A Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  He leaped to his feet, his hip catching the fragile table and careening it over on two legs, the papers tumbling among the discarded sheets already on the floor. He went down on his hands and knees to gather them, eager to escape the sight of her for those few blurred seconds at least. His sweat dripped on the pages in his hand.

  She set the glass on the dresser and squatted down in front of him to help, her dress a taut line across her knees. Tim spun away from the sight and sprang to his feet. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered hoarsely. His face was gray-white, the blue veins standing out on his forehead.

  “Will you get up from there and leave me alone? Please …”

  She leaned on the bed and hoisted herself up. She flung the handful of papers on the bed. Her smile was gone and some of the hair had straggled from the pins.

  “What’s the matter with you? Am I so ugly? Am I so old?”

  He shook his head. “No, Mrs. Galli, no, no, no.” He motioned desperately toward the tray. “Thank you for bringing that to me.”

  “Mrs. Galli, Mrs. Galli! There’s more man in that cat scratching up the tree out there than there is in you.”

  “Please,” he said, thumping the fat of his hand against the chair.

  “Please,” she mimicked again. “It was please before and thank you after. I could take you in from the street all shaking like you had palsy. I could knit you sweaters and socks and darn them for you. I could put food in your belly and a blanket around you at night. It was please and thank you for all of that. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was,” he said more quietly. His pressure was easing off as her anger mounted. Her anger was easier on him than her affection.

  “You liked my arm around you then. You let me take your hand. Put it where it’s warm. ‘Envelop me,’ you said. ‘Envelop me.’ I never forgot the word. I looked it up. A hundred times I looked it up.”

  Her anger was easier on him, but not her memories. Tim moistened his lips and reached for the Cola she had poured for him. She slashed out with her fist and spilled the dark stuff to the floor and over his manuscript.

  “That kind of refreshment I can give you, can I? Well, I’m telling you you won’t have it. You can lick it up from the floor. That’s what you can do. Get down and lick it up like a dog. Then get out of my house. Go and do your begging on somebody else’s doorstep. All your life you beg, don’t you, beggar-boy?”

  She watched him gather the pages and wipe the Cola from them with his sleeve. Her anger snapped the instant she spilled over the glass. She turned from him, trying to hold a part of it to hide her rising shame. Catching her reflection in the mirror, she saw the red splotches on her face and the ugly sweat seeping through them. Her heavy breathing hissed through her teeth. Her mind churned wildly as she sought for words, for issues on which to abuse him.

  “You think I don’t know what’s changed you. I seen you looking at her and her looking at you, and neither one of you looking at the same time.”

  That thought seemed to revive her anger. She swung around and pulled him to his feet, forcing him to look at her. “She’s my daughter. Flesh of my flesh.”

  “I know,” he said helplessly. “I know.”

  “You want her, do you?”

  His head shot up and he wrenched free of her grasp. He looked at her, and through her.

  “I don’t want her. Before I would lay a hand on Katie I would cut it off.”

  “I don’t believe it. You think she didn’t tell me. My Katerina don’t keep secrets from her mother. You think I didn’t see you coming out of the church with her. I did. I seen you get on the bus together. Coming home at three o’clock. Leaving me to stand over the stove. And I told her something, too. Letting me get old-looking when I’m not over forty-one. ‘Oh, Mama,’ she says, ‘why do you care how you look?’ There. That’s your fine young Katie for you. I’d like to see if she looks as good as me at forty. What were you doing in the park?”

  “Talking,” Tim said. “Talking and walking, and then we ate a hot dog and came home.”

  “You didn’t hold hands even, I suppose?”

  “No,” he said, and then added wistfully, “we didn’t even hold hands.”

  She believed him, and believing him, had nothing left for which to abuse him. Her anger was all spent even as her other emotion was spent in the anger.

  “Is that poem about her?” she asked sullenly.

  “In a way.” He laid the pages together on the card table as he righted it.

  “Am I in it?”

  “Yes. In a way you’re in it, too.”

