A Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “It’s a great omen, him wanting to see us.”

  “Don’t be ungrateful, Goldie. He could clean this all up for us with a confession. Maybe he was jealous.”

  “That naïve he can’t be.”

  Within five minutes Mr. Winters arrived, white-haired, portly and very nervous. Holden waved him into a chair and rang for the stenographer.

  “This is a terrible business, officer, a shocking thing,” Winters started.

  “Hold it a minute,” Holden said. “We need routine information first. Then, you understand, Mr. Winters, your statement will be taken down and you’ll be expected to sign it.”

  “Will it go into the newspapers?”

  “It might. That depends on a lot of things.”

  “It will kill my wife.”

  “Miss Gebhardt is already dead,” Holden said coldly. He motioned to the stenographer and began questions on age, occupation, previous arrests … Then he asked abruptly, “Where did you meet Miss Gebhardt?”

  “At a party,” Winters blurted. “Yes, at a benefit party.”

  “For whose benefit?”

  “I don’t know that. I’m invited to so many. My wife rarely goes. She is something of a recluse. Indeed, that’s why …”

  Holden interrupted. “When was the party you met her at?”

  “Two years ago. Yes, two years ago. It was a Christmas party.”

  “This is August. Christmas came early that year?”

  “More or less. I mean it was two years ago, more or less.”

  “Obviously. Pin it down for us.”

  “See here, officer. Be so kind as not to fluster me. I came in of my own volition, you know.”

  “Be so kind …” Goldsmith thought. The phrase had occurred in Mrs. Flaherty’s testimony. “Be so kind as to ask her to take the phone …”

  “A lot of people come in of their own volition, Mr. Winters,” Holden said. “Some of them confess to murder.”

  “I certainly didn’t come here for that. I’m sorry I came at all if that’s what you expect.”

  “Be glad you came, Mr. Winters. How often did you see Miss Gebhardt?”

  “Once a week we met.”

  “You met? Where?”

  “At her apartment.”

  “Intimate?”

  “Rather,” Winters said miserably.

  “Did your wife know of the relationship?”

  “Certainly not. Miss Gebhardt did know of my wife, however.”

  “Is that a fact?” Holden said with great sarcasm.

  “The truth is she threatened to call my wife Friday night.”

  “What would she want to do that for?”

  “Money. I mean that’s what she wanted for not calling. It was a great shock to me that she would stoop to that. Miss Gebhardt seemed different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Different, that’s all. She didn’t seem that kind of a girl.”

  “What you really mean, Mr. Winters, is that she seemed different from the others you’ve known, isn’t it?”

  The big man squirmed in his chair. “I wish you wouldn’t twist my words, sir. I’m trying to tell you this in the easiest manner possible.”

  “I’m not particular whether it’s easy for you or not, Mr. Winters. As far as we’re concerned, we’ve heard dirty stories before. The fact is I’d like to get the information out of you the hard way. What was Gebhardt’s price for not calling your wife?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Did she tell you what she wanted it for?”

  “Only when I insisted. It turned out to be something as ridiculous as a fur sale.”

  “And then you made up?”

  “After a fashion.”

  “You had lunch with her Saturday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you go shopping with her?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Of course not. You wouldn’t want to be seen …”

  “You’re quite wrong, sir,” Winters interrupted. “As a matter of fact, I offered to go with her. It was she who discouraged it.”

  “Do you know why, Mr. Winters?”

  “She said she wanted to surprise me.”

  “Cute,” Holden said. “You must have had quite a making-up party That’s a far cry from the blackmail approach she tried the night before.”

  “Dolly was quick-tempered. Sometimes she blurted out things she did not mean at all.”

  That was one thing she hadn’t meant, Goldsmith thought, not for a measly five hundred if she intended to stay in business. He made his first note of the interview—on Dolly’s temperament.

  “Gebhardt actually paid two hundred and seventy-nine dollars for the fur,” Holden said. “When you called her Saturday night, did she mention the bargain?”

  “I intended to tell you about that call,” Winters said. “No, She didn’t mention the fur till I prompted her. As a matter of fact, she said she wasn’t feeling well.” He shuddered.

  “You were the last known person to speak to her,” Holden said. “I’d like you to repeat the phone conversation as exactly as you can.”

  “May I smoke?”

  Holden’s package was lying on the desk, but he did not offer it. “Smoke if you like.”

  Finally, when Winters’s hand shook trying to light the cigarette he had taken from his pocket, the lieutenant struck a match for him. “The telephone conversation,” he prompted.

  “When I returned home Saturday afternoon, I learned that my wife had gone to the country. I’d been urging her to do that all summer. We have a place only the caretaker gets the benefit of. At any rate, I had dinner alone Saturday night, and it occurred to me that if Dolly, Miss Gebhardt, were not engaged, we might spend the evening together. Ordinarily I saw her Friday evenings only. I called. It was several moments before she answered her phone. I asked her if she had found a fur piece to her liking.

  “‘Yes,’ she said. Now that I recall, she did not use my name during our whole conversation. In fact, the conversation was rather strained. But, at the time, I laid it to the fact that she was not well.”

