Black Sheep, White Lamb

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  He paused and looked into her face under the one street lamp within the block. “What’s the most important thing, Jo?”

  “You and me.”

  “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he said and, putting his arm about her, he kissed her gently at the temple. It was like falling in love all over again, just the first, tentative, fleeting moment of it. “I want to help you, Jo. We’ve got to help each other.”

  “I know what I must do, Martin. I want to find my mother and bring her home. You know …”

  “I know,” he said. He had heard it at the fire station, having gone there after the meeting of the locked-out plant employees. The news of Catherine Rocco’s precipitate flight from the county hospital had reached Hillside with the return of the ambulance team from a call there.

  “Do you know … him?”

  “No, I don’t,” Martin said quickly, for it was a lie, a cowardly lie after saying he wanted to help her.

  “Father Walsh knows, I’m sure,” the girl said.

  Martin was relieved. A priest would better know how to deal with such things. Still, he was ashamed of himself until he realized that it was for Johanna’s sake he had kept silence, that she not be embarrassed by his knowledge. He did not know how far she was beyond a false decorum.

  “Jo, do you want my place? It isn’t much but you could fix it up, and it wouldn’t kill me to move back in with Grandma Tonelli.”

  “Thank you, Martin. For the time being, that would be fine.” Johanna had reached the determination to take what help she had to have without false pride or idle protest.

  “It’s clean,” Martin said when he unlocked the door and threw it open for her. He lighted the lamp hanging over his desk. “You can’t say much more for it.”

  Johanna viewed the wall sweep of books. “I think it’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and then because he was embarrassed, he went on: “I’ll have a phone put in in the morning. I’ve always needed one.”

  “I don’t like telephones very much,” Johanna said. “They don’t really help.”

  “Well, they’re not as good as people,” he said slyly, making her smile. And when she smiled he opened his arms to her. They held each other for a long time, an embrace of sustenance, not of passion: that would follow, they knew, and were secure in the knowledge.

  “I’ll see Father Walsh in the morning—about mama,” Johanna said.

  “There are enough dishes,” Martin said, “and that bed opens out, and I know where I can get an extra cot for—when you need it.” He could not bring himself to say Georgie’s name. Yet that was the one thing he felt he had to talk with her about. Bassett was no fool. He was a man who made his moves, Martin was sure, only when he had eliminated all other possibilities. Johanna had to be prepared for the worst—if it came to the worst.

  “I wonder if we’ll need it,” Johanna said in a way that set an icepick stabbing at him.

  “Jo …”

  “I must plan for mother,” she said, forestalling him, and sat down in a straight chair, herself as straight and steadier by far than the chair.

  Goddamn mother, Martin thought, but he said nothing. He listened to her tell in her deliberate fashion what she felt had to be done. That Georgie was not mentioned he knew to be deliberate. He yielded to Johanna’s way, knowing it to be stronger and, perhaps, wiser than his own. She would always do what had to be done.

  When Martin left her no more than an hour later back at the door of Mrs. Tonelli’s, Jo went in to find her brother sitting at the old lady’s bedside. They seemed to be in the best of humor, both of them, as though they had been exchanging jokes. There was a kind of guiltiness to their suspended mirth when Johanna came into the room. She tried to remember where she had seen a picture they resembled—the chubby, red-cheeked youth and the old lace-nightcapped woman staring round at her, half-laughing. She tried to remember, because if she couldn’t she felt that she must be near madness—or they were. They did look mad, their eyes wild, insane!

  “Your brother has been telling me, Johanna—this Mr. Bassett—is that his name?” Georgie wagged his head in affirmation. “Mr. Bassett is investigating the places of ill repute in Hillside.”

  Johanna simply did not know what she was talking about, not in that night’s context.

