In the Still of the Night: Tales to Lock Your Doors By

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The final meeting before the hit date occurred at Gibbons’s loft. Mary Ellen played cards every other Wednesday night at the church hall. Gibbons would go over to McGowen’s Pub for a few beers and then pick her up on his way home. When he told her he was staying home that night, that he didn’t feel so great, she wanted to skip the card game. But when he blew up at her for it, she took off. He called after her that he’d pick her up as usual.

  Phillips was watching from across the street. There wasn’t much traffic, most of it the precinct cops taking in the whores from Eleventh Avenue and the crosstown Thirties: sweep night. There were night-lights on all the floors of Gibbons’s building—pale, low-wattage bulbs you’d think would die any minute. And he couldn’t see a homeless slob on the street, the cleanest street in town. Real treacherous. Gibbons’s wife left the building at ten minutes to eight. He wasn’t sure at first that it was her, the way she walked with her head up, her shoulders back, a tote bag swinging at her side. Good legs and noisy heels. It had to be her. The time was right and nobody else came out of the building. He could hear the clack of her heels far down the street.

  That night he got into the vestibule the way everybody else did, by ringing Gibbons’s bell and waiting to be buzzed in. He even took the elevator to the fifth floor. Never again. It climbed one floor after another as though it wouldn’t make the next. Gibbons was waiting for him in the hallway. “Did you see her?”

  “It must’ve been her. Nobody else came out of the building.”

  “I don’t pick her up till ten, but I’d like to get you out of here as soon as we get things settled.”

  “Suits me.”

  “Want a drink?”

  Phillips shook his head. “Let’s get on with it.” He sat down on a straight chair, having hooked it out with his foot from the round polished table. Mary Ellen kept a bare and tidy house. No plants, a couple of holy pictures. He thought about all the room there was in a loft. William, raised in a railroad flat, would go wild in a place like this. Phillips’s nerves began to jump, the tension grabbed at the back of his neck when Gibbons returned.

  “Fifty C-notes,” Gibbons said, and took a packet of mixed old and new bills from a paper bag. “Want to count them?”

  “You do it for me,” Phillips said.

  Gibbons put the already heavy bag down carefully on the table, removed the rubber band from the bills and slipped it onto his wrist. He counted the bills aloud, stacking them by tens on the table. “Satisfied?”

  Phillips stood up and took his wallet from his slacks pocket. “Give me twenty of them.” He stuffed them into the wallet and put it away. “Put the band back on the rest of them.” He put the packet into his breast pocket.

  They confirmed the date of the hit and the date and place of the final payoff. Phillips sat down again and they went through the setup one last time. Phillips looked around at the phone where it sat on a table between two easy chairs that faced the television set.

  “What about the bedroom phone?”

  “I told you, it’s on a jack that’s broke. I’m supposed to fix it but I won’t.”

  Phillips got to his feet. A wall clock with one of those sunshine faces showed a quarter to nine. He motioned to the paper bag. “Let’s have it.”

  “Take it.”

  “I don’t want the bag. Hand me the gun.”

  “Goddamn it, take it yourself.” The sweat glistened on Gibbons’s forehead.

  Seeing Gibbons sweat was balm to Phillips’s nerves. “It’s clean, right?” He reached into the bag and brought out the .38 police revolver. Beautiful. It looked as new as the day it came from the gunsmith. He flicked off the safety and rolled the cylinder. Every chamber was loaded. He reset the safety. “Thanks for the spares,” he said. “Got any more?”

  Gibbons sucked in his breath and let it out. “The rest of the box. It’s on the closet shelf in the shoe box.”

  “Leave it there.” Phillips put the gun in the pocket of his jacket, kneed his chair back into place, and went to the door. He looked back. Gibbons was still standing at the table, crumpling the bag, staring after him. He was shaking, Phillips realized. Gibbons was scared shitless. The stinking coward was scared of him. Phillips knew himself the man had good reason. “Let me out of here, will you?” he said.