  She fussed about the dresser a moment, setting the glass upright. “It’s awful stuffy in here. I’ll open the door.” Her movements to the door and back were awkward. She fumbled with the dresser scarf, painfully aware now of her own awkwardness, her bulk. She was tired, conscious of the weight of her body in each part of it separately. “There’s some Coke left in the bottle. I’m sorry I spilled it over your poem, Tim.”

  He permitted her to give him the glass. He drained it in one swallow.

  “It’s the heat,” she said. “If it would just let up for a couple of days things wouldn’t choke up inside us. You need clean curtains. New York’s awful dirty in summer.”

  “Thank you,” he said, giving the glass back to her.

  “There’s more in the icebox. I’ll go down and bring you a bottle. Eat something here while I’m gone. Don’t leave it for the flies.”

  He did not protest.

  At the door she turned. “Tim, don’t put me in the poem like I was just now. It was the heat—and things.”

  13

  BY MONDAY MORNING CONSPIRACIES and taxes had crowded the murder into the small subheads of the tabloid front pages: CABBIE SOUGHT IN SLAYING. On page three, however, the caption read: FATHER REFUSES BODY OF MURDERED REDHEAD. Only in the final paragraph was the theme of the front page explained: the cab driver was expected to throw some light on Miss Gebhardt’s activities on the evening of her death.

  Father Duffy read the story through … Reached at his home in Little Falls, Minnesota, Albert J. Gebhardt, an iron-ore miner, commented on his daughter’s death, “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.” Dolly’s life was no secret to her father or to any of the other five hundred souls in Little Falls. Someone had visited her in New York and taken home a righteous story of her career. Since then, Albert Gebhardt did public penance for the sins of his daughter over a thousand miles away.

  It was an odd twist on the Biblical prophecy of the visitation of one generation’s sins upon the other, Father Duffy thought. He dropped the paper in the wastebasket and went to his desk. There he composed a letter to the parish priest at Little Falls, acting on a hunch and inquiring if there had ever been a Father McGohey serving there. He gave the possible variations of the spelling as they came to him.

  The letter sealed, he drew another piece of paper from the drawer and tried to recompose the distraught confession of the murderer … the hammer, his mother had given him one because St. Joseph was a carpenter … he wanted to be a priest … a prayerbook for his first Communion … the hammer … her windows always stuck this time of year … dirty again … the dream of slime … if I could just keep my mouth clean …

  Bit by bit, the fragments came back to him, and he refashioned the story in all its incoherence. In a way it took on a strange logic of its own, the priest thought, especially in the association of his crime with early guilts in his life, early guilts and sufferings. He read through his notes and then juxtaposed the phrases to bring them as exactly as he could into the order he had heard them. He rewrote the confession and read it a few times, committing it to memory. Then he tore the papers into small pieces and burned them a few at a time in the ash tray.

  He closed his eyes and remembered again the feeling about him in the confessional that night, the ache and heat and someone calling good night to Father Gonzales. For a moment he caught the outline of the man’s face as it was when he had first looked up to
see if there were someone really there. He remembered his association of the face with St. Francis, and then with the faces of boys he had seen returning from their first experience under fire during the war.

  Two thoughts out of the whole pattern seemed to converge for Father Duffy then. They had no right to come together because only one of them came out of the confession at all. The other was out of himself, his own character, prejudices, experience. But wherever the conviction came from, he was virtually certain in that instant that Father McGohey had at some time in his life been an army or navy chaplain, and probably in the First World War.

  14

  “LOOK, I WAS CRUISING down Madison. I was thinking to myself if the damn buses wasn’t lined up like a string of elephants I’d have a chance of picking up a fare. Then I sees her standing there, waving this fancy pocketbook. Like crazy she was waving it. ‘Break it up, boys,’ I says. ‘I’m coming through.’ But like I said, she could of got a dozen other cabs.”

  “I understand that,” Lieutenant Holden said, having combed the drivers of the city. “But she did get you.”

  “Yeah. She got me,” the cabbie said dismally.