  “Did it occur to you that there might have been another man there?”

  “Well … yes, after a bit, it did occur to me.”

  “Go on with the conversation.”

  “I said something about how I thought she might look in the fur. Foolish, sentimental stuff. She said it was too hot to think about it.”

  Goldsmith closed his eyes an instant and tried to imagine how that would sound to someone hearing only her part of the conversation.

  “I asked her if she had an engagement for the evening,” Winters continued. “She told me then that she was not feeling well. I suggested that I might come up and do something for her. ‘Not tonight,’ she said. She sounded a little desperate. It was then that it occurred to me that someone might be with her. ‘Tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘Call me,’ she said. I went on to tell her that Ida, my wife, had gone to the country, and that we might go away ourselves somewhere for the weekend if she felt up to it.”

  He paused to take a deep pull at his cigarette. Holden did not take his eyes from his face. The only sound in the room was the stroke of the stenographer’s pencil.

  “A peculiar thing she asked me then—‘How old are you?’ I thought it was her way of telling me to act my age.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I made some flippant remark, something like ‘over twenty-one.’”

  “Then what?”

  “I had the strange feeling then,” Winters went on, “that she wasn’t listening to me at all. ‘Dolly?’ I said. It was a second or two before she answered. I asked her outright then if there were someone with her. Until then, I’d never really thought very much about Dolly’s other engagements, you see. I hadn’t permitted myself to … I …” He floundered miserably.

  “I know,” Holden said, “your high sense of morals. What did she say when you asked if someone was with her?”

  �
�‘I just don’t feel well,’ she said. ‘Call me tomorrow.’ And without another word, she hung up.”

  “At the time you felt that she wasn’t listening to you,” Holden said, “was there any other noise on the wire, as though, for example, someone might have taken the phone from her?”

  “There was no noise distinguishable in itself. But she sounded as though she were coming on the phone when she spoke again.”

  Holden nodded. “What time did you call her?”

  “I had dinner at seven-thirty. It was no more than an hour later.”

  “Where did you spend the rest of the evening?”

  “Home. I did not go out at all. I rang the kitchen for ice at perhaps nine o’clock. I spoke to my man when he was going out for the evening. I thought it was rather late he was getting through. That was a quarter to ten.”

  “And the next day?” Holden asked.

  “I called about noon. I happened to make the call from the vestibule of my home. One of the hotel employees answered, a woman with an Irish accent. I asked her to look in on Miss Gebhardt when there was such a delay in the answering of the phone. I was worried, you see. Unfortunately at that moment I heard someone at the door. The servants were out. I had to answer it, so I hung up the phone.”

  “You thought it might have been your wife at the door?”

  “It was my wife. At the first opportunity, I called back but the line was busy. That was probably an hour later. I didn’t have a chance to call again until late evening. By then I had seen the newspapers.”

  “Why didn’t you come to us then?”

  “The shock was considerable. Then when I got thinking about it in some order, I felt there were certain things I should take care of first. I didn’t know what this visit with you might involve.”

  “What sort of things had to be taken care of?”

  “On some pretense, I wanted to get Ida out of town. She has a heart condition. It’s a source of great worry to me.”

  Holden looked at him. “You might as well feel sorry for yourself, Mr. Winters. I can’t think of anybody else in the world who will. Wait in the other room till the statement’s ready for you to sign. Read it first.”

  Winters got up with as much dignity as he could muster. “I’m not a suspect in her murder, am I, sir?”

  Holden smiled contemptuously. “Your kind of murder isn’t that clean. On your way.”

  When he and the lieutenant were alone, Goldsmith got up and helped himself to one of Holden’s cigarettes.

  “Worth coming in for, Goldie?”

  “I’d like to have seen him squirm some more, but I’ll take that for a down payment.”

  “Look, Goldie, the town is crawling with his kind. We put on the heat, he puts it on. He knows a lot of firemen. See what I mean? This way you, get the leisure to read poetry.” He grinned when Goldsmith’s eyes met his over the cigarette. “I presume that’s what you’re doing with the two books you signed out on the inventory?”

  Goldsmith took the cigarette from his mouth and looked at it. “Funny thing about one of those poets—Francis Thompson. When he was down and out a prostitute took him home with her and kept him. That’s when he started writing poetry.”

  18

  DAY BY DAY, THE Gebhardt murder story moved farther back in the newspapers. When, toward the end of the week, it disappeared altogether for a day, Father Duffy decided that he could wait no longer. He had received an answer to his letter to Little Falls. No one there remembered a Father McGohey. By the time it came, it no longer mattered. He had located a Reverend Walter A. McGohey, a captain in the United States Army during World War I. In 1919 he had returned to his parish in Marion City, Pennsylvania.

  Friday afternoon Father Duffy stepped off the train in Marion City. He had one week’s vacation coming, and as it turned out, the Monsignor was glad to have him take it while his nephew was in New York. Less than a week before Father Duffy had planned his vacation in Canada. He had thought about the long days fishing, and nights so quiet that he could hear a bird stirring in its nest. A week ago? Much longer it seemed, and unimportant, anyway. And of the choice between tramping the thousand dusty streets of New York and the one dusty lane, which was the whole of Marion City, he still felt that he had chosen the more direct way to his quarry.

