Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Was he aware of his own inadequacies?” Father Duffy asked, wanting more to ask if the novice-master had not made them plain to him.

  The Superior made a noise deep in his throat. “There were times I was hard put to it to discover exactly what the boy was aware of. He came from an unfortunate home—though some of our best people have survived that. Brandon’s father was a drunkard, you know.”

  “And the mother?” It was a question Father Duffy asked almost without being aware of asking it. For all that he intended only to avoid the direct issue, he was learning duplicity.

  “An unhealthy woman. She worshiped the boy. I use the word advisedly. Her letters to him were …” the old man fingered his lips while searching for the right words. “Well, I remember thinking them at the time disgusting.”

  “They must have disturbed young Brandon,” Father Duffy suggested.

  “Oh, they did. We spoke about them often.” Inadvertently, he nodded to his desk, and Father Duffy imagined how miserable the timid boy must have been during those sessions. “Finally, I wrote to her myself and suggested that she restrain her … remarks.”

  “Did he know that you wrote?”

  “I don’t recall now whether he did or not. That’s a long time ago, but I think it unlikely that I should have told him. I don’t think I’ve changed much.”

  Very little, Father Duffy thought. “Do you think they might account for his having run away, Father?”

  “I doubt that. The business with the mother was very early. Besides, the devotion was all on her part. He was a much happier lad when she got hold of herself.”

  The Superior folded his hands and waited for questions. He would enjoy silences, Father Duffy thought. It was probably one of his many pat tests of a man: seeing if he could withstand scrutiny without words to cushion it. He took his time in framing a simple question.

  “How long was he with you, Father?”

  “About three years. I know that from the work he was permitted. Even his departure was characteristic: utterly irresponsible. Simply not equal to discipline. He left the horses at the plow. In the evening they came home.”

  “And no word from him after that?”

  “No more than if he had been plucked off the face of the earth.”

  Father Duffy felt in his pocket for a cigarette and then thought better of it. The old priest watched him. “Just now you are reminding me of something else about the boy: he was forever denying himself things—milk on his oatmeal, sugar … He even fashioned himself a belt from a raspberry bush which he wore next to his skin. It was discovered when his skin became infected.”

  “That sounds like guilt,” Father Duffy said. “It sounds like an adolescent punishing himself for being … an adolescent.”

  “Of course.”

  As matter of fact as that, the young priest thought. “It took a special kind of discipline to wear something long enough to cause infection,” he persisted.

  “I didn’t say he was without self-discipline. Nor for that matter was he without devoutness. He merely could not abide authority. Nor was it that he deliberately defied authority. He simply failed to heed it. And there was no punishment he considered more than he deserved.” After a moment the Superior added, “I like a boy with spunk.”

  There was the man, Father Duffy thought: even as an old man, he liked to be fought back. For all their service and devotion to God, this dean of the religious and the Father McGoheys reaped boys much as they would tackle the breaking of so many colts. He shook off the thought and asked, “Do you remember his father’s death while he was here?”

  “Yes, I remember it,” the Superior said after a moment. “He went home for a week.”

  Father Duffy kept his eyes on the floor. Wherever the boy had gone, it was not home to Marion City. “Was there any particular change in him after that?”

  “Come now, Father Duffy. I have an excellent memory, but even mine has its limitations. All I can give is an overall impression of the boy.”

  “The bramble belt,” the young priest suggested. “Do you remember if that was before or after he returned from that week?”

  “After. The belt affair was not very long before he disappeared.”

  Things that were suggestive, but that was all that he was to learn here of Little Tim, Father Duffy thought. Through the open window he could see the students stacking the shocks of grain, and from somewhere off he heard the whir of the reaper. There was something about it that gave him a sense of perpetuity. Without the sound of the machine the seminarians might have been young men of the middle ages reaping a hand-sown field while their brethren illuminated holy manuscripts. One of the boys straightened up and took off his straw hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He shaded his eyes from the sun and turned slowly to view the field from one direction and then another. There was adoration of God and gratitude for his own part in the harvest in that long look.

  “He liked poetry,” the Superior said abruptly, and somewhat as he might have said he liked cheese or buttermilk. “And he loved all ritual … the Mass, Tre Oré, Benediction …” He was looking for characteristics, things he had drawn out of the strange boy in a weekly visit in this room.

  “Yes?” Father Duffy said when the old man paused again.

  “And he was very handy with a tool kit.”

  The young priest shuddered. He had all but forgotten that in his sentimental musings about novices who toiled against the world and the flesh and prayed wordlessly in the open fields.

  “The room is damp,” the Superior said. “If you had sat in the sunlight you would not be uncomfortable. I am used to it.”

  “Did he receive special training in any trade, Father? I notice that you’re self-supporting here.”

  “Not quite self-supporting these days. Of Brandon, I should have to say that he failed there also in discipline. He would be assigned to the fields, and turn up, on inspection, in the tool sheds. Put him in the sheds and we might look for him in the fields.”

  “Were any of the priests here now friends with him, Father?”

  “None who would know him better than I. We are not here for conviviality.”

