The Good Friday Murder (10 page)

It was nearly nine and I was beat. I turned in.

Jack called me Thursday morning, and I gave him an abbreviated version of my day.

“We should send you after Judge Crater. You sure you haven't been doing this all your life?”

“Very sure. But now I'm coming to a standstill. I have to give Kathleen Mackey time to get back to me, and I've talked to pretty much all the people on my list.”

“I'm still looking for O'Connor's partner. His name is Stassky. He was about O'Connor's age, so he's probably retired.”

“Okay. Then I think I'll come back to Brooklyn this morning and see those two people again, the old man across the street and Selma Franklin. I want to know why they lied.”

“Probably has nothing to do with the Talley case.”

“But I want to know.”

“I'm not discouraging you. Will you have lunch?”

I caught myself smiling. “Sure.”

“Whenever you get here. And look, if I'm not here, I do get called away sometimes. I'll give you a rain check.”

“Fine.”

I arrived at the Talleys' apartment house at nine-thirty. Mrs. Franklin buzzed me in and I took the elevator up to the fourth floor.

“It's nice to see you again,” she said, welcoming me. She was wearing a loose-fitting colorful cotton shift that might have been a housedress or might just be the kind of comfortable clothing you wear on a hot day in Brooklyn.

“I'm glad I caught you,” I said. “I kind of decided to come on the spur of the moment, and I didn't want to call you too early in the morning to ask if you'd be in.”

“You could call at sunrise, I'd be up already.” She smiled and plopped into the same chair in the living room she had sat in last time. I took the nearest chair to hers, as I had done on my first visit, making it seem as though this were merely a continuation of that last pleasant conversation.

But for me it was different. I knew now that I was in the identical apartment to the one Mrs. Talley had been murdered in. This was her living room; over there in a kitchen exactly like that one, Mrs. Talley had been murdered.

“You thought of some more questions,” Mrs. Franklin stated, inviting me to proceed.

“I found out that the Talleys lived in the apartment above yours,” I said.

“That's true.” She said it blandly, but I thought I saw her raising her guard.

“Were you home that day?”

“Well, of course, that's what the policeman wanted to know.”

I waited.

“It was Good Friday, you know, that day. It's not my holiday, but my children had no school, so it was a holiday for them. What I did that day…” She shook her head.
“Some shopping, some sewing. What I told the police is what I did. You want to know if I heard anything.”

I nodded.

“Not a thing. Lunch I'm sure we had at home, so I can tell you it didn't happen at lunchtime. Dinner I think we had at my mother's in those days on Friday, so I couldn't tell you about after five-thirty.”

“And the rest of the weekend, Saturday and Sunday morning before the police came, did anything sound unusual up there?”

She seemed very wary now, measuring her responses. “Nothing unusual. The same as always.”

“What was it like usually?” I asked.

She shrugged, but her face, her round, chubby face, had hardened. “Footsteps,” she said. “Nothing special.”

“Were you on good terms with Mrs. Talley?”

“I told you. We lived in the same building. We smiled and said ‘hello' in the street.”

I knew she would never admit anything if I didn't provoke her, but I didn't want to make her angry. She was an old woman and a very unlikely murderer. “They made a lot of noise up there, didn't they?” I said.

She shrugged again. “People make noise when they walk.”

“Someone in this apartment used to bang on the ceiling to make them be quiet.”

She gave me a hard look, but the corners of her mouth started to curl. “So how come a young girl like you knows something the police don't know?”

“Someone told me.”

“Now? Today?”

“A few days ago. The girl that helped Mrs. Talley. She remembered the banging.”

“The little blond girl,” Mrs. Franklin said.

“Yes.”

“Why do you want to know all these things?”

“Because I think someone else killed Mrs. Talley. And to prove it, I need all the information I can get.”

She looked straight ahead of her, avoiding my eyes, her mouth set in what I took to mean not determination but resignation. “All right,” she said finally, “I'll tell you what I never told anyone else. I didn't get along with her. I lived for twelve years with such noise, it would drive you crazy. Not voices. This is an old building, thick, built solid. Voices you don't hear. But on my head the whole day and half the night, such pounding, you could not believe it. They ran, they jumped, they did I-don't-know-what. A little carpeting would have helped. They didn't have it. My children slept in the room under the twins. Sometimes they couldn't fall asleep. When it got so bad that I couldn't take it anymore, I banged on the ceiling with a broom handle.”

“It must have been very unpleasant.”

“Terrible.”

“You didn't speak to her, did you?”

She shook her head. “In the street we looked the other way.”

“You told me a story, Mrs. Franklin, about Mrs. Talley asking the twins what color the light was before they crossed the street.” The same story had appeared, almost verbatim, in the police interview. “Did you make it up?”

