The Good Friday Murder

by Lee Harris

  “It’s you I’d like to talk to, Mrs. Cappicola.”

  She looked for a moment as though she were considering this. Then she said, “Come in, Sister.”

  We went into the same living room and sat.

  “I really don’t think I can tell you any more. We weren’t involved in what happened across the street.”

  “I know that. But I was looking over my notes the other night and I noticed your father referred to the ‘blue-and-white’ police cars. They weren’t blue and white in 1950. They were green and white.”

  “Well, you know, he’s an old man and his memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  There was a definite creak overhead, as though someone had moved on the second floor. I glanced up toward the ceiling, and Mrs. Cappicola looked pained. This seemed to be my morning for making people unhappy.

  “Did he really see those police cars?” I asked. “Was he really here that day?”

  “He was here.” But that was all she said, as though that had answered both my questions.

  “And he saw what happened across the street?”

  She sat in the chair looking nowhere. Finally she said, “He didn’t look out of the window all day.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t see. When you came last week, I forgot that was the year…My father is a devout Catholic, Sister. Even today, at his age, he goes to mass every Sunday. That Easter, in 1950, he missed mass for the only time in his adult life.”

  “I didn’t mean to stir up old problems. You don’t have to explain.” I started to put my notebook away. What difference did it make whether one old man had looked out his window that Easter Sunday?

  “He had a terrible fight with my brother,” she went on, as though I had not spoken. Upstairs, there were rhythmic creaks, and I thought her father was probably rocking in a chair. “My brother is much older, and he’d gotten in trouble that weekend. It was nothing serious, but my father reacted very strongly. There was such shouting that weekend, and then, on Easter Sunday morning, I thought my father would kill him. My mother grabbed me and took me to church while they were still fighting. They never went. Neither one of them.”

  “I’m sorry I upset you, Mrs. Cappicola.”

  “He never went near the window the whole day. He was afraid someone he knew might see him and wonder why he hadn’t been to church.” She smiled. “We worry about silly things, don’t we?”

  “I’m afraid we do.”

  “I went out on the sidewalk to watch what was going on. People gathered. There were rumors about what had happened. When the pictures were in the paper the next day, it was like I was part of something very important.”

  “You were.” I got up, sorry I had come. “I hope your father and your brother came to terms.”

  “Oh yes, later they did. He’s a good man, my brother. A good son. But it was the only mass my father ever missed.”

  I thanked her and left. Crossing the street, I felt sure the old man on the second floor was watching me.

  16

  We went to the same place for lunch and were waited on by the same waitress. There was something different about Jack Brooks this time, the way he looked at me. He kept smiling when our eyes met, and it made me smile back.

  I told him about Selma Franklin’s new story.

  “You’ve got to expect that, that people’ll lie to protect themselves. Whoever questioned her after that murder should’ve been more sensitive to the situation. Anyone who lives in an apartment in New York knows that the lady downstairs can’t stand the noise from upstairs. It’s the way things are.”

  “So the place to live is on the top floor.”

  “Then the roof leaks,” he said, and I laughed.

  “Always?”

  “Always in New York.”

  “You don’t think that sweet little lady could have reached the end of her rope and gone upstairs and killed Mrs. Talley?”

  “I doubt it. What would you do if you convinced yourself she did?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. It would be much easier to show that someone dead and buried had been guilty or to find that a dirty old man who had done other terrible things had done this one, too. “I wonder if you can check something for me.” I pulled out my notes to get the spelling right. “Sometime that weekend the son of the old man across the street got into some kind of trouble. His sister told me about it this morning. She didn’t say what kind of trouble, but I had the feeling it was more serious than she wanted to let on.”

  Jack pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, found a clean surface, and clicked his pen open. “Got a name?”

  “Antonetti.”

  “I’ll try to have it when I see you Saturday.” He turned the folded paper until he found what he was looking for. “Applebaum,” he said. “Applebaum Sr. never worked in Brooklyn, so I guess he’s not the guy your Magda talked to.”

  “We’ll have to look for a different fruit.”

  “You know, looking for fruits in the police department is not the way I want to be remembered.”

  I started to say something that I hoped would sound clever, but he interrupted. “I like your hair. It has a devil-may-care look about it.”

  “It was cut by a friend. I need a more professional hand.”

  He ran a hand through his own rather wildly curly mass of hair. “Don’t we all. So you found Patrick Talley’s daughter.”

  “I spoke to her,” I told him, “just last night.” I told him of my trip to New Jersey and all my inquiries.

  “Not bad,” he said appreciatively when I had finished. “You think he’s the man, don’t you?”

  “Except that the twins didn’t identify him, which I really can’t explain. But if you had seen the contrast between the little house they first lived in and the place they moved up to, you’d know why I feel that way. And everything fell into place. His wife dies and he marries his lover. A year later the family moves to a minimansion and they furnish it expensively. He was maintaining two families for years, and one day in 1950 he suddenly had only one. No one else benefited the way he did.”

  “But he’s dead and buried.”

  I nodded. “And I have qualms about naming a dead man who can’t defend himself.”

