The Good Friday Murder

by Lee Harris

  “Of course. You’ll be the first to know if I learn anything concrete.”

  —

  On Wednesday I drove to the George Washington Bridge—it’s free leaving New York, but they clip you three dollars coming back—and crossed to New Jersey. Patrick Talley had lived in a town called Leonia, not far from the Jersey side of the bridge. I used a map to find the street, and then I drove down it slowly until I found the house. It was an old brick house with a small second story, two dormer windows above and on either side of the front door. I thought the house was rather pretty. It stood between two other brick houses, both different, both about the same size. In front of the Talley house a brightly colored plastic riding toy stood on the lawn, which was neither as lush nor as well cared for as the O’Connors’.

  I made a U-turn and drove back to the corner I had come from. Leonia is a small town directly west of the bridge, past the town of Fort Lee. It’s surrounded by a slew of towns: Fort Lee, Englewood, Teaneck, Bogota, Ridgefield Park, and Palisades Park. I had the feeling that people like Patrick Talley and the woman he lived with would want to marry—had probably planned to marry—as soon as they were legally able. I also felt that they wouldn’t do it in the church closest to home, because there would be a certain embarrassment attached to their relationship if it became known they had lived together for years without benefit of matrimony.

  On the map, Englewood and Teaneck both looked like larger towns than Leonia, but because I was pointed toward Teaneck, I drove in that direction. It proved fortuitous.

  The yellow pages gave me the names and addresses of the Roman Catholic churches in the area. The first one couldn’t find any record of the Talleys’ marriage, searching from Spring 1950 on, so I went to the next one on my list. It was a big old church with a convent on the grounds, and I found myself wondering about the nuns who lived there. After I lit my three candles, I found Father Romero, a smiling, bearded priest who was happy to look into old records—“It gives me a sense of history”—and he quickly found the Talleys’ marriage. They had tied the knot in May of 1950, confirming my suspicion that they had married at the first opportunity after the first Mrs. Talley’s untimely death.

  There was no record of the Talleys as members of any church organizations, which didn’t surprise me since they lived in another parish. I thanked the good father and made a contribution to the church building fund, which pleased him.

  Then I returned to Leonia. I felt sure that when the Talley children had been born, the parents would have wanted to baptize them, as any parents would. This they could have done in their parish church simply by concealing the fact that they were not married. Then, when they were able to marry, they slipped away to another parish to avoid embarrassment.

  There was no record of Patrick Talley Jr. being baptized in the local church, but the daughter, Kathleen, had been, in 1939.

  A picture of the Talleys started to emerge. Patrick and Anne had begun living together sometime in the 1930s, perhaps in an apartment. (I would probably never know where, but it didn’t matter.) After the birth of their son, they had bought the house in Leonia and become members of the local parish. There was little likelihood that anyone would ask them point-blank if they were married. There are few occasions in life when you’re called upon to produce a marriage license. If the Talleys traveled abroad and needed passports, they could probably lie to the feds as well, or tell the truth and use their legal names. It would make little difference. But people didn’t travel much during the war, and probably not very much in the years immediately after.

  I asked Father McDonald, the priest at the local church, to look further in his records for first communions, organization memberships, and so on. They were all there, until the summer of 1951, little more than a year after the murder, when the Talleys moved to another New Jersey town farther from the bridge and probably, I thought, more fashionable and more expensive.

  I was right.

  I found the town on the map and drove north along roads with county numbers through a succession of towns, past a reservoir, into communities where the size of the lots was increasingly larger. Suddenly, at a bend in the road, I saw the church ahead of me. It was a frame building one story high with a large parking lot behind it. Inside, I found it divided roughly in half, the church on one side, and a few meeting or classrooms on the other. In one of these rooms a small group of women sat around a table.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I’m looking for the pastor.”

  They looked at each other. “You can probably find him in the rectory,” one said.

  They directed me and I took off. The rectory was a house on a residential street about a quarter of a mile from the church. The door was opened by a young woman in street clothes who turned out to be Sister Diane. Part of her job was assisting in the parish, and she was more than happy to be helpful.

  As it turned out, the Talleys had lived in this small town until Patrick died in 1965. His widow then left for an apartment in White Plains, New York. That piece of information gave me a shiver. Oakwood isn’t far from White Plains, and there was a chance Anne Talley might still be alive. She was born in 1907, which would make her about eighty-three. It also made me think that one or both of her children might be living in that area. After all, where do you go when your husband dies? To be near the children.

  Sister Diane checked the marriages starting with 1955, when Kathleen Talley would have been seventeen. It was such a small town (“We’re over four thousand now,” Sister Diane said) that looking at a year’s marriage records took less than a minute. And suddenly there it was, Kathleen Talley and Gordon Mackey, June 1958, when the bride was twenty.

  “Any forwarding reference?” I asked, so excited I could scarcely contain myself.

  “An address in White Plains. Looks like an apartment number. And a letter was sent to the church, introducing them.”

  “Wonderful.” I wrote it all down. “Would you mind looking to see if the son married here? If he married a local girl, it’s always possible.”

