A Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She had been calling up the stairs to him all night, Tim thought. The more wine she had, the more people she thought of to call into the party, and she would want him, especially him.

  Her son’s concertina started as Tim went up the outside steps. He paused a moment and looked in through the limp curtains. “When I was a fisherman there by the shore …” Johnny Galli sang. He was a baker and the son of a baker, and if ever he had caught a fish he had trapped it in his mother’s goldfish bowl, Tim thought. He thought about goldfish and bowls for a moment, and how much like them people were, except that most of them didn’t know they were in the bowl. He knew it. It was why he liked the darkness and preferred to see a party from where he watched now. The chorus of Johnny’s song was picked up in Italian. The singers swayed with the music and closed their eyes, remembering the shore they sang about, the long white beach and the blue Mediterranean and the great gulls flying …

  Tim was more weary than he could remember ever having been before. He entered the house and went upstairs unnoticed. In five minutes he was sprawled on his bed, clothes and shoes still on, and asleep.

  He awoke suddenly to the sound of his name. He looked about the dark room frantically, trying to get his bearings, for he had been torn out of a wild and terrible dream.

  “Tim, Tim, are you in there?”

  He heard music now behind the voice and the knocking, and fumbled his hands over the bed. The tufted quilt was familiar. He turned his head and felt the coolness where the air sluiced his wet neck and forehead. He moistened his lips and breathed deeply. The knocking persisted.

  “What is it?” he called out.

  “It’s me, Katie, Tim. Mama thought you’d be sorry if you didn’t come down.”

  “Just a minute, Katie.”

  He groped for the light cord above his head and pulled it. Sitting up, he shook off sleep and the dream. “Come in if you want to.”

  A slim, dark girl opened the door a few inches at a time.

  “I didn’t want to bother you, Tim. But you know how mama is when there’s a party.”

  “It’s all right, Katie. I’m just groggy with sleep. The light hurts my eyes.” He swung his feet to the floor.

  She moved a pile of books from the one rocker in the room and sat on the edge of it tentatively.

  “How do you feel, Tim?”

  “How do I feel?”

  “You had a headache this afternoon.”

  “Oh. It’s all gone. I needed sleep. That’s all.”

  “Wasn’t it hard?”

  He felt a constriction in his breath as though a hand were at his throat. The dream seemed to be creeping up on him again. He fastened his eyes upon her to keep from being dragged back into it.

  “Don’t look at me so funny, Tim,” the girl said. “I don’t see how anybody could fall asleep with all the racket downstairs.”

  “Oh.” He sat a moment with his face in his hands.

  “I’d better go downstairs.”

  “Don’t go yet, Katie,” he said, making an effort to be congenial then. “Let me get awake. I’ll go down with you.” He got up and went to the window. He caught her reflection in it. She was watching him, unaware that he could see her. Her eyes asked him frankly to come downstairs for her sake, just to be in the room with her, like a protector. She had come eagerly on her mother’s errand. Something hurt him in the thought of it. It was too soon after the dream, gnawing as it was at his consciousness. He flung the window to its limits and leaned out.

  “Look at the stars up there,” he said over his shoulder. “Like you could step from one to another of them and never stop going.”

  “I’d like that,” she said, when he pulled back into the room.

  He turned and looked at her. “Would you, Katie?” He answered himself, seeing the response in her eyes. “I believe you would. Just think. If we were doing that, we could reach down and pick up the earth and just toss it like a snowball.”

  She giggled at the picture. “Where would you throw it?”

  He thought about that a moment. “I’d smash it right in the face of the sun, I think. It would go f-f-ft and that’s all there’d be to it. You know that’s what’s going to happen some day. That’s how important the earth is really, Katie. A lot of people know that.”

  “It’s more important to God,” she said. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Tim.”

  “How can it be so important to God if it means so little to men? He’s got lots of worlds, and they’ve got only one.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Good. I hope you never learn it.”

  “I’ll learn it,” she said proudly, “if it’s something to learn.”

  He nodded. “Maybe. But I won’t be the one to teach you.”

  “You’d better comb your hair. It’s all messed up.”

  He went over to her then and brushed his hand against her cheek. “Poor little Katie. You don’t like to hear me talk like that.”

  “Your hand smells funny.”

  “Does it?” He drew it away and looked at it, turning it over slowly. “Have you ever thought about all the things a hand does, Katie? Without hands, how lost we would be! How would your brother make his bread? How would I repair things? …”

  The girl got up from the chair and shook her hair out from where it clung to the back of her neck. Out of the habit of household chores, she straightened the spread on the bed.

  “What were you doing with the hammer, Tim?” she asked, picking it up from where it lay with his jacket at the foot of the bed.