  “Well, we’ll see what you turn up when you talk to the daughter.”

  We walked back to the precinct together and made arrangements for Saturday night. Then I drove back to Oakwood.

  —

  Kathleen Mackey called at six just as I was about to sit down to a quick dinner. I turned off the stove as I passed it on my way to the telephone.

  “Miss Bennett, this is Kathleen Mackey,” she announced.

  “Thank you for calling,” I said, trying to sound friendly.

  “You know, summer is really a very bad time to get together. My brother is leaving for vacation tomorrow—the Fourth is next week, you know—and I’m involved in a number of activities that don’t leave me much free time.”

  Her tone was patronizing, and her excuses sounded like quick fixes. But I couldn’t lose her now and I couldn’t let her postpone this meeting till after the summer. After the summer I was finished, so far as Greenwillow was concerned.

  “I could see you tonight,” I said, taking a bold step.

  “Well, that seems rather—hold on a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece and I could hear muffled noises. “I’ll call you back,” she said suddenly, and hung up.

  I went back to the stove and tried to repair my dinner. I had everything out on the table when the phone rang again.

  “When could you be here?” Kathleen Mackey asked without preliminaries.

  “In half an hour.” I looked at the dinner that I would not be able to eat.

  “No. That’s too soon. How’s—” She covered the phone again. “Could you make it at eight?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t give you much time.”

  “I’ll make it as fast as I can.”

  Sh
e gave me the address and some brief directions and hung up. I waltzed back to the kitchen table, almost too excited to eat. I had done it.

  —

  I got there early, found the house, and drove away so that I could arrive at the stroke of eight. When I returned, a car had parked in the previously empty driveway. I left mine on the street and walked to the front door.

  The house was in a beautiful community near the Hudson River. It was a long way from the little house in Leonia and a longer way from Alberta Talley’s apartment in Brooklyn.

  Kathleen Mackey was a good-looking woman. I knew from the police records that she was fifty-two, and her brother two years older. She was slim and well dressed in a khaki outfit with rolled-up sleeves, a wide belt of some endangered reptile’s expensive skin, and attractive sandals. She led me into a room with sliding glass doors open onto a large deck, where a man sat on a chair that matched a whole set of outdoor furniture.

  “Nice to meet you,” Patrick Talley Jr. said genially, raising himself without offering his hand and returning quickly to his seat.

  “Thank you. I’m Christine Bennett.”

  “Kath tells me you’re doing some research or something on an old murder.”

  “The murder of Alberta Talley in 1950.” I sat down at the umbrellaed table, took my notebook and pen out of my bag, and flipped to a clean page. I noticed Kathleen’s face as I did so. Her eyes seemed to open wide and burn through my notebook.

  “We probably can’t help you,” Patrick said. “Never knew the lady.” He at least had a cordial sound to his voice.

  I wondered how much he resembled his father. I imagined his father as something of a charmer, perhaps because I have a stereotype of the successful salesman in my head.

  “Do you know when your parents started living together?” I asked, looking directly at him.

  “Before I was born, that’s for sure. I guess in the mid-thirties. They didn’t talk about it much. Lots of people lived together in those days. Common-law kind of thing.”

  “Did he visit his first family?”

  “He did not,” Kathleen’s icy voice shot at me. We were all sitting equidistant from one another around the circular table so that everyone was almost opposite everyone else.

  “Do you know if he ever telephoned, if he kept any relationship going with them?”

  “Got me,” Patrick said. He smiled, and I felt sure he had decided to be nice to me but give me nothing of value. It was clear that tonight he was the family spokesman. “I didn’t hang around when Dad was on the phone.”

  “What kind of research are you doing that requires questions like these?” Kathleen asked.

  “I’m looking into some unsolved murders.”

  “But that one was solved,” she shot back.

  “There was no trial, no conviction. It’s possible the twins didn’t kill their mother.”

  “And you think my father did!” Her voice rose in shock and anger.

  “I don’t know who did. I’m trying to get as complete a picture as I can of the family. It’s part of my research.” I hoped it sounded legitimate. “Do you remember how old your father was when he retired?” I looked back at Patrick.

  “Well, you know, Dad sold insurance and he was good at it. He wasn’t the kind to stay home just because he reached a certain age. He kept some clients till he was well into his seventies.”

  “That must have been nice for him,” I said.

  It was growing dark. Someone inside the house must have flicked a switch at that moment, because lights went on, not just on the deck, but along the perimeter of the property. It would be a lovely place to have a summer evening party.

  “It was nice for everybody,” Patrick said. “He kept up his business, but they had time to travel and do a lot of things they wanted.”

  “He must have lived to a ripe old age with a regimen like that.”

  “He surely did,” Patrick said. “They took him kicking and screaming.”

  I smiled. “Where is your father buried?” I asked.

  “How dare you ask a question like that,” Kathleen said.

  “Come on, Kath,” her brother cajoled. “Actually, they were on vacation when Dad died, and Mom had him buried there.”

  That surprised me. “What an unusual thing to do,” I said.

