sum for the time.
When she left the Talleys, she went to church for Good Friday services. The Talleys would not go. Services were long, and the boys sometimes became restless.
Magda spent the evening quietly with her parents and sister. On Saturday she had a special job cleaning a house for a lady who was having a large group over for Easter Sunday. She was paid well, but she worked hard and she came home tired.
Easter Sunday morning, she dressed and took the bus to Ocean Avenue and Kings Highway.
Magda had the key to the Talley apartment. It had not started that way. At the beginning, when she was still in high school and came to work a few afternoons after school, Mrs. Talley would give her the key so that she could go walking with the boys. But Mrs. Talley sometimes forgot, preventing their outing. Finally, when a great deal of trust had grown between them, Mrs. Talley had given Magda her own key, and that was how she got in that terrible Easter morning.
She had rung several times and could hear footsteps inside, but no one answered the door. Perhaps, she thought as she stood waiting, Mrs. Talley was in the bathroom, readying herself for church. T
he boys had been told never to answer the doorbell, much as one would caution a child, and Magda knew they would be obedient. And since it didn’t really matter whether Mrs. Talley opened the door or whether she let herself in, she took the key out of her bag and used it to enter the apartment.
She could see that something was wrong the minute she got in. The twins were there, disheveled, dirty—she didn’t realize it was blood until later—and when they saw her, they began to cry.
“Mama, Mama,” one of them said.
“What happened?” Magda said, frightened. “And then I thought,” one of the newspapers quoted her, “ ‘Mother of God, Mrs. Talley has had an accident.’ I ran to the bathroom, thinking she had fallen.”
But Mrs. Talley was not in the bathroom. There was blood in the bathroom, in the sink and on the tile floor and on the towels. More frightened than ever, Magda ran to Mrs. Talley’s bedroom. It was neat, the bed made as it always was—“She was such a clean person,” Magda told the police—but Mrs. Talley was not there. She ran into the boys’ room, which was in disarray, the beds not made, blood on the sheets. But no Mrs. Talley.
Magda then ran through the living room into the kitchen and stopped herself at the door. There it was. “It” was the ravaged body of Alberta Talley, lying on the kitchen floor, covered with blood, blood congealed on the floor about it, blood on the cabinets, blood splashed on the window and the pretty white curtains.
“I crossed myself,” Magda said.
It must have been horrible. Reading the accounts, I wondered that so young a girl had comported herself so bravely. First she took Robert by the arm and walked him to Mrs. Talley’s bedroom. She told him to stay there and closed the door. (She explained that Mrs. Talley sometimes locked one of the twins in her bedroom when she was too busy to look after both of them. Magda didn’t have the key to the bedroom, but, she said, she thought Robert would believe he was locked in and would stay there. He did.)
She then called the police. They came very quickly, she said, and they were very kind.
I put all this into my chronology and then looked further for reports of the autopsy and the questioning of possible suspects. The autopsy reports were in the Wednesday papers, having been made public on Tuesday. Mrs. Talley had died of multiple stab wounds covering almost all her body. Some of them were fairly superficial—as if the killer didn’t mean it, one newspaper said—but the slash across the throat was probably the mortal blow.
Fingerprints from James and Robert Talley were found everywhere—on the bread knife that had killed their mother, in the blood that had congealed on and around her body, and throughout the apartment. Both twins had handled the knife; in fact, they had held the blade as well, leaving me to believe that they had picked it up out of curiosity or horror but not as a weapon. The police removed the twins from the apartment in handcuffs. There were photos of them being led away. I could not tell one from the other in the pictures, but I could see the resemblance between the twenty-nine-year-old twins and the old man at Greenwillow.
I suppose the police questioned them for hours, perhaps overnight. The year 1950 was long before the famous Miranda case and the subsequent Miranda warnings that everyone nowadays takes for granted. Heaven only knows how they abused those two poor young men, but apparently to no avail. Neither twin admitted anything. In fact, they were quite silent, asking frequently for “Mama” and for each other.
The tabloids kept the story alive in that grotesque manner that is not common nowadays, I KNEW THEY WERE KILLERS, one headline screamed on Wednesday, quoting a neighbor who lived in another building on Ocean Avenue and who sometimes saw the twins walking with Mrs. Talley or Magda. There was little behind the headline, and I felt disgusted both by the sentiment and by its publication. I am not always a lover of the good old days.