  Clumsy, Father Duffy thought of himself. He asked, “His father’s death—what do you remember of it?”

  “It was I who told him of it. That is our custom. I remember it very well. I think it was probably then that I was certain he was not a proper candidate. He was unmoved when I told him. ‘God is just,’ were his only words. I asked him then if he presumed to sit in judgment on his father. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My father sits in judgment of me.’”

  Father Duffy got up and walked to the window. The sun upon his face heightened his sense of the coldness in the depth of the room. How abruptly he had changed his whole pattern of thinking … one little phrase had done it, “God is just.”

  Tim Brandon had passed yet another judgment. He had judged a prostitute in a New York apartment so many years later—so removed from the golden harvest where he, too, might have labored. But he had turned from it early, and the one germ nurtured within him was pride. From all his failures, and Father Duffy could now imagine a lifetime of them, he learned no more of himself than to be sorry for himself and to blame the world although he did penance. His penance was not for himself. He was sick in the shame of the world, even to murder. Father Duffy turned to the old priest.

  “Did you give him the money to go home to his father’s funeral?”

  “His ticket would have been bought for him by the purser. The older seminarians are not permitted to go home, incidentally …”

  “And money for his meals en route?”

  “He would have been given enough.”

  “I am most grateful to you, Father,” the young priest said. “I know you must be curious as to my interest in this man. And I cannot tell you.”

  The Superior leaned heavily on the arms of the chair, getting up. “I have always found curiosity the least of my temptations,” he said. “By the way
, Father, it occurs to me now that when he left he did not take so much as a change of clothes. If you are not in a hurry and think they might interest you, the custodian should be able to turn up his things.”

  “I’d like to see them,” Father Duffy said.

  28

  TIM SAT AT THE card table before the open window. The pages he had copied so neatly the day before were now so many sheets of broken, scratched-out lines. For each word he deleted, the one he added changed the meaning of the phrase, and sent him in wild search for another, brighter image. He was like a child catching snowflakes one at a time and seeing in each one passing a greater beauty than in the one he caught before.

  Each word he selected was another name for Katie. But in his ecstatic pursuit he found himself at last exhausted and unsatisfied. Picking up the numbered pages he expected at least the pleasure of reliving the glorious lines to the point where he had bogged down. Until today that had sustained him in his failure to progress. There were many fragments in literature. Everything was a fragment in its making. His would comfort him another day.

  But something had happened, something horrible and blasphemous. He could not even begin from the first clear lines he had written. The rhythm was broken, and words he had thought to have put down were missing. When he tried to remember them they flickered through his mind among others, which he had rejected. The bad were good and the good bad. For an instant he glimpsed the distortion he had done to the very structure of his work.

  He shook his head and turned the pages over. The distortion was in his own mind now, not on paper. He was tired. He got up stiffly and gradually stretched himself out of the cramped position his body had taken in its response to his mind’s tension. He lay down and closed his eyes. For a few moments light splashed in the after-darkness. It took on color as he grew aware of it and tried to hold each changing swatch. He was aware of no particular shape or substance until he found himself imagining Katie’s hair across his face, the strands of it a web over his eyes. He even sensed the smell of soap and lemon in it. His eyes open, he still held the illusion. He moistened his lips, examining their crevices with his tongue, half-expecting at least a single hair to have lingered there. Only the breeze from the open window sifted over him, but his whole body tingled with the excitement. He closed his eyes again and strained for a deeper identification. But the effort snapped the tendrils of fancy. The after-light was no longer sudden. It had a rolling motion, like flood, like running, slow-moving liquid.

  He leaped from the bed in terror of what he anticipated, the darkening colors of that flow, an ugliness seeping through it and pouring over him. That had happened before, and this once he escaped it. A little dizzy, he stumbled about the room, putting his few books in order, straightening the spread, brushing the dust from the window sill.

  He opened his door. The draft between the window and doorway cooled him. After a moment’s indecision he went out. In the hall he listened to the sounds downstairs—singing. It was Mrs. Galli at her work, he knew, but from the distance he could imagine the voice to be Katie’s. There was a likeness to their voices. Katie’s, clear now with only an occasional tremble, would take on the vibrance of her mother’s as she grew older. Moving from step to step soundlessly and listening for nuances in the voice that soothed him, he went downstairs and to the kitchen door.

  Mrs. Galli was hanging curtains, her back to him. He watched her slip the rod through the hem and then climb up the small ladder. There was grace in her movements, and something in the way she tilted her head so like Katie when she was listening to him and trying to understand some special message in his words. Her arms seemed longer than he had thought them when she reached to hook the rod into its catch, strong arms, but round and soft as Katie’s arms would some day be, or as indeed they might be now if he dared to touch his fingers to them. Her dress hung upon her like a veil, her body silhouetted against the light of day, a strong back with a little swelling beneath one arm as she turned slightly, the shadow of a breast. Her waist was slender as she stretched upward, or so he thought, and the thighs bulged out like molded clay. Flesh of my flesh, she had said of Katie …

  As she descended the ladder she saw him, and she lifted her chin before speaking.