  “I don’t mind at all. It’s kind of fun to see the old names. It’s surprising how many are still here after so many years. It’s a town people get attached to.”

  “It’s very pretty.”

  She went right through to the present, but Patrick Jr. hadn’t married in town, and there didn’t seem to be any reference to him anywhere. But at least I had something to go on.

  —

  Before leaving the town, I drove to the Talleys’ address to see the house they had lived in. It took my breath away. The contrast between the little brick house with its tiny front lawn and this old colonial set way back from the road, a circular drive in front and stately old trees everywhere, was dramatic. On a lark, I turned in to the drive, parked the car, and went to the front door.

  It was opened by a well-dressed woman in her fifties. I introduced myself and told her I was looking for Mrs. Talley, who had lived here in the sixties.

  “We bought the house from her,” the woman said. “Her husband had died and she was all alone.”

  “I don’t suppose you kept in touch with her.”

  “We never saw her. I think she left when she put the house up for sale. She wasn’t even there at the closing. Her lawyer came. I think it was too painful for her, you know, selling the house she’d raised her children in. We just dealt through the realtors.”

  “Was the house in good condition when you bought it?”

  “Oh yes. No house is perfect, you know, but they’d kept it up. And it was furnished beautifully. It was our first house and it was really a reach for us. We kept her decorations for years, until we could afford to do our own thing.”

  “Well, thank you. It’s really a beautiful house.”

  “If she’s still alive and you find her, tell her we’ve been good to the house. I think she’d like to hear that.”

  “I will. Thanks for your help.”

  I drove around the rest of the half circle of drive, lin
gered a minute at the tree-shaded road, and went on my way.

  —

  Sister Diane had told me how to get to the Tappan Zee Bridge, which crosses the Hudson River farther north than the George Washington. There the toll is only $2.50, so I saved fifty cents on the day. Hah!

  The church in White Plains found a record of a baptism for Kathleen and Gordon Mackey’s first child, a daughter, Lisa, born in 1961. The family moved after that to an address in North Tarrytown, which was close to the Tappan Zee Bridge, from which I had just come. It was already three o’clock and I had visited more towns in New Jersey than I ever knew existed, not to mention half the Catholic churches on the east coast. When you get up at five, you tend to tire early, and I could feel fatigue gnawing at me. I had done a good day’s work and it was time to go home.

  —

  I called Information that evening and asked for Gordon Mackey at the address the church in White Plains had given me. He wasn’t at that address, but the operator volunteered that someone with that name lived at a different address in the same town. I wrote down the number, hung up, and rallied my courage. I didn’t like the idea of calling a stranger—possibly a wrong number, at that—but either I did it, or it didn’t get done. I killed a little time by calling Information again and asking for Mrs. Anne Talley or Mrs. Patrick Talley. There was no listing for either name in White Plains.

  That left me with a phone number for Gordon Mackey and no excuse not to call. I dialed the number.

  A man answered, and I asked for Kathleen Mackey. He asked for my name and I gave it. He said, “Just a minute,” and left the phone. I heard his voice at a distance say, “Some gal named Bennett,” and then the phone was picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Kathleen Mackey?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Mrs. Mackey, my name is Christine Bennett and I’m researching some events that happened in 1950.”

  “What events?” she asked quickly.

  “The death of Alberta Talley.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I’d just like to get together with you, Mrs. Mackey. I’d like to ask—”

  But she cut me off. “Exactly what kind of ‘research’ are you doing?”

  “I’ll be glad to tell you about it when I see you. It has to do with the twins.” I thought that if I dropped something about the twins, she would know that I was aware of all the family relationships.

  “How did you find me?” she blurted.

  “In the phone book, actually,” I said.

  “I have to talk to my brother. Give me your name again.”

  I did.

  “And your phone number.”

  When she had it, she said she would call me back, and she hung up rather abruptly. I knew I had stirred something up, but I had no idea what. I felt fairly confident that Kathleen Mackey would return my call. She was listed and I could find her. I might not want to impose myself that way, but she didn’t know that.

  It was nearly nine and I was beat. I turned in.

  15

  Jack called me Thursday morning, and I gave him an abbreviated version of my day.

  “We should send you after Judge Crater. You sure you haven’t been doing this all your life?”

  “Very sure. But now I’m coming to a standstill. I have to give Kathleen Mackey time to get back to me, and I’ve talked to pretty much all the people on my list.”

  “I’m still looking for O’Connor’s partner. His name is Stassky. He was about O’Connor’s age, so he’s probably retired.”

  “Okay. Then I think I’ll come back to Brooklyn this morning and see those two people again, the old man across the street and Selma Franklin. I want to know why they lied.”

  “Probably has nothing to do with the Talley case.”

  “But I want to know.”

  “I’m not discouraging you. Will you have lunch?”

  I caught myself smiling. “Sure.”

  “Whenever you get here. And look, if I’m not here, I do get called away sometimes. I’ll give you a rain check.”

  “Fine.”