  Gibbons moved with a start. He tossed the bag on the table and strode to the door.

  In the hall Phillips turned back. Gibbons stuck out his hand. They had never shaken hands, and didn’t then. Phillips made his hit face to face with his victim for the first time ever.

  Nothing this night had gone the way Mary Ellen expected it to. She had left the house in a rage of her own and vented some of it clattering down the street. Like all her rages, it turned in on herself. She knew there was something wrong with her to take all the abuse she got from Red. It was sick to love him even more afterwards. At one time they’d taken counseling together from their parish priest. Red had insisted on it. The gist of what the priest had to say was, “Why don’t you fight back, Mary Ellen?” “I wish to God she would,” Red told the priest. But when she tried it with about as much punch as a kitten’s paw, he’d twisted her arm behind her and said, “Don’t you ever try that again.”

  She knew he was having an affair and she’d left the house convinced the woman would arrive at the loft as soon as she was safely out of the way. When Red blew up because she decided to stay home with him, she felt absolutely certain. She could taste the pain and pleasure of knowing them to be in bed together—in her bed. Her mind was on fire with the thought of actually seeing it. Give them enough time and then go back quietly. She tried to concentrate on the card game at first. Red would kill her. But she didn’t really care. When an extra player showed up at the card game she gladly gave up her place. At twenty past eight she started back home, at half-past eight she left the elevator on the fourth floor and walked up the one flight of fire stairs. Before she even got near the loft door she heard the voices, Red’s and another man’s. She fled, ashamed and panicky. Red would kill her if he knew she’d come home, and he’d know why she did the minute she tried to lie about it. She got all the way back to the door of the parish hall and heard the scrape of chairs, the talk and laughter as the switch in bridge partners took place. She had no heart for the game and there wasn’t a place for her anyway. There really wasn’t a place for her anywhere. She felt ashamed, disappointed, crazy.

  Whether suicide entered her mind she was never going to be able to say for sure, but she walked to the river, past the air force carrier Intrepid in its semi-permanent dock, and through the scattered people out on a chilly weeknight. She walked out on the long pier. Some way along it and close to the water’s edge, she found herself among materials set out for dock repair: the barricade had been overturned, the lantern an askew red eye. Backing out she sank her heel into a glob of tar. She pulled her shoe out and tried to remove the gummy residue with Kleenex, then with an emery board, finally with the nail polish remover she had in her tote bag. She only made things worse. The only place to deal with it was at home. She checked her watch under the first high-density streetlight.

  She avoided passing the church hall where Red would soon be turning up to walk her home. If she hurried she could get to the loft well ahead of him. She might not have time to clean the shoe, but she could hide it away and not have to confess that part of the night’s silliness. And she’d pretend she hadn’t heard him say he would pick her up as usual. She took off her shoes and ran the last part of the way home.

  Homicide Detective John Moran and his partner Al Russo took Mary Ellen and her lawyer back to the loft at seven in the morning. She had been questioned throughout the night at precinct headquarters. The lawyer, a smart young fellow recommended by Moran himself, demanded that the police charge her or release her. Moran was, to the extent his duty allowed, on Mary Ellen’s side. He had known Gibbons when he was on the force; he knew him for a smiling Irishman with a cruel streak in him, a lot of charm until it wasn�
��t working. Then he was a son of a bitch. He knew that Gibbons abused his wife. A jury might come out on her side, too, but it would go better for her if she confessed, let her lawyer spell out what a bastard her husband was. And it would be better for Moran himself if he could break the case now, before the brass moved in.