“I didn't make it up. It's a true story. Remember I told you my best friend, Harriet Cohen, lived next door to them? Next door is not underneath. Next door was quiet. She was friendly with Mrs. Talley, my friend Harriet. The story I told you, I heard from her.”

“I see.”

“Christine. May I call you Christine?” I nodded. “I didn't hate the woman. I hated the noise. I didn't want her dead. When I heard on Sunday what happened, I cried. Do you believe it? You say things sometimes you don't mean and then something terrible happens and you feel—” she paused “—responsible.”

“It wasn't your fault.”

“Your head knows this, but it hurts all the same.”

“So you heard nothing unusual that day,” I said.

“Unusual. Who knows what unusual is when every day it
sounds like a stampede? How many times did I say, ‘Someone must be getting killed up there'? So when it happened on that bad Friday, everything was the same as always.”

“Thank you for being so honest, Mrs. Franklin.”

“I didn't even give you tea.”

“You gave me something much better.”

“You're such a nice girl. Come in and say hello if you're in the neighborhood.”

I rang a second time at Mrs. Cappicola's house before I heard her footsteps approaching. She opened the door, recognized me, and said, “My father isn't home.”

“It's you I'd like to talk to, Mrs. Cappicola.”

She looked for a moment as though she were considering this. Then she said, “Come in, Sister.”

We went into the same living room and sat.

“I really don't think I can tell you any more. We weren't involved in what happened across the street.”

“I know that. But I was looking over my notes the other night and I noticed your father referred to the ‘blue-and-white' police cars. They weren't blue and white in 1950. They were green and white.”

“Well, you know, he's an old man and his memory isn't what it used to be.”

There was a definite creak overhead, as though someone had moved on the second floor. I glanced up toward the ceiling, and Mrs. Cappicola looked pained. This seemed to be my morning for making people unhappy.

“Did he really see those police cars?” I asked. “Was he really here that day?”

“He was here.” But that was all she said, as though that had answered both my questions.

“And he saw what happened across the street?”

She sat in the chair looking nowhere. Finally she said, “He didn't look out of the window all day.”

“I see.”

“You don't see. When you came last week, I forgot that was the year…My father is a devout Catholic, Sister. Even
today, at his age, he goes to mass every Sunday. That Easter, in 1950, he missed mass for the only time in his adult life.”

“I didn't mean to stir up old problems. You don't have to explain.” I started to put my notebook away. What difference did it make whether one old man had looked out his window that Easter Sunday?

“He had a terrible fight with my brother,” she went on, as though I had not spoken. Upstairs, there were rhythmic creaks, and I thought her father was probably rocking in a chair. “My brother is much older, and he'd gotten in trouble that weekend. It was nothing serious, but my father reacted very strongly. There was such shouting that weekend, and then, on Easter Sunday morning, I thought my father would kill him. My mother grabbed me and took me to church while they were still fighting. They never went. Neither one of them.”

“I'm sorry I upset you, Mrs. Cappicola.”

“He never went near the window the whole day. He was afraid someone he knew might see him and wonder why he hadn't been to church.” She smiled. “We worry about silly things, don't we?”

“I'm afraid we do.”

“I went out on the sidewalk to watch what was going on. People gathered. There were rumors about what had happened. When the pictures were in the paper the next day, it was like I was part of something very important.”

“You were.” I got up, sorry I had come. “I hope your father and your brother came to terms.”

“Oh yes, later they did. He's a good man, my brother. A good son. But it was the only mass my father ever missed.”

I thanked her and left. Crossing the street, I felt sure the old man on the second floor was watching me.

We went to the same place for lunch and were waited on by the same waitress. There was something different about Jack Brooks this time, the way he looked at me. He kept smiling when our eyes met, and it made me smile back.

I told him about Selma Franklin's new story.

“You've got to expect that, that people'll lie to protect themselves. Whoever questioned her after that murder should've been more sensitive to the situation. Anyone who lives in an apartment in New York knows that the lady downstairs can't stand the noise from upstairs. It's the way things are.”

“So the place to live is on the top floor.”

“Then the roof leaks,” he said, and I laughed.

“Always?”

“Always in New York.”

“You don't think that sweet little lady could have reached the end of her rope and gone upstairs and killed Mrs. Talley?”

“I doubt it. What would you do if you convinced yourself she did?”

“I don't know,” I said truthfully. It would be much easier to show that someone dead and buried had been guilty or to find that a dirty old man who had done other terrible things had done this one, too. “I wonder if you can check something for me.” I pulled out my notes to get the spelling right. “Sometime that weekend the son of the old man across the street got into some kind of trouble. His sister told me about it this morning. She didn't say what kind of trouble, but I
had the feeling it was more serious than she wanted to let on.”

Jack pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, found a clean surface, and clicked his pen open. “Got a name?”