  He did not seem to hear her, absorbed now in his own words. This was not unusual. She was accustomed to his ramblings, sometimes directed at her, but as often spoken as though she were not there at all. She liked it a little better when he was not speaking directly to her, in fact. Although she could not explain it, those times seemed to include her more than when he did talk with her. No one she had ever known talked like Tim. The boys she knew talked baseball, cars, hot bands and getting into the big time. When they stopped talking and looked at her, every fiber in her body tightened to its defense. First the eyes and then the hands. She was drawn to it and frightened of it, hating herself. It was like Tim was saying now …

  “‘… And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee … And if thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee; for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body go into hell.’ What is hell like, Katie? What is it like when cutting off our hand is nothing compared to it?”

  She was startled by his appearance when she turned to look at him. There were great hollows under his eyes and his whole face looked gray, almost green, slimy, swimming as it was in sweat.

  “You better go to bed, Tim. I’ll tell mama. It’s after midnight, anyway.”

  “No,” he said harshly. “I’ve got to have some music. I’ve got to sing. When I can’t work I’ve got to sing.”

  He pushed the rocker out of his way and got a towel from where it hung at the side of his dresser. He looked at himself in the mirror and brushed the sweat away with the back of his hand. He caught her reflection in the glass.

  “I frightened you, Katie. I frightened the little bird.”

  “I’m not a little bird.”

  “Oh? Have you grown into an eagle all of a sudden?” He smiled at her and picked up his toothbrush and soap.

  The whole room changed when he smiled. “I’m a skylark,” she said, lifting her chin.

  “Ah, that’s it. A little pilgrim of the sky.” He went to the door. “Don’t fly away until I come back. I can’t fly alone, you know.”

  “Katerina!” The rich full voice of her mother boomed up the stairs.

  Tim went to the head of them. “She’s talked me into coming down, Mrs. Galli. As soon as I wash my face.”

  “Before you come down it will be already time to go up. The wine will be gone.”

  “Then
save a song for me.”

  “Send her down, Tim. Maybe if she runs down to Krepic’s before he closes …”

  “Not alone!” Tim shouted.

  “Then I’ll go out myself,” she said petulantly, her chubby, jeweled hand not moving from the railing.

  Tim could feel a knot of revulsion rising in him. He shook his head and shivered. Easy, easy, he told himself. This always passes.

  “Don’t you care whether I go or not?”

  Go to hell and good riddance, swiller of wine and men, he thought. He choked out the words: “Send Johnny.”

  “You’ll hurry before he comes back?” Her hand slid down the railing with a slow sensuousness.

  He plunged toward the bathroom without answering.

  In his room, the door open, Katie pulled his tool kit from beneath the bed and laid the hammer away in it, refastening the strap around the canvas. She took a shirt from the hanger on the pole that was stretched between the walls in the corner of the room. The other of the two shirts she had ironed for him that day was hanging there, as was his other pair of army suntans—his complete wardrobe. It was then that she wondered what he had done with his third shirt, the clean one that he had put on that afternoon. He was wearing a tee shirt now, and that so soaked with sweat it might have been wrung out in the sink and put back on without looking any different. Her thoughts drifted from it to the shirt she now laid out on the bed for him. She unbuttoned it and smoothed it out, feeling of the kind cleanliness of it, and relishing it as she so relished the same virtue in Tim. He was the one clean thing, she thought, in a world very much in need of scrubbing.

  She went to the mirror and pushed up the waves in her black hair. She touched her lipstick on her lips with her little finger, spreading it where a little had congealed in the corner of her mouth. There was a faint scent to her hand, the same as she had noticed on Tim’s hand … Putty, she thought, or some such pungent stuff as would cling to the hammer from his work. She lifted her hand again and smelled it, and then put it from her, lest straining for the association she lose it altogether. Humming “When I Was a Fisherman,” she left the room and went downstairs.

  4

  FATHER DUFFY HAD THE six o’clock Mass that Sunday. He had no more than fallen into a sodden sleep when the alarm clock wakened him. He was conscious several seconds before he could identify the sound. Whatever his dream, his first waking thought was that he was lying on the sidewalk somewhere, unable to move for a weight that was holding him down. He recognized the ringing then and was completely awake. Before he reached it, the alarm had rung out.

  Raising the window shade he looked out on the deserted street, the night’s debris its only ornament. In another hour or so, the kids would gather up the beer cans and build skyscrapers with them, and they would harvest the bottle caps and count them into imaginary cash registers.

  A police prowl car drove up to the call-box on the corner, and Father Duffy permitted himself his first fully formed thought of the man with the hammer: where was he at that moment? He shaved, showered and dressed, forcing the thought from his mind, calling on God and all His saints for help. He tried to fill his mind with prayers, and, in final desperation, repeated aloud to himself the prayers he had learned in childhood, pausing with each phrase to evoke from it an image. It was like thumbing through a box of old holy pictures, and he found himself hastening from one to the next without prayer, only with curiosity. It became a child’s game, and his mind sought then for a child’s saint, and he was again with the gentle St. Francis … and the gentle murderer.

  At the altar, each time he turned upon the worshipers he scanned their faces, hoping fervently to find among them the man he had likened to St. Francis. He was sure now that he had not gone to the police. Sure? Fearful that he had not. Again and again, he strove to put the torment from him.