  The priest checked his bag at the station and inquired the direction to St. Teresa’s rectory.

  “You can’t miss it for the cemetery,” the station master told him, pointing through the town. “We’re more dead than alive here.” He chuckled at his own joke.

  Walking through the town, Father Duffy decided there was more truth in the jest than the jester had intended. Marion City had been a mining center at one time, but the coal veins had dried up, and the only business left was in the stores, which served the few farmers in the area. Most of the buildings were in need of paint, including St. Teresa’s church and parish house.

  An arthritic looking old woman came to the door in answer to his knock. “Father McGohey?” she said to his inquiry. “He’s out yonder.” She motioned to the cemetery. “He’s been dead fifteen—sixteen years. Do you want to see his grave, Father? We’ve a terrible time keeping them up.”

  “Presently,” he said. “Did you keep house for Father McGohey?”

  “I did. And Father Blake before him, and Father Hanrahan before him, God rest his soul. He was my brother.” She opened the door a few inches wider but kept herself squarely between him and the house’s hospitality. “Is it about the missions you’ve come, Father? You can see we’re a poor parish. The church roof is leaking in three places and a lump of plaster fell on Mrs. Cartright’s head last Sunday. She said it was enough to make a Lutheran of her. All the farmers hereabouts is Lutherans and they have all the money.”

  She had the poor mouth as his mother would have said, Father Duffy thought, and the melancholy was in her bones. “I’m not looking for a donation, Mrs.—”

  “Miss Hanrahan.” It was only then that she opened the door its full width. “Will you come in and sit down, Father? I’ve nothing but a bit of bread and tea in the house, but I’ll put on the kettle.” She led him into a parlor that matched the tale she told.

  “Don’t trouble, Miss Hanrahan. I had lunch a short time ago.”

  “I hope it was tasty,” she said, sitting on the edge of an old wicker chair. “I’ve no taste for food myself no more. And fortunate that is, the poor share of it we get from charity. Are you related to Father McGohey?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I never met him. But I heard about him.” He was not sure how he hoped she might construe that, but it started her talking, as almost anything would in her loneliness. And that was what he wanted. If there were information for him in Marion City, he had come first to its best source.

  She screwed her mouth into a sort of smile. “There’s more people heard of Father McGohey than ever saw him, I dare say. He was a hard man to work for, plagued as he was with the bad temper. But he made up for it in his own fashion. It was like the devil was plaguing him but the Lord won him.”

  She nodded approval of her own summary, and then looked up at him. “You never heard him preach? No, you said you didn’t meet him. He’d start a sermon and all you’d know was the first word and the last till you got on to his way of talking. He’d string all his words into a jumble and be started and finished before you knew whether it was Advent or Pentecost. They say he got that way during the war. He was an army man, and do you know, I think he was sorry having to come home? He was real military in his way of doing things. He trained his altar boys like little soldiers, and he had enough of them to attend a cathedral. You’ve no notion how lonesome it gets, Father.”

  Father Duffy looked at his hands. Somehow he had known this of Father McGohey. He felt very humble in having followed this instinct.

  “Would you like to wash, Father? Are you off a train? Father Mullens is at a diocesan meeting. He won’t be home till supper.”

  “No thanks, Miss Hanr
ahan. You’ve been here a long time?”

  “Fifty-five years. This was my brother’s first parish. He died here of pneumonia.”

  “I’m sorry,” the priest said.

  “He would of died some place else. He was always too delicate for a priest.”

  “Is there a parochial school?”

  “There was till ten years ago. My brother laid the cornerstone and never lived to see it up, and me living to see it burned to the ground. There was more children in the town then. There was coal mines and plenty of work for them able to do it. Now the children get their instructions Tuesday and Friday afternoons and go to the public school. I don’t see as they’re so much worse off.”

  Father Duffy smiled. “Father McGohey’s altar boys,” he said, “they interest me, Miss Hanrahan.”

  “Were you in the army?”

  “Yes. But I wasn’t quite as fond of it as Father McGohey apparently was.”

  “Oh, there’s many of your opinion.” She leaned forward confidentially. “For them as likes a parade, it was all right. But for them as likes to pray to themselves, it was a terrible distraction.”

  “Father McGohey was of the old school,” he said, putting “together the best story he could of it. “He liked efficiency, he liked sportsmanship, but, like most military men, he liked a winner.”

  “Oh, you’ve got him down to a T.”

  “Did he fix up a gymnasium for the boys?”

  “He did. And he led them in calisthenics himself. A great place this for gymnastics, with them going out from it to do the work of grown men.”

  “I suppose he had boxing,” the priest suggested.

  “There was some of that till the mothers wanted a stop to it. The men were all for him, of course. But the women—some took it and some didn’t. Finally somebody got word to the bishop and there was a letter from him though it never came out and I shouldn’t be telling it of the dead. But after that there was no more fighting that he refereed them in. You know, I’ll say this, there was never so much going on around here since Father McGohey passed on, and it’s kind of nice thinking about it.”