  “Do you carry a tool kit or tools of any sort?”

  “Not me. When anything goes wrong I just sit till they come and get me. I ain’t mechanical on eight bucks a day. No sir.”

  “Then you don’t have a hammer in the cab?”

  “Look, Lieutenant, I wouldn’t be in here on my own accord like this if I had the hammer you’re looking for.”

  A police stenographer in the back of the room changed pencils.

  “Just answer my question,” Holden said. “Do you have a hammer?”

  “Yeah. I have one. I keep it on the seat beside me. I got mugged once. Want to see it?”

  “I think that would be advisable,” Holden said quietly. He motioned to a uniformed policeman standing at the door.

  The cabbie looked around to see him depart. “You don’t waste no time, do you?”

  “We try not to,” Holden said. “Now I’d like to hear the details of what happened from the moment you picked her up.”

  The cabbie sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. He accepted the cigarette Holden offered him. “She jumped in. Didn’t waste no time,” he started. “Gave the door a good whack shut. I don’t get one out of ten can get that door closed themselves. Some day I’m gonna get a new hack. In the neck I’m gonna get it. Five thousand bucks. Anyway, ‘I’m late,’ she says. ‘Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. Try and get there in a hurry.’ ‘I don’t aim going in second, lady,’ I says, ‘but we ain’t going to set any records this time of day …’”

  Holden made a note of the address while the cabbie talked. So did Goldsmith, who sat at his desk throughout the questioning, listening although apparently absorbed in work of his own. Now he drew a map from his drawer and opened it.

  “Well, I get all the way down to Twenty-third Street. I’m beginning to make time then and she leans up to me. ‘Driver, you’ll have to take me back.’ ‘Forget something?’ I says. But I take one look at her and I could tell she didn’t forget nothing she wanted to remember. That dame was sick. She looked good when she got in but right then that makeup on her face was like something stuck on, something that was going to fall off any minute. I made a U-turn and stepped on it. I don’t like people getting sick on me. If they’re real sick they can’t think about the fare, and I ain’t got what it takes to ask ’em for it. One time I damn near got a baby. You think that’s funny. Happens in the newspaper maybe, but let me tell you …”

  “We’d better wait for that,” Holden said. “It took you about a half-hour to get to Twenty-third Street and back. Then what?”

  “I pulled up in front of Her apartment—almost in front, that is, I thought the doorman would come and get her. Maybe she don’t want him. Maybe she figured she can’t wait. He was putting somebody in a private car. Anyway, she asks me to help her upstairs. Says she’ll make it worth my while. That suits me. I take the key out of the car, go around and give her an arm. She leaned hard and she wasn’t no lightweight. We goes in through the lobby. A couple of people look round at us. Maybe they think she’s drunk. I don’t know. The guy at the desk looks up. Says ‘good evening’ just like it was one. She don’t say a word. The elevator’s there. The operator says ‘good evening’ the same way. I think maybe she’ll let go of me then. No sir. If I’d tried to get away I’d had to leave her my right arm. Right to the door. She leans on the wall while she gets out the key. I take it from her and open the door. Then she grabs my arm again and says, ‘Help me into the bedroom, please.’ I don’t like that much, but I figure she’s got to sit down before she pays me …”

  “Were there any lights on in the apartment?” Holden interrupted.

  The cabbie thought about it. “Yeah. There was one on down there in the living room. We went through that hall there and she says the bedroom switch is on the wall. I turned it on.”

  “Did you close the door to the apartment before helping her into the bedroom?”

  The cab driver rubbed the back of his neck. “I just don’t remember that. It was closed when I went to go out again—I know that …”

  “All right,” Holden said. “Take that when you get there. You helped her into the bedroom and lit the light. Then what?”

  “She sits down on the bed and pulls off her earrings. I’m standing there waiting for my money. I don’t like asking her for it just like that, so I asks her if I can get her anything, maybe call up a doctor for her. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she says. ‘Just open that window for me.’ If I’d had a block and tackle I don’t think I could of opened it. I pulled and I pushed and the sweat rolled down my back. I couldn’t open it. ‘Let it go,’ she says. ‘Please give me my purse.’ I gave her that in a hurry.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Down at the bottom of the bed.”

