Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Father Duffy felt a stiffening in his body, and a sort of helpless rolling in his head.

  Mrs. Benedict was unaware of the effect of her words. “It was a shocking business. Her husband was arrested—a salesman. She had been seeing other men while he was on the road—young men.”

  The priest controlled his voice with effort. “I suppose, along with everybody else who worked in the library, Brandon was questioned?”

  “I suppose he was asked some questions. The husband killed himself in jail the night of his arrest. But it probably affected the boy. The papers were full of it.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “Only once. I went around to the cobbler’s shop, and he was mending shoes. The little Italian shoemaker had taken a liking to him. ‘He’s a good boy,’ he told me. I remember his accent. ‘Like my own son.’ When I stopped by a month later, he was gone. He had walked out as I suppose he did from the seminary. The old man wept telling me. We never heard of Tim again.”

  In the afternoon Father Duffy canceled his railroad reservation and flew back to New York.

  31

  THE HOUSE ON EAST Eighteenth Street was not as bad as Goldsmith had expected when he got below Gramercy Park. The gray stone front was scrubbed clean and the window curtains were stiff with respectability. So was the ornate sign: MRS. MORAN’S THEATRICAL BOARDING HOUSE. It was the sort of place he imagined to have thrived before the Forty-second Street theaters converted to movies. When he rang the bell a small-voiced dog responded. It continued to bark until someone came and evidently picked it up, for he could hear mothering noises although the words were indistinguishable.

  A large, handsome woman opened the door, the fuzzy dog under her arm, tail to the front.

  “I’d like to speak to Mrs. Moran,” Goldsmith said.

  “I am Mrs. Moran.” She said it in the grand manner and looked down at him graciously, for all the world as though he were a whole audience. She had been on the stage in her youth, he decided, and had retired from it to run a boarding house where she could “keep in touch.” Her hair was a white mountained pompadour and her face elegantly powdered and rouged. Her pendulum earrings glittered in the morning sun.

  On a sudden impulse he decided against asking her about Brandon directly. “I’m Ben Goldsmith, Mrs. Moran, homicide division of the police.” He showed identification. “I’m working on the Dolly Gebhardt case. I wonder if you read about it in the papers?”

  “Very little to read, I should say. Won’t you come in?”

  She led him through the vestibule into a large comfortable living room. There was a faded richness to it, the lace curtains and the doilies, the worn oriental rug on the floor. He could see the long mahogany table in the dining room and the circular windowed cabinet for dishes. Somewhere upstairs a soprano was warming up. Mrs. Moran set the poodle on the floor and gave his rump a shove with her hand that sent him almost to the dining room. “Run and play, Patsy. The gentleman and I wish to talk.”

  The dog gave a whimper of protest, shook himself, and went to the back of the house.

  “Miss Gebhardt did live with you, didn’t she?” Goldsmith asked.

  “Yes. I think it was she.” Mrs. Moran arranged her ample body in a chair and motioned him into one opposite her. “She was not Dolly then, however. Doris, and a respectable sort of person when she came. I have only respectable people in my house, Mr. Goldsmith.”

  The soprano chipped off a high note. “I believe you,” he said, grinning.

  “She does hit clinkers now and then. It’s really a nice voice—when she sings, that is. She has an audition this afternoon for a new musical. So excited. Oh, my dear boy, the celebrations and the mournings I’ve been a party to in this house.”

  “You were in the theater yourself, weren’t you, Mrs. Moran?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Call it instinct—and the picture above the mantel.” He nodded toward a well-corseted ingenue with a rich brown pompadour.

  She smiled broadly. “I’ve changed a great deal but I’ve managed to keep young with young people about me.” She sighed. “Though I sometimes wonder if anyone in the theater stays young for long any more.”

  “Dolly Gebhardt had a hard time doing it.”

  “Not as hard as some, I’m sure. She was a blonde in the days we knew her, by the way.”

  “That was in 1943, wasn’t it?”

  “Earlier. She came here before the war, I know that. The Sunday we heard about Pearl Harbor, I remember her sitting right here with us.”

  “Was she working then?”

  “An occasional night club booking. She could have managed.” Mrs. Moran insinuated her meaning into the words.

  “But she didn’t,” Goldsmith said.

  “Well, I’ll say this, Mr. Goldsmith: she was no hypocrite. I’m not going to cast a stone. I’m not a fool. I’ve seen the scales in this business balanced by a lot of things. They say talent gets its reward. Well, I know where a lot of talent tests occur, and it’s not behind footlights. I suppose it’s the same in other professions. I just happen to know mine. Gebhardt wanted money. I don’t know why. She wasn’t greedy. She had no great notion of her ability as a dancer. I just don’t know. I often said to her: ‘Doris, if you had money, what would you do with it?’

  “‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have some fun. There’s a lot of things I’d like to do. There’s some people I could help …’

  “‘Don’t sell your soul to buy peanuts for the monkeys,’ I told her. That all came about because of a little fellow she was forever helping out, a nice enough boy, but scarcely worth a turn—well, you know, officer.”

  “I know,” Goldsmith said. “Tell me something about the young man.”