  He was dog-tired and well into overtime. His partner was asleep on his feet and the suspect was a staggering zombie, but Moran was determined on one more go-round with her. It might be irregular to bring her back to the scene so soon, but he got away with it. He wanted her to see the forensic crew still at work, the scraping and the measuring, the chalked outline of the figure who had lain there. She had been fingerprinted and tested for powder burns. None showed up, but the tar and the polish remover rendered the findings inconclusive. If she was guilty the whole tar and tar removal bit could have been calculated. The long pier had been checked out and at dawn a diving team was scheduled to search the river along the pilings for the gun. She readily admitted knowing there was a revolver in the house. It had been there for years. But she could not account for why it was missing now—unless her husband had taken it to his office. Or the man she’d heard him talking to had got it from him. The last time she had seen it was the night of the break-in when her husband scared off the burglars. The medical examiner had not yet offered any findings on the spent cartridge.

  They went through the CRIME SCENE barricade in the first daylight. People on their way to work were routed away from the building and got no more out of the uniformed cops than that a police investigation was going on. But the rumors had it about right and a Daily News photographer was on hand. The minute he started shooting pictures the word went up, “That’s her! That’s the wife!”

  Moran began what he hoped was the final grilling inside the entrance to the building. He wanted to know where the elevator was when she rang for it.

  Mary Ellen swayed, a little dizzy when she looked up at the floor indicator. Her lawyer offered his arm. She threw it off. She was home and that was support enough for now. “It was on the fifth floor. That’s what made me even surer she was up there.”

  “You took the elevator to the fourth floor yourself. Why not the fifth?”

  “I didn’t want them to hear it stop on our floor.”

  “But wouldn’t they have heard it starting down for you? Or wasn’t it right there waiting on the first floor, where you’d left it when you went out?”

  “I’ve told you the truth. Are you trying to trap me?”

  “I’m trying to help you,” Moran said. “I don’t know that there was a man up there at all unless you convince me there was.”

  “I heard him. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “Were they arguing? Were they laughing? Come on, lady, you heard something. What was it?”

  “Just voices. They were talking.”

  “Voices make words. That’s how people communicate. Didn’t you hear one word?”

  She shook her head and swayed again.

  The lawyer said, “Mrs. Gibbons needs to sit down, sir.”

  “So do the rest of us,” Moran snapped. He pressed the button and the elevator door slid open noisily.

  Mary Ellen did not allow herself to see that which she did not want to see. She was aware of men at work, the hallway filled with equipment, cigarette smoke, light that was blinding. She longed to be inside the loft with everything else shut out. She fought off the memory of that other return. Over the years she had rehearsed a like scene many times when Red was on the force. She clutched her lawyer’s arm and looked only at the ceiling while they edged their way around the floor tape. Moran allowed her to use the bathroom, given the all-clear by the crew.

  There were only three rooms to the loft, the bedroom, the kitchen, and the very large living room. The round table with its four chairs had been dusted for prints. It was available to them. Moran seated the group the way he wanted them, allowing Mrs. Gibbons to keep her back to the area under investigation. If he wanted to make her look there, he could. At the moment he wanted her cooperation, not her collapse. He resumed his questioning; Russo activated a small tape recorder.

  “Suppose, just for a minute, Mrs. Gibbons, you had not heard those voices, what would you have done?”

  “I’d’ve let myself in real quiet. If there wasn’t a light on in the big room—that’s what we call this room, the big room—if there wasn’t a light on here, I’d have sneaked through and turned on the light switch to the bedroom just as I opened the door.”

  “How would you have felt if there was no one there?”

  “Don’t answer that,” the lawyer intervened.

  “You’d have been disappointed, right?” Moran amended.

  “I was disappointed when I heard those voices. Oh, yes. I wanted her to be there with him, if that’s what you want me to say.”

  “All I want you to say is the truth.” Moran drew a deep, raspy breath. He wanted a cigarette, but he’d smoked his last one before leaving headquarters. “Let me tell it the way I see it, Mrs. Gibbons. You were absolutely sure you’d catch them here last night if you came back early. In your bed! In your bed. So when you got the chance early in the evening, you took the revolver from the closet shelf, from a shoe box, right? And tucked it into that bag of yours. Lots of room. No problem.” He paused. She was shaking her head. “So what’s wrong with it?”