Separate from my chronology, I made a list of all the people mentioned whom I thought it would be useful to interview. There was Magda, of course, if I could find her. There was Sergeant Kevin O’Connor, who had told one newspaper that only a madman could have done such a killing. I hoped he had been young in 1950 so that he might still be on the force or perhaps retired somewhere in the area. There were people living in nearby apartments who were mentioned by name. I knew that New York’s rent-control laws made it disadvantageous to move, and I thought there might just be a slim chance that someone who remembered that Easter Sunday might still live in the same building. And I wondered very much about the missing Mr. Talley.
I had a lot of work ahead of me. Before going upstairs to get ready for bed, I tidied the dining table but left my notes and microfilm copies in separate piles, neat and accessible. I had more; questions than answers. Tomorrow I would begin to ask them.
6
I hooked up with Melanie Gross the next morning and we walked, ran, and talked.
“I was there Tuesday night,” she said as we rounded the first corner. “Do you really think you can find out anything about a murder that happened so long ago?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve already started and I’ve learned a few things.”
Melanie broke into a smile. “You did? When? What have you done?”
“I spent yesterday at the New York Public Library reading old newspapers on microfilm.”
“That’s fabulous. Have you got anything?”
“Just a deeper respect for the Miranda warnings.”
“Oh?”
“Those twins were questioned for hours without a lawyer. I’m sure you know what that means.”
“Was there a confession?”
“I don’t think they ever got anything out of them. I’m going to Brooklyn today to see if I can dig up the file on the case. I’d like to see whatever records there are of the questioning, and I’d like to see the autopsy report.”
“Will you be able to read it?”
“Probably not, but I’ll take it to Aunt Meg’s doctor, who’s also my cousin Gene’s doctor. I’m sure he’ll help.”
“Listen.” Mel slowed her pace, and I slowed my own to stay even. It’s tough to run and talk at the same time. “I’d like to tell you how I feel about Greenwillow.”
“Sure.”
“If James Talley isn’t in the group, I have nothing against the house being in Oakwood. I frankly wouldn’t want it next door to me, because we’d never sell the house. But I don’t object to their buying the Aldrich property. It’s the possibility of that man being a murderer that stops me. I have children and I’m concerned about their welfare. You don’t have to have kids to understand that.”
“Of course.”
“If you really find that someone else did that murder—and I can’t imagine how you can do that—I’ll support the variance.”
“Thanks, Mel.” We had come to a stop in front of my house. “I really appreciate your support. And I’m going to come back for it in September.”
“You’ll get it. But not if there’s still a cloud over Talley’s head. Okay?”
“Okay.” I waved as she jogged down the street to her house. It was time to start fighting clouds.
—
I drove down Ocean Avenue before I went to the police station. It was a wide street with old apartment houses, most of them about six stories high, and interspersed here and there with a one- or two-family house. Young mothers pushed strollers, and older men and women hobbled along with canes, walkers, or companions for support. The building the Talleys had lived in was of the same vintage as the others, probably a once grand place to live.
I drove slowly along the great avenue, crossing Quentin Road and then Avenue R and Avenue S. They had walked up the street—I wondered on which side—forty years ago, not knowing their mother would the horribly that afternoon or evening. The autopsy report estimated the time of her death as “sometime on Good Friday,” not a very scientific conclusion. Someone even linked the brutal murder to the crucifixion. I found that hard to believe.
A car honked behind me, and I put on some speed and found the Sixty-f
ifth precinct.
—
Outside, the police station looked like every picture I had seen on television or in the movies. (We watched TV at St. Stephen’s sometimes in the evening.) Inside, there was a high counter with a stone front, wood top, and stainless steel railing separating me from the uniformed people on the other side. One of them was a woman, and she asked politely if she could help me.
“I hope so. I’m looking into a murder that took place in this precinct forty years ago.”
I don’t know what I expected, but what she said left me almost speechless.
“Sorry, can’t help you,” she said, voice and expression dismissing me.
It was such a complete turndown, I didn’t know how to proceed. “Do you think someone else could help me?” I asked finally.
“No.” She turned away and spoke to a male officer.
I waited for her to return, but she obviously thought she had done with me. “Excuse me,” I said a little loudly. “I really need some help.”
She came back. “Ma’am, there’s no one here who was even alive forty years ago.”
I looked around and had to agree with her. “There have to be reports, records,” I persisted. “I want to see the file.”
She took a deep breath and exhaled to show her irritation. “Maybe the desk officer can help you.” She pointed to my right. “Ovuh theah.”
“Thank you very much.” I smiled to show I was grateful and went to the designated desk. A police officer was sitting there, and if the woman I had just spoken to had sounded weary, this one looked on the verge of sleep. He glanced at his watch as I approached.
“Good morning,” I said as cheerily as I could manage.