“Antonetti.”

“I'll try to have it when I see you Saturday.” He turned the folded paper until he found what he was looking for. “Applebaum,” he said. “Applebaum Sr. never worked in Brooklyn, so I guess he's not the guy your Magda talked to.”

“We'll have to look for a different fruit.”

“You know, looking for fruits in the police department is not the way I want to be remembered.”

I started to say something that I hoped would sound clever, but he interrupted. “I like your hair. It has a devil-may-care look about it.”

“It was cut by a friend. I need a more professional hand.”

He ran a hand through his own rather wildly curly mass of hair. “Don't we all. So you found Patrick Talley's daughter.”

“I spoke to her,” I told him, “just last night.” I told him of my trip to New Jersey and all my inquiries.

“Not bad,” he said appreciatively when I had finished. “You think he's the man, don't you?”

“Except that the twins didn't identify him, which I really can't explain. But if you had seen the contrast between the little house they first lived in and the place they moved up to, you'd know why I feel that way. And everything fell into place. His wife dies and he marries his lover. A year later the family moves to a minimansion and they furnish it expensively. He was maintaining two families for years, and one day in 1950 he suddenly had only one. No one else benefited the way he did.”

“But he's dead and buried.”

I nodded. “And I have qualms about naming a dead man who can't defend himself.”

“Well, we'll see what you turn up when you talk to the daughter.”

We walked back to the precinct together and made arrangements
for Saturday night. Then I drove back to Oakwood.

Kathleen Mackey called at six just as I was about to sit down to a quick dinner. I turned off the stove as I passed it on my way to the telephone.

“Miss Bennett, this is Kathleen Mackey,” she announced.

“Thank you for calling,” I said, trying to sound friendly.

“You know, summer is really a very bad time to get together. My brother is leaving for vacation tomorrow—the Fourth is next week, you know—and I'm involved in a number of activities that don't leave me much free time.”

Her tone was patronizing, and her excuses sounded like quick fixes. But I couldn't lose her now and I couldn't let her postpone this meeting till after the summer. After the summer I was finished, so far as Greenwillow was concerned.

“I could see you tonight,” I said, taking a bold step.

“Well, that seems rather—hold on a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece and I could hear muffled noises. “I'll call you back,” she said suddenly, and hung up.

I went back to the stove and tried to repair my dinner. I had everything out on the table when the phone rang again.

“When could you be here?” Kathleen Mackey asked without preliminaries.

“In half an hour.” I looked at the dinner that I would not be able to eat.

“No. That's too soon. How's—” She covered the phone again. “Could you make it at eight?”

“Yes.”

“I can't give you much time.”

“I'll make it as fast as I can.”

She gave me the address and some brief directions and hung up. I waltzed back to the kitchen table, almost too excited to eat. I had done it.

I got there early, found the house, and drove away so that I could arrive at the stroke of eight. When I returned, a car
had parked in the previously empty driveway. I left mine on the street and walked to the front door.

The house was in a beautiful community near the Hudson River. It was a long way from the little house in Leonia and a longer way from Alberta Talley's apartment in Brooklyn.

Kathleen Mackey was a good-looking woman. I knew from the police records that she was fifty-two, and her brother two years older. She was slim and well dressed in a khaki outfit with rolled-up sleeves, a wide belt of some endangered reptile's expensive skin, and attractive sandals. She led me into a room with sliding glass doors open onto a large deck, where a man sat on a chair that matched a whole set of outdoor furniture.

“Nice to meet you,” Patrick Talley Jr. said genially, raising himself without offering his hand and returning quickly to his seat.

“Thank you. I'm Christine Bennett.”

“Kath tells me you're doing some research or something on an old murder.”

“The murder of Alberta Talley in 1950.” I sat down at the umbrellaed table, took my notebook and pen out of my bag, and flipped to a clean page. I noticed Kathleen's face as I did so. Her eyes seemed to open wide and burn through my notebook.

“We probably can't help you,” Patrick said. “Never knew the lady.” He at least had a cordial sound to his voice.

I wondered how much he resembled his father. I imagined his father as something of a charmer, perhaps because I have a stereotype of the successful salesman in my head.

“Do you know when your parents started living together?” I asked, looking directly at him.

“Before I was born, that's for sure. I guess in the mid-thirties. They didn't talk about it much. Lots of people lived together in those days. Common-law kind of thing.”

“Did he visit his first family?”

“He did not,” Kathleen's icy voice shot at me. We were all sitting equidistant from one another around the circular table so that everyone was almost opposite everyone else.

“Do you know if he ever telephoned, if he kept any relationship going with them?”

“Got me,” Patrick said. He smiled, and I felt sure he had decided to be nice to me but give me nothing of value. It was clear that tonight he was the family spokesman. “I didn't hang around when Dad was on the phone.”