  “I’d’ve been scared Red would catch me taking it.”

  “Was he home all the time? Didn’t step out for cigarettes, a breath of air? Didn’t get a telephone call that kept him on the line—a call from his other woman, let’s say, so he’d be glad to see you disappear in the bedroom?”

  “You’re wrong, wrong, wrong. That just didn’t happen.” She put her head down on her arms on the table.

  Moran tucked his hand under her chin and forced her head up. His face close to her, he said, “Let’s go back to the question. If you didn’t hear those voices, what would you have done?”

  “I told you I’d have sneaked in.”

  Moran interrupted. “And if you’d found them in bed, naked as baboons, making love so hot you could smell it?”

  Her whole forlorn expression changed. She smiled, her dead eyes caught fire. “Yes!” she cried encouragingly.

  “Yes!”

  Christ, Moran thought, she’s enjoying this.

  When the medical examiner agreed that the fatal bullet had probably come from the box of cartridges found on the shelf of Gibbons’s closet, pressure mounted within and outside the police department for the arrest of Mary Ellen Gibbons. The insurance representatives kept to the background, but the company made it plain they wanted to see a case developed along the lines of murder for profit, the direction toward which the district attorney’s office was already inclined. While Gibbons had written the policy and paid its premiums by pouring virtually all his commissions into it, Mary Ellen was co-signatory. Indeed their investments and bank accounts were in both names. The only noticeable irregularity in the Gibbons’s finances was that in the past eighteen months he had, on several occasions, failed to deposit their monthly dividend check from mutual funds. This, however, coincided with his extramarital affair with a woman who testified to “his generous care of her.”

  As for physical evidence, the weapon itself had not been found. Given the tides, the muck, and the undertow of the Hudson River, this was not surprising. The grappling for it went on. None of the fingerprints brought up in the Gibbons home indicated a visitor that night. There were simply no witnesses to confirm that part of Mary Ellen’s story. Testimony to her erratic behavior was ample. Her distracted behavior at the card party was readily testified to, as was the hour at which she cut out of the game. A young couple came forward who had seen her bumbling around the pier repair site. They were afraid she might fall or jump into the river and turned back themselves, not to be involved. They had intended to report her to the first cop they encountered, but by the time they came on one they decided that their imagination
had exaggerated her strange behavior.

  Mary Ellen never wavered in her account of that night’s activities. She admitted that although she had known of her husband’s affair for a year, and had found out where the woman lived, she had not until that night tried to confront them. Detective Moran tried to believe, along with almost everyone on the case, that she had contrived the story to cover the murder of her husband. But he could not reconcile her responses under questioning with murder for profit. He was superseded in the case, not taken off it, but dropped down a couple of notches in authority. The Police Benevolent Association was adding pressure: one of their own had been murdered.

  Her arrest, Moran knew, was imminent. Without quite realizing how it happened, he found himself back where he had started, on Mary Ellen’s side. As he said to Al Russo, who had answered the complaint with him that night, “You saw that place—all the comforts of a zoo. That money wouldn’t mean much to her if she was to get it.”

  “Wait till the lawyer’s bills come in. She’ll need it then.”

  Moran thought about what Russo said. It was out of sync. And that was what he felt about the whole case. The money angle would make sense if Mary Ellen was the victim, her husband the one to profit from her death. No one would pay those premiums without expecting to collect. That’s what made it crazy: he paid the premiums. He had to believe she was going to die first. And here she was, about to be charged with his murder, frozen into a story she hadn’t moved a shadow’s length away from.

  On Saturday morning Moran went over the prints again. It was the third day after the homicide. Most of the recent prints had been identified, including those of Mary Ellen’s sister—whom she was staying with now—and a plumber. Moran studied Gibbons’s prints on the table. Those marked FRESH were in one place where, he figured out, Gibbons would have been facing the door. He got out the crime scene photos of the table and chairs. He was a few seconds identifying the one item on the table.