The Good Friday Murder

by Lee Harris

  “But who would that have been?”

  “This I can’t tell you. There was a little blond girl that worked there—she found the body. Who knows? Maybe she has a fight with Mrs. Talley. Maybe the super comes up and tells Mrs. Talley he doesn’t want those boys there anymore. The super in those days—I don’t remember his name anymore—he wasn’t the nicest person in the world. So maybe there’s an argument. Maybe the gas man came to read the meter and took the elevator up to find an empty apartment to rob. You think such a thing never happened? Somebody rings and one of the twins opens the door and poof! She’s dead.”

  Almost as she said it, her doorbell rang. She lifted herself from the chair, went to the door, and called, “Who’s there?”

  “Andy,” a small voice came back.

  Mrs. Franklin opened something in the door, looked out, then turned the lock and opened the door. A little boy scampered in.

  “Andy,” Mrs. Franklin said, scooping him up and kissing him. “I knew you were coming, I have cookies.” She put him down.

  He looked at me shyly, found the cookie tray, and took two. “My mommy says hello.”

  “And hello back to your beautiful mommy.” Mrs. Franklin was beaming.

  They chitchatted for a minute and then Andy said goodbye and left. Mrs. Franklin locked the door behind him.

  “You see,” she said, still standing at the door, “when someone comes, I look through the peephole.” She tapped it with her finger. “But when it’s a little fellow like that, you can’t see him.”

  “So if Mrs. Talley let someone in, she knew who it was.”

  “Absolutely. But if one of the twins did it, who knows?”

  “The newspapers said the twins didn’t open the door, that they were trained not to.”

  “Sweetheart,” Mrs. Franklin said, “let me tell you about the newspapers. Those reporters came to every apartment. They asked every question you could think of. And you know what they did then? They went back and wrote their stories out of their heads. They said Mrs. This and Mrs. That said such-and-such. They said no such thing. It was all made up. Nowadays you have television. You ask a question, you see the person giving an answer. But in 1950 who had television? I can tell you, after it happened, I never opened the door again without I looked first.”

  “I have just one more question,” I said, setting down my cup of tea. “Do you remember Mr. Talley at all?”

  “Mr. Talley? There was no Mr. Talley. Not from the time I lived here.”

  “How can you be so sure? You lived on a different floor. He might have left early and—”

  “Sweetheart, I’m telling you. No Mr. Talley. My best friend, Harriet Cohen, may she rest in peace, lived next door to the Talleys.”

  “I see.” I stood and went to shake her hand.

  She pulled herself out of the chair again. “You’ll take a couple of cookies with you for later,” she said.

  “Well, I-”

  “They shouldn’t go stale.” That was to tell me what a big favor I was doing her.

  She made me promise I would stop by if I ever came back, and I took her telephone number in case I thought of any more questions.

  Then I left. As I started for the elevator, I heard the distinct sound of the bolt being turned in the heavy door.

  There was still time to talk to the other woman who had lived in the building in 1950, but I thought better of it. The person I needed to talk to was Magda Wandowska. And I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to find her.

  8

  On Friday I decided to start the day by trying to talk to James Talley. When I arrived at Greenwillow, Mrs. McAlpin intercepted me and we talked in her office for about a quarter of an hour. She’s a woman with a controlled, low-key managerial style, but she was pretty excited at what I told her, convinced that it was progress. When I asked for permission to speak to James Talley, she escorted me to his room.

  It was a room similar to my cousin’s, but the furniture was arranged differently and the curtains and bedspreads were a different color. Mrs. McAlpin left me, and I stood just inside the door.

  “Hello, James,” I said.

  He was sitting in his easy chair, and he looked up at his name.

  “My name is Chris. May I come in?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I walked in and sat in the desk chair. “We met a few days ago. Do you remember?”

  He nodded his head. Then he said, “Do you know where my brother is?”

  “I don’t know, James, but I’m trying to find out. I’m trying very hard.” I watched his face for some glint of acknowledgment of what I’d said, but I couldn’t see any. Then I plunged in. “Do you remember Magda, James?”

  This time there was a definite response. The head bounced up and the eyes seemed almost to glow.

  “Do you remember when Magda took you and Robert for a walk?” I asked softly.

  He said, “Magda.”

  “Yes, Magda. She was a very nice girl, wasn’t she?”

  But I had lost him. He turned away, deep in his own thoughts, if indeed they were thoughts.

  I wondered what kind of melodies James Talley heard.

  —

  At ten-thirty, after I had said hello to Gene, Sergeant Brooks answered his phone.

  “Got it,” he said when I gave him my name.

  “The file? Really?”

  “Right here in front of me.”

  “It’ll take me an hour.”

  “I’m here all day.”

  —

  I enjoy driving. My monthly trips to Oakwood were a special joy for all the years that I made them from St. Stephen’s. There was something about being alone in a car, being the captain of my own ship, that I found satisfying. Now, driving to Brooklyn to see the file on the Talley murder. I thought of Frost and the road not taken. But I thought of it happily. The road that I was traveling right now was that road, and I was taking it.

