A Gentle Murderer

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Did you see him, Mama?”

  “I heard him up there. Bumping around like a rat in a cage. I’ll see him, don’t mistake. He’s going to” the basement where he started. The first thing somebody comes looking for the room, they get it. Down he goes.”

  “Shall I beat up the eggs, Mama?”

  “Beat them. Six of them. I’ll put in the milk. You don’t know how much to put in so they go further. Eggs, the price they are—oatmeal should be enough for them. And I’m warning you, Katerina. I’m watching you. Let me see one bit of fooling around making love—and he goes farther than the basement.”

  Katie threw her chin up. “I don’t want to make love with Tim, not the way you say it.”

  Her mother looked at her incredulously. “What do you want to do with him? Tell me. Wash his hair?”

  Katie turned to her, near tears. “Mama, please stop teasing me.”

  Mrs. Galli came toward her. “I’m not teasing you, Katerina. Never in all my life was I so serious. I’m trying to figure out what kind of a girl are you.” She caught the girl’s chin in her hand and forced her to look into her eyes. She let go then and shook her head. “The things a mother cannot tell to her own daughter.” The words were more to herself than to Katie. “Leave the eggs and sit down to your breakfast. I’ll make them.”

  Katie did as she was told, forcing down the tasteless lumps of oatmeal. While the boarders were at breakfast she made her own bed and her mother’s, not even pausing outside Tim’s closed door.

  Only on her way to work did she find relief from the oppression. And only then could she again begin to plan. This was to be her first payday.

  43

  GOLDSMITH CRUISED DOWN ONE Village street after another, stopping at each Catholic church, waiting interminably and then showing Brandon’s picture. Some of the priests thought they had seen Brandon, but they were not sure. When, near ten o’clock, he caught sight of Father Duffy in the rearview mirror entering a church the detective himself had just left, he decided to abandon that part of the search to the priest. For all the need for haste, there was no greater urgency now than there was each day since the Gebhardt murder. The chief pressure he had feared was from Holden, and that had been withheld.

  He began a canvass of the area on foot. As he walked and made his guarded inquiries, he went over in his mind the kind of places Brandon might have worked. He stopped once and called the Building Service Employees’ union. He expected nothing of the call, and got nothing. Brandon worked for his keep if he worked at all, and picked up an odd dollar handout.

  The detective tried then once more to figure out the man’s attitude toward his crime. He felt guilt toward it, part of the time at least. Otherwise he would not have gone to the priest. Being aware of guilt he must be aware of the consequences of the crime where the police were concerned. He must know that he is wanted, he reasoned. At such times, he would be cautious about looking for work. Suppose he needed a dollar? If he were desperate for it, what would he do? What did he have to sell besides his labor? Poems? The five-dollar check was in Goldsmith’s pocket. Certainly not a quick buck. A handful of secondhand books? Possible. But Brandon would have to be absolutely desperate to sell his books. His tool kit. That would go first. Complete with hammer.

  The detective called headquarters then to have every patrolman in the area check the pawn and junk shops on his beat.

  44

  MRS. GALLI ATE HER own breakfast after the boarders were gone. She sat over it a long while and then got up and piled the dishes in the sink. She went from one chore to another mechanically, wiping the oilcloth and folding it, cleaning the stove, the dust from the window sills. Upstairs Tim was pounding his heels on the floor as he moved back and forth across the room.

  She needed advice now badly, desperately. If it weren’t for her own guilt with him, she would go to the priest. Katerina was more important to her than anything in the world. She was the beautiful, sensitive child of her father. With a father in the house everything would have been different. Katerina was stubborn, secretive. But the hurt in her eyes that morning was not to be endured. And all this was her fault, the mother reasoned. She was a dirty old woman, looking for a man and her own lost youth. Stupid and full of lust, getting notions from alley-cats. Her stomach turned over with the thought of it.