  —

  I arrived at the Talleys’ apartment house at nine-thirty. Mrs. Franklin buzzed me in and I took the elevator up to the fourth floor.

  “It’s nice to see you again,” she said, welcoming me. She was wearing a loose-fitting colorful cotton shift that might have been a housedress or might just be the kind of comfortable clothing you wear on a hot day in Brooklyn.

  “I’m glad I caught you,” I said. “I kind of decided to come on the spur of the moment, and I didn’t want to call you too early in the morning to ask if you’d be in.”

  “You could call at sunrise, I’d be up already.” She smiled and plopped into the same chair in the living room she had sat in last time. I took the nearest chair to hers, as I had done on my first visit, making it seem as though this were merely a continuation of that last pleasant conversation.

  But for me it was different. I knew now that I was in the identical apartment to the one Mrs. Talley had been murdered in. This was her living room; over there in a kitchen exactly like that one, Mrs. Talley had been murdered.

  “You thought of some more questions,” Mrs. Franklin stated, inviting me to proceed.

  “I found out that the Talleys lived in the apartment above yours,” I said.

  “That’s true.” She said it blandly, but I thought I saw her raising her guard.

  “Were you home that day?”

  “Well, of course, that’s what the policeman wanted to know.”

  I waited.

  “It was Good Friday, you know, that day. It’s not my holiday, but my children had no school, so it was a holiday for them. What I did that day…” She shook her head. “Some shopping, some sewing. What I told the police is what I did. You want to know if I heard anything.”

  I nodded.

  “Not a thing. Lunch I’m sure we had at home, so I can tell you it didn’t happen at lunchtime. Dinner I think we had at my mother’s in those days on Friday, so I couldn’t tell you about after five-thirty.”

  “And the rest of the weekend, Saturday and Sunday morning before the police came, did anything sound unusual up there?”

  She seemed very wary now, measuring her responses. “Nothing unusual. The same as always.”

  “What was it like usually?” I asked.

  She shrugged, but her face, her round, chubby face, had hardened. “Footsteps,” she said. “Nothing special.”

  “Were you on good terms with Mrs. Talley?”

  “I told you. We lived in the same building. We smiled and said ‘hello’ in the street.”

  I knew she would never admit anything if I didn’t provoke her, but I didn’t want to make her angry. She was an old woman and a very unlikely murderer. “They made a lot of noise up there, didn’t they?” I said.

  She shrugged again. “People make noise when they walk.”

  “Someone in this apartment used to bang on the ceiling to make them be quiet.”

  She gave me a hard look, but the corners of her mouth started to curl. “So how come a young girl like you knows something the police don’t know?”

  “Someone told me.”

  “Now? Today?”

  “A few days ago. The girl that helped Mrs. Talley. She remembered the banging.”

  “The little blond girl,” Mrs. Franklin said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you want to know all these things?”

  “Because I think someone else killed Mrs. Talley. And to prove it, I need all the information I can get.”

  She looked straight ahead of her, avoiding my eyes, her mouth set in what I took to mean not determination but resignation. “All right,” she said finally, “I’ll tell you what I never told anyone else. I didn’t get along with her. I lived for twelve years with such noise, it would drive you crazy. Not voices. This is an old building, thick, built solid. Voices you don�
��t hear. But on my head the whole day and half the night, such pounding, you could not believe it. They ran, they jumped, they did I-don’t-know-what. A little carpeting would have helped. They didn’t have it. My children slept in the room under the twins. Sometimes they couldn’t fall asleep. When it got so bad that I couldn’t take it anymore, I banged on the ceiling with a broom handle.”

  “It must have been very unpleasant.”

  “Terrible.”

  “You didn’t speak to her, did you?”

  She shook her head. “In the street we looked the other way.”

  “You told me a story, Mrs. Franklin, about Mrs. Talley asking the twins what color the light was before they crossed the street.” The same story had appeared, almost verbatim, in the police interview. “Did you make it up?”

  “I didn’t make it up. It’s a true story. Remember I told you my best friend, Harriet Cohen, lived next door to them? Next door is not underneath. Next door was quiet. She was friendly with Mrs. Talley, my friend Harriet. The story I told you, I heard from her.”

  “I see.”

  “Christine. May I call you Christine?” I nodded. “I didn’t hate the woman. I hated the noise. I didn’t want her dead. When I heard on Sunday what happened, I cried. Do you believe it? You say things sometimes you don’t mean and then something terrible happens and you feel—” she paused “—responsible.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Your head knows this, but it hurts all the same.”

  “So you heard nothing unusual that day,” I said.

  “Unusual. Who knows what unusual is when every day it sounds like a stampede? How many times did I say, ‘Someone must be getting killed up there’? So when it happened on that bad Friday, everything was the same as always.”

  “Thank you for being so honest, Mrs. Franklin.”

  “I didn’t even give you tea.”

  “You gave me something much better.”

  “You’re such a nice girl. Come in and say hello if you’re in the neighborhood.”

  —

  I rang a second time at Mrs. Cappicola’s house before I heard her footsteps approaching. She opened the door, recognized me, and said, “My father isn’t home.”