  Georgie said, “He was asking me about Big Molly’s.” He shrugged and opened his hands, looking at Mrs. Tonelli. “Jo wouldn’t know.” To his sister he said, “He was asking me about Billy Skillet and Big Molly, that’s all. When I’d seen them, if there was any men around. Imagine him asking a kid like me something like that.”

  “In my day,” the old lady said, “Molly was a girl in pigtails, which the boys dipped into inkwells. But there was not a boy in the neighborhood she did not beat up at some time or other.”

  “Man,” Georgie said, “how people do change!”

  Johanna left them, having not spoken a word, and ran upstairs. She turned the key in her bedroom door, not because she was physically afraid, but because she felt the need for as much isolation as it was possible to have.

  Downstairs the old lady said from her bed, “Bring me my pocketbook, Georgie. It is in the lefthand drawer on the top.” She watched him. He was about to open the other drawer whether by design or stupidity. “The other drawer!”

  “I used to be lefthanded,” he said. “It makes me opposite.”

  “Opposite to what?” the old lady said, taking the purse from his hands.

  He shrugged. “Opposite to what I should be, I guess.”

  “Ten dollars is a great deal of money, young Mr. Rocco.”

  “I know. I swear I’ll pay it back to you, Mrs. T.”

  “Do not swear. Just pay it back.”

  And after he’d given her thirty bucks Saturday night, Georgie thought.

  21

  JOHANNA WENT TO EARLY Mass in the morning and afterwards waited at the sacristy door for Father Walsh. She watched his shadow against the wall where the light of the early sun was bright and multi-colored, filtered through the stained glass window. She saw him remove his stole and kiss it. She went outdoors then until he came. He took off his biretta, speaking with her.

  “Father, do you know the name of the man my mother has gone to?”

  The priest took her into the rectory parlor to talk. “Yes, I know who he is, Johanna.”

  “Is he married, I mean to someone else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone in Hillside?”

  “I don’t think you need to know that, Johanna.”

  “But everyone else must know it,” the girl said. “I can tell. That’s why they make allowances for Georgie … and me.

  “As I said to you the other night,” Father Walsh said, “people are sometimes merciful.”

  “I want to go to my mother wherever she is, Father. She’s not bad, not like some people.”

  “Nobody is altogether bad,” the priest said.

  “I don’t know about that, Father, but I know my mother isn’t. My father loved her.”

  The priest merely looked at his hands. “How can I help you?”

  “Tell me where she is.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “Then tell me who the man is. If you don’t, Father, I’ll find out.” The girl thrust her head up. “I’ll go from door to door and ask it if I have to. Someone will tell me. I’m sure someone will be glad to tell me! I might even ask his wife, and wouldn’t that be funny?”

  “Give me a day or two,” the priest said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “But you’ve already tried, haven’t you, Father?” He did not say anything. “Isn’t that really why you came to the house the other night?” Still he did not answer. “People always talk about telling the truth, and then they find all kinds of ways not to tell it,” the girl said.

  “Christ spoke in parables,” he said quietly.

  “But not to hide the truth, surely.”

  “You are right, Johanna. You’re qu
ite right. Will you give me a day or two to try and find her?”

  “And will you find her?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell her that I need her … desperately.”

  The priest nodded. The girl got up and opened her purse. Father Walsh held up his hand and shook his head. He neither needed nor wanted money. “I’ll pray for you, Johanna.”

  “Thank you, Father. I’ll pray for you, too.”

  He smiled a little, taking her to the rectory door. If he had been an ancient mystic he might have taken this visitation as divinely prompted. Perhaps it was. God is eternal. The customs of men change, and priests, in the end, are only men.

  And, as though by way of proof, the housekeeper came from the dining room, a great maiden Irish lady whose mission in life was the care and feeding of the clergy. “Will you come in now to your breakfast, Father, before your eggs have skirts on them?”

