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

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  It was a crumpled paper bag. His association was instantaneous. Now. Not originally. The bag had gone to the lab. It would take time to bring up prints on the rough paper. Moran tore through the transcripts of Mary Ellen’s statements—when questioned she did not remember the paper bag at all. Her husband might have gone out after she left the house, but not before it. Moran turned to the autopsy report: there had been no food intake after that night’s early dinner. Gibbons did not smoke. The inventory of personal effects showed his wallet to have contained ninety-eight dollars. It was still in his pocket when he was shot. Eighty cents in change had spilled out on the floor. Moran turned everything around and made himself assume Mary Ellen to be telling the truth. The paper bag fit the payoff tradition. Someone had come to the loft with it, or for it? The man whose voice Mary Ellen claimed to have heard was real. He had been there. So what went wrong between him and Gibbons? If they’d been quarreling she’d have known that much at least from the pitch of their voices.

  Moran went back to the monthly dividend checks Gibbons had failed to deposit. They totaled $5,100. But something else showed up: Mary Ellen was not as ignorant of their finances as he had supposed. On several occasions she had requested a bank printout of their accounts. So she would have been aware that Gibbons was siphoning off the occasional dividend check. She could have been aware. Was it one more example of her masochism to have known and been silent?

  Yet another possibility occurred to the detective. Suppose a killer hired by Gibbons had gone to her and told her he was being paid $5,000, say, to kill her. Say he asked her to make it ten and he would turn the gun on Gibbons. Would she finally, finally, have taken the offense against her husband and said, “Go ahead. Kill the bastard!”?

  Phillips had run down the four flights of stairs that night knowing he should have gone back into the apartment and taken the paper bag. But too much blood had spattered and there was too little time. When Gibbons failed to pick her up at ten she’d come home on her own. Poor sick woman, he had done her a good turn and he hoped she’d appreciate it some time. Now he had to forget Mary Ellen and make new plans for himself.

  On the street he stood a moment sucking in the air to clear his head of the reek of gunpowder. His hearing was coming back. A noisy argument was building mid-block. The cops would be close at hand when Mary Ellen wanted them. He went the other way and set himself an ambling gait with little simian spurts now and then. If anyone noticed him at all in the twenty blocks uptown and the two long blocks west, he’d be taken for a harmless drunk. In fact, he picked up an empty wine bottle, discarded it, and kept the brown bag it was wrapped in. He worked the revolver into the bag without taking it from his pocket.

  It wasn’t ten o’clock yet when he reached Mickey’s Place, the hangout of the Rooneys. Rooney was out of town, Phillips was glad to hear. Fitz Fitzgerald was the one he wanted to see, without Rooney putting his nose in. Fitz was shooting pool. He had three more balls to clear the table. Phillips went into the back room, called the “conference room,” and waited for him. He tried to remember the names of the former gang members whose initials were carved in the table. Fitzgerald came in flushed with a win. He looked scrubbed and, as usual, wore a white shirt and striped tie. He looked like a bank teller, and his daytime job wasn’t far from that mark: he worked in a check-cashing shop. He looked no more like a gun fence than Phillips looked like a killer. The first thing he asked was if the gun was hot.

  “Plenty. You don’t get it unless you got a place for it outside the U.S.A. And I don’t mean Ireland.”

  “You know I ain’t political, Billy. Let’s have a look at it and you can tell me how much you want.”

  “Half what you can get for it, and I’m willing to wait for mine.” He slipped the gun from the bag.

  Fitzgerald’s face went white. He knew a police special when he saw one. He began to back off.

  “It’s okay with me if you put it on ice for a while,” Phillips cajoled. “I’m going out to the West Coast tracks in the morning. Just put it on ice and I’ll check with you at the end of the week.”

  Fitzgerald moistened his lips. “Rooney won’t like it, Billy. He keeps saying, ‘Some of my best friends—’”

  Phillips cut in, “Does he have to find out? It’s you and me doing business here.”