  “Open?”

  “Not when I gave it to her. She fumbled inside it and pulled out five dollars. Looked hard to make sure what it was. Whatever was the matter with her, I don’t think she was seeing so good. ‘Is this all right?’ she says. ‘Want change?’ says I. ‘No.’ ‘That’s swell,’ I says. ‘You better call a doctor, lady.’ I figured she had advice coming, anyway.”

  “What did she do with the purse then?” Holden asked.

  “She tossed it over on the dressing table. It didn’t make it. Fell on the floor. I picked it up and laid it on the table for her.”

  “Did you look around the room at all?”

  “Just while I was waiting. It was kind of messed up.”

  “As though someone had been through it?”

  “Naw. Like she just threw things around getting dressed. Underwear and stuff.”

  “Did you leave then?”

  “Just about. I was just going when she says, ‘There’s something I wish you’d do for me.’ ‘What?’ ‘Go into the kitchen and make sure the latch is off the hall door there.’ ‘No, ma’am,’ I says, ‘I don’t like to do that. I’ll stop by the desk and ask ’em to send up the janitor …’ ‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘I’ll manage.’ I beat it then. Boy, did I beat it. There was something about the whole business I didn’t like. As soon as I got out in the hall, I felt like I’d been in there a week maybe. I poked and poked at the elevator bell. The chains were going up and down but no cage. Then I saw the stairs sign and I ran down them. I was right by the service door when I reached the first floor so I scrammed out that way. Somebody pushed my cab down a ways. I just hopped into it and beat it. I picked up a fare on Fifth Avenue going to Riverside Drive and Ninety-sixth Street. That’s all.” He put his cigarette out beneath his foot.

  “And after the Ninety-sixth Street fare?”

  “I hopped over to West End. I cruised down there to about Seventy-fourth. I got a couple of dames there going to the Alvin Theatre.”

  “And then?”

  “I stopped over at Kavanaugh’s on Eighth Avenue for a corned beef sand
wich.”

  “Keep going,” Holden said.

  The cabbie drew his record book from his pocket. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “A couple of sailors. Frenchies. I took ’em to Pier Sixteen. That’s around Fulton. I headed back up through Chinatown. Figured I might get some slummers. No soap. I didn’t get nothing till I was up around Washington Square. That was ten o’clock …”

  “Okay,” Holden said. “That’ll do it.” He swung around to Goldsmith. “Any questions, Sergeant?”

  Goldsmith got up from his desk and went over to the cabbie. “You didn’t by any chance go into the kitchen to make sure that door was locked?”

  The driver smirked nervously. “No sir. What I did do: going round to the stairs when the elevator didn’t pick me up, I tried that door just to make sure it was locked.”

  “Or to make sure it wasn’t locked?” Holden snapped.

  “No sir. If it wasn’t locked I was going right straight to the desk and tell ’em. Like I told you, I felt funny about being in that place. And I felt like I’d been in there a hell of a long time.”

  “That often happens,” Goldsmith said easily. “Our imagination distorts time on us under some conditions.”

  “Yeah, don’t it?” said the driver.

  “Did you see anyone when you left by the back entrance of the building?” Holden asked.

  “Not a soul. I waved at the doorman when I was going round the hack. I figured he moved it. But I don’t think he saw me.”

  “If you’ll wait in the room out there,” Holden said, “the stenographer will type up your story. I’d like you to sign it.”

  “Sure.”

  The cabbie was at the door when Goldsmith called to him. “You said you did not get the window open. Is that right?”

  “Right. I couldn’t budge it.”

  Goldsmith nodded his thanks and the stenographer followed the driver out.

  Goldsmith returned to his desk. “There’s a lush private club down in the neighborhood she was heading for. I wonder if she didn’t have a date there.”