  22

  SITTING IN HIS PARKED car a few doors up from the church, Bassett saw the girl go into the rectory with Father Walsh and come out again so soon. He had stopped on his way to Hillside, parking as was his habit a distance away from his destination. But was the rectory his destination? He was of two minds on the matter of talking with the priest. It was a ticklish business, even for a heathen like himself, perhaps especially for a man who called himself a heathen. In answering his questions, Johanna Rocco had omitted mention of the priest’s presence when her brother arrived home Friday night. He could not believe that to have been accidental. That her brother had embroidered it into his story was not accidental either, Bassett was sure. That a slob of a boy should have a quicksilver mind did not amaze him. But it made it almost impossible to pin down his testimony, to sort fact from fantasy.

  Without collaborating testimony he was not going to be able to make a case against the boy. And whether the boy was the actual killer or merely part of a gang, possibly its leader, he did not know. The only physical evidence was the two stockings, and they had been found near a railway car used for cockfighting! For all he knew the gang might have been in action before MacAndrews’ murder. Kearns did not think so. But Kearns was not the most reliable chronicler of Hillside delinquency. Piece by piece, he was going to have to sort, compare, and put together as close an approximation as he could come to the truth.

  Bassett decided against seeing Father Walsh for the time being. He did not want to call so quickly in the wake of the Rocco girl’s visit. He liked the young priest, after what he had started yesterday. How that would come out he didn’t know. Nobody in Hillside knew. But the men had voted to start their strike fund.

  The detective started his car and drove up the hill by way of the nearest side street in order to avoid passing the girl.

  And what kind of work do you do, Mr. Bassett? one of his son’s teachers had asked him at a recent P.T.A. meeting. “Well, you might say, I do piece work,” he had answered, and then explained his office. But that was as large a mouthful of truth as ever a man was likely to say in jest.

  He watched the Tonelli house from the distance of a block away and saw Georgie start out with an armful of books. He wondered what he did with the books besides cart them between house and school, but then he often wondered that of his own children: ten pounds of books out of which they seemingly did ten minutes of work. The boy, unaware that he was observed, stopped for a moment at the ruin of his house; he just stood and looked, kicked then at a piece of rubbish or two, and shook his head. Even from where he watched, Bassett could see him heave a great sigh before going on his way. That lad never let himself off-stage, the detective thought. He didn’t need a mirror to see himself. He saw himself wherever he looked.

  When Georgie had disappeared through the school gate, Bassett proceeded to the Tonelli house. The old matriarch had refused to see him the night before, pleading her exhaustion to Martin while Bassett had waited with Johanna in the living room.

  “Get her in the morning when she’s fresh,” Scully had suggested. And that he intended to do right now.

  Mrs. Grey opened the door to him. “Thank you,” he said, and stepped into the hall before she could close the door against him if that were her instructions. “I’ve come to see Mrs. Tonelli. Bassett is my name.” He had caught a flicker of movement in the living room and followed the housekeeper down the hall. She turned and looked at him over her shoulder, as much as to say she had expected him to wait. He merely smiled and nodded for her to proceed. She would know his business. In her part of town they watched policemen as sparrows watch a cat.

  “Mr. Bassett to see you, Mrs. Tonelli.”

  “Leave the door open so I can call you, Mrs. Grey,” the old woman said. She sat in a high-backed chair, a shawl over her knees although the room was already hot, the fire glowing in the grate. Her eyes were as bright.

  “I have the feeling you’ve been trying to avoid seeing me, Mrs. Tonelli. Perhaps I’m wrong. May I sit down?”

  “That’s what the chairs are for,” she said. “Bassett: what kind of a name is that? Did you change it from Basso?”

  “No, if it was changed it was done before my time. It goes back to England somewhere along the line.” He selected a chair he could move a little closer to hers. “Do you remember, when we met on the street Saturday morning, you told me that you had called the fire department Friday night?”

  “I remember,” she said, aloof as a stone tower.

  “I was wondering how you happened to see it. I assume you are in the habit of retiring early?”