  “Well, they had a little bungalow they used to go to. R and R. You know.”

  I suddenly started picking up interesting vibes. Neither of them had said where Patrick Sr. was buried, and something was very strange. I couldn’t imagine the Talleys living in a “little bungalow,” and I found it very peculiar that, wherever he had died, he had not been buried somewhere near home with a funeral at the local church near their New Jersey home. “What country is that?” I asked.

  Patrick smiled. He didn’t want to answer, but he couldn’t avoid the question. “The Bahamas, I think it was,” he said finally. “Isn’t that so, Kath?”

  She said, “Yes,” tightly, and I sensed she was seething.

  “Grand Bahama Island, that’s it,” he said.

  “What a nice place to have a bungalow,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound sarcastic. “Does your mother spend all her time there now or might I be able to find her here?”

  “Stay away from my mother,” Kathleen ordered, letting me know that Anne was still alive. “She had nothing to do with my father’s first wife. There’s nothing she can tell you.”

  “It must have come as a terrible shock to your father when he heard his wife was dead.”

  “In a lot of ways,” Patrick said, recovering his calm demeanor. “With cops knocking on the door, my parents had to tell us a lot of things they would have rather not. It wasn’t an easy time for them.”

  “And of course, you’ve never had anything to do with the twins.”

  “Nothing at all. Don’t even know if they’re still alive.”

  “They are,” I said. “I’ve visited one of them recently.”

  “No kidding,” Patrick said in a flat tone.

  “How did your lives change after the murder?” I asked.

  “Nothing changed,” Kathleen said firmly.

  “Well, that’s not true,” her brother said in that easy manner he had. “As I said, we found out things we hadn’t known before, that we had these—half-brothers, that Dad had had a wife, and eventually that the folks weren’t married. It was a shocker, I’ll tell you.”

  “Did he ever talk about them?”

  “Not too much. As you can imagine, it hadn’t been the happiest of marriages.”

  “Because of the twins?”

  “Because of the twins and because of their mother,” Kathleen said in her icy tone. “How would you like to come home every night to a family like that? My father pleaded with her to put those boys away, to let them have a real life together without those terrible encumbrances. They couldn’t go to a goddamn movie without getting a baby-sitter. Their lives revolved around those boys. There was nothing; else and she wouldn’t have it any other way.” I could hear Kathleen’s anger mounting as she warmed to her tale. “My father was a kind, warm person. He was loving, he had a sense of humor. She took all that away from him. She made him into a robot whose only reason for living was to support that family. And what did he get from them? Nothing.” She spat out the word. “He had to leave her to save himself.”

  “C’mon, Kath,” her brother coaxed.

  “No, let me say it. The only thing in the world that woman cared about was those two retarded sons of hers, and if you ask me, she got what was coming to her. She was a leech. When I found out how much my father was sending her every month, I realized why we had to live the way we did. She had money for everything, and we had to count pennies.”

  “It must have gotten much better after she died,” I said, hoping for a reaction before she thought better of it.

  “Of course it did. And when my father got his—”

  “Kathleen!” It was the first time Patrick had spoken sharply. “I’m
sure Miss Bennett doesn’t want to hear personal details.”

  I did, of course, but there was no way of making her continue. She sat back in her chair, seemingly stunned by what she had nearly said.

  To my surprise, she smiled. “Is your research complete now?”

  “I think I have a better picture of things,” I said. I closed my book and pushed my chair back. “Thank you both very much. You’ve been very helpful.” That was my understatement of the year.

  17

  I slept on it, reserving thought until the next morning, Friday, when I went out for my daily lope. But I had scarcely reached the corner when Melanie Gross came out of her house and joined me.

  “Hi, good morning,” she called, coming down her driveway in running clothes.

  “Good morning.”

  “I tried to call you yesterday. You’re never home, do you know that?”

  “It occurs to me when I run out of milk and eggs.”

  “I wanted to ask you…I really don’t know how to say this, but would you like to go out with a cousin of mine?”

  “You mean on a date?”

  “Sure. He’s a terrific person, works on Wall Street, has lots of money, a great apartment in New York. I’d go out with him if I were single. He’s Jewish, of course. I don’t know how you feel about that.”

  I laughed. “People are people. Do you think I could take a rain check? l’ve only been out of the convent a month now, and I told myself I should wait a few months before I start to think of men as men. I mean, I’d kind of like to get my sea legs before I plunge in.” The longer I babbled, the more I was apt to mix my tenuous metaphors.

  “Okay,” Melanie said. “I’ll ask you again in the fall. He’ll probably still be around. He works so hard, he never has time to do much else. My aunt is having fits over it.”

  I said something noncommittal and changed the subject to my advancing investigation.

  When I got home, I made breakfast and took it out to the dining room so that I could get an early start on my thinking. The Bahamas had rung a bell as soon as Patrick Talley Jr. had mentioned it last night. People with money to hide went to the Bahamas. Perhaps Patrick Sr. had cheated the IRS and wanted a place to stash his funds. I hadn’t for a minute believed the “bungalow” story. As I thought about it, I had an idea.