  The Mass finished and his thanksgiving said, the priest abandoned himself to his troubled curiosity. He walked to the corner and bought a newspaper. He returned with it to the rectory, and in the study paged through it. Murder, rape and assault were not nearly so remote as he had thought. They were almost as conventional to Sunday breakfast as the comics. They were even conventional to some of the comics. But none suited the description of the one confessed to him.

  Monsignor Brady looked in on him, frowned, bade him a curt greeting and moved on. He turned back then and told him that his nephew, who was also a priest, was visiting with them, and asked if Father Duffy minded giving up his nine o’clock Mass to him. The young priest agreed. When his superior left, he lit a cigarette. A few minutes later the housekeeper, as though she had smelled the cigarette smoke, brought him breakfast on a tray. Once more he turned on a radio and waited for the news. It was actually less than twelve hours since he had heard the confession. He seemed to have carried the burden much longer, so much longer, in fact, that for a few seconds he permitted himself to wonder if it had really happened at all, if he had not imagined it. But the face as he remembered it was real, and the words began to sound again in his mind. His mother had given him a hammer … St. Joseph was a carpenter … the only thing she had ever given him … his first confession … Father McGohey … McGohey, MacGoughy, McGooey … he had lost a fight …

  Father Duffy emptied his coffee cup and got up. He turned the radio up only to find music still playing and then down again to a volume that only he might hear. He had been assuming that the man had come to the confessional almost directly from the murder—that was because he was carrying the hammer. Perhaps the man was carrying it as a symbol of his guilt: something to strengthen his resolve, something to show to the police. The murder might have been committed long ago …

  Something else occurred to him then: the whole thing might be a horrible hoax. There might have been no murder at all. The supposed penitent might have been someone under the influence of God knows what, carrying on a private and deranged grudge against the priesthood. Things as fantastic had happened before.

  Murder, he thought grimly as he glanced down at the paper, was far less fantastic. He turned up the radio as the hour signal sounded. Nothing for him.

  “Nothing for me,” he repeated when it was over.

  What was for him, then? He could find out from some source or other what murder might have been committed with a hammer that was unsolved, or perhaps wrongly solved. And if there had been a murder last night, as yet undiscovered, he would learn of it soon. There was obvious haste in reporting such news. But in either instance, what was there for him? His vows prevented him from going to the police. And could he go, what could he tell? That a man unknown to him confessed the murder? Beyond an imagined likeness to the holy picture concept of St. Francis, how could he describe the man? Walking down Ninth Avenue to Forty-second Street and across to Broadway, would he not see a hundred faces whose emaciation and aged youth likened them to that same concept?

  There were other ways of identifying a man. The top comic sheet taught even children that police did not rely on faces to identify criminals. They looked for fingerprints. Among the hundreds on the little ledge in the confessional box, uppermost were those of the man with the hammer.

  He left the newspaper on the tray for the housekeeper, and hastened to the rectory basement. There he got a screwdriver, and, during the eight o’clock Mass, he slipped into the confessional and removed the small board. At the other side of the church, Father Gonzales was hearing confessions. There had been no one on Father Duffy’s side since the last penitent of the night before. Careful not to touch the upper portion of the board, he tucked it into the folds of his cassock and carried it to his room.

  5

  THE EAST SIXTIES ARE almost another world from the west sixties in New York. More than Central Park divides them, although less than a five-minute bus ride spans the geographic difference. That morning Norah Flaherty brushed her six oldest children out of St. Timothy’s after the seven o’clock Mass. She bought them a Sunday paper, forbade them the funnies until they were home,
arbitrated the order in which they were to see them, and herded them along to Sixty-fourth Street two abreast and up the walk-up single file.

  She sipped a cup of warmed-over coffee while she cautioned the oldest girl on the do’s and do-not’s of the day, the most important of which was that they might play in the bathtub provided they put on their bathing suits, and provided the baby was not left in it alone. Also, they were not to waken their father. He needed his sleep, working on the night shift. She hurried out of the house then, hairpins in her mouth, which she fastened one by one into her tawny hair as she went down the steps. She caught the crosstown bus and five minutes later had crossed into that other world. Invariably she got out at the front of the bus and thanked the driver.

  His answer varied as little as her exits: “Take it easy.”

  She hesitated on the curb to figure the ways of the traffic light. The bus driver waited, too, watching her. She drew a few deep breaths.

  “My, it’s cooler over here,” she said up to him. “Sometimes I wish I could bring the kids.”

  He nodded and waved her across the street. She went in the service entrance of a large apartment-hotel, getting a hat-tip from the doorman as he caught sight of her from his station at the guest entrance.

  She spent the first two hours in the building counting the linen for which she was responsible, sorting and mending it. Actually this was not Sunday work, but she was very sensitive about disturbing people, and besides, doing it on Sundays saved a couple of hours for her family shopping during the week. Mrs. Flaherty considered it indecent for anyone to sleep beyond ten o’clock, however. Accordingly, she began her rounds at that hour, a great ring of keys in one hand and a bucket in the other, her arm stacked with towels.