  “Do not assume, Mr. Bassett. I am not a prisoner of habit. I go to bed when it suits me.”

  Bassett smiled a little. He could believe that. “Do you mind telling me what first caught your attention?”

  “You want to know if I am a busybody, if I watch constantly out of my window. Is that not so?”

  “Busybodies—your word, not mine, Mrs. Tonelli—are sometimes a policeman’s best friend. They can also be his worst enemy. They often see things that don’t even happen. I don’t think you are a busybody.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now I will tell you how I happened to be looking out of the window.” She spoke with a slight accent, he observed, but her English was by far the best he had heard in Hillside. “You will maybe decide I am a busybody after all. Father Walsh came to see me that night. I like to confess to him. It amuses me to tell him certain things in my past. I like to make him blush. He reproves me for enjoying it. I have become repetitious with him. But I say, ‘then you have something new for which to give me absolution, Father.’ But you are not a Catholic. I can see.”

  “I think I get the point, however,” Bassett said. He had certainly got the picture—the old vixen tormenting a young priest, his having to see her face to face without the shield of the confessional screen.

  “He was later than usual Friday night and after he had gone I turned on the radio, but I had already missed the ten o’clock news.” She paused and with the ball of her thumb pressed her upper teeth. It was fairly delicately achieved, the making firm of the dental plate on gums that were shriveling in old age, and it gave Bassett the pause in which to take his notebook from his pocket and say,

  “I’m going to take note of what you’re saying, Mrs. Tonelli, so that I won’t have to ask you to go over it again.” He made his point without distracting or causing her suspicion.

  She smacked her lips, a punctuation to her settling of the teeth, and said, “Do not put in the part about my teasing Father Walsh.”

  “Of course not,” he said, and then prompted, “You had missed the ten o’clock news.”

  “I decided therefore to stay up and wait for the eleven o’clock on the television. I said my rosary …” She pointed to where the black beads lay now on the table beside the silver bell. “And then I went to turn on the television. While it was getting warm I looked out the window and was surprised to see Father Walsh’s car still parked in front of my house. I thought he might not have been able to start it. I looked out on
ce or twice afterwards. It was still there. Then I watched to see what the movie would be after the news. A dreadful thing, nothing but gangsters. I turned off the television and looked out again. That was when I saw the flames going ‘whoof’ at the windows of the Rocco house.”

  Quickly, for he had memorized such as he knew of them, Bassett correlated the time elements. Father Walsh had been at the plant very shortly after the ambulance arrived. He had undoubtedly been on his way from the Rocco house when he saw or heard the ambulance.

  “What station do you generally get for the ten o’clock news, Mrs. Tonelli?”

  She named the station. “I like to listen to the commentator afterwards. He’s such a fool.”

  Bassett could not allow himself the luxury of being amused. “And you’d missed him, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Bassett avoided asking a direct question about the priest. Instead he sought his information by saying, “Then you were alone here after ten-fifteen?”

  “Ten-thirty. I went into the bedroom to get my watch …”

  Young Rocco’s alibi was cracked. By his own testimony, the priest had been in the living room with his sister when he came up from the village—at ten o’clock. But the priest had not left Mrs. Tonelli’s until almost ten-thirty. Unless … Father Walsh had stopped first at the Rocco’s, then here, and after confessing Mrs. Tonelli had gone somewhere else in the neighborhood, leaving his car still where it was.

  Bassett could feel the raw edges of his own nerves. “How long would you say Father Walsh was here, Mrs. Tonelli?” He had to ask it that way; he could think of no other.

  And all it invoked from the witness he had thought his triumph was a petulant question in return: “How long does it take an old woman to tell her sins? I don’t know, Mr. Bassett.” She began wagging her head. “I don’t know. I don’t like clocks.”

  “But if he hadn’t been here by then, you would have listened to the ten o’clock news?”

  “If I remembered,” she said, compounding the imprecision of testimony he had thought his most precise.