  “He finds out most things, don’t he?”

  “Yeah, when some fink tells him.”

  “I ain’t no fink and you know it, Billy.”

  “What in hell would I be doing here if I didn’t know that?” The words had a familiar ring: it was what Gibbons had said talking him into the job.

  Marge Phillips was about to leave the house on Saturday morning when the phone rang. She hoped her perm customer wasn’t canceling.

  “Is Billy back yet?”

  “He’s not, but he’s due in around noon.”

  “It’s Fitz Fitzgerald, Marge. I got to deliver a package to Billy and it’s got to be this morning, Rooney’s orders. Could I bring it around to you on my way to the shop?”

  “Ah, Fitz, I won’t be here, but William’s home. I’ll have him watch out the window for you. It’ll give him something to do and keep him out of mischief till his father gets here.”

  Fitzgerald hesitated. “The kid wouldn’t open it, would he?”

  “Not if you tell him he mustn’t. He’s very good that way.”

  Moran was in the squad room unwrapping his lunch when the report came through of a ten-year-old boy dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. He’d been shot while playing with a .38 revolver. Moran stuck the sandwich in his pocket on his way to the desk. “I want to roll on this one, Sergeant. I’m looking for a .38. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

  Now Is Forever

  THEY MET IN THE Medieval Sculpture Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a vast room through which museum visitors can go off in any of several directions—to galleries for special exhibits, into the wing housing the Lehman Collection, through the Medieval Treasury and on to the Garden Court and the American Wing. It is so vast a room one almost always feels alone, no matter how numerous the company. They shook hands and spoke softly, words that any listener, picking up on them, might interpret as casual. It looked like, and was contrived to look like, an accidental meeting after which, as though there were a discovery she had made recently and wanted to show him, they moved into the small Romanesque chapel with its thirteenth-century stained glass. They stared up at the window from the Lady Chapel of the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres, not really seeing it. They were too absorbed, too overwhelmed by the sudden presence of one another. But when he reached out and touched her hand where it lay on the back of a chapel chair, she withdrew it, and slowly looked around toward a wood carving of mother and child. Beyond the sculpture she could see the hall from which they had come and the people passing there.

  “No guilt?” he said in light mockery.

  “None,” she said, tossing her head in defiance of God knows whom.

  “Shall we sit down? You can lecture me on whatever that window’s all about.”

  “The passion of St. Vincent of Saragossa.”

  “The passion—a word with many meanings,” he said, moving a chair to make more room between it and the next one.

  “Let’s not sit down,” she said.

  “I understand.” Then: “Couldn’t sit on these chairs anyway. They’re built for midgets.”

  “There are not many men as tall as you in the countries where you find them.”

  “Or women as beautiful as you?”

  “That is a non sequitur, Father Morrissey.”

  He nodded gravely. They moved beyond the altar-like table supporting a marble bas-relief. When they stood behind it, beneath the St. Vincent window, they could hold hands unobserved from outside the chapel. She squeezed his fiercely and then let go of it. A silence fell between them. She broke it presently to say, “Oh, Dan, what’s to become of us?” She again laughed softly at herself, the hackneyed melodrama of her
words.

  “Before we’re old and gray, priests will marry,” he said.

  “Divorced women?”

  “Mmmmm. I have a way of forgetting about your husband.”

  “So do I when I’m with you.”

  From the chapel entry a guard spoke. “Step back, please.”

  Startled, they leapt apart.

  “You are not allowed so close.” The guard gestured them back to make clear his meaning. His accent was Hispanic.

  “We are not touching anything,” the priest said, speaking in Spanish. It was a language in which he was almost fluent. He was not recognizable as a priest; he wore a sports jacket and turtleneck sweater.

  “It is my responsibility to say,” the guard said aggressively, perhaps because he had been addressed in Spanish, calling attention to his accent.