  She took the trash box from beneath the stove out to the refuse can at the basement door and emptied it. Bits of paper had stuck to the bottom through many emptyings. She plucked them loose with her fingers, grocery lists and coupons. She noticed figures on a scrap, and held it up to the sunlight. Fifteen had been subtracted from twenty-two dollars and fifty cents. The seven-fifty had been multiplied by four, coming to thirty dollars.

  She put the paper in her pocket and went into the house. Katerina was supposed to be earning fifteen dollars a week.

  Mrs. Galli washed her hands and face at the sink, not that she cared whether she was clean or dirty. But the water was cool and she could think better. Only once she glimpsed her face in the mirror, pale and hard and old-looking. No matter. She went upstairs, leaning on the railing with each step. Her breath was coming heavily. In her own room, she sat by the window for a few minutes, the breeze in her face. Now and then she glanced behind her at the dresser where her husband smiled confidently from his picture. Outdoors, a rag picker went by, a peddler with his fruit wagon. She had meant to buy some apples. No matter. A police car … If only she had renewed her license for the rooming house in July … No matter.

  She got up and went to Katerina’s room. Tim’s books were still on the dresser. The room was no different than on other days. She opened one drawer and then another. Her daughter’s clothes were neatly folded in their places, her knickknacks scattered in the top drawer, her rosary in a box at one corner. There was a letter from a girl friend who had gone to Montreal for the summer, the dance program from her graduation night, a postcard from a boy with a picture of a steel mill: “Wish you were here to help me. Ha! Ha!”

  The only sounds in the room were her own quick breathing and the ticking of the clock. She turned to see where it was. On the window sill. A foolish place for the clock. But Katerina probably slept with her head at the foot of the bed to get the breeze, and she had left it within reach to turn off the alarm. Mrs. Galli picked up the clock and looked at it. The alarm had been set for five o’clock. Katerina had gone to the six-thirty Mass.

  45

  WHILE HE WALKED BACK and forth across the narrow room, Tim tried to imagine himself scuffing up the dirt on a country road. He tried to pretend the wallpaper flowers were real, and for whole spans of pacing he succeeded. But each noise within the house brought him back to where he was. The noises themselves were not too bad. The distraction was only momentary, and after each one he could resume his flight. But when stillness settled on the house, his peace was gone completely, his peace and his dream. He listened at the door for the step of Mrs. Galli on the stairs. He had waited then, sitting on his bed. But she had not come to his door. She had gone into her own room and closed the door.

  If only she had gone somewhere else, he thought, upstairs perhaps, he could have gone to her. Or if he had not waited. If he had gone down to her after he knew the boarders were gone. But he could never bear the sight of her room again.

  He wiped the sweat from his face on his sleeve. His stubble of beard rasped across the cloth. If Katie had stopped before going to work, it would have made this waiting tolerable. A pulse was pounding in his head. He could almost hear it, and an ache was growing with its pounding. He could not tell then whether the sounds he imagined were in his own head or in the house. He went to the door on tiptoe and opened it a crack. Mrs. Galli’s door was open. She had left the room. He saw her apron then, a flick of it, as she moved to the window in Katie’s room.

  He closed the door and went to his bed again. He plucked at the tufts of cloth on the spread. It occurred to him then that her slowness in coming was a good sign. She wasn’t in a hurry
to see him at all. Katie had said she expected him back. But she didn’t care whether he came or not. She was going to leave him alone, after all. He could walk out into the hall and ask her what he could do around the house and she would give him a job. She wouldn’t touch her hand to him. Otherwise, she’d have brought his breakfast up to him. She’d have come as soon as the door closed on the last boarder going out to his work.

  He began to giggle with the relief, with the pleasure the thought gave him. He would never again have to be alone with her. Mrs. Galli swung his door open.

  “The monkeys in the zoo laugh like that,” she said. “I don’t see anything funny. Maybe me. Am I funny?”

  He had never seen her look so old, so sad. “I was laughing at myself, Mrs. Galli,” he said.

  “I wish I could laugh at you. Where did she find you?”