  “Tim his name was. I can’t even remember his last name. He came to the door one night and asked for her. She talked to him for a while and then she asked me to give him something to eat. ‘A poet,’ she said to me, ‘down on his luck.’ It’s a very sad commentary on our world, but if there’s anyone less in demand than an actor, it’s a poet. Well, to make the short of it, my husband gave him a cot in the basement, and he stayed with us for quite some time—in fact, until after Gebhardt herself was gone.”

  “I wonder where she met him,” Goldsmith said.

  “I’ve no idea at all—except that I don’t think it was in New York. But for the life of me, I can’t tell you why I’ve got that impression.”

  “Maybe when he came to the house,” he suggested, “when she first saw him that night …”

  Mrs. Moran nodded her head emphatically. “That’s it exactly. She was surprised to see him. ‘What are you doing in New York?’ That’s precisely what she said. My, aren’t you clever, Sergeant?”

  “Not very,” the detective said. “The first and last words are pretty handy keys. The trouble is, the last words aren’t overheard very often. While they were both here, Mrs. Moran, how did they behave toward one another?”

  “I’d say she tried to take care of him. He was like a friendly puppy, always looking for a hand to pet him. As a matter of fact, he rather looked for it from me after Doris left. But I have children of my own—four of them—and I was thirty-eight when the first one was born. Isn’t that something?”

  Goldsmith nodded that it was. “Why did Dolly leave?”

  “To move Uptown. She needed privacy, and, well, I needed the room. She was getting so many calls—and no show. I didn’t like it. I liked her, though. But on account of the children and all, I finally spoke to her. She had already set up the place for herself … where it happened. It was a sad day. I should have much preferred to see her take the bus back to Minnesota. How many kids go home after a try at it. Not Gebhardt. She had to beat it, one way or the other.”

  Mrs. Moran was growing emotional in her reminiscences. She fumbled about her breast for a handkerchief and then blew her nose. Why, Goldsmith wondered, did people think in terms of beat or be beaten. “And the little man,”
he prompted. “He stayed on with you?”

  “For quite some time. In winter he stoked the furnace. When he wasn’t busy, he’d sit down there scratching verses on wrapping paper.”

  “Tell me something, Mrs. Moran, did he know the occupation Dolly turned to?”

  “It’s funny that you should ask me that. I don’t think he had any notion of it at all. But something strange: how I decided that Tim should go. I have a daughter—Sarah. She’s married now but she was about fifteen then and sometimes I’d notice him looking at her. Then I found him saving her school papers from the waste basket. And if he was outdoors and she walked by, he would stop his work and look after her. Now that, you may say, can happen with any man when a pretty girl walks by, and my Sarah is pretty. But when a man who doesn’t know a prostitute from a virgin starts looking at your daughter like that you do something about it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sent him packing.”

  “It might have been a good idea to call the police.”

  “Why? He didn’t touch her. Can you imagine what the cop on the corner would have said if I’d told him? ‘Lady, go wash your mind in a bird bath.’ That’s precisely what I’d have gotten.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Goldsmith admitted.

  “If he’d come back, then I might have done something about it. But he went out of here with his tool kit as meek as a lamb.”

  “A tool kit?”

  “Rolled up in sort of a canvas.”

  “Any idea where he came from, Mrs. Moran?”

  “No more than I have where he went to. But I don’t think he’d have had the strength to do a thing like—what happened to her.”

  Goldsmith looked at her.

  “It was he you came to ask about, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. I got the address from a letter to him you returned to the sender.”

  “From a poetry magazine. I remember it.”

  “I’d like to go back to when he first came here, Mrs. Moran. See if we can pin down the date.”

  “I’ve already pinned it down. It was during the first coal shortage of the war: winter of 1943.”

  “And you knew Dolly pretty well then—to take in someone like that on her recommendation?”

  “Yes. She’d been here a couple of years. I know that summer she’d been away to some country clubs. She danced a little. But mostly, it was glamor. We kept her room for her.”

  “What country clubs?”

  “I don’t know. Upstate, I think. She got the jobs through an agent.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “I might if I heard it.”

  “Dave Albright?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Tell me, Mrs. Moran, was Tim a religious sort?”

  “He was. He was running to church every morning.”

  “How about Dolly? Was she a church-goer?”

  “Not much. She had too much of it as a girl. Her father was the real old-fashioned revivalist. She would take a drink once in a while here—not so much. Sociability. And she would do her father getting saved on a Saturday night. The Lord God’s bringing me down the aisle, brother. Make room on the sinners’ bench. I’m in need of salvation.’” Mrs. Moran gave her own dramatic version. “Then he would go home and take his shaving strop to the children.”

  “Nice,” Goldsmith said.

  “Something happened one night that might interest you,” Mrs. Moran said. “We had a nasty scene with Tim and her. She was higher than usual and the higher she got the more abusive she was of religion. She said something about what she thought of the Saturday night breast-beaters, the Sunday saints. Tim took issue with her. He started preaching about rising to fall to rise again. Gebhardt didn’t care much about her language at times like that, and she said the word she had for it right out. Sarah happened to be there. Tim ordered the child to leave. Gebhardt needled him about protecting the innocent. He turned on her and slapped her across the face. She just looked up at him and smiled. ‘Want the other cheek, honey? I need a lot of saving.’ My husband finally took him from the room and I got her to bed. An ugly scene.”