  There were things I missed that I had left behind at St. Stephen’s, good friends, a way of life rich in fulfillment. I remember the first time I saw the convent, before I entered it, when I went up as a visitor. It was awesome, as the young girls say now, big and heavy and very beautiful, on landscaped grounds shared with the college in which I would later study and even later teach. There was a warmth from the nuns, a girlish friendliness from the novices.

  “And you know,” one of them said as we toured the grounds, “we have such a lovely view of the Hudson River.”

  I couldn’t see it, but I didn’t want to say so, afraid that I would unwittingly insult my guide. Later, when I myself was a novice, I realized it was a joke. “The view of the river” that everyone mentioned now and then, especially to visitors and prospective novices, didn’t exist. It was all a myth. Even in winter, when every branch was bare and the air cool and dry and you could see for miles, there was no river.

  Once, I had climbed to the top floor of the Mother House and stolen a look out the windows that faced west. There was no river. It had saddened me to know it, but I had kept the secret. The nuns would have their jest.

  —

  “I went through it this morning,” Sergeant Brooks said, indicating a thick file tied with string that lay on his desk. “I have to tell you, I had some funny feelings reading it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there were some loose ends I didn’t like. Maybe somebody could have worked a little harder.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t necessary.” I heard myself become the devil’s advocate. “Maybe the twins were just guilty and that was that.”

  “I don’t know. I think if it had been my case, I would’ve followed up on a couple of things.”

  “What kind of things?” I tried not to sound too eager.

  “For one thing, the knife.”

  “Why?”

  “Let me show you.” He opened the top desk drawer and pulled out a twelve-inch ruler. “Here’s a knife you’re about to stab me with. Show me how you hold it.”
>
  I took it in my right hand and wrapped my fingers around it. “Something like this.”

  “I can see you’re no pro. It’s got to go in this way.” He turned my clenched hand so that the ruler was horizontal. “Gets stuck in the ribs the other way. Very messy. But look at where your fingers are. They’re more on the edge than on the flat surface. But the prints on the cards are nice, clear, whole prints. And some of them came from the blade.”

  “I read that in one of the papers,” I said, feeling a ripple of excitement. “I had a feeling the twins might have picked it up to look at it out of curiosity, not to use it.”

  “That makes two of us. And there was something else. I thought they should have followed up a little better on other people that might have visited the apartment, maybe some guy hanging around the building that might have followed them upstairs.”

  “The gas man,” I said, remembering Selma Franklin.

  “Like that, right. But you can’t look into things like that forty years later.”

  “I understand. But there are people with names that might still be living.”

  “Possibly.” He looked at his watch, and I was afraid he would tell me he had other things to do. “Why don’t we go out to lunch and talk?”

  “Thank you, I have a sandwich in the car.”

  “Leave it for supper. C’mon.” He pushed his chair back and stood.

  “I guess I could.”

  “Sure you can.” He started walking, pausing at an occupied desk to say something quick.

  When we were out on the street we walked two blocks to a small restaurant and went inside. The waitress knew him and teased him about not having been around for a while.

  I read the menu. When the waitress came for our order, I said, “Tuna fish on rye, please, with lettuce and tomato.”

  Sergeant Brooks stopped her from writing and turned to me. “That’s what you’ve got in your car for supper. Live it up a little.”

  I’m sure I blushed. He was exactly right about what I had in my car. “Eggplant parmigiana,” I mumbled, and sipped a glass of ice water. “And a glass of iced coffee,” I added before she took the sergeant’s order.

  Frankly, I was about as nervous as I’ve ever been in my life. I was sitting at a table with a man I found attractive in a very nice way. He had a ready smile, an easy manner, curly hair that I expected defied both brush and comb and looked as if it rarely saw either, rather pale eyes that didn’t avoid mine but invited confidence. He had been kind to me. He had helped me in ways I could not have helped myself.

  And in all of my thirty years I had never found myself in—don’t laugh—so intimate a situation. I was close enough to touch him, I who did not touch men. But I think I realized then for the first time in my life that when a man and a woman are near each other, the idea of touching arises quite naturally. It didn’t do much to calm me.

  When the waitress had left, he felt in a couple of pockets and then pulled out a much-folded piece of paper—it turned out to be several sheets—and started to unfold it. He had written on many of the folded surfaces so that as he talked, he had to turn it this way and that to retrieve information. It seemed to me a disorganized and inefficient method of taking notes, but to my surprise, he found what he was looking for very quickly. So much for organization.

  “I’ve been through the highlights of the Talley file,” he said. “It’s pretty clear the guys working on the case were sure who did it the minute they walked in that apartment. And there’s a lot of reason to think they were right. But as I said at the precinct, it’s possible they were wrong. If they were, I have to tell you it’s an almost impossible task to prove anything at this point.”

  “But we can explore some possibilities,” I said.

  “We can explore anything.”

  “We talked about the gas man. That’s one of the possibilities, isn’t it?”