“What kind of research are you doing that requires questions like these?” Kathleen asked.

“I'm looking into some unsolved murders.”

“But that one was solved,” she shot back.

“There was no trial, no conviction. It's possible the twins didn't kill their mother.”

“And you think my father did!” Her voice rose in shock and anger.

“I don't know who did. I'm trying to get as complete a picture as I can of the family. It's part of my research.” I hoped it sounded legitimate. “Do you remember how old your father was when he retired?” I looked back at Patrick.

“Well, you know, Dad sold insurance and he was good at it. He wasn't the kind to stay home just because he reached a certain age. He kept some clients till he was well into his seventies.”

“That must have been nice for him,” I said.

It was growing dark. Someone inside the house must have flicked a switch at that moment, because lights went on, not just on the deck, but along the perimeter of the property. It would be a lovely place to have a summer evening party.

“It was nice for everybody,” Patrick said. “He kept up his business, but they had time to travel and do a lot of things they wanted.”

“He must have lived to a ripe old age with a regimen like that.”

“He surely did,” Patrick said. “They took him kicking and screaming.”

I smiled. “Where is your father buried?” I asked.

“How dare you ask a question like that,” Kathleen said.

“Come on, Kath,” her brother cajoled. “Actually, they
were on vacation when Dad died, and Mom had him buried there.”

That surprised me. “What an unusual thing to do,” I said.

“Well, they had a little bungalow they used to go to. R and R. You know.”

I suddenly started picking up interesting vibes. Neither of them had said where Patrick Sr. was buried, and something was very strange. I couldn't imagine the Talleys living in a “little bungalow,” and I found it very peculiar that, wherever he had died, he had not been buried somewhere near home with a funeral at the local church near their New Jersey home. “What country is that?” I asked.

Patrick smiled. He didn't want to answer, but he couldn't avoid the question. “The Bahamas, I think it was,” he said finally. “Isn't that so, Kath?”

She said, “Yes,” tightly, and I sensed she was seething.

“Grand Bahama Island, that's it,” he said.

“What a nice place to have a bungalow,” I said, hoping I didn't sound sarcastic. “Does your mother spend all her time there now or might I be able to find her here?”

“Stay away from my mother,” Kathleen ordered, letting me know that Anne was still alive. “She had nothing to do with my father's first wife. There's nothing she can tell you.”

“It must have come as a terrible shock to your father when he heard his wife was dead.”

“In a lot of ways,” Patrick said, recovering his calm demeanor. “With cops knocking on the door, my parents had to tell us a lot of things they would have rather not. It wasn't an easy time for them.”

“And of course, you've never had anything to do with the twins.”

“Nothing at all. Don't even know if they're still alive.”

“They are,” I said. “I've visited one of them recently.”

“No kidding,” Patrick said in a flat tone.

“How did your lives change after the murder?” I asked.

“Nothing changed,” Kathleen said firmly.

“Well, that's not true,” her brother said in that easy manner he had. “As I said, we found out things we hadn't known
before, that we had these—half-brothers, that Dad had had a wife, and eventually that the folks weren't married. It was a shocker, I'll tell you.”

“Did he ever talk about them?”

“Not too much. As you can imagine, it hadn't been the happiest of marriages.”

“Because of the twins?”

“Because of the twins and because of their mother,” Kathleen said in her icy tone. “How would you like to come home every night to a family like that? My father pleaded with her to put those boys away, to let them have a real life together without those terrible encumbrances. They couldn't go to a goddamn movie without getting a baby-sitter. Their lives revolved around those boys. There was nothing; else and she wouldn't have it any other way.” I could hear Kathleen's anger mounting as she warmed to her tale. “My father was a kind, warm person. He was loving, he had a sense of humor. She took all that away from him. She made him into a robot whose only reason for living was to support that family. And what did he get from them? Nothing.” She spat out the word. “He had to leave her to save himself.”

“C'mon, Kath,” her brother coaxed.

“No, let me say it. The only thing in the world that woman cared about was those two retarded sons of hers, and if you ask me, she got what was coming to her. She was a leech. When I found out how much my father was sending her every month, I realized why we had to live the way we did. She had money for everything, and we had to count pennies.”

“It must have gotten much better after she died,” I said, hoping for a reaction before she thought better of it.

“Of course it did. And when my father got his—”

“Kathleen!” It was the first time Patrick had spoken sharply. “I'm sure Miss Bennett doesn't want to hear personal details.”

I did, of course, but there was no way of making her continue. She sat back in her chair, seemingly stunned by what she had nearly said.

To my surprise, she smiled. “Is your research complete now?”

“I think I have a better picture of things,” I said. I closed my book and pushed my chair back. “Thank you both very much. You've been very helpful.” That was my understatement of the year.