  “Let’s go, for heaven’s sake,” Kate said. “I want to see the modern glass.”

  The guard stood his ground while they walked past him, Kate holding high a very heavy head. “We’ve been drummed out of paradise.” There was not much mirth in the laugh she managed.

  “That guy’s a bully,” Morrissey said.

  Kate had it on the tip of her tongue to say that bullies chose their prey carefully. She held her peace and once out of the Sculpture Court felt some restoration of her pride. She ought to have learned, living twenty years with Martin Knowles, how to ignore the tyranny of servants, public or personal. Instead, in a restaurant, for example, where Martin insisted that the service be impeccable, she sympathized with the underdog waiter, however truculently he came to heel. She glanced up at Morrissey. He winked at her and she almost took his hand to swing along with him in the carefree manner of young lovers.

  At the heavy glass doors to the Garden Court an odd thing happened: as Kate pushed through, she caught the reflection of a man’s face in the glass. His eyes were on hers, sad, questing eyes. She thought she recognized him, but as the glass receded with the door’s opening, the image vanished, and when, having passed through, she looked back, there was no one in sight except Morrissey following close behind her.

  “The strangest thing,” she said. “I saw a face in the glass door, someone I thought I knew, but now it’s gone.”

  “That was me,” Morrissey said.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Kate, shall we go on to your house and skip the art course?”

  “It’s too early,” she said. “We need to give my housekeeper a little more time to get away.”

  Katherine and Martin Knowles had been active members of St. Ambrose parish since their marriage. Martin was a convert to Catholicism and, as Kate’s mother said crankily at the wedding, it made him more Catholic than the pope. Indeed the Knowles, on their wedding trip to Italy, had knelt before Paul VI and kissed his ring. Kate wished at the time that it was John XXIII whose hand she touched. She could imagine that great hulk of a man with a heart to match, reaching down, taking her by both hands, and saying, “Come, you have as much right to the throne of Peter as I do.” Not that she wanted to be pope any more than Betty Friedan did, but she had grown up in the early days of ecumenism and of Women’s Liberation and was fiercely partisan. Martin took a dim view of both, and looked in recent years to John Paul II to put both church and women back on course.

  Kate knew that the fabric of her faith was thinning before Daniel Morrissey crashed into her life. Martin’s was of tougher stuff. Their son and daughter, in college, attended mass with some regularity, but made no secret of their differences with the church in matters they felt should be arbitrated directly between themselves and the Almighty. It was not something, however, they discussed with their father. Kate sometimes would have preferred not to be their confidante herself. She had been somewhat shaken on a recent Sunday when her daughter, visiting home, had gone to mass with her and, meeting Father Morrissey on the church steps afterwards, had declared of the dark-eyed, handsome priest, “What a waste!” On their way home, Kate silent, Sheila had teased her, “Did I shock you, Mother?”

  “I agree!” Kate had said.

  And Sheila: “Now I’m shocked.”

  On the day Kate and Morrissey met in the museum, they met again later that afternoon, but not by their own design. Twice a week Kate conducted what she loosely—very loosely—called an art class for youngsters attending St. Ambrose parochial school who, at the end of the school day, might otherwise have been unsupervised until a parent got home from work. St. Ambrose, once a wealthy Upper East Side parish, had become, like the neighborhood, a mix of the moderately rich and the borderline poor, the latter mostly Hispanic. The church had been undergoing extensive renovation at the time; the grime of sixty years was being removed from four large murals that depicted Christ’s trial, death, resurrection and ascension. Much of the original paint came away with the dirt, however, and the restoration became more complicated and costly than the commissioned funds could cover. Martin Knowles made a substantial contribution to allow the work to go forward. Thus it was, Kate felt sure, that Monsignor Carey consulted with her on the work as it progressed. As soon as the restoration crew had closed up shop that day, the monsignor sent Morrissey to ask Mrs. Knowles, in the adjoining building, if she’d mind stepping over to the church for a few minutes. “You won’t mind staying a while with the children, will you, Father?”