  “It’s queer,” she said. “I thought you were there a minute ago, but I was afraid to look.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want to see the empty place when I looked. I was thinking about you all morning. But I didn’t come up.” She took another set of curtains from the basket and laid them on the table.

  “I shouldn’t have minded,” he said, standing in the doorway still.

  “I do not interrupt poetry no more than music.”

  “I heard you singing.”

  “I have a good voice.”

  “Very good. It’s like a cello.”

  “A good cello.”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t stand there. Come in by the table. There’s a breeze today. I feel so good when the breeze comes up, I feel like I’m twenty years old maybe.”

  He came into the room and sat down at the table, but away from it, facing her as she put away the clothes basket and drew herself a glass of water at the sink. She glanced at him through the mirror there.

  “It’s foolish to feel twenty at my age, with a man for a son and a daughter almost a woman. But twenty is a good age to feel any time—even if you don’t look it.”

  “You look thirty.”

  “Thirty is a good age, too,” she shrugged. “I’m complimented.” She dipped a washcloth beneath the faucet and wrung it out. With it she wiped her face and neck. “So nice,” she said. “It makes me think of the nighttime.”

  As he watched her, he drew his hand across his forehead. Seeing the movement in the mirror, she rinsed out the cloth and brought it to him.

  He did not lift his hand. “My forehead and neck,” he said.

  She brushed them gently and then laid the cloth on the table. With her cool hands, she massaged the tightened muscles first at the back of his neck. Her fingers plunged farther down between his shoulders with each motion and spanned the width of his back, his shirt straining the top button at his throat until it gave and clinked on the porcelain-topped table. He let his head loll back, touching her breast.

  Presently she stopped and let his head rest upon her for a moment. Then she moved it away gently and picked up the cloth which she returned to the sink.

  “I’m going upstairs now,” she said, beside him once more. “I’ve got to hang the curtains in my room.”

  She picked them up and folded them over one arm. As she turned she extended her hand to him. He took it and followed her, waiting mutely while she threw the night-latch on the front door.

  29

  LIEUTENANT HOLDEN EXAMINED THE pencil portrait before him. He took his time, holding a blotter first over the mouth and then over the eyes, in each instance studying the feature separately. Goldsmith, watching him, lit a cigarette. A great deal hung upon his superior’s decision. Nor was it an easy one for Holden to make. It was one thing for Goldsmith to want time to pursue Brandon in his own way, but quite another for Holden to go along with him. Should Brandon kill again, Holden would be under fire from the top, not the sergeant. Several times Goldsmith was tempted to say something, to try to influence him, but each time he held his tongue. If Holden came to his way of seeing it on his own, so much the better.

  Finally the lieutenant slid the drawing across the desk to him. “Not good enough for you. Is that it, Goldie?”

  “It’s the best we can do, Lieutenant. We’ve given the artist every detail of his description we’ve got. We’ve shown it to Mrs. Flaherty three times. The same with Liza Tracy …”

  “I’m assuming it’s the best you could do,” Holden interrupted. “I’m simply asking you if you’re satisfied with it.”

  “No sir. I’m not. Change the chin a little, shade the cheeks—almost any little deviation, and it resembles a dozen other
guys, and maybe Brandon more than it does now.”

  Holden shook his head. “I don’t like it a damned bit, but I agree with you. Keep looking, Goldie. But for God’s sake, let’s get something we can put our teeth into.”

  The sergeant put the sketch away gratefully. A general alarm had been forestalled a while longer. “I’m not the only one looking for him, by the way.”

  “That’s nice. Who else is?”

  “Mrs. Flaherty’s parish priest. You were right that she’d never seen Brandon before or since. But it looks like the priest did. He’s looking for him now.”

  “Where?”

  “A little town in Pennsylvania, and then Chicago.”

  “Then he did skip town.”

  “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know what the priest’s angle is, but I’m pretty sure he started out looking for his name like we did. The sheriff down there went over his moves. It could be that when he gets back here he’ll lead us right to Brandon. It could even be Brandon will go to him again, maybe to confession.”

  “That’s ticklish business, Goldie. I wouldn’t count on the priest for help.”

  The phone was ringing on Goldsmith’s desk. “I’m not counting on it,” he said, going to answer it. “Just the opposite. I’m going to help him all I can.” He picked up the phone. “Goldsmith speaking.” He listened a moment and then said, “I’ll be there within a half-hour.”

  Joshua G. Fabish, POETRY CONSULTANT, the detective read on the doorplate as he rang the bell. It was a walk-up apartment on Fifty-sixth Street just off Lexington. The building also housed consultants on beauty and Inca coinage. Nobody could be beautiful, poetic or rich without a consultant, he thought, waiting for the buzzer to release the door lock. As it sounded he thought of Fabish, exeditor of the Young Poet. Magazines died, but editors transmigrated.

  A bald, round-faced man opened the door to him. “Just eighteen minutes, Sergeant,” he said smiling. “Only the fire department surpasses your efficiency.” He led the way through ornate, wildly colored rooms. The odor of a sweet pipe tobacco permeated the place. Paisley shawls were spread over chairs, sofa and a grand piano that dwarfed the front room of the railroad apartment.