  He remembered vaguely that Katie had asked him not to say that she had looked for him. “I came home.”

  “You couldn’t find your way out of a floursack. Don’t lie to me, Tim. There’s already enough lies. I know she was out looking for you at five this morning. All right. I don’t care where she found you. What I want to know: what’s going on between you and her?”

  “There is nothing going on, Mrs. Galli. Nothing you can’t see with your own eyes.”

  “My eyes don’t see at all what I know here.” She pointed to her breast. “She can’t think of nothing but you. She steals from her own mother for you. My Katerina was a good girl till you came.”

  “There is no better girl living than she is, Mrs. Galli. And I’ll give my life to see that no evil comes to her.”

  “Your life isn’t worth enough for that. What you’ve done with it, what good is it to her?”

  “It’s all I’ve got, and I’d give it to her.”

  “You’d give her a bag of moonbeams and fleas. I don’t want you giving her anything, Tim Brandon. I don’t know what you are, but you aren’t a man. I don’t want my girl spoiling her life with you. I don’t care any more who she takes up with. That Tommy, maybe. He’s not so bad. He used to talk to me about her. I want her to marry him. He’ll give her two rooms anyway, and kids.”

  The pulse had begun to pound again in Tim’s head. He forced it still with his hand. “He’ll give her dirty jokes,” the words choked out. “And his big, fat hands all over her body.”

  “And there’s something the matter with that when the time comes?”

  Tim’s eyes were wide upon her, incredulous and full of loathing. “You filthy slut,” he said. He buried his hands in his face, pressing his fingers into his forehead.

  Mrs. Galli crossed the room and yanked his head up by the hair. “Tell me, Mr. Angel, how do you think children get born?” He only stared at her.

  “To you just dirty people go to bed. You think of her and come to me to make believe you’re a man …”

  “Jesus, sweet Jesus,” he whispered.

  “Now you stay here. I want you to stay here a while. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want her running away after you. But listen to me. If anything happens I don’t like, if anything happens before I can talk sense to her, I’ll talk the truth to her. I’ll make her see. I’ll tell her about you and me that day. Yes! You don’t want that, do you? It would dirty her mind. It’s better if her mind gets dirty. It’s better she hates me, her own mother. Just so she hates you, too, Tim Brandon.”

  She flung him away from her and wiped her hands on her thighs. At the door she turned. “Think about that. Think good. And take those books out of her room. She don’t need books for what she’s got to learn now.”

  Tim pounded the calves of his legs against the iron railing of the bed, anything to distract him from the other pain. He could scarcely see with it, except the swirling yellows, browns, greens, oozing into one another. He took one hand from his head, and groped beneath the bed for his tool kit where it had lain for so many months.

  46

  FROM ONE RECTORY TO another, Father Duffy worked his way downtown, inquiring in English and in his meager knowledge of Spanish which he had picked up from Father Gonzales. He came upon two priests who were fairly sure they had seen Brandon, and one who had given him a job the winter before. It was at a little church near the river called Mary, Refuge of the Sea. But the priest had no idea where the man had come from or where he went. “So many like him, Father. There aren’t more fishes washed in from the ocean than men like him beached in New York.”

  At noon Father Duffy had to return to St. Timothy’s. The Monsignor had insisted that he preside at a luncheon of the women’s Altar and Rosary Society. It was late afternoon before he took a bus down Tenth Avenue and commenced again at Fourteenth Street near the river.

  47

  WHEN GOLDSMITH CALLED HEADQUARTERS at four o’clock he received word of the tool kit. It had been sold to a secondhand store on Hudson Street that morning. He reached the store within ten minutes.

  “That ain’t the guy,” the man said when Goldsmith showed him the picture of Brandon. “No sir. That ain’t him. It was a big fellow. Big face with a nose like a piece of raw beef. I never seen a nose like it. He didn’t get that smelling flowers. Not except there was a bee in them.”

  “A real tramp,” Goldsmith said. “Is that it?”