  “It always is. A guy gets in the building for some legitimate reason—he reads a meter or delivers a package—and then looks around for an apartment to burglarize. He could’ve gone up to the fifth floor, rung the doorbell, gotten in, and killed her. But there’s a lot wrong with that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “First of all, he killed her with her bread knife. Guys don’t carry bread knives, and the one that was used was identified by the girl who worked for her.” He looked at his notes.

  “Magda,” I said.

  “Right. Wandowska. And suppose the gas man did it. Why didn’t he steal anything?”

  “You mean nothing was missing or disturbed?”

  “Disturbed, yes, but by the twins. Missing, probably not. There was jewelry in her dresser, some good stuff, a diamond ring. And there’s something else. A guy like that doesn’t stop with one. Sooner or later he’s caught and they match his fingerprints with others where the MO is the same.”

  “But they were sure they had a killer here.”

  “True, but they would’ve tried anyway.”

  “All right,” I said, setting aside the gas man theory, not unhappily, because it was unprovable. “Suppose Magda did it.”

  “An eighteen-year-old girl knifing a woman to death?”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  “It’s pretty farfetched.”

  “She said she left at noon on Good Friday and went to church. Maybe she killed Mrs. Talley before she left. She knew no one was coming back till she was expected on Sunday. They could have had an argument. Maybe it was unintentional.”

  “But you’re forgetting the twins,” Sergeant Brooks said. “Magda knew the twins. She knew they were savants, that they would remember everything that happened.”

  “That’s true. I hadn’t really thought of that.”

  “So she couldn’t take a chance of having them tell what they saw. Which pretty much rules out anyone who knew the twins’ powers.”

  “So we’re back to the gas man.” We said it almost in unison and then we laughed.

  “Now, as it turns out,” Sergeant Brooks went on, “the twins never said anything. If they were guilty and they understand what they did, I can see why. But if they’re not guilty, why haven’t they ever said anything? There was no statement, no denials, nothing.”

  “They were traumatized,” I said.

  “I can buy that. But what I can’t buy is someone knowing in advance that they would be.”

  “Which, as you said a minute ago, rules out anyone who knew them. It leaves me with a very tough job.”

  “They may have done it.”

  “They were described as almost docile.”

  “I’m not a psychiatrist,” Sergeant Brooks said, “but I’ve seen cases where normal people went berserk. Can you rule out that a retarded person could do the same?”

  “Of course I can’t rule it out. But I’ve spoken to James Talley twice, and he seems a man of sadness, not a man of anger.”

  “But he’s been traumatized, remember? He’s not the same person he was before his mother’s murder.”

  “I think that’s true,” I said, starting to feel discouraged. But discouraged is not defeated. “I need to find Magda,” I said. “The law of averages says she’s still alive, and my head tells me she hasn’t forgotten any of what happened.”

  “You want to see her even though you think she might be guilty of murder?”

  “I don’t really think that. What I think is that she knew the Talleys more intimately than anyone else.”

  “Granted.”

  “And if there’s anything at all that isn’t in your file, she may know it. But how am I going to find her after forty years?”

  He pulled the bottom sheet of folded paper out from under the other two, folded it in half and in half again, and wrote Magda Wandowska along the top edge. “Okay,” he said thoughtfully, “let’s see what we know about her. In 1950 she’s eighteen years old and a recent immigrant from Eastern Europe. And she’s a good Catholic. Either she stayed home and took care of Mom and Pop in their old age or she marri
ed. If she married, her name’s different.”

  “Right, but she married in the parish church. They published the banns and they’ll have a record of the marriage.”

  “Good thinking,” he said with approval. “I could run up there next week and ask around.”

  “No. Let’s just find out where the church is. I’m very good with clergy.”

  He looked at me, then said, “Okay. We got that one out of the way.”

  “There’s something else.” I took a sip of my iced coffee. It was such a long shot. “The Talleys lived nicely. Mrs. Talley paid Magda a dollar an hour. When I was reading the Times on microfilm the other day, I looked at the want ads. Do you know that people earned fifty-seven and a half cents an hour in 1950?”

  He gave me the nice smile. “I didn’t.”

  “So a dollar an hour was a lot of money for housecleaning and baby-sitting.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And it didn’t sound as though Mrs. Talley worked at all.”

  “Not if the Wandowska girl was the only baby-sitter.”

  “So what did she live on?” I watched his face.

  “You’re talking about the missing husband.”

  “Right. I saw no mention of him in any of the newspapers I read on microfilm.”

  “He’s written up in the file.”

  “Really?” I had been so sure I’d made a clever discovery, “How did they find him?”

  “Well, you start off making the same observations and assumptions that you did. Then you go to the local banks and find the one she keeps her money in. Once a month there’s a deposit made, a check, always the same amount. From there, it’s pretty easy to find the guy who wrote the checks.”

  I hoped I didn’t look as disappointed as I felt. “Are his name and address in the file?”

  “Sure. I’ll give it to you when we get back to the house.” He signaled the waitress. “Dessert?” he asked me.

  “Not for me.”

  He got the check and pulled out his wallet. I took mine out of my bag and glanced over at the check.