  Goldsmith took a cigarette and offered Mrs. Moran one. He lit them and studied the end of the match. “That looks like a beginning, doesn’t it?”

  “God help us, it does,” she said. “I hadn’t realized how significant it might be.”

  “No victims, no murderers,” he said. “Got any more pretty things like that?”

  “No. Another such scene and my husband would have put both of them out. They apologized in the morning, Tim most abjectly.”

  “I think that sounds like him, too,” Goldsmith said, thinking of Father Duffy. “How did your daughter feel about him?”

  “She thought he was wonderful. That was one more reason I wanted him out. Girls of that age are real suckers for poets. She was always getting him books on her library card.”

  Goldsmith took a notebook from his pocket and made a note. “Can you give me a description of him, Mrs. Moran?”

  “I can do better than that. It’s a group picture, but he came out very nicely in it. One of the boys took it one Christmas.”

  32

  “MR. ALBRIGHT DOESN’T ANSWER. Besides, we have instructions not to ring him before noon.”

  “This is Homicide,” Goldsmith said. “Get him on the phone.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll keep ringing.”

  While he waited, the detective turned the group picture of Mrs. Moran’s Christmas party over to the photography expert. He pointed to Brandon. “Can you blow him up and bring it out clear?”

  “Sure. He’ll come out nice and clean. Like Washington on a dollar bill—or is it Lincoln?”

  “Just bring out this boy. How soon?”

  “By tonight.”

  By tonight, Goldsmith thought, watching the lab man depart. Holden was apparently busy at his desk, but he wasn’t missing a trick. Still seven years off Brandon and by tonight—tomorrow morning at the latest—Holden would demand that a general alarm be put out with the picture. The papers would have it. He listened to the monotonous droning of the phone.

  Suddenly the receiver was pushed off the hook at the other end. There was no sound at all. “Albright?” he said. He repeated the name several times.

  The hotel operator came in. “Mr. Albright’s taken the phone off the receiver …”

  “Get him on that phone in five minutes or we’ll bring him down to headquarters. Maybe that’ll wake him up.”

  The fuzzy voice of Albright came on then. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want to know what clubs you booked Dolly Gebhardt at in the summer of 1942.”

  “Oh, for Chris’ sake.”

  It was some moments before Goldsmith coaxed and threatened him into coherence.

  “It wasn’t clubs anyway,” he said at last. “I got her a hostess-entertainer job in a roadhouse—the Cabarino, a few miles this side of Albany.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Goldsmith sat for a few seconds, thinking about it.

  “Want to put McCormick on that?” Holden said.

  The sergeant was grateful for the suggestion. He had no time now for going back, however valuable the connection might be in tying Dolly and Brandon together. He made notes of the information he wanted. Waiting for McCormick, he called the librarian who had helped him in the first futile search for Brandon’s “The Mother.” He had not checked the possibility of a library card because when he was there he had not had Brandon’s name.

  Brandon without books was a beggar without a cup, he reasoned, and if he got a card of his own it was probably after his stay at Mrs. Moran’s. That meant an address and a reference, a listed phone number. He hoped fervently that the idea was not a boomerang back to Dolly.

  McCormick had come and gone, promising a preliminary report by that night, when the librarian finally called back. But the call was worth waiting for: a card had been issued to Timothy Brandon in June, 1944. His residence and referenc
e were the same: care of Mrs. Gerald Fericci at an address on First Avenue.

  33

  NEW YORK HAD NEVER seemed so small to Father Duffy as when he saw it from the sky—a child’s model-city with squares and spheres poking upward—and never so large as when he drove through block after block of tenements on the way from the airport.

  At St. Timothy’s he stopped in the church for a few minutes to pray. This was home, he thought, and his place at his appointed altar of God. That he should have left it to seek someone who had already come to him there now seemed the folly of a vain man. What turns and twists the conscience took, he thought. His own had urged him first to seek the man at his beginnings, and now it plagued him for not having waited where the murderer might have come again to him.

  He wondered then if other priests in other parishes, perhaps in Cleveland, perhaps in New York, God knew where, had not suffered his same tortures, for there was something in the killer that made him feel righteous in his sin, arrogant in his humility. Somewhere in his warped mind, conscious of it or not, he took sadistic release in throwing the burden of his crime on the priest. Perhaps it was a vengeance for his own youth, his failures.

  The first words of the Mass ran through Father Duffy’s mind: “I will go unto the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth …” What must Brandon’s thoughts be, he wondered, saying those words over and over? What a mockery he must make of them.

  No. If that were so, he could not have persisted so long in his pursuit of God. It was no use trying to reason thus, the priest decided. He was judging the man, not finding him, nor helping him, and judging him by a behavior standard which was not applicable to him.

  Leaving the church by the sacristy door, he met Father Gonzales. He was hurrying, about to go on a sick call and stopped only long enough to shake hands.

  “Do you know if anyone was looking for me while I was gone?” Father Duffy asked, holding the door for the other priest.