  Morrissey did not mind. Seeing Kate, however briefly, eased the pain of separation that inevitably followed their hasty and furtive lovemaking. The way her eyes lit up when she saw him told of the same quick joy. They touched hands when she put the large scissors in his and told him he was journeyman to her apprentices. The color flared in her cheeks and she avoided looking at him. But very much on the alert was a youngster of eight or nine sitting across the table. His eyes, with the speed of arrows, darted from one adult’s face to the other’s.

  Father Morrissey winked at him. He was a great winker, something that eased him out of many a confrontation. It was a mistake in this case. A little gleam of cunning shone in the boy’s eyes. He had intuited something. “What’s your name, young fellow?” the priest said.

  “Rafael.”

  “Rafael,” Morrissey repeated admiringly.

  A pigtailed girl sitting next to the wily youngster said, “His name is José, father. Rafael is his brother’s name.”

  “José is a fine name, too,” Morrissey said, feeling like an idiot, making child’s talk.

  “She very nice woman,” José said. “Smart.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You know.” The little demon rolled his eyes toward the door by which Kate had left them.

  “Go back to work on whatever you were doing before I interrupted,” the priest said.

  “She say I’m going to be famous artist.” The children were cutting out paper of different shapes and sizes and colors and pasting them together in such designs as they fancied or could manage. “Like Matisse.” He said the name with practiced care.

  The little girl giggled, “Mrs. Knowles calls all of us her little Matisses.”

  With lightning speed José grabbed a compass and tore it through the paste-up the little girl was working on. She howled, and Morrissey aimed a slap at the face of José—aimed it, but interrupted his own hand before it touched the boy. His dire intention became nothing more than a clap of noise. José did not even dodge what must have seemed to him an impending blow. The little girl reached over and snatched the collage José had been attempting and tore it apart. Very soon, up and down the long table, a dozen children were caught up in a frenzy of destruction. Those who reached for their neighbor’s work too late to get it tore up their own, and shrieked with pleasure.

  “Holy Mother of God,” Morrissey murmured. “How do I handle this one?” Then, “Come on, you barbarians, let’s get some exercise. On your feet and march!” He pushed one youngster in front of him and pulled one after him. He had to hunch down like Quasimodo. The only marching song he could think of was “Onward Christian Soldiers,�
�� and he belted out the tune in a sturdy baritone. The other kids fell in and soon they were marching around the room, strung together, hand in hand. Twice around and he called a halt and set them to cleaning up the mess.

  José had joined the march, but now he sat, dark and sullen as a stone. When the little mischiefer next to him began to giggle and bite her lip, Morrissey realized something new was going on with José. He was probably peeing where he sat. If he was, his eyes never wavered from the priest’s face while he did it.

  “I always hesitate to ask you to come ’round and have a look, Mrs. Knowles,” the monsignor said. “Ah, now, I’m supposed to call you Kate, Martin says, after all the years we’ve known each other, but I shy away from that as well. All the Protestants I know are on a first-name basis with their ministers and one another. I suppose it’s all right, but I wouldn’t want one of those little colts you’re kind enough to corral after school, I wouldn’t want one of them calling me Timothy to my face. I don’t care what they call me behind my back. What was I saying?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kate said. She could no more call him Timothy than could Dan. Once in a while Dan spoke of him as the Old Man, but with reverence. Monsignor Carey had celebrated his fortieth year as a parish priest and he had trained his curates well. Two of them had been called to parishes of their own, and that, he had once told Martin, was as much as he could do for an ailing church. “It will come back to you,” she said of whatever it was he’d been going to say.

  “Things do,” he said, “and some to haunt me.” He squinted at her from under the shaggy black and white eyebrows. “You know, you don’t look a day older than when I married you and Martin? He still calls you his bride, you know.”

  “I know,” Kate said. She was sure there was nothing covert in his words, almost sure.