  “A Bowery bum if I ever seen one.”

  Goldsmith nodded. “Got a pair of pliers?”

  The man got him one from the back room. Very gingerly, Goldsmith yanked open the strap with which the kit was fastened. It unfolded itself. He took a flashlight from his pocket and shone it on the hammer. Under the concentrated light little brown streaks were visible in the grain of the wood even to the naked eye. He waited at the store until a police car came for the kit to deliver it to the laboratory.

  “How much did you give him for it?” he asked, while waiting.

  “Seventy-five cents. That wouldn’t last that baby till ten o’clock. Three, maybe four shots.”

  “If he had that kind of a nose, he could get a quart of his stuff for that money,” Goldsmith said.

  “Smoke?”

  “Yeah. Three-quarters kerosene.”

  The storekeeper shook his head. “Damn shame what people let happen to themselves.”

  “Yeah,” Goldsmith said. He hadn’t a chance in fifty of finding him. “He was here when you opened?”

  “I wasn’t in the place two minutes when he shuffled in.”

  He had found the tool kit, Goldsmith thought. That was even less consolation. It indicated Brandon was on the move. He had probably found it in a park. He might have snatched it when Brandon was asleep. There were two small parks and one large one within a few blocks. He ruled out Washington Square because it was the farthest. Besides which there were many more likely stores in its vicinity than this one. He decided against Sheridan Square also. Its route was zigzag through the Village. The tramp who got the kit would pick the straightest line to his money. Three blocks due north was Abingdon Square. It was no park, but a few scrawny trees poked out of it, and there were benches and a water fountain.

  He checked his watch. He had less than three hours of daylight. He liked to work in daylight. Moving restlessly about the store waiting, he thought of Father Duffy. The priest might be closer to Brandon than he was. If Brandon had been turned out of where he stayed, he might go to a parish house for a handout in the morning. He called St. Timothy’s then, and found that the priest had left a few minutes before. He was not expected back until late evening.

  He rode north two blocks in the car on its way to the laboratory and walked the rest of the way to Abingdon Square. No one had paid any attention to him as he got out of the prowl car. That was the way he wanted it.

  Three youngsters were playing in the square, squirting one another from the weak spray of the drinking fountain. On one bench a woman sat fanning herself with a newspaper with one hand and rocking a baby buggy with the other. A couple of derelicts were stretched out on the ground, their backs to the fence in the only shade
in the square. Goldsmith edged his way to the drinking fountain through the water fight. Neither of the two vagrants looked like the red-nosed customer. He was probably far, far away, crazy, mad-drunk, the detective thought. Leaving the fountain, he took off his hat and fanned himself with it. He sat down on a bench, his back to the tramps, and waited.

  Presently, as he had anticipated, one of them scrambled to his feet and approached him. “Can you let me have a quarter, mister? I ain’t had nothing to eat all day.”

  Goldsmith reached into his pocket. He let his hand rest there, promisingly. “You been around here all day?” he asked.

  The tramp sneered. “I own the place. You’re trespassing.”

  “I’m serious,” Goldsmith said, drawing a dollar bill from his pocket. “I’m trying to check up on somebody. If you were around here maybe you saw them.”

  “I get it. Your wife, huh?”

  “Maybe,” Goldsmith said.

  “A tall woman. Good looking. Not too tall maybe, not skinny, but kind of …” The tramp made futile gestures of improvisation.

  “What kind of a woman is that?” Goldsmith said, grinning. “Here.” He gave him the dollar. “You didn’t happen to spend the night here, too, did you?”

  “Me? I got a feather mattress and silk sheets. Never get out of it till noon. Thanks, bud.” He slipped the bill in his pocket and motioned toward his partner. “Now there’s a guy who’s really got a lease on the place.”

  “Send him over,” Goldsmith said.

  He couldn’t hear what went on between the two men, but he heard a long sigh and enough grunts to hoist an elephant. “Goddam,” he heard. “